Whirlwind

by James Clavell

  “And how will the loan be repaid, over what time period?” Bakravan asked. “Out of oil revenues, as always,” Kia said patiently, “just as the Shah would have done, the time period over five years, at the usual one percent per month. My friend, Mehdi, Mehdi Bazargan, says Parliament will guarantee the loan the moment it meets.” He smiled and added, exaggerating slightly, “As I’m not only in Mehdi’s cabinet but also in his inner cabinet as well, I can personally watch over the legislation. Of course you know how important the loan is, and equally important to the bazaar.”

  “Of course.” Bakravan tugged at his beard to prevent himself guffawing. Poor Ali, he thought, just as pompous as ever! “It’s certainly not my place to mention it, old friend, but some of the bazaaris have asked me what about the millions in bullion already advanced to support the revolution? Advanced to the fund for Ayatollah Khomeini—may God protect him,” he added politely, in his heart thinking: May God remove him from us quickly now that we’ve won, before he and his rapacious, blinkered, parasitical mullahs do too much damage. As for you, Ali, old friend, bender of the truth, exaggerater of your own importance, you may be my oldest friend, but if you think I’d trust you further than a camel can cast dung… As if any one of us would trust any Iranian outside of immediate family—and then only with caution.

  “Of course I know the Ayatollah never saw, needed, or touched a single rial,” he said, meaning it, “but even so, we bazaaris advanced huge amounts of cash, bullion, and foreign exchange on his behalf, financing his campaign—of course for the Glory of God and our beloved Iran.”

  “Yes, we know. And God will bless you for it. So does the Ayatollah. Of course these loans will be repaid immediately we have the money—the very second! The Tehran bazaari loans are the first in line to be repaid of all internal debts—we, in government, realize how important your help has been. But, Jared, Excellency, old friend, before we can do anything we must get oil production going and to do this we must have some cash. The immediate 5 million U.S. we need will be like a grain of rice in a barrel now that all foreign banks will be curbed, controlled, and most cast out. The Pr—”

  “Iran does not need any foreign banks. We bazaaris could do everything necessary—if we were asked. Everything. If we search diligently for the glory of Iran, perhaps, perhaps we might discover we have all the skills and connections in our midst.” Bakravan sipped his tea with studied elegance. “My son Meshang has a degree from the Harvard Business School.” The lie bothered none of them. “With the help of brilliant students like him…” He left the thought hanging.

  Ali Kia picked it up immediately. “Surely you wouldn’t consider lending his services to my Ministry of Finance and Banking? Surely he’s far too important to you and your colleagues? Of course, he must be!”

  “Yes, yes, he is. But our beloved country’s needs should take precedence over our personal wishes—if of course the government wanted to use his unique talents.”

  “I will mention it to Mehdi in the morning. Yes, at my daily morning meeting with my old friend and colleague,” Ali Kia said, wondering briefly when he would be allowed to have his first audience—long overdue—since he had been appointed deputy minister of finance. “I may tell him also you agree to the loan?”

  “I will consult my colleagues at once. It would, of course, be their decision, not mine,” Bakravan added with open sadness that fooled neither of them. “But I will press your case, old friend.”

  “Thank you.” Again Kia smiled. “We in government, and the Ayatollah, will appreciate the help of the bazaaris.”

  “We’re always ready to help. As you know, we always have,” the older man said smoothly, remembering the massive financial support given by the bazaar to the mullahs, to Khomeini over the years—or to any political figure of integrity, like Ali Kia, who had opposed either of the Shahs.

  God curse the Pahlavis, Bakravan thought, they’re the cause of all our trouble. Curse them for all the trouble they’ve caused with their insistent, too hasty demand for modernization, for their insane disregard of our advice and influence, for inviting foreigners in, as many as fifty thousand Americans alone just a year ago, letting them take all the best jobs and all the banking business. The Shah spurned our help, broke our monopoly, strangled us, and tore away our historic heritage. Everywhere, all over Iran.

  But we had our revenge. We gambled our remaining influence and treasure on Khomeini’s implacable hatred and his hold over the unwashed and illiterate masses. And we won. And now, with foreign banks gone, foreigners gone, we’ll be richer and with more influence than ever before. This loan will be easy to arrange but Ali Kia and his government can sweat a little. We’re the only ones who can raise the money. The payment offered is not high enough yet, not nearly enough to compensate for the closing of the bazaar all those months. Now what should it be? he asked himself, highly satisfied with their negotiations. Perhaps the percentage shou—

  The door burst open and Emir Paknouri rushed into the room. “Jared, they’re going to arrest me!” he cried out, tears now running down his face.

  “Who? Who’s going to arrest you and for what?” Bakravan spluttered, the customary calm of his house obliterated, the faces of frightened assistants, clerks, teaboy, and managers now crowding the doorway.

  “For…for crimes against Islam!” Paknouri wept openly.

  “There must be some mistake! It’s impossible!”

  “Yes, it’s impossible but they…they came to my house with my name…half an hour ago we—”

  “Who? Give me their names and I’ll destroy their fathers! Who came?”

  “I told you! Guards, Revolutionary Guards, Green Bands, yes, them of course,” Paknouri said and rushed on, oblivious of the sudden hush. Ali Kia blanched and someone muttered, God protect us! “Half an hour or so ago, with my name on a piece of paper…my name, Emir Paknouri, chief of the league of goldsmiths who gave millions of rials…they came to my house accusing me, but the servants…and my wife was there and I…by God and the Prophet, Jared,” he cried out as he fell to his knees, “I’ve committed no crimes—I’m an Elder of the Bazaar, I’ve given millions and—” Suddenly he stopped, seeing Ali Kia. “Kia, Ali Kia, Excellency, you know only too well what I did to help the revolution!”

  “Of course.” Kia was white-faced, his heart thumping. “There has to be a mistake.” He knew Paknouri as a highly influential bazaari. Well respected, Sharazad’s first husband, and one of his longtime sponsors. “There must be a mistake!”

  “Of course there’s a mistake!” Bakravan put his arm around the poor man and tried to calm him. “Fresh tea at once!” he ordered.

  “A whisky. Please, do you have a whisky?” Paknouri mumbled. “I’ll have tea afterward, do you have whisky?”

  “Not here, my poor friend, but of course there’s vodka.” It came at once. Paknouri downed it and choked a little. He refused another. In a minute or two he became a little calmer and began again to tell what had happened. The first he had known that something was wrong were loud voices in the hallway of his palatial house just outside the bazaar—he had been upstairs with his wife, preparing for dinner. “The leader of the Guards—there were five of them—the leader was waving this piece of paper and demanding to see me. Of course the servants wouldn’t dare disturb me or let such an ape in, so my chief servant said he’d see if I was in and came upstairs. He told us the paper was signed by someone called Uwari, on behalf of the Revolutionary Komiteh—in the Name of God, who’re they? Who’s this man Uwari? Have you ever heard of such a man, Jared?”

  “It’s a common enough name,” Bakravan said, following the Iranian custom of always having a ready answer to something you don’t know. “Have you, Excellency Ali?”

  “As you say, it’s a common name. Did this man mention anyone else, Excellency Paknouri?”

  “He may have, God protect us! But who are they—this Revolutionary Komiteh? Ali Kia, surely you’d know?”

  “Many names have been mentione
d,” Kia said importantly, hiding his instant unease every time “Revolutionary Komiteh” was uttered. Like everyone else in government or outside it, he thought disgustedly, I don’t have any real information about its actual makeup or when or where it meets, only that it seemed to come into being the moment Khomeini returned to Iran, barely two weeks ago and, since yesterday when Bakhtiar fled into hiding, it’s been acting like it was a law unto itself, ruling in Khomeini’s name and with his authority, precipitously appointing new judges, most with no legal training whatsoever, authorizing arrests, revolutionary courts, and immediate executions, totally outside normal law and jurisprudence—and against our Constitution! May all their houses burn down and they go to the hell they deserve!

  “Only this morning my friend Mehdi…” he began confidentially, then stopped, pretending to notice the staff still crowding the doorway for the first time, waved an imperious hand dismissing them. When the door was reluctantly closed, he dropped his voice, passing on the rumor as though it was private knowledge, “Only this morning, with, er, with our blessing, he went to the Ayatollah and threatened to resign unless the Revolutionary Komiteh stopped bypassing him and his authority and so put them in their place for all time.”

  “Praise be to God!” Paknouri said, very relieved. “We didn’t win the revolution to let more lawlessness take the place of SAVAK, foreign domination, and the Shah!”

  “Of course not! Praise be to God that now the government is in the best of hands. But please, Excellency Paknouri, please continue with your harrowing story.”

  “There’s not much more to tell you, Ali,” Paknouri said, calmer and braver now, surrounded by such powerful friends. “I, er, I went down to see these intruders at once and told them it was all a fatuous mistake, but this boneheaded, illiterate piece of dog turd just waved the paper in my face, said I was arrested, and that I was to go with them. I told them to wait—I told them to wait and went to fetch some papers but my wife…my wife told me not to trust them, that perhaps they were Tudeh or mujhadin in disguise, or fedayeen. I agreed with her and decided it would be best to come here to consult with you and the others.” He put the real facts out of his mind, that he had fled the moment he had heard the leader call out in the name of Revolutionary Komiteh, and Uwari personally, that Paknouri the Miser submit to God for crimes against God.

  “My poor friend,” Bakravan said. “My poor friend, how you must have suffered! Never mind, you’re safe now. Stay here tonight. Ali, directly after first prayer tomorrow, go to the prime minister’s office and make sure this matter is dealt with and those fools are punished. We all know Emir Paknouri’s a patriot, that he and all the goldsmiths supported the revolution and are essential to this loan.” Wearily he closed his ears to all the platitudes that Ali Kia was uttering now.

  He studied Paknouri, seeing his still-pallid face and sweat-matted hair. Poor fellow, what a shock they must have given him. What a shame, with all his riches and good name—connected as he is through Cousin Valik’s wife Annoush to the Qajars—that all my work for Sharazad came to naught. What a shame he didn’t sire children with her and so cement our families together, even one child, for then certainly there would never have been a divorce and my troubles wouldn’t have been compounded with this Lochart foreigner. However much this foreigner tries to learn our ways he never will. And how expensive it is to keep him to uphold the family’s reputation! I must talk to Cousin Valik and again ask him to arrange for Lochart to have extra monies—Valik and his greed-filled IHC partners can well afford to do that for me from the millions they earn, most of it in foreign currency now! What would it cost them? Nothing! The cost would be passed on to Gavallan and S-G. The partners owe me a thousand favors, I who for years have advised them how to gain so much control and wealth with so little effort!

  “Pay Lochart yourself, Jared, Excellency,” Valik had said to him rudely the last time he’d asked him. “Surely that’s your own charge. You share everything we gain—and what’s such a tiny amount to my favorite cousin and the richest bazaari in Tehran?”

  “But it should be a partnership charge. We can use him when we have 100 percent control. With the new plan for the future of IHC, the partnership will be richer than ever an—”

  “I will at once consult the other partners. Of course, it is their decision not mine…”

  Liar, the old man thought, sipping tea, but then, I would have said the same. He stifled a yawn, tired now and hungry. A nap before dinner would do me good. “So sorry, Excellencies, so sorry but I have urgent business to attend to. Paknouri, old friend, I’m glad everything is resolved. Stay here tonight, Meshang will arrange quilts and cushions, and don’t worry! Ali, my friend, walk with me to the bazaar gate—do you have transport?” he asked thinly, knowing that the first perk of a deputy minister would be a car and chauffeur and unlimited gasoline.

  “Yes, thank you, the PM insisted I arrange it, insisted—the importance of our department, I suppose.”

  “As God wants!” Bakravan said.

  Well satisfied, they all went out of the room, down the narrow stairs and into the small passageway that led to the open-fronted shop. Their smiles vanished and bile filled their mouths.

  Waiting there were the same five Green Bands, lolling on the desks and chairs, all armed with U.S. Army carbines, all in their early twenties, unshaven or bearded, their clothes poor and soiled, some with holed shoes, some sockless. The leader picked his teeth silently, the rest were smoking, carelessly dropping their ash on Bakravan’s priceless Kash’kai carpets. One of these youths coughed badly as he smoked, his breath wheezing.

  Bakravan felt his knees weakening. All of his staff stood frozen against one of the walls. Everyone. Even his favorite teaboy. Out in the street it was very quiet, no one about—even the owners of the moneylending shops across the alley seemed to have vanished.

  “Salaam, Agha, the Blessing of God on you,” he said politely, his voice sounding strange. “What can I do for you?”

  The leader paid no attention to him, just kept his eyes boring into Paknouri, his face handsome but scarred by the parasite disease, carried by sandflies and almost endemic in Iran. He was in his early twenties, dark eyes and hair and work-scarred hands that toyed with the carbine. His name was Yusuf Senvar—Yusuf the bricklayer.

  The silence grew and Paknouri could stand the strain no longer. “It’s all a mistake,” he screamed. “You’re making a mistake!”

  “You thought you’d escape the Vengeance of God by running away?” Yusuf’s voice was soft, almost kind—though with a coarse village accent that Bakravan could not place.

  “What Vengeance of God?” Paknouri screamed. “I’ve done nothing wrong, nothing.”

  “Nothing? Haven’t you worked for and with foreigners for years, helping them to carry off the wealth of our nation?”

  “Of course not to do that but to create jobs and help the econ—”

  “Nothing? Haven’t you served the Satan Shah for years?”

  Again Paknouri shouted, “No, I was in opposition, everyone knows I… I was in oppo—”

  “But you still served him and did his bidding?”

  Paknouri’s face was twisted and almost out of control. His mouth worked but he could not get the words out. Then he croaked, “Everyone served him—of course everyone served him, he was the Shah, but we worked for the revolution—the Shah was the Shah, of course everyone served him while he was in power…”

  “The Imam didn’t,” Yusuf said, his voice suddenly raw. “Imam Khomeini never served the Shah. In the Name of God, did he?” Slowly he looked from face to face. No one answered him.

  In the silence, Bakravan watched the man reach into his torn pocket and find a piece of paper and peer at it and he knew that he was the only one here who could stop this nightmare.

  “By Order of the Revolutionary Komiteh,” Yusuf began, “and Ali’allah Uwari: Miser Paknouri, you are called to judgment. Submit yo—”

  “No, Excellency,” Bakravan s
aid firmly but politely, his heart pounding in his ears. “This is the bazaar. Since the beginning of time you know the bazaar has its own laws, its own leaders. Emir Paknouri is one of them, he cannot be arrested or taken away against his will. He cannot be touched—that is bazaari law from the beginning of time.” He stared back at the young man, fearlessly, knowing that the Shah, even SAVAK, had never dared to challenge their laws or right of sanctuary.

  “Is bazaari law greater than God’s law, Moneylender Bakravan?”

  He felt a wave of ice go through him. “No—no, of course not.”

  “Good. I obey God’s law and do God’s work.”

  “But you may not arres—”

  “I obey God’s law and do only God’s work.” The man’s eyes were brown and guileless under his black brows. He gestured at his carbine. “I do not need this gun—none of us need guns to do God’s work. I pray with all my heart to be a martyr for God, for then I’ll go straight to Paradise without the need to be judged, my sins forgiven me. If it’s tonight, then I will die blessing him who kills me because I know I will die doing God’s work.”

  “God is Great,” one of the men said, the others echoed him.

  “Yes, God is Great. But you, Moneylender Bakravan, did you pray five times today as the Prophet ordered?”

  “Of course, of course,” Bakravan heard himself say, knowing his lie to be sinless because of taqiyah—concealment—the Prophet’s permission to any Muslim to lie about Islam if he feels his life is threatened.

  “Good. Be silent and be patient, I come back to you later.” Another chill racked him as he saw the man turn his attention back to Paknouri. “By order of the Revolutionary Komiteh and Ali’allah Uwari: Miser Paknouri, submit yourself to God for crimes against God.”