The Shield of Darius (21 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Ben was back in his cell. He could tell without opening his eyes. His head throbbed just as it had when he’d first awakened in the prison, and he was surrounded by the same smells. Every part of his body hurt. It hurt to breath, especially on his left side where the bullet still bulged between his skin and protruding ribs. He wondered if he was in the same cell – back with Jim.

He listened for traffic, for sounds of the city. Complete quiet. They had taken him somewhere else. Or he was deep down in the bowels of the building. Slowly he opened his eyes.

A man stood over him looking down with cautious curiosity. He was Iranian, but not a soldier; clean shaven and wearing a loose brown suit and no tie. Merchant class. The man bent closer, and spoke softly.

“Farsi mefameed?”
Do you understand Farsi?

Ben shook his head painfully. “
Farsi koobe ne-meefamam.”
I don’t understand Farsi well.

“
E
e
njaw khoob neest,”
the man said. “
Meefameed?”

Ben nodded. The man was telling him as simply as he could that this was not a good place to be. Ben struggled into a sitting position on the low cot, seeing a woman peering at him from behind her shielding husband. Both withdrew a step as he rose, but the man stepped forward again to steady him until he regained his balance. The burning in his side doubled him over and he straightened slowly, feeling shrunken and impotent.

He was in the bedroom of what appeared to be a small house of plain concrete block. The furnishings were simple, with a single red carpet covering most of what was otherwise a bare cement floor. Somehow they had managed to dress him in a new shirt, but he still wore the plain pajama pants. He pulled the shirt open. His bandage was freshly changed and he could feel the sting of some kind of antiseptic against his skin.

“What place is this,” he asked in broken Farsi.

The man pointed toward the wall on his right. “Anzeli,” he said.

Ben looked out the single bedroom window. A small rocky beach began a hundred yards behind the house, stretching into endless gray sea. An early morning sun was just breaking the horizon over the water.

Anzali? He must mean Bandar Anzali, north along the Caspian coast from Rasht. When he had come to this coast before, the family had driven in one day the distance from Tehran that it had now taken him over a week to travel. They had stopped to shop for fruit and souvenirs in the open markets at Bandar Anzali.

Ben straightened painfully and stood, tottering to the open bedroom doorway, then through the small living room to the front door. The couple followed, the man reaching with every step as if he thought Ben would fall. The house stood on the seaward side of the road, facing coastal mountains that rose abruptly a half mile inland. Between the road and the mountains spread a patchwork of carefully terraced rice fields, the grassy grain now almost knee high. An equal distance along the road to his left, the rooftops of Anzali rose above the trees. A piece of luck. He was north of the city and wouldn’t have to pass through it. The couple must have come across the wreckage of the bus, decided from his wound and foreignness that he was a fugitive, and brought him here.

Gingerly Ben felt at an egg sized knot in his hairline above his right eye. He remembered little of the crash. Just the bus leaving the road. As he turned back into the house, a cramp seized his wounded side, again doubling him forward.

“Nun dareed?”
he asked in a strained whisper. Do you have bread?

The man led him back to a hard sofa and turned to his wife who nodded and disappeared, returning with a tray carrying strong black tea, small bananas, and a fresh piece of
sangyak
. Ben drank most of the tea before trying the banana, eating slowly and mashing the fruit to watery paste before each painful swallow.

“
Chador? Chador dareed?”
he asked.

Again the couple looked at each other, this time with unveiled surprise. The woman finally shrugged, bringing a plain black
chador
from a second small bedroom and handing it to him.

“
Merci,”
he said simply, using the French ‘thank you’ that was a common substitute in Persian. The couple stood watching him nervously.

“
Bayreed,”
the man said, his voice tight with fear.
Go!

Ben smiled weakly and nodded. For some reason they had chosen to help, but knew that they were now in mortal danger. He stood slowly and made his way to the door, scanning the road in both directions before venturing into the bare yard. Instead of moving toward the road, he walked to the corner of the house and started toward the sea. As the couple watched, he splashed knee deep into the water with the
chador
bunched around his shoulders like a shawl and with the sand and gentle undertow tugging at his feet, turned north up the coast.

Three hundred yards up the beach, beyond a dozen similar square block houses, a small stream washed into the sea. Ben wrapped the bread in the
chador
and tied it around his waist, then turned inland along the shallow bed, dropping to his hands and knees to stay below the top of the stone embankments that protected the land on either side from washing into the sea. A low concrete bridge took him beneath the road and into the rice fields that stretch to the mountains, and he stood into a low crouch along the sandy bed, bending below the green shield of rice stalks. Surely the bus had been discovered and an alarm raised. Within hours, police would learn that it had been stolen in Karaj. They would probably view it as a common theft, a joyride – if anyone in Iran took joyrides. But no sense taking chances. He would stay in the water and below the level of the rice paddies until well into the forest.

Since the stream was used to flood the paddies during high water, its banks were trimmed and clear until it reached beyond the fields and disappeared into the trees. Here it began to flow more swiftly, tumbling down the overgrown slope over moss-covered rocks and wet clay. As Ben struggled up into the thickness of the jungle, he slipped onto his stomach, clutching with his right hand at vines and branches that arched low over the stream, sliding back, then inching forward again. Twenty yards into the thick undergrowth, an animal trail crossed the stream and climbed diagonally up the hill to his right. He clambered from the water and crawled forward along the path. The trail was no more than a burrow through a low thicket and he felt his way beneath the tangle of vines until the path widened and he found himself below the low hanging branches of a massive tree. The giant had pushed the forest away as it grew, and he pulled up into the lower limbs, tied the
chador
securely under his arms and about the trunk, and collapsed back against its smooth bark. Along the coastal road he heard the distant
weeee waaaa
of  sirens. The police had discovered the bus.

.  .  .

As soon as the door opened, Jim Cannon knew he was in trouble. It wasn’t time for his afternoon meal, and his guards had company. An officer. The man was dressed in the heavy wool uniform of the men who brought his food but was obviously their superior. He entered with a confident step that Jim hadn’t seen in his regular sentries.

In the stifling stillness of the building’s summer heat, the uniform looked even more uncomfortable and ominous and the man had dark sweat rings under his arms. He frowned through a heavy black mustache but was otherwise clean shaven, and wore a short-billed military hat and gold, diamond-shaped pips on his shoulders, with the same bronze shield patch on his right sleeve that Jim had seen on the man who threatened to blow his head off just after Ben arrived. He took in the room with a sweeping glance, stepped quickly into and out of the bathroom, checked a clip board in his hand and spoke to the guards in sharp, guttural tones. The other men shook their heads stupidly and pointed toward Jim, one gesturing with an index finger to indicate that there was only one person in the room. The officer stalked to where Jim sat motionless on the bed and signaled vigorously for him to rise.

“Get up,” he ordered in thickly accented English. Jim rose slowly, towering six inches above the officer’s head and forcing him to step backward. The man reeked of garlic and sweat.

“Where is the other one?” he demanded, pointing at the empty bed behind him.

Jim shrugged. “You mean Sager? They took him away a week ago.”

“Who? Who took him away?”

“Some of the guards – like those three,” Jim said, following the script he had rehearsed with Ben before the escape and pointing at the men behind the officer. The guards shrunk back in alarm. The trucker waved a finger in a circular motion beside his temple. “He was getting kind of loony. Shouting and knocking around the room. They came in one night and hauled him away.”

The officer stabbed wildly at his clipboard with a dull pencil and shouted again at the guards who looked frightened and bewildered. Turning back to Jim, the officer showed him a full list of names in English with squiggly writing beside them; a script of shorthand-looking lines and dots that Jim took to be Arabic. The man pointed to a name near the bottom of the list.

“Is this the man who was here?”

Jim looked at the row of names in stunned silence. There must be twenty-five or thirty…some women. Four or five from the top he found his own name.

“Answer me,” the officer shouted. “Is this the man that was here?”

Jim nodded slowly. “Benjamin Sager. That’s the man.”

“When did this happen? The guards taking him away?”

“How am I supposed to know that?” Jim said. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

The officer pointed at Jim’s markings on the wall above his bed. “Was it four days? A week ago? How long?”

“About a week, I’d say,” Jim said, looking thoughtfully at his scratches. “Yup. Pretty close to a week.”

The officer turned abruptly and pushed the guards out the door, slamming it behind them. Jim listened as the four retreated down the hall and slumped back onto his bed. At least Ben hadn’t been caught. But he must not have reached an embassy either. Must still be out there, trying to figure out where the hell he was. Or he was dead.

Jim wondered if the officer had believed his story and leaned back against the wall to think about what he’d say when they came back. But muffled footsteps already approached the door and the four entered with another, a man Jim recognized and had hoped he would never see again. It was the civilian in the dark suit who had thrust the pistol into his mouth.

While the others stood by the door, the new man stalked slowly about the room as if by examining each inch of the wall he could force Ben to suddenly reappear. He returned to the officer, grabbed the clipboard and glared at it fiercely, pointing and shouting. His comrade with the gold diamonds shouted back, jabbing a finger into the civilian’s chest. Without understanding a word of the conversation, it was clear to Jim that the man in the suit must be responsible for the prisoners. The berated civilian finally stamped his foot firmly and gestured toward the door, shaking his head. Still shouting and gesturing, the two again exited the room with the guards, and bolted Jim in.

Within minutes he heard them in the alley below and pulled his stool to the window, peering down through a corner of the upper pane. The two paced nervously up and down, studying the ground, glaring doubtfully up at the window, examining the wall of the compound across the alley. They stopped beside the spot where Ben had hauled himself up to reach the
chador
and squatted, leaning forward to peer at the mud surface. The officer who had entered with the clipboard traced his finger down a yard long scar, scraped into the wall’s face when something had scuffed the mud while wet. Again they looked up at the window, then back at each other, and hurried down the alley to Jim’s left.

He jumped quickly to the floor and replaced the stool at the table, waiting for footsteps in the hall. Instead the voices rose again from behind the building, far enough away that Jim knew they were in the compound where Ben had stolen the clothing. With the stool back beneath the window, he inched upward until he could peer with one eye through the bottom left corner of the unpainted glass. The woman who washed her clothing beside the step stood between the two men, pointing dramatically toward the clothes line and raising her arms in gestures of baffled resignation. Again the men looked up at the window and Jim pulled away, jumping to the floor and pushing the stool back to the table. He sat on his bed, heart throbbing violently as he envisioned the search of the room. Someone would notice the broken bed or the panel. Once opened, the escape route would be clear. They would push him up against the wall next to his scratched calendar marks and shoot him through the head.

Instead the guards came at their usual time with his evening meal and he spent a sleepless night waiting for a visit that didn’t happen. They came again in late morning, the officer and the civilian, pulling after them a pale, haggard woman whose straw-colored hair hung in matted strands about her thin face. She cowered against the wall beside the door, gazing at Jim with wild, frightened eyes. The officer with the gold diamonds still carried his clipboard and still wore the sweat stained jacket. He marched rigidly to where Jim stood beside his bed.