He headed toward the mansion-one of the last yalis in Yeniköy. A summer house, made of wood, by the waterfronts, on tarred piles. This lofty palace. decked with turrets, had the haughtiness of a citadel, but also the nonchalant simplicity of a fisherman's hut.
The weather-beaten laths on the roof gave off sharp reflections, as vibrant as a mirror. But the façades soaked up the light, producing somber glints of infinite softness. All around this building, there was an atmosphere of transience, of floating, or departure. The sea air, the worn wood and slapping waters made the old man think of perpetual travel, of summer holidays.
Yet when he drew nearer and examined the details of that oriental façade-the latticework on the patios, the suns on the balconies, the stars and crescents of the windows-he saw that this sophisticated palace was in fact quite the opposite. It was an elaborate, well-anchored, stable environment. The tomb he had chosen. A wooden sepulchre with a seashell's hush, where he could watch death approach while listening to the river…
In the hall, Ismail Kudseyi took off his oilskin and boots. Then he put on his felt slippers and a jacket of Indian silk before examining himself in the mirror.
His face was his sole object of pride.
Time had inflicted its inevitable ravages, but beneath the skin, the bone structure still held up. It had risen to his defense, stretching his flesh and pulling at his features. More now than ever, he had the profile of a stag, with his jutting jaw and that perpetual pout of disdain on his lips.
He removed a comb from his pocket and tidied his hair. He was smoothing down his gray locks when he suddenly realized what he was doing, and stopped. He was being careful about his appearance for them. Because he was dreading seeing them. Because he was afraid of confronting the real meaning behind all those years…
After the 1980 coup d'état, he had had to go into exile in Germany. When he came back in 1983, the situation in Turkey had calmed down, but most of his fellows in arms, the Grey Wolves, were in prison. In his isolation, Ismail Kudseyi refused to abandon the cause. On the contrary, he secretly reopened the training camps and set up his own personal army. He was going to give birth to a new generation of Grey Wolves. Even better, he was going to train a better race of Wolf, who would serve both his political aims and criminal activities.
So he left for Anatolia to choose the children of his foundation personally. He organized the camps, watched the youngsters being trained, kept files on them so as to select an elite group. Soon, he was totally absorbed. Even while he was beginning to take over the opium market, exploiting the opening left by the revolution that was going on in Iran, this baba was interested above all in bringing up his children.
He felt a visceral complicity develop with these peasant children, who reminded him of the street urchin he had once been. He preferred being with them to spending time with his own children whom he had had late in life with the daughter of a former minister and who were now studying at Oxford University or in Berlin-his privileged heirs who had become strangers to him.
When he came back home, he shut himself up in his yali and studied each file, each personality. He weighed up their talents and gifts, but also their will to raise themselves up, to tear away from their stony origins.
He sought out the most promising profiles the ones he would support with grants, then bring into his own clan.
His quest gradually turned into an obsession, a mania. The pretense of a nationalistic cause was no longer enough to hide his own ambition. What excited him was molding human lives from a distance. Manipulating destinies, like an invisible demiurge.
Soon, two names were to interest him more than the others. A boy and a girl. Two children of pure promise.
Azer Akarsa came from a village near the ancient site of Nemrut Dagi. He was exceptionally gifted. When only sixteen, he was already a hardened fighter and a brilliant student. But most of all, he displayed a real passion for old Turkey and nationalist convictions. He had enrolled in the secret Adiyaman camp and had signed up for commando training. He was already planning on signing up for the army so as to fight on the Kurdish front.
And yet. Azer had a handicap. He was diabetic. But Kudseyi decided that this weak point would not prevent him from living out his destiny as a Wolf. He swore to provide him with the best possible treatment at all times.
The other file concerned a certain Sema Hunsen, age fourteen. Born amid the rocks of Gaziantep, she had succeeded in winning a place at school with a state grant. Superficially, she was just another young, intelligent Turk set on breaking with her origins. But she wanted to go further than that and emigrate. At the Gaziantep Idealist Club, Sema was the only girl. She had applied for a course at the camp in Kayseri so as to be with a boy from her village called Kürsat Milihit.
He had at once been attracted by this teenager. He adored her headstrong wildness. her desire to better her condition. Physically, she was rather a chubby redhead, with a peasantlike appearance. To look at her, you would never have guessed how gifted she was, or how politically motivated. Except for her stare, which she threw into your face like a stone.
Kudseyi was sure that Azer and Sema would turn out to be far more than mere scholarship students, or anonymous soldiers serving the extreme right-wing cause or his network of organized crime. They would be his protégés. But they would not know this. He would help them from a distance, from the shadows.
The years went by and the two chosen ones lived up to their promise. At the age of twenty-two, Azer had earned a master's degree in physics and chemistry at Istanbul University; then two years later, an international business degree in Munich. Meanwhile, Sema was seventeen, had left Galatarasay school with full honors and had gone to the Robert College in Istanbul. She spoke fluent Turkish, French, English and German.
Both of them had remained political militants, baskans who could have run local clubs. But Kudseyi pushed them toward different horizons. He had greater ambitions for his creations projects linked with his own drug empire…
He also wanted to cast light on certain darker regions. Azer's behavior revealed dangerous fault lines. While still at the French school, he had disfigured a fellow pupil during a brawl. The wounds were serious and clearly inflicted not in a fit of anger but instead with a terrifyingly calm determination. Kudseyi had to use all his influence to stop the boy from being arrested.
Two years later, Azer had been caught skinning live mice. Some female students also complained of the obscenities he addressed to them. They had later found the gutted bodies of cats rolled up among their underwear in the changing rooms at the swimming pool.
Kudseyi was intrigued by Azer's criminal impulses, which he at once saw could be exploited. But he was still unaware of their true nature. A freak incident was to reveal it. While studying in Munich, Azer Akarsa was hospitalized after his diabetes got out of control. The German doctors had decided to treat him in an unusual way: periods spent in a pressurized chamber so as to oxygenate his body better.
During these sessions, Azer had experienced the rapture of the depths and had started to rant. He had yelled out his desire to kill women-all women!-to torture and disfigure them, until he had reproduced the ancient masks that spoke to him in his dreams. When he was back in his room, this fit continued, despite the sedatives he was given, and he scratched effigies of such faces into the wall beside his bed. Mutilated features, with their noses cut off and bones crushed, around which he had stuck his own hair with his sperm-dead remnants, eaten away by the centuries, but with heads of living hair…