The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  “I was scared,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Why would you be scared to go to the police?”

  “Haven’t they told you? I’m living here illegally. I haven’t even got a driver’s—”

  “You say three people had just been killed in your apartment. And you were worried about your papers?”

  “I told you. I wasn’t thinking straight.” He doesn’t seem to know about Dan, I thought. I tried to change the subject. “Did the police say what time they came by this morning?”

  “Around the time they transferred you,” he said.

  “That wasn’t until seven, seven-thirty.”

  “You’re about to tell me the driver who attacked you returned and tidied up.”

  “No,” I said. “I think it was the housemaid.”

  The Agent cocked an eyebrow.

  “The Middle-Eastern guy—Arshan—when he picked up the flower seller’s phone, he told whoever was on the other end, ‘Your flower boy’s stained the rug. Better call the housemaid.’”

  “In English?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who do you imagine he was talking to?”

  “I don’t know. But whoever it was sent someone here to clean up after he was killed. What do they call them? Cleaners? Fixers?”

  “Apparently they call them ‘housemaids.’” He turned his gaze to Oriana. She was leaning out over the edge of the roof, exposing the dizzying heights of her thighs. “Your story raises an obvious question,” he said. “Why would the people who sent this ‘flower seller’ want to clean up after his murder?”

  He was right: It made no sense. Like Maya using a silencer. What had she been afraid of? Waking up the neighbors?

  “That must be it,” I said. “They want to keep it quiet. Away from the police and the media. They’re afraid if word gets out, everyone will want it.”

  “The mysterious plant, you mean.”

  “The lotus. Maya was fascinated by it. The Middle-Eastern guy was nearly drooling over the thing.”

  The Agent eyed me skeptically. “Why do you think that is?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe they’re some kind of flower fanatics. Like those orchid hunters in the 19th century.”

  “Orchid hunters.”

  “You’ve heard of the tulip craze in Holland? The orchid craze was even crazier. Collectors would travel to the ends of the earth to discover some new variety, then sell them at auction in London for a fortune. Rich Victorian gentlemen became totally obsessed—they’d journey deep into the jungle and practically kill each other for them. They called it ‘orchidelirium’—orchid madness.”

  The Agent squinted at me. “How is it you happen to know about this?”

  I started to say, then stopped myself. “I read an article about it.”

  “I see,” he said. “Is there any chance that article was authored by your brother?”

  I stared at him, then looked away. “Part of his dissertation, actually.”

  “Yes. I understand your brother Daniel is quite a distinguished scholar. In fact, it’s him I’ve been wanting to ask you about.”

  Here it comes, I thought. D. J.’s can of worms. Grant had been waiting all this time to crack it open. And sure enough, for the next twenty minutes, the Agent grilled me about him. He seemed to have studied in great detail Dan’s so-called criminal record. And he knew all about the incident in Greece. Now this Sherlock was determined to discover what Professor Moriarty was up to. Why had Dan sent me the seeds? What was he doing in Asia? When had I last heard from him? Where did I think he was now? His questions reminded me of the questions from Maya—or the man with the knife, for that matter. They all seemed to be suffering from the same desperate need. I began to wonder what the Agent was really after. The killers? The lotus? Or Dan?

  He gazed out over the rooftops. “What if you thought your brother’s life was in danger? How would you try to warn him?”

  “That’s a funny question.”

  “You said this man ‘Arshan’ almost killed you. You said he was after your brother.”

  I hadn’t really considered the danger to Dan. “I wouldn’t be able to warn him,” I said. “I told you: I don’t know where he is.”

  “No address. No email. No cell phone.”

  “No. He doesn’t…we don’t…communicate.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to risk bringing Phoebe’s name into it. “It’s personal,” I said.

  The Agent glanced over his shoulder at Oriana, wandering among the pots of bamboo. He inched slightly closer. “By personal, you mean…?”

  For a moment I considered answering him. Then I looked past him at Oriana as she crouched to caress a pink-flowered hibiscus. “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Friend of mine,” he shrugged.

  “She in the DSS, too?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Italian police?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. “Then I guess it must be personal,” I said.

  The Agent opened his mouth to answer, then seemed to take my point.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be taking a bullet for the Secretary of State or something?”

  Oriana interrupted before the Agent could reply. “Someone’s been playing hearts up here.” She was sauntering toward us, and her comment, in accented English, was apparently directed at me.

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

  She handed me a playing card, soggy from the rain. The card looked familiar, though I couldn’t remember why. I flipped it over.

  Queen of Hearts.

  The two of them seemed to be watching my reaction. “I found it between the slats of the deck there,” Oriana said, nodding back toward the stairwell. “Maybe your friend was trying to tell you something.”

  “Maya?” I looked toward the entry to the stairs. The spot where the dissimulating Indian had died. Could she have dropped the card there? I didn’t remember seeing her with it, but given how frightened I was at the time, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

  Queen of Hearts. What could it mean?

  12.

  truth

  “YOU BELIEVE I’M TELLING THE TRUTH.”

  Oriana briefly glanced at Harry Grant before she answered. “In the police report, you said this woman died in your arms.”

  I nodded, remembering with a shiver how the life had fled from of her eyes.

  Again Oriana looked at Grant. “A man might lie about a lot of things, Harry. He wouldn’t lie about that.”

  The Agent stared back at her. She seemed to be forcing his hand. He finally turned to face me with a look of resignation.“I just flew in this morning through the air base in Aviano,” he said. “I’m the Regional Security Officer for the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.”

  “Iraq?”

  “We’ve been investigating a series of assassinations in the lead up to the Iraqi elections. The victims have been local politicians, mostly. But two weeks ago an attempt was made on the life of the U.S. ambassador.”

  I had heard about it in the news. The assailant had managed to infiltrate the highest levels of Iraqi security. But at the moment of attack he had been shot dead by an alert American bodyguard. I remembered they were surprised to discover he hadn’t worn the obligatory bomb belt.

  Again Grant and Oriana seemed to be studying me, looking for some kind of reaction.

  I shrugged. “It’s Iraq. What else is new?”

  The Agent locked his eyes on me. “The assailant used a dagger. Similar to the dagger you described to the police.”

  “Damascus steel?”

  “An 800-year-old Damascene blade shaped in the form of a crescent.”

  I could barely contain myself. “What about the handle? Was there a lotus on the end?”

  “Some sort of flower icon, yes.”

  “That’s it!”

  Grant didn’t appear to shar
e my enthusiasm. “There’s more,” he said.

  I waited.

  “Five days after the assassination attempt, investigators raided the office of a conservative Shiite political party in Baghdad. The police believed this office had links to a secretive group of Iranian ex-military. No one was apprehended, but a list of twelve names turned up on a confiscated laptop. One was Ali Ashiri, the Iranian who tried to kill the Ambassador in Iraq. Another was the name of a man who’d been killed three months earlier in Damascus, after cutting the throat of a rebel leader suing for peace in Syria. And last but not least, the top name on the list, a former henchman of the Supreme Leader himself, a man believed to be their top commander in the field—a notorious assassin named Arshan Azad.”

  “Arshan!” I said. “He’s the man Maya shot on the roof!”

  “So you stated in the police report. That’s what brought us here. The police ran the name through Interpol, and Interpol notified us.”

  The speed of the DSS response was nothing short of amazing. Grant must have wrangled a plane out of Baghdad in the middle of the night. “Who are these guys?” I asked.

  “We believe they’re fundamentalists recruited out of the Quds Force, the special forces branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”

  I had heard of the Quds Force. Iran’s elite military commandoes. They received their orders directly from the “Supreme Leader” and reportedly sponsored terrorist groups all over the Middle East.

  But if these men were truly the elite, where could they go from there? “You say ‘recruited.’ By whom?”

  “We don’t really know for sure. But some think they may have been lured away by a Grand Ayatollah in the holy city of Qum.”

  “I thought there was only one Grand Ayatollah.”

  “Only one is appointed Rahbar—‘Supreme Leader,’ but there are a number of Grand Ayatollahs in Iran and several more residing in Iraq. Though they don’t often voice their differences in public, these senior clerics frequently disagree with one another—and sometimes come into conflict with the Rahbar. One of them, a radically hard-line cleric in his late seventies, appears to have had a serious falling out. He’s a paranoid recluse who grants no interviews and rarely ventures outside of his compound in Qum. But he has millions of followers, in Iran and around the world, and legions of supporters flood his treasury with donations. I’m talking easily over a hundred million dollars a year—which he invests in various ‘charitable’ and ‘educational’ projects.”

  “Like buying his own private army, you mean.”

  “A dozen men is hardly an army,” Grant said. “But twelve of the right men can do a lot of damage. And these seem to be stirring up as much trouble as they can—between reformers and hard-liners, Shi’as and Sunnis, Muslims and Christians, you name it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What could they want with my brother?

  Grant folded his arms across his chest. “According to you, they’re looking for a flower.”

  Baiting me again with sarcasm. Despite the evidence Grant had found that clearly supported my story—same kind of knife, same name on the list—the agent remained suspicious. “Why is it you think I’m not telling the truth?” I asked.

  Grant stared at me without answering. Oriana said, “Were you aware that your brother lived for a number of months in Iran?”

  I scoffed. “That was years ago.”

  “It was at the height of the Iraq War,” Grant said.

  “Well…yeah?” I remembered a sketchbook Dan had filled with ink-wash drawings of Persian ruins. “Dan was a tourist, not a terrorist,” I said. “It’s probably just a typo in your report.”

  Grant was unamused. “We noticed he wrote a lot of commentary on various anti-war websites. Sounded a little angry.”

  “A lot of people were,” I said. “It was not exactly a popular war.”

  Grant said, “It was not exactly popular with the Iranian regime, either.”

  “Look, I told you, Dan was a tourist. A visiting academic. Believe me, he’s completely apolitical. He sees war as a neurological problem.”

  “Maybe it’s not politics,” Oriana said. “We understand he studied under a Sufi mystic in Qum.”

  How had they found out that? “Dan has studied under masters in every religion in the world,” I said. “It’s a basic part of his research.”

  Grant remained unconvinced. “So you know absolutely nothing about any connections he has in Iran?”

  “No,” I said. “And certainly not with some holy man’s army.”

  The two of them continued eyeing me.

  “So you’ve really got no info on this lotus?” I asked.

  The Agent scowled and shook his head.

  They apparently knew nothing about it. And maybe, I thought, they didn’t even care. It seemed all they really wanted was Dan. “So is my brother in danger?”

  “If he’s involved with these people, yes.”

  I suddenly realized my heart was racing. “Is the danger from them, or from you?”

  Again, the two exchanged a glance.

  Grant uncapped a pen and scribbled figures on a calling card. “If you happen to remember anything,” he said, “I urge you—for your brother’s sake—to contact me immediately.”

  He waved the card to dry the ink and handed it over to me. Special Agent Harold Grant, Deputy Regional Security Officer, United States Diplomatic Security Service, United States Embassy, Baghdad, Iraq. It showed the embassy website, along with a dot-gov email address and the Agent’s scribbled phone number.

  Grant looked to Oriana. Oriana nodded, and without another word, he headed for the stairs.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked.

  “Back to Baghdad, I suppose.”

  “Baghdad? Why?”

  “The ambassador likes to keep him around—he’s proved to be very useful.”

  “You mean…Harry—?”

  “Yeah. But he thinks he just got lucky. That’s why he wants your help.”

  “He wants my help? What about helping me? I’m their next target!”

  Oriana started to leave. “I don’t think you need to worry,” she said. She called back over her shoulder, “You’ll be perfectly safe in jail.”

  I shouted after her: “Harry should tell the police what he told me!”

  “He already has,” she replied, and started down the stairs.

  I stood there dumbfounded. Gears slowly turning. No wonder the Italian police don’t trust me. They figure I’m either smuggling dope—or spying for the Ayatollah!

  I ran to the stairwell and called down after them. “That nut is still out there—you can’t just leave me here like this!”

  “I’m sorry,” Grant’s voice echoed as they spiraled down the stairs. “Rome is a bit outside my jurisdiction.”

  They reached the entry and headed out. I raced down the stairwell after them.

  Among the wetly glistening autos parked across the street sat their bone-dry, gem-blue BMW. Grant opened the door for Oriana. “Call me if you hear anything,” he shouted. “I’ll do what I can to help.”

  I stood numbly at the doorway as the Roadster pulled away. Shafts of slanting sunlight threw great shadows on the street. The low car neatly threaded through them, disappearing and reappearing again, until finally it turned a corner and vanished.

  I scanned the street for the black Mercedes. He’s sure to be coming, I thought. The shadows seemed to grow deeper. He’s probably already here.

  Two giggling schoolgirls flitted by as if nothing in the world was the matter. I backed inside and shut the door. Panic rippled through me as I stared at the broken lock.

  13.

  The Satyricon

  I FOUND MY LITTLE BACKPACK buried in my closet and tossed it onto the bed, then yanked out dresser drawers and threw a hasty selection of clothing at it. I didn’t know where I was going, how hot or cold or wet it would be, even how long I’d be gone. I just knew I had to get out of Rome before the Iranian came to kil
l me.

  I crammed the clothes into the pack, searched the desk for my passport, slipped it into a jacket pocket and started out of the room. At the doorway, I suddenly stopped and turned around.

  Lying neatly at the center of the desktop—and not on the table where I’d left it—was the bawdy paperback book I’d been reading, an Oxford Classics edition of The Satyricon. Maya and I had discussed the book at dinner. I suddenly remembered the playing card Oriana had found on the roof.

  The Queen of Hearts had been my bookmark!

  I hurried back to the desk. Maya must have taken the bookmark with her when she made her bloody climb to the roof. But why?

  Because only I would know where it came from. If the killer had somehow gotten hold of it, he wouldn’t have had a clue. I grabbed the paperback and fanned through the pages. The fluttering stopped near the back of the book, where Maya had inserted a card of her own—a plastic, numberless, room key card from the Excelsior, an exclusive hotel in the Ludovisi Quarter, a few blocks from Piazza Barberini.

  I closed the book with the card inside and stuffed it into my backpack. Out in the hallway, I stopped to listen. The coil of the stairwell seemed to reverberate with silence. I crept down the spiral to the landing and paused there, staring at the door to the street.

  The quiet unnerved me.

  Abruptly I turned and walked to the rear apartment. The workmen had left the door unlocked, and I stepped inside and found my way through darkness into the kitchen. The galley was gutted, draped with ghostly powdered canvas amid plaster-laden ladders. I unlocked the back door and peeked into the alley.

  Except for the startled white cat on the step, the puddled lane was empty.

  I slipped out quietly. The hungry cat meowed.

  “Not today, Lily.” It followed me briefly as I scurried down the lane. Alessandro Beronio emerged with his bicycle and gave me a curious look. I waved at the boy and trotted out to the street. For several blocks I hurried without a thought of where I was going, aiming only at getting away from the house and blending into the city. The morning traffic was already swelling, and a flurry of pedestrians coursed the narrow streets. I shouldered the pack, turned up my collar, and tried to merge in with the crowd.