The Abyssinian Proof: A Kamil Pasha Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels) Read online

  “There’s been a murder,” Kamil interjected abruptly. “We’d like you to tell us what you can about how the man died.” The surgeon’s levity seemed sacrilegious, given the circumstances.

  Courtidis rubbed his hands with what to Kamil looked strangely like glee.

  “Let’s get started then. I love a puzzle.” He picked up his leather bag and turned toward the hamam entrance. “In here, right?”

  As they made their way single file along the outside corridor that hid the entrance of the bathhouse from public view, Courtidis kept up a nonstop monologue.

  “You saved me from the usual routine, you know. Pregnancies, hemorrhoids, fevers, diarrhea. Last week this couple came to me because they’d been married a year and she hadn’t conceived yet. The bride complained about pain during, beg your pardon, you know, intercourse. You’re not going to believe this, but when I examined her—with her husband present, of course—she was a virgin.” He stopped, turned, and blocked Kamil’s path. “Can you even guess what was going on?” He smiled happily up at Kamil.

  Kamil grit his teeth. “No, I can’t.”

  “They had been, beg your pardon, fucking in the urethra.” Courtidis whinnied a laugh.

  “Urethra?”

  “Where she, beg your pardon, pees.”

  Kamil found himself laughing. “No wonder she complained about pain.” Despite himself, he began to warm to the prattling surgeon. A man must be forgiven his childhood, he thought. Omar was sometimes too harsh in his assessment of his fellow man, seeing evil everywhere. It was a policeman’s weakness.

  They had come to the central room of the hamam, where the men had deposited Malik’s body on the central platform, the bellystone, and covered it with a tattered sheet. A cauldron of hot water steamed nearby on the floor. The warm, buzzing smell of offal bloomed into the room from the direction of the body.

  Kamil nodded at the ranking policeman. “Take your men and wait outside, but stay within earshot.” The men made quickly for the door, unable to hide their relief.

  Courtidis strode up to the body and slid the cloth off, throwing it into the corner.

  “His name is…was Malik,” Kamil explained. “Caretaker of Kariye Mosque.” Until a few hours ago, this had been a scholar with pupils and a library in his home. A man with secrets. A friend. The caretaker’s hands were still tied behind his back and he lay awkwardly at an angle. Grief and fury made him turn Kamil head away. It felt as though iron bands were compressing his head.

  The surgeon stared wordlessly at the body, hands dangling by his sides. He looked shocked.

  “Did you know him?” Kamil asked.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Who killed him?”

  “We don’t know. Can you tell us how he died?”

  Courtidis walked over and squatted before one of the low marble basins. He turned on both spigots, releasing ropes of cold and hot water. When the basin was full, he plunged his head into the water and kept it there until Kamil thought he was trying to drown himself. Finally, he pulled his head out, drenching his jacket and the floor about him. He continued to squat there, holding his head in his hands.

  Kamil handed him a towel.

  “Thank you,” Courtidis said. “For every death, a baptism.”

  “You must have known him well. Bashiniz sagholsun.”

  The surgeon toweled his hair dry and took off his jacket. He let it fall onto a marble bench, then sat down next to it, his eyes fixed on Malik’s body.

  “You know, Magistrate, I didn’t really know him that well, but I know that he was a great and generous man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t have a lot of opportunities when I was a child,” he said finally in a strained voice. “My mother and father had passed away and I had no one to give me direction, to help a young whippersnapper with more balls than brains get off the street. I was like one of those mangy mutts that lie in the sun and then hang around the butcher’s door. You know what they say, if you could get a skill by watching, then every dog would be a butcher. I’d do anything for a free scrap. And, beg your pardon, I mean anything.”

  He got up and stood over Malik’s body, a haunted look on his face.

  “This man gave me a life. He just handed it to me. It’s as if the butcher had opened his shop door and said, ‘Come in, eat all you want.’ I thank God I was smart enough to reach out and grab the opportunity.” There was a strained smile. “Or desperate enough.”

  Courtidis reached out and gently caressed Malik’s forehead. He slid his hand over Malik’s eyes to shut them, and told him softly, “Your eyes are in my heart.”

  Kamil stood quietly nearby, careful not to interrupt the surgeon’s requiem.

  Courtidis shook himself and began to examine the body. He looked at it carefully from head to foot, at first touching nothing, at times bending so close that his nose almost touched Malik’s robe. Finally, he opened his bag and took out a thin sharp blade. He reached behind the body and cut the rope tying Malik’s wrists. The arms fell stiffly apart. Courtidis pulled the arms forward and settled the body on its back. He pulled the gold ring from Malik’s finger, rinsed it in the basin, and observed it for a few moments before handing it to Kamil.

  Kamil saw that the surgeon’s face was wet with tears. He wrapped the ring in his handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket.

  “First he fed me,” Courtidis continued. “Then he paid me to sweep the mosque. Then he showed me the magnificent illuminated manuscripts he has. Have you ever seen them? He let a simple child with dirty hands hold his masterpieces. It was like training a wild bird to come closer and closer until it eats the grain right from the palm of your hand. Because then, you know what he did? He taught me to read and write.”

  As he spoke, Courtidis pulled the blood-soaked wool away from the body, then cut and removed the undergarments. Malik’s body on the bellystone was blue-white and shadowed, like a hard-boiled egg released from its shell.

  The sight of the birdlike bones of the old man’s chest, the wiry gray hairs around his sagging nipples filled Kamil with pity and grief. By the time Kamil had seen his dying father, he had been wrapped in a quilt that padded his fragile, broken body. Now, in the thin-skinned, pathetic presence of death, Kamil was reminded that even fathers are frail and that this was something most sons never acknowledged. He averted his eyes from the white worm of Malik’s shriveled but clearly uncircumcised organ.

  Every Muslim must be circumcised. The story of the Melisites and their reliquary became more real. Christians masquerading as Muslims for hundreds of years. They must have had a reason. The Proof of God?

  “So you know,” Courtidis said, continuing to wash the body. “Otherwise you would have been exclaiming from here to Baghdad, ‘What’s this? He’s not a Muslim!’”

  Pink water pooled on the marble.

  “How did you know?” Kamil asked him.

  “I didn’t, but it makes sense from what I know about his family. He was Habesh. They pray like Muslims, they say they’re Muslims, but they have their own rites.” He stopped, momentarily overcome by grief. “He was the finest human being I have ever met.” He looked up at Kamil suddenly. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? You know there are people who would call this blasphemy and make trouble. Let Malik keep his dignity.”

  “If I need to share this information with the police in order to find his murderer, I will do that. But otherwise I don’t see why any of it should become known.”

  “Thank you.”

  After he had cleaned away the blood, Courtidis bent over and repeated his close inspection of the body.

  “Look at these.” He swept his hand across a battlefield of cuts and punctures between Malik’s groin and chest. He gently inserted a probe into the middle of one of the cuts, then moved it sideways. He did the same to another. “The wounds all have the same strange pattern. They’re flat, deep in the middle and shallow at the ends.” He pointed to Malik’s stomach. “One pierced the intestines. Th
at’s where the smell comes from and, of course, from the usual, beg your pardon, evacuation.” He probed around Malik’s chest. “Another one pierced his lungs. But here’s the strangest thing of all. Do you see these pairs of puncture marks? It’s as if something with two sharp teeth bit his chest all over.”

  Admiring his professionalism, Kamil observed that focusing on the puzzle of piecing together the cause of death seemed to have calmed the young surgeon.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Kamil said. “What do you think it could be?” Kamil steeled himself to look closely at the wounds. The thought of Malik’s prolonged agony nauseated him.

  “The puncture marks occur at the same places as the other wounds. I’d say the weapon had an odd-shaped blade and two sharp protrusions. But I haven’t got a clue what it could be.”

  Kamil thought about this. “Perhaps some kind of knife used in a particular profession. Skinning animals, maybe?” He thought of Mustafa the Tanner.

  “Help me turn him on his side.”

  The surgeon grasped Malik’s hips and Kamil his right shoulder. Together they tilted the body forward so its back was visible.

  Much of the blood had been soaked up by Malik’s heavy robe, which now lay on the table. Kamil looked at the blood-soaked wool. Malik’s silver brooch was gone. He wondered whether robbery had been a motive after all. It seemed a lot of effort to kill someone in this brutal manner for a small piece of jewelry.

  “Would you soak this in hot water?” Courtidis asked Kamil, handing him the sponge.

  Kamil held Malik’s shoulder while Courtidis swept the sponge back and forth across the back. When the blood was gone, they both leaned over, speechless.

  “The lost angel,” Courtidis said softly. “You have fallen to earth and been destroyed.”

  On Malik’s back was tattooed a pair of wings that stretched from his shoulder blades to below his waist. The powerful wings were folded shut. Every deep blue feather was detailed. Over time, the ink had begun to bleed and blur the outlines, giving the feathers the appearance of having been ruffled, disarranged.

  “Do you know what they mean?” Kamil asked.

  “A tolerance for pain. That would have taken hours with a sharp needle.”

  Kamil ran his fingers down the span of wings. “The detail is amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He had seen tattoos on the arms of sailors and prisoners, and on the faces and hands of tribal women from Hakkari and the Sinai. But those were crude tracings compared to the wings on the dead man’s back. They looked so real he expected them to unfurl and take flight at any moment.

  “I had a Habesh patient once—with a bad cough that eventually killed him—the man had a tattoo of this quality on his chest. Not wings, though. The face of Jesus. So real, I expected Jesus to open his mouth and bite my hand. I didn’t see his back.”

  “Do you know where he had his tattoo done?”

  “The Sunken Village midwives were famous for their tattooing. There’s only one left now who knows how to do it, a water buffalo named Gudit. Secret ingredients in the ink, she told me.”

  They laid Malik on his back again. Courtidis dipped a hamam bowl into the cauldron of hot water, soaped his hands, and rinsed them, leaving a red scum in the bowl. “I think Malik was alive for a while after they did this. They’re shallow cuts, most of them, painful, but not immediately life-threatening. He was killed by a blow to the head. Look here.” He showed him an area of matted hair speckled by fragments of bone.

  “The murderer used a candlestick from the mosque.”

  “Bastard. Who would do this to a harmless old man? Why?”

  “We’ll do our best to find out. He was my friend too.” As Kamil said it, the truth of it came to rest painfully in his chest.

  Courtidis walked to the corner, retrieved the sheet, and flung it in the air so it came to rest slowly over Malik’s broken body like a wing. “When you find the devil, “he said viciously, “saw off his tail with a blunt sword. And, beg your pardon, I don’t mean the hind one.”

  KAMIL EMERGED FROM the hamam and was surprised to find it was still day, that the sun was shining and that people were going about their business as normal. It seemed incomprehensible. His head throbbed. Propping himself against a ruined wall, he reached into his pocket for his beads, but instead his hand encountered the pocket watch. It was twelve o’clock.

  Time. Things in their place. He sighed and fished out a clean handkerchief to wipe his face and hands. He had washed them in the hamam, but in the daylight he saw there were still flecks of Malik’s blood beneath his nails. Courtidis joined him, rummaged in his bag, and took out two cigarettes. He offered one to Kamil, then lit them both with the same match.

  Kamil inhaled deeply. The acrid smoke scorched the back of his throat. Perhaps patients in this part of town didn’t pay well.

  “You look pale, Magistrate, if you want my professional opinion.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Headache?”

  “How did you know?”

  Courtidis flashed his equine smile. “Two things cannot be hidden—love and a headache. The area around your eyes is tense and you look like you’re balancing a water jug on your head.”

  Kamil managed a weak smile, then took refuge in his cigarette. The tobacco was much stronger than the Egyptian cigarettes he usually smoked.

  Courtidis rummaged in his bag again. He clicked open a tin case and plucked out a small brown ball. He extended it to Kamil. “Chew that.”

  “What is it?” Kamil sniffed it. It was sticky and had a sharp, unpleasant smell.

  “Trust me. It’ll cure your headache.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Works every time. Myrrh, cedar agaric, aloe, a pinch of charred tobacco, marjoram, and a few other things. Can’t tell you everything. Proprietary information, like Gudit’s ink. I call it Balat Balm. It’s very popular, if you’ll excuse me beating my own drum.”

  Kamil thought about it, remembering Omar’s suspicion that Courtidis was a drug dealer, then popped the ball in his mouth and chewed. What was the difference between medicine and drugs when one was ill?

  “It tastes like vinegar.”

  “The ingredients are dissolved in vinegar, then mixed with honey so they stick together. Go home and get some sleep. I guarantee you’ll feel better tomorrow. If you still have problems, I live by the Crooked Gate. Ask anyone. You’re welcome to visit. Even if you’re not ill.”

  As though embarrassed, he added, “You know, Malik made it possible for me to study and become a surgeon. It pains me not to be able to help him.” He examined his cigarette. “I promised myself a long time ago that I would always be there for his family. He has a niece, Saba.” He crushed the cigarette in his fingers and flung it to the ground. “This will break her.”

  He shook Kamil’s hand awkwardly, showed his teeth in a halfhearted smile, and disappeared around the corner.

  Kamil leaned against the wall, thinking about Courtidis and Malik. It fit with what he knew of the old scholar that he would see the most potential in those who had fallen the farthest. Courtidis, Omar had said, was infatuated with Saba. Kamil could understand that; she was beautiful. But the young man’s bond to Saba and her family was much deeper than that. Kamil found he was relieved that Saba had such a devoted protector.

  He walked through the ruins toward the Kariye Mosque, where he found the square now oddly deserted. The mosque door was open and he went inside. Someone had cleaned up the blood and the hall smelled of vinegar. He followed the light into the main room, lit by three high windows and carpeted for prayer. Kamil squatted in a corner and looked up at the marble revetments. At the back of the room, the marble was the gray and white of mist and bones. The patterns looked like women, he thought, one bowing, the other lifting her dress. One woman emerging from another, white, the red of clotted blood, white. A woman giving birth, the pubic bone rising sharply to either side of the head of a child emerging from the womb. What was it Malik had said? Mother
of God, Container of the Uncontainable. Muslims did not believe that Jesus was God, of course, simply a prophet like others before him. Disturbed by the images in the veins of marble, Kamil fled through the corridor and out into the square. His headache was gone, but he was seeing visions.

  16

  HE LOOKS LIKE his father, Balkis thought. The same eyes that seemed to see into everything, the chiseled features. Her daughter sat huddled beside her. They were both dressed in white, the color of mourning. Word of Malik’s death had arrived within minutes of the imam finding his body.

  “I see that you already know, but I wanted to tell you in person. Your brother Malik has passed away.” Kamil handed Balkis Malik’s ring. “I’m very sorry. Bashiniz sagholsun.”

  Balkis took the ring and held it against her breast. My heart, she thought, my heart has ceased to beat. She had railed so long against her brother’s irresponsibility that she had forgotten his gentle humor, his boyish enthusiasms. All this came rushing into her mind as she clutched his ring: the fat-cheeked boy who had brought her fistfuls of poppies from the ruins; the young man who had found her pregnant, distraught, and almost destitute in Beyoglu and brought her back to Sunken Village; the man who had stood up to Gudit after her circumcision. The only man who had always stood by her.

  Balkis cried out and doubled over in pain. Saba threw her arms around her, weeping. Balkis reached out and stroked her daughter’s head, then pushed her gently away. She turned Malik’s ring in her hands, trying to focus her mind through the pain.

  “Who killed him?” she asked Kamil, who stood by the door, eyes on the floor as if ashamed to have brought such news.

  “We don’t know. He was found in the mosque, stabbed. It must have happened late last night. When did you last see him?”

  “At the ceremony on Friday.” Kubalou’s man had come that night, but that had nothing to do with Malik.

  “Why would anyone kill Uncle Malik?” Saba wailed. “All he did was help people.” She rocked back and forth on the divan, keening softly, her veil pulled across her face.