They were standing on the balcony in front of the steps leading up to the attic. “We found obvious marks left on the old ivy. The murderer climbed up it to the balcony, then just went upstairs to the top floor,” explained Ismail, his right hand pointing. “And then,” he continued, leaning on the balustrade, “he must have taken the body through the balcony room and out of the front door of the apartment. We found fibres from the sack on the sharp metal edge of the safety lock. He went down the main staircase and into the street.”
“Why do you say
he
? Are you sure it was a man? And are you certain he was acting on his own?” asked Barudi, his eyes tracing the way from the street back up to the balcony.
“That broken neck is clearly a man's work, no woman did it, but of course there could have been several men,” replied Ismail.
“So why not a man and a woman?”
The expert smiled. “That may sound likely, but if the murderer had
the wife helping him, he was a fool. Far too risky to climb the ivy into the apartment if you can just walk through the front door unnoticed.” He paused briefly. “No, I have a feeling that the murderer didn't care about anything, even being arrested himself, so long as he killed the major. There's a whiff of bitter vengeance about this, not cold-blooded murder by the wife's lover.”
“And suppose the whole thing was planned well in advance? It seems our man had a sensitive position in the secret service. I don't know details yet, but he was a major, after all, and such men live dangerously,” said Barudi.
“We can't rule that out. The climb itself wouldn't take a real pro more than two or three minutes,” replied Ismail, going thoughtfully up the steps to the top floor, just as the widow came to tell the commissioner that his adjutant Mansur wanted him on the phone.
It was after eleven by the time he left the widow's apartment. He couldn't help thinking of her. “Major Mahdi, my husband, had many enemies,” she had said straight out, only quarter of an hour into the interview. And Barudi had the impression that she herself didn't much like her husband either. She didn't even bother to pretend she did. Instead, she always called him Major Mahdi, like a stranger, and then, quietly and almost as if ashamed of it, added the explanatory “my husband.”
What was the woman's secret? How dead inside must a man be, the commissioner kept wondering, to sleep alone in a rundown attic instead of in the soft arms of this beauty? He could find no answer.
A ravenous hunger for bread was gripping his guts. The widow had served him coffee and sweetmeats five times. He drove his beat-up Ford to Iskander's delicatessen shop in Straight Street, near Abbara Alley and, as usual, ordered a flatbread filled with thinly sliced pas-turma. Iskander knew this delicious air-dried beef with its piquant crust of sharp spices was his favourite food, but nonetheless, every day he asked politely, “The usual?” And as usual the commissioner had a flatbread sandwich and a glass of cold water. Together they cost a lira, and while the commissioner ate his sandwich Iskander quickly made two coffees, hoping to hear some tale or other about the depravity of human nature. His wish was quite often granted. Commissioner
Barudi liked talking to the little man, although on condition that he never asked for names.
Today the commissioner said, “No coffee, thank you. I've drunk five already and I feel quite dizzy.”
The man could tell that the commissioner didn't plan to tell him anything, so he kept quiet and hoped the net of his silence would soon catch a bigger fish.
Omar the ironer had stepped out of his little shop opposite Iskander's for a moment, to get a breath of fresh air. On seeing him, Barudi remembered that he wanted to bring the ironer his own laundry. What a terrible job Omar's was! He seemed to be nothing but skin and bone. His shop was small and stuffy, and he stood at his ironing board all day, emaciated and sweating, pressing other people's laundry with his hot, heavy iron. And all for a few paltry piastres.
Commissioner Barudi paid, finished drinking his water, and hurried back to his small apartment. On days like this he despaired. He felt he was doing everything wrong. Moving to the capital without a wife had been a mistake, and he blamed himself for it every morning. There was no one here to look after him. He even had to do his own laundry, and now he must take it to the ironer instead of sitting in the office thinking about this murder case. Every morning he made his own coffee and drank it alone in the kitchen, with a view of an ancient, yellowed calendar on the wall. What was he to do? Nadia had chosen the village schoolteacher instead. “He won't rise far, but he won't fall far either,” she had said, when Barudi threw his future as a high-ranking police officer into the balance against the poor elementary schoolteacher's expectations. But the prospect of the good life hadn't weighed with her. Barudi could offer no more. The teacher was a handsome man with a captivating voice.
At this point in his morning lamentations he always looked at his face in an old mirror hanging on the wall above the table. It was half blank where the silvering had flaked away. He had never admired his own looks. His Creator, he thought every day, must have been drunk or short-sighted, and he smiled.
He had spent four years with the Criminal Investigation Department in the big northern city of Aleppo. His boss had liked him, and
when the job with the homicide squad in Damascus fell vacant he pulled strings. Barudi had been in the post for a year now. He found his task in the capital demanding, sometimes too demanding for a young commissioner. However, he tried hard to learn, and he was industrious. His working day was twelve hours, sometimes fourteen, but he didn't complain. In general he was glad to be at police headquarters doing something. The mountains of files familiarized him with a city that still puzzled him, a farmer's son from the south. The one fly in the ointment at work was his boss, Colonel Kuga, a vain, chilly diplomat. “Things are different in the capital,” his kindly boss in Aleppo had told him when he left, “but you're a hard worker, you'll soon show them.”
Barudi felt as if Kuga ignored his achievements on purpose, so he was hoping for a difficult case to come his way at long last. Then he might be able to shine by solving it.
The front door of the building was left unlocked, as usual. In the Christian quarter of Damascus, people lived as serenely as if their alleys still had gates that were locked at night in the fashion of the last century. From a modern criminologist's viewpoint, leaving the door of a building unlocked was pure carelessness.
He was his old landlady's only tenant. Two small rooms and a kitchen on the first floor, not a bad place. However, he had to share the toilet and bathroom with her. He knew he could live a bachelor life here, and out of the kindness of her heart the old widow cleaned his apartment for him. She regarded him as a good, well-brought-up boy from a Christian village, who never had visitors, paid his rent in advance, and neither smoked nor drank. He wasn't interested in women, and no woman seemed to be interested in him. He was short, wore thick glasses, and had gone prematurely grey, all three of them factors likely to put off the girls of Damascus.
His landlady had only one fault to find with him. Like her, he had been baptized a Catholic, but he never showed his face in church. When she reproved him, he had replied that he didn't commit any sins. And then he had laughed, adding that he had no spare time for sinning.
Today he gave her a hasty greeting. She looked up briefly from the
old dress she was mending. Soon he was on his way out of the apartment again with his laundered shirts and trousers stuffed into a big bag.
“But you've only this moment come home,” said the widow.
“I just dropped in for my laundry. There's a lot going on right now. You'll have heard about the murder in the Bulos Chapel,” he replied, secure in the knowledge that nothing, absolutely nothing that happened within a radius of two kilometres escaped the old lady. Her house in Ananias Alley wasn't far from the entrance to the Bulos Chapel.
“People don't fear God at all these days. A murder in church! Whoever would think of doing such a thing?”
“I only wish I knew,” sighed the commissioner.
4. In the Jungle
As Commissioner Barudi sat down at his desk, he remembered the note found on the body. He took it out of its folder, examined the words, absorbed them, closed his eyes and repeated them. Then he said, quietly, “It's as if the murderer wanted to leave a clue.” He recollected a case discussed as part of the syllabus while he was studying at police academy: a murderer who kept returning to the scene of the crime and even offered to help the police. They kicked him out because he was hampering their investigations. Until one clever commissioner took notice. He accepted the man's offer of assistance, and very soon the murderer had his statements all tangled up and gave himself away. He wasn't even upset when he was arrested, he was finished with life, all he wanted was peace.
Barudi's friend First Lieutenant Ismail had said jokingly, as they parted, “
Cherchez la femme
.” Absently, the commissioner sniffed the paper. The smell was faint, but reminded him slightly of furniture polish. Or was it perfume after all?
âThis piece of paper could well put us on the right track,' he said to himself, but loud enough for it to seem as if he wanted to communicate his confidence to Adjutant Mansur.
However, Mansur rolled his eyes. “There's something weird about the case. A Muslim, and what's more a Muslim major in state security or whatever it is, hanging in a basket over the Bulos Chapel with a note giving a false name in his pocket? My nose tells me it stinks to high heaven. Don't get too excited. Hang around a while, or you could burn your fingers on this case.”
After a year of Mansur, Barudi was sick and tired of his adjutant's scepticism and caution. He was just waiting for a good moment to remove the old nuisance from his office and appoint a young policeman with a more optimistic cast of mind. Mansur didn't merely irritate Barudi, he turned his stomach. His heart was as rotten as his teeth. The man was obsessed with the notion of destroying all the mice in the world. On Commissioner Barudi's very first day at work, Mansur had told him all his mouse-catching theories, and showed him the infernal devices he himself had developed over the years and set every evening. Barudi had to be careful not to trip over one of those cruel traps himself.
He felt he was in a madhouse. Everyone else seemed keen on Mansur's machines. Even the boss Colonel Kuga, from whom the recent solving of an almost perfect murder by a prosperous widow hadn't drawn so much as a weary smile, whinnied with delight when he saw the executed mice.
Commissioner Barudi had already tried all sorts of ways of getting rid of Mansur. But the old wretch had over thirty years of service behind him, and knew all the tricks of the trade. He never laid himself open to attack, for he carried out every task stolidly but strictly to rule.
At five in the afternoon â eight hours after the corpse had been identified â the commissioner was facing Colonel Badran. Badran, President Amran's youngest brother and head of security, cancelled Barudi's authority to continue investigating the case of Major Mahdi Said. It was a political murder, he said, and as such not within the remit of the CID. He spoke quietly and unemotionally, as if discussing no more than a sip of water. Major Mahdi Said, he added, had been his best man, and he was going to track down and eliminate the murderer. Colonel Kuga kept nodding like a wound-up clockwork
doll. Barudi was surprised not just by the security chief's rigour and his vanity but also by his high rank, for he had learned to be wary of all who were too young for their rank in the services. They usually belonged to the inner circle of power, men who had carried out a coup or the sons of such men, the kind ready to stake everything on a single throw of the dice, and at the age of thirty they ended either on the gallows or in top government posts. In the last five years alone there had been eleven uprisings, four successful and seven failures, there had been coups, men who rose to power and men who fell from power, there had been victors, and young officers executed in a hurry.
But the hierarchy of the authorities forced the young commissioner to keep his mouth shut. The secret service was at the very top of the pyramid of power, just below the President, and many even whispered in private that the President himself ruled only by permission of the secret service. The CID occupied a very lowly position in the hierarchy. It was authorized to deal with criminals so long as they didn't belong to the upper crust of society, or the military caste, or the ruling Ba'ath Party.
“Only night watchmen have less power,” said Mansur the cynic.
Barudi was forced not just to call his men off, but to assure the colonel meekly that so far as he was concerned the dead man no longer existed. And within twenty-four hours Barudi was told to bring Colonel Badran, head of the secret service, all the results of his investigations
in person
. There was no mistaking the threat contained in that emphasis.
5. Mansur
“Knowledge,” stated Adjutant Mansur, “is a lock, and the key to it is a question, but we're not allowed to ask questions in this country. And that, my dear Barudi,” he added portentously, “is why there isn't a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions.” And he grinned. “Remember the anti-corruption campaign announced by President Amran in spring 1969? He set up a committee of eminent
scholars and judges to ask everyone the standard question, âWhere did you get that?' Still laughing, the President told the committee right there, in front of the TV cameras, âAnd gentlemen, do by all means start with me.' But the committee decided to start with the most corrupt Syrian of all time: the President's brother Shaftan. They sought him out and politely asked him their question. âWhere did you get that?' Shaftan was the second most important man in the state, commander of the dreaded special task force units. He immediately threw all the committee members into jail and kept them there until they publicly stated: âAllah gives boundless wealth to those he loves.' Only then were the men set free.”