The Abyssinian Proof (4 page)

“Abdullah,” Kamil called testily. “Get up.”

The clerk woke, startled, and rolled to his feet. “You’re here early, Magistrate.” Seeing Avi, he said, “How did this street dog get in here?”

“He’s here to see me.”

Abdullah shrugged. “I’ll get the tea, in that case,” he said and, shoving his feet into leather slippers, shuffled toward the corridor.

“Bring two glasses and two plates,” Kamil called after him. He invited Avi into his office and pulled over a chair. When Avi didn’t move, Kamil realized he was unfamiliar with chairs and the high tables that accompanied them, alien European contraptions. Kamil fetched a small portable writing desk and placed it on the carpet. Avi folded himself into a sitting position before it.

While they waited, Kamil handed Avi his pen, showed him where the ink was, then placed a piece of paper before him. He moved the lamp nearer as the light from the window was still only a pale wash.

Avi touched the white paper reverently. “I can write on something less good, bey.”

“If you want to be a scribe, this is what scribes write on.” Nonetheless, he was impressed by the boy’s frugality and modesty. He noticed that the boy’s hands were blistered.

“What happened to your hands?” he asked.

“An accident, bey.” Avi tucked his hands under the desk.

“Someone should take a look at them.”

The boy stubbornly shook his head.

“Can you write?”

“Yes, bey,” Avi responded eagerly.

Kamil stopped, unsure what to tell the boy to write and unwilling to give him a task that he couldn’t do and thus shame him.

“Write the alphabet.” Thinking this would buy him some time, Kamil sat at his desk and began to go over his notes on the thefts.

“I’m finished, bey.”

Startled, Kamil walked over to see what the boy had done, prepared for a page of ink blots and scratches. Instead, he found a neat line of letters.

“Why don’t you write your name at the top?”

He watched as Avi confidently took the pen, dipped it in ink, and wrote, “Avi of Middle Village,” the coiled Arabic letters sweeping right to left across the page.

“Write my name.”

Avi wrote, “Kamil Pasha.”

“Beyoglu Municipality.”

The boy wrote.

“Remarkable.” Kamil took a closer look at him. “How old are you?”

“I’m nine.”

Kamil made a decision. “If you’d like to apprentice with the court, Avi, I’ll arrange it.”

Avi nodded shyly, eyes gleaming. An orphan raised by the village midwife. Kamil pitied the boy. His own mother had died after a long illness, and his father had passed away the previous year.

Abdullah came through the door carrying a tray. He put it down on the table and bowed his way out of the room. Kamil opened the package of pastries and placed a meat pastry and a piece of börek on each plate, holding some aside for Abdullah and Ibrahim. He sat at the table before his own plate and watched as Avi climbed onto a chair to eat. The boy added so much sugar to his tea that the spoon almost stood up by itself.

“What would Amalia Teyze say about your working here?” Kamil asked him.

Avi became very still, clasped his hands in his lap, and refused to meet Kamil’s eye. Finally, he said in a small voice, “I know she’d want me to do this.”

It was obvious that Avi was hiding something, but Kamil decided not to press the matter now. From what he remembered of Amalia, it seemed unlikely that Avi would have had reason to run away. Perhaps she was ill and couldn’t take care of the boy anymore and he was embarrassed to say so. Either way, an apprenticeship would be the best solution. He’d send someone to check on the midwife.

Kamil got up and pulled the cord on the wall beside his desk to summon Abdullah. The head clerk came into the room and waited just inside the door, pointedly ignoring the boy, who had slid from his chair and stood behind the magistrate.

“Abdullah, this is Avi of Middle Village.” Kamil pulled the boy forward. “I’m putting him in your care. I’d like him trained as a scribe.” He showed him the paper in his hand. “You can see that he already knows his letters. Let him learn the trade with the other apprentices and send someone to confirm this arrangement with his guardian, the midwife Amalia. And get him cleaned up.”

“But, Magistrate,” Abdullah sputtered. “Look at him. He’s a street urchin. He can’t apprentice here.” He peered at the boy. “Avi. That’s a Jewish name. They can’t even speak Turkish properly, much less write it.”

Kamil raised his eyes to look directly at his head clerk and said in an icy voice, “The Jews are physicians and scholars and the padishah himself employs them. Who are you to claim otherwise?” He glared at Abdullah. “You can conquer from the back of a horse, but you can’t rule from the back of a horse. For that you need learned men.” He pointed his chin at Avi. “And they start out like this, as young boys with promise.”

“Yes, Magistrate,” Abdullah answered with what Kamil was certain was feigned meekness. The clerk grabbed Avi’s arm and led him out.

A few minutes later, the door opened and Abdullah stepped in again. He waited just inside the door, hands clasped before his belly, shoulders slumped.

“What is it now?” Kamil snapped.

Abdullah straightened. “Magistrate, a letter from the Ministry of Justice has arrived.”

“Fine. Let me have it.”

Abdullah bustled importantly to Kamil’s desk and placed a letter before him, then retreated to wait by the door.

Kamil broke the seal. Minister of Justice Nizam Pasha desired that he come to the ministry immediately. The minister would want to hear his report on this morning’s raid, Kamil knew. Word of the arrests would have spread by now.

Kamil had never understood the origin of the minister’s seeming dislike of him. He assumed it was because Nizam Pasha had been educated in the religious schools of the old empire, while Kamil represented the new generation of bureaucrats—young, educated abroad, fluent in every language but religion. The minister was in his sixties and still dressed in the old-fashioned robes of the kadi courts instead of trousers, frockcoat, and the jaunty pressed-felt fez that was the mark of the modern man. Kamil had never seen any evidence of corruption, though, and for that he respected the minister.

He set the letter aside and pulled out his pocket watch, another gift from his mother. It was only eight o’clock. The minister kept early hours. Kamil respected that as well, although he wondered why the minister had assumed he would be at the court at this hour when the offices didn’t officially open until ten. Kamil had a sudden unpleasant thought. Did Nizam Pasha assume Kamil wouldn’t be here, and thus when he failed to appear, could accuse him of not answering the minister’s summons? Kamil decided he had no evidence for such a supposition, but the idea soured his mood.

“Get my horse ready,” he told Abdullah gruffly. “I’ll ride over to the ministry now.”

A
CLERK USHERED
Kamil into the reception hall of the Ministry of Justice. Nizam Pasha was sitting cross-legged on a raised divan, flanked by his advisors. At his feet sat three scribes, bowed over their writing desks. An army of clerks and other officials stood to attention along both sides of the enormous, gilded room. Kamil stepped forward and waited for permission to speak.

“Begin,” the minister commanded, his eyes implacable beneath a large white turban. He wore a black robe with frogged buttons, its wide sleeves lined with magenta silk.

Nizam Pasha listened expressionlessly to Kamil’s report. When Kamil described Marko’s suicide, the minister’s face registered surprise. “That’s unfortunate. We could have obtained a great deal of useful information from him if you hadn’t decided to play the hero.”

“I apologize, Minister.” Kamil imagined Marko in the hands of the ministry’s torturers and understood the boy’s decision. “From now on, I’ll devote myself to the thefts.”

“Now is not soon enough,” the minister said, drawing out his words. “The entire situation is out of hand. Yesterday the Greek Orthodox Patriarch suggested that the government is involved in the thefts. Unbelievable.” His voice rose. “He actually accuses us of ransacking their churches to pay for the wars. And now the Jews are starting to complain that their places of worship are being looted as well. They’ve lost sight of the fact that mosques are being stripped too. The minorities have tasted blood in the provinces and now they’re rioting in the capital. These thefts pour oil on the fire.”

Kamil had seen the Muslim refugees from the Balkans. There were too many for the mosque hospitals and soup kitchens to take care of, and they sat begging in doorways and on street corners across the capital, their eyes angry or simply blank. They bore the scars of massacres, neighbor killing neighbor without mercy. European countries were quietly supporting Christian populations that wished for independence from the empire, fanning the flames of nationalist movements that devoured everything in their way, friend and foe alike. Istanbul was a tinderbox of enraged Muslim refugees who had lost everything and angry minorities who were afraid of losing as much.

“It’s not enough that the Europeans are taking our provinces and emptying our treasury.” The minister leaned forward angrily. “They’re stealing our culture too. There’s a long pipe sucking the treasures of the empire into Europe, and I want you to find it and shut it down. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Minister. I’m…”

“I give you one week, Magistrate,” Nizam Pasha interrupted. “Seven days. If you haven’t broken this antiquities ring by then, you’re dismissed from the court. But if you do manage it,” he paused for several long moments, as if trying to decide whether he should go on or not, “I can’t promise anything, but, who knows, there might be an opening on the Appellate Court.”

Kamil was offended that the minister assumed he had to be bullied or bribed into doing his job. He had made no appeal to Kamil’s professionalism or to any shared vision of public service. Kamil wondered if the spirit of public service that had animated his ancestors was now dead; these days, what you did was more important than who you were. There were advantages to this, of course. It allowed talented men to rise, but it also discouraged the enthusiasm that for generations had driven men to follow their families’ tradition. Who cared anymore who one’s grandfather was, when all that counted were results?

“I’ll do my best, Minister,” he responded politely. The Appellate Court was the next level of appeal above the district court Kamil now represented. All were technically subordinate to the chief public prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, but Nizam Pasha insisted that the prosecutors report directly to him. Kamil wondered whether a promotion would give him a freer hand or just subject him to even more scrutiny.

“You’ll do more than your best, Magistrate,” Nizam Pasha said in a low voice, then turned abruptly to speak to one of his advisors.

Kamil took that as his cue to leave.

He stepped through the portals of justice into the bustling avenue. The buttresses of Aya Sofya Mosque cast half the street in shadow. He marveled, as he always did, that the stolid former cathedral was still standing after more than a thousand years, having survived wars and earthquakes. At the other end of the avenue, the slender minarets of Sultan Ahmet Mosque soared white and delicate like orchid stems against the china blue sky. He had a vision of himself on an expedition in the eastern mountains, bending over a rare orchid. Yet he knew he couldn’t escape the responsibilities of his birth. These days, the title of pasha meant little more than a lord, but once it had given a man a clear position and duties in society. His father had been a governor and head of the gendarmes. One grandfather had also been a governor, the other a judge. Kamil had always thought of himself as one of the empire’s modern men, but maybe he was really a throwback, an idealist among the technocrats, a sheep jostling amid the goats.

Maneuvering his horse around the carts and carriages that were beginning to fill the streets, he rode back across the Galata Bridge and up the hill to the Grande Rue de Pera. Boys scuttled by carrying trays of tea and stacks of warming tins, rushing breakfast to craftsmen already toiling in their workshops. Shopkeepers cranked open their awnings and washed down the pavements before their shops. The street was filling with servants purchasing fresh bread for the families in embassies and mansions who were at this moment still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and deciding what to wear.

He loosened the reins, closed his eyes for a moment, and listened.

B
ACK IN HIS OFFICE,
Kamil took up a sketch of a chalice stolen from a mosque two days earlier. Someone had colored in the precious stones, pink for rubies, yellow for diamonds. Like many in the Old City, the mosque had been converted from a church, and some of its Christian valuables were still kept in a storeroom. Probably not locked or guarded, Kamil thought, shaking his head at the foolhardiness of his countrymen. Constantinople had fallen to the Turkish armies more than four centuries ago, but Istanbul was still strewn with its bones. Byzantine walls, arches, cisterns, and artifacts came to light every time someone stuck a spade in the ground. The old city was encrusted with the new, but no matter how many palaces and mosques the sultans and their families built, the Christian city always found a way to remind the newcomers that it had been there first.

Abdullah brought in a new file. A note attached to the front asked that it be delivered to Kamil directly. Thinking the file might be important, Kamil opened it. A silver reliquary, he read, had been taken the previous day from a storeroom in the Kariye Mosque in Balat. Also a small prayer rug. An accompanying sketch of the rug showed elaborate borders of saz leaves and lotus palmettes, and an open field, in the center of which was a six-lobed medallion. There was a description but no sketch of the reliquary.

He read through the file again, running his hand through his wiry black hair. The streak of white over his left temple had become more pronounced since his father’s death and Kamil’s lean face appeared older than his thirty-one years.

A small rug and a tarnished silver box hardly seemed worth his while. Why had this file been addressed to him personally? He detached the envelope from the front and broke the seal. Before reading even the first line, his eyes were drawn to the sketch in the bottom right corner, a charcoal rendering of a fox. Above the drawing was the signature “Malik.”

Kamil remembered Malik with a rush of pleasure. The swarthy, white-bearded man with a pronounced limp had appeared one day at his office soon after he became a magistrate to ask about the medicinal uses of orchid powder. Having spent years finding, sketching, and cataloguing specimens native to the empire, Kamil had been delighted to find someone else interested in orchid lore and invited Malik to his house to see his collection. On that first day, he remembered, they had discussed Kamil’s favorite winter drink—hot, creamy saleb, made from the tubers of
Orchis mascula.
People believed it healed the spleen, helped in childbirth, and prevented cholera, something they had both agreed was unlikely. Saleb in Arabic meant fox, Malik had explained, because the orchid’s tubers looked like the testicles of a fox.

Their conversation had quickly moved from plants to philosophy. Malik, Kamil discovered, was a remarkably learned man. They began to meet once a month at a café near Karaköy Square, halfway between Kamil’s office and the Kariye Mosque, of which Malik was the caretaker. One day in late spring of this year, the café owner had handed Kamil a note in which Malik explained apologetically that a relative had come to town, so he wouldn’t be able to visit Kamil for a while. He had signed it with a sketch of a fox. Kamil berated himself for letting six months go by without calling on his friend. What if he had fallen ill? It would have been a simple enough matter to find his house, but Kamil, absorbed in his work, had let it go.

Happy to see that Malik was well, Kamil read his brief note. In it, Malik asked Kamil to come to see him that day on an urgent matter. The note was polite and apologetic, but gave no further information about what was so important. Surely not a simple reliquary and a rug?

Kamil debated whether he should go. He had only a week to solve the thefts. How could he justify wasting time on an errand for a friend?

He reread the report and noted, at the bottom of the page, the name of the police chief responsible for Balat and Fatih, Omar Loutfi. He had met Chief Omar several times and was impressed by his intelligence and tenacity, but remembered him also as a man with a temper, an intemperate tongue, and little patience. Still, discussing the thefts with the police chief of Fatih would give him a legitimate reason to follow up on Malik’s request and might even open up new leads. He had to start somewhere.

He left his office cheered at the prospect of meeting up with his old friend. In the antechamber, Abdullah was laughing with another scribe in the corner. When they saw Kamil, they fell silent and lowered their heads respectfully.

Kamil stepped out into the avenue and rounded the corner to the stables at the back of the court building. He waited in the dimness, breathing in the salty scent of hay and equine sweat while the stable boy brought out a strong bay. He swung himself into the saddle, glad of the activity. His horse wound its way through the narrow streets behind the Grande Rue de Pera, past the British Embassy, and down a steep hill to the Old Bridge across the Golden Horn, which shone like beaten copper in the morning light.

C
HIEF
O
MAR WAS
a big, rangy man with a greasy mustache and the brusque talk and manner of a soldier. He had soft brown eyes, the kind that would be irresistible to a woman, but which lent the rough policeman a rather doleful air.

“I read your report on the theft at Kariye Mosque,” Kamil told him.

“You came all this way because of a silver box? Not that you’re not welcome,” he added graciously.

They were facing each other on low stools in a corner of the Fatih police station. Between them was a round copper tray on a stand that held a battered bowl and two glasses of tea. Despite the early hour, the Fatih station was busy. Several men squatted on their haunches against the wall. A heavily veiled woman sat on a low bench, telling her story to a policeman who stood by a desk. Her son had been missing for three days, she began. Whenever she finished a sentence, the policeman would repeat it to another man, sitting at the desk, who wrote it down in a ledger. Kamil could hear raised voices down the corridor, where they kept the prisoners.

Omar offered him a cigarette. The tea was too sweet for Kamil’s liking, but he sipped it out of politeness.

“So, tell me about the reliquary and the rug. If they’re so unimportant, why send us a report at all?” Kamil waved a hand at the room. “You deal with such things all the time.”

Omar shrugged. “I told the caretaker it would be wasting your time, but he insisted. I hear you’ve got your hands full with thieves and assassins.” He looked at Kamil with approval.

Kamil brushed off the reference the previous night’s raid. The less said about it, the better. He leaned forward, alert. “How much do you know about the thefts?”

“What there is to know. A lot of it’s happening right here. Fatih has always been a paradise for smugglers. They do quite well with all of Byzantium lying beneath their grubby hands. You should see some of their houses. Not much to look at, but inside they’d rival a pasha’s konak.”

Surprised, Kamil asked, “You’ve been in their homes?”

“I’ve been a policeman in this neighborhood longer than you’ve been wearing a fez. I know everybody.”

“Why don’t you just arrest them?”

“The jail isn’t big enough. We watch them and we make sure they know that we’re watching them. We’ve been busy chasing down a string of murders over the past few months. Had another one this morning. They’ve just brought the body in. Want to see it?”

Kamil didn’t, but knew he had to. He followed Omar down the corridor to a small, tiled room. The body of a skinny young man lay on the table, a deep cut in his chest just above the heart.

Kamil walked around the corpse. “Is there a pattern to the killings?”

“There’ve been a lot of them.”

Kamil wasn’t amused by his flippant tone and regarded the police chief with irritation. “Who is this?”

“Don’t know yet, but bound to be a local, the usual rabble, stabbed, like the others.” Omar bent over and looked at the hands. “Chafed knuckles, went down with a fight. One unusual thing is the number of deaths, every other week another body, sometimes two, since midsummer. This was a pretty quiet district before. Nobody knows anything, so people start believing it’s all a conspiracy.”

He signaled to an assistant to turn the body over.

“This is the other unusual thing.”

Kamil saw four intersecting cuts on the dead man’s back. “Torture?”

“I don’t think so. There was no bleeding. Looks like this was done after he was killed. It’s always the same pattern, although not all the bodies have it on them.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Beats me. Looks a bit like mountains,” he tilted his head, “or wings. Clearly the murderer’s mark.”

“A message of some kind?”

“It’s not writing, but then most of these thugs can’t read anyway, much less write.” Omar turned and led the way back down the corridor. He stopped and spoke to the policeman behind the desk. “See if that woman recognizes…you know.” He nodded in the direction of the back room. The policeman got up and went over to the woman who had reported her son missing.

Kamil and Omar sat back down on their stools. Kamil lit a cigarette to take away the chill of death.

“A fight over territory between rival gangs of smugglers?” Kamil suggested as he held out his cigarette case.

An agonized wail rose from the corridor.

Omar pursed his lips and exhaled loudly. “Now we know whose body it is. That’s the butcher’s widow. Must have been her son.” He took a cigarette and rolled it thoughtfully between his fingers. “If it is a fight over territory, that’d be something new. These smugglers have been doing it for generations. They’re organized in families, not gangs. It would explain how that boy,” he nodded toward the corridor, “got involved. He’s not a member of the smuggling families, and they don’t take kindly to outsiders. They have their own traditions and they don’t get in each other’s way. As long as they keep on our good side, we don’t bother them either. It keeps the peace.”

“Your policemen take bribes to look the other way?” Kamil asked, watching as the policeman and a woman helped the bereft mother out of the station. “Don’t you think that encourages people to commit crimes?”

Omar looked at Kamil incredulously. “Ah,” he said finally, as if he had solved a puzzle. “Of course. They say you have to be ignorant to be a saint. Do you have any idea what a policeman’s salary is?”

Kamil ignored Omar’s implied insult and admitted that he didn’t.

“Four hundred kurush a month.”

Kamil was taken aback. Even the lowest official’s salary was fifteen hundred. Ministers earned more than fifty thousand, but they had to support an enormous staff.

“Do you know how much it costs to support a family?” Omar continued relentlessly. “At least a thousand. Do you think the Ministry of Justice takes bribes into account in calculating a policeman’s pay?”

Kamil didn’t answer. Was it really corruption if policemen were paid so little that they were forced to take bribes to feed their families? The answer wasn’t clear to Kamil, and this disturbed him. Taking bribes was stealing both from the citizens and from the state. It ought to be wrong, always. He thought he might ask Ismail Hodja about it next time they met. The wise old sheikh would surely have some insight.

Meanwhile, Omar continued, “Just think of bribes as a kind of service tax that goes straight into the pockets of the civil servant, instead of through the government first. If you feed meat to the government, it comes out as shit the other end. Makes sense to give it to a man up front so he can feed his kids. You know the saying, ‘If one eats while the other can only look on, that’s when doomsday starts.’”

“It would make more sense for the government to pay the police a decent wage,” Kamil responded dryly. “There’s no justice if it can be bought.”

“Like I said, you’re a saint, Kamil Pasha.” The police chief flicked his ashes into the bowl. “I agree, but we’re not living in the Garden of Eden.”

“The Garden of Eden is overrated. Think of the snakes and the temptation.”

Omar laughed. “Yeah, not too different from Fatih.”

“Tell me about the smuggling.”

“Until now, it’s been mostly petty stuff that doesn’t harm anyone. We don’t let anyone get too big because that’s dangerous. And we don’t like it when someone starts trampling on our district. We’re the only ones allowed to wear iron shirts around here.”

Kamil understood this to mean that whoever was responsible for the recent spate of thefts hadn’t paid the traditional bribe to the police and was therefore unknown and unpredictable. A co-opted criminal was a predictable criminal.

“The problem is,” Omar continued, “there are just too many places to hide. This whole area is full of cisterns and tunnels from so long ago, nobody knows where they all are. Sometimes I wonder why the whole district doesn’t just slide in. The other day, Ali over there,” he indicated with his chin the policeman who was again sitting behind his desk, “was replacing a floorboard in his house and what do you think he found when he took it up?”

“What?”

“A whole goddamned cistern. His house, which, by the way, is as old as ten grandmothers, was propped on top of an enormous lake. One strong fart and the whole thing would have tipped in and sunk.” Omar laughed uncontrollably, knocking against the tray and spilling his tea. Kamil laughed too, picturing the serious Ali hunched over his ledger and breaking wind. He found Omar both disturbing and refreshing.

Omar called over to Ali, “What happened to your hole?”

Ali looked up, confused. He was tall and gangly, with a jutting nose and hair cropped so close that his ears appeared overly large. His Adam’s apple slid up and down like a small animal trapped just beneath the surface of his neck.

“The hole in your floor.”

“Oh,” Ali responded, smiling broadly now. “I’ve been fishing. There are fish down there. Big ones.”

“Well, they’ve been down there for a hundred years, fattening themselves up just for you.”

Omar turned back to Kamil. “Now I’ve heard everything. Can you imagine fishing through a hole in your floor?” He shook his head in wonder. “But enough of this. I’m sure you didn’t come down here to have a laugh.”