Brides of Blood (4 page)

“Yes.”

“I see.” He betrayed all the involvement of a doctor discovering a spot on a lung. “Do you know where she was?”

“Yes.”

“Where?” he asked.

“She was in purgatory,” the woman cried. “But now she is in paradise.”

The moment of calm was slipping away. “Who did this to her?”

The woman beat her chest with such force that Darius felt the shock of the blows. “You did!” An arthritic finger, shiny as bone, pointed where the punches echoed in his heart. “You murdered her.” She took her case to the crowd outside the rope. “Stone him,” she pleaded. “Crush his skull to powder. He murdered my child.”

“Mother Taleqani—”

The woman screeched her misery to the heavens. She threw herself on the corpse, watered it in tears.

A hard object jabbed into Darius’s shoulder, and he looked back at the crowd as Dr. Baghai reached him a second time with the tip of his cane. “I can give her an injection, if you like.” In hopes that he might lose a patient to a sudden resurrection the coroner went nowhere without a full doctor’s satchel. “Otherwise it may take several days before she is lucid.”

“Will she stand up under interrogation?”

Baghai gestured indecisively with his stick. “A drink would be better.”

“For everyone concerned,” Darius said.

The rope thrummed in his fingers as a teenager in a light summer chador slipped inside the cordon. She put an arm around Mrs. Taleqani’s heaving shoulders and murmured in her ear. Mrs. Taleqani shook her head. She kissed the corpse, cajoled it forgivingly to come home while the teenager tried to bundle her away.

Darius jerked the rope. The traffic cones danced like bobbers on a struck line. “Mrs. Taleqani can’t leave. She’s a witness in a murder case.”

“My mother knows nothing about murder,” the girl said.

“Tahera was your sister?”

“That’s right.”

“And your name?”

“Farah Taleqani. But I don’t see—”

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar, the investigator in charge. Information about your sister is badly needed. Your mother is overwrought and not responding. It’s essential that you answer for her.”

Farah Taleqani raised the rope above her head.

“Without your cooperation,” Darius said gently, “it will be that much harder to find the killer.”

“I can’t help.”

“Tell us about the last time you saw Tahera. Start there.”

“Very well.” The young woman paused to calculate her words. “It was three years ago next month. Tahera was at school, and she told her girlfriends that she had dreamed she saw the Imam without clothes. It was a joke. That night, the Komiteh came to our house and took her away. For questioning, they said. We never saw her afterward.”

“Where was she?”

“Tahera was tortured to death. Word reached us from the prison.”

“Impossible. She died tonight.”

Farah Taleqani stared at him with her mother’s vacant eyes. “This girl is not Tahera.”

“But Mrs. Taleqani—”

“My mother has spent three years searching the city for her daughter. Each day she goes into the streets to look, always to look. It is not the first time she has found someone else’s Tahera.”

The crowd parted as she prodded the sobbing woman under the rope.

Darius did not turn away until they disappeared across the street. “About that drink …”

Baghai stepped on Darius’s toes in his hurry to get at the corpse. His thick fingers probed in the area of the head and neck while the attendant recorded his observations on a clipboard. “You started without me,” he said.

“The body was compromised by the Pasdars when I arrived.”

“You should always finish what you start. When we have her on a slab, I’ll sit back and let you.” Baghai lifted the head. “You’ve seen the wound in the mastoid bone behind the right ear? A small-caliber weapon, almost touching the skin, was fired from above and slightly to the left of the girl. The slug entered her skull from what I would estimate to be an angle of greater than forty-five degrees. Do I have to tell you it didn’t kill her?”

“What did?”

Baghai opened his arms wide.

“The time of death?”

“The body has chilled noticeably, but rigor mortis has not begun. A rough guess on a night like this would be about eight hours earlier, about—” Baghai brushed his cuff back from his watch. “Nine
P.M.
, more recently if she was brought from a room without air-conditioning.”

The coroner pressed one hand over the other, and leaned on the handle of his cane. “We are ready to remove her to the morgue. The autopsy will be the first order of business. Will you attend for the police?”

“For the girl, too.”

He stayed with the body while the attendants brought Baghai to the wagon. Glancing up at the windows he spotted a blond head in an eleventh-story apartment, Ghaffari insulated by double panes from the virulence of murder. The rising sun was in his eyes when he walked back to his car. It glinted off the flask of vodka as he wrung out the last drops.

W
ITH A WEEK’S STUBBLE DARIUS
was a Chicago gangster. More than that—Rasputin, the black tundra of his beard melded into the blacker tangle that cascaded over his ears, while his coal eyes burned with a hard, feverish gleam.

He dabbed a brush at a bar of brownish soap, and worked the thin lather into his skin. Photographs edged the cracked mirror on the wall. Those showing him unshaven had been taken twenty years ago, when like others of his generation he had flirted with the Imam’s brand of Shi’a Islam. In another, which was a few years newer, he braced with boyish pride in the uniform of a United States Air Force Reserve officer trainee. It was this photo that he returned to as he wielded his razor like a portraitist’s brush, defining subtleties only hinted at by the camera.

Ghaffari sat on the lid of the toilet, smoking a Turkish cigarette. “I never saw these pictures before. Frankly, I like you better with a beard.”

“So do I,” Darius said.

“And with a woman.” He flicked his thumbnail at a faded Polaroid of Darius in his ROTC blues. His arm was around a pretty girl with brown, windblown curls. A flowery kerchief was tied over the back of her head, and she had on a montoe, a shapeless, ankle-length coat. Barely visible in the background was the west portico of the United States Capitol. “I didn’t recognize you at first. You’re smiling.”

“Shit.” A red splotch marred the portrait. “I assure you it won’t happen again.” Darius tore off a sheet of toilet paper, and crumpled it against the nick. “What did you find after I left?”

“What we expected. No one heard a shot or scream, and because of the brownout no lights were on at the court.” Ghaffari returned the photo to the mirror. “I visited thirty apartments, and at all of them I was told the same thing, that at night it’s impossible to see to the benches.”

“And during the day?”

“Many of the units are like the first one we visited—without a view of the court; although from the upper floors it’s easy to see into the private homes across the street.”

Darius angled the razor under his nose, scraping away at the underlying pallor to get at a few stubborn hairs. He used an Iranian blade, an aptly named Shark; when he glanced in the mirror again, his upper lip was awash in blood.

“You’re the only man I know who keeps pictures of himself on his mirror,” Ghaffari said.

“To remember me by.”

Searching for a match Ghaffari went into Darius’s office, a waiting-room ambience of gray walls and gray carpeting. A threadbare sheet had been tossed over a couch upholstered in torn vinyl, and a bolster pillow was squashed against the armrest. In a large outer office burly men in various stages of uniform dress breakfasted on melon juice and coffee cake while civilian clerks beat on manual typewriters. He returned to the bathroom without the match. “Why don’t you sleep in your own bed for once?”

Darius screwed the cap off a green bottle, and held it to his nose. “It’s not worth fighting the traffic, when I have to be at the morgue by ten.”

“You never go home. There are corpses who spend less time at the morgue than you.”

“They don’t know what they’re missing. Look, Mansur, it would be nice if you could stop poking your nose into every little thing I do.”

“What other friends do you have to tell you that your behavior is cause for concern? You see so little of your wife, it’s a mystery why you bother to stay married. Considering all the time you spend here, it would be more practical to move into one of the cells downstairs, and Farib can come stay with you during visiting hours.”

“Now, I think you may have something,” Darius said.

Ghaffari hung his head in surrender until he saw the beginnings of a reluctant smile. Taking the bottle from Darius, he milked it of a drop, and transferred a whisper of scent to the underside of his jaw. With liquor outlawed, alcoholics had bid the price of aftershave and cologne to the equal of French perfume. “You should lay off this stuff.”

“Why?” Darius snatched back the aftershave, sloshed it on his face and neck.

“You waste it like water.”

Darius poured more onto his tie. “A pretty girl is waiting.”

The coroner’s office was housed in a building the color of mud brick several blocks from police headquarters. Darius went in through the viewing room where Teheran’s bereaved gathered each morning to claim the bodies that sprouted like malevolent toadstools on the streets. Corpses waiting to be identified were stored in the basement morgue, and brought up for inspection on a glassed carousel. The building resounded with an iron clangor like the housing of a huge engine. Descending into a chemical bouquet of formalin and urine, of cold sweat mixed with the foulness of death, Darius had the sensation that he had skipped the intermediate stations of dying and burial to arrive intact in the bowels of hell.

A room the size of a downtown block was a benign necropolis under the rule of men in surgical gowns and masks, the nether side of the living city three stories above. A dozen slabs were inhabited by corpses in various stages of destruction. To each was assigned a young doctor as squeamish as a schoolboy investigating a frog. Flitting from table to table was the stooped figure of Baghai.

A body without a face lay under fluorescent strips. In the most devout neighborhoods a splash of sulfuric acid was vigilante justice for women found wearing makeup. Blindness or disfigurement was the usual sentence, but too often it was administered with an excess of zeal. Baghai claimed from the chest cavity a gelatinous heart, and placed it in a shiny pan—Baghai, who hadn’t the decency to fill the air with cigar smoke, to pretend to be offended by premature death.

He stood behind a pathologist tracing a Y-shaped cut on a cadaver whose lower torso had been crushed to the thickness of a book. Steadying the tremulous scalpel, Baghai forced it through the brittle flesh on both sides of the sternum, and slid it to the sexless pubis. When the incision was complete, he curled his fingers inside the slit. The body opened with the sound of shredding cloth.

“Only suicides leave hesitation marks,” he admonished the doctor.

Darius loosened his tie and inhaled the scent stored there. The racket was deafening. The refrigerator motors whirred in harmony like a robot section of an orchestra. Warm air rushed in through the loading dock as another gurney was brought inside. Darius recognized the attendant from Shemiran as Baghai waved him to the only vacant slab and said, “This one goes to the head of the class.”

Baghai tore away the sheet with the flair of a magician whipping a tablecloth from under a setting for twelve. All color was drained from the girl’s face, leaving the bland residue of pain. Her limbs had begun to stiffen; the attendant had to force her arms against her sides to remove the chador. Underneath, a scoop-neck dress clung to her like silk snakeskin.

“Islam’s critics,” Baghai said, “would have us condemned as practitioners of pagan cruelties. Before you, though, is evidence of how far we lead in equality of the sexes. In Europe and the Americas women dress provocatively to win the admiring eye of a man. But the chador prevents women from being regarded as mere sex objects. As a result, they are free to wear what pleases them close to their heart.”

“For her,” Darius said, “the chador was a disguise, not a political statement.”

Baghai fumbled with the zipper. “The dress is fetching, but the girl is not. She must have expected that its glamour would wear off on her.”

A lace bustier prodded the girl’s small breasts into thin sensuality. Patterned stockings completed the transformation.

“Make an extra set of pictures,” Darius said. “The Komiteh will have a good laugh.”

“Conclude nothing from what you see. You would be amazed at how many modest women dress like her under the chador. Some sew their own frilly garments.”

“I doubt she’s Iranian. Not from Teheran, anyway.”

“Teheranis have the same fantasies as women everywhere.”

“But a different expression,” Darius said. “She seems too compliant, too accepting of death. Like an Arab.”

“It could be she is a foreigner. Saudis in particular are obsessed with seductive lingerie: Not having had to live under the tyranny of a Westernized shah, they’ve never known a time they were not liberated by the veil.” His dry cackle trailed off into coughing. “I speak from professional experience only.”

Baghai searched the lace for a zipper. “Cut her out,” he told the attendant.

Darius blocked the scissors. He snapped open a panel at the crotch, and the attendant eased the girl out of the bustier.

“I see you’ve had experience of a hands-on nature,” Baghai said.

Darius inspected the label, then folded the garment as though the girl would be slipping into it again when she was done on the slab.

“We will start now,” Baghai said.

“First let me have the bullet. Try not to scratch it.”

Baghai’s arthritic fingers moved deftly as he trimmed the ragged skin around the mastoid bone. “We should be done in an hour. Get some fresh air. I’ll send for you when we have compiled the preliminary report. Only a word of warning: don’t eat before you return.”