“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.”
As he spoke, Courtidis pulled the blood-soaked wool away from the body, then cut and removed the undergarments. Malik’s body on the bellystone was blue-white and shadowed, like a hard-boiled egg released from its shell.
The sight of the birdlike bones of the old man’s chest, the wiry gray hairs around his sagging nipples filled Kamil with pity and grief. By the time Kamil had seen his dying father, he had been wrapped in a quilt that padded his fragile, broken body. Now, in the thin-skinned, pathetic presence of death, Kamil was reminded that even fathers are frail and that this was something most sons never acknowledged. He averted his eyes from the white worm of Malik’s shriveled but clearly uncircumcised organ.
Every Muslim must be circumcised. The story of the Melisites and their reliquary became more real. Christians masquerading as Muslims for hundreds of years. They must have had a reason. The Proof of God?
“So you know,” Courtidis said, continuing to wash the body. “Otherwise you would have been exclaiming from here to Baghdad, ‘What’s this? He’s not a Muslim!’”
Pink water pooled on the marble.
“How did you know?” Kamil asked him.
“I didn’t, but it makes sense from what I know about his family. He was Habesh. They pray like Muslims, they say they’re Muslims, but they have their own rites.” He stopped, momentarily overcome by grief. “He was the finest human being I have ever met.” He looked up at Kamil suddenly. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? You know there are people who would call this blasphemy and make trouble. Let Malik keep his dignity.”
“If I need to share this information with the police in order to find his murderer, I will do that. But otherwise I don’t see why any of it should become known.”
“Thank you.”
After he had cleaned away the blood, Courtidis bent over and repeated his close inspection of the body.
“Look at these.” He swept his hand across a battlefield of cuts and punctures between Malik’s groin and chest. He gently inserted a probe into the middle of one of the cuts, then moved it sideways. He did the same to another. “The wounds all have the same strange pattern. They’re flat, deep in the middle and shallow at the ends.” He pointed to Malik’s stomach. “One pierced the intestines. That’s where the smell comes from and, of course, from the usual, beg your pardon, evacuation.” He probed around Malik’s chest. “Another one pierced his lungs. But here’s the strangest thing of all. Do you see these pairs of puncture marks? It’s as if something with two sharp teeth bit his chest all over.”
Admiring his professionalism, Kamil observed that focusing on the puzzle of piecing together the cause of death seemed to have calmed the young surgeon.
“Yes, I can see that,” Kamil said. “What do you think it could be?” Kamil steeled himself to look closely at the wounds. The thought of Malik’s prolonged agony nauseated him.
“The puncture marks occur at the same places as the other wounds. I’d say the weapon had an odd-shaped blade and two sharp protrusions. But I haven’t got a clue what it could be.”
Kamil thought about this. “Perhaps some kind of knife used in a particular profession. Skinning animals, maybe?” He thought of Mustafa the Tanner.
“Help me turn him on his side.”
The surgeon grasped Malik’s hips and Kamil his right shoulder. Together they tilted the body forward so its back was visible.
Much of the blood had been soaked up by Malik’s heavy robe, which now lay on the table. Kamil looked at the blood-soaked wool. Malik’s silver brooch was gone. He wondered whether robbery had been a motive after all. It seemed a lot of effort to kill someone in this brutal manner for a small piece of jewelry.
“Would you soak this in hot water?” Courtidis asked Kamil, handing him the sponge.
Kamil held Malik’s shoulder while Courtidis swept the sponge back and forth across the back. When the blood was gone, they both leaned over, speechless.
“The lost angel,” Courtidis said softly. “You have fallen to earth and been destroyed.”
On Malik’s back was tattooed a pair of wings that stretched from his shoulder blades to below his waist. The powerful wings were folded shut. Every deep blue feather was detailed. Over time, the ink had begun to bleed and blur the outlines, giving the feathers the appearance of having been ruffled, disarranged.
“Do you know what they mean?” Kamil asked.
“A tolerance for pain. That would have taken hours with a sharp needle.”
Kamil ran his fingers down the span of wings. “The detail is amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He had seen tattoos on the arms of sailors and prisoners, and on the faces and hands of tribal women from Hakkari and the Sinai. But those were crude tracings compared to the wings on the dead man’s back. They looked so real he expected them to unfurl and take flight at any moment.
“I had a Habesh patient once-with a bad cough that eventually killed him-the man had a tattoo of this quality on his chest. Not wings, though. The face of Jesus. So real, I expected Jesus to open his mouth and bite my hand. I didn’t see his back.”
“Do you know where he had his tattoo done?”
“The Sunken Village midwives were famous for their tattooing. There’s only one left now who knows how to do it, a water buffalo named Gudit. Secret ingredients in the ink, she told me.”
They laid Malik on his back again. Courtidis dipped a hamam bowl into the cauldron of hot water, soaped his hands, and rinsed them, leaving a red scum in the bowl. “I think Malik was alive for a while after they did this. They’re shallow cuts, most of them, painful, but not immediately life-threatening. He was killed by a blow to the head. Look here.” He showed him an area of matted hair speckled by fragments of bone.