The Abyssinian Proof (18 page)

“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.

W
HEN 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 Muslim 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.”

“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.”