Jenny White: The Abyssinian Proof

Chief Omar was a big, rangy man with a greasy mustache and the brusque talk and manner of a soldier. He had soft brown eyes, the kind that would be irresistible to a woman, but which lent the rough policeman a rather doleful air.

“I read your report on the theft at Kariye Mosque,” Kamil told him.

“You came all this way because of a silver box? Not that you’re not welcome,” he added graciously.

They were facing each other on low stools in a corner of the Fatih police station. Between them was a round copper tray on a stand that held a battered bowl and two glasses of tea. Despite the early hour, the Fatih station was busy. Several men squatted on their haunches against the wall. A heavily veiled woman sat on a low bench, telling her story to a policeman who stood by a desk. Her son had been missing for three days, she began. Whenever she finished a sentence, the policeman would repeat it to another man, sitting at the desk, who wrote it down in a ledger. Kamil could hear raised voices down the corridor, where they kept the prisoners.

Omar offered him a cigarette. The tea was too sweet for Kamil’s liking, but he sipped it out of politeness.

“So, tell me about the reliquary and the rug. If they’re so unimportant, why send us a report at all?” Kamil waved a hand at the room. “You deal with such things all the time.”

Omar shrugged. “I told the caretaker it would be wasting your time, but he insisted. I hear you’ve got your hands full with thieves and assassins.” He looked at Kamil with approval.

Kamil brushed off the reference the previous night’s raid. The less said about it, the better. He leaned forward, alert. “How much do you know about the thefts?”

“What there is to know. A lot of it’s happening right here. Fatih has always been a paradise for smugglers. They do quite well with all of Byzantium lying beneath their grubby hands. You should see some of their houses. Not much to look at, but inside they’d rival a pasha’s konak.”

Surprised, Kamil asked, “You’ve been in their homes?”

“I’ve been a policeman in this neighborhood longer than you’ve been wearing a fez. I know everybody.”

“Why don’t you just arrest them?”

“The jail isn’t big enough. We watch them and we make sure they know that we’re watching them. We’ve been busy chasing down a string of murders over the past few months. Had another one this morning. They’ve just brought the body in. Want to see it?”

Kamil didn’t, but knew he had to. He followed Omar down the corridor to a small, tiled room. The body of a skinny young man lay on the table, a deep cut in his chest just above the heart.

Kamil walked around the corpse. “Is there a pattern to the killings?”

“There’ve been a lot of them.”

Kamil wasn’t amused by his flippant tone and regarded the police chief with irritation. “Who is this?”

“Don’t know yet, but bound to be a local, the usual rabble, stabbed, like the others.” Omar bent over and looked at the hands. “Chafed knuckles, went down with a fight. One unusual thing is the number of deaths, every other week another body, sometimes two, since midsummer. This was a pretty quiet district before. Nobody knows anything, so people start believing it’s all a conspiracy.”

He signaled to an assistant to turn the body over.

“This is the other unusual thing.”

Kamil saw four intersecting cuts on the dead man’s back. “Torture?”

“I don’t think so. There was no bleeding. Looks like this was done after he was killed. It’s always the same pattern, although not all the bodies have it on them.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Beats me. Looks a bit like mountains,” he tilted his head, “or wings. Clearly the murderer’s mark.”

“A message of some kind?”

“It’s not writing, but then most of these thugs can’t read anyway, much less write.” Omar turned and led the way back down the corridor. He stopped and spoke to the policeman behind the desk. “See if that woman recognizes…you know.” He nodded in the direction of the back room. The policeman got up and went over to the woman who had reported her son missing.

Kamil and Omar sat back down on their stools. Kamil lit a cigarette to take away the chill of death.

“A fight over territory between rival gangs of smugglers?” Kamil suggested as he held out his cigarette case.

An agonized wail rose from the corridor.

Omar pursed his lips and exhaled loudly. “Now we know whose body it is. That’s the butcher’s widow. Must have been her son.” He took a cigarette and rolled it thoughtfully between his fingers. “If it is a fight over territory, that’d be something new. These smugglers have been doing it for generations. They’re organized in families, not gangs. It would explain how that boy,” he nodded toward the corridor, “got involved. He’s not a member of the smuggling families, and they don’t take kindly to outsiders. They have their own traditions and they don’t get in each other’s way. As long as they keep on our good side, we don’t bother them either. It keeps the peace.”

“Your policemen take bribes to look the other way?” Kamil asked, watching as the policeman and a woman helped the bereft mother out of the station. “Don’t you think that encourages people to commit crimes?”

Omar looked at Kamil incredulously. “Ah,” he said finally, as if he had solved a puzzle. “Of course. They say you have to be ignorant to be a saint. Do you have any idea what a policeman’s salary is?”

Kamil ignored Omar’s implied insult and admitted that he didn’t.

“Four hundred kurush a month.”

Kamil was taken aback. Even the lowest official’s salary was fifteen hundred. Ministers earned more than fifty thousand, but they had to support an enormous staff.

“Do you know how much it costs to support a family?” Omar continued relentlessly. “At least a thousand. Do you think the Ministry of Justice takes bribes into account in calculating a policeman’s pay?”

Kamil didn’t answer. Was it really corruption if policemen were paid so little that they were forced to take bribes to feed their families? The answer wasn’t clear to Kamil, and this disturbed him. Taking bribes was stealing both from the citizens and from the state. It ought to be wrong, always. He thought he might ask Ismail Hodja about it next time they met. The wise old sheikh would surely have some insight.

Meanwhile, Omar continued, “Just think of bribes as a kind of service tax that goes straight into the pockets of the civil servant, instead of through the government first. If you feed meat to the government, it comes out as shit the other end. Makes sense to give it to a man up front so he can feed his kids. You know the saying, ‘If one eats while the other can only look on, that’s when doomsday starts.’”

“It would make more sense for the government to pay the police a decent wage,” Kamil responded dryly. “There’s no justice if it can be bought.”

“Like I said, you’re a saint, Kamil Pasha.” The police chief flicked his ashes into the bowl. “I agree, but we’re not living in the Garden of Eden.”

“The Garden of Eden is overrated. Think of the snakes and the temptation.”

Omar laughed. “Yeah, not too different from Fatih.”

“Tell me about the smuggling.”

“Until now, it’s been mostly petty stuff that doesn’t harm anyone. We don’t let anyone get too big because that’s dangerous. And we don’t like it when someone starts trampling on our district. We’re the only ones allowed to wear iron shirts around here.”

Kamil understood this to mean that whoever was responsible for the recent spate of thefts hadn’t paid the traditional bribe to the police and was therefore unknown and unpredictable. A co-opted criminal was a predictable criminal.