“That’s an unusual combination,” Kamil laughed weakly, “a philanthropic, drug-dealing surgeon.”
“Let’s not take the charity thing too far. He gets something out of it. Think of all the grateful mothers with nubile daughters.”
“Not everyone thinks like you,” Kamil teased, glad that Omar seemed to have regained some of his equanimity.
“The world would be better off if they did.”
“I take it that none of those mothers has managed to marry off a daughter to him yet.”
“He’s besotted by Saba. You can understand why. But he doesn’t have a chance. She’s much too proud to take up with a bastard like him. I mean that in the best sense of the word. He doesn’t know who his father is. When he was five, his mother tried to walk out on his stepfather and he bludgeoned her to death. The stepfather married again and the new wife decided she didn’t want someone else’s spawn, so they shipped him off to the monastery out on Heybeli. And suddenly he reappears as a surgeon. How is that possible, I ask you? Something stinks. I don’t think he really is a surgeon,” Omar grumbled. “And besides, an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“People take charge of their own fates. For all we know, the darkness this man saw as a child might have spurred him to climb towards the light. I’m sure the monks on Heybeli helped him.”
“You mean they enlightened him?” Omar joked.
“I mean they educated him.”
“As I said before, Kamil, you’re a saint.”
“Well, whether he’s a real surgeon or not, we have to take what we can get. Where can we bring Malik?” Kamil couldn’t get himself to say the word body.
“There’s a hamam just down the street.”
“Have your men take the body there. We’ll need some hot water.”
“Already arranged,” Omar said in a rough voice and turned away. “Ready?”
Kamil nodded and followed Omar back inside. His head still ached, but the cigarette had helped.
Two policemen lifted the body onto a stretcher. They covered it with a sheet, then carried it outside. One of the men was retching, a dry, barking sound.
Kamil looked around. The stench emanated from a sticky puddle where Malik’s body had lain.
The imam bustled in breathlessly, then retreated to stand by the open door. “I did another inventory of the mosque’s valuables,” he reported. “A silver candleholder is missing. That’s all.”
Kamil scanned the corridor, then pointed to a candleholder glinting in a dark corner. “There.”
Omar picked it up. It’s blunt end was slick with blood. “Looks like they used it to bludgeon him.”
“It might have been just one man,” Kamil countered. “Maybe the same man the baker’s apprentice saw during the first robbery. He didn’t find what he was looking for the last time and came back.”
“True, but if it was one man, he’d have to be young and strong. Malik, may Allah accept him into paradise, was old, but he had steel in his arms.”
They went outside and followed the policemen carrying Malik’s body.
“I suppose that lily-ass Amida will become caretaker now. That’s the way it is with that family. Malik’s father was caretaker before him. My own father knew him. They probably sat together in the coffeehouse just like me and Malik. It must have been almost time for old Malik to retire,” he shook his head in disbelief, “but I wish he had left that way and not this.”
He leaned closer to Kamil. “All last week Malik looked worn out, like he wasn’t sleeping.” He thumped his chest. “Something was wrong. I felt it here.”
“He might have been worried about the stolen reliquary,” Kamil ventured.
Omar thought for a moment. “He claimed it wasn’t valuable, but there must have been something important. Otherwise he wouldn’t have badgered me to write you. And why you?”
“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.