“A doroshkeh accident,” he said.
“He and his doroshkehs,” Chandler lamented. “Crushed between two city buses. He and his servant girl killed instantly. Only the driver survived. Not a scratch. Imagine that.”
“Not a good way to go,” Pearce remarked. “But fast. The corpses were unrecognizable, of course. Good thing the driver could identify them.”
Lily wanted to speak, to say something in protest, but instead composed herself. She couldn’t afford to look like a fool—or worse.
“A doroshkeh accident,” Lily said.
“And he went owing me money, too,” Chandler said.
The ambassadors chuckled.
“Never could play a decent hand of cards.”
Chapter 55
Kandovan, Iran
An ancient legend—Sardinian, I think—alleges that the bodies of those born on Christmas Eve will never become dust like the rest of ours, but will be preserved until the end of time.”
The Great Detective opened the wooden shutter above the tiny propane stove, but just barely. Outside the sun was completely obscured, and the swirling air was the color of sepia. His hair and skin felt coated in a film of sediment that was somewhere between the consistency of cake flour and ash. Even Pasha Tarkhan’s bandages—fresh only a couple of hours before—had already taken on the look of ancient parchment.
“It’s a shame you can’t get a good look around here,” Rodki continued. “It’s an interesting place. Of course, you’re much more travelled than I am, so perhaps this is all passé for you.”
The weather had held up General Pushkin’s plane, and judging by the sound of the wind battering the tiny beehive of a place they were staying in, the plane wouldn’t be arriving any time soon. Dust storms in this part of the world were legendary. Hazardous, and with the potential to last for days. The one that had begun that morning had started typically enough, but by afternoon, as the storm picked up strength—first obscuring the mountains, then the town, then even their last few feet of vision—locals were already speculating that this might become the worst storm in memory.
“Just the same,” Rodki mumbled.
He was not looking forward to handing Pasha Tarkhan over to General Pushkin anyway. It spelled the end of a brilliant man, and Russia was fast running out of people with any real brains—what with his former master’s purges. The Great Detective thought it was a marvel the Soviet Union continued to function at all and wondered how many decades it could survive on merely the fumes of its revolution.
“Quite a predicament,” he said, though mostly to himself this time.
“I thought I was the only one of us in a predicament,” Pasha said.
Rodki Semyonov smiled; he couldn’t help himself. Pasha Tarkhan hadn’t uttered a word in their time together. Not as Rodki removed a bullet from his upper chest, and not during their endless ride back to Kandovan. The Great Detective, having met Tarkhan before, knew what good company he was. And if there was one thing for which he had a weakness, it was for good company. So much of his life was solitary.
“Your predicament is certainly grimmer than mine, but we are both in a predicament,” the Great Detective alleged. He hummed a few lines of “The Lights of Moscow Nights.”
This time Pasha Tarkhan smiled. “You don’t belong here,” he said.
“Here,” Rodki asked. “In Kandovan?”
Tarkhan shook his head. “Moscow.”
Tarkhan adjusted his position and tried unsuccessfully to sit up. The morphine was starting to wear off. Rodki Semyonov removed a blanket—a rich tapestry of henna, mustard seed and eggplant—from the top shelf of the pantry and stuffed it carefully behind Pasha Tarkhan’s shoulders. The morphine was running low, and he only wanted to use it when absolutely necessary.
“Why would you say such a thing?” he asked.
“Why would you be interested in my comfort?” Pasha countered.
Rodki shrugged and smiled again. “I’m interested in you, of course. What can I say? I’m a detective.”
“Precisely.”
The Great Detective had nothing further to add. To his disappointment, this spelled an end to their brief exchange, and Rodki wondered if there was anything he could have said to save the conversation. That he couldn’t leave his wife, perhaps, whose memory sat with him every morning at his breakfast table? Or worse, that he simply loved the taste of Russian coffee, though he knew it was terrible by any rational, objective standard?
“Mr. Tarkhan,” he said. “You are Georgian by extraction. But I am a Russian tried and true.”
“Then perhaps you’re right,” Tarkhan said, his voice trailing off as a wave of pain overtook him. “I’m not the only one in a predicament.”
Rodki Semyonov watched Pasha Tarkhan slip further into an exhausted sleep. He liked the man—very much—and held his general character and abilities in high esteem. He knew little about him, of course, at least specifically. But nobody in Moscow talked about Tarkhan much, and that in and of itself told him a great deal.
It occurred to him he should kill Pasha Tarkhan now, rather than let Pushkin get ahold of him. Such thoughts were rash, and the Great Detective knew it. How could he explain shooting a sleeping man before his interrogation? If he’d shot him like he should have—when Tarkhan had attempted to flee in the Mahallah—this wouldn’t be an issue. Damn “The Lights of Moscow Nights.”
No, the Great Detective would have to let him go under some sort of plausible circumstance and then kill him as he made his escape. It would be best for everyone that way. Even General Pushkin, who despite his cruel nature, would surely have felt a brief pang of regret as he sent his one-time friend to die in a gulag.
Chapter 56
Tehran
Sputnik, you said?” Pearce repeated. “Sounds like a board game.”
“Or a game of dice,” Sandy Chandler offered. They’d both agreed it was a funny-sounding name for spaceship. “Not at all dignified,” Pearce concluded while Chandler poured himself another bourbon.
Lily’s mention of Sputnik at this point in the game was undoubtedly reckless, but she could think of no other alternative. The horrible news about Mansoor Nassa had been a considerable blow to her position of strength.
“How about Dostoyevsky 1?” Pearce chortled.
“Or The Brothers Karamazov, if there were three of them?” Chandler chimed in.
“Dostoyevsky intended the work to be the first part of an epic titled, The Life of a Great Sinner. He died, of course, before he could complete it.”
Pearce hmmm’d.
Lily put her drink down, uncrossed her legs and cupped her hands over her knees.
“The satellite is a five-hundred-eighty-five-millimeter diameter sphere, assembled from two hemispheres which are hermetically sealed using O-rings—whatever those are—and connected using thirty-six bolts,” she recited. “It has a mass of eighty-three point six kilograms. The hemispheres, covered with a highly polished one-millimeter-thick heat shield, are made of an aluminum-magnesium-titanium alloy, and are two millimeters thick. Shall I continue?”
Pearce blinked hard and looked at Chandler, who put his drink down and folded his arms across his chest. Behind them, leaning with his back against the gigantic picture window, Fedot stood smiling.
“Please,” the American ambassador said.
“The satellite carries two antennas. Each is made up of two parts, two point four and two point nine meters long. Each of these antennas resembles whiskers pointing to one side, at equal thirty-five-degree angles with the longitudinal axis of the satellite. The power supply, with a mass of fifty-one kilograms, is in the shape of an octagonal nut with the radio transmitter in its hole. It consists of three silver-zinc batteries. A temperature regulation system contains a fan, a dual thermal switch and a control thermal switch. Sputnik is filled with dry nitrogen, pressurized to one point three atm—or atn, I’m not sure. The typeface was smeared. While attached to the rocket, Sputnik will be protected by a cone-shaped, payload f
airing, with a height of eighty centimeters and an aperture of forty-eight degrees. The fairing will separate from both Sputnik and the rocket simultaneously when the satellite is ejected.”
Pearce and Chandler stood together at the bar, unmoving. Finally, Chandler cleared his throat.
“You, uh, remember all that?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Well, that was quite a recitation, I must say.” He sauntered over to Lily and hovered above her. “And one any pretty little actress could have memorized on the long journey from Russia to Iran.”
Lily held the American ambassador’s gaze and then glanced over to Pearce. Judging by the look on Barnaby Pearce’s face, Lily had struck a nerve. The British ambassador was a trained engineer, after all, and Mansoor Nassa had made a point of his passionate interest in astronomy. Pearce would know her level of detail and explicit knowledge could be neither lie nor fantasy. Lily stood up and placed her hands on her hips.
“I’m not an actress, Ambassador Chandler,” she said. “I’m the daughter of a very powerful man. And it took me thirty seconds to memorize the information I just gave you. I’ve heard it’s called a photographic memory, but I’ve never paid such monikers much thought. To me, it was always just a great tool for getting good grades without having to try too hard—you know?”
Chandler scratched his neck and sniffed. It was a gesture meant to buy him time, not satisfy an itch.
“Well, then, Miss Tassos,” he said. “Why don’t you write down these Sputnik plans for us so that we can actually share them with someone who might know what a—what is it you said, ‘O-ring,’ is?”
Lily sighed. It had been imperative that she describe the Sputnik plans perfectly and convincingly for credibility’s sake, but she also needed to sound just naïve and frightened enough that the ambassadors would never suspect she had any more than what she’d given them.
“I can,” she explained. “But I’m not sure they’d do you much good. I only looked at a couple of pages worth of the written designs. The complete plans are copied onto a tiny roll of microfilm—one that only Pasha Tarkhan can provide, I’m afraid.”
It occurred to her that she had been too direct for Ambassador Chandler’s liking. Most men liked their tough-talking women on a movie screen, played by women like Lauren Bacall. Lily sat back down and buried her face in her palms.
“Oh, please,” she begged. “I must help Pasha. I love him.”
It was true, of course, but she laid it on thick the way she did back home when she was stopped for a traffic violation. There was always a crisis, a vindictive boyfriend, a broken engagement (although that one had been true) she could pull out of her back pocket. That and a tear or two would soften the stern look on any policeman’s face. The few times she’d told the truth, remained stalwart and taken responsibility—Yes, Officer, I certainly have been drinking, but I’m not drunk per se—she got the ticket. She couldn’t afford to get the ticket with Pearce and Chandler. Pasha’s life was at stake.
“There, there,” Chandler said, patting her shoulder.
“I guess I should call Daddy—maybe he could help after all. Do you suppose I could use your telephone?”
Pearce and Chandler looked to one another in unison.
“I can’t imagine that will be necessary,” Pearce countered. Chandler nodded. “I’m sure I could make a couple of calls and get some idea of where a Soviet agent might take a high-level diplomatic defector around here.”
“How much longer?” Lily yelled over the wind. Her goggles were pressed on too tightly, giving her a dreadful headache. Lily despised motorcycles. “Fedot!”
Fedot didn’t answer –perhaps he didn’t hear her. He was pushing the cycle’s engine to its limits and it—along with the sidecar Lily was crouched in—practically hovered above the road. Actually, Lily wished it was a road—by her standards, anyway. The divots, pea gravel, dust and potholes that characterized the main artery leading to Iran’s rugged northwest could hardly be called a road. She held on tightly, nearly getting bounced out and into a ditch, where the leather cap, jacket and thick canvas pants she was wearing might protect her from the worst kinds of road burns and scrapes but couldn’t keep her from bashing her head on some of the larger rocks at the road’s edge.
“Watch it, will you?” she chided.
Lily was still angry, and unfairly taking it out on Fedot. She had expected more help from the Ambassadors Chandler and Pearce. Especially after coming clean not only about Sputnik, but the Soviet directive to put a nuclear arsenal into space in sight of a decade. For all that, she’d gotten the name of a province where Pasha had likely been taken, a village with a rudimentary airstrip frequented by the Soviet Union, and a BMW R69 motorcycle with sidecar.
Pearce had also given her some of his younger son’s biking clothes, making Lily look something like Amelia Earhart, though not, she hoped, on her way down and into oblivion. He would have liked to do more, she thought. As she and Fedot prepared to leave, Pearce had come out to the cycle to “bid them farewell.” In reality he’d come to slip her a gun. It was a .44 Magnum—bigger and better than the one she’d taken from Gulyas—and likely an indication of the kind of trouble Barnaby Pearce thought she was getting herself into. Ambassador Pearce, for all his back-slapping and bourbon-swilling, was a serious man who held his cards very close.
Lily wondered what Mansoor Nassa thought of Pearce. She imagined he’d liked him very much—perhaps they’d talked of horror movies together. Nassa’s death weighed heavily on her heart in an unexpected way. Perhaps it was his lovely and peculiar way with words, or the quotes he could summon so effortlessly. What was it he had said to her on that morning as they left for the market? Is not pacifism cowardice dressed in the frock of ideology? Pasha had laughed heartily at that.
“We’re close!” Fedot shouted. “But I’m afraid not close enough, Miss Lily.”
He pointed toward the horizon—or at least to what would have been the horizon. Up ahead, billowing, coming straight for them, was an enormous russet-colored cloud that stretched from the sky to the soil.
“What the hell is that?” Lily cried.
“Looks like a dust storm.”
“How on earth are we going to get around it?”
Fedot glanced toward her and revved the engine. “We’re not.”
Lily watched as the distance between them and the dust cloud closed.
“Fedot, we can’t do this!”
“Have faith, Miss Lily,” he shouted. “If there were another way, surely God would have shown us by now.”
Chapter 57
In a moment, day turned to night. The wind churned the air around them as the storm enveloped Lily and Fedot completely, obscuring everything but a few feet of vision. The air was dense and chalky, difficult to breathe. Lily pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, holding it over her mouth and nose. Up ahead, there came into view what looked like a large shadow shaped in the form of a termite’s nest and studded with hazy, twinkling lights.
“Kandovan,” Fedot said as the motorcycle slowed.
The village of crude dwellings began to take shape as they entered its perimeters. With its streets deserted, Kandovan had the feel of an abandoned archeological site, except for the scattering of lanterns in the windows of various caves and hives. The only sounds were those of the storm—the wind, the tiny bits of refuse being blown about, the bray of an animal in pain.
A little pension sat at the foot of the village, accessible only by a stone staircase leading down to a rounded doorway. The entrance resembled a tomb, Lily thought. She and Fedot parked the R69 and made their way to the pension step by step, enduring the assault of pebbles, dust particles, chips of wood and assortment of granules that whipped at them like a gauntlet of cat o’ nine tails.
“Good evening,” Lily bid the pension owner in Arabic as they entered the lobby. The room had curved ceilings the color of bone and was furnished with Persian rugs, pillows and the occasional wooden end
table that held worn and charred kerosene lamps.
The owner—sporting a quilted tarboush and a midnight blue tunic—introduced himself as Ismayil. He stared blankly at Lily, a study in incomprehension as he tried to grasp what kind of woman would dress the way she was dressed. It was odd even by the modern, Western standards the Shah had imposed upon Persia.
“A room, please, Mr. Ismayil,” Lily said. “For my husband and myself.” She took off her goggles, revealing two white rings around her eyes, and smiled. The pension owner laughed.
“What a weather,” Ismayil said in his native Azeri-Turkic. “Allah is angry with someone.” With its Arabic influences, Lily was able to discern roughly what he was saying. His intent was another thing altogether. She wasn’t quite sure whether he was implying it was she who had angered Allah or if Allah was simply taking his wrath out on some other unnamed offender.
“I’m sure Allah will be just in his dealings,” she said in Arabic. Ismayil seemed to understand, or at least get the gist of her comment. From behind a thick, embroidered pillow, he procured a wooden block the size of a deck of cards. It hung on the end of a loop of rope, and the owner swung it around his index finger as he led them through a honeycomb of guest rooms. Theirs was tucked around a corner, and he opened the door for them, hanging the block on an irregular, handmade nail that protruded from the wooden door at eye level. Ismayil stepped into the darkness of the guest room, lit a lantern and scurried away, giggling after bidding them a good night.
“I guess they don’t believe in locks around here,” Lily said. She swiped at the hanging block—the only apparent marker that their room was now occupied.
Lily stood outside their door for a moment and listened—familiarizing herself with the various noises specific to the pension. There weren’t many of them, as the pension couldn’t have had more than one other occupant: she could hear the habitual snorting of a man—probably middle-aged—with a sinus problem, and the clinking of water glasses being washed in a small tub. Having no windows, the pension was ventilated by a series of narrow tunnels leading to its plateau rooftop, and these were the only conduits to the sounds of the storm outside. Its incessant howling—nearly deafening in the streets—was barely audible over Isamyil’s alto soprano hum.
[2017] The Hungarian Page 25