The Abyssinian Proof

18

The blackness was so thick he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. The leaden weight of his hands and tongue was gone. He was naked. He could feel the air caressing his skin, then a breath or a hand-he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was nothing. A dream. He dozed, then woke again. The darkness over him seemed thicker and his body had begun to glow in a slow, molten way, though it emitted no light. He felt it expand, first his chest and thighs, then his organ. His tongue swelled and thrust from his mouth. His back arched. His hands reached up to push against the blackness riding him and cupped two breasts, their nipples lying in his palms like pebbles. Kamil’s eyes tore open. He bucked, but the center of his body was no longer his. She had taken possession even of his voice, hoarse and strangled with lust until he brayed and lost consciousness. He remembered the nacreous gleam of a woman’s back stained by a long smudge like a feather.

When he woke again, it was still dark. He got up to light a lamp. His sheets were wet. He touched them and sniffed his fingers. Too viscous to be sweat: an erotic dream. His mind cast back to his first memory of such helpless deliverance as a small boy, when he was little more than six or seven years old. His mother had taken him along to the hamam as she always did. But for the first time his childish eyes had registered the naked women stretched out on the bellystone, soaping and scrubbing each other’s breasts and backs, applying aghda to depilate the area between their thighs. A blazing line of lust and desire had unfurled itself from that moment to the present.

He went to the washstand, filled the bowl with cold water, and cleansed himself, feeling strangely violated. In his dream, someone had used him like a tool, a vessel to be broken after use. Yet he wanted it again. He wanted her very badly, whoever she was. He shuddered. He had heard of incubi, male demons who sat on a woman’s chest while she slept and engaged in intercourse with her. If he believed in that sort of thing, he would suspect he had just been visited by a female incubus. It must be the Balat Balm, he decided.

He dressed and went downstairs. Instinctively, he checked his orchids. They seemed to watch him with bemusement, craning their long necks. He stepped outside into the back garden, carefully closing the door behind him so there would be no drafts. The pebbles on the path had been raked after Malik’s departure and not been disturbed. What had he expected to find? Footprints?

By the time he went back inside, Yakup had lit the oil lamps. The windows were black wells into which the light fell, echoing faintly in their depths. Everything seemed slightly off kilter.

Kamil stared out of his office window, seeing nothing, his eyes focused inward. He had four days to break up the antiquity smuggling, and what had he accomplished so far? His friend and two, possibly three, policemen were dead. He knew that Amida had stolen the reliquary and was somehow involved, along with the thug Remzi and a brutal smuggling gang based in Charshamba, but Kamil had no proof of anything and now Remzi was gone. The marks found on bodies dumped in Fatih perhaps indicated a war between rival gangs. The mysterious Kubalou pulled strings somewhere in the background. Yet everyone Kamil met seemed obsessed by the battered reliquary they believed contained the Proof of God. Despite Ismail Hodja’s enthusiasm, Kamil thought it unlikely that the Proof of God proved anything at all, but someone had been willing to kill Malik for it. To Kamil, that proved the ungodliness of man, nothing more.

He glanced at the files on his desk. In the past three days, a valuable, ancient Torah had been stolen, this time from the Ahrida Synagogue. This case was like a dog with ten tails. He had always liked the challenge of puzzles, the calm, exacting inevitability of logic winning over circumstance. What was the matter with him now?

He fell into his chair in exasperation and noticed Avi standing inside the door.

“Ah, you’re well again. I see my sister has released you back to me.” He flung out his hands. “But you find me pursuing the same case. What is it they say? ‘The church is dark, the letters in the holy book are small, the priest is blind, the congregation is deaf, so what good is shouting?’”

Avi approached Kamil’s desk. “There’s another saying, bey. ‘However high the mountain, a road goes over it.’”

“Well said. So let’s find that road, shall we? I’ll lay out the landscape like the blind priest and you can tell me what you see.” He took out a piece of paper and began to write down what he knew, separating the wheat from the chaff, as he put it to Avi, the true from the derivative. There were only two important questions: Why kill and who controls the flow of antiquities into Europe?

Underneath the first question, “Why kill?” Kamil placed Malik’s name and, beside it, “Proof of God.” Next he wrote the names of the three policemen, including Ali, and beside them “criminal arrogance” and Remzi’s name.

Under “antiquities,” he wrote Kubalou and Amida. It was hard to imagine Balkis running a smuggling ring, but both Omar’s and Malik’s words pointed in that direction, so he finally added her name. Then he drew an arrow between Amida and Remzi-Remzi was involved in both the murder of the policemen and the antiquities gang. He underlined Kubalou.

Next to Malik’s name he wrote “wings.” Suddenly he remembered the feather on the woman’s back in his dream the night before, and the feeling of unease intensified. It had seemed so real. He wrote “Habesh, Wings, Proof of God.” He thought for a moment, then added “drugs” and the name Courtidis.

Avi watched, fascinated, as the chart took form. “What is the Proof of God?”

Kamil hesitated. “A box of very special papers. Someone trying to find it probably killed Malik. You are not to speak of it to anyone.”

“Yes, bey. They couldn’t open my mouth even with a hammer.”

Kamil winced at the metaphor and turned back to his chart.

“Who else wants it that badly, bey?”

“It seems the whole world wants it.” He sat up suddenly. “It would be worth a fortune in Europe, not just to antiquities dealers, but to people who believe it’s a sacred object.” He drew a circle around “Proof of God.”

“Are those people here?”

“That’s an excellent question, Avi.”

What did a member of a secret religious society look like? He imagined them to be rough, gullible, and ignorant, but then remembered that the Crusader orders had been made up of knights and educated men.

“If Kubalou is after the Proof of God, I bet he has a foreign buyer.” Kamil doubted someone like Kubalou had many scruples, much less a religious bent. “The buyer could live anywhere.”

Kamil wrote down the only European names connected to the case so far: Magnus Owen, cultural attaché, and Joseph Ormond, Metropolitan Police. He added Rettingate and Sons, the dealers in London.

“I wonder how central the Habesh and the Charshamba men are,” he mused out loud. “Who actually runs the gangs and who’s just a hired hand? Remzi said Amida had hired him.”

Avi’s eyes moved between Kamil’s face and the chart. “Maybe they both work for Kubalou.”

“Hmm. You might be right. If they’re rivals, they’ll try to undercut each other. Remzi would try to pin all the blame for the Tobacco Works fiasco on Amida. Although, I think Amida would sell the Proof of God without blinking an eye. He probably stole it on order for Kubalou. Why else would he take an old box and not the valuable pieces next to it?” He drew an arrow between “Proof of God” and “Kubalou.” “But who killed Malik? Did Kubalou come back and tell Amida the reliquary was empty and to get the real Proof of God? Then Amida asked Malik for it and when he wouldn’t give it to him, killed him?” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “I can’t see Amida killing his uncle.” He looked down the list. “And I doubt Kubalou ever gets his hands dirty. That leaves Remzi.” Remzi who had escaped from jail the same night Malik was killed. He drew an arrow between the names Remzi and Malik. The murders were linked to the antiquities smuggling, of that he was sure. There was also the mysterious symbol that had been carved on the bodies and on the wooden chest they had briefly captured behind the Tobacco Works. He drew that on his chart beside Kubalou.

Saba wanted the Proof too, but why? Malik had trusted her enough to teach her to read it. Saba would be the next priestess. Malik must have believed she’d use the Proof to strengthen the sect. If it was as important as Ismail Hodja said, it would indeed elevate the Melisites. He could imagine people making pilgrimages from all over the world to Sunken Village.

Kamil shook his head. Once people knew it had been found, it would never rest peaceably anywhere on this earth without people trying to steal it. He had to find it before Malik’s killer did. Malik’s letter to Saba rested in his jacket pocket. He took it out and turned it over in his hands. He wondered if Saba would allow him to read it. He returned the letter to his pocket and stood back from the chart to reflect on the thick inked lines linking Malik’s death, Remzi’s brutality, Kubalou’s network, and the priceless Proof of God. He was convinced that all the others-the Charshamba gangs, Balkis, and Amida-were bit players. He leaned forward and wrote at the very top, above Kubalou, the word “buyer.”

Avi stretched out his hand, palm up, and commented shyly, “It’s a problem that doesn’t fit easily in the palm, bey.”

Kamil stroked the boy’s soft hair. “What was it you said? ‘However high the mountain, a road goes over it.’ If we use our heads, we’ll get there.”

“And our feet.”

Kamil laughed and felt the tension fall from his shoulders.