The Dervish House (58 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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Green lights all across the board. BitBots are go.
The accountants are closing up as Rat skitters behind their feet, along the wall. By the time it hits the vent it has reconfigured into Snake and goes straight through the terracotta slats without a beat. Up up. Can grins in delight and concentration as he maps Snake’s camera feed - looming, sudden, wide-angle, bizarrely lit by Snake’s limited LED output - on to the architect’s plans. This is the best game in the world. Over the top of the cinder-block inner wall and the raftered space of the underfloor stretches before him. Cables: follow them. Ducting. He’s there. The vent is a grille of blinding light. Can stops down the cameras and crawls closer, nano-scale by nano-scale. Snake’s nose is millimetres from the vent cover. A dark shape fills the visible horizon. Can hisses air over his tongue in concentration as he opens up the cameras into wide-angle. The dark mass recedes into substance and shape. Necdet, lying on his mattress, but his back is to the vent, and worse, beyond his reclining shape, the upright shape of the guard, facing the vent. He could not fail to miss a metre-long robo-snake emerging from the ventilators.
Only patience will see Can’s plan succeed.
For an hour Can sits at the monitor, not moving, not making a sound, looking at Necdet’s hunched back. The last truck has left the apple-packers. Even the security man has closed down his booth and locked the gates. The Samsung F118s still patrol and lights now burn in the apartment over the accountancy firm. The traffic along Bostancı Dudullu Cadessi carry lights. There’s a stupendous sunset unfolding beyond the flat tin roofs of the business centre.
‘Is someone coming for you?’ the proprietor of the Kapçek çayhane. The nosy men have all drifted away, one by one, unsatisfied by the non-resolution of the story of the Robot-Toy-Boy vs the Money-Lenders of Kayişdaği. Can is alone between the day and the evening shifts.
‘I’ll not be long,’ Can says but he hasn’t solved the problem of where to stay the night. He has not even thought of it until now. But stay he must, until the Boy Detective saves the day.
A movement. Necdet has turned over. Now Can carefully, a millimetre at a time, moves Snake’s head so that it is directly looking at Necdet’s face. He goes close with the cameras. Necdet looks bad. He is unshaved and his hair is greasy. Crusty stuff from bad sleeping gathers around the corners of his mouth and eyes. Necdet’s closed eyelids flicker. Open them open them. They flicker again. Open. Necdet opens his eyes. Now, the Boy Detective shows his brilliance. Can flicks up a new command window, moves his right hand into the haptic field and snaps fingers to thumb, like a duck quacking. Across the boulevard, in the offices above the accountants, Snake starts flashing his LEDs at Necdet’s face.
 
Wake.
I don’t want to wake.
Wake!
Leave me alone.
How can that be? Wake! Open your eyes.
I don’t want to open my eyes. I’ll see how much closer I am to them killing me.
Who am I? Recite!
You are Hızır Khidr al-Khadir Khidar Khwaja Khizar Khizr. You are the Green One.
What am I?
You are the Undying One, Eternal Wanderer, the Righteous Servant of God, Tutor of the Prophets, Lord of the Men of the Unseen, Master of the Assembly of Saints, Lord of the Waters of Life, Initiator of those who walk the Hidden Path.
Open your eyes!
I see the edge of a mattress, a thin grey hard-pile carpet, the junction of two white-painted walls scuffed with trainer-marks, skirting board, sockets, vent . . . What would you have me see, Green Saint?
The vent. Something flashing in the vent. Not flickering, not arcing. Flashing. Rhythmically.
This is real, says Hızır in a voice of springtime.
Necdet blinks twice. The light blinks back, twice. Something in there with a mind, something that recognizes him. Something that knows he’s here. Something that followed him? One blink, one flash back. What’s behind the lights? Necdet tries to make sense out of the strips of shape behind the vent slats. It looks like a snake head. A snake head with spider eyes, a dozen dot-eyes, blinking light at him. A machine of some kind. A robot snake. He’s seen a robot snake before. He was in the garden of the dervish house. It was all new and fresh but threatening at the same time. He was new then. It must have been just after Ismet took him away from Başibüyük to build a new life for him. He had been sitting on the edge of the little fountain, skinning up, when a movement on the edge of the roof had drawn his eye. Snake! He dropped the half-rolled skin, breathless in fear. At first he had thought it was a flashback or a flashout or some hideous flash-in, all his sins manifesting themselves. Then he saw that it was a complicated machine, hanging over the edge of the sloping cloister roof, watching him. And another time, when he discovered the tiny triangle of the old dervish graveyard behind the kitchen cloister, a movement in the grass, and that same snake-robot had darted away from his feet, coiled up a cylindrical tombstone topped with a conical Mevlevi headdress and, to his astonishment, turned into dust that coalesced into a bird. The bird spread it wings and flew away. He had always thought it some kind of parable.
The kid’s robot. The kid’s found him. How? Doesn’t matter. The kid’s found him. Someone knows he’s here. He has to get a message out, but he’s locked in a room with an armed guard who is going to kill mercifully, painlessly, without prejudice and in the name of God when the operation is finished with a toy robot stuck up the air vent flashing lights at him and a deaf kid at the other end of the line.
The deaf kid can lip-read.
Once for yes, twice for no
, Necdet mouths slowly and clearly. There is a long pause, then the spider-eyes flash once.
Don’t flash unless I ask you
, Necdet says. Big Bastard is as much a prisoner in this room as Necdet and plays mental games with the walls, the lights, patterns in the carpets, knots in the skirting, anything to break the boredom.
Flash.
Listen carefully. At the end, I will ask you if you understand. Call the police. These people are terrorists.
Necdet feels the repeated ‘r’s move his jaw against the mattress. His head will have tilted, just a fraction but Big Bastard will have noticed that.
‘Hey, Necdet, you awake?’
‘I am now.’
‘You need water or the pot or something?’
‘Does it matter?’
Necdet never takes his gaze from the half seen shape in the vent. He says nothing for several minutes, listening for the soft noise of Big Bastard making himself comfortable and inattentive again. The kid doesn’t move, doesn’t flash.
Call the police
, Necdet mouths.
They have some insane plan. Nanotechnology; they won’t tell me. Call the police. Be careful. Go now. Be quick. They are going to kill me. Do you understand?
A blink of light. Necdet closes his eyes. The next time he looks he cannot see anything behind the slats of the air vent. He had forgotten the most famous attribute of the Green Saint. Hızır: help from beyond comprehension.
 
Hasan the barber wraps the wad of kitchen roll around the tip of the screwdriver, douses it in lighter fuel and ignites it. Quick as knife he wafts the flame close to Adnan’s ears, left, then right, and repeat twice before he douses the brand in the flowerpot of sand on the counter. A wash of heat too quick for pain, the smell of burning hair. This is the heart of barbering, the intimate violence, the placing of yourself in the seat of a man who can bring so many blades close to your eyes, ears, nostrils, jugular. A splash and gasp of kolonya and the ritual is done. The door bell clangs; there is the courier, on time to the second, with the flat boxes under his arms.
‘Mr Sarioğlu?’
The other three Ultralords of the Universe, perched along the bench like old men at a winter tram-stop, point at the freshly groomed man in the chair. Adnan swirls off the sheet, opens the top box and shakes out the virtuous white new shirt.
‘I’m just going to change here, all right, Hasan?’ The barber bows a fraction and flips over the
Closed
sign. Adnan peels off his Galatasaray top. The new shirt falls around him like a blessing. The tailors know his skin better than anyone except Ayşe.
‘I’ve got the same for you, Kemal. I wasn’t sure of the size so I just guessed and went up one.’ He kicks the flat boxes over at Kemal. Adnan Sarioğlu’s rules for life. Off-the-peg is a false economy when a bespoke Istanbul tailor will keep your statistics on file, cut and assemble a suit in an hour and deliver it across the city by courier. ‘With respect, gentlemen, he’s the only one needs to be there.’ Kemal gingerly lifts the jacket out of the folded tissue.
‘When I was a kid, I saw this old American silent comedy film. It was pretty funny so it can’t have been Charlie Chaplin. There was this scene where the funny man was standing in front of the barn, with an open door right at the top.’ He fastens up his cufflinks and kicks off his shoes. ‘The joke is that the barn wall blows down, right on top but he’s positioned so that the open door goes right over him. That’s good timing and that, gentlemen, is pretty much what I intend to do with Özer.’ He steps into his slacks, adjusts the waistband. New shoes on. ‘Özer is coming down. We all know that. But what if, instead of the Levent Tower coming down around our ears and hoping we walk away with our asses, we arrange a controlled demolition? Kemal, get that fucking suit on; without you we do not have a hope.’ Adnan pulls on the shoes; left, right. They’re pretty good for cheap slip-ons. ‘Kemal has the details: names, accounts, transactions, codes, times, everything. I have the deal.’
‘Immunity,’ Kadir says. His team shirt and baseball cap sit uneasily on him, he looks like a British prince at a music festival.
‘Correct.’
‘We deliberately destroy Özer?’ Oğuz asks.
‘It’s going to fall anyway. How much does it owe?’
‘Somewhere not far off two point seven billion euro,’ Kemal says. He stands in the middle of the tiny, one-chair Alemdar barbershop in his Cimbom top with his pants off. ‘When did you find out about the Cygnus X error account?’
‘I told Adnan,’ Kadir says.
Adnan raises a finger. ‘Kadir, shut the fuck up. He told me the day before the deal went down, straight after the meeting with Larijani. We thought you were a threat to Turquoise.’ He meets and holds Kemal’s eyes. Straight is the only way to play this now.
‘A threat? A threat? Fuck you, who cleared the money, who ran the back office, who snorted Larijani’s coded nano - you want to try that some time, that’s a whole basket of fun. What were you going to do? Go on, what were you going to do?’
‘We were planning to cut you out of the deal.’
‘Cut me out? Me? Out? The fuck . . . And how were you going to do that exactly, knowing what I know? Hm?’
‘Kemal, put the suit on.’ Oğuz is about to open his mouth with some stupidity. Adnan stabs a finger at him. ‘You say nothing. Only I talk here. Put the suit on, Kemal.’
‘What is this, like some gangster movie where they all fall out after the heist? What were you going to do, you fuckers? A bit of a kicking? A car going into the Bosphorus with a body in the trunk?’
‘Put the fucking suit on, Kemal.’
‘A hit? No . . .’ Kemal’s mouth chews air; implications fall on him, sharp as glass. ‘You fuckers. You fuckers!’
‘No,’ Adnan very clearly and slowly. ‘It was a tailored nanotech package. I was to swap it for your usual dose. It would have scrambled your memory; you wouldn’t have known what was yours and what was the nano’s.’
Kemal remembers, he remembers every little detail. ‘That cough . . .’
‘Is why you’re talking to me here today.’
‘You bitches!’ Kemal screams. ‘You sneaking, scheming, faithless little bitches.’
‘Now put the suit on. We have to go.’
‘Why the fuck should I ever work with you?’
‘Because we need each other, one last time. Just do this one thing and we need never see each other again, but you need to put on the suit, Kemal.’
Kemal is defeated but he is an Ultralord, he is a paşa; he tosses his head back in a final gesture of contempt. ‘Clever of you to pull this little one out of your ass after the wifey gets in trouble.’
Two moves, and Adnan has Kemal by the scruff of his Galatasaray shirt; breath to breath.
‘You do not ever, ever talk about Ayşe,’ Adnan hisses and then Kadir and Oğuz are in to separate them. Adnan slowly exhales, straighten the lapels of his jacket, matches the sleeves.
‘We go to meet Bekdil and whoever else he’s persuaded to come along to the Anadolu Hotel. We tell him about Turquoise. We tell him about Cygnus X. We tell him Mehmet Meral’s personal intervention in the Cygnus X accounts. You give him the codes, he sees the accounts, he sees the errors, he sees the off-balance-sheet losses, he sees the authorizations from the top floor. We tell him that Özer is rotten from the head, that the company has no assets, that it’s manipulated its share price, that it has lost billions and that it is effectively bankrupt. For this we want immunity for Turquoise. Yes and I want any charges against Ayşe Erkoç dropped as part of the bargain. Bekdil goes to the Financial Regulatory Office. We tell it all over again to them. We tell it as many times as we need to until we get our immunity documents in our hands, our cash in our pockets and the regulators take Ozer apart like an Eminönü Rolex.’ Adnan shakes the new shirt out of its shallow box and holds it out to Kemal. ‘Put the suit on or don’t put the suit on, but wear something. You see, we do this one thing, you and me, and we get everything.’

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