The Dark Side of Love (5 page)

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.

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.

Day after day he sat in the young widow's drawing room, let her serve him lemonade, coffee, and sweetmeats, and turned on the charm, trying get past the veil of indifference surrounding the woman by dint of clever questions. His men took the attic storey apart, searching the major's little upstairs apartment inch by inch.

Soon Colonel Badran's suspicions seemed to be confirmed: an inconspicuous little notebook in the dead man's safe contained names in code. They were deciphered by methods taught to the Syrian secret service on certain courses given by East German and Russian officers. The six people whose names were decoded were in the highest ranks of the army and the secret service. Mahdi had entered himself under the name of Bulos. Badran was triumphant: his presentiment had been correct.

After interrogation and torture, one general confessed that he and five other officers had founded a “Secret Society of Free Officers” to fight for the Fatherland.

“You mean you were planning a coup, you bastard!” the colonel shouted at the general, who whispered despondently and in terror, “Anything you say, my lord.”

Knowing he faced execution, the general pinned his tiny remaining scrap of hope on that obsolete honorific. Perhaps the colonel would feel royally flattered, perhaps he would magnanimously overlook the
torture victim's little lapse, which hadn't affected the state adversely in any way at all.

However, the only effect his servile “my lord” had on Badran, whose rank was far lower than the general's, was to convince him that the man was a slimy hypocrite.

They had contacted Mahdi Said a year ago, the general continued in a low voice, because he himself and the other officers thought there were too many Russians and too many German communists around in their proud land of Syria. They'd wanted to save the Fatherland, and what they admired about Mahdi Said was his implacable hatred for communism as well as his brains and his tough stance. At first the major had not disliked the idea of saving the country, but three months ago he had suddenly backed out, and would have no more to do with the officers and their secret society.

“And for that you broke his neck!” said the colonel rather more calmly, almost quietly, because now he knew he was on the right track. At the same time he felt a malicious satisfaction when he thought of the dead man. For at this same moment Badran realized that Major Mahdi Said had indeed been a traitor. He should never have kept such a conspiracy secret from the colonel. He could have been sure of a decoration for revealing it, a golden order, whereas now his reward was a broken neck. The colonel smiled at this reflection, and thought of the widow's soft knees. Like all modern women, she was wearing miniskirts that year.

The general began weeping pitifully. Never in their lives, he pleaded, had they dreamed of hurting so much as a hair of the major's head, for he and the others had soon realized that the whole idea of the coup was absurd, and the new government under the brothers Amran and Badran was as patriotic as it could possibly be. At the very latest when he, Colonel Badran, had sent the Russians and East Germans packing, they had all agreed that when Mahdi Said backed out he had opened their eyes and liberated them from the clutches of the devil. As a result…

The colonel rose to his feet and left. He paid no attention either to this eulogy or to anything else the general went on to say. Outside, he gave the man on duty orders to torture the high-ranking
officers until they all confessed to Mahdi's murder and signed their confessions.

“And how far may I go?” asked the man on duty, holding the car door open for his master.

“As far as death,” replied the colonel, and he got into his limousine and drove away to visit Major Said's widow.

A week later the six high-ranking officers went on trial. They were found guilty of planning a coup against the government and murdering, with malice aforethought, a former fellow conspirator whose remorse and love for the Fatherland had caused him to withdraw his support for them. The trial was held in secret in an empty barracks in Damascus. The condemned men were shot the same day.

Badran made this conspiracy an excuse to purge and reorganize the secret service. A wave of arrests rolled over the entire network, and men who had been powerful only a day before suddenly found themselves interned with their enemies in dreary prison camps. All secret service contacts were closely checked. From now on, absolute obedience was required throughout the whole system.

Under Colonel Badran, the East German and Russian advisers on military matters, torture, and the running of a secret service also had to accept drastic cuts in their authority. He expressly banned the arrogant tone that these experts had allowed themselves in their dealings with Syrian officers since the devastating defeat of the Arabs in the Six Days' War with Israel. The Russians had treated Syrian army officers like stupid schoolboys.

The colonel also forbade them to intervene directly in the affairs of the army and the secret service. His declared aim was to preserve state secrets. His arguments were logical, and convinced the political leadership. The experts, Badran argued, had come to Damascus to answer questions about technical matters, not to ask questions of their own, and definitely not to express political opinions. It wasn't easy to keep a close eye on their informal, politically wide-ranging involvement, so there was a danger of information trickling through to Israel at some point. The colonel was standing in front of a blackboard in a small room as he made these points. Three men sat around a table listening to him: his eldest brother President Amran; his cousin General
Sadan, the Minister of Information; and Sadan's son-in-law Colonel Hardan, the Interior Minister. Soon after he had spoken to them, the three most powerful men in the country gave Badran the go-ahead for any measures he thought necessary.

The Russian experts, who had patronized him as a man overeager for advancement when, in a memo of the previous year, he had politely asked them to adopt a friendly tone with Syrian army officers, now had to stand by and see one of their generals taken by night from his villa in the upper-class quarter of Abu Rummanah and humiliatingly flown home to Moscow in his pyjamas, because an hour earlier, while drunk, he had insulted a young Syrian officer. And once the Russians knuckled under, the East German, Bulgarian, and Romanian experts crawled to the resolute colonel too. He himself reacted to these concessions not with satisfaction but with even greater suspicion. That day, however, the officers of the Syrian army and secret service had found a hero who restored to them the honour they had lost in the war against Israel.

In the Christian quarter, on the other hand, it was whispered in private that the widow and Colonel Badran themselves were behind the murder. The rumour was that one day Mahdi Said had discovered the relationship between his wife and his superior officer. In revulsion, said the neighbours, he had separated from his wife, preferring to sleep alone in the attic storey. He had not raged and ranted, nor had he beaten his wife, as most men would, but in secret he had plotted to murder Badran. Only then would he revenge himself on her. In the process, however, he had made a fatal mistake. His wife, according to this version of events, had found a note in the waste bin listing all the stages of his plan in detail and even giving the date. She alerted her lover, whereupon the colonel had hidden with her. That night the two of them had gone up to the attic, and together they strangled her husband in his bed. A neighbour, the goldsmith Butros Asmi, claimed to have seen a short, sturdy figure with a sack over his shoulders going downstairs. He couldn't identify the man, he said, because it had been dark, but after all, Badran himself was short and of athletic and muscular build.

As evidence for this macabre theory the neighbours adduced the
fact that, only a week after the major's death, Colonel Badran was brazenly spending nights with the widow. His bodyguard stood outside the building, searching everyone who went in or out of the place, which had a number of tenants.

However, when the sole witness, that same goldsmith Butros Asmi, died in a strange accident, the building where the murdered major had lived in Marcel Karameh Street, in the middle of the Christian quarter, suddenly became a desert island cut off from the rest of the world by an ocean of fear.

The case of Mahdi Said's murder was officially closed on 19 March 1970, and the three fat files containing the records of the investigation, the evidence, and the witness statements, as well as the indictment of the high-ranking officers and the court's verdict on them, found their way into the secret service archives. The little note with the handwritten scrawl lay neglected inside transparent film in the first file.

Commissioner Barudi learned about the murdered major's Christian past from his contacts. Now he was sure that the name Bulos and the note were the compass he must use to give him his bearings as he followed the trail leading to the murderer. Before handing over his own thin file on the case to the colonel, he had photocopied all the results of his investigations, and cut a strip about twenty centimetres long and a finger's breadth wide from the note found with the body. He stored all these things carefully away in a secret compartment that he built into his desk one night.

Barudi believed that the murder victim's childhood would lead him to the murderer. He felt certain of solving the case if he set about it carefully.

And he did set about it carefully. The trail he was following would finally prove to be the right one, but he had no idea where his curiosity would lead him just six months later.