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 — eight hours after the corpse had been identified — 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, ‘Where did you get that?’ Still laughing, the President told the committee right there, in front of the TV cameras, ‘And 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. ‘Where 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: ‘Allah gives boundless wealth to those he loves.’ Only then were the men set free.”
The commissioner had indeed heard of the President’s corrupt brother, but he didn’t see what this had to do with the present murder case. He glared angrily at his subordinate.
“One more word and you’ll be up in court for slandering the President. And in future I’m not your dear Barudi, I’m First Lieutenant Barudi. Do you have that straight, Adjutant Mansur?’
The adjutant nodded in silence. He knew these young fellows only too well. A few months at police academy and they strutted like generals. He would have liked to tell this greenhorn that his information about the local lack of crime novels and the questions that were never asked came from no less than Agatha Christie, whom he had once accompanied through Syria. Her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan had been travelling in the northeast of the country during the early 1940s, carrying out excavations.
At the time Mansur was almost dying of starvation. Drought and a plague of mice such as had never been seen before had destroyed all his village’s stocks of provisions. Agatha Christie took a fancy to the lad, and in spite of her husband’s dislike of him employed him. Later he became their head boy, and Agatha Christie called him “our Number One boy” in her memoir Come Tell Me How You Live. He looked after them, he fixed their accommodation and catering. She was a refreshing character, fourteen years older than her husband, but with a much better sense of humour, she’d laugh at everyone, most of all herself. Mansur often had to translate her comical remarks. “My dear,” she had told his sister Nahla, when Nahla invited the English couple to a meal, “I advise you to marry an archaeologist. Then the older you get, the more interesting he’ll think you.”
Shortly before the couple left, Mansur had found a post in the police force, which was just being built up at the time. When the Mallowans said goodbye he was already in uniform.
That had been thirty-one years ago.
For safety’s sake, however, Mansur said no more about his knowledge of crime fiction, which had been his second passion in life since his encounter with Agatha Christie. Here, in this very room, he had worked for sixteen officers who passed by leaving no more trace than summer clouds, and in the process he had learned when to keep his mouth shut. He still had three years to go before he drew his pension, and getting transferred to some lousy village in the south would be a catastrophe. That fate was the usual penalty for quarrelling with a senior officer.
For the first time in years he suddenly felt afraid. When he cracked a joke, no superior had ever before threatened to inflate it into an insult to the President. That could easily earn him a prison sentence, might even cost him his pension. From the start, however, he had thought this first lieutenant too ambitious, and thus dangerous.
6. Colonel Badran and the Course of Events
As Colonel Badran saw it, the case was clear. The murder of Major Mahdi Said had a political background. He thought the note was proof that the major had to die because he knew too much about some conspiracy, the work of a secret society whose members either feared betrayal, or had already condemned Mahdi as a traitor. The colonel assumed that the name Bulos on the note was a cover name. Probably because the major used to be a Christian and had lived in the Christian quarter until his death. Badran knew that the murdered man’s original name was Said Bustani, but as he had been so badly treated by his stepfather as a child he didn’t want to be known by the same surname in his new life as a Muslim. Consequently, when he converted to Islam, he had called himself Mahdi Said, the happy follower of the right way.
As the dead major’s immediate superior, Badran’s first reaction on hearing of his best officer’s violent death was horror. Mahdi Said had been ambitious, reliable, and tough as steel. He had been the only friend on whom Badran could count in a fix.
When the horror died down, a suspicion surfaced that made the colonel uneasy. Suppose the ambitious Mahdi Said had betrayed him, making contact with plotters behind his back? The idea kept Badran awake at night. He was so obsessed by it that two days later he dispatched a whole troop of his best men to collect all the information they could about Mahdi Said. He himself led the small special unit that examined the dead man’s home in microscopic detail.