The Abyssinian Proof by Jenny White Read Free Book Online

and rounded the corner to the stables at the back of the court building. He waited in the dimness, breathing in the salty scent of hay and equine sweat while the stable boy brought out a strong bay. He swung himself into the saddle, glad of the activity. His horse wound its way through the narrow streets behind the Grande Rue de Pera, past the British Embassy, and down a steep hill to the Old Bridge across the Golden Horn, which shone like beaten copper in the morning light.
     
    C HIEF O MAR 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