Arabic ornaments.
After a moment had passed, the Christian knight stopped wiping away the sweat, the Saracen lost interest in the crossbow. Both attentively observed the valley which stretched beyond the rocky slope. A low yet wide temple stood among green palm trees. Small alcoves had been hewn into its walls where olive lamps burned, blackening all around with smoke. Every now and then, someone approached the fire, passed their right hand over the flame and, with blackened hand, touched their right brow. The horsemen were paying less attention to this strange behaviour; they were more interested in the number of people in the valley. With a great effort and independently of each other, they counted and arrived at a similar result: in the vicinity of the temple and houses adjoined to it, milled around about two hundred people of both sexes and all ages. The men dressed in tight hair shirts and black turbans drew their attention in particular — they were making sure that not a single oil lamp went out. When a lamp began to burn down, they dipped fresh wicks into olive oil and the flame, hissing, fired up again.
Night fell on the land. In the light of the oil lamps began rituals — wild, violent dances. Singing, full of passion, soared over the valley. Guttural cries tore the air. The Crusader was sure he was witnessing an orgy to Semiramida, the Turk felt a painful arousal. They looked each other over and gave orders to their soldiers. Slowly, cautiously, they rode down the gentle slope of the hill. The names of seven angels vibrated in the air: “
The stampede of horses’ hooves thundered; the faithful — terrified — turned their faces from the sacred fire. It had begun. The armoured horses, covered in crosses, trampled and jumped over living barriers. The Crusader, cleaving human torsos with his sword, was intoxicated by the sweet sensation of justice: here, under his loyal instrument of God’s glory, were falling the worshippers of Satan and the seven fallen angels, whose names had reverberated so proudly in the air a moment ago. The Turk showered arrows into the smoke of the bonfires and oil lamps. Blood poured over brightly dyed jackets and colourful turbans. A few of those attacked drew fantastically curved weapons from their belts and tried to stand up to the enraged assailants. The hiss and whistle of crossbow strings created strange music. Arrows pierced soft flesh, crunched against bone, tore apart tense muscle fibres. A moment later, the assailants’ passion was turned against the women, the only survivors. In the embraces of steel arms, the brown faces paled, the beautiful, regular features froze; under stress from abrupt and violent movement, the intricately plaited braids fell apart, the flowers decorating the hair withered, the silver and gold coins tinkled on their temples, the polished stones covering foreheads clanked, glass beads cracked. Some of the women hid in the alcoves and rocky ravines. The Crusaders and Saracens dragged them out and took them in frenzied convulsions. Those who had not yet come upon such a reward were finishing off the few men still alive. The captive women humbly accepted their fate. They knew they would be put up at the slave market. Over the valley silence gradually fell, only rarely interrupted by moans of pain or ecstasy.
Both leaders stood in the temple courtyard in front of the entrance to the home of the man for whom they had been searching so long: the holy
The Turk looked at the Crusader and said in Arabic:
“It’s a verse from
The Crusader was acquainted with this famous fragment. He had heard it on the lips of dying Saracens, listened to it in the evenings coming from the lips of praying Arabian captive women. But he was not put out by the lofty sacred inscription intended to protect and bless Al-Shausi’s house just as a year ago he had not been troubled by the Byzantine God when, in search of loot, he had desecrated and defiled the temple in Constantinople.
They entered. Two Turkish soldiers blocked the door so that nobody could slip out; the rest went in search of the holy elder. Instead of him, they brought in two rolled carpets which were moving violently. These they unfurled and, at the leader’s feet, there appeared a desperate, perhaps thirteen-year-old girl and her slightly older brother — children of the man they were looking for and who had escaped into the desert. The leader of the Crusaders threw himself at the girl without a word, pushed her to the uneven, stone floor and, very shortly afterwards, won his successive spoil of war. The girl’s brother said something about their father and vengeance. In the light of the oil lamps, the rapist saw several scorpions which had crawled out of a broken clay vat. He wasn’t afraid of them; on the contrary — the presence of these sinister creatures flamed his passion all the more. All around, men were yelling — aroused, olive oil stank, shadows danced on walls. The satiated Crusader had decided: the children of the satanic cult’s highest priest would be punished by way of example. He ordered the boy’s and the girl’s bellies to be stripped bare. He raised his sword, the faithful companion in the fight
XII
BRESLAU, THAT SAME MONDAY, JULY 16TH, 1934
FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
The heat had increased after lunch but, strangely, neither Mock nor Anwaldt seemed to feel it. The latter, however, was troubled by a pain in his gum where, an hour ago, the dentist had extracted a root. Both men were sitting in their offices in the Police Praesidium. But it was not just the place that brought them together — their minds, too, were preoccupied by the same case. They had found the murderer. It was Kemal Erkin. Both had confirmed their first, still intuitive suspicions, reached by a simple association: the tattoo of a scorpion on the Turk’s hand … scorpions in the Baron’s daughter’s belly … the Turk is the murderer. This conclusion, after Hartner’s expert appraisal, had acquired something without which any investigation would be groping around in the dark: a motive. In killing Marietta von der Malten, the Turk had taken vengeance on a seven-century-old crime which the Baron’s ancestor, the Crusader Godfryd von der Malten had committed, in 1205, on the children of Al-Shausi, leader of the Yesidi sect. As Hartner had said, the imperative of vengeance was passed down from generation to generation. However, some doubt did arise: why was it committed only now, after seven hundred years? In order to disperse the doubt and turn suspicion into unwavering certainty, it was necessary to answer the question: was Erkin a Yesidi? Unfortunately it would remain unanswered as long as nothing more was known about Erkin than his name, nationality and fat Konrad’s babbling “He came to the Gestapo in order to train”. This could mean that the Turk was undergoing something like a practice period with the Gestapo, an apprenticeship. One thing was certain: the suspect had to be captured using all possible means. And interrogated. Likewise using all possible means.
At this point, the parallel thinking of the two policemen came up against a serious obstacle: the Gestapo guarded its secrets. In all certainty, Forstner, freed of his “vice” by the death of Baron von Kopperlingk, wouldn’t want to co-operate with a man he loathed, Mock. Getting hold of basic information about Erkin, therefore, was extremely difficult, not to speak of finding any proof of his belonging to any secret organisation or sect. Mock did not even have to stretch his memory to know that he had never in the Police Praesidium met anyone resembling Erkin. The former Political Department of the Police Praesidium, which occupied the west wing of the building on Schweidnitzer Stadtgraben 2/6, after Piontek’s downfall and Forstner’s domination, constituted territory where Mock’s feelers did not extend. Long infiltrated by Hitler’s men and officially under their control after Goring’s decree in February, it constituted an independent and secretive organism whose numerous sections were located in rented villas in beautiful Kleinburg, utterly inaccessible to anyone from the outside. Erkin might be working in just one of these villas and only be in the “Brown House” on Neudorfstrasse from time to time. In the old days, Mock would
