Brides of Blood (16 page)

“You have just attended a class on the concealment and safe removal of antipersonnel ordnance in rural areas. This is not women’s work. Do you see women in this camp?” the mullah said. “I would have been notified of anything like that occurring close by.”

“Her name was Leila Darwish. Tell me how to find which camp was hers.”

“There is nothing I can do,” the mullah said, and began walking away.

“An innocent woman was tortured and slain.” One quick step was all that Darius took after him; the driver hadn’t holstered his gun. “She deserves a full inquiry into her death.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps the kinder deed is to let the matter rest.” The mullah stopped, but didn’t look back. “You had better go before too much is made of your being here. Tonight the basij will talk of nothing but your brazen act. It’s not good … not good for you. I would lock you up, but for—” He turned to Darius. “Do you know me, Bakhtiar.”

“No.”

“I am Sheik Javad Salehi. Years ago, I was a student of your wife’s uncle at Faiziyeh, in the disciplines of logic and Persian history. Hormoz was a brilliant teacher, compassionate, a father to his pupils—my good friend to this day. He spoke warmly of his niece’s new husband in America—so much so that sometime later, without meeting you, I voted to reprieve your life after the murder of Ibrahim Farmayan.”

Salehi waited, and Darius heard the click of worry beads.

“Not even a thank-you … ?”

A volley of rifle fire delivered its mournful report through the camp, and after that a single shot.

“You owe me something,” Salehi continued. “Hormoz used to read to us from your letters from the United States. You were one of the few who adapted readily, yet you chose to return to Iran. Why?”

“The government invested a good deal of money in my schooling so I could better serve the people. I couldn’t renege.”

“Others did,” Salehi said. “The government changed.”

“But not the people—not much.”

“That was not Hormoz’s interpretation. During your typical infatuation with the United States, your wife wrote that you had been offered several jobs with prestigious firms. Her uncle remained unshaken in his faith that you would come back.”

“Why bring this up now?”

“Among the most highly regarded faculty members at Manzarieh are our ‘moral preceptors,’ who have spent time in the West, and returned with firsthand knowledge of the crisis afflicting the so-called democracies. The youth must be made to see that the West is strangling on its degeneracy and that, God willing, Islam will triumph in the hearts of men. We would be honored to make a place for you as a moral preceptor that will not interfere with your regular duties with the National Police.”

Why, Darius wondered, in a ruined economy with raging unemployment was he everyone’s first choice for a job? The Revolutionary Prosecutor, the Bon Yad Monkerat, couldn’t find enough for him to do. Now a place on the staff at “The Institute” was his for the taking. As if Salehi had known he would turn up—as if the Revolutionary Guards wanted him occupied with anything other than the hunt for Leila Darwish’s killer.

“Is the enemy so seductive,” Darius asked, “that the volunteers have to be taught to hate it?”

“Our youth grow up enamored of the West from television and movies. They are captivated by its hedonism, including—sad to say—many who wish to bring it down.”

“My friends also viewed the West with disdain,” Darius said. “Who among us hadn’t had it crammed into his brain that when Islam led the world in science and philosophy Europeans were still living in caves? We came flaunting our spiritual superiority—and were overwhelmed by Americas richness. When we returned home, our guilt boiled over into hatred of the West for opening our eyes to how backward we were. Few of my friends could remain in Iran …”

“Were they so greedy for material comforts?”

“Everything they’d been taught to believe appeared as lies,” Darius said. “How could Islam be the final revealed truth of God when life was far better in the infidel West? Those who returned to stay became more Muslim than Muslim to show they rejected the things they secretly craved.”

“But not you.”

“In the U.S. I was more American than American. I was only fooling myself—and then not even me. That’s when I came home.”

“Your objectivity alone qualifies you to be a moral preceptor. The basij will respect your honesty.”

“There’s nothing I can tell the volunteers, nothing they want to hear. All I can do for them is find who murdered their comrade.”

“Without my assistance,” Salehi said. “For security purposes one camp very often is unaware of what the next is doing, or even where it is.”

Under Salehi’s thin beard Darius noticed a scar that reached around his chin to both cheeks. “What about the camp of the Brides of Blood?” he asked. “Is its location secret, too?”

“It would be impossible, strictly speaking, for any of the Brides of Blood to turn up near Manzarieh.” Salehi’s friendly tone had become neutral. “They are headquartered far from here, and have no business in the capital.”

“Where?”

“Outside the country. If you have to ask—How much do you know about them?”

“Next to nothing,” Darius confessed.

“The Brides of Blood are the most esteemed young women volunteer fighters for Islam. Each one is a virgin, who has dedicated herself to avenging Imam Hussein by doing battles with the enemies of the faith.”

“What kind of missions do they take on?”

“To kill, and to die for the faith. The girls who drove trucks filled with dynamite into the Zionist positions in southern Lebanon, they were Brides of Blood. Their reward was a martyr’s death, and instant admission to paradise, where Ayatollah Aqda’i has said that Hussein will select husbands for them from the most devout and physically beautiful of young men.”

“But where—”

“Lebanon,” Salehi said.

“Be specific. I need details, every fact you have.”

The jeep cut between them, and the driver flung open the passenger’s door. Again Salehi shook his head, and put a foot up on the bumper.

“In southwestern Beirut,” he said, “in the harbor district known as Ouzai, is an elite encampment whose volunteers are mainly Shi’ite girls from Lebanon, plus a few Iranians. They are divided into a number of fighting units. The one that has brought the most glory on itself is the Sayyidah Zaynab Brigade, which has embraced a martyr’s fate to drive the Israelis out of the land. Theirs is the forward base of the Brides of Blood.”

“You’d be doing an immeasurable service by writing a letter of introduction into the camp.”

“A service? For whom—for you? For Leila Darwish? Not the girls.”

“Please, you’ve given me this much. A little more and, I think, I can wrap up the case.”

“You’re deluding yourself, Bakhtiar. If there was a chance you might succeed, I wouldn’t have told you anything.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Seven weeks ago, commandos from Acre, in the belly of the Zionist beast, landed four rubber dinghies just south of Beirut. From the beaches they proceeded unmolested to Ouzai and massacred the innocent girls. After taking what they wanted, they planted explosives in all the camp structures. For eight hours fire raged in the rubble. There were no survivors. The coffins returned to the families for martyrs’ funerals contained only blackened bones. That is why I don’t want to talk about it: each girl’s memory is too precious to be defamed by such a death. And that is why the girl found slain in Shemiran cannot have been a Bride of Blood—because the Brides of Blood no longer exist.”

Salehi climbed into the jeep, and tossed out Darius’s guns. “Do you want to know more? Ask the Jews. They have the duty roster, the order of battle, the names of informants and spies, all the records. They can tell you
everything
about the Brides of Blood.”

Two volunteers escorted Darius back to his car. The semaphore went up when he was fifty meters from the perimeter, and the guard came out and waggled the Kalashnikov good-bye. His evidence pad was in the glove compartment, but not the flask that he had filled from two cases of premium bootleg that he had moved into his new apartment ahead of his clothes. He saw himself as a moral preceptor lecturing thirsty fanatics on where in Teheran to find the best vodka. Who was to say it wouldn’t be his most valuable service in the cause of the Islamic Republic?

His subconscious already had begun to process the new information. He scribbled furiously, taking notes on his talk with Salehi before the facts were tainted by sober opinion. Whether Leila Darwish had known about the destruction of the camp, or had tired of life there, was beyond the range of his inquiry. Safe to say that she had been on a foreign mission at the time Ouzai was overrun and, instead of returning to Lebanon, likely had spent her final weeks dodging the Komiteh in Teheran while she tried to dispose of several kilograms of heroin. Slow to discover what poor material she was for a Shi’ite martyr, she would seem to have compounded the error by attempting to finance a new life out of proceeds expropriated from the old.

He stopped writing. Safe to say that nothing was safe to say, or to commit to paper. Thinking was safe; but, without alcohol as a lubricant, too often created painful friction and heat. He had allowed Bijan to steer him down one blind alley after the next in the belief that it was
he
who was doing the manipulating, which he saw now for the same arrogant delusion that had brought Leila Darwish to Teheran to deal heroin under the nose of the Komiteh.

Bijan’s agenda was the mystery within the mystery. Having failed to persuade Darius to drop the investigation, he had joined it as a partner generous with information detectives had gathered on their own. Darius put no faith in the notion that he wanted simply to be kept abreast of progress he could not prevent from being made. Nothing at Homicide remained hidden for long from the Komiteh. Bijan’s interest in the case was in controlling its direction, now urging Darius to delve deep into Leila’s past. It was as if a secret had been forgotten by the last person on earth to know it, and Darius was needed to bring it to immediate light, to whisper it in Bijan’s ear. Had Leila been that person? Had Farhad? Darius did not anticipate a future brighter than theirs if the Komitehman wasn’t given what he wanted. And if Darius didn’t fail? Bijan did not need excuses to get rid of anyone. Hatred for the murderer of his uncle burned bright as ever in his eyes.

The sun descending through a pall of soot colored the city in liquid orange. Below Niavaran a steamroller ground layers of steaming asphalt into the road. Traffic was detoured through steep avenues of grand villas erected in the last years before the Revolution. As he was admiring what was meant to be a Tudor-style estate in an English garden, a white Chevrolet hurtled across two lanes of traffic and cut him off. He slammed the brakes. The Chevrolet slowed with him, and he was forced to wheel around the corner to avoid a crash.

The near miss was accomplished reflexively with little anger directed toward the driver of the other car. Who better than a policeman understood the Iranian penchant for reckless driving? Traffic signals were meant to be ignored. The rules of the road were as theoretical as the Imam’s outline for the working of the Islamic state. Under the law it was legal to run down jaywalkers.

He had been shunted onto a street of smaller houses, which he followed downhill assuming that it would rejoin the old Shemiran Road. At a cross street called Qods the way narrowed to a single lane that was blocked by an ambulance. Two paramedics sat on a litter in the middle of the street smoking cigarettes beside a body under a gray blanket. On an average day six Teheranis lost their lives in traffic accidents, most of them at night when women in black chadors virtually were invisible, and there were days when it seemed he witnessed every one. More than moral preceptors, he thought, what were needed in the camps were instructors in defensive driving.

One of the paramedics, a huge man with a stethoscope like calipers around his bull neck, came over to the Paycon. “We are sorry, sir,” he said, “but he cannot be moved until the police arrive.”

Darius shifted into reverse, but the white Chevrolet was on his bumper now. “I’m a police officer,” he said dispiritedly, “let me have a look.”

From the compact form outlined under the blanket, the body already had been disturbed. There was no blood, or broken glass, or skid marks in the street, nor vehicles other than the ambulance.

“Were there witnesses? Did anyone see the car that ran him down?”

The medic on the stretcher blew smoke through thin, cracked lips. “No.”

As Darius peeled away the blanket, a jab to his kidneys doubled him over in pain. “Don’t move, don’t say anything,” the big man ordered.

The corpse flung its gray shroud over Darius’s head. Darius’s shoulder gun was taken away while other hands probed for his reserve pistol. Another kidney punch started him toward the ambulance. When he felt the bumper against his leg, he locked his knees and wouldn’t go further.

“Get in!”

Two quick, hard blows came down on the top of his head. Someone said, “Don’t, you almost killed him last time.” Lighter punches raining on his shoulders wearied him and put an end to his resistance. Holding himself still, he listened for Farib’s husky voice to tell him that she was bringing him someplace quiet and safe, then shut his ears to his labored breathing and the click of handcuffs behind his back, the shriek of tires as the ambulance hurtled down from the mountain carrying him into the steaming city.

I
N BLACKNESS DARIUS CONCENTRATED
on tracking the movement of the ambulance, which immediately had turned onto a level street and veered left again without slowing. A long, straight decline gave the sensation of increasing momentum. The next turn, a sharp right, spilled him across the floor. To imprint the route in his memory he began a silent litany of “Left-downhill left-right—” then “Left-downhill left-right gentle left—” knowing that the imprecise directions could be plotted as easily over the map of any large, hilly city. Nevertheless, he didn’t quit until the ambulance raced around a small park, or square, spinning him in circles on his back. After that, he occupied himself with staying wedged against a wheel well, where he best could keep from becoming goods damaged in transit.