As they approached Waterloo Bridge, Gido Agha said, “There’s a man, maybe you know him.”
“Who?” Hıdır Arif asked.
“Bedir, or Bezir, something like that. He lives here. You know what he does?”
The other boats on the Thames and Waterloo Bridge were teeming with tourists. Many of them held cameras, snapping photos of everything around them—photos they would probably never look at again. Someone on the bridge saw the old bearded man in an Islamic robe and turban and snapped a photo of him before his luxury yacht sailed under the bridge. He figured he was the political leader of some country in the Middle East.
The man next to him on the bridge said, “Forget that guy, I know who he is. Get a photo of the one we’re after.”
The two men in trench coats were MI5 officers, members of the British Security Service. They had been assigned to collect information on Gido Agha, currently residing in the Waldorf, one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Gido could have come to Britain like any other tourist and left the same way, but the fact was he visited people the MI5 had been watching for months and this made him a new suspect. So now he was being watched under tight surveillance, too.
A Scotsman with a bushy red beard and a kilt elbowed the MI5 officers out of his way, grumbling, “Out of my way. Can’t you see I’m working this part of the bridge?”
And as he resumed blowing vigorously on his bagpipe the officers had no choice but to move out of his way. A double-decker bus emblazoned with a full advertisement for the new James Bond film barreled past them as they stepped back toward the street. There was James Bond in a tuxedo, his hair blown like a motorcycle helmet, and bikini-clad girls draped over his shoulders. The two agents looked at the poster and then each other, at their dark coats and what remained of their hair—there was less and less of it every year—billowing in a gust of wind. Their eyes were bloodshot from so much overtime. They had bought their Chinese-made shoes on sale. They couldn’t help but sense that the Scottish bagpipe player—now comfortably blowing a Scottish air on his bagpipe—was shooting them an evil glare.
“Fuck James Bond,” one of them cursed, and they walked away.
Meanwhile, Hıdır Arif was trying to remember where he’d heard the name before. He needed more details.
“Which group is he associated with?”
He meant to ask whether he was from the tribe or the sect. More precisely, he was asking where his true allegiance lay.
“He’s one of yours,” said Gido.
“Praise God,” said Hıdır Arif, nodding his head. “I know the name but from where? Anyway, why are you interested in him?”
“Don’t ask …” Gido said, lowering his eyes to the muddy waters of the Thames. “We have some business together.”
Hıdır Arif didn’t ask any more. So he wouldn’t learn that Bezir had established a small organization of Muslim kickboxers in London and that he had managed to hook hundreds of non-Muslims on heroin, justifying himself by saying, “in the service of God any kind of jihad is permissible.” Hıdır Arif didn’t ask any more. And so he didn’t find out that Bezir had reinvested all the money he’d earned from drug dealing in heroin, as he couldn’t touch that dirty haram money, and that he’d developed a kickbox move that could break the knees of drug dealers who sold heroin to Muslims in one just blow. Even if Hıdır Arif had asked despite Gido’s countermand, he still wouldn’t have learned the truth about Bezir.
Gido himself knew nothing of all this. His men only told him that there was a man from the Hikmet Tariqat who’d gone gonzo. They told him to take care of him. They’d heard it from Dulluhan, one of the four brothers who were proud to control 75 percent of the heroin that came through the UK. The Daltons of London. Their problem with Bezir was that he bought heroin from the Russians. In other words, from the 25 percent that didn’t belong to them.
“We’ll look into it,” Gido told them. And that was when the MI5 got their first picture of him. The shot was taken from a window on the fourth floor of the apartment building right across the Dalton headquarters in Westminster.
They moved to the stern of the yacht and sat down to eat.
Hıdır Arif said, “Right! I remember the man. Bezir, he’s Ubeydullah’s son. He’s a good boy. He looks after his father’s furniture factory.”
He didn’t say that five years ago he’d acted as an intermediary for him, when he bought an eleven-year-old girl to be his wife.
He carried on carefully: “That’s right. He married a girl from Kurudere. Now I remember. In any case, what do you need him for?”
Gido was put out that rakı wasn’t served with the
