The Dervish House (62 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
They’re coming.
Necdet wakes. Grey dawn light fills the upper room. He is alone but from his position on the mattress he can see feet in the next room. He counts four pairs of shoes moving in and out of the room, up and down the stairs. Voices: Green Headscarf; orders from the tone of her voice. He can’t make out any words but they all seem to agree on something.
Now. Prepare yourself.
Big Bastard enters the room and in one movement grabs Necdet by the collar of his T-shirt and hauls him to his feet. But Necdet has obeyed the voice of Hızır. He is awake and aware. He is focused.
Clench your fists. Thumbs out.
Big Bastard whips cable tie around Necdet’s wrists and pulls the zip plastic tight, pinning Necdet’s arms behind his back. Big Bastard hooks into Necdet’s left arm, Big Hair the right. Necdet digs in his heels, goes limp at the knees, struggles and twists as they wrestle him out of the back room to the stairs.
‘Where are you taking me? Oh God no! Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!’
Surly Fucker clatters down the stairs behind the three struggling men. Necdet feels a ring of cold metal pressed under the base of his skull.
‘Not a whisper or I will blow your head right off your neck.’
The white van has been backed up to the front of the building so that the open doors will screen the abduction from any early Kayişdaği traffic but the lift is so fast, so smooth that Necdet is in the back, the doors closed and the van driving out the gates without even a single truck-gardener’s delivery pick-up noticing.
Green Headscarf and Big Hair drive. Necdet is seated on the floor between Surly Fucker and Big Bastard. With his hands bound behind his back, Necdet’s balance is thrown. He can count the turns by the number of times he veers left into Big Bastard’s legs, right into Surly Fucker’s. His back is pressed against a pile of equipment, the styrofoam cases, plastic tidy boxes and cartons he saw in the upstairs room.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To glory, Necdet.’
You will not be killed. They need a potential hostage.
It’s dark in the back of the van, the overhead bulb burned out. Needles of laser-light beam through holes in the bodywork, cracks in the floor. Planes of illumination stream into the van body around the door but, above the top lock, does Necdet see a flicker of green?
Now relax your hands.
Necdet pushes himself back against the equipment to mask any movement. His fists are aching, the blood throbbing in his fingers. He lets go, he folds in his thumbs. The binding relaxes, there’s a gap. Necdet pulls. It hurts, it cuts but he can feel the plastic start to slip over the balls of his thumbs.
This is the mission. This is the day. They’re going to do it. Where are the police, why didn’t the kid get the police? Maybe the kid did. Maybe they’re keeping a low profile, waiting until they’re out in the open, in position before they make their move. Maybe they want to see if there’s a second, back-up group in case the first is captured. Whichever way, he’s in the middle of a holy war.
Hızır
, you’ve never failed me yet; help from beyond comprehension, help me now.
Hızır
, you’ve never failed me yet; help from beyond comprehension, help me now.
The van bounces to a jarring stop. The light as the doors bang open is painful. Necdet tests his ties. They will give. They will tear his hands to shreds but they will give and he will be free. To do it now would be a leap into blind white light. He wouldn’t make it more than three metres. Hızır will tell him. His God-sense will know the best time. Big Bastard is almost gentle as he helps Necdet down from the van.
They’re parked outside a basket-ball-court sized industrial station, a rectangle of fat yellow pipes and bright blue valves and big metal wheels wrapped around a mass of white machinery, all housed under a corrugated aluminium roof. At one end of the installation stand three vertical cylinders, each the height of three people. Piped in and piped out, they look like monstrous village water pumps. The site is defended by a chain-link fence with a razor wire overhang to deter climbing boys and is tucked incongruously away behind a small rundown shopping complex, overlooked by a new-build housing project. Wire, pumps, gate are all generously tagged with Ozer Pipelines’ logo.
The gate is dealt with so quickly the trespassers almost seem to walk through it. A pass with a doorcode cracker, a squirt of lock-burn nano and they are in. Big Hair reverses the van as Big Bastard hustles Necdet out of sight from the housing units. Surly Fucker closes the gate. The assault of God’s Engineers on Kayişdaği Compression Station has begun.
Cold hurts, Can realizes. Cold makes his fingers feel like they will snap. Cold turns his feet to steel hooves. Cold locks every bone and muscle. Cold is in every cell of his body. Can is shivering and he can’t stop. He can’t move. He has to move. The alert has sounded. Rat Baby is moving.
The cold came in the night. It swept in from the east over Kayişdaği and came into the pipe with him and woke him up. It would not let him sleep again. For hours Can has sat in his pipe, coat pulled around him, eking out the warmth of the BitBots. He had always thought it would be thrilling to stay up all night, like the day they took his hearing away and Turkey joined the EU and he sat up late late to watch the silent fireworks and the painted man fall from the front of the Adem Dede teahouse. Staying up all night is hard and boring and endless and cold cold cold. No one is ever cold in adventures. In adventures, no one ever tells you that cold is much more dangerous than jackals or city dogs or the last wolf in Istanbul. A Boy Detective can freeze and only be found when the construction crews’ crane lifts the concrete pipe.
That concrete is so cold it burns. But the alert has sounded, the alert has sounded. Can forces limbs into motion, painfully unfolds fingers, shuffles lifeless stone feet forward. Is this what it is like to be old, like Mr Ferentinou? It’s a dreadful thing. He emerges from the pipe into the light. The sun is still under the horizon, the air is grey and pitilessly cold. Can blows into his fingers. Work work work. He opens the computer. Slow slow slow to boot up. Can cries in frustration as his fingers trip, numb and stupid, over the keys, blunder through the haptic field. He is almost weeping by the time he manages to open the command application. He overlays the map. Necdet is close. The van is on the highway. Here is the construction site, there is the road: Can hobbles out of the jumble of pipes to watch the white van speed past in the early commute. North-east. Kayişdaği Compression Station, just as he thought. He reconfigures the BitBots. They’re low on power. He’ll need a charge point soon, or failing that, somewhere he can buy a couple of gas canisters for the catalytic charger.
Better now. Out on the highway he can at least soak up a little sun. On the highway he has a direction and a purpose. The heat is slow to penetrate the core of cold inside him but the sun gains in strength every minute. He tries to take his mind off the pain and the hunger by imagining how it would be if people were like flowers and could live from the sun. You would never be cold. You would never be hungry either. Plants are never hungry. The nights would be terrible. People would dread the night even more than they do now. They would fill it with much worse things than ghost wolves of Istanbul. Cold demons, ice horrors; that might be terrifying enough.
This is a long road without any shops and the traffic is heavy and constant. He wonders what they think of a boy with a pack and a bird on his shoulder, striding along the dusty verge in the early light. Do they even notice? Osman hardly notices anything when he heads to work in the morning. There is a tea and news stand at the corner where Bostancı Dudullu Cadessi crosses Kayişdaği Cadessi. Can doesn’t like tea but he buys a glass. The tulip-shaped glass is like a drop of molten gold in his fingers. He can hardly stand the pain but he sips and feels warmth shine through him. A second glass and the cold is gone from everything but the tips of his fingers, toes and nose and the sun is up and hard and bright. With the last of his folding money he buys three gas canisters for the emergency charger. He squats around the back of the stall on the kerb and checks the laptop while Bird recharges from the catalyser. The van has stopped moving. It’s right on top of Kayişdaği Compression Station. Can tries to click his fingers in delight, winces with the pain and awkwardness. But the Boy Detective is back.
It’s a long trot up Kayişdaği Cadessi but by the end of it Can has everything planned. It is a very good plan. He is so clever. The compression station is tucked away in the middle of a built-up area. The map shows him that there aren’t any useful çayhanes where he can sit all day and survey the gas plant. There is an arcade of shops at the end of the alley and a gas station with a 24/7 and a little traveller’s chapel across the road. Boys are always hanging around gas stations and 24/7s and he can sit in the entrance to the mescid and no one will know he is there. Then he will send Bird over to scan the area. If they haven’t brought the Samsung nightwatchman robots, he will use Bird. If they have, it will be Rat or Snake. Either way, he will shoot footage, lots of footage. When he called the police last night they didn’t believe what they heard. Maybe they will believe what they see. Oh, it is a brilliant plan. He’s even starting to feel warm.
Şekure Durukan goes down on her knees before the concrete pipe and picks up the applecore, the empty water bottle, the gözleme wrapper. She lifts them up in her two hands as if praying. Then she begins to wail; deeply, inconsolably, the shrieking of a woman at the funeral of her mother. Pipeline workers look up from the morning tea, distressed.
‘This is where the call came from,’ the police sergeant says.
‘And you didn’t act on it?’ Georgios Ferentinou asks.
‘If we acted on every call we got from a nine-year-old kid, we wouldn’t do anything else,’ the sergeant says.
‘You didn’t think it odd that a nine-year-old was calling from a construction site after dark?’
‘We didn’t check the location until the Beyoğlu police told us a child was missing, probably in Kayişdaği.’
As soon as the car had turned out of Vermilion-Maker Lane Şekure Durukan switched to autodrive and called Beyoğlu police.
Theory about the missing boy. Kayişdaği. Trying to be a detective. Finding some man who was supposedly kidnapped from Eskiköy. Kayişdaği, in Kadiköy. Has some notion there’s a terror plot. Yeah kids. Going over there now
.
Theory about the missing boy. Kayişdaği. Trying to be a detective. Finding some man who was supposedly kidnapped from Eskiköy. Kayişdaği, in Kadiköy. Has some notion there’s a terror plot. Yeah kids. Going over there now
.
Then she turned on Georgios Ferentinou.
‘You put him up to this.’
‘I told him expressly not to go off on his own. I forbade it absolutely. I told him that he was not to get involved, that this was dangerous and a matter for the police.’
‘Forbade him absolutely, did you? Do you know anything about nine-year-old boys? Forbade it absolutely. What city are you living in? And all this disappearance, mystery, conspiracy stuff, did you tell me? Did you think to tell me? It’s only my son after all. Did you ever think that maybe his mother should know about all these theories and conspiracies you were cooking up down in your apartment. Who said he could go to your apartment anyway? My God, he was in your apartment. He’s nine years old! Oh my God. How often did he go? Did he ever take out his earplugs? Did he? Did you not know that could kill him, or did you just not care? Sneaking around behind my back. The lies, oh the lies, the bare-faced lies, after all we did for him. You told him it was dangerous. You might as well have thrown petrol on a fire. How long has he been coming down to see you?’
‘About a year and a half. Ever since he got those . . .’
‘Those things, God I wish I’d never set eyes on the bloody things. As soon as he gets back home, well that’s the last he’s seen of those things, I’m telling you.’
‘Mrs Durukan, your son is a highly intelligent, highly creative, highly energetic boy who’s been forced into an unnatural . . .’
‘Unnatural? Of course it’s unnatural. Do you think we want this for him? Do you think we want to keep him cooped up in the house, afraid in case a random noise stops his heart beating? It’s all for him, you know. We could have been somewhere bigger, better by now. But I don’t begrudge it. Don’t you ever think that about my Can. I love him. Mr Ferentinou. I love him.’
‘Guys,’ Mustafa interrupts from the back seat, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I can see your ceptep and the Beyoğlu police have been calling for about three minutes.’
That call had taken them to this construction site off Bostancı Dudullu Cadessi and an applecore, an empty water bottle and wrapper from a sandwich.
Why did I not defend myself?
Georgios Ferentinou asks himself.
Because you are right, Mrs Durukan. I have done wrong. Everything you have accused me of is true. I could have told you from the moment I trapped the BitBot under my tea glass and the boy came knocking on my door; I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to share it with you. I wanted him for myself. I wanted a son. I wanted a tiny family of my own. You wouldn’t have let me have that, and now you never will
.
Georgios Ferentinou asks himself.
Because you are right, Mrs Durukan. I have done wrong. Everything you have accused me of is true. I could have told you from the moment I trapped the BitBot under my tea glass and the boy came knocking on my door; I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to share it with you. I wanted him for myself. I wanted a son. I wanted a tiny family of my own. You wouldn’t have let me have that, and now you never will
.
Şekure Durukan cries unashamedly at the discarded trash and Georgios knows it is a thing he will never and can never do.
Mustafa has been asking around the area. Georgios thinks him a strange cove; worldly-wise with a fool’s knowledge but wide-eyed to the wonders of the world. He cares about Necdet very much. Georgios finds it touching.
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