The Abyssinian Proof (24 page)

“Ferosh,” he said softly. “Nothing that happened was your fault. I wish you’d accept that. I told you, if you want to blame someone, blame me. It was my suggestion to reduce Baba’s opium. But remember, he had stopped eating. We were trying to save his life.”

“But we killed him.”

Soon after Feride cut her father’s opium supply, he had walked off a balcony to his death. Witnesses reported that he had been smiling. Kamil knew with certainty that his father had been walking toward his wife, the woman whose absence and then death he could never accept and whose image he conjured up in his opium dreams. Now Kamil added a new scenario, that his father had also taken to opium out of guilt.

After their father’s death, a sadness had settled on Feride. He knew she had always been lonely, despite her large household and a constant bustle of teas and social visits. She used to press Kamil to get married, begging him to give her a sister-in-law, a companion, but had lost interest even in that. She seemed to have no dreams left, he thought, as he held her hand. He handed her a clean handkerchief from his pocket and passed his forefinger across her brow.

She pressed the linen against her face, then placed it on the sofa beside her, calmer now. “How do you stand it?” she asked Kamil, trying to laugh. “Your sister is a lunatic.”

“Not at all. My sister is as lovely as the moon. And sometimes as enigmatic.”

“Where did you learn to draw butter like that?” she teased him, but he could tell she was pleased.

“So what was it you wanted to tell me?”

Kamil hesitated.

“I promise not to collapse, cry out, or otherwise cause a scene. Seriously, I’m fine, brother dear.” She pressed his hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Kamil decided it would be better to tell her now, rather than risk having her find out some other way. He took a deep breath and asked, “Feride, do you remember when Mama took us to Beshiktash?” Kamil still lived in the small villa his mother had inherited and in which she and her children had spent their mother’s last years.

“A little. I was only eleven. You were older. Why?”

“Do you know why Mama moved there?”

“Living in the governor’s mansion was too much for her. There were always dozens of women trying to see her or inviting her over. I don’t think they cared about her at all. They just wanted to use her to influence Baba. I saw her crying a few times. I remember that very clearly.”

“Do you think Mama and Baba were happy?”

“Of course,” she exclaimed. “Baba started on the opium after she moved to Beshiktash, remember? And after she died, he was inconsolable. He loved her. That’s what killed him in the end.”

They let that conclusion settle between them. Feride gave Kamil a small smile and blinked back tears.

Then Kamil asked, “Yes, but did she love him?”

Feride looked puzzled. “Of course she did.” But she sounded unsure. “What are you saying?”

“It’s possible that Baba had a mistress.” Kamil braced himself for Feride’s response.

She was silent for a moment, her face unreadable. Then, to his surprise, she said simply, “I suppose that’s possible. Most men have them. You know, there’s a saying, ‘If your husband has two coffee cups, break one.’ As soon as a man has enough money, he buys a mistress. In the old days, it was a second wife or a concubine. I suppose having a mistress is more modern.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment, then looked up again. “Do you think that’s why Mama left?”

Kamil wondered whether Huseyin had a mistress. “Yes,” he said. “And she has a daughter.”

Feride sat up straight. “You think it’s Baba’s child?”

“I’m not sure. I think she might be.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen. So she would have been born around the time we moved. Her name is Saba.”

“That’s a strange name.”

“It’s an Abyssinian name.”

Feride was silent for a moment. “Mama had an Abyssinian slave at the governor’s mansion. Do you think it was her? She was very beautiful.”

“The woman’s name is Balkis. I met her brother, Malik, a couple of years ago. He was a good man. He was killed two nights ago.”

“I’m sorry, Kamil. Was he a friend?”

“Yes,” Kamil allowed himself to grieve for a moment, as much for his friend as for his friendship. “But he never said anything about this to me.”

“So maybe it isn’t true.”

“I don’t know. He came to my house that night. He wanted me to find an object that had been stolen from him and that he wanted his niece Saba to have. He seemed to want to tell me something else, but decided to put it off. We were supposed to have breakfast together the next day and he was going to invite Saba. It’s possible that this is what he wanted to tell me. When he left that night, he asked me to take care of her and gave me a letter to give her in case something happened to him.”

He pulled out Malik’s letter and handed it to her.

“I gave it to her this morning. From her reaction, I’m sure she didn’t know. Her mother told me the whole story, but I didn’t believe her.”

He waited while Feride read. It occurred to Kamil that Malik had sought him out and befriended him not because he had any interest in orchids, but in order to judge his character. He thought Malik had been his friend. Instead, he realized with a shock, he had been a relation.

When Feride finished, her face was white. “Can I keep this?”

“There’s some information in there that I need. But there’s no rush to return the letter. I’ll bring it back to you. Are you going to show Huseyin?”

“Of course. And Elif.”

Kamil realized that next to Elif’s arrival, this was the most exciting thing that had happened to Feride in a long while.

“What did the mother…”

“Balkis.”

“What else did Balkis tell you?”

“She said she met Baba as he was coming out of the Mosque of Sultan Selim.”

Surprised, Feride asked, “What was Baba doing in a mosque?”

“I don’t know, Ferosh. It was probably part of his official duties.”

“Did Baba know about the child?”

“I don’t know. Balkis said she didn’t tell him.”

Feride considered this. “I think he must have learned about it, don’t you?”

They sat for a few moments without speaking.

“Do we want to acknowledge the girl?” Kamil asked finally. It seemed the decent thing to ask Feride, although what he desperately wanted to know instead was whether his parents had been happy and why his father had taken up with Balkis. He couldn’t imagine his father with her. It was another man, another father he didn’t recognize. He felt grief, as if he were losing his father all over again.

“Is there any proof of this story?” he heard Feride ask.

“I don’t think so. But there is a resemblance.” He remembered Saba’s eyes, so like his own.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Yes. She looks like you.”

“Do you think she’ll want an inheritance?”

“She’s illegitimate, so she has no legal right.”

“There’s law,” Feride pointed out, “and there’s justice. We’d need some kind of proof, though.”

Last night’s nightmare came back to him with the force of a hallucination. He could see the feather on the woman’s back. He fought the images by trying to picture his mother’s face, but found the memory of her pulsing faintly in and out of focus, displaced by the stronger impression of Elif’s small golden head.

O
MAR AND
K
AMIL
pored over the map while the men placed dozens of lanterns around the perimeter of the Tobacco Works basement. Omar hadn’t bothered to get permission from the French owners. When Kamil showed him the map, he simply gathered his men, rode there, and broke down the door.

The rusted machines, pillars and capitals, piles of bricks, clotheshorses, and a hundred other objects were revealed as nothing more than trash in the bright light, not the mysterious overlaid voices of grand civilizations. It all meant nothing, except obsolescence, decay, bad design. That was what the basement of the Ottoman Tobacco Works represented—a museum of dead machines.

Omar was clearly in no mood to reflect on any of this, Kamil observed. The police chief walked through, upending and kicking over objects until they came to the wall marked on Saba’s map with an X. It was right next to the cavalcade of dummies. Omar hurled each one through the air like human projectiles.

The policemen waited tensely, hands on their guns and truncheons, as Omar stood nose to the wall, looking for an entrance. Instead of brick, the wall here was made of limestone blocks as long and high as his arm, fitted together without mortar.

“Son of a bitch. Where’s the door? There’s got to be a door.”

Kamil told the men to bring more lamps. He peered at Saba’s map. Beneath the X was an arrow pointing down. He looked at the floor. Most of the basement was paved with cracked slabs of marble and stone, but at the base of the limestone wall, he could just about make out a mosaic. It was so layered in grime that the design was almost invisible. He squatted and began scraping at the dirt with his knife. Omar quickly joined him.

“The design goes right to the wall, do you see? As if it goes through it.” Kamil uncovered the image of a naked child riding a dolphin, but this was no time to look at pictures. He thought of Elif again. She would have appreciated the adventure of uncovering this art. A curled seahorse with the head of a bearded man emerged from beneath the dirt. He could hear Omar on his knees beside him, grunting with concentration. Two policemen, looking puzzled, scraped energetically. Kamil looked at what they had uncovered. It was a seascape with fish and mythological creatures and, in the center, Poseidon holding his staff. One of the fish seemed to be swimming into the wall.

“What does it mean?”

“It means that this wall is new,” Kamil said, pointing to the block above the half-submerged fish.

“In this place, new could mean a thousand years,” Omar snorted. He went over and kicked the wall, hard. It resonated dully.

“That’s it. Right here,” he crowed. He took a large hammer from one of the men and was about to swing it into the wall when Kamil stopped him.

“Wait. There has to be a way to open it.” He squatted and brushed his fingers across the mosaic. Poseidon’s staff looked different from the rest.

“This is some kind of metal.”

“And it’s cleaner,” Omar observed, reaching down. He pushed the tip of his knife into the grout beside it and gave a satisfied grunt when the staff popped up.

He tried to pick it up, but it was attached to something. He knelt down and examined it in the light. “It’s brass.”

“Not Byzantine, then,” Kamil surmised.

The policemen circled them, watching curiously.

Omar took the small brass rod in his hands and pulled, felt resistance, pulled harder, and then lost his balance when whatever it was attached to gave way. They heard a whirring sound. Omar found he had a length of greased cord in his hands that stretched from the rod into a hole in the floor. He pulled on the cord and they heard whirring again, then a grating sound.

The policemen shouted and reached for their guns.

Omar and Kamil swung around. One of the granite blocks had disappeared, leaving an opening just high enough that they could enter it bent double.

Omar grabbed a lamp and ducked inside. “Pulleys. Very clever.” His voice came from inside the wall. “They swing the block backward and up. There’s a release mechanism so you can let it drop back once you’re inside.”

“Wait.” Kamil crowded in after him.

“Don’t worry. I have no desire to close this damn door now that we have it open.” He pointed his lamp upward. “Look how shallow this block is. Probably not very heavy.”

“I still wouldn’t want it falling on my head.”

Kamil didn’t say what they both thought. That they had no time to lose and all the time in the world. Kamil remembered Remzi’s face when he had asked him about Ali. He was sure Ali was dead.

Omar didn’t meet Kamil’s eye. “Let’s go find the poor bastard.”

“Are you coming with the lamps?” Omar shouted impatiently.

The other policemen followed behind them. The light revealed a narrow vaulted tunnel that stretched ahead. The bricks were weeping dampness and the air was rank. Kamil’s feet stepped into shallow puddles, but the water seemed to seep continually away, perhaps into a cistern farther down. If this had been the foundation of a palace, he thought, it was likely to have been built on top of a large cistern, its water supply. He looked down and imagined layers of such structures beneath his feet, enormous vaulted underground cities, sealed for a thousand years.

As they advanced, they saw signs of recent occupation. A piece of moldy bread. A silver coin not yet tarnished. An empty cigarette tin. The air became more foul. Kamil and Omar said nothing, but pushed ahead. Behind them, some of the men coughed and pulled their shirts over their mouths and noses.

Kamil stumbled into Omar’s back.

“The bastards have blocked it off,” Omar said, but Kamil could tell by his voice that he had seen something more in the tunnel before him.

Kamil pushed forward to stand beside Omar. The tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling with bricks, stones, and debris. But what Kamil saw first was a head resting on the bricks. Below it, shoulder width apart, were two hands. One hand still gripped a stone, as if the man had attempted to defend himself. Or dig himself out.

What was most disturbing of all was that Ali’s eyes, nose, and ears, and the fleshy tips of one hand had been chewed off by rats. Part of his tongue protruded where the rats had burrowed into his mouth.

Kamil was sickened. He and Omar were speechless for a few moments. Then Omar exploded into a string of curses. “The sons of bitches buried him alive.”

There was a commotion behind them as the other men shared the news.

Omar dropped his lamp and began to haul rocks from the pile.

“Be careful,” Kamil cautioned. “We don’t want to have to dig you out too.”

But Omar was beyond listening or caring. He tore into the pile, and Kamil handed rocks back to the line of men who passed them along the tunnel, through the door, and into the basement.

They pulled Ali from the rubble. His body and limbs, frozen in a sitting position, had been protected by the stone and were unmarked except for a cut on his forearm encrusted with blood. Kamil took a closer look at the wound, then motioned Omar to do the same. Four straight cuts in the shape of two mountain peaks. “The mark of Remzi’s boss,” Kamil noted.

“The son of a bitch likes to advertise,” Omar snarled.

“He wants us to know who he is. What use is an empire if no one knows you run it?” Kamil said. “I think his need to be acknowledged will make him easier to catch.”

“A puffed-up chest makes a bigger target, we used to say in the army. One way or another, we’ll get him and then I’ll break his bones one by one.”

Omar took off his jacket and pulled off his shirt. He wound the shirt around Ali’s head, then lifted the body under the arms. Kamil took the legs and they carried Ali awkwardly through the narrow tunnels, the corpse’s stiff arms grazing the walls. The policemen were frightened. When Omar and Kamil reached the basement, they put the body down and Omar bellowed for someone to get a closed carriage to take it to the mosque.

Kamil forced himself to look at Ali’s ruined face. He accepted as due punishment the nausea and anxiety this aroused in him. Maybe he should have pushed harder, had Amida arrested and beaten until he revealed the location of the tunnel. It wouldn’t have saved Ali, who appeared to have been dead since the night he was snatched, but they would have found his body sooner. This, Kamil thought, was what happened when you didn’t have a plan, when you relied on luck or fate to solve a case. He vowed that would never happen again. He would become more vigilant, look at things more closely, ask more questions. He didn’t believe in fate, and this should never have been Ali’s. All the same, beneath the words in his mind, a disquieting murmur flowed through his chest and heart, finally taking up residence in his stomach: out of control, out of control. He had a sudden vision of himself as a passenger on the Gravity Pleasure Ride, forced to go wherever the train sped, unable to get off, completely helpless.

He stood and pressed his handkerchief against his mouth. After the nausea subsided, he tossed the dirty cloth in a corner. Omar was berating two policemen for not bringing a large enough board to carry the corpse. If he had seen Kamil’s distress, he made no mention of it.

Ali’s body sat bent over, hands stretched forward, on the mosaic of fish above the ghost of a cistern, looking for all the world as if he were fishing.