The Dervish House (17 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘For a natural-born entrepreneur who professes deep-rooted market instincts, you do talk such fearful shit,’ declares Constantin.
Father Ioannis throws up his hand. ‘A kadı, and now a miracle worker. That’s the last thing we need. Lefteres . . .’
‘I can only intervene if someone asks me,’ says the confectioner.
‘The bomb must have knocked something loose,’ Constantin growls.
‘This young man is caught in the tram bomb and sees djinn,’ says Georgios fanning himself with a menu card. A silver brow of sun has risen over the roof of Ismet Inönü Apartments. Soon it will pour its full heat into Adem Dede Square and drive the old men to shelter. ‘Can Durukan was chased over the roof by a robot after he was caught spying on the bomb scene. That robot is destroyed but someone removed the evidence.’
‘And that bomb, there’s something not right about that,’ Bülent says. ‘Suicide blast; martyrdom video. That’s the rule. Glorious martyrdom against Turkish prostitution in the arms of the decadent West. It’s up on the internet before you can say Inshallah.’
‘You know rather a lot about this,’ Lefteres says.
‘I’ve watched a few. I like rating them. I’ve this idea for a TV show: people send in their martyrdom videos, people vote and the winner gets a suicide bomb mission.’
‘God forgive you,’ says Father Ioannis. ‘That’s not even funny.’
‘It seems odd that whoever planted the bomb put a robot there to make sure there were no videos at all.’
‘They were watching for something else,’ Constantin says with a rap of his cane on the cobbles. ‘Something they needed to follow closely, without being seen or suspected. And they were afraid your young friend saw it too.’
‘Exactly,’ says Georgios Ferentinou, leaning forward and pursing his fingers, an unconscious gesture from the days when his debating circle was wider than old Greeks and a çayhane owner. ‘Let’s review what we know. One small bomb, no casualties beyond the bomber. There is no martyrdom video. The bombers - or someone else, it’s a possibility - leaves a robot there at the scene. It may be recording something, but when someone else comes to investigate, it pursues him and tries to find out his identity. This is all very interesting.’
‘Are you suggesting we play amateur detectives?’ Lefteres asks. He gets creakingly up from the low stool, shakes hands quickly with his friends. ‘A bunch of old Greeks and a çayhane owner?’
Father Ioannis is next to leave.
‘Whatever it means, it will all come down on us,’ he says. ‘It always does. God and His Mother be with all here.’
‘What time does the car take you to Kadiköy?’ Constantin asks.
‘The afternoon.’
‘Plenty of time then.’ Constantin pulls out the backgammon board from the rack under the table and unfolds it.
‘Now you know I beat you at this every time,’ Georgios says.
‘I do.’ Constantin lays out the counters on the points and folds up the leather dice cup. ‘I just thought you might welcome a reason to spend a little more time with me.’
‘Why would I want to do that? I see you every bloody day.’
‘There might be something you want to ask me.’
‘What would I want to ask you?’
‘Like where you might find Ariana Sinanidis.’
A flicker of movement catches Georgios’ attention. A little plastic monkey-thing scurries with soft gripping pads along a cable slung from the dervish house to Ismet Inönü Apartments, scuttles up the wall, over a coaming and is gone. Bülent brings fresh tea on his swinging tray.
‘Just roll the damn dice,’ says Georgios Ferentinou.
Can is the Boy Detective and he is on patrol up on the rooftops of Eskiköy. From his vantage parapet on Ismet Inönü Apartments, he looks down into Adem Dede Square. There is Mr Ferentinou with his old friend, the nasty one he doesn’t like. There is Bülent leaning against the counter reading something off his ceptep. The Georgian woman comes out on to her verandah beneath him to take in her washing. She is smoking and her television is blaring. She doesn’t see the Boy Detective. That’s because he is a master of disguise, the wearer of many shapes. There is that stupid girl who works in the shop full of dead books, opening up the locks. She always looks furtive when she opens up the store. In she slips, as if she has committed a crime.
Monkey turns until the camera locator matches with the GPS log from yesterday’s rooftop chase.
Size of a rat!
the Boy Detective commands. Monkey explodes into his component BitBots and reforms into creeping, careful Rat, sniffing and snooping and sampling the roof for clues. What kind of clues? The sort of thing that crime scene investigators on television clear entire rooms to keep safe, and put on masks to lift with long tweezers, and put into plastic bags. Clues. An empty cigarette packet isn’t a clue. A lottery ticket torn almost in half, a pair of pants long fallen from a line, grey and gritty from years of rooftop exposure. Rat goes sniffing across the rooftops. Seagulls lift, braying in irritation at being disturbed and settle again. Rat perches on his little sprung feet on the edge of the parapet, tasting the air. There is Mr Ferentinou playing tavla with that nasty Egyptian one. There is the Boy Detective’s mom going to bring the little silver car up from the garage on Vermilion-Maker Lane. The Gas Bubble, he calls it. The Boy Detective has ten minutes to get a start on this case before he has to pull on his blue uniform and stick his big pack on his back. Think Rat think. Bülent sets out saucers of milk for the cats of Adem Dede. He feeds them because Aykut across the square hates them. Think Rat think. The Boy Detective clicks up the GPS log. This is where Monkey leaped into mad mid-air; here the hunter robot fell and smashed. Look, look well, concentrate. The Boy Detective makes a new movement through the haptic field and Rat transforms into Snake; freaky, go anywhere Snake. Walls are no object to Snake’s sticky-smart belly; down he goes, scanning, scanning. Can’s eyes flick across five panes of information, looking for the overlooked, something small and unconsidered that the clean-up crew might have missed. But the men who controlled the hunter robot are big and old and slow. The Boy Detective is young and quick and brilliant. His brain is naturally attuned to pick visual clues out of the world that others miss. It’s rewired itself this way, Mr Ferentinou says; compensating for his muffled, sound-poor world.
Size of a rat!
the Boy Detective commands. Monkey explodes into his component BitBots and reforms into creeping, careful Rat, sniffing and snooping and sampling the roof for clues. What kind of clues? The sort of thing that crime scene investigators on television clear entire rooms to keep safe, and put on masks to lift with long tweezers, and put into plastic bags. Clues. An empty cigarette packet isn’t a clue. A lottery ticket torn almost in half, a pair of pants long fallen from a line, grey and gritty from years of rooftop exposure. Rat goes sniffing across the rooftops. Seagulls lift, braying in irritation at being disturbed and settle again. Rat perches on his little sprung feet on the edge of the parapet, tasting the air. There is Mr Ferentinou playing tavla with that nasty Egyptian one. There is the Boy Detective’s mom going to bring the little silver car up from the garage on Vermilion-Maker Lane. The Gas Bubble, he calls it. The Boy Detective has ten minutes to get a start on this case before he has to pull on his blue uniform and stick his big pack on his back. Think Rat think. Bülent sets out saucers of milk for the cats of Adem Dede. He feeds them because Aykut across the square hates them. Think Rat think. The Boy Detective clicks up the GPS log. This is where Monkey leaped into mad mid-air; here the hunter robot fell and smashed. Look, look well, concentrate. The Boy Detective makes a new movement through the haptic field and Rat transforms into Snake; freaky, go anywhere Snake. Walls are no object to Snake’s sticky-smart belly; down he goes, scanning, scanning. Can’s eyes flick across five panes of information, looking for the overlooked, something small and unconsidered that the clean-up crew might have missed. But the men who controlled the hunter robot are big and old and slow. The Boy Detective is young and quick and brilliant. His brain is naturally attuned to pick visual clues out of the world that others miss. It’s rewired itself this way, Mr Ferentinou says; compensating for his muffled, sound-poor world.
There. What’s that? In a gutter along the side of Kenan’s store. Something small and sharp-edged and orange. Snake loops across the side of Ismet Inönü Apartments. Snakes have no hands so Can reconfigures it into Monkey and snatches the orange ort out of the dried, cracked sludge. In three bounds Monkey is on the window ledge of the dervish house balcony. It drops the treasure into the Boy Detective’s hand. A sliver of plastic, chipped cleanly from the hunter robot’s shell. It must have flown a long way from the impact. There is printing on it. NG428. Can squeezes the piece of plastic in his fist until it cuts. God is good, God is very good.
Do like the CSI cops do. Tag it. It’s the work of a moment to take a high-resolution photograph on your ceptep. Bag it. Into the plastic lunch bag on which he’s written the word EVIDENCE, and that bag into your school bag. Can is doing up his blue school tie when Mom enters and signs,
All ready to go then?
All ready to go then?
‘Right and ready,’ says Can the Boy Detective.
‘A karin,’ says Mustafa as he boils up his ritual start-every-morning coffee in the Business Rescue Centre’s immense kitchen, ‘is not a thing you see every day, even you.’
A topic that regularly surfaces in the Levent Business Rescue Centre is what talent its two wardens already possess might become a superpower. Mustafa’s is becoming an expert overnight. He can catch an obsession in the blink of an eye. Urban Golf, that’s just so old. Djinn, now they are endlessly fascinating.
Necdet, whose superpower is now all-too manifest and genuine - Djinn-Boy - is certain that Mustafa now knows more than Necdet ever will about the djinn; their ranks and orders, their foibles and weaknesses and the words of power by which a strong shaykh may master them. The Mustafa Bağli Guide to Djinn, Ifrits and the Lesser Members of the Creation of Fire.
‘Upside down, inside the earth, now that’s very interesting.’ Mustafa pours two tiny cups of frothy, grainy coffee from the brass pot. The coffee is strong and very good - another of Mustafa’s small researched expertises, when he became obsessed with the sacks of coffee the Ottomans abandoned on their retreat from the gates of Vienna, at the height of imperial ambition. ‘That’s kind of a North African interpretation - specifically from Cairo. Tell me, if you look down, do you see anything at my feet?’
‘No, but there is something on your shoulder.’
Mustafa almost upsets his coffee.
‘Describe this . . . entity.’
‘It’s like a hand on your shoulder, if a hand looked like a crab made of clay.’
‘Clay, you say?’
‘Clay, or rocks, sort of like that American superhero who’s made of rocks.’ Necdet decides not to mention the eyes, which are between the fingers.
‘I think the comic character you’re referring to is Benjamin Grimm, aka The Thing. You see, there is a different interpretation of the karin, that they are creatures of clay rather than creatures of fire and that they sit on your shoulder, like angels or demons.’
‘It’s drumming its fingers on your shoulder.’
Now Mustafa’s coffee cup does hit the grey carpet tiles. After he has cleaned up the spill he wanders down along the aisles of dusty workstations to where Necdet now sits clicking vacantly at a gossip site.
‘Is it still there?’ Mustafa asks. ‘The thing - the karin- on my shoulder?’
Necdet doesn’t want to tell Mustafa what he really has at his shoulder so he mumbles, ‘Yeah.’
Mustafa pulls a chair over from the next work cube.
‘This interests me. It pains me to say this, being a rationalist and a modern European as well as a modern Turk, but we do seem to be living in a new age of mental recidivism. For every reaction there has to be an equal and opposite reaction, as much in the spiritual world as the physical, it seems. Just as we finally cast off our mantle of being the Sick Man of Europe, the eternal barbarous Turk, we find the most primitive and superstitious kind of Anatolian folk religion rearing its head in our cities. Djinn, shaykhs, street kadıs administering their own brand of the shariat. Dervishes and everything. Action, reaction. It’s a cloud of unreason. Some Islamist woman blows herself up on the tram and you see a djinni on the hot-air drier, meet a karin under the doorstep and find Ben Grimm’s hand on my shoulder.
‘Now, I don’t know how this works - it’s obviously some post-traumatic hallucination - but I tell you this most sincerely, once that pregnant girl starts talking, half the neighbourhood will be round looking for prayers and readings and healings. You’ll never hear the end of it. Your brother may go on about wanting an Islam for the street that’s pure and fresh and modern - so far, so old school Sufi, if you ask me - but I tell you this too, there was never an imam - or a kadı, for that matter - could resist a quick euro. There’s money to be made and to be honest, what you need is marketing. Good, creative marketing, with vision and a long-term plan. An investment structure. Get you out of this hole. Get you some kind of life.’
‘When you say marketing, you mean you.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘You run a Business Rescue Centre no one’s ever used.’
‘Yes, but with entrepreneurial flair.’
Necdet can’t deny this. The doctor-fish health spa for American psoriasis sufferers, the Roses from Turkey company, Hazelnuts for Health and Happiness: the new superfood, Your Cave in Cappadocia! and most recently the Urban Golf; all business schemes of Mustafa’s. All fantasy.
Mustafa goes to take the morning call from Gum-Chewing Suzan. There’s a directive to cut down on the air-conditioning. The price of gas on the micro-markets has peaked again. Mustafa reasonably argues that the rescue centre only needs air-conditioning because of the heat thrown out by the hundreds of purring workstations. Shut down the computers and the gas price system is solved at a stroke. Simple. Brilliant.
Necdet is seized by sudden, low-grade panic, the rushing, roaring of a landslide in his head; all the places and faces of his life slipping away from him, tumbling and bowling and grinding each other ever smaller until they are nothing but walls of dust billowing out on every side of him. Necdet looks again at Mustafa, arguing on the screen with Gum-Chewing Suzan and knows him. Somewhere outside this dungeon is Ismet. Necdet can see his face, hear his voice and speak his name. He knows there are others, brothers of the tarikat who come around on a Thursday afternoon to argue new, good, street law from the Koran and the Hadith but he can’t see their faces or hear their names. On the tram, hadn’t there been a woman whose head came off? He had seen her as a vision, floating in front of him as he tried to flee the crowd before the police asked him questions he didn’t want to answer, it must have been just yesterday but the face, the place, the time, even the dull boom of the necklace of explosives detonating, are clouded, memories of memories. What had he so feared from the police? Before Ismet let him into the sun-dusty cellars beneath the dervish house, what had he done, where had he been? He can’t remember. His memory is just a storm of djinn.
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