The Dervish House (29 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
She flashes between the ferries and the cruise ships moored in at Karakoy like a wall of light and drops down into the water, mortal again. She nudges the Riva gently in to the mooring, barely kissing the tyres. Engines gurgle to silence, the water goes still.
‘Who taught you to do that?’ the matelot asks as he gallantly hands her up on to the quay.
‘My dad was a destroyer captain.’
The boatman salutes. On land Adnan is the hero again. He adjusts the drape of his jacket, the reveal of his cuffs. Then he swoops and scoops up Ayşe, crushing her to him, her heels scraping the concrete, their faces breath-close, kiss-intimate.
‘Didn’t I?’ he roars. Ayşe can taste the wine he swallowed. ‘Didn’t I, by fuck?’ Adnan spins her around. Caught up in his arms, Ayşe feels boats, buses, buggies, minarets blur around her. ‘Come on!’ Adnan shouts and she slips back to earth but he has her hand and he dashes through the night-time strollers, through the close-laid tarpaulins of shifty ware, straight out into the traffic, dodging and dancing and stopping the trucks and tour buses with an out-held hand and the grace of lovers. A tram sweeps down upon them. Ayşe shrieks, then Adnan’s hand pulls her clear of the killing monster, between the scooters and the Volkswagens and into the alleys between the shops that shoulder up against the New Mosque. There, in a doorway against a red painted roller shutter overhung by a curl of urban wisteria, Adnan pulls her to him. Ayşe slams hard against him, a declaration of war as of love, wanting him to feel the power of her belly, the strength, the perfection of her thighs. A youth in a leather bomber jacket jeers up the alley at them. Adnan bellows with filthy laughter but pulls her on, deeper into Sultanahmet. It’s no city for lovers, this old Ottoman capital.
On Hoca Paşa Sok at the back of a tiny neighbourhood mosque she backs him into a doorway. His good pants, his deal-making pants are open, his half-hard, heavy cock is in her hand. She has a bad bold idea what to do with it, then lights go on in the grille above the door across the alley. Ayşe shrieks with laughter and spins away, running and laughing up the maze of cobbled alleys that run up to Cağaloğlu. Away from the main streets Sultanahmet is empty. The shuttered shop faces radiate the memory of the day’s heat. Ayşe stops in the middle of a steep cobbled lane overhung by dusty almond branches to step deftly out of her panties. Adnan catches her, prises the gossamer triangles from her hand and presses them to his face.
‘Now that’s what I call a fine bouquet. Exceptional vintage.’
Ayşe grabs the pants and forces them into Adnan’s mouth, laughing hysterically as he munches with great woofing chomps like a monster. A woman late home, shopping bag in hand, coat pulled discreetly around her, crosses the top end of the alley. She stares at Adnan with the pants hanging from his mouth.
‘Waugh!’ he roars. He waves his hands. The woman flees, coat pulled tighter against the immoral night. Ayşe and Adnan are still aching with laughter as they tumble into the elevator in the multi-storey car park. Ayşe’s dress is up around her waist, her legs wrapped around Adnan’s waist and her back jammed against the emergency call panel when the elevator pings and stops on three and the door opens on a sick-faced man in bad-cut suit and bad-cut hair. He blinks. His little mouth is open.
‘Going up,’ says Adnan. Adnan and Ayşe fall out of the elevator and into the Audi. It’s the only car on the entire level. ‘Two million euro!’ Adnan shouts. The chipped pillars, the tyre-polished concrete return it to him. ‘Two million euro!’ No one is so corrupt, so insensitive to the malign spirit of place, as to fuck in an empty multi-storey car-park. But Ayşe keeps her hand on Adnan’s cock as he third-gear spirals down the exit ramp, one hand keeping the wheel on full lock. Tyres shriek, the ghosts of old multi-storeys.
If we hit a random drip of oil we’re dead
, Ayşe thinks.
No, that can’t be. Not this night.
If we hit a random drip of oil we’re dead
, Ayşe thinks.
No, that can’t be. Not this night.
Out in the street Adnan clicks in the autodrive. Ayşe wiggles close to open her thighs to his touch. She frigs him gently, more a tease, all the way through the shuttling dolmuşes on O1. On the bridge approach she feels Adnan take his thumb away from her clitoris. The auto drive snaps off. The gas turbine whinnies like a proud horse. Acceleration pushes Ayşe deep into the seat. This is a thrilling car. The bridge to Asia is an arc of light. High over the black water, between continents. There are ships down there. Floodlit Turkish flags stand like beacons along the hill-tops of the Asian shore. Moons and stars, hanging limply. Night is no respite from the heat. Down there, where the dark water abuts the bright shore, is the yalı of Adnan’s dreams. Your secret deal will buy it for us, but my secret deal will take us to the yalı of which you really dream, the one behind me, on the European shore.
She smokes. The night traffic never ceases. The Audi burns past truck after truck after truck rolling up from the east into the maw of great Istanbul. Ayşe rolls sideways to gaze out the window at the blur of cheap housing and strip stores. She opens her lips a syllable; smoke falls from her mouth like water. Spindly minarets, tinny silver domes, cheap Saudi-built mosques, alien and thoughtless. Youths hanging around. Sports fashion. The police have pulled over a truck. Three cop cars. The truck carries Armenian characters; the fiveo’clock-shadow men in mud-coloured clothes standing listlessly have come from farther east than that.
They seem the only passionate things in Ferhatpaşa as they cross the still-warm concrete from the garage to the lobby. Speedboats, horse-drawn carriages, glittering previews over as the night of lights, good suits and high shoes and million-euro deals: Ferhatpaşa does not believe in these. It’s still urgent, she still wants him; he’s hungry for her but every second dry, drab Ferhatpaşa wears away at it.
He’s kicking his shoes off in the hall; strewing jacket, tie, shirt across the living room floor. A man should undress from below the waist. She’s never been able to teach him that; lazy Kaş beach boy.
‘One minute. Keep it hard for me. I am going to fuck you until your balls are like dried apricots.’
Quick pee. Needs doing. By the time she is clean and sweet and out of everything but the stockings he loves so much and the killing heels, he’s face down star-fished across the bed, snoring.
Wednesday
5
From early light Adem Dede Square has been busy with mops and buckets, hoses and scrubbing brushes, multi-surface cleaners and paint-stripper. Up ladders, hanging out of balconies, on chairs, working painstakingly on the details of carved doors with toothbrushes, bent over cars dotingly dabbing away the orange bug-bursts with T-Cut. Hafize mops the front steps and dabs at the woodwork of the Gallery Erkoç, working the graffiti out of the floral scroll, sleeves and trouser legs rolled up immodestly in the heat and effort; Mrs Durukan, leaning out of the balcony screens freely and enthusiastically hosing down the front of her apartment and treating the angry shouts of the splashed in the street as if it is their fault. Kenan’s roller shutter has spared him the worst of the paint-bot attack; even that shameless Georgian woman is on her knees on her balcony, hair tied back in a headscarf. There is a temporary truce between Bülent and Aykut as they scrub at their chairs and tables and splattered windows with nylon dish scourers. Orange-tinged streams of water run across Adem Dede Square, merge, vanish down drains and through unexpected sinkholes between cobbles, pour down the steps on Vermilion-Maker Lane in a bright cascade. If you had a police frequency scanner, you could map the hidden watercourses of Eskiköy, Georgios Ferentinou thinks, sitting at his recently cleaned table outside Bulent’s çayhane. Another secret Istanbul. His own section of the dervish house remains resolutely freckled. The first rain will wash it away.
‘I’m thinking of suing,’ Bülent says, wringing out his mop and pouring another bucket down the street drain.
‘The police? Don’t waste your time,’ Lefteres says.
‘No.’ Bülent nods over at Güneşli Sok down the side of Aykut’s meyhane. ‘Him.’
The old Greeks keep a moment of uncomfortable silence.
‘You don’t want to be starting something,’ Lefteres says.
‘Well, something is started, whether we like it or not,’ Father Ioannis says. A great dark presence in his beard and robe, he is even more quiet and brooding than usual. Georgios notices his hands busy knotting and unknotting his prayer rope. ‘They were at the church again last night. Spray paint. God is Great. Infidels will burn. Greek paedos.’
‘Have you tried talking to Hüseyin Yaşayan?’ Hüseyin is the imam of the small Tulip Mosque and a brilliant amateur historian of Beyoğlu types and characters. Georgios has frequently drawn on his prodigious store of community knowledge to help chart his alternative maps of Istanbul.
‘I called him. There’s not a lot he can do against Hızır.’
‘The Green Saint? We are in trouble.’
‘Hüseyin’ll make some mention about community relations at Friday prayers but it’s not his people doing it. This is grass roots, popular religion. God preserve us from young men with religion. He’s as scared of them as we are. He’s duty bound to report this kind of thing to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, but if he does, Tulip Mosque would burn right after St Panteleimon. This will not end well.’
‘You know,’ says Lefteres, stirring his tea, ‘I’m thinking of taking that commission.’
‘The lampoon?’
‘Against your woman.’ He nods at the Georgian woman pausing in her industrious scrubbing to mop her brow.
‘I thought you said you had to be satisfied there was just cause and a clear social need,’ says Bülent.
‘I can be flexible on the just cause if the social need is clear enough,’ Lefteres says. ‘Right now it couldn’t be clearer.’
‘God save her,’ Father Ioannis mutters. Everyone around the table understands a minority fingering a yet smaller minority. Show which side you’re on.
‘I’m writing a new contract,’ Georgios Ferentinou announces to crack the bad silence. ‘There will be a terror attack - actual or thwarted - involving gas at some point in the next ten days.’
‘I’ll buy that,’ says Bülent. ‘Is this what you’ve been talking about in your think-tank?’
‘They’ve had information,’ Georgios says. ‘It’s an interesting group. Lots of experts in diverse fields. I was put next a zoologist who specializes in how birds manage to communicate a threat across an entire flock in a split second. Isn’t that fascinating? Might terror groups unconsciously communicate signals to each other? If we could just recognize that language. There’s Selma Özgün the psychogeographer. She’s interested in how over centuries city architecture affects the social and mental spaces people inhabit. I can see how that might give insights into where terrorists might preferentially strike, or where they might live and meet. There are legacies in these things. They’ve even recruited our one and only science-fiction writer. That’s clever.’
‘The big fear’s always been blowing up one of those gas tankers in the Bosphorus,’ Bülent says. ‘I saw this programme on the television; Istanbul’s particularly vulnerable: the hills on either side of the Bosphorus contain the blast. The programme said it could locally reach the intensity of Hiroshima.’
‘God forgive you for knowing too much about this sort of thing,’ Father Ioannis says.
‘Well, when you’ve a three-year-old you watch a lot of Discovery Asia,’ Bülent says. ‘It’s good; you learn stuff.’
‘You see, I think that’s what Ogün Saltuk will be thinking,’ Georgios says.
‘Ogün Saltuk. Wasn’t he the one . . .’ Constantin says.
‘He was,’ Georgios says quickly. ‘The same man.’
‘Yes,’ says Constantin, frowning as if the tea spoon he is twirling is the very axis of great Istanbul, ‘The one you once said never would have an ideal academic career, untroubled by anything like an original thought.’
‘I said more than that and the man is fool and a plagiarist,’ Georgios says. ‘But it interests me. I want to see how it develops.’
‘So you don’t think it’s a tanker,’ Bülent says.
‘It’s too obvious.’
‘Ten to one Ogün Saltuk suggests it,’ Constantin says.
‘So what do you think, before you float your terror contract?’ Bülent asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Georgios says. ‘There’s something; there are forces moving, patterns I can’t quite see but I can feel.’
‘You’ll be seeing djinn next,’ says Lefteres. ‘Hey! Maybe that would do it.’
‘Well, I’ll take a few of your gas contracts,’ Bülent says. ‘Never steered me wrong yet.’
‘Well gentlemen, I’ll be taking my leave.’ Lefteres rises painfully from his place. ‘I have a lampoon to write.’
Next to rise from his low stool is Father Ioannis. ‘I’m going to call round with Hüseyin, though there’s bugger all he can do. If anyone’s interested, I’m saying a vespers tonight.’
Georgios and Constantin sit in comfortable silence as men can enjoy silence between them without the need to fill it with words. The Alexandrian lights a cigarette and slumps into accustomed ease behind it, trickling a thin ribbon of smoke up into the warm air. Around them the cleaners and scrubbers and swishers of Adem Dede Square come to their independent, but simultaneous truces with the tag-paint of the Istanbul security police. It’s too damn hot out there for work.
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