Brides of Blood (12 page)

“What have you got on the woman?” Darius flung his jacket over the back of a chair, opened his shirt.

Mehta’s reply was a snore. His head burrowed deeper into his arms.

“
Nader?
”

“Nothing. She’s clean—never been printed.”

There was another file that merited the trip to this sweatbox. Letting himself out of the cage, Darius went into a locked storeroom that was the archive of criminal investigations cleared prior to the Revolution. For forty-five minutes he combed the steel cabinets fruitlessly, until under the Ls, where it had no reason to be, he found a folder with his name on the tab. Nothing had ever given him greater satisfaction than to read the reports of the criminalists stymied by the execution-slaying of the mass murderer Farmayan, the most feared inquisitor in all of SAVAK. No fewer than twenty detectives had been assigned to the case, and this in the days when the homicide bureau was a top-flight investigative body. The folder had been thick as his fist when he borrowed it surreptitiously during his first months with the National Police, and must have been pulled and misfiled since the last time he had taken it home. Now it contained only the record of his final questioning before charges were drawn up, and a few yellowing documents from the appeal.

Because Ibrahim Farmayan’s body had been found in a desolate highway wayside known to be frequented by bandits, the case had fallen under jurisdiction of the National Police as a suspected robbery-homicide. Not until the remains were identified as those of a SAVAK colonel was the investigation taken over by Farmayan’s subordinates in the shah’s secret police. Carbons of subsequent entries to the record routinely were sent to the agency that had handled the initial probe. These, however, had been edited by the military censor, so that the National Police glimpsed only the bare bones of the case against Darius. The huge gaps in the file would be in possession of the Komiteh, which had taken over SAVAK’s functions under the new regime.

Reviewing the notes of his interrogation by the assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister for National Security Affairs—General Nassiri, the director of SAVAK—it seemed to Darius that the lies he had answered with were so clumsy that he must have wanted to be convicted. Abandoned to the mercies of the military magistrate serving directly over him, he had declined to beg for compassion, instead unburdening himself of a sanctimonious admission to having eliminated a vile monster. There was a snapshot of a very young man in this folder, too, a faded Polaroid documenting the collar-length hair and flared sideburns that even then were nearly ten years out of fashion, except as they were etched in his memory of Washington in the early 1970s.

The smell of bootleg was assaulting his olfactory nerve. He poured an inch in Mehta’s reserve tumbler, and put it down in a gulp. Surviving this trial by fire, he measured out two fingers more to get him through the transcript of the unsuccessful appeal of his death sentence. Large blocks of text had been blacked out with a marking pen, making piecemeal the thrust of the prosecutor’s statement against him. Left untouched by the censor was the testimony of secret witnesses in opposition to the appeal. Of the four Farmayans who had spoken that day, the victim’s nineteen-year-old nephew, Bijan, then a student at Faiziyeh Seminary in Qom, had argued most persuasively for death.

Ghaffari drove. Darius, relegated to navigator’s duty by the destruction of his car and residual dizziness from his cracked skull, directed him through a morass of streets renamed to accommodate the new religious-political line.

“Is this good Hejab Street we’re looking for,” Ghaffari joked, “or bad Hejab?”

Hejab meant the proper style of Islamic dress and personal grooming. Every Friday, during prayer services at the major mosques, crowds of the faithful would shout,
Down with bad hejab.
Hejab Street, prior to the Revolution, had been Los Angeles Boulevard.

A motorcycle accident had stopped traffic in both lanes. As Ghaffari gunned his overheating engine, Darius found himself staring at a woman on the sidewalk whose head scarf was fastened under her chin with a silver brooch. What he had taken, at first, for the evidence of a sleepless night on her face was almost definitely a touch of mascara. He looked back over his shoulder, eyeing the woman, who smiled flirtatiously and immediately turned away.

Incredible. Had he been present when the Imam returned from exile in France he would not have witnessed a revolutionary more dangerous than the frightened woman. But the Imam was dead for a few years now, and tomorrow perhaps another woman would find courage to push back her veil to reveal a wisp of hair. After that, who could say? A touch of rouge? Some lipstick? And then an exposed wrist, and arm, and—Praise Allah—a bare ankle? From that point it was a short step for the nation to embrace nudity and fornication, all varieties of copulation with beasts as proscribed in the holy texts. It was truly incredible what you saw on the streets these days.

Pakravan’s Fried Chicken was surrounded by a declining residential neighborhood that had not fared well in the War of Cities. A gas station on the opposite corner had taken a hit from an Iraqi bomb, and the explosion of the underground tanks had transformed several blocks of apartment houses into black ghosts. Pakravan’s was a single-story building with large, inward-slanting windows above a sealed takeout counter, and walls of red-and-white brick trimmed in aluminum. Looking down from the roof was a plexiglass replica of what might have been a Kentucky colonel, but for yellowish paint that had smeared a wispy goatee all over the cheeks, and an open collar sketched crudely on top of a string tie.

When the homicide detectives entered there were no customers at the lunch counter that was the restaurant’s Formica spine. Above one of six cramped booths was a poster showing a woman’s bare head circled in red with a broad stripe slashing through shoulder-length hair. Superimposed over the illustration of bad hejab was a long scarf wrapped around the hair to conceal every offending strand.

SISTER
,
the illustration was captioned,
PLEASE BE MODEST
.

Under the poster three women sat at a table sipping tea through sugar cubes clenched in their teeth. The woman facing the oversize windows had opened her chador and was nursing a newborn from her exposed breast.

A man with a fry cook’s smoky pallor looked up at Darius and Ghaffari from a chopping block on which he was positioning a watermelon as though it were a baby about to be sacrificed. “Today’s luncheon special,” he said, “is honey-fried—”

Darius intercepted soiled menus. “Are you Mr. Pakravan?”

Admitting to nothing, the fry cook pulled out worry beads, and passed them through his fingers. Darius suspected that he was performing a divination to find out whether his visitors could be trusted before inquiring who they were. It was hard not to snatch the beads from his hand. He wished, momentarily, that he was back in America, where the superstitious were ridiculed to their face.

But he could no more interfere than walk away from the restaurant without answers to his questions. Something in his own character that also rejected pure reason had weighed in his decision to leave the United States; as a homicide investigator in a poor country he had come to rely on intuition over costly technology. Yet, if he had abandoned the West to escape the tyranny of reason, he had gotten more than he bargained for when he returned to Iran. In the clash between science and religion he remained an observer, holding his allegiance for the more civilized system, whichever that turned out to be.

The fry clerk put away the beads and did not look at Darius again. He tested his blade against a callused thumb, and then hacked through the melon’s thick rind.

“What kind of trouble is Khalil in now?” he asked Ghaffari.

“His troubles are over,” Ghaffari said. “He was shot dead yesterday in a house off Shush Avenue.”

Pakravan was preoccupied with replacing the menus against a napkin holder. Darius read his bland reaction as a shield against grief. The blade divided the melon into quarters, and eighths, and Darius made a mental note to inquire into bad blood between the Pakravans, and to mark the fry cook as a suspect if any were found to exist.

Ghaffari, waiting for tears, and then information, said, “This is your brother we’re talking about. Do you understand what I told you?”

“Too well. If you’re here to see me shocked, you’ll go away disappointed.”

“Some sorrow would be sufficient,” Darius said.

“Khalil exhausted my capacity for sorrow years ago. The Komiteh used to come by regularly to let me know of each new scrape he’d gotten into, and warn me he had better change his ways. After the last time, I told them what I’m telling you now, that he wasn’t my brother anymore, I’d cut him out of my life as permanently as they had cut off his foot.”

“Even so,” Darius said, “we need to learn what he was doing at the house.”

“Selling heroin? Fencing stolen goods?” Pakravan avoided looking at Darius’s ID. He hunched his shoulders to say, Why ask me? “Those were the only occupations that suited him.”

The melon slices were arranged like pink flower petals on a cracked plate. A counterman brought them to the nursing woman.

“Khalil was the light in my father’s eye. He had been accepted as a student at the Madreseh of the Shah’s Mother in Isfahan. I had big plans for him. As the older brother, I would support him with my restaurant until he completed his education and became a famous mullah. But with puberty, Khalil changed. He was interested only in earthly pleasures. It wasn’t long after that he lost his hand, and was deprived even of the satisfaction of touch. So much for the life of a sybarite.”

“Who were his friends in Teheran?” Darius asked.

“Not mine.”

“His enemies, then?” Darius spread the photos of the Shush Avenue victims on the counter. “This is Khalil?”

Pakravan nodded.

“Who’s the woman?” Darius asked.

“I never saw her before.”

Darius added a morgue shot of the girl found murdered in Shemiran. “What about her?”

Pakravan blotted his fingers on his shirt, and snatched up the photo. “That’s Leila. She was my sister’s friend when they were growing up.”

“
You’re certain?
Look again.”

“Well, she’s lots more mature than the last time I saw her, and here she looks—But, yes, the timid mouth, it’s definitely her.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Darwish. What happened to her?”

“Like your brother,” Ghaffari said. “Tell us everything about her.”

Pakravan’s shoulders heaved, and he took a short breath. “She was just a little kid who lived several streets away, and went to school with my sister. She was always hanging around our house, but I can’t say I ever talked to her. I heard she went away to college … but who remembers?”

At last Ghaffari had his tears. “Does her family still live there?”

“I see her mother sometimes when I’m back in the Mazanderan. She’s a fine woman. Her husband is Arab, but Shi’ite. Originally from Iraq.”

“What else?”

“What else can there be? In my head Leila is always eight, my sister’s playmate, dressing up their dolls for formal tea parties. I didn’t make a study of her. I didn’t know she would end up like this, and the police would be interested in every little thing.”

“Where’s your sister?” asked Darius. “We want to talk to her, too.”

“Like Khalil she went her own way.” Pakravan wiped away his tears—more than Ghaffari could use. “A second time my parents’ hearts were broken. I cut her out of my life, too.”

The caller, a Captain Eshragi, had a reedy voice that long-distance transmitted to Teheran in pulses of barks and hisses.

“I apologize for taking so long, but the Darwishes live on a plantation outside Lahijan. Phone service is undependable at best, and no one was at the house the two times men were sent out. It’s only because a patrolman ran into the mother at the post office that we have anything to report.”

“You’re acquainted with the family?” Darius held the receiver away from his ear. He spoke loudly, as if to a deaf man.

“We’ve had certain dealings with them.”

“Concerning the daughter?”

“The daughter,
and
the father.” Through the clutter Darius made out a Caspian accent that was the basis for Maryam Lajevardi’s artless imitation.

“Leila Darwish should be twenty-four now. Six years ago, she was one of a few students allowed to attend the University of Moscow on a scholarship made available by the Soviet-Iranian Friendship Society. Despite her father, Leila was nonideological. She had no links to communist organizations, else she would not have been let out of the country.”

“The Komiteh in Guilan Province permit the National Police to examine their subversives’ files?”

“To compile them.” Brittleness crept into Eshragi’s voice, making his accent nearly impossible to decode. “I myself was the officer designated to assess her political reliability.”

“Please, go on,” Darius said.

“Leila Darwish rightly viewed the scholarship as her only opportunity for advanced education. When she came home after her second year, she was interviewed again and was determined to be unsympathetic to the socialist system. She didn’t enjoy her stay in the Soviet Union, and spoke of little other than starting a teaching career here. Over the next couple of years she wrote often to her family of those plans. Shortly before she was to take her degree, the letters stopped coming. Her parents contacted Moscow but received no cooperation from the authorities. This was at the height of the campaign against the Red Satan, when there were few lines of communication between the two countries. The girl was reported missing to us, and we put out a nationwide alert in case she surfaced in Iran. Since that time the family has been in the dark. Now you announce that she’s been found murdered on a bench in Teheran. It’s hard for the mother to accept.”

“Why is that?”

“Mrs. Darwish had consoled herself with the fantasy that her daughter had fallen victim to political intrigue, and would return as some sort of post-revolutionary heroine. She is grieving as much over the manner in which Leila died as for the fact of her death.”