Bled Dry
Page 18
Hanash waved his hand, stopping him mid-sentence, and then picked up the phone to dial Kinko’s number.
“Kinko, release the man who notified us of the crime immediately.” He replaced the receiver and looked back at Hamid. “Continue.”
“Like I was saying, sir, after I received the news from dispatch I gave orders to the security detail to head to the area, surround it, and guard the perimeter from looters or nosy bystanders. I didn’t order Qazdabo to go with them, but when I arrived on the scene I found him inside, by himself. I was surprised to find him there, coming out of the bedroom pretending that he was about to throw up.”
Hanash nodded, acknowledging the gravity of what he was hearing. He fell back into his chair, ordered Hamid to sit down, and picked up the phone to request Qazdabo.
“We need to coax him into talking about this without threatening him,” Hanash said.
Qazdabo appeared at the office door and gave an anxious salute along with a silly smile.
“Please, come in and sit, Officer Qaddur,” said Hanash, addressing him by his real name.
Qazdabo sat down half-heartedly. It was clear that he knew why he had been summoned.
“How is your family doing?” Hamid asked, smiling wryly.
“My eldest, Omar, who is fifteen, wants to drop out of school. He’s really giving his mother a headache, and she’s all alone with them while I’m up here.”
Hanash handed him the forensics report. Qazdabo grabbed the paper and remained completely still as he looked it over. He returned it to Hanash and looked at him with his silly smile, indicating that he didn’t quite understand what it said.
“What does this mean, sir?” Qazdabo asked.
Hanash tossed his head back lightly, trying to keep his composure. “Don’t test me,” he said, in a paternalistic tone. “Don’t make your situation any worse. I’ll give you one day to return the thirty-five hundred dirhams that you took. Then we’ll clear all this from the records, and nothing will get out about it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Qazdabo, in horror. “What are you talking about, sir?”
“On the day the investigation began,” Hamid intervened, incensed, “I caught you coming out of the bedroom where the victims had been murdered. You were the first person to arrive at the scene. You took it upon yourself to enter the crime scene before I arrived!”
“Qazdabo, you don’t want me to hand this forensics report over to another unit, do you?” Hanash asked. He reached out and grabbed the phone, waiting for Qazdabo’s response.
Qazdabo lowered his head. He seemed to be weighing his options before giving a definitive response. Finally he lifted his head, his eyes welling up with tears.
“Will you be able to forgive me, sir?” he said imploringly. “Could you at least show mercy for my children, who would become homeless?”
“Confess to what happened first!” Hamid rebuked him with unexpected severity.
“I give you my word,” said Hanash.
“Okay, I’ll confess.” Qazdabo closed his eyes, placed his quivering hands on his knees, and began his confession. “Yes, I was the first to arrive at the crime scene. It must have been the devil himself who tempted me to look in the open nightstand drawer. Then I found the envelope and saw the money. I said to myself: ‘The rightful owner of this money has been murdered, and left us for eternity.’ Meanwhile, I’m here on earth drowning in debts. I send all my wages to my wife in Taza, and you know I have five children. You know I can’t even rent a room here in the city. You’re the one who allows me to use the abandoned office on the top floor.”
While confessing, Qazdabo hadn’t been paying attention as Hanash got up from his chair, hung his jacket on the coat hanger, and rolled up his sleeves. Hanash smacked Qazdabo so forcefully that he flew out of the chair.
“You bastard!”
Hanash had never felt so enraged before. Even in Tan-gier, when he was working with drug traffickers and violent criminals, he had never been as angry and disappointed as he was now. He felt like Qazdabo was mocking him and had completely underestimated the consequences. Even worse, he couldn’t believe that Qazdabo thought that his personal circumstances might save him. Qazdabo crawled over to Hanash and fell at his feet, kissing them in a gross display of humiliation.
“The fate of my children is in your hands. Please don’t send me to prison. You gave me your word, sir. I didn’t find 3,500 dirhams in the envelope; I found 3,200.”
Instead of making things better, this further enraged Hanash, and he kicked Qazdabo in the stomach.
“You don’t deserve any mercy!” he shouted indignantly. “You’re a corrupt piece of shit who gives our profession a bad name!”
Up until that moment, Qazdabo had been expecting forgiveness, but when he saw the detective reach for the phone to call for the security guards he drew the gun out of the holster under his armpit, aimed it at Hanash’s heart, and fired. The phone fell from Hanash’s hand, and he crashed to the floor. Before Hamid had a chance to react, Qazdabo put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed right through his skull and lodged itself in the wall, along with shards of bone and pieces of brain.
14
The attorney general’s office chose to carry out the reenactment of the crime while Detective Hanash was still in the hospital, recovering from the gunshot wound, which, thankfully, had just missed his heart. All media outlets were invited to attend, and television crews reported live from the scene. At ten o’clock in the morning a police van pulled up with Abdel-Jalil handcuffed inside, surrounded by four muscular police officers. The crowd was so large that all the roads leading up to the crime scene were barricaded, and traffic in surrounding areas came to a standstill. When Abdel-Jalil was taken out of the vehicle, shrieks and jeers rang out from the crowd, demanding his public execution.
Hamid, who had been with Hanash every step of the way, oversaw the reenactment of the crime. He was surrounded by the nation’s top security officials, all dressed in black suits with dark sunglasses. Despite the incredible satisfaction that accompanied solving a double murder of this caliber, the officials who gave television interviews did not present themselves as the heroes in some crime drama, as usually happened. Instead, they showered their bedridden colleague Detective Hanash with praise, and gave him all the credit for solving the crime.
A male and a female officer played the roles of the victims during the reenactment. They stretched out on the bed and a white sheet was placed over them. They asked Abdel-Jalil, who seemed completely bewildered, to reenact how he had murdered the victims. Baba provided him with a plastic sword, just like the ones children play with. In front of all the cameras, Abdel-Jalil yielded to his orders and began swinging the plastic sword down on the victims. The whole thing didn’t last more than five minutes. Hamid intervened twice to demand that Abdel-Jalil deliver a more realistic reenactment of the murder. It was obvious that Abdel-Jalil was putting on a poor performance, simply trying to do what he was told.
Eight months later Abdel-Jalil was sentenced to be executed, despite having denied throughout the trial that he had committed the double murder. A confession had been extracted in a police interrogation room, though. The prosecution’s case was based on several pieces of evidence. Among them were the bus ticket that was never used, the bus register that confirmed he hadn’t traveled on the midnight bus, and the fact that he was the last person confirmed to have been with the victims. The prosecution established his motive to commit murder and relied also on the interrogations of Abdel-Jalil’s family, who all confessed to lying. It was true that the murder weapon had still not been found, and the suspect denied all charges, but this did not prevent the court from convicting him and sentencing him to death.
Ruqiya didn’t get the chance to attend the trial. She died from a heart attack only a month after her daughter was murdered. One morning, she hadn’t woken as usual to perform the dawn prayers, and when Ibrahim tried to wake her he found her body stiff.
Her eyes were open, and she looked like she’d greeted death kindly. Ibrahim considered his mother’s parting a relief from the torturous kidney pain she had been suffering.
Three days after his mother’s burial, Ibrahim vanished into thin air. No one knew where he went. Everyone in Kandahar assumed that he had headed to Tangier to attempt an illegal crossing into Spain.
The only Kandahar resident who attended the trial was the neighborhood muezzin, Driss. He had become the undisputed leader of Kandahar after Sufyan left for Syria. Driss had started preaching, and on the eve of the trial gave a sermon in the neighborhood mosque about how immorality tore apart families that had once been unified. He developed a unique charisma that attracted older residents of the neighborhood as well, even though he was only twenty-one years old. There was something about his thick beard, Afghani clothes, determined walk, and the fervent determination in his eyes that made him both feared and loved, especially by the girls in the neighborhood. He convinced many young girls to put on the full niqab, instead of just the veil. When he made public his intention to marry, nearly every eligible girl in the neighborhood came forward. He chose the most beautiful among them: the chicken seller’s daughter. She was a chemistry student at the technical college, and one of the first who had put on the niqab out of love and devotion to his message.
Driss also got Salwa to close her salon. She acceded to his request without putting up a fight, and begged for his forgiveness.
Driss was provided with a respectable monthly income by the merchants in the neighborhood market. He used some of the money to rent the area adjacent to the mosque, which was reserved for selling medicinal herbal cures, as well as religious books and cassettes.
Driss launched a venture called Prepared Islamic Foods, on the suggestion of his brother-in-law, who also sold chicken. He and his followers sold cheap and delicious meals composed of onion with chicken innards, as well as minced, spiced sardines. They had wheeled carts to move about the neighborhood. The venture became quite successful, and the local youth who followed Driss would work all day, and share their profits every evening.
One night, around ten thirty, Driss received a phone call from Syria. The voice was choppy and distorted, and the line cut out completely more than three times. Sufyan’s voice had changed, taking on a Levantine inflection. He spoke in short, concise sentences, as if he had received orders about what to say. Sufyan asked how his father was doing, and told Driss to send him his regards. Sufyan said that he couldn’t speak to his father directly, since he was hard of hearing. Then he asked about Ibrahim and the neighborhood. The line dropped again. Sufyan called back and resumed speaking in a terse official tone, as if reading an announcement. He said: “Salam Alaykum, I’m in Syria and I’ll be carrying out a martyrdom mission tomorrow in the name of God. I request forgiveness by all . . .”
The newscasts reported the massive blast that shook a popular marketplace in Syria, resulting in the death of twenty individuals, with hundreds more injured. On the very same day, someone who called himself Abdel-Qahar called Driss and succinctly informed him of Sufyan’s death.
The phone calls that Driss received had been intercepted by the Moroccan intelligence services, who eavesdropped on all communication coming from Syria. Driss was at the neighborhood mosque getting ready to deliver the afternoon call to prayer when they snatched him and brought him into custody. Three masked men brought him to a secret facility. They treated him well at first, since he cooperated and told them everything about his relationship with Sufyan. He said that Sufyan had been the leader in organizing the proselytization and dispatch of Moroccan fighters to Iraq and Syria. Driss revealed even more information when the interrogators decided to hang him upside down and apply electric shocks to his genitals. The interrogators were stunned when he confessed that Sufyan had murdered two people before he left Morocco.
After extracting these confessions, a special unit was dispatched to Sufyan’s family home. They found a long sword wrapped in newspaper hidden in a trashcan on the roof of the house.
The laboratory analysis verified that the dried blood on the sword was, in fact, that of Nezha and Said.
Driss denied any involvement in the murders, but he did confess that his friend Sufyan had been infatuated with Nezha since he was fifteen years old. He used to send her love letters, and wanted to marry her. But Nezha slipped from his grasp after her father’s passing, and she spiraled downward. Sufyan used to follow her everywhere, without her knowing, and he knew her every move. Sufyan had tried to forget about her, but couldn’t. Driss concluded: “Before Sufyan traveled to Syria, he said that an angel had come to him in a dream and ordered him to cleanse the neighborhood of its impurities.”
Selected Hoopoe Titles
Whitefly
by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, translated by Jonathan Smolin
The Final Bet
by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, translated by Jonathan Smolin
A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me
by Youssef Fadel, translated by Alexander E. Elinson
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