Brides of Blood (23 page)

“This man is my prisoner,” Darius said.

“And you,” the young Guardsman said, “if we see fit, are ours.”

“So long, Bakhtiar.” Rahgozar allowed the gunmen to push him around the bed. “Thanks for making that call.”

As Rahgozar walked to the door, the Guardsman he had flung into the window fired his gun. The large-caliber bullet caught him high on the shoulder. Rahgozar’s back twitched, and he broke stride, but kept moving. A second shot dropped him to his knees in a Christian attitude of prayer. It was the young Guardsman who fired the third slug that entered the back of Rahgozar’s neck, and put a hole the size of a small coin in the wall.

“He should not have tried to escape,” the young Guardsman said.

Darius drew his other gun, and swept it around the room. It felt light in his hand, a harmless affectation.

“You don’t seem to appreciate that we saved your life,” said one of the men who hadn’t spoken before. “Possibly, you know better than we. I would suggest that you were in collusion with the Russian.”

“What is a homicide investigator from Teheran doing in Mashad?” asked the Guardsman in the buffalo skin sandals.

“You had better go,” the young one said to Darius, “while you have the chance.”

Darius walked around the body. Rahgozar had fallen reaching for the door. His lifeless fingers closed over Darius’s wrist as Darius moved him out of the way.

Darius went upstairs and barricaded himself inside his room. His mind was racing, wild images out of synch with the narration from his own frightened voice like a film dragged through a projector without catching in the sprockets. Vodka had the opposite effect of what he sought, speeding his brain so the film ran off the reel and spilled onto the floor. And still he drank. In SAVAK he had taught himself to assume guilt for nothing he was not directly responsible for, and not much of that; otherwise it had been impossible for him to function. But there was no escaping culpability for Rahgozar’s death. Not for refusing to call the embassy—history showed that the Revolutionary Guards were not squeamish about abusing the entire legation of a foreign power. What he blamed himself for was an improbably efficient job of finding Rahgozar. Better to have let him go about his business unmolested than to lead his killers to his door. On some level, instinct told him, their interests coincided.

He shut off the lights, leaned over the low railing of his balcony. Three cars were parked on the sidewalk, and men in khaki strutted in the entrance to the lobby. A noisy crowd was forming in front of the hotel despite commands from the Guardsmen to keep moving. The spectators fell silent as two of the gunmen came out with the body trussed like a slaughtered deer, and slung it in the back of one of the cars. The young Guardsman brought Rahgozar’s suitcase, followed by his companion with the bloody nose, who had exchanged his buffalo sandals for the dead man’s new shoes. The crowd dispersed as the caravan raced away.

Darius ran downstairs to the seventh floor. A chambermaid unhappy to have been summoned at that late hour had pushed her cart outside Rahgozar’s door. Darius waved his badge in her face as he squeezed past her. “I want a few minutes here alone,” he said, “and then you can come in.”

Squatting beside a splotch of blood on the runner, he might have been trying to remember the incantation that would restore life to the man from whom it came. The room had been torn apart, but not by the chambermaid. Linens were heaped on the floor along with the bedspread and blankets; the stripped mattress stood on end against a wall. The closets were empty, as was the bureau. Everything Rahgozar had carried with him had been returned to the suitcase and taken away. The chambermaid came inside uninvited, and began scraping the rug with a vacuum cleaner.

He went to the lobby, and bullied the clerk for a look at the invoice from 727, and the record of Rahgozar’s phone calls. The thin man had been at the Hotel Iran two nights prior to his death. He had paid cash in advance for a week’s stay, charging several breakfasts and a few bottles of overpriced mineral water to his room. The home address he had registered under was a joke, a street in northeast Teheran that he’d probably pulled from an out-of-date tourist guide: Roosevelt Road had been renamed Shahid Mofatteh in the first weeks after the Revolution.

Out of loneliness, or duty, Rahgozar had made long-distance calls approximately every other waking hour. All of them were to Teheran, to three different numbers. The shadow of the clerk’s prominent nose moved across the page as Darius read.

“Do you know if Mr. Rahgozar had any visitors while he was a guest here?” Darius asked him.

“You mean a woman, sir? In his room? That is strictly forbidden.”

“I mean anybody.”

“I never saw him, except when he was alone. He would leave in the morning about ten and was back by noon, and did not go out again until the following day.”

“Did he receive any letters?”

“No sir,” the clerk said, and then turned away to steal a look at the empty box for 727.

“Did you talk with him?”

“Only to pass the time of day.”

“Did he mention what he was doing in Mashad?”

“Yes.” The clerk smiled, but then thought better of it. “He said he came to get away from it all.”

O
F TWENTY-SIX CALLS
billed to Zaid Rahgozar’s Iran Hotel room no fewer than fourteen had been placed to the Russian embassy in Teheran. The bulk of the remainder, a telephone company service representative reported to Darius, were rerouted via central switching to Moscow and could not be traced further. Others had been dialed each morning precisely at 8:00, and again twelve hours later, to a number in an industrial area of western Teheran on the Old Karaj Road. Not one of these had lasted as long as a minute.

By 7:30 on the morning of his first full day back in Teheran, Darius was parked outside the Old Karaj Road address, a small, square house between a factory where steel pipes were bent to shape and cut, and a commercial printer. An unusually high brick wall served as the first line of defense around an overgrown garden ringed by poplars whispering in the light breeze. The kidney-shaped goldfish pond was a dead sea capped by a mat of green scum. When his knock went unanswered, Darius peered inside the living room at flat cushions on threadbare rugs. Stale air still warm from yesterday’s sun seeped from the partly open window. Darius pushed up the glass and slipped in.

The bedroom, too, was unoccupied. He turned on the single bulb in the ceiling that shined down on an unmade bed as fiercely as the fluorescent strips over Baghai’s slabs. There were no papers or envelopes in the drawers of a plain pine bureau on which oak grain had been hand-painted. No mail seemed ever to have been delivered to the house, or newspapers allowed inside. The closet contained several summer dresses perfumed with sweet female perspiration that aroused him in a manner that, he decided, must violate some unwritten law. He went into the kitchen kneading the bruised ribs that had begun to hurt again, and put a flame under a pot of water. Though it occurred to him that whoever lived here had panicked when they didn’t hear from Rahgozar at the usual times and were en route to Mashad—if not out of the country—he waited.

At 9:00, as he was emptying the sugar bowl into his third glass of tea, the garden gate creaked open. A shadow bobbed along the walk prodded by a woman wearing a pushiyih, a facial veil that obscured her features completely below green eyes. She set down a couple of paper bags beside the pond, and broke off a piece from a loaf of naan lavashe, pit oven-baked bread, which she tossed under the poplars. Two black birds immediately swooped down from the trees and declared a cawing tug of war. She threw another crust, but only the first was satisfactory to the birds, who carried it into the air with an end locked between their beaks. Scooping up her packages, the woman went inside to the living room and plugged a cassette player into the wall. Soft rock music manipulated the heavy air, a Beatles tune that Darius had heard a million times before, but whose title eluded him. Not until she was in the kitchen did she see him, and the pushiyih fluttered against her mouth.

The woman removed the veil, and Darius was staring at Maryam Lajevardi. She looked drawn, taller than he remembered her, and prettier, the lightness of her skin and hair not of the Caspian, or Iran. Darius could not have been startled more had she taken off all her clothes. Not because she had shown herself so casually—strange women did that all the time—but because the effect it was having on him was not much different than if he had, in fact, spied her naked.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m someone else, can’t you see?” She laughed without smiling. “The person you want doesn’t live here. I would invite you for tea, but apparently you’ve already helped yourself. Good-bye,” she said. “Don’t forget to lock the gate on your way out.”

She reached for a cabinet above the refrigerator, presenting a lush silhouette that her chador only partially obscured. She had to stand on her toes to hoist a small sack of rice inside. Darius took it from her, and slung it on the top shelf.

“Who, Miss Lajevardi?” he asked again.

“I believe I answered all your questions the last time we spoke.”

“With lies,” he said. “No one at the Azadi currency exchange has ever heard of you.”

“
They’re
the liars. I can’t be held to account for the things they say. I’m resented there because I was a diligent worker and the rest were laggards.”

“You mean ghosts. Azadi has been out of business at least a year. There’s nothing but an empty storefront.” Darius paused to study her reaction. It was he who had lied, although he would have called it probing. He had meant to go to Firdowsi Street to check out her story on a hundred occasions, but hadn’t. Still he felt he was on solid ground in assuming she had never worked there.

Maryam Lajevardi took off her chador. Underneath she had on a short V-necked dress like the one she had worn in Shemiran, but of a washed-out yellow. “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“Rahgozar told me.”

She looked at him, puzzled, to say she had never heard the name before. If she was still acting, she was very good. He decided that she was.

“… Lean, unhealthy-looking fellow attached to the Russian embassy,” Darius went on. “He can’t stop talking about you.”

Her chin dropped. “Where did you see him?”

“In Mashad,” he said. “A few days ago.”

Whatever it was that differentiated fake puzzlement from the real thing vanished from her expression. What remained was made imploring by her helplessness. Darius saw that she was struggling not to ask him how he had known Rahgozar had been there. She had more questions than he did, but feared him finding out what she didn’t know. It was a cumbersome way of conducting an interview—bluffing, posing misleading questions to obtain nonverbal cues to determine the next tack and then plugging ahead with more misdirection. Cumbersome for the two of them. Maybe, thought Darius, it was weariness brought on by too many interrogations like this that had driven Baraheni to take up boiling samovars and the bastinado, but he didn’t like to consider it. “How does a woman from the Caspian become acquainted with a Russian diplomat?” he asked.

“In a most casual way,” she said coolly.

“That isn’t how it appears. I ran into him once before, at your old apartment, and he seemed at home.”

Maryam said nothing.

“What was he doing there?”

“What were the police?”

“Looking for you.”

“I was hiding,” she said. “I was afraid you’d send me away.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “You would find a place. I’m sure you’re good at that.”

“Why would I want to?”

“You’d find a reason, too.”

“So you came here instead?”

“It was his idea,” she blurted. The change in tone struck Darius as artificial, the time having come for her to inject emotional drive into her narrative. He let her go on. “We had met through friends, and began seeing a lot of each other. He was convinced he was being watched—by his people, as well as the Komiteh—and that soon our affair would become public knowledge with all the trouble that brings. He rented this house for me. It’s convenient, yet out of the way. I like—” The printing presses chugged into action next door, and she raised her voice over the racket. “I like the quiet.”

Darius became aware that the Caspian accent she had practiced on him in Shemiran was giving way to a Teheran patois no less stilted. Maryam Lajevardi seemed pleased with herself. He remembered grade school classmates basking in the same glow of accomplishment after they had been called upon to recite a speech.

“What was Rahgozar doing in Mashad?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You say you’re close—”

“He
is
a diplomat, a
Russian
diplomat. Needless to say there are some things we never discuss.”

“Things like heroin?”

“Why would we talk about that?”

“And mycotoxins?”

The look of helplessness deepened, and then hardened—but she had nothing on him.

“Playing dumb doesn’t become such an intelligent face,” Darius said. “I haven’t been hunting for you to return you to your family. You’re rather old to be a runaway.”

“I know nothing about heroin.”

“What about heroin dealers?” he asked. “What do you know about Sousan Hovanian?”

“I’ve never heard that name”

“And Leila Darwish?”

“Nor her,” Maryam said. “Or that other word you used, my-myca …”

“Why, then, do you suppose Leila’s body was placed under your window as a warning?”

“A warning to me? To do what?”

“To tell nothing to the police when we caught up with you.” It came out as a question, a wasted one. “Rahgozar didn’t install you here because you two needed a love nest. No one on Saltanatabad Avenue would care what you did, so long as you were quiet doing it and didn’t frighten the children. He wanted you out of harm’s way while he tried to locate the heroin and mycotoxins, those things you know nothing about.”

Maryam’s expression conceded little. Darius would have liked the veil in front of her face again, to be able to gauge her anxiety in much the way doctors used to employ a feather to detect the spark of life on the lips of a dying patient. He hid his frustration behind his professional stone face, an expression so rigid that he might as well have been grinning at her like the idiot she seemed to take him for.