Brides of Blood (18 page)

“But who is going to prevent Baraheni from putting his hands on me?”

“You see, Saeed?” Baraheni said. “Even a murderer has compunctions.”

“You will transport the heroin yourself,” Ashfar said. “We trust you not to screw us out of it. Once you rejoin us in Paris, you’ll be under the protection of French law. Until then,
you
are the law. Your well-being is not in such great jeopardy as you pretend. I would venture that you’d set other considerations aside if we could bestow a French visa on you, let alone asylum or citizenship.”

A nerve rubbed raw transmitted the energy to break out of Baraheni’s grasp. “Then we’re agreed—what you’re proposing is an impossibility,” Darius said. “Be realistic, or let me go.”

“Nothing is impossible.” Ashfar snapped his fingers, then examined his empty hand like a conjurer who had made a ridiculously large object disappear in air. “We have access to excellent French ID; stolen and bought, not forged; driver’s license, social insurance card, immigration papers, military discharge documents for a man of your age, general appearance, and background. Ever want to be in the French Foreign Legion when you were a kid? Here’s your chance to be a bona fide Legion veteran entitled to all medical and legal benefits that go with twenty years’ service. We can pull you out of this hellhole, and get you started on a new life in Europe with a tidy sum in the bank.”

Darius pictured himself a retired Legionnaire crumpled in a Parisian alley with Baraheni’s knife in his back, an expression of pained bewilderment combining his own cynic’s distrust with Gallic resignation. “Up to now, you’ve been picking my brain,” he said. “You haven’t told me anything about the heroin.”

“You’re not in much of a position to make demands,” Baraheni said.

“Bakhtiar never was one for jumping into the water without wetting a toe first, except, I suppose, when it came to Farmayan. What he’s asking is not unreasonable.” Ashfar refilled Baraheni’s glass from the jar. “On approval,” Ashfar said to Darius, “we will let you have the name of the girl shot to death with Najafi in south Teheran.”

“You knew her?”

“Thanks to Saeed. We hadn’t been in Teheran two days when we realized the people weren’t ready to rise up against the fanatics. We were bored, disheartened, scared—I don’t mind telling you; nursing our meager funds until something came along to make our mission worthwhile. Saeed alone was enjoying himself. He’s from Isfahan, and this is his first time in the capital. He was out every day, taking in the sights, when he ran into a girl he had known at home. A drug dealer had captured her fancy, and quickly lost it, rather a repulsive fellow whose daily beatings were starting to wear on her. She asked Saeed if he wouldn’t mind helping her to rob her boyfriend for fifty percent of the profits. Saeed didn’t know what to make of it. Valuable time was lost before he passed on what she had said. A meeting was arranged for the Museum of Archaeology, where the girl told us Najafi was storing kilograms of Afghani heroin in his house—” A heavy object crashed to the floor upstairs. Djalilian would have snatched up the M-16 had Baraheni not beat him to it and put it out of reach. “This is not what we came to Iran for. It’s the kind of thing we have been fighting all our lives. After much debate, we concluded the drugs were going to be sold in any event, and the greater evil would be to let the dealers have the proceeds. While we debated, others went into action. The night before the robbery was to take place Najafi and the girl were murdered, and the heroin apparently taken from its hiding place.”

“You were inside the house?” Darius asked.

“Twice before the police. Once after.”

“What did you find?”

“Not a thing.” Ashfar took more vodka for himself. “Dope is a contemptible occupation. Already the smell of shit is on us. But if we don’t turn up the heroin ourselves it is going to the U.S. and the money to the fanatics, and better we should stink from that than they. If you come over to our side, you will be treated as an equal partner. If not, if you get to the drugs ahead of us and return them to the Komiteh, it will be on
your
conscience. Are you listening?”

Ashfar waited to hear his answer. Darius waited with him.

“I’ll take that for a yes,” Ashfar said abruptly. “The girl’s name is—was Sousan Hovanian, a Christian, originally from the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, where her parents are caretakers of the Vank Cathedral. She was twenty-three. Any more questions, save them; you know as much as we. More …”

Marched upstairs with the blanket over his head, Darius listened in vain for the voices he had heard through the ceiling. Djalilian went with him into the back of the ambulance, and to guard him against his guard so did Baraheni. As they retraced a twisting route into the heights, Baraheni regaled the younger man with stories of how he had disposed of the shah’s enemies, the expedient murders of left-wingers pinned on Muslim zealots of the right, who then were tortured to death for refusing to confess to crimes about which they knew nothing. His intended audience was Darius, who discounted the message of each grisly account. It was illogical for Ashfar to attempt to recruit him to locate the heroin and then order him slain while the offer stood. As illogical as shooting Najafi and Sousan Hovanian before they could tell where the drugs were to be found.

“Farmayan was a good friend of ours. Everybody in the bureau was shocked that he took a bullet without a fight.” The voice was still Baraheni’s, but directed at Darius it lacked humor. “It threw a fright into some of the weak sisters when they heard. They thought the fanatics had sent us a message. We knew better, Ashfar and me. To get close to him the killer had to be someone he knew. The part that gave us trouble was that you would have that much guts.”

The blanket was torn from Darius’s head, and he was looking into the black bores of two guns.

“Nice equipment,” Baraheni said. He patted the weapons with the rough affection of a doctor delivering twins into a sorry world, and stuffed the barrels inside Darius’s waistband.

The air sweetened as the way grew steeper. Darius tossed the blanket around his shoulders, but could not warm himself against a chill that had eaten into his bones. Soon the ambulance stopped, and the door was opened by the tall man who had gotten in the first lick when Darius was worked over in Shemiran. Keys were pressed into his hand, and his gunbelts slung over his arms. “Three from the corner,” the tall man said, and pointed him at the curb.

Walking away into the darkness, Darius experienced the sensation of a bull’s-eye burning into his back. Halogen beams washed over him like radar locking on to a target. The roar of the engine starting up again sent him diving between parked cars. As he fumbled for his guns, the ambulance raced down the center of the street. His Paycon was parked where the tall man had said it was. The ambulance ran a red light and disappeared while he jabbed the wrong key at the door.

He locked himself inside, and swept out the glove compartment for the flask that wasn’t there. His guns had been returned with the clips intact, the firing chambers empty. He drove home to his new apartment composing the report of his kidnapping, reciting the details out loud because there was no one he could entrust them to. While Ashfar and Baraheni decided whether they wanted him silenced, it was worth more than his life to keep them out of the Komiteh’s hands. One word that he had been in contact with SAVAK expatriates, and the Revolutionary Prosecutor would declare him in enmity with God, and corrupt on earth, crimes for which the penalty was crucifixion.

Vodka from the freezer took some of the chill out of his bones. He asked the long-distance operator to connect him with the National Police in Isfahan. “Isfahan is half the world” had been common wisdom since the sixteenth century, when the city was the grandest in Persia. Tonight, with phone service cut off, the ancient capital might as well have been on another planet. The smart thing would be to have Bijan put the Komiteh in Isfahan to work confirming Sousan Hovanian’s identity. But that was the smart thing. A better thing was the vodka. He fell asleep clutching its dregs to his chest.

He was up at 5:00. He showered, and because it was the sabbath, made a concession to the new reality by not shaving. In an hour he was at police headquarters. He teletyped a request to Isfahan for information about Sousan Hovanian, then went downstairs where Ghaffari was waiting to drive him to congregational prayers at the University of Teheran.

Basijis armed with German G-3 automatic rifles ushered them inside the walled campus. In a plaza the size of several soccer fields tens of thousands of men knelt on prayer rugs toward an unadorned stage. The delegation from the National Police were clustered in the shadow of a television camera platform. At the end of the row of the newest recruits Darius set down a white prayer stone that was his last birthday present from Farib. After attendance was taken he would leave early, as he always did, pleading the demands of a major investigation.

The stage was a breakwater in a khaki sea buffeted by a tide of white turbans. A crater in the concrete near the Foundation of the Oppressed and Deprived memorialized the worshipers killed when a Khalq Fedayeen guerrilla had blown himself to bits with TNT several years before. An ayatollah from Shiraz, whom Darius had never heard of, was imploring the faithful to donate blood for Lebanese Shi’ites battling surrogates of the Zionists south of the Litani River. He was followed to the rostrum by Ayatollah Maraghehni, the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, who pledged to the crowd that the government had no intention of restoring relations with the United States.

“We have welcomed the severance of ties, and this is the word of the Imam, officials, parliament deputies, and people from various walks of life. Global arrogance led by the Great Satan lacks wisdom. In their unmanly propaganda the Americans have defamed us before world public opinion, and have introduced Iran and every other revolutionary country as supporters of kidnapping and have thus deceived many a country into believing this.”

Darius wondered what he had been deceived into believing about his murder case, the absurdities he had clung to because a false trail under his feet was less frightening than a free-fall through a void. The evidence alone didn’t lie, but much of it had nothing to say, not to him. With dental records unobtainable for Sousan Hovanian, he would pay from his own pocket to bring a relative to Teheran for a look at the body, and to prolong the illusory comfort of gradual progress. The heat reflected off the plaza’s bare walls gathered like dust in the prayer rugs. It boiled the alcoholic sweat from his body, which he was determined to replace at the first opportunity. Ayatollah Maraghehni finished his sermon on the Great Satan, and launched into another.

“We guarantee the people the administration of justice and equity in every aspect of social and economic life. The laws of the state look at wrongdoers and offenders with the same eye irrespective of their social position. It has been brought to our attention that miscreants in the army, the bureaucracy, and most notably the National Police have escaped punishment for longstanding misdeeds that demand retribution. Rest assured that the law will catch up to all transgressors, including those who believe that, because they are charged with enforcing it, they are outside its reach.”

The entire line of recruits turned toward Darius. He faced them down with a stare borrowed from Ashfar until they bowed their heads in a prayer that was neither to him, nor for him, but a plea to God just to make him look away.

The ayatollah stopped for a drink of water, and resumed less stridently. “I want to laud the teachers of the nation on the occasion of National Teacher Week, and to pay tribute to the educator at so many madresehs and the University of Teheran, Ayatollah Motaharri, who was martyred in this city on May 2, 1980 …”

A martyr’s death was the highest honor the regime could accord. A hypocrite’s death was the greatest disgrace. In between, thought Darius, was the living death that was his. He clenched the prayer stone in his fist. The clay shattered into gritty dust that seeped through his fingers. Somewhere, he had heard that the summer temperature in Paris never went much above eighty degrees.

S
ATURDAY MORNING, WHEN HOMICIDE
normally was held down by a lone recruit, Darius was at his desk by 8:00. Within the hour Isfahan called, a Sergeant Kamoushi reporting that Sousan Hovanian was unknown to the National Police in that city.

“Did you send a man to the Christian quarter?”

“We never went to Jolfa when we were five hundred strong,” Kamoushi said. “Now that we are fewer than forty officers, I can’t waste one on the pork eaters. Let them kill themselves for all I care.”

Jolfa, Darius remembered from three days in Isfahan with a SAVAK tribunal investigating a counterfeiting ring, was the old Armenian neighborhood where the Christians who had built much of the city were segregated from the believers across the Zayendah River. “Until they do,” he said, “I must insist that the request for information on the girl be honored.”

“I will ask for her birth certificate,” Kamoushi said uncomfortably. “But it will be several weeks before you have it, if at all.”

It took twenty minutes to establish another connection to Isfahan, half an hour before Darius was put through to Vank Cathedral and the caretaker called to the phone.

“Hello, what do you want with me?” Maria Hovanian asked in a voice as fragile as the wires that transmitted it.

“I’m calling about your daughter, Sousan …” Darius accepted the woman’s silence as assent to continue, but gently. “We have reason to believe she may recently have been in Teheran.”

“Sousan? My Sousan is a child. She never leaves my side.” Maria Hovanian laughed uneasily. “What do the police in Teheran want with my little Sousan?”

The same sick feeling that seized his guts Darius sensed tightening its grip on the woman. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

“What about this Sousan?”

“Never mind. I’m glad to say it doesn’t concern you.”