“He’s not married. Uncle Malik told me all about him.”
“What did he tell you?” Balkis asked warily.
“He said Kamil Pasha would always be there for me and that I could rely on him. Why else would Uncle Malik have said that if he didn’t mean for us to be together?”
The fool, Balkis thought, her mind in turmoil. How dare he introduce her daughter to Kamil without her knowledge or her permission. Now Saba had misunderstood and believed Kamil would marry her. It could never happen.
She grasped her daughter’s hands. “I won’t force you to marry Courtidis. But if you don’t choose him, then you must choose someone else. The village is full of good-looking, ambitious young men. Pick one. In six months, there will be a wedding. If you don’t choose someone, I’ll do it for you. But I forbid you to see Kamil Pasha again.”
Tomorrow, Balkis decided, tomorrow she would tell Saba the real reason she couldn’t marry Kamil. Today she felt too ill and too upset. Meeting Kamil for the first time had struck open a fissure of pain and longing she had thought long healed. She wanted a last chance to dream her own story, before sharing it with others who might dismiss it as nothing more than a sordid affair. Tomorrow, she would start at the beginning and give Saba the gift of her life as she had composed it, before others had come to carve it to their own design. She wanted Saba to love the only part of her mother’s life that she had loved.
Balkis steeled her heart against the broken look on Saba’s face. She recognized it. It had been her own face eighteen years earlier.
Balkis stood on the terrace of the Sultan Selim Mosque, which towered over Sunken Village, watching men leave the mosque after prayer. She could see each man’s face as he emerged from behind the leather curtain that spanned the main door, squinting at the light, then bending down to put on his shoes. The pasha had sought her out, those many years ago, in the Charshamba market. She was eighteen and already married, her baby at home swaddled and asleep in his cradle. He had come up to her in the sweet afternoon light and bought a handful of peaches, telling her, as he bent to count the coins into her hand, that her cheeks put the peaches to shame. They burned even today, those cheeks, when she thought of the timbre of his voice, lush and low, casting everything in gold. She had said nothing at first, but she couldn’t stop herself from hurtling willfully into his life like a basket of peaches overturned. She had never wished it otherwise. All she wanted was for him to return.
She knew he was dead now, yet she continued to stand there every afternoon, hoping to see his face, guarding her emptiness.
Amida pushed Bilal away and sat down heavily on the piano bench. He took a big gulp of whisky. His hands were shaking. Kubalou must have sent Remzi to the magistrate to point the finger at him. There was no other explanation. Did Kubalou think he had squealed about the shipment last night? Someone had told the police, but it hadn’t been him. The image of Remzi stabbing the two young policemen in the heart so efficiently and nonchalantly was etched into his mind. The younger policeman had been about the same age as Amida, no more than twenty, his eyes full of intelligence and yearning. He could have fallen in love with that policeman.
Now there was another policeman missing. Didn’t those fools know that killing policemen would bring retribution raining in upon them from every direction? This couldn’t have been Kubalou’s plan. Remzi must be acting on his own, sheltering under Kubalou’s money and power to play his own sick games. Did Kubalou even know? He should tell him that Remzi’s bloodlust would destroy his operation. Maybe then, Amida allowed himself to think, Kubalou would trust him and give him more responsibility, even his own gang. Then he wouldn’t need to run to his mother for permission for every fart.
They had arrived home near dawn and he had barely slept. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw the blood spurting from the young man’s chest. Bilal had curled himself around Amida. In his fitful sleep, Amida dreamed a hand had reached into Bilal’s chest and torn out his beating heart.
Amida emptied the rest of the decanter into his glass and drank it down. After Kubalou’s man, Ben, had left yesterday evening, Amida had celebrated with his favorite whore, a boy with a harelip whose family had sold him to a brothel. Amida had bought him and kept him in a rented room on the outskirts of Charshamba. The boy kept his face veiled when they did the act. He found it more exciting that way, the satin expanse of his belly, his tight nipples, the gleaming pink snail between his thighs rendered forbidden, vulnerable, even more naked by the black cloth covering his face. He could be anyone.
And then Remzi had come to the door of that rented room with his rough men, smiled knowingly, and demanded that Amida come with them. An initiation, he called it. No Habesh were needed that night, just him. And he had gone, wondering how they had known where to find him. No one in Sunken Village knew about the rented room. He worried about the boy. He wasn’t safe there anymore.
He opened the lid of the piano and let his fingers slide across the keyboard, then looked at the score and began to pick out Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor. He played badly, despite a year of lessons in Cairo, but the cool ivory responding to his fingers soothed him. He played until his arm hurt so much that he could barely move it, then closed the lid and held out his hand to Bilal.
Later, Bilal’s smooth copper-colored flesh hot beneath him, Amida imagined a sleek, blond boy like the ones he had seen on the verandah of Shepheard’s in Cairo, his skin white and taut as the belly of a fish and cool to the touch even in the heat. Afterward, Amida lay in the dark, eyes open, wondering how the future that had been so tantalizingly clear yesterday, had become so murky today. A man had to make himself. He decided to speak directly with Kubalou. He would find a way to bypass Remzi. The wound on his left arm, four slashes from Remzi’s knife, throbbed under its bandage like a second awkward heartbeat grafted onto his body.
12
When he saw Kamil, Omar jumped up from his chair in the corner of the police station and greeted him. The room was subdued. The desk by the door was unoccupied, the ledger lying open, seemingly untouched since Ali had sat there yesterday noting down other people’s misfortunes.
“Thanks for the gift,” Omar grumbled. “Wrapped like a butcher’s portion. Where did you find that scum?”
“He followed me from the Tobacco Works. Did you find out anything?”
“He squealed like a calf when we used the bastinado. The tougher a man’s hide, the thinner the soles of his feet. Allah is just.”
For once, Kamil had no qualms about Omar’s method.
“Ali?”
Omar frowned, flung his cigarette onto the floor and stamped on it. “Nothing. He said he didn’t know anything about it. I think that’s a bad sign. If Ali were still alive, this motherfucker would have tried to bargain.”
Kamil slapped his riding gloves on the table in frustration. An officer brought tea, but the men let the glasses sit untouched between them. Kamil told Omar about his conversation with Amida, the carpet that proved Amida had stolen the reliquary, and his fruitless search for the tunnel.
“Amida looked pretty rough, like he hadn’t slept. And he was holding his arm stiffly, as if he’d been wounded. He denied knowing Remzi, but I’m sure he recognized the name. He’s involved, but I don’t see him as a killer.”
“No, his main vice is chasing ass, which I couldn’t care less about. I kind of like the kid, pathetic as he is. Growing up in that strange family, all that weird sect crap, then being sent off to some mountaintop in Africa for eight years. That would screw up anyone.” From Omar’s red eyes and chin thick with stubble, Kamil was sure he had neither gone home nor slept.