Chapter 99
Leontios sobbed.
The sound escaped from his throat just like that, unplanned, unrestrained—a short sob that burst into the air like a soap bubble popping too quickly.
His hand, which had been gripping the clay cup all this time, finally released its hold, causing the cup to roll across the table and fall to the floor with a startling crash.
The red wine spilled out, forming a pool that slowly seeped into the cracks of the stone floor, like blood sinking into the earth after a murder.
No one moved to clean it.
Nirma remained seated in her chair, her left eye never leaving Leontios, Arya remained standing before him with the last two pieces of evidence still in his hands, and outside the Prefect's soldiers who heard the breaking sound quickly moved closer, their shadows behind the window growing thicker and nearer, ready to enter at any moment if commanded.
"We have a hypothesis, Master Leontios," Nirma's voice finally emerged again, breaking the suffocating silence, her tone flat like a river stone worn down by thousands of years of water, indifferent to tears or sobs or shattered cups on the floor.
"Perhaps you brought something with you that night.
Something inside a leather pouch. Perhaps remnants of forging fuel, perhaps charcoal, perhaps a mixture of pine resin still retaining heat.
And when you were in a hurry, when you were running from the scene, that pouch spilled.
Spilling its contents right near your shoeprint, right behind the Kapeleion, exactly at the place and time so closely tied to the death of a thirty-four-year-old crusader soldier named Étienne d'Arques."
Arya took the fifth piece of evidence from his cloth pouch with a motion slower than before, as if this small object carried a weight far heavier than its physical size.
A broken silver stylus, its writing tip still bearing flakes of dried ink in several places, its body bent irregularly like someone writhing in unbearable pain.
Leontios stared at it with suddenly widened eyes, his breath rasping in his broad chest, and for a moment he looked like someone who had just seen a ghost emerge from the wooden cupboard in the corner of the room.
"This stylus belonged to the victim," Arya said, his voice trembling slightly for the first time since the interrogation began—not out of fear or doubt, but because he himself still felt the heavy truth that a dying man had managed to write the name of his killer before his final breath left him.
"Étienne d'Arques carried it everywhere, according to his companions at the Latin Soldiers' Hostel.
He liked to write, to record his experiences during the journey to Jerusalem, to send letters to his family in France, sometimes merely scribbling in the margins of his prayer book when he grew bored waiting for orders from his commanders."
Nirma observed Leontios's reaction with her unblinking left eye, noting every smallest change on the old blacksmith's face—how the sweat on his temples ran more heavily, how his lips, once pale, had turned bluish like someone lacking oxygen, how his hands, once trembling, had now become rigid, frozen halfway in the air as if reaching for something he could not reach.
Arya continued his explanation in a voice that grew softer yet clearer, like water flowing between stones in a river that was beginning to recede.
"We found this stylus not far from his body, wedged between a stack of firewood behind the Kapeleion, broken from extremely strong pressure.
Panic pressure, according to our expert. The pressure of someone who realizes he is dying, that his breath will soon run out, that there are only a few seconds left to leave one final message for the world."
He lifted the broken stylus, turning it slowly beneath the candlelight Nirma had just lit from the dying flame of the oil lamp.
"And that message exists, Master Leontios. Étienne d'Arques, a thirty-four-year-old crusader soldier who came from across the sea with dreams of reaching Jerusalem, used the final seconds of his life to write a single word on the ground—in the dust, upon the scattered pebbles behind that tavern."
He paused for a moment, allowing silence to creep into every corner of the room, allowing the weight of his words to settle into Leontios's chest, which rose and fell unevenly.
Outside, dusk hung heavily over Constantinople, the remaining golden light reflecting dimly upon the domes and copper-tiled roofs, as though the city were coated with a thin layer of embers that had not yet died out.
The sky was not yet fully dark, but its blue had faded into a deep violet, thinly veiled by smoke from thousands of furnaces still burning in the Chalkeus district, making the nearly sunken sun appear like a red disk slowly squeezed against the western horizon.
"ΛΕΩΝ," Arya said, pronouncing each Greek letter slowly, one by one, like a teacher teaching the alphabet even to the dullest student.
"Leon. Your name. The same name we have used to address you since we entered this workshop."
He placed the broken stylus on the table beside the row of evidence that had formed a dreadful line: the wax cast of the shoeprint, the piece of cloth from the Amalfi merchant, the half-burned leather strap, the sticky black ash residue like resin.
"The writing is not neat, Master Leontios.
Not like the writing of Greeks who have used these letters since childhood.
This is the writing of a Frank, a foreigner struggling to write Greek, with stiff and disproportionate letters.
And that is what makes it more convincing, more authentic, harder to deny.
Étienne d'Arques wrote your name with his own hand before he died. He wrote the name of his killer on the ground, and we read it."
Leontios opened his mouth, perhaps wanting to scream, perhaps wanting to defend himself, perhaps wanting to curse the entire world that had suddenly turned against him—but no sound came out.
Only ragged air, only gasping breaths like a man who had just run a marathon from one end of the city to the other.
Nirma looked at him with that deep black left eye, and for a moment she almost felt pity for the old man before her—a man who perhaps only wished to defend his pride, a man who might have been resentful because he had not been paid for the work he had sweated over, a man who might never have imagined that his actions would lead him to this point, sitting on a wooden chair in his own workshop, surrounded by undeniable evidence, with two investigators staring at him mercilessly and dozens of the Prefect's soldiers ready to drag him to prison at any moment.
But Nirma was not someone who easily drowned in emotion.
She had seen too many deaths, too many tears, too many regrets that came too late to allow herself to be carried away by momentary sympathy.
She remained silent, waiting, letting Arya continue his duty.
"The sixth piece of evidence," Arya's voice broke the silence again, this time with a different tone—heavier, deeper, like someone about to close a coffin after all the final respects had been given.
He removed the final object from his cloth pouch: a small glass container holding several strands of short hair that appeared coarse and gray—no more than perhaps ten strands, yet enough to change everything.
To be continued…