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.
22
By the time they brought Ali’s body to the Fatih Mosque and handed it over to the imam for washing; by the time Omar and Kamil had located his family in a shabby two-story wooden house up a steep, narrow lane; by the time Omar had delivered the news of Ali’s death to his elderly parents and to his shy, young wife, her face hidden behind a veil, in the sparsely furnished sitting room of the house they occupied together, it was nearly night. A scruffy boy with wide eyes and Ali’s ears pressed himself against his mother’s legs. She bent her head low over the baby in her arms and rocked back and forth. Ali’s mother went over and put an arm around her.
Kamil couldn’t help but look for the hole in the floor from which Ali claimed to have fished, but saw only a threadbare carpet.
He and Omar stepped out to find an orange sky blazing across the landscape as if the whole city were on fire. From this height, they could look down through the tight canyons of streets to the Golden Horn, which at this moment channeled not water but molten copper. Without a word, they both stopped and watched. Omar took out a cigarette but didn’t light it. Kamil thought about the looting and burning of Constantinople by the Turkish armies. He wondered whether someone, a Byzantine, had stood at this very spot and watched his city go up in flames.
“Want one?” Omar murmured. When Kamil nodded, Omar handed him the cigarette, took another out of a battered silver holder, and clamped it in the corner of his mouth.
When they’d finished smoking, they began to walk down the steep hill. The sky had quieted too, matching their mood. Shades of gray bled into feathers of pink, slowly smothering them. Kamil was aware of Omar walking beside him, but in the twilight he felt invisible, alone. Sounds seemed to come from a long distance away, or were muted, as if from another room. Children cried out and pots clanged from a kitchen window; a street vendor called out, “Melons like honey, melons.”
“Should we head over to Malik’s house or leave it for tomorrow?” Omar asked.
“Might as well go now.”
A pigeon had somehow managed to get into Malik’s house and fluttered about like a dispirited ghost as the two men systematically searched the rooms. They were in no hurry this time, so they moved slowly and deliberately, Kamil on one side, Omar on the other, lifting each object and examining it carefully before placing it on a cotton sheet that Kamil had spread on the floor. The pile grew: shattered crockery, worn leather slippers, a broken pair of spectacles, the detritus of a simple life.
“What does this Proof of God look like?”
“A box of some kind, probably lead, or individual pages of a very old document written in Aramaic.”
“And what does that look like?”
“Like odd Arabic.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” Omar huffed, picking up a book in Ottoman Turkish, written in Arabic script.
“Just look for anything you can’t read.” Kamil wished he could show Omar the letter-maybe Omar could see clues that escaped him. But Malik’s letter contained too much information that Kamil didn’t want anyone to know about. It was too new, too raw.
After he and Omar had finished with all the other rooms, they stood at the entrance to the study and eyed the sea of paper with trepidation.
Kamil bent over and picked up a fragment of old linen parchment, brown and crumbling at the edges. His eyes had been caught by the brilliant colors that surrounded the Greek text-vivid purple, green, and red, ornamented in gold leaf.
Omar looked over his shoulder. “Malik collected those. He said they were done by monks at the Kariye when it was a church.”
Kamil wondered what the monk who had copied this particular page had been thinking when he painstakingly painted the flowers and vines, the tiny distorted faces peering from behind highly elaborate letters. Did monks have a sense of humor? Were they bored by the texts and looking to entertain themselves? Why would their superiors allow such a thing?
According to Ismail Hodja, the Chora monastery had been built by Theodore Metochites, a Byzantine minister of state and diplomat who in his later years became a monk there. Had he devoted himself to studying these texts or did he while away his remaining days painting whimsical designs around their edges? Perhaps he had written his memoirs, as aging statesmen were wont to do in any age. If so, they hadn’t survived. Only his image on the wall of his church and on the reliquary had survived him.
Kamil picked up another illuminated page. They were beautiful.
“Well, the old rake,” Omar exclaimed, throwing on the table a depiction of a man penetrating another from behind in an explosion of colorful robes.
“This is Japanese,” Kamil commented, noting the eyes and elaborately knotted hair of the two men and their exquisitely detailed kimonos.
“Well, I guess the Japanese aren’t choosy.” Omar dropped another page on the pile, an ink sketch of a woman holding up her kimono and straddling a man. She was leaning forward and every detail of their joined organs was lovingly depicted. Discomfited by the memory of his dream, Kamil placed a page of Latin text on top of the Japanese drawing.
Omar looked at him with amusement. “I didn’t know you were so squeamish, Magistrate.”
“Let’s not forget what we’re doing here,” Kamil responded irritably.
Omar shrugged and lumbered back into the pile of papers on the study floor. He picked out the spines, shook each one, then laid it out flat on the table.
After an hour, the table was covered in papers and book spines, but the piles on the floor didn’t look much smaller.
Omar rubbed his back and stretched. “Guess I’m not going to smoke here,” he observed. “Back in a minute.” He tramped down the stairs.
Kamil heard the iron entrance doors clang. After a few moments, he heard voices, Omar’s deep bass and a rapid-fire response. He opened the window and looked out. The night air, tinged with coal fumes, filled his lungs and he had to wrestle a desire to cough. The yellowish haze was illuminated by the moon and seemed almost alive, twining itself around the ruined Byzantine arches and foundations.
He could make out the top of Omar’s head and broad shoulders by the door, and the top of a fez and long hair of a man facing him. The latter glanced up and Kamil saw it was Amida.