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?
‘This 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.