The Abyssinian Proof

21

Omar and Kamil pored over the map while the men placed dozens of lanterns around the perimeter of the Tobacco Works basement. Omar hadn’t bothered to get permission from the French owners. When Kamil showed him the map, he simply gathered his men, rode there, and broke down the door.

The rusted machines, pillars and capitals, piles of bricks, clotheshorses, and a hundred other objects were revealed as nothing more than trash in the bright light, not the mysterious overlaid voices of grand civilizations. It all meant nothing, except obsolescence, decay, bad design. That was what the basement of the Ottoman Tobacco Works represented-a museum of dead machines.

Omar was clearly in no mood to reflect on any of this, Kamil observed. The police chief walked through, upending and kicking over objects until they came to the wall marked on Saba’s map with an X. It was right next to the cavalcade of dummies. Omar hurled each one through the air like human projectiles.

The policemen waited tensely, hands on their guns and truncheons, as Omar stood nose to the wall, looking for an entrance. Instead of brick, the wall here was made of limestone blocks as long and high as his arm, fitted together without mortar.

“Son of a bitch. Where’s the door? There’s got to be a door.”

Kamil told the men to bring more lamps. He peered at Saba’s map. Beneath the X was an arrow pointing down. He looked at the floor. Most of the basement was paved with cracked slabs of marble and stone, but at the base of the limestone wall, he could just about make out a mosaic. It was so layered in grime that the design was almost invisible. He squatted and began scraping at the dirt with his knife. Omar quickly joined him.

“The design goes right to the wall, do you see? As if it goes through it.” Kamil uncovered the image of a naked child riding a dolphin, but this was no time to look at pictures. He thought of Elif again. She would have appreciated the adventure of uncovering this art. A curled seahorse with the head of a bearded man emerged from beneath the dirt. He could hear Omar on his knees beside him, grunting with concentration. Two policemen, looking puzzled, scraped energetically. Kamil looked at what they had uncovered. It was a seascape with fish and mythological creatures and, in the center, Poseidon holding his staff. One of the fish seemed to be swimming into the wall.

“What does it mean?”

“It means that this wall is new,” Kamil said, pointing to the block above the half-submerged fish.

“In this place, new could mean a thousand years,” Omar snorted. He went over and kicked the wall, hard. It resonated dully.

“That’s it. Right here,” he crowed. He took a large hammer from one of the men and was about to swing it into the wall when Kamil stopped him.

“Wait. There has to be a way to open it.” He squatted and brushed his fingers across the mosaic. Poseidon’s staff looked different from the rest.

“This is some kind of metal.”

“And it’s cleaner,” Omar observed, reaching down. He pushed the tip of his knife into the grout beside it and gave a satisfied grunt when the staff popped up.

He tried to pick it up, but it was attached to something. He knelt down and examined it in the light. “It’s brass.”

“Not Byzantine, then,” Kamil surmised.

The policemen circled them, watching curiously.

Omar took the small brass rod in his hands and pulled, felt resistance, pulled harder, and then lost his balance when whatever it was attached to gave way. They heard a whirring sound. Omar found he had a length of greased cord in his hands that stretched from the rod into a hole in the floor. He pulled on the cord and they heard whirring again, then a grating sound.

The policemen shouted and reached for their guns.

Omar and Kamil swung around. One of the granite blocks had disappeared, leaving an opening just high enough that they could enter it bent double.

Omar grabbed a lamp and ducked inside. “Pulleys. Very clever.” His voice came from inside the wall. “They swing the block backward and up. There’s a release mechanism so you can let it drop back once you’re inside.”

“Wait.” Kamil crowded in after him.

“Don’t worry. I have no desire to close this damn door now that we have it open.” He pointed his lamp upward. “Look how shallow this block is. Probably not very heavy.”

“I still wouldn’t want it falling on my head.”

Kamil didn’t say what they both thought. That they had no time to lose and all the time in the world. Kamil remembered Remzi’s face when he had asked him about Ali. He was sure Ali was dead.

Omar didn’t meet Kamil’s eye. “Let’s go find the poor bastard.”

“Are you coming with the lamps?” Omar shouted impatiently.

The other policemen followed behind them. The light revealed a narrow vaulted tunnel that stretched ahead. The bricks were weeping dampness and the air was rank. Kamil’s feet stepped into shallow puddles, but the water seemed to seep continually away, perhaps into a cistern farther down. If this had been the foundation of a palace, he thought, it was likely to have been built on top of a large cistern, its water supply. He looked down and imagined layers of such structures beneath his feet, enormous vaulted underground cities, sealed for a thousand years.

As they advanced, they saw signs of recent occupation. A piece of moldy bread. A silver coin not yet tarnished. An empty cigarette tin. The air became more foul. Kamil and Omar said nothing, but pushed ahead. Behind them, some of the men coughed and pulled their shirts over their mouths and noses.

Kamil stumbled into Omar’s back.

“The bastards have blocked it off,” Omar said, but Kamil could tell by his voice that he had seen something more in the tunnel before him.

Kamil pushed forward to stand beside Omar. The tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling with bricks, stones, and debris. But what Kamil saw first was a head resting on the bricks. Below it, shoulder width apart, were two hands. One hand still gripped a stone, as if the man had attempted to defend himself. Or dig himself out.

What was most disturbing of all was that Ali’s eyes, nose, and ears, and the fleshy tips of one hand had been chewed off by rats. Part of his tongue protruded where the rats had burrowed into his mouth.

Kamil was sickened. He and Omar were speechless for a few moments. Then Omar exploded into a string of curses. “The sons of bitches buried him alive.”

There was a commotion behind them as the other men shared the news.

Omar dropped his lamp and began to haul rocks from the pile.

“Be careful,” Kamil cautioned. “We don’t want to have to dig you out too.”

But Omar was beyond listening or caring. He tore into the pile, and Kamil handed rocks back to the line of men who passed them along the tunnel, through the door, and into the basement.

They pulled Ali from the rubble. His body and limbs, frozen in a sitting position, had been protected by the stone and were unmarked except for a cut on his forearm encrusted with blood. Kamil took a closer look at the wound, then motioned Omar to do the same. Four straight cuts in the shape of two mountain peaks. “The mark of Remzi’s boss,” Kamil noted.

“The son of a bitch likes to advertise,” Omar snarled.

“He wants us to know who he is. What use is an empire if no one knows you run it?” Kamil said. “I think his need to be acknowledged will make him easier to catch.”

“A puffed-up chest makes a bigger target, we used to say in the army. One way or another, we’ll get him and then I’ll break his bones one by one.”

Omar took off his jacket and pulled off his shirt. He wound the shirt around Ali’s head, then lifted the body under the arms. Kamil took the legs and they carried Ali awkwardly through the narrow tunnels, the corpse’s stiff arms grazing the walls. The policemen were frightened. When Omar and Kamil reached the basement, they put the body down and Omar bellowed for someone to get a closed carriage to take it to the mosque.

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.