The Abyssinian Proof: A Kamil Pasha Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels) Page 18

  He took the previous day’s newspaper, which he hadn’t had a chance to read, and carried his tea into the winter garden. Yakup lit the lamps. Kamil relaxed into a chair and looked up at the wet, black panes. The newspaper dropped from his hand.

  “Bey, bey.”

  Kamil awoke with a start, wincing with pain as he moved his head. Yakup stood above him, his face imperturbable, as always.

  “What is it?”

  “The police chief of Fatih, Omar Loutfi, is here.”

  “What time is it?” Kamil squinted. He could just make out the shapes of the rosebushes in the garden.

  “Five thirty,” Yakup replied.

  Kamil pushed through the door into the house.

  Omar was streaming water onto the carpet of the receiving room. “Malik is dead, Allah protect us. He’s been murdered. The imam found him in the mosque when he went to call the first ezan.”

  “What?” Kamil was stunned, remembering Malik’s furtive visit the previous night. He pressed his palms against his forehead. Malik had as much as told him he was afraid for his life, and what had Kamil done? Nothing. He had sent him off to his death with a handshake.

  Kamil pulled on the raincape Yakup held out to him and headed for the front door.

  Omar grabbed his arm and said, “There’s one more thing. Remzi has escaped.”

  Kamil halted and turned on Omar. “How could that happen?”

  “Someone must have bribed the guards. Believe me,” he added grimly, “when I find out which one, I’ll rip out his liver.”

  THE ASHEN-FACED imam held Kamil’s bridle as he and Omar dismounted. The rain had turned into a light mist that crept along the ground and clung to hollows. Residents peered out of their windows at the commotion and a crowd of men had begun to gather in the square. The imam began a steady stream of low-pitched commentary as they made their way to the mosque.

  Kamil squeezed the string of amber beads in his pocket, aligning himself with the fingertips of his father and grandfather, who had ticked off each bead with a prayer, one of the ninety-nine names of God, or, like him, with a string of thoughts. This morning, he gripped the beads in his fist. He should have pressed Malik about who he thought might come after him. Men who would use the Proof of God to incite hatred among religions, Malik had said. That didn’t sound like Amida.

  A policeman stood guard by the door and saluted when he saw Omar. Following the imam’s lamp, they stepped across the threshold of the mosque. There was a fetid smell, not of decay but of excrement. He took a linen handkerchief out of his pocket and held it across his nose. The imam extended a silver rosewater sprinkler, but Kamil waved it off.

  “The windows don’t open, you see,” the imam explained. “I would have moved the body outside, but I didn’t want the neighbors to see it.”

  “It’s better this way,” Kamil assured him. “I can learn more if the body isn’t touched. Nothing should be moved.”

  “No, Magistrate bey. Nothing’s been touched.” He grimaced.

  Omar had gone ahead. Kamil could see him standing like a statue in a pool of lamplight at the far end of the corridor.

  “Wait here,” Kamil told the imam, and joined Omar by the ruined body of their friend.

  Although he was wet through and the thick walls trapped the cold, Kamil’s face was covered in a sheen of sweat. He knew his distress was not just a result of his headache.

  Omar’s face was grim. He glanced at Kamil, then looked again more closely. “Are you well?”

  “I’m fine,” Kamil answered through gritted teeth. He closed his eyes for a moment, then took a deep breath and forced himself to look at the scene slowly and methodically.

  Malik’s turban had fallen to the side and his wispy hair was matted with blood. His mouth was a rictus of pain. His robe was splayed open and revealed his chest, raw with cuts that were already thick with flies. Judging by his frame, Kamil thought he must once have been a large man, but age had withered him. His feet were bound together with rope.

  They each grasped the body and turned it. Malik’s hands were bound behind his back.

  “Do you have a surgeon assigned to the Fatih police?”

  “That’s Fehmi. I’ll send one of my men to get him.” He thought for a moment. “Fehmi might be gone. In that case, they’ll bring in Courtidis. Damn.” He was unshaven and his face sagged with sorrow and fatigue.

  “What’s the problem with Courtidis?”

  “Let’s go outside.” They stepped into the square and Kamil waited while Omar instructed one of his men.

  When Omar returned, he led Kamil into the small mosque garden. They stood in a dry area protected by the wall, smoking. “Courtidis is another one of those people who have sudden, unexplained wealth.” Omar narrowed his eyes. “I hate people like that. It makes me want to know everything about them down to the direction they piss in.” He threw his cigarette to the ground. “He’s a Greek, lives near the Crooked Gate. I get tired of hearing what a great guy he is, how he treats the poor, even if they can’t pay.”

  “That sounds admirable.”

  “Why would anyone do that? And if he’s giving it away for free, where’s he getting his money from?”

  “You know and you’re about to tell me.”

  “He’s a small-time drug dealer, that’s where. Makes the stuff at home and sells it all over Fatih. Dishes it out like halvah. Not enough to bother about, but I like to keep people like him on a long rope, so I can reel him in if I need to.” He made a sweeping motion, ending with his fist before Kamil’s nose.

  “That’s an unusual combination,” Kamil laughed weakly, “a philanthropic, drug-dealing surgeon.”

  “Let’s not take the charity thing too far. He gets something out of it. Think of all the grateful mothers with nubile daughters.”

  “Not everyone thinks like you,” Kamil teased, glad that Omar seemed to have regained some of his equanimity.

  “The world would be better off if they did.”

  “I take it that none of those mothers has managed to marry off a daughter to him yet.”

  “He’s besotted by Saba. You can understand why. But he doesn’t have a chance. She’s much too proud to take up with a bastard like him. I mean that in the best sense of the word. He doesn’t know who his father is. When he was five, his mother tried to walk out on his stepfather and he bludgeoned her to death. The stepfather married again and the new wife decided she didn’t want someone else’s spawn, so they shipped him off to the monastery out on Heybeli. And suddenly he reappears as a surgeon. How is that possible, I ask you? Something stinks. I don’t think he really is a surgeon,” Omar grumbled. “And besides, an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “People take charge of their own fates. For all we know, the darkness this man saw as a child might have spurred him to climb towards the light. I’m sure the monks on Heybeli helped him.”

  “You mean they enlightened him?” Omar joked.

  “I mean they educated him.”

  “As I said before, Kamil, you’re a saint.”

  “Well, whether he’s a real surgeon or not, we have to take what we can get. Where can we bring Malik?” Kamil couldn’t get himself to say the word body.

  “There’s a hamam just down the street.”

  “Have your men take the body there. We’ll need some hot water.”

  “Already arranged,” Omar said in a rough voice and turned away. “Ready?”

  Kamil nodded and followed Omar back inside. His head still ached, but the cigarette had helped.

  Two policemen lifted the body onto a stretcher. They covered it with a sheet, then carried it outside. One of the men was retching, a dry, barking sound.

  Kamil looked around. The stench emanated from a sticky puddle where Malik’s body had lain.

  The imam bustled in breathlessly, then retreated to stand by the open door. “I did another inventory of the mosque’s valuables,” he reported. “A silver candleholder is missing. That’s all.” />
  Kamil scanned the corridor, then pointed to a candleholder glinting in a dark corner. “There.”

  Omar picked it up. It’s blunt end was slick with blood. “Looks like they used it to bludgeon him.”

  “It might have been just one man,” Kamil countered. “Maybe the same man the baker’s apprentice saw during the first robbery. He didn’t find what he was looking for the last time and came back.”

  “True, but if it was one man, he’d have to be young and strong. Malik, may Allah accept him into paradise, was old, but he had steel in his arms.”

  They went outside and followed the policemen carrying Malik’s body.

  “I suppose that lily-ass Amida will become caretaker now. That’s the way it is with that family. Malik’s father was caretaker before him. My own father knew him. They probably sat together in the coffeehouse just like me and Malik. It must have been almost time for old Malik to retire,” he shook his head in disbelief, “but I wish he had left that way and not this.”

  He leaned closer to Kamil. “All last week Malik looked worn out, like he wasn’t sleeping.” He thumped his chest. “Something was wrong. I felt it here.”

  “He might have been worried about the stolen reliquary,” Kamil ventured.

  Omar thought for a moment. “He claimed it wasn’t valuable, but there must have been something important. Otherwise he wouldn’t have badgered me to write you. And why you?”

  “Maybe because he knew me.”

  “Maybe.” Omar didn’t sound convinced.

  “That’s his house, isn’t it?”

  They stopped before the half-buried remains of a massive brick arch. Behind the ruin was a narrow two-story building with an overhanging second floor. The men carrying Malik’s body disappeared around a corner.

  “Let’s take a look,” Kamil suggested.

  “Why not? There’s no hurry now, is there?” Omar added bitterly. He pushed open one of the tall iron double doors.

  They paused in the entryway to let their eyes adjust to the gloom. The house felt abandoned. Kamil wondered idly how houses knew when their owners were gone. He opened the door to the ground floor and felt his way through the hall into a large, central room. It was dark and something crunched underfoot.

  Omar leaned out to open the shutters.

  The light fell on a scene of destruction. The room in which they were standing appeared to be the sitting room. It was furnished only with a chair, lying on its side, a glass-fronted cabinet now empty, its contents scattered across the threadbare carpet, and a low, old-fashioned settee, its horsehair innards protruding like weeds through slashes in the upholstery.

  “Allah protect us,” Omar exclaimed.

  A mattress had been dragged into the sitting room and disemboweled there. It had been slashed and turned inside out, brown clots of wool and straw stuffing strewn everywhere. Like its owner, Kamil thought.

  In the adjoining room, a small chest of clothes had been emptied onto the floor. The kitchen was a graveyard of broken crockery.

  Without a word, Kamil turned to the stairs, Omar following. The upstairs rooms had also been systematically violated, the furniture smashed.

  “Look at this,” Omar called from an adjoining room.

  Kamil stood stunned just inside the door. The walls were lined with shelves, all empty. The floor was a blizzard of pages that lapped at his feet. Malik had used the room not as a bedroom, but as a library, and someone had ripped out every page of every book and thrown them on the floor. Splayed spines hovered in the drifts of paper like birds massacred in flight.

  “Crazy. This is the work of a crazy person,” Omar exclaimed, taking up handfuls of paper and throwing them back down. “Do you know how long it must have taken to rip out all these pages?” He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  Kamil looked around and thought. “Whatever they were looking for,” he said slowly, “must be something that can be hidden inside a book.”

  He was thinking about the pages of Aramaic text that Malik said had been inside the reliquary. He wanted to tell Omar, but remembered Malik’s desperate desire that this remain secret even from his own sect. Kamil shifted uncomfortably under the burden of other people’s secrets. It was against his nature and his principles to sit on information in an investigation. And yet, he wasn’t sure what was at stake here.

  “I remember from when I was as a soldier,” Omar mused, examining one of the spines, “people use to hide their jewelry in books, thinking soldiers don’t read. Carved out the middle of a book so it looked gnawed by rats and then put their stuff inside.”

  Kamil didn’t ask Omar which war—there were enough to choose from—nor did he ask how the soldier Omar knew where people hid their jewelry.

  “Nothing was taken from the mosque,” Kamil said, “so robbery doesn’t seem a likely motive. Unless the killer was looking for something specific and didn’t find it. Or found it here. You’d better post a guard at the door. I wonder why they killed him in the mosque.”

  Omar waded through the drift of paper. “They wanted something from Malik, otherwise why the multiple cuts? It’s a filthy way to kill someone. It takes a lot of time and a strong constitution. There are easier ways.”

  “Maybe the reliquary wasn’t what the thief thought it was and he was trying to persuade Malik to tell him where to find what he wanted.”

  “The wrong box?” Omar scoffed. “You don’t do this sort of thing over a wrong box. You have to be powerfully motivated, if nothing else just to stand the smell. Death doesn’t have to be dirty, Kamil, believe me. I was in the war. For this type of death, you need more than just a missing box. You need hate, revenge, greed, something that doubles the size of your liver.” He kicked at the papers, then stomped out of the room.

  Omar was right, Kamil thought. Amida’s liver wasn’t strong enough for this. Who had he sold the reliquary to?

  They emerged from the dark house. The sudden change from dark to light intensified Kamil’s headache, and he stood blinking on the stoop, taking shallow breaths. When he focused his eyes, he found Omar looking at him curiously, but the soft-eyed man said nothing.

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the lane, they could hear raised voices coming from the direction of the mosque. Knots of men were gathered on either side of the small plaza and there was a rumble of angry muttering. Kamil could see the dark shapes of women listening at their windows behind curtains and wooden lattices.

  “Looks like there might be trouble.”

  “I’ll take this side of the square,” Kamil offered. “We can separate the groups.”

  Omar squinted at the scene. “I know all these men. I think it’d be better if I just talked to them.”

  Kamil hesitated.

  “Crowds are like children,” Omar explained. “You have to distract them. But having an outsider involved won’t help. Let me handle this my way.”

  “Agreed. I’ll go see about the autopsy.”

  “That’s the hamam.” Omar pointed to a dun-colored dome studded with circular glass windows that was just visible down a narrow lane.

  Suddenly one of the men in the square shouted, “You Christian son of an ass. How dare you push me.” Kamil couldn’t see who it was, but the crowd began to swirl inward.

  Omar strode into the square, took out his baton, and smacked it on the side of the fountain beside the mosque. The crack caught the crowd’s attention and it paused for a moment, a hydra-headed creature intent on destruction but nonetheless curious.

  Omar took this moment to raise his voice, “If you want to know who killed Malik…”

  He waited as the crowd disengaged and people turned toward him expectantly.

  Omar drew out the tension until someone called out impatiently, “Well, who the hell did it?”

  Omar lowered his voice so the men had to move closer to hear him. The groups mingled as the men pressed forward. “I’m pleased to think that Lame Malik was my friend, and I know he was a friend to many of you, Christian and Musli
m alike. He was a learned man.” He paused. “We all respect learned men, no matter what their religion.” There were mutters of agreement. “We want to punish whoever did this.” Shouts of approval.

  “So who did it?”

  “Well,” Omar answered slowly, “we need your help to find that out, don’t we?”

  A few of the men laughed, realizing they had been cleverly strung along. Others groaned.

  “Did any of you see anyone last night who didn’t belong in the area? How about you, Gyorgio?”

  “I was sound asleep in the coffeehouse.”

  “Because his wife kicked him out of the house,” a man called out from the crowd. The men laughed.

  Kamil could only admire Omar’s defusing of the tension. Now he circulated among the men, asking questions. Kamil turned and walked down the lane leading to the hamam. The rain had stopped and the mist cleared, but the air was still dark, as if a stain had fallen on the world.

  A MAN IN HIS late twenties sat on the low wall before the hamam, his horse tethered beside him. When he saw Kamil, he jumped up and strode toward him.

  “Are you the magistrate?” he called out. His gray trousers were frayed at the cuffs and his jacket was missing several buttons. His black curls were cut tight under a fez that badly needed to be cleaned and pressed. A carefully trimmed mustache ended in a curl at either side of his lips.

  “Yes.”

  The man broke into a smile showing a row of alarmingly large teeth. “Constantine Courtidis, surgeon, at your service. Call me Constantine.”

  So this was the shady drug dealer, Kamil thought. He didn’t know what he had expected, but it wasn’t this friendly, enthusiastic young man. He found himself simultaneously drawn to Courtidis and repelled by him. Judge on the evidence, Kamil reminded himself.

  “Thank you for coming. I take it the surgeon assigned to the Fatih police couldn’t come?”

  “That’s Pericles Fehmi. He’s taken his family to the coast. He’s an old man now, and even healers need time to heal. I’m the next best thing. Never take a vacation. Tried it once and couldn’t handle it. Too hard on, beg your pardon, my behind. All that sitting and staring at trees and squinting at the sun. Not for me.”