The Dervish House (49 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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Ayşe dips her finger into the coffin. She tastes it. The Mellified Man is sweet, musky, earthy; there’s a crunch from the crystallization, a slightly phenolic tang, a hint of old leather and peat, salt, a touch of urine.
Haydar Akgün gazes into the coffin.
‘You have done a remarkable job. This makes this all the more regrettable.’
As he speaks, Ayşe hears the distant sirens. Akgün takes a wallet from his inside pocket and holds it up.
‘I am Inspector Haydar Akgün of the Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime Bureau working with the Directorate of Antiquities and Museums. Remain where you are, police officers are positioned above ground. You are all under arrest on charges of procuring historical artefacts for illegal sale outside the Republic of Turkey.’
A policeman descends the ladders, then another. Ahmet and Mehmet are taken up into the light, Burak Özekmekçib, Barçin Yayla are already under arrest.
‘I should have known!’ Ayşe shouts at Akgün as two officers take her arms. ‘That cheap
Arslan
aftershave!’
 
‘Yes.’
‘Can you imagine living other people’s lives? We can. Can you imagine knowing what someone else really thinks, being able to predict what they’re going to do? We can. The next industrial revolution is here. This is more than just nano. This is the moment everything becomes smart. This is the . . .’
‘Yes, Ms Gültaşli.’
Deniz Saylan is the smartest-suited shiniest-shod cleanest-shaven neatest-hairstyled best-manicured sweetest-smelling man Leyla Gültaşli has ever seen. He is polite and strong and radiates power and confidence and has a higher, bigger, handsomer more-corner-respecting office with wider views than the CoGoNano! drones — what kind of name is that for a corporation? Three offices on three afternoons and they’re all beginning to blur. At least he doesn’t have shape-changing toys. Men shouldn’t have toys.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said yes. We’re interested in this. We’d like to get involved.’
Sometimes when the coyote runs off the cliff and hangs that cartoon moment in mid-air, he doesn’t wave bye bye and drop. Sometimes the coyote makes it back again to solid rock.
‘The Besarani-Ceylan transcriber.’
A high-speed elevator streaks up the side of the building.
‘This is precisely the kind of project for which Ozer Special Projects was set up. I’m sure you’ve looked at our company profile and history.’ Leyla was reading it up on the train to the dolmuş to the Nano Bazaar. Five a.m. she was down in the station, with the platform sleepers and the home-wending partyers and the people who ride the metro all night and the early workers and Leyla the only one in a suit. She had drilled Aso: established 2012 as Özer Gas Distribution. Consistently among the Top Five IBT companies. Share price . . . Profits posted last fiscal year . . . know your market know your market know your market. ‘Our edge over our competitors is that we’re completing the transition to a truly twenty-first-century company. Ten years ago we were Ozer Distribution, today we’re Özer Gas and Commodities, ten years from now, when the pipelines have stopped pumping, we’ll be something else. We may even be Özer Cellular Transcribers.’
No
, Leyla thinks.
Don’t try and be witty. Men are beautiful when they are serious. Aso is best when he is serious.
‘Our strategy is to seek new centres of profitability and progressively abandon business areas as their value drops or competition increases. Ozer isn’t a gas or a commodities company, it’s a profit-generating nexus. We get in at the start, make a lot of money and when the resource peaks, when the market gets crowded, when we get bored with it, we sell and move on. So we throw a lot of seed money at start-up projects we think have the potential to create markets. We hunt for emerging technologies and new business trends. If this can do even twenty per cent of what you say it can, this is the biggest new technological breakthrough since the integrated circuit. This is the equivalent of getting in on the ground floor with Texas Instruments. Have you even thought about the IP and licensing potential. We cannot not be involved with this. We’ll draw up a standard development deal to work up a prototype. How much are you looking for?’
Aso is about to speak, Leyla stabs her heel into the toe of his twice-worn shoe.
‘Half a million euro,’ she says boldly. Saylan doesn’t even blink.
‘You have to understand that to a company like Özer, that’s pretty much small change. Our standard terms are eighty-twenty.’
‘Seventy-thirty?’ Leyla ventures.
‘No, Ms Gültaşli.’
Firm but mannerly. Aso has the mannerly but not the firm. But firm is mannerly. An inability to make your no no is the worst possible manners.
‘How soon can you move on this?’
‘We can have the contracts with you by tomorrow. Now, we will need audited accounts and certificates of ownership and clear indication where intellectual rights are vested. This is lawyer stuff. From you I will need a detailed technical dossier that we’ll put before an adjudicating panel. Nano’s not our current area of expertise so we’ll hire in specialists.’
‘Can I ask who’ll be on the panel?’ Aso asks.
‘For nanotechnology we regularly call on Professor Süleyman Turan of Ankara University and Nevval Seden from Bilikent University. Do you know them?’
‘Nevval Seden was my adviser of studies.’
‘That’s not a problem. We may ask you to a
viva voce
with them. That can be online. Now, we will go through your accounts very very thoroughly. We will insist on due diligence and we will appoint a project director. Can you live with this?’
‘Yes,’ Leyla says. Saylan ignores her.
‘Mr Basarani.’
‘I need to talk with my business partner.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘So, what is on the table here?’ Leyla asks.
‘Half a million euro development funding to work up a prototype of the Besarani-Ceylan transcriber, in return for Ozer Special Projects taking an eighty per cent share in the IP and future profits.’
‘Seventy-five,’ Leyla interjects.
‘No, Ms Gültaşli.’
‘And after the prototype?’ Aso asks.
‘There’ll be separate funding for market testing. If that’s successful, we go to full production and global marketing. This is a long-term project, medical safety testing alone could take five years.’
‘It’s been five years in development already. This is our life’s work.’
Saylan seems pleased by that answer.
‘Good good good. So, get your people to call my people.’ Saylan’s handshake is, of course, perfect: correct firmness, correct length, correct vibrato and with the crackle of contact details passing palm to palm. ‘Thank you very much Mr Besarani, Ms Gültaşli, this is a very, very exciting project. I’d love to talk more with you about it but I do have another appointment coming in. We will talk very soon.’
‘You were flirting with him,’ Aso says as they wait for the elevator dropping like liquid tar down the face of the tower. They are high as spring storks, giggly as schoolgirls, dazed and drunk on victory. Yes. He did say yes.
‘I was not,’ Leyla whispers. She was mining him, stripping him of suit and style and grooming and manners. She was taking makeover notes. Not for her, she realizes; for Aso. She feels a new, unfamiliar kick in her belly at that thought.
‘But, half a million?’ Aso says as the elevator car arrives.
‘Small change to Ozer, he said. It can be as big a mistake asking for too little as too much.’
‘Don’t you think . . .’ Aso begins but the doors open and Leyla ushers him into the full elevator.
Ssh
, she mimes. The elevator drops them down the side of the Özer tower. Men come and go from floor to floor. Aso wants to talk.
I want you to talk
, Leyla thinks.
I want to shout and run around like an aeroplane and splash in that fountain in the plaza, but for the moment, ssh
. In the atrium among the suits and the money men — are there no money women, are there any women other than Leyla?
Ssh
. Handing in the passes at the front desk:
ssh
. The desk is a slab of black marble designed to awe with the power of Özer, intimidate with the stone impassivity of its receptionists. Leyla smiles as she slides her swing-badge across the black mirror marble. I beat you. You big men, I’ve got your money. Me, the girl from Demre, Ms Have-Your-Little-Career, Ms You’ll-Come-Running-Back. Little Tomato. And you Yaşar and all you Yazıcoğlus and Ceylans and Gültaşlis and everyone sitting around the table in Bakirköy, Uncle Cengiz and Sub-Aunt Kevser and even you Great-Aunt Sezen out on your balcony but most of all you, Zeliha, sitting there behind your desk with that pureed-aubergine smirk: me. Me. Brilliant me.
Out on the plaza she turns to face the forty storeys of corporate glass and titanium and throws her arms wide to the seven heavens.
‘Özer! Ozer! Ozer! Love you!’
‘Don’t you think he agreed a bit quickly?’ Aso says. ‘One guy in an office says, very good, I like this, here’s half a million euro?’
‘For eighty per cent. I’m calling Yaşar.’
‘I’m not thrilled by that. Back home, you mention Özer in the same breath as “Satan”. They run the east like their own private empire. I’m the local lad made good, the only guy from the town got further than secondary school, and the first thing I do is sell my soul to the evil empire.’
‘What is this, some kind of anti-capitalist lament? You needed a deal, you got a deal. I’m calling Yaşar.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think someone else did the spadework for us. I think we ran in second. I think those Idiz boys were in that office maybe three weeks ago looking for funding for their version of the transcriber. That was the difficult sell. That was when Saylan was persuaded. Then we breeze in with the same thing and he sees an opportunity to cover all the bases. Ozer gets a virtual monopoly on transcriber tech. For half a million, that’s cheap.’
‘But their version won’t work.’
‘It has at best sixty per cent of the functionality of ours.’
‘So they’ll go for the clearly better product. You’ve got the money. This is party stuff! Hey! Naci!’
Across the main road stands an incongruous tin kebab wagon. Naci has taken a stool at the counter and sips tea. Hearing his name across the traffic he looks round; seeing Leyla’s unconcealable delight he smiles.
You have a glorious smile
, Leyla thinks.
You have a smile that turns you into another person
.
‘Before you go off celebrating, I think I should say, there is that small matter of the Koran. The money is only half of it.’
Big Naci dodges into the traffic, raising his hand to stop cars.
He could taekwondo them away
, Leyla thinks. But the brightness of the possible is fading. Aso has deflated her. But God has been merciful to her today, God can be merciful again. It’s God’s nature.
‘Okay, okay okay. Half a celebration.’
Naci is running down the pavement waving his arms in delight.
‘Call Yaşar then.’
 
Necdet drags himself vertical from the mattresses to use the pot. Whatever they gave him, their ‘suites of nano’ have left his muscles shaking and his joints aching and the room spinning with a vertigo beyond the heat-flicker of djinn, but a man should stand to piss. He sets the pot in the corner and rests one staying hand against the wall.
‘Do you mind not watching me while I’m having a piss?’
He startles Big Bastard from his stone-stolid meditations.
‘What?’
‘Not you, him.’ Necdet nods to where Hızır sits cross-legged against the opposite wall. The piss is scanty and dark. Necdet is very dehydrated. What chemicals beyond his own is he excreting into the pot? ‘Okay, finished.’ Big Bastard throws a cloth over the pot and raps the door with the butt of his gun for Surly Fucker, the fourth member of the group, who has yet to speak a word to Necdet, though he can still feel the bruises of his hard fingers on his biceps. Big Bastard is a different proposition. He practises silence but in the end he always has too many questions.
‘When you talk to Hızır, like just then, what do you see?’
‘Do Alevis revere Hızır?’
‘We revere all saints and imams.’
‘How do you picture him?’
‘He’s old but he’s young at the same time, like a man but sometimes like an animal or a bird. He has a halo of green flame.’
‘Then that’s what you would see.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Nothing I can explain. Something that comes before the animal or the bird or the man, those are just different shapes we put on something . . . unconscious. Something that comes before shapes and seeing and even thinking. Something that exists before we’re conscious of it.’
Big Bastard nods.
‘Everyone sees their own Hızır.’
‘No, you don’t get it. Yes, how else could it be?’

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