The Dervish House (10 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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‘This is a library?’ Can said in his too-loud, flat voice. He stared around at the simple whitewashed dervish cell with its single brass lamp and small, shuttered window. ‘The woman downstairs has hundreds and hundreds of books.’
But those are not books for reading
, Georgios wrote on the smartpaper sheet on the old Ottoman desk.
A library full of books that are never read is not a library
. He lets the words erase themselves, letter by letter.
This library has only one book, but it is every book in the world.
He set the BitBot under the upturned tea-glass in which he had imprisoned it on the desk. He wrote,
This is clever technology
. He gestured for Can to lift the glass. The little robot ran up the boy’s forefinger, under the sleeve of his T-shirt to curl in the hair at his temple.
It could be so much more than just a toy.
‘What do you mean?’
We could reprogramme it. Make it do really interesting things.
Can blinked twice at him.
‘I have to go now. My mum will wonder where I am. She wouldn’t like it if she knew I’d been to see you. She thinks you’re a paedo. I know you’re not but I’m still going.’
Come back
, Georgios thought at the closing door. Can did return the next day, Monkey riding on his shoulder. The slow, careful education began.
In a different season of another year Can waits in the Library of All Books. He beckons. Snake scurries across the ceiling and drops. In mid-air it breaks into its component mites, then the cloud of microrobots reconfigure into Bird. It flies up to perch on his shoulder. Can carefully carefully removes the plugs from his ears. Georgios always holds his breath as Can extracts the delicate technology. He seems not himself today. He fidgets, his face is flushed. Georgios makes tea. Two glasses, two saucers, two spoons. Man to man across the tiny white table.
‘Mr Ferentinou, I went to look at the bomb. You know, down on Necatibey Cadessi.’ Georgios stirs the lazy sugar crystals in the bottom of his glass. Can’s small world is full of big stories. Can continues in his slightly-too-loud voice, ‘I hid up on the front of the Allianz building, and there was another robot on the building next door, hiding like me. I thought it was watching the bomb, but it wasn’t. It was watching the people, the ones caught on the tram. It looked at all of them, and then it followed one. Mr Ferentinou, it was following Mr Hasguler from downstairs.’
‘Ismet?’ Georgios fears Shaykh Ismet. He is the antithesis of his life.
‘No, the other one.’
‘Necdet. I didn’t know that Necdet had been caught in the bombing, but why would anyone be interested in him?’
‘Well, it was following him; and it wasn’t the only one. There was another robot: I didn’t see it, but it saw me. It came right up behind me and it would have had me if Monkey hadn’t jumped just in time. It chased me, Mr Ferentinou.’
‘Chased?’
‘Over the roofs. It was scary but really brilliant. It was big and fast. But it wasn’t as clever. I did this trick I’ve been practising where I jump and morph into Bird in mid-air. It thought there was another roof there. It fell and smashed. Just out beside Kenan’s.’
Georgios Ferentinou’s spoon slips from his fingers and takes a quadrant off the fragile, tulip-shaped tea-glass. The tea floods the table. He will clean it up later.
‘It knows where you live?’
‘No, like I said, I tricked it and killed it.’
‘Just outside Kenan’s you say? I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that.’
Can is on his air-soled feet, Snake riding his shoulder like a wave. Georgios points him back down into his seat.
‘You stay there. Whoever sent it could have come looking for it. I don’t think it would be good should these people know that you live here.’
‘Do you think it’s a conspiracy?’
‘Mr Durukan, if God is dead then everything is conspiracy.’
Can presses his forehead against the window of the tiny tearoom. Mr Ferentinou waddles painfully down the steps, greets Bülent and Aydin the simit seller and pokes around behind the Coke machine outside Kenan’s.
Right, to your right
, Can mouths at him, mutely waving him toward the street door.
There there, right there!
Georgios Ferentinou prods and pokes, hunkers down, face red like it could explode. He opens his hands in a gesture of incomprehension.
Nothing.
‘There was a robot, there really was, it really chased me and I did kill it,’ Can says on Mr Ferentinou’s return.
‘Oh I believe you,’ Georgios says. ‘They’ve already taken it away. They will have video footage of your robots. And, if, for some reason they are interested in Mr Hasgüler, they will come back to this dervish house.’
‘But then if they’re watching that Necdet guy, then I could watch them.’
‘Mr Durukan, I think you and your robots should keep a low profile.’
‘But I know places in this building that no one else does. I know all the secret places. No one will ever find me.’
I watch you
, Can thinks.
I watch that Leyla girl, the one who watches too much television too and she never knows. I watch everyone.
‘I forbid it. I would be very angry if I thought you were doing that.’
‘But it’s a conspiracy, only it’s on my own doorstep. It’s cool. A real conspiracy!’
‘Mr Durukan, take it from my own personal experience, real conspiracies are not cool. Real conspiracies are dangerous and bewildering and exhausting and so, so frightening. In real conspiracies, you are all on your own. Whatever this is, it’s no matter for a nine-year-old boy. Leave it.’
Georgios Ferentinou gets a sponge and mops up the tea, careful of the shards of glass.
 
Necdet sees the first djinni perched on the hot-air hand-drier as he exits the toilet cubicle. The djinni is like a grossly obese baby, slit-eyed and puff-faced. And it’s on fire. Necdet can feel the heat from the toilet door. It seethes and roars like burning fat.
‘I’d, uh, kind of like to dry my hands? It’s hygienic?’
The djinni cocks its bloated head to one side and holds out its pudgy hands. Necdet lifts his own hands towards them. The heat is incredible. His hands are dry in an instant.
‘I’m going now.’
The question strikes him in the corridor: why didn’t the hand-drier melt? Necdet ducks back into the toilet. Nothing of course. Djinn are never there when you look for them. Then the shakes hit. Necdet leans over the sink, stomach heaving. He presses his head against the cool porcelain. It is solid, it is dependable, it is cool certainty. He daren’t look up. It could be there again, perched on the hand-drier with its horrid horrid baby face. Or there could be something worse. Or the head of the woman who blew herself up on the tram. Necdet puts his mouth under the tap and gulps down clear cold water, lets it run down his face, into his eyes. Wash away what they have seen today. When he looks up the toilet is still empty.
In the lobby Mustafa practises his pitch shots. Mustafa is never without a plan. None have ever earned him a cent, let alone broken him out of this pressed-aluminium barn of a Business Rescue Centre but his theory is that if he generates enough ideas one of them will stick. His latest is to exploit the fact that he is trapped in a Business Rescue Centre by turning it into an Urban Golf Facility.
‘It’s a new urban sport,’ Mustafa says. ‘Turn a building into a golf course. Corridors become fairways, offices are greens. But what makes it much much cooler than just golf is that you have to get your ball around corners and up flights of stairs. All the office furniture and partitions and workstations: those are like hazards and bunkers and all that stuff. You’re never quite sure where your ball is going to go. Sort of like handball or squash - or three-d crazy golf? Maybe we should include safety helmets and goggles, what do you think? I’m going to write up a prospectus, I’m sure I can raise some venture capital. It’s another great Turkish idea.’
Mustafa hits a five-iron down the corridor from his tee-off position on the empty reception desk. A sweetly angled shot, the ball strikes the wall just before the turn and ricochets around the corner. Mustafa swings his club over his shoulder. He has a lot of time to practise.
You could walk over and around the Levent Business Rescue Centre and never know it was there. Hundreds do every day. It is forty thousand square metres of office space built into the underpinnings of the Emirates Tower. Cavernous halls, office spaces, corridors and meetings rooms, storage and kitchen and toilet facilities, even a recreation room and a gym, buried away, never seeing the light of day. Should earthquake, fire or flood ever strike down those shining towers, a corporation could seamlessly move its business down to the Rescue Centre. It’s big enough to handle the entire Istanbul Stock Exchange. In the year and half Necdet has been here, the red telephone has rung once and that was a wrong number. Mustafa has been here since day one. Necdet is Mustafa’s only partner to stick it more than six months. Mustafa likes the dusty, neon-lit solitude of the rows of empty workstations, the meeting rooms with their chairs all set at perfectly regular intervals around the oval tables. It’s room for creative thought. A thousand flowers have bloomed among these server farms.
‘On for even par,’ says Mustafa with a golfer’s follow-through airpunch. ‘What’s with you? You look like you saw a ghost.’
‘Not a ghost. I did see a djinni in the toilet.’
‘Well, that is a traditional haunt of djinn.’ Unfazed, Mustafa swings his club over his shoulder and jumps off the reception desk. He has time - buckets of time - to become a minor expert on everything. ‘According to those mystics and Sufis who make a study of such things, you’re supposed to ask permission every time you piss.’
‘It was on the hand-drier, and it was a baby. A burning baby.’
‘Ah. That’s different then. Carry these for me, would you?’ Mustafa hands Necdet a pitching wedge, putter and a clatter of irons. He is only three years older than Necdet - they’ve talked about their ages, they’ve talked about everything down in the bunker - but he conducts himself like a worldly-wise cosmopolite. ‘I incline to the theory that djinn are spare thoughts left over from creation, memories of the Big Bang, so to speak. That would fit with them being creatures of fire. There’s a new theory among the imams who have a little quantum physics that the djinn are ourselves in a universe at an angle to ours. But I think in this case they are most likely to be some lingering trauma from being in the epicentre of a tram bomb. You don’t just walk away from these things you know. I’m sure they have counselling available. If it were me, I’d have given you the day off, but it’s not in my gift, alas.’ The Levent Business Rescue Centre is managed by Gum-Chewing Suzan. When she phones in twice a week to make sure Necdet and Mustafa haven’t killed each other with the fire axes she sounds as if she is chewing a wad of gum the size of a car. Neither Necdet nor Mustafa have ever met her. ‘Either that or all that skunk you smoke is finally catching up with you. Pitching wedge, please.’
And that would also explain the floating luminous head of the suicide bomber
, Necdet thinks as he picks the wedge out of the clutch of clubs in his grasp.
I didn’t tell you about her because I thought that too. But I felt the heat of the djinni of the hand-drier on my face. I dried my hands on it. Traumas don’t dry hands.
Mustafa addresses the ball. He has a good lie in the centre of the corridor, well-positioned for a chip up the staircase at the end on to the return. Mustafa wiggles his ass. A flicker in the corner of Necdet’s vision makes him glance over his shoulder. Behind the glass wall is the main back-office; twenty-seven thousand square metres of dusty desks, tucked-in chairs and outdated workstations. Every monitor, as far as Necdet can see into the regress of screens, crackles with static and the ghost of a face from another universe.
 
The Roman Emperor Vespasian said that money has no smell. The emperor lied. Money is every breath Adnan Sarioğlu takes on the trading floor. The smell of money is the ionic charge of Özer Gas and Commodities; sweat and musk, electricity and the hydrocarbon scent of power-warmed plastics, time and tension. To beach-boy-turned-commodities-trader Adnan, money is the smell of a wetsuit worn by a woman.
The commodity pit is a cylinder at the heart of Özer’s glass tower, eight floors ringed around a central shaft and capped with a stained-glass dome that throws shards of colour across the traders ranged around the Money Tree. That is Adnan’s name for the IT core that runs from floor to ceiling, tier upon tier of suspended servers and network links, each level keyed to a specific commodity. Gas is a lowly so its traders are on the second tier, one above crude and dirty oil, and Adnan is only rarely surprised by a shard of blue or gold falling through the jungle of routers and servers and power conduits on to his face. Carbon is the highest, right up there under the dome. Carbon is exalted, carbon is pure.
Adnan Sarioğlu reaches up and slides trading screens around the branches of the Money Tree. He brings in new panes of prices, expands some, pushes others away into the recesses of the central tree. To the virtual eye of the Özer trader, the information core at the centre is dense with leaves of information, almost impenetrable in their total coverage of the global markets. Commodity trading floors, once roaring pits of open-outcry bids and buys, have all become silent as dervish monasteries now that trading information is beamed directly on to the eyeball and AI assistants murmur in the inner ear. Adnan knew the old pit of the ITB exchange only as a red-jacket junior but the roar of the traders screaming into each other’s faces shook his blood vessels, echoed in the ventricles of his heart. When the bell rang, when trading closed and he stepped out to the back office the hush hit him like a breaking wave. Now he only gets that breaker of sound on the terraces of Aslanteppe Stadium.

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