The Few

  “No,” the two men said.

  Derdâ’s entire body went cold. She could feel the beads of sweat forming on her forehead.

  She grabbed her head and cried, “What am I going to do now?”

  The two Jamaicans looked at each other. But they couldn’t keep the act up any longer and burst out laughing.

  “You really must be a skinhead,” one said.

  The other: “How could anyone be so dumb?”

  Derdâ wanted to strangle them but she threw herself down in the armchair and asked for a cigarette. Laughing, one passed her a joint. The harshness in her face softened as she lit the joint and soon enough she was laughing along with them. The rhythms of Desmond Dekker filled the room and it seemed, if only for a short while, that they were all genuinely happy. As the joint moved round the room every now and then one of them imitated Derdâ: “And what I going to do now?” And they cracked up, laughing all over again, replaying the scene again and again, laughing every time, until their friend came back with the three bricks of heroin.

  “It’s alright,” the Rasta said, handing Derdâ an envelope.

  She stood up and took it. The others got up to say good-bye. Derdâ patted Bob on the head—a dog as mellow as the man he was named after—and left the room. On the ground floor she saw the Jamaican watching the door. As a woman came out of the toilet, the Jamaican turned to Derdâ and said, laughing, “You wanna go? A special price for the lady.” Derdâ thanked him for his offer and left the house. She stepped through the line outside and walked back through the carnival where she hailed a taxi and set off for Chelsea. She gave the driver the second address written on Black T’s card. After a few blocks they pulled up to a ten-story apartment and Derdâ got out of the car. She found the apartment number on the panel beside the door and rang the bell.

  A muffled voice crackled through the intercom, “Who’s there?”

  “Delivery from Black T …”

  A sharp metallic snap stopped her before she could finish and Derdâ pushed open the door. She thought of the Jamaicans and everything that had just happened to her on the elevator ride up to the eighth floor. She started laughing. She was still laughing when she rang the doorbell to apartment 33.

  Regaip opened the door. Her eyes shot open in shock. Derdâ stopped laughing.

  Regaip grabbed Derdâ by the collar and pulled her inside. Then he slammed the door shut.

  “Is anyone following you?” he said in a strange English accent.

  “No, no,” Derdâ stuttered. She noticed the gun in his hand.

  Derdâ stood before her father. A man who had nothing but blood on his hands to prove it. I’ll be fine if I just stay calm. Give him the envelope and leave, she thought. She struggled to stay calm and collected. Regaip hadn’t recognized her. In the last sixteen years he’d spent no more than five days with his daughter. The last time he’d seen her was five years ago. Derdâ had shaved her head since then. He doesn’t recognize me, she thought. And there was something he didn’t know. Something else that had come between them: cocaine.

  A week after Bezir had been killed, Gido called Regaip and told him to rent a new flat and hole up there with a year’s supply of food. “Don’t leave until you hear from me,” he ordered. They had a cop on the inside who had told Gido that the Dulluhan brothers got the MI5 onto them. His only advice on the matter: “Make yourself scarce.”

  And Regaip did just that. But he couldn’t entirely shut down his past, especially his history as an ex-con. Regaip hadn’t taken a shine to prison, just like he hadn’t taken a shine to the security cabin at the entrance to Ubeydullah’s furniture factory he was confined to his first three months in London. He could hardly breathe in there. So one morning he left home with the other security guards, just as if they were going to work. But instead they went straight down to the underworld as if running to a newfound freedom. He’d never learned the fundamentals of English grammar but Regaip quickly formed his own gang because he knew the rules in the underworld. They were called the Fighting Wolves, a group formed with the children of relatives from Yatırca. The first few weeks Ubeydullah and Bezir tried to hunt Regaip, but they knew he was a forest ranger and this time wasn’t just hiding out in the mountains. He was in London. It was futile tracking down a ranger in a city like London. They’d never find him. So there was only one thing left to do. Ubeydullah took the matter into his own hands: he put a curse on the man, and not a small one at that.

  So many years in prison and now holed up in his house in Chelsea with nothing to do but stare at the walls and curse his fate, Regaip stayed in command of the Fighting Wolves and he had no qualms investing his earnings in cocaine. “If I can’t go out into the world, I’ll bring the world to me,” he’d say before taking a blow. The coke made him say, “God is great, but fuck his decrees.” In his drug world, he met the people who’d shot their own brother, who’d strangled their wife. People who didn’t even know their own children. The drug world turned people against each other. Heroin addicts didn’t give a damn about anyone else in the world. They themselves were the centers of the universe and they found as many reasons as there were planets to justify their actions. “May God save them,” Regaip used to say. But he didn’t say it any more. Hadn’t said it for five months. In fact, he’d been cooped up like this for the last five years. He no longer had a brother or a wife, so his tragedy now was not recognizing his own child. He had no idea that his daughter had been living the life of a retired trade attaché since he saw her last. He could hardly even remember what she looked like.

  He let go of Derdâ’s leather jacket and walked into the living room, muttering to himself in Turkish.

  “How would a stupid egghead like you even know if you were being followed?”

  Derdâ stepped into the apartment and then stopped, holding the envelope, waiting. Regaip called out to her from the living room.

  “Come here!”

  Derdâ was reluctant to go into the living room. All she wanted to do was deliver the envelope and leave. Regaip stood scratching his forehead with the barrel of his gun. The room was empty except for a television and a sofa. He pointed to the sofa with the gun.

  “Sit.”

  Derdâ handed him the envelope.

  “This is for you …”

  Regaip trained the gun at Derdâ’s face.

  “I said sit.”

  Derdâ’s felt sick. The poverty and deprivation she had endured in her short life, the weed she had just smoked with the Jamaicans, and the sight of her armed father after so many years. It was all too much to bear.

  Her voice quivered, “I just came to drop off this envelope … please …”

  Regaip stepped forward and grabbed Derdâ’s ears. She didn’t have any hair to grab. The pain was so great she bent over and nearly collapsed on the sofa. There was no way out. Regaip released her and she grabbed her ears as if to regain balance. It felt like he’d torn them off. He’d only pulled them the way any other father would have done. He scolded like a father, too.

  “If I tell you to do something, you do it. If I tell you to sit down, you sit down. If I say stand up, you stand up. Now listen to me. Listen. Listen carefully. Take off your clothes.”

  Tears welled up in Derdâ’s eyes. She shouted in Turkish this time, silencing Regaip.

  “I’m Derdâ. Derdâ. Your daughter! I’m your daughter!”

  For a moment, Regaip froze. A moment later, his body went limp.

  Then he screamed in Turkish: “How the hell do you know my mother’s name?”

  And he struck Derdâ in the face with such force that he knocked her over, leaving her crumpled up on the sofa, hyperventilating like a wounded animal. Like a young dog about to die. Her mind was blank. She was looking through the wrong end of the telescope again.

  “Don’t waste your time crying,” Regaip said. “I’ll fuck you either way. Isn’t that why you came? Didn’t that kid tell you? Timur …”

  She gave up trying to convince her father
who she was. Derdâ cried out through her tears, “Who’s Timur?”

  “The bastard who goes by Black T,” Regaip said, laughing. “I asked him for a girl and he sends me you. But first give me that envelope.”

  So Black T knows, she thought. He knows I killed his sister. He sent me here to get his revenge.

  Until then Derdâ had kept a tight grip on the envelope. She stood up and threw it at Regaip’s face. It bounced off his shoulder and fell to the floor. Regaip smiled. He leaned over and picked it up. He opened it and pulled out a thick wad of cash. He counted it, his eyes flickering over the bills like a money-counter.

  “Now strip. I don’t want any more trouble from you!”

  And he slapped his daughter’s breasts, his bloodshot eyes smiling hungrily like gaping mouths.

  “Or do you want a little something before? A little tetanus shot?”

  “Dad,” Derdâ pleaded. “Dad, don’t you remember me? For God’s sake …”

  He caught her by the ears again.

  “You freak, how dare you speak that name before God? Look at yourself, damn it! If your mother or father saw you like this they’d die of shame!”

  As he dragged her down the corridor, he continued to berate her. He opened the bedroom door and threw Derdâ onto the bed.

  “There’s stuff there by the bed! Do what you need to do, but just be ready when you come back,” he said before locking the door behind him and stuffing the key in his pocket. He walked back to the living room, stuffing his gun back into his pants. Then he grabbed his cell phone off the TV and dialed. He started shouting the second the boy picked up.

  “You stupid mother fucker! You pick a junkie up on the street and send her to me, you dog! You flatter yourself, thinking you can find me a girl, eh? And in the end, you find me this whore psychopath! And then she turns out to be fucking Turk!”

  He had exhausted himself and paused to catch his breath. Black T broke in the moment he got the chance.

  “How should I know? The girl was set on seeing you …”

  Regaip hurled his cell phone at the wall and scrambled out of the room. It had finally sunk in. He tripped at the entrance and frantically picked himself up.

  “Derdâ!” he cried as he pounded on the bedroom door, fishing the key out of his pocket with his other hand. His hands were trembling when he unlocked the door.

  Derdâ lay motionless on the bed with a syringe hanging from a dark purple bruise on her arm. Regaip ran over to her and shook her by the shoulders.

  “Derdâ! Oh, Derdâ!”

  Derdâ opened her eyes and whispered. Regaip leaned over her lips, and he heard something he would never forget.

  “Dad, fuck me as much as you want.”

  The words slipped in through his ear and coiled around his brain like a snake. Regaip took his daughter in his arms and sobbed, pressing her tightly to his chest, staring up at the ceiling. He sobbed as much as his breath would allow. The same painful pitch as the cacophony unfurled on judgment day. Regaip was sobbing so loudly he didn’t hear the SAS commandos and MI5 smash down his front door as they raided his apartment.

  Regaip screamed as the officers pulled him away from Derdâ, as they pulled his gun out of his pants, as they cuffed him on the floor. He kept screaming, but his voice was cracking.

  “Forgive me, oh, forgive me, please forgive me!”

  The MI5 needed just one more call from his cell phone to get a fix on his location. Regaip had made that call just to bawl out Black T.

  An officer checked Derdâ’s pulse and called an ambulance.

  As Regaip was dragged out of the apartment, his voice echoed through the halls: “Derdâ!”

  Regaip had almost fucked his own daughter, the daughter his wife Saniye had given up just four days after she was born. Even when he put his hands over his ears, he could still hear Derdâ whispering those words to him. He saw her bald head, the dark purple bruises on her arms. He saw those words in the cracks of the prison walls. When he paced his cell her ghost was there beside him. He shared his life story with her and he tried to explain why he’d left her. But he kept returning to the same refrain, “I had no other choice,” and he begged her forgiveness just as many times. But Derdâ’s ghost never forgave him. Those whispered words kept swirling in his ear: “Dad, fuck me as much as you want …”

  He tried cutting off his ears on the steel edge of his bed. Regaip hanged himself the moment he had the chance, leaving behind nothing but a sentence chiseled on the wall of his cell:

  GOD PROTECTED US FROM THE VERY WORST.

  It was the only thing he could be thankful for in this world. He was spared at least from fucking his own daughter. That was enough. So when he left the world, his eyes closed in peace. He was thankful for that.

  Derdâ woke up in the intensive care unit of St. Mary’s Hospital. She’d been in a coma for three days. She looked up at the bottle of serum on the steel hook beside her bed and watched it drip like an hourglass.

  She thought that she was alone until a nurse leaned over her and quietly said her name. Derdâ looked up to see a plump redhead smiling down at her.

  “So the little lady has woken up. Good morning,” she said.

  Then she pointed to a button at the end of a cord dangling near Derdâ’s motionless arm and said, “If you need anything just press this button. I’m going to get the doctor now. So you don’t go anywhere.”

  Derdâ looked at the hourglass again and began counting the drops, her mind completely blank. The nurse reappeared with a young man holding a clipboard.

  “How are we feeling?” he asked with a smile on his face.

  “Alright, I guess.”

  The doctor handed the clipboard to the nurse and pulled a penlight from his shirt pocket to examine Derdâ’s eyes.

  “I guess, you say, but to me you look just fine. Do you remember what happened to you?”

  “I screwed up, I guess …”

  “We could say that,” the doctor said, laughing. “Right, so do you remember what you took?”

  “Heroin …”

  “No. You injected a critical amount of cocaine, enough to put you in a coma for the last three days. You were lucky. Your heart stopped beating twice. Do you understand me?”

  He looked over his file.

  “Derdâ. That’s a pretty name. Where are you from?”

  “Turkey.”

  “Good … Now look, in a little while the police will come to ask you a few questions, alright?”

  Derdâ nodded.

  “Ok, then. I’ll be back a little later,” he said and turned to leave, but then he stopped and smiled.

  “Yes, that’s right. Fethiye! I was there just last summer. What a wonderful country. You’re a very lucky girl!”

  Two MI5 officers stood on either side of Derdâ’s bed.

  One looked up and said, “Look, the only thing we’re asking you to do is testify in court. That’s all. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life. And we’ll do everything we can to see that you can stay in England, because, as you may or may not be aware, you’re now residing here illegally. All you have to do is tell the judge what you know.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” Derdâ said.

  “But you know Bezir, right?” the other officer asked. “The one who brought you here and kept you locked up in that apartment.”

  “Yes …” she whispered, softly.

  “Ok then, so just explain what happened to you in that house. And of course there’s your dad. We need you to talk about him.”

  “But I only saw him once,” Derdâ said. Her voice was louder.

  “Look Derdâ, we’re here so that we can catch all the people who have hurt you since you came to London.”

  He was lying. For the past five years they’d been after everyone from the Dulluhan brothers to Gido Agha, from the Tariqat leader Hıdır Arif to Bezir’s kickboxers. And if it had been at all in their powers to do so, they would have extradited Sheik Gazi himself from one of his guest ho
mes in Turkey and put him on trial in London. But for the time being, people at the London headquarters were preoccupied with this dramatic new trial. What could have been more dramatic than the plight of a young girl taken from her village in Turkey at the age of eleven against her will, a girl who eventually ended up living and working with a London sadist and drug addict? And her father was the man who had organized it all from the beginning.

  Derdâ was now the linchpin in the Turkish underworld in London. The claim in court was that she was somehow involved with radical Islamic gangs working with London drug lords. In making this connection, they hoped to kill many birds with just one stone. All the related persons could be added to the suspect list, their bank accounts subject to inspection. At least a few would receive life sentences. To be able to pull it off, MI5 officer James Bond had to do what James Bond would never do. He had to lie to a sixteen-year-old girl. Derdâ believed everything he said.

  Derdâ was sent to a private drug rehabilitation center in Brighton. At the end of week five in her treatment the MI5 came and took her back to London. The Queens Court building—known in most other countries as the Palace of Justice, for the sense of intrigue that the name evoked—was submerged in a mask of snow. Derdâ quickly learned that although the building went by a different name it still hatched the same kind of intrigues.

  In an historical court room in an historical building, Derdâ appeared before the judge. She was a protected witness so Hıdıf Arif would never know who had testified against him in a court of law.

  “They took my picture in a village in Turkey and they sent it to Hıdıf Arif in London. He was the one who picked the girls. And he picked me. He picked the man I had to marry, too. Rahime told me all of this, you know, that woman who jumped off Tower Bridge …”

  Derdâ was happy to tell them everything she could remember. She even told them about Black T.

  “I bought heroin from him. He was a member of a gang called the Fighting Wolves. They fought with rival Kurdish gangs. He worked for my father, Regaip. And the kid said he wanted to be Jamaican.”