Solar Plexus by Rustam Ibragimbekov

Author:Rustam Ibragimbekov
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78267-118-3
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications Ltd

FOUR

The Golden Ratio

Narrated by Seidzade

The investigator with the round face and noble shock of grey hair continued to behave like a man very interested in resolving the situation in a way that would please everyone. After several hours of vain attempts to extract the answers he wanted from me, this benevolent attitude could not possibly be sincere. But I caught myself thinking that it was precisely his sympathetic tone that was making it harder and harder for me not to give him the confessions that he was after. It would have been better if he hadn’t concealed his perfectly justified irritation — that would have simplified the situation greatly; but this way it looked as if he was doing everything within his power to help, while I was obtusely resisting, insisting on petty details that hindered the completion of necessary legal formalities.

His pronunciation betrayed his rural origins — he had most likely been born in the Agdam region. In answering his questions, I sometimes switched into Russian. He didn’t object at all, but he himself spoke only in Azeri, flaunting his fluent mastery of the standard literary language.

He looked about five years younger than me, his likeable face seemed familiar, and the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before came to me immediately, just as soon as we found ourselves in the tiny, scantily furnished office where he was now interrogating me, sitting with his back to the window that was as narrow as a loophole. When it was almost midnight, it suddenly came to me: I realised that we had never met, but my former classmate, Marik Haikin, who had become a well-known defence attorney, had told me about him. Among the numerous cases Marik had won, there was one of which he was especially proud — he had managed to get an investigator from the public prosecutor’s office out of jail, where he was serving time for taking a large bribe. It was a sum of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which had been paid to the investigator by a man accused of the murder of a well-known scientist. But Haikin had found and brought another man to court, who claimed that he had shot the victim. This turn of events had allowed Haikin’s defendant to go free and return to his duties as an investigator. Haikin swore to me that the killer he had found was the genuine article, but for a long time rumours circulated in Baku that neither the man originally accused of the murder, who had been obliged to pay the bribe, nor Haikin’s volunteer had killed the scientist. Hearsay confidently named the individuals who had actually organised and carried out the murder, but what the entire city knew remained a secret for public justice. The investigator whom Haikin had got out of jail went on to work in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was now interrogating me.

The silence of the night outside the window was broken only occasionally by the sound of passing cars.

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