Brides of Blood (6 page)

THE ROAD TO SALVATION:

FAITH, HOLY WAR, AND MARTYRDOM

The floorboards groaned beneath the carpeting. He stepped over dusty suitcases in the foyer, and tossed his jacket on the couch. The three-room apartment had been considered luxurious when the building went up during the early 1970s oil boom. But the thin walls were no match for the stench of dombeh, frying lamb fat, and the gulping toilet next door. On the television was a photo of him at the former Shahyad Tower on the western approach to the city with a curly-haired girl who was wearing a green head scarf and had stolen his smile. Colorless images flittered across the screen. Darius stared absentmindedly at a mullah sermonizing on the evils of idolatry and sexual deviation.

In the bedroom a sleeping woman held herself tightly on a sliver of the double mattress. He sat next to her, and studied the aquiline nose that plastic surgeons had whittled a step beyond perfection. Gold droplet earrings were lost in her thick curls. “When did you come back?” he asked.

Her lips parted, and the red tip of her tongue tasted them. Her eyes darted around the room. Not happy with what she saw, she closed them again. Propped on an elbow she rubbed the lids with her knuckles like a child. “Where were you?”

“A woman was murdered. I had to work all night.”

A knife edge of sun sliced across her cheek. Held to the scrutiny of natural light her complexion was flawless, which she attributed to having given up makeup and alcohol.

“Tell me about Qom.”

“Uncle misses you,” she said.

“He’s well?”

“It was 118 degrees yesterday, and the pollution does his asthma no good. But he will never leave.”

“You spent time with him every day?”

“When I was not at the mosque.” Farib scratched her forehead. Just below the hairline was a thin callus from the stone that she pressed her head against while crouched in prayer. The Qur’an forbade touching any man-made object during discourse with God. “You might visit sometime.”

“You know my feelings,” he said. “It would be hypocritical—”

“It’s your duty as a Muslim to go to the holy city and pray to the Almighty.”

“Your uncle is a turban man, and he doesn’t object.”

“If uncle forgives you for not attending to your religious obligations, it’s because he is a saint. As a woman, such forgiveness is beyond me. You can make an appearance at the mosque, even if it means nothing to you. For what he did for you he is still criticized everywhere.”

“It was more than ten years ago. How long will I be repaying my debt?”

“For eternity,” Farib said. “You owe him your life.”

Darius kissed her, and she yawned. Reaching under her chador, she removed sturdy cotton panties of Syrian manufacture. The chador surrounded her like a tent as she rolled onto her stomach.

Darius touched her shoulder, and she hiked the chador above her hips. Farib’s bottom was as creamy as her face. Once, he had asked her if this was also because she abstained from alcohol, and she had stopped talking to him for a month.

On her knees she said, “What are you waiting for? It’s your right.”

“We aren’t from a village still in the dark ages. We can make love like human beings.”

Dutifully, she took off the chador, turning over onto her back. Her body was pink and fresh, as if she had stepped out of her skin. Darius nuzzled between her breasts, marched his lips along her slender throat. He pinched a hair from a corner of her mouth, and kissed her again. Farib’s arms remained at her sides. She was as responsive as the pillow.

A woman, it was written, was possessed of greater desire than a man—nine times more—and was not to withhold herself when her husband wanted her. The nature of a man was to utilize this desire at his pleasure, to respond to what already was there in her. Farib, for all her professions of orthodoxy, adhered to stubborn heresies in the interpretation of her wifely responsibilities. Darius pulled away.

“If I don’t please you anymore, take another wife. It’s your right,” she said. “Or a temporary wife, for when I’m not here.”

She sat up. “Or divorce me. I won’t fight it. Just pronounce a talaq, and it will be done. Surely, that’s not too hard for you to do. Unless you’re afraid my uncle may forget he once had reason to save your life.”

Darius went back into the living room. On the ring with his apartment keys was a brass key, which—when there was someone to share the joke with—he called his Key to Paradise. He unlocked a cabinet in the wall unit. Removing a bottle of Russian vodka, he poured some into a collins glass.

He switched channels. A mullah in a black turban, which indicated he was a direct descendant of the Prophet, took the place of the other on the screen.

“We recognize no absolute values besides total submission to the will of the Almighty. Our teachers say, ‘Don’t lie!’ But the principle is not the same when we serve God. He gave man the precious gift of lies so that, we can protect ourselves at times of danger, and puzzle our enemies. Should we adhere to the truth at the cost of defeat and jeopardy to the faith? We believe not. Our teachers say, ‘Don’t kill!’ But the Almighty himself instructed us how to kill…”

Farib had slipped into a University of Maryland sweatshirt and blue jeans.

She stood at the mirror brushing her hair, a fleeting image of the woman he had married. Their eyes made contact in the glass. “Have you finished poisoning yourself?” she asked.

Darius put down the vodka in a swallow. “Got to go,” he said. “It’s a big case. I just wanted to say hello, see how you were—”

“I was well, thank you.” Farib dropped the brush on the bare cosmetics table. “You look tired,” she said. “There’s time for you to nap. I’ll be out of your way. I have shopping to do.”

Darius took her place at the mirror. Knotting his tie, he watched the chador fall over Farib’s shoulders and swallow her whole.

“A very big case.”

W
ORKMEN HAD DUG UP
Hafez Avenue and gone away leaving it a watery trench, a catchbasin for the djoub. Darius parked in the shallows close to the former British embassy whose brick walls were blackboards of revolutionary rhetoric.

THE SPIRIT OF ALLAH HAS COMMANDED: ANY COMPROMISE IS TREASON TO SLAY AND BE SLAIN FOR ALLAH:

THAT IS THE EDICT OF RUHOLLAH

The sidewalks were empty, the flooded gutter devoid of traffic. Darius walked slowly, playing the rare midtown quiet against his nerves. At Bobby Sands Street he took a running start across the gorge. His shoes squished as he let himself inside a walled garden on the corner.

A cement blockhouse set in a jungle of azalea and jasmine was guarded by a Komitehman with an Uzi. Darius said, “Police,” and waited to be asked to produce identification. The Komitehman lowered his gun. He went to a lawn chair under a tattered Cinzano umbrella, and turned up a sermon on a portable radio.

The mist from a revolving lawn sprinkler broke the sunlight into pocket rainbows. Above a plastic wading pool a swing creaked in the breeze. The door was opened by a boy of no more than eight wearing a felt cap that budded in fuzzy mouse ears.

“Is your father at home?” Darius asked him.

The boy nibbled a white strip around a green apple with big mouse teeth, and ran inside the house. Darius entered and looked around a large room paneled in walnut. Embroidered drapes kept the sun off fine elephant’s feet Bokhara carpets that lay three deep on the hardwood floors. The walls were lined with religious texts dating back to the seventeenth-century Sufi mystics. Darius heard an adult voice, and followed it into a room filled with baby furniture, where the boy squatted in front of a television.

The cap fell off as the boy turned around. Darius saw a bulbous head and narrow eyes, the patrimony of the religious elite. For generations the women most desired as brides in Iran had been the daughters of their future husband’s father’s brothers. Children like this one were a common result.

The boy giggled, and looked back at the screen. Darius poked through the rooms, but saw nothing around which to construct an investigation. In twenty minutes he was ready to leave. The Komitehman had returned to the door, but now faced inside, as though having let him too easily into the house he would rectify the mistake by keeping him prisoner.

Darius said, “This
is
the Golabi home that was burglarized?”

The guard said nothing, thought about it, nodded.

“The child’s parents will be back soon?”

“I don’t know.”

Darius gave him his card. “Have them contact me at my office.”

The guard stepped aside, and Darius went out to the car furious with himself for wasting time that should have been spent hunting a killer. The only crime he had found was perpetuated in the genes of the misshapen child. He had gone far enough with Zakir’s charade. Sooner than probe the burglary he would accompany Farib on a pilgrimage to Qom.

Dredged from his subconscious the murder case came back to him with several hard theories attached. In no manner were Iranians involved; for the girl to have been ruined as she was pointed unmistakably to Arab hands. As far back as elementary school he had been taught that the Arabs were a cowardly lot of Sunni heretics who prided themselves on their lust for innocent blood. Torture was not unknown in the long history of his country. But the Persians were a compassionate people, and the judicial application of pain traditionally was limited to the bastinado, the melancholy flogging of the soles of the feet.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon at the train stations and airport, searching for witnesses to the girl’s arrival in the city. The photo he showed, a black-and-white Polaroid snapped at the crime scene, made no impression on anyone, perhaps—as the baggage clerk at Iran Airlines told him—because the young woman he was looking for appeared to be sleeping. When he returned to headquarters there was a note on his desk that Baghai had called. He reached the coroner at the morgue as he was going home.

“What news?”

“In all the hubbub of finding the mutilations,” Baghai said, “I didn’t examine the body as carefully as I should have. In the crook of the left arm was a crusting sore, extremely deep. My assumption was that it was a severe rash, like several others I saw, but when I looked closely I noticed a cluster of tiny punctures in the skin.”

“She’d injected herself regularly?”

“There aren’t enough marks to indicate she had taken narcotics over a long period of time. She may have become an addict recently, or previously smoked the drugs before graduating to the use of needles.”

“Could she have died of an overdose?”

“Of an overdose, of bad dope, of intentional poisoning. Of anything else,” Baghai said. “In any event, it’s no longer our case. This is about drugs, and drugs are the Komiteh’s jurisdiction.”

“No,” Darius said. “It’s about torture. And murder.”

Darius thanked him and hung up. Heroin addicts were a rarity in a country where the illicit drug of choice was opium. He rubbed his smarting eyes, and the room pinched in at the walls. As it rebounded, he felt compressed in turn. A blurry figure in a blue suit came into the office and stood at the door. “Yes?”

A bearded face with high, sloping cheeks and black hair the texture of iron filings assumed character as Nader Mehta stepped close to the desk.

“The girl’s fingerprints are not on record.”

Mehta once had been chief of investigations for the homicide squad, the brightest of the rising stars in the National Police. A Zoroastrian by birth, he was officially a “believer,” like Jews and Christians of “the people of the book,” to be treated with deference, although not as equal to Muslims. When the Revolution dead-ended his career, he had retreated into the records department and the mysticism of fire-worshiping ancestors who had ruled Persia before the Muslim conquest. Though such interests officially were frowned upon, Darius—like many Iranians—was fascinated by his country’s pre-Islamic past, and every spring on Red Wednesday, during the Now Ruz new year’s celebration, he joined Mehta in a leap over three bonfires of desert thorn, chanting, “My troubles and my pallor I cast into your flames. Your warmth and rosy cheeks for me.”

Darius said, “Send her card to Khuzestan Province. She may be an Arab. If not from another country, then one of ours.”

Mehta made no move to go. “What do you call Jewish babies that are not circumcised?”

“Huh? I’m no good at riddles. You tell me.”

“Girls,” Mehta said, but didn’t laugh. “With them it’s girls.”

“You’ll send the card?”

“The files in Khuzestan are in worse shape than here.” Mehta looked at him sadly, the curator of a museum with no capital for acquisitions. “The only decent records are the Komiteh’s. You might ask … No, you might come to them on your knees, and beg for a peek.”

“They’ve told me to mind my own business.”

“Then why are we chasing all over to identify her?”

“What would you do instead?”

“Seek solace from God.”

“God won’t find her killer.”

“And from this.” Mehta lifted the flap on his jacket pocket, and Darius saw the neck of a pint flask. “Let the sin be on me.”

Darius took the bottle and unscrewed the cap, brought the vodka to his lips, then paused to say, “There’s plenty to go around.”

After the evening shift had come on duty, and he was on his own time, Darius drove south from the administrative district of Ark. Near the central bazaar traffic thickened, and the sidewalks were sluggish with pedestrians. Down stone steps he entered the bazaar through the gold sellers’ quarter, and stood there while his ears grew accustomed to the din. Under a faienced arcade six thousand shops and stalls undulated for ten kilometers through the heart of the city. He pushed into the crowd, which swept him to the copper beaters, and beyond to the rug merchants and traders in textiles, gem cutters and tile makers and leather crafters whose booths gave off an oily, animal smell neutralized by the sweetness of bakeries and the charcoal smoke of cello kebab, square chunks of lamb served on a bed of rice. Between the wool dyers and lumber traders, at a narrow stall no deeper than a closet, he stopped to watch a man bent over a bench cluttered with tin cans.