Empire of Lies

5

On a quay by the Bayezid Bridge, Kamal and Taymoor flashed their badges and cut through the Zaptiye cordon to reach the small huddle of police officers.

One of them frowned as he saw them approach.

“Here we go,” he chortled to his buddies, knowing that Kamal and Taymoor were well within earshot. “We can rest easy. The ‘experts’ are here.” No air quotes were necessary. His tone didn’t leave much room for a misreading.

“Salamu alaykum too, mulasim komiser,” Kamal returned with a sardonic smile. “Mind if we take a look?”

“A look I don’t mind. Assuming you can swoop in here and take over, I do. What is it with you guys anyway? Is there anything you don’t butt into these days?”

“Not my call.” Kamal shrugged as he moved in close to the dead body. “Just following orders.”

“Honestly, we had better things to do today than barge in on you like this,” Taymoor added, his grin and the raised eyebrows that accompanied “barge” confirming how pleased with himself he was.

“Orders.” The lieutenant inspector virtually spat the word out. “Well, who knows? Maybe this poor effendi and his dastardly friends were plotting to use the river to flood the whole city, and your being here will save us all.”

“It’s happened before. The saving part, anyway,” Taymoor said as he brushed past him to join Kamal.

A year ago, Kamal would have also questioned the order for him and Taymoor to look into such a situation. A dead body had been fished out of the Seine. At this stage, there was nothing that cried out terrorism or internal security. Accident, murder, or suicide—it was clearly a police matter. But things had changed. The charged situation across the empire meant the bosses at the Hafiye felt a need to be on top of any suspect event. Which meant that Kamal and Taymoor were often getting dispatched to check out cases that, at first look anyway, fell outside their operational purview.

Which often didn’t sit well with the cops whose toes were being trampled.

Kamal pulled back the sheet to expose the body.

It was male, middle-aged. Unusually, the man was naked.

“What do we know?” Kamal asked.

“Seriously?” the lieutenant inspector scoffed. “You mean you haven’t divined it already?”

Kamal gave him an impatient, withering look. “The sooner we can establish that this doesn’t concern us, the sooner we can get out of your hair.”

“Although I, for one, will forever savor the memory of this delightful rendezvous,” Taymoor added.

Kamal shifted his withering look to his partner.

The lieutenant inspector nodded grudgingly. “Well, in that case…” He pointed at a man who was sitting on a bench closer to the bridge. A couple of cops were shadowing him. “That guy over there? He was fishing from the Osman Bridge. Saw the body floating by, half-submerged. Called it in. River patrol set up some nets by this bridge and snagged him.”

Kamal got down on his haunches for a closer look. He noticed it immediately. The heavy bruising around the neck. There was no sign of cadaveric spasm either, not that it’s always there. But this was no swimming accident. It wasn’t a suicide either.

“I assume he wasn’t carrying any ID?” Taymoor said. “I mean, you checked everywhere, right?” A raised eyebrow accompanied the “everywhere.”

Kamal ignored him and asked, “What’s the coroner saying for time of death?”

“Fresh,” the lieutenant inspector replied. “He hadn’t been in the water long.”

Kamal nodded and glanced at the water. The current wasn’t strong at that time of year. The body hadn’t traveled far.

“We need to find where he went in,” he said. “And what happened to his clothes.”

“Genius,” the lieutenant inspector said. “Praise God that you’re here.”

Kamal got up but didn’t rise to the jibe. Instead, he looked up, checking for cameras, then reached into his pocket, pulled out a card, and held it out to the cop with two fingers. “Let me know what your men find. We’ll hold off on filing our report until you do.” He gave him a pointed glance.

The cop understood and snatched the card.

Kamal nodded to Taymoor, and they walked away.

“Can you believe that dickhead?” Taymoor complained as he drove east on the boulevard that ran alongside the river. “As if we don’t have bigger fish to fry”—said with the smirk.

Kamal slid him a sideways scowl. “Are you done? ’Cause I’m happy to walk back.”

Taymoor laughed.

In truth, Kamal hadn’t been any happier about being summoned out there than the cops were about seeing him. He and Taymoor did have, to use Taymoor’s cheesy words, bigger fish to fry. Terrorist whales, not civilian-homicide goldfish. He also empathized with the cops’ frustration at having him and Taymoor show up. If this was a murder, it would be something they’d be loathe to share for the simple reason that, in Ottoman Paris, murders were rare. The capital penalty for it under shari’a law was a major deterrent. There were crimes of passion, as well as honor killings—women murdered by male relatives who considered them to have dishonored the family, typically for eloping or getting pregnant out of wedlock. They had become a rarity in the big cities, where attitudes had changed after the previous sultan, the progressive Murad V, introduced legislation making them a crime. But honor killings were now on the rise again after his successor, Abdülhamid III, had given the imams more power and turned back the clock on many of Murad’s reforms. Far from the cities, though, it was as if the reforms had never happened. The commonly held credo of “my horse, my gun, and my woman are sacred” may have been updated to include a car instead of a horse, but the belief was still deeply entrenched in the patriarchal and tribal system of many of the empire’s provinces.

But this was no honor killing.

In terms of the recovered body, there wasn’t much more to be done. No one had filed a missing person report. Kamal had already called the Hafiye’s surveillance center and told a senior analyst he knew there to go through all the CCTV footage of the riverbank since that day’s first light, going back one fersah from where they’d fished the man out. He knew it wasn’t a long shot. With the security services installing more cameras every day, there was hardly a corner left in the city that wasn’t under constant watch.

It was still the holy day of rest, which was why Kamal and Taymoor were soon seated across from each other on the sidewalk terrace of a kahvehane on the left bank. Separating them was a table with a backgammon set and an empty jug of mint lemonade. Two narguileh water pipes stood proudly on either side of the table.

Clattering dice, gurgling water, and boisterous conversation reverberated all around them as men of all ages filled the curved bamboo chairs of the coffeehouse while indulging in their age-old love of all three pastimes. Around them, waiters in dirty white aprons flitted among the tables, precariously balancing tiny cups of strong coffee, glasses of heavily sweetened Arab tea, and tongs holding the heated tobacco coals for the water pipes. There were no women around: this kahvehane didn’t have a separate “family area” where women could sit with other women or with their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Most coffeehouses in Paris didn’t have such sections either.

“Come on,” Taymoor hissed, “du shesh”—two sixes. Holding the small ivory dice with three fingers, he kissed them, then flicked them onto the elaborately carved game board.

The dice tumbled, spun, and finally settled. Sure enough, two sixes showed up.

“Allez,” Taymoor rasped as he pumped the air with his fist.

Oddly, people across the empire still called out the dice rolls using Persian numbers, a tradition that was as old as the game itself. Taymoor’s last outburst was another linguistic anomaly, this one a leftover from the eyalet’s French history.

Taymoor didn’t have to move any of his checkers. His victory was now numerically unavoidable. He took a celebratory pull from his mouthpiece, causing the water pipe to gurgle so loudly it seemed to be heckling his opponent, then sat back with a big, smug grin on his face. “Had enough? Or are you feeling particularly masochistic tonight?”

Kamal frowned at him—then he flicked both sides of the board upward, slamming it shut like a vertical clamshell. “Hasiktir,” he cursed. “Your dice are impossible today.”

The outburst startled everyone around them. Bad sportsmanship at backgammon was a major faux pas in Ottoman circles, but no one was going to scowl at them tonight.

“Go easy on him, Taymoor Agha,” a man sitting at the next table laughed. “Today, you are both champions.” He raised his glass to him. A wave of others joined in his toast.

Taymoor raised his own glass, smiled, and bowed his head in thanks.

“For our heroes,” the jovial coffee shop’s owner bellowed as he wobbled over with a tray of fresh drinks. “You’ve never tasted anything like it, trust me,” he said as he laid down the two tall glasses of pomegranate and plum khoshâb. “I’ve made it for you with a touch of amber, musk, and my secret ingredient.” He paused, then leaned in with a wink and whispered, “Wisteria.”

Taymoor nodded his thanks as the man retreated from the table. Then he turned to his partner. “Would you stop already?”

“What?”

“Look at you. All glum on one of the biggest days in our—hell, in anyone’s—life. Come on, brother. Live it up.” He leaned in and gave Kamal a big slap on the shoulder.

Kamal raised his glass half-heartedly. “You’re right.” He took a sip.

Taymoor frowned. “Your sister-in-law chose to be friends with an enemy of the state, all right? That’s her problem, not yours. She’s an adult. There’s only so much you can do.”

Kamal nodded. “I know, I know.”

“You need to talk to Ramazan,” Taymoor told him. “He needs to set her straight before she gets caught up in a bad situation.”

Kamal scoffed. “Set her straight? Are you kidding me? No one sets Nisreen straight. No one ever has. Except her father.”

“So talk to her father.”

“It’s a bit complicated, given that he passed away two years ago.”

Taymoor took another long pull. “Well, someone’s got to talk to her.” He edged in, lowering his voice. “I don’t want to see you get into trouble because of her.”

“Me, or us?”

Taymoor looked at him askance. “That’s not fair, brother.”

Kamal’s face scrunched with remorse. “I’m sorry. It’s just… the way things are going, it feels like we’re all going to get sucked into some kind of trouble, doesn’t it?”

Which threw Taymoor. “What are you talking about?”

“The psychos hoping to get their seventy-two virgins by blowing themselves to smithereens? I’m all in. Find them, take them out, every last one of them—absolutely. That’s what I signed up for. White Rose subversives and anarchists like Azmi plotting to topple the Divan? They need to be stopped, no question. But the rest of it? They’ve got a radio DJ in the dock for insulting the beylerbey’s son by questioning his real estate dealings. A university professor was fired for giving a seminar about the merits of solar power. They even locked up two puppeteers for ‘incitement to anarchy’”—using air quotes around the words—“just because their puppet show linked the sultan’s ripping up of environmental controls and the grand vizier’s factories to poisoning a town.”

“It’s not conclusive. The Environment Department’s still looking into that.”

“It’s a puppet show, brother.”

Taymoor shrugged. “That’s not us. That’s Z Directorate. It’s their business.”

“We’re on the same team.”

“Our job is to get the killers. That’s what we do. It’s not complicated.”

“Yeah, but… you don’t think this is going overboard? Everyone seems to be guilty of something these days. It’s getting so that people are scared to think.”

“Maybe they should be.” He edged closer. “Some thoughts can be more dangerous than explosive vests. We’re at war, brother. It might not be a war in the old sense of the word, but it’s a war. We’re under attack from all sides, and we’re vulnerable. And if we let some cracks set in, then everything could fall apart.”

Just then, Taymoor’s phone beeped with an incoming text. He picked it up with a grin. “Saved by the bell. That’s way too heavy a conversation for today, brother.” He glanced at the screen, and then his grin widened.

“Hot date?” Kamal asked.

“Care to rephrase that without limiting yourself to the singular?”

Kamal played the game, kept up the pretense, and rolled his eyes as Taymoor got up.

“I’m out of here,” Taymoor said. “Take a breath and kick back a little, brother. Or I just might have to find myself a new partner.” He gave him a playful, pointed look.

Kamal gave him a nod. “New me. Tomorrow. Promise.”

“Good. See you at the castle, bright and early.” Taymoor wagged a finger as he stepped away through a wave of congratulatory pats. “No rest for the vigilant: remember, bad guys are waiting.”