The Winter Thief

50

A nun carrying slops in the early morning had found the body by the courtyard wall of Saint Peter’s Church. The girl’s body was draped across the rosebushes, her marigold robe pinned by thorns as if she were a rare specimen of butterfly. Her face was creased as if in pain, a discolored, swollen tongue protruding from her mouth. There were bruises on her neck.

When Sister Balbina touched her, an object fell from the dead girl’s hand. The nun screamed and ran to wake the others.

Chief Omar gave Rejep instructions, then faced the nuns. “Did any of you move anything?”

Sister Balbina stepped forward and handed him a silver pocket watch. “This was in her hand.”

Omar glanced briefly at the elegant timepiece, trying to keep his face expressionless, then slipped it into his pocket. He had seen the magistrate pull this watch countless times from his vest to check the hour. Someone wanted to set Kamil up as a murderer. He thought he knew who that might be.

“Anything else?” he asked brusquely.

“Take a look at her arms,” Sister Balbina insisted. The girl’s sleeve was pushed up around her elbow. The flesh inside her forearm was ravaged with punctures, burn marks, and cuts, some healed, others fresh. “We should take her down.” She headed for the rosebushes. “She’s been through enough.”

“Hold on,” Omar bellowed. The girl had been strangled. What else she had endured would have to await the arrival of Sister Hildegard, the nun from the Austrian infirmary, whom he had sent Rejep to fetch. It would take hours to track down the police surgeon in Fatih, across the Golden Horn. He had muscled his way in on another police chief’s turf, and he would have to improvise. The Austrian nun had seemed efficient and cold-blooded enough to deal with a girl’s corpse, unlike this flock of Italian nuns who fluttered about in morbid excitement.

He told one of his men to string a rope across the end of the garden and keep an eye on the nuns so they didn’t enter. He didn’t trust them. When nuns were convinced that something was right, not even Allah could stop them.

A few minutes later, Sister Hildegard hurried through the gate, accompanied by Rejep, who carried a bulky leather case. She made her way directly to the girl caught on the bush. “Get her down,” she ordered Rejep, who looked helplessly at Chief Omar.

Omar nodded. He had looked the body over carefully and noted where and how it had fallen. She hadn’t simply been tipped over the top of the wall. If that had been the case, the weight of the body would have crushed the bushes and it would have come to rest on the ground. No, someone had carried the girl into the garden and arrayed her neatly across the top of the rosebushes, spreading her robe around her. The girl was small, so she rested easily on her bier of thorns.

Sister Balbina ducked under the rope and joined Sister Hildegard and the policemen. In a babble of languages, they took the girl down and laid her gently on a cloth-covered table under a tree. It had lost its leaves, but wizened yellow apples decorated it like a tree of wishes. The other nuns had retreated into the church, and the murmur of their prayers leavened the air.

“We’ll need to know…” Omar began.

Sister Hildegard raised her hand. “I know, Chief Omar. I regret to say that I’ve done this sort of examination before. Much too often.”

Omar wondered at this. He had thought nuns to be aloof from the sort of sordid crimes he had to deal with. Sister Hildegard was clearly a nun who got her hands dirty.

The women rolled up their sleeves and bound them at the elbow, and Sister Hildegard opened her leather case.

Omar left them to the examination of the body and, together with Rejep, went over the crime scene again to see if he had missed anything. He had already examined the soil for footsteps, but the pack of nuns had trampled most of it. In other places, the ground had been swept. He could make out the telltale parallel grooves of a broom.

He walked over to the gate, his head bent to the ground. There it was: the imprint of a boot. A new boot, with a clear circumference instead of the amorphous shape of the well-worn shoes most people wore. A sharply outlined heel. He could even see the faint impression of a line of stitches along the front and, more important, a small nick where the leather had been cut by a sharp stone. Hand-sewn soles were expensive, but as prey to the city’s razor-sharp rubble as the meanest slipper. Judging from the size, he estimated that the man would be about two heads taller than himself. Omar told Rejep to place a stool above the footprint, so no one would blunder over it. He wanted to show it to Kamil, who, he now remembered, had mentioned that Vahid was tall.

He hadn’t been able to get hold of Kamil. The messenger sent to his house had returned saying the pasha had gone to Üsküdar. What on earth was Kamil doing in Üsküdar? No matter. He would deal with this himself. Certain that this neighborhood would have a shop making friezes for the many high-ceilinged apartments, he told Rejep to find a plasterer.

When Rejep had gone, Omar leaned against the wall, watching the nuns hover over the girl’s body. The stone was warm against his back, having absorbed and saved up the faint winter sun all afternoon. He fell into a kind of trance. The garden was so tranquil, the light leaning in sideways and backlighting the leaves so that they seemed to glow from within. He was content, he realized, with a wife who put up with him and maybe even loved him, or at least had the compassion to let him believe so, and since last year the boy Avi, a street boy they had adopted and whom he loved as much as any of the sons he might have had but never could. Contentment was nerve-wracking, he decided. It made you always afraid of a fall from grace. What would it do to his famous willingness to take risks, to walk toward a blade or rifle barrel point-blank, as he had done many times as a soldier, intent upon breaking the enemy and uncaring whether he himself lived or died? Surprisingly, that kind of bloody-mindedness worked miracles. More than one enemy soldier had turned and run. He couldn’t now remember which wars, but he thought of all of them with fondness and regret, not for his dead companions, some of whom he still mourned, but for the old Omar, who he feared was now truly dead.

He was startled by Sister Hildegard’s voice close by his elbow. “You look tired, Chief Omar. Let’s go sit on that bench.” She was wiping her hands on a towel as she walked.

The girl was gone from the table.

“They’re washing the body. Do you know who she is? She must have family.”

“She might be a missing Armenian girl from Kurtulush called Sosi. That looked like it might be an engagement dress.” And what does Sosi have to do with Kamil? he wondered, sliding his thumb over the domed surface of Kamil’s watch in his pocket.

Sister Hildegard closed her eyes for a moment. “She was engaged? How terribly sad,” she said. “The poor girl was strangled, but first she was raped and tortured. She also has what appear to be dog bites on her arms and legs.” She glanced sideways at Omar to see how he was taking this narrative of harm.

“Go on,” Omar said gruffly. “I’ve seen worse in the war.” He took out his cigarette holder, hesitated, then offered the nun a cigarette. He thought she looked at it longingly, but she shook her head no. Omar returned the case to his pocket without taking one himself.

“Cuts, cigarette burns, bruises on her arms and chest,” she continued. “Who would do something like that to a young girl?” After a few moments she added, “I too have seen war close up. Visiting such brutality on children is beyond evil.”

Omar wanted to ask Sister Hildegard which war, but a certain delicacy held him back. He remembered hearing about an Englishwoman, Florence Nightingale, who had cared for wounded British soldiers thirty years earlier at the Selimiye barracks in Üsküdar across the Bosphorus. This nun didn’t seem old enough to have worked with Nightingale. He had a sudden image of Sister Hildegard aiming a rifle that didn’t seem at all incongruous. What did he know about women?

“We can still be shocked,” Sister Hildegard went on. “That’s the only good thing.” She squinted at the apple tree, as if to find an answer there. “It means we’re still human.”

Omar nodded. Another saint, he thought, not unkindly. As for him, the horror of war had settled well into his bones. Having seen and withstood the worst gave him a kind of immunity, but he paid his tithe in bitterness. Everywhere around him he saw the potential for neighbor to brutalize neighbor, even after forty years of sharing tea and grazing sheep in the same pasture. No one was exempted, including himself. He knew what he was capable of. Except for the few saints like this nun that walked among them. If he allowed himself to be shocked by the girl’s brutalization, Omar thought, he wouldn’t be able to summon the rage he would need to find and castrate her murderer.

Just then Rejep returned with a man in a white-stained smock, followed by an apprentice struggling to carry a heavy bucket. Omar gave instructions, then watched while the plasterer carefully poured the pasty mix into the footprint.

“How long will it take?” Omar asked him.

“You can pull it out with these.” The man pointed to two loops of string half buried in the plaster mass. “Best if it sets for a day.” He thrust his beaked nose in the air. “Good thing it’s not snowing.”

“How about two hours?”

The plasterer shrugged. “Five, maybe. Not less.” He nodded to the apprentice, who picked up the empty pail.

When they were gone, Omar put the stool back over the footprint and told Rejep to make sure no one disturbed it for five hours. Kamil wasn’t the only one who could be clever, he thought with satisfaction, putting the question of humanity out of his mind.