Brides of Blood (28 page)

“Nader, you ought to ease up on the booze,” Darius said, “and give your liver a break.”

Mehta snored with his eyes open. “You woke me.”

“You’re not supposed to be here at this hour.”

“… To protect and serve,” he mumbled.

“Tell me something, and I’ll let you back to sleep. Is there any mention of Bijan Farmayan in the files?”

Mehta opened one bloodshot eye, scraped at the scaly lid with a black fingernail. “You can’t count the piddlyshit cases he’s handed over, the poor bastards in jail on his testimony.”

“Not that. Has there ever been a time when his loyalty was suspect?”

“… being absurd. The regime’s his life’s blood. He’d sooner turn against his family.”

Darius shook his head at Mehta’s back. “His loyalty to the nation.”

Mehta turned slowly into the light like a sunbather adjusting to afternoon shadow, his skin stretched thin and glossy across the bristling thrust of his jaw. He wore a tweed jacket and vest over a long-sleeve shirt with a high starched collar. Darius found it incredible that he had been entertaining company for several minutes without going to the evidence room for a bottle.

“When things are slow, I like to see what’s in the files. If I’d noticed anything to make him squirm, you would have been told a long time ago. Why do you ask?”

“I heard his family was from Iraq, and he might still have ties there. It offered an interesting avenue of investigation.”

“He wouldn’t betray his country. He’s too straitlaced. What could he be bribed with? He wouldn’t know what money is for if he had it in his hands.”

Darius, recalling the fat woman on Khayyam Avenue and the silver package that had gotten Bijan past her door, said, “Not as straitlaced as you’d think. But, if there’s nothing on him—”

“Is this what you ruined my sleep for?”

Files that had been brought down from the shelves never to be returned were heaped on the table, the chairs, the floor with odd bits of evidence that Mehta kept as trophies from the bureau’s best cases, a rare Turkish Kerikkale pistol Darius remembered from the holdup-murder of a cab driver that remained unsolved for two years before an arrest was made, the timing device recovered intact from a pipe bomb planted by fanatics in a north Teheran cinema that claimed thirty-seven lives.

“Nader,” he said, “as your friend I have to tell you, you don’t look well. You ought to try to eat once in a while, and get out for some fresh air. It wouldn’t be hard to develop tuberculosis in this dungeon.”

“I plan to die here,” Mehta said with finality, “so why bother? Worry about yourself instead. You don’t look that good either—and where’s
your
excuse?”

For years Darius and Mehta had been locked in a contest of dissipation, making a battlefield of their bodies as they thumbed their nose at the regime. Now that Mehta had opened a lead it struck Darius as unfair to change the rules, to declare that it had not been his intention to play until one of them was more dead than alive, a near-winner. He put his arm around Mehta’s shoulder. “I meant that you should take care. I … all of us would be lost without you.”

“Good Muslim that you are, at least indulge me in my despondency.”

Darius laughed because he thought he was expected to, but Mehta didn’t join in. “I’m as good a Muslim as any oil sheik at the roulette tables of London. It’s an accident of birth I recovered from ages ago.”

“I would have given thirty years of my life to be party to the same accident.”

Mehta was slurring his words, bogged down in a sibilant quagmire. Darius glanced around the cage. What was the records officer drinking these days?

“After Islam conquered Persia,” Mehta said, “we Zoroastrians believed that Ahura Mazda, the god of Good and Light, had forgotten us. Our sages had prophesied that the Messiah would appear, and instead the Arabs arrived and forced our faith underground. For fourteen centuries we have clung to our beliefs while Muslims ruined this land.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“Persia will be redeemed when over three thousand years three saviors will appear, each one a son of Zoroaster.”

“You’re forgetting something, aren’t you? Zoroaster’s been dead a long time. How can he have kids?”

Darius was waiting for Mehta to confess that he did not subscribe to the old mythology any more than Darius did to the stories in the Qur’an. But the records chief looked at him gravely and said, “His sons will be born to a virgin who has bathed in a lake that preserved Zoroaster’s semen. It is written in our holy books that one day the Messiah will help God in displacing the Islamic demons.”

“Is that who I am? A demon from the forces of darkness?”

“As the spawn of invaders, you’ve worn out your welcome.” Mehta straightened his wilted lapels. “What you have before you is a casualty of the holding action until the Messiah comes to put you smug bastards in your place.”

“The son of Muslim invaders? More like the invaded, you mean. You haven’t an inkling about my parents, the people I come from. Never—never talk to me like that again.” Darius rarely raised his voice, not to Mehta, of whom he genuinely was fond, and now he was raving, shouting himself hoarse.

“You’re a fool,” Mehta said. “Every Muslim is a prince in this miserable land. If I were you, I’d—”

Drink twice as much, Darius finished the thought for him, invent crazier reasons for destroying yourself. He went out of the cage, too far for his anger and embarrassment to carry back. “Yes, Nader, what would you do in my shoes?”

“… I’d—something …” Mehta sputtered, and, groping for more, rested his head on the table.

Darius remained where he was until he heard snoring. Mehta’s reputation at headquarters was that of a brilliant mind ruined by drink. But his genius was overrated, consecrated in vodka and improved upon and made gospel by friends invited to share in his alcoholic bounty. This morning, Darius would credit him with rare passion—unless it was simply a better brand of bootleg that had added conviction to his drunken banalities.

He began hunting for the file on Sousan Hovanian, who had not yet been closely linked to Maryam Lajevardi at the time her body was found in Dharvazeh Ghor. The folder was not on the shelves, and he returned to the cage and searched futilely around the dozing records officer. Mehta was so far gone that he had ceased functioning on the job. Something had to be done about restoring order to the files. But not by Darius. The new homicide chief could lobby for his own man.

The door to his apartment opened without his turning the dead bolt. He remained on the threshold letting adrenaline bring him to alertness, then went inside with his shoulder gun drawn. The bureau had been torn apart, and his clothes dumped on the floor. The heap was not tall, or distinguished by style or taste; it must have taken all of a minute to go through everything. His suits and jackets were in another modest pile at the bottom of his closet. Consolation was a quick inventory that determined nothing to be missing. Had he recovered the heroin, or mycotoxins, and hidden them here, they would have been lost to him for good. His ineptitude again had proved its worth. Too tired to open the convertible bed, he lay on the sofa with his feet dangling over the armrest. Immediately, he was lost in a black void of sleep. It was late afternoon when he woke, not rested or energized. He poured a glass of juice and drank it in the living room, digging through his underwear for his last clean white shirt, which he found on the floor wrapped around an accordion envelope that wasn’t his. He had seen letter bombs in envelopes thinner than this one. A disarmed bomb sent by Mujahadeen hypocrites to Islamic Republican Party headquarters had been the prize exhibit in Mehta’s trophy room until it was taken for evidence in court. He walked in wide circles around it, as though it were a wild beast chained to a stake, or else he was, and then raised the blinds and turned on all the lights, when what he would have liked was to run it through an X-ray machine. Using scissors from the medicine chest he sliced through the flap without extricating the envelope from the shirt. He inserted a finger into the opening, widened it and slid in another, pinched out a sheaf of papers five centimeters thick.

His heart was still lodged against his Adam’s apple as he examined a voter registration card for the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, a driver’s license, and a French passport with his photo on the first page. Had Ashfar and Baraheni expected to find anything in the apartment, or was their sole purpose to remind him of the power they had over him? As if he didn’t understand. As if he had to be told that by leaving Iran on their safe passage he would incur a debt from which he never would be allowed to free himself. All of the documentation they had promised him, and more, was here. He returned it to the envelope, and dropped that inside his suit coat. He would see the ex-SAVAK men again soon, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to make them eat the packet.

He called Ghaffari at home, but the line was busy. He tossed his things inside the drawer, and dressed in a hurry. He was impatient to get back to Maryam’s. When he dialed again, Sharera answered. Without asking how he was, she brought Ghaffari to the phone.

“It’s time to talk to the girl.”

“You haven’t heard?” Ghaffari asked him.

Watching his reflection in the window, Darius constructed a fat knot in a red-and-blue striped tie. “Heard what?”

“Nader’s dead.”

“What are you talking about? I was with him this morning. Six hours ago he was fine.”

“He’s dead now. His housekeeper found him in bed, not breathing. I was trying to reach you at the bureau when she called it in. Baghai’s already on the way.”

Darius’s mind was racing, spinning off thoughts faster than he could articulate them, jamming the filter of his subconscious. All that registered was the fact that he had just seen Mehta, really seen him for the first time, and now, impossibly, his friend was gone.

“Meet me there,” he said. “The girl will have to wait.”

In a traditional house off Shabbaz Avenue near the power plant in the eastern part of the city Mehta had lived for six years with his wife, and alone for fifteen years after her death. A truck from the coroner’s office was contesting space at the curb with several police cars when Darius arrived. A white Paycon from the motor pool was Ghaffari’s favorite. Uniformed officers saluted as they let Darius inside, and closed the door behind him with the finality of dirt being shoveled onto a grave.

Mehta’s living room was as immaculate and well ordered as the records room once had been. But then, thought Darius, a housekeeper didn’t come to the basement of police headquarters twice each week to tidy up. The housekeeper in question was a woman in her fifties whose unlined features, not accustomed to grief, resisted the solemn mask occasioned by her tears. She was a short woman, the top of her head barely reaching to the chest of her interrogators, who formed a semicircle around her. They were led by Ghaffari, still in the same dirty shirt. He pointed Darius into a corridor filled with uniformed officers and coroner’s assistants with nothing to do but rock on their heels and trade comments on the certitude of death and bad weather.

Baghai was in the bedroom, bent over rumpled sheets on which Mehta sprawled on his side in his undershorts and argyle socks. Like his patient the coroner appeared to have shriveled in the heat of his underground workplace until only the heavy wool suit that he wore like armor retained the original shape of his body. To Darius he still did not look well; there might have been two dead men in the room, except that Baghai moved from time to time, probing Mehta with swift hands that suddenly motioned toward the bed.

Baghai straightened Mehta’s left arm, and twisted it outward. Inside the crook of the elbow a hypodermic needle protruded from a greenish vein. This was not the crude eyedropper and needle combination favored by the addicts of Dharvazeh Ghor, but the finest professional equipment. Darius noticed black-and-blue marks and a few fresh ulcerations below Mehta’s bicep, but none of the scarring of a habitual user.

“Did you know he was injecting himself with drugs?” Baghai asked.

“Nader was a confirmed boozer. You see his house, the old furnishings, not even a TV or radio. He was not the kind to abandon his regular vices for something new.”

“But he did—and beginning not long ago. These marks on his arm aren’t old. For a man of his age, with no prior history of narcotics use, to experiment with heroin was no different than taking up Russian roulette. Even a normal dose might have killed him, and I’m skeptical he had a good idea what a normal dose was. The assumption must be that he gave himself a hot shot, either injected too much dope, or dope of such purity that his system wouldn’t tolerate it.”

“Mehta wasn’t stupid.”

“I didn’t say he was. Had he been depressed?”

“He was born depressed, and then things went downhill.”

“This was not an accident,” Baghai said. “He had access to large amounts of drugs seized as evidence in criminal cases, and knew basically what he was getting himself into. I’m ruling suicide, and you can hold a departmental funeral tomorrow.”

The bedroom was hotter than the records cage, the windows shut tight to guarantee the sweltering ambience Mehta had loved. Darius unbuttoned his collar, and blew inside his shirt. His socks were soaked through, his pants legs glued to his thighs. “Why not call it liver failure, so we can bury him with some of his pride intact? It’s how his friends expected him to go.”

“How many friends did he have? Who will be scandalized to find out that he did himself in this way?” Baghai lifted the wounded arm, and plucked out the needle. “Have you a more plausible interpretation for this? He was sick, miserable, alone, physically an old man at forty-eight, with nothing to live for, or even to die for, but alcohol. Until he found heroin. What are drugs and liquor anyway, but intermediate stages of death? He killed himself. Don’t ask me to lie for him.”

“Make out the death certificate as you see fit,” Darius said.

“Will you come to the morgue to sign it?”

“Ask Ghaffari. I’m needed elsewhere.”