Brides of Blood (3 page)

Police cars rolled up where the Pasdars had been parked, and men in baggy uniforms got out and rubbed the tightness from their thighs. The rumpled procession could not be blamed on the hour. Under the new order, neckties, too, indicated a pronounced lack of piety; but the fashion of the National Police had not been restyled to accommodate the revealed truth. Buttons were left undone, and undershirts and tufts of hair sprouted from open collars. A black Paycon was edged out by a Nissan for the last spot at the curb. The Paycon slunk away, then roared back head on and bounced up onto the sidewalk and over the tiles.

The plainclothes investigator behind the wheel caught Darius in his lights. “If I made no sense on the phone,” he called out, “it’s because I was having a bad dream, and you woke me. What have we here?”

“Another nightmare,” Darius said.

Mansur Ghaffari dropped his high beams as he steered toward the benches. A slender, almost gaunt blond man, he was half a foot taller than any of his colleagues. Ghaffari was third-generation National Police, his mother’s father having been one of a handful of Swedish army advisers imported in the early 1920s to establish a constabulary under Reza Shah. “Do I remember your saying she was shot behind the ear?”

“Don’t take my word.”

Ghaffari kept his distance from the body. “The photographer is done with her?”

“You have my permission.”

Ghaffari’s nostrils twitched as he took the dead girl in an awkward embrace. “A nightmare for us,” he said, and whisked away a fleck of red from the mouth. “Damn witches, they did everything but steam-clean her. It’s incredible they had the presence of mind to call.”

“The Komiteh did,” Darius told him. “She’s
their
gift.”

Ghaffari tilted the girl into the light. A uniformed officer leaned over his shoulder, watching them cuddle. Darius asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“I was just …” He was not much older than the dead girl, a recruit patrolman returned to duty after three months at the National Police Academy. Though the young man had been sent for schooling in criminal investigation, Darius suspected a field of study along the more practical lines of issuing traffic citations. The role of the police gradually had been usurped by the Komiteh, until its police duties consisted primarily of writing tickets. Because salaries had been cut commensurately, most officers moonlighted as security guards. “We just want to know if there is anything special you need.”

“Second sight.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Cordon a wide area around the body; this court soon will be as busy as the bazaar. Videotape the entire scene. Include the buildings and sidewalks, then hunt for clues. Go along both sides of the street and note the license plates of every car parked within four blocks.”

The patrolmen had wheeled a gas-fired generator onto the court. Roaring like a motorcycle, it was hooked up to arc lights, which were positioned around the benches. Ghaffari looked behind the girl’s ear. “A contact wound.”

“But not the cause of death,” Darius said. “There’s no blood on the tile—”

“The Pasdar is fanatical also about cleanliness.”

“Or on her chador, not in the amount you’d expect. Someone wasted a bullet on a perfectly dead girl.”

Ghaffari patted down the black garment. “No papers.”

“No nothing.”

“I can take her fingerprints on the spot. If the Bon Yad Monkerat is involved, this is top priority.”

“They want to make an example of her,” Darius said.

“What example? She’s been murdered.”

“The kind that’s buried in an unmarked grave.”

The uniformed officers strung a rope between the benches and a triangle of iridescent traffic cones, and then clustered around like fighters hungry to enter the ring. The twenty-four-year-old criminalist who doubled as police artist, seeing Ghaffari move the body, put away his sketch pad to hunt for the mother lode of clues. Eighteen months out of the academy, in over his head in a job spurned by veteran investigators because it allowed no opportunity for graft, he kept a criminology text inside his evidence kit at all times. The tiles were as clean as a dinner plate. For want of anything to do he scraped some of the dust between them into a clear envelope.

Darius stepped over the rope and started across the court with Ghaffari hurrying after him.

“The girl was roughed up over a period of time,” Ghaffari said. “Last night was simply the coup de grace. When we get her to the morgue, I’ll bet we find she’s been tortured.”

“No bet.”

“Why are we looking for witnesses, when there won’t be any? You know whose work this is.”

“I do?”

“It has all the earmarks of one of
theirs.
”

“What do
theirs
look like? Has anybody seen one in years? Aren’t
theirs
planted at night near the Fountain of Blood at Behesht-e-Zahra? … No,” Darius said, “the Komiteh has its reasons for wanting us to go easy on this, but not because they’re responsible.”

“Such as?”

“They say the girl is a whore. It could even be they’re right.”

They entered the sweltering lobby of the building closest to the benches without waking a doorman nodding beside the intercom phone.

“Apparently security at this complex is not a problem,” Ghaffari said.

“What doesn’t exist rarely is a problem.”

The elevators were out of service: Full electric power was limited to daylight and evening hours in most areas of the city. Water was available part of the day on the days it was available at all. The air was sticky from bathtubs kept filled all the time.

The investigators sprinted up several flights of stairs and came out in a corridor reeking of the spicy sauce called khoresh. Ghaffari pounded on a door on the side of the building overlooking the death scene. “Police!” both men said.

Light footfalls faded inside the apartment. “Open up,” Ghaffari demanded.

Darius conjured a family frozen in mid-step, holding its collective breath until the angel of death had passed by. “Try somewhere else.”

Two apartments away a door was edging shut. Darius wedged a foot in the space and straightened his leg. The panel gave slowly, then flew back, and he staggered into the arms of a man wearing striped pajamas.

“Thank you for inviting us in.” Darius flashed ID.

“You can’t—This is a religious household. My wife and daughter are not dressed.” The three-day growth on his cheeks Darius attributed to lazy grooming or a recent conversion. “If you would return later, when they are properly clothed—”

“It will be too late.”

A head popped out behind a corner, and a girl of about fourteen in a
VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS
T-shirt dashed barefoot across the doorway. Darius pushed into the living room. Flat woven carpets were piled three deep beneath a floral print oilcloth, a sofray, used as a tablecloth for eating on the floor. On a convertible sofa a handsome woman in her mid-forties inhaling through a cigarette holder made the same sucking sound as someone lighting a pipe. Her frosted hair was in curlers, and blue tears were frozen under her eyes. The woman clutched a robe around her throat but didn’t hide her face or run away. A violin concerto floated through the smoke she kept moving with the back of her hand.

“Bastards,” she said, “what crime is this?”

Music corrupts the minds of our youth, the Imam had said. There is no difference between music and opium. Music leads to fun, and Allah did not create man to have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be tested through hardship and prayer.

All this Darius knew by rote. If an existence devoid of pleasure was at the heart of the divine plan, then he had moved closer to God than ever had been his intention. With nothing in life but his work, it was the difference between opium and homicide that had become obscure for him. For the doggedness with which he broke the great majority of cases he was in debt to the mullahs who ruled the land and were the generals in God’s war against fun.

The woman slid a portable tape player from between the cushions. Training it like a death ray at his heart, she turned up the volume full blast. Her husband made a grab for the machine, and she twisted away and shielded it behind her back.

“Bring me to Evin Prison,” she sobbed. “See if I care.”

Darius held out his palm. Sobbing, the woman surrendered the cassette. Darius drew the curtains from glass doors and stepped out onto a terrace that looked down on a kidney-shaped rock garden.

“Where are we in relation to the courtyard?” he asked.

“Just around the corner. The apartment has a northern exposure,” the man boasted.

Darius leaned over the railing to study the rare flora below. How many weeks since he had been this close to grass and a handful of shrubs? There were few parks in Teheran, and most of them were sodded in concrete. In the courtyard the gas generator coughed.

“I apologize for the music,” the man was saying. “My wife is very tense. There was some disturbance outside, and she couldn’t sleep. The classics help soothe her nerves. Please, do not mention it to the Komiteh.”

“Have you or your family heard anything out of the ordinary tonight?”

“The Imam’s sermon on the Jews, if that is not ordinary.”

“Nothing else?”

“The sirens of the police.”

“You shouldn’t play music so loud.” Darius returned the tape.

“I understand.” The man smiled knowingly.

Darius didn’t smile back. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

“What was that racket about?” Ghaffari asked in the corridor.

“Mozart.” Darius pounded on another door. “Those people couldn’t have seen anything. Let’s try here.”

An old man opened, hiding his face behind a liver-spotted hand. He was completely bald but for a few silver threads in the pink flesh below the crown of his head. “Excuse me,” he said, and then he yawned. “You woke me.” He took off wire frame bifocals and buffed each lens on a sleeve of his housecoat. “You are—”

“Police.” Ghaffari was already inside. “We need a few questions answered.”

The old man pressed the glasses to his puffy eyes and curled the temple pieces over his ears. Darius noticed he had more hair in his ears than on his head.

“Please come in,” the old man said to their backs. “I will make some tea.”

Darius whirled on him. The Komiteh were forbidden to accept food or drink in the homes they visited, because of the strong chance of being poisoned, and he had applied the rule to his squad. “
National
Police.” He walked through the kitchen into an unlighted room. “We’ll be a minute, and you can go back to sleep. We want to look out your window.”

The old man hesitated. “There is a viewing fee …” He laughed, unamused, and followed them onto a logjam of rolled carpets. Since inflation had destroyed the value of the rial, Persian rugs had become legal tender among those members of the upper middle class that had not been ruined. The penalty for taking carpets illegally out of the country was death.

“May I ask what this is about?” The old man yawned again—forced it, Darius thought. When his hand came away from his mouth, it was shaking.

Darius stared down into the street as a morgue wagon moved between the massed police cars and parked close to his Ford. An attendant in a stained lab coat opened the double doors in back. A blackthorn cane rooted in the asphalt, and then the coroner, Dr. Baghai, stepped out, smiling and shaking hands with everyone like a playwright on center aisle on opening night.

Darius turned away from the window. The old man was still yawning. His hand hadn’t quit shaking.

“Thank you, sir,” Darius said. “For you, this is about nothing.”

Ghaffari peeled back a corner of an antique Lavar Kerman carpet. “We’re passing up a good arrest. He’s smuggling, you know.”

“We’re here to investigate murder.”

The stairwell reverberated to the sound of a brigade marching out of step over a bridge, and then Hamid, the young criminalist, dashed into the corridor alone. “I’ve been up to the top floor and down again, trying to find you. The dead girl—” He puffed out his rib cage to take a deep breath. “We have her identified.”

“Good work,” Ghaffari said.

“How?” Darius asked.

The criminalist had Darius by the sleeve. “Her mother is waiting downstairs.”

“I’ll talk to her alone,” Darius said. “I want you to canvass both buildings with Lieutenant Ghaffari. I’ll expect written reports.”

In the street, uniformed officers pressed around a woman who sat rocking on her hips beside the body. Ululating, she tore at her hair as she smothered the girl’s forehead with kisses. When Darius put his leg over the rope, she made a fist and pounded her breast.

“Mother—” he began. The woman peered at him through her tears, then resumed wailing.

“Mother, my heart goes out to you.” Darius locked into her gaze. Without changing tone, he said, “Someone shut off the damn generator. She can’t hear me.”

Silence brought with it a watery twilight that calmed the woman the way darkness stills a caged bird. The trilling ceased, and her sobs were spaced further apart. From inside the folds of her chador Darius heard the clacking of worry beads. “Is this your daughter?”

“Tahera.” The woman caressed the scratched cheek. “She is just sixteen.”

“And her last name?”

“Taleqani.”

“Mother Taleqani, tell me when was the last time you saw Tahera.”

“When?” Time was an alien concept. “Two years? Three? Yes, three,” she said. “For three years she was gone.”

“Mother Taleqani—” Of all the distasteful aspects of police work, what he had no stomach for was grilling the survivors of murder. In little real sense could many be said to have survived. Endurers, he would have called them. Existers—the momentum of their broken lives rapidly winding down. The woman beside the body, judging by the whistling in her lungs each time she let out a sob, soon would be at a dead stop. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there are more questions about your daughter I must have answers for.”

The woman grieved quietly, braced for the next assault.

“Three years is a long time. Were you in contact with Tahera before tonight?”