The Ayatollah's Money
Page 15
Chapter 16 – The Guard Responds
The five plain clothes Revolutionary Guard Corps guys (no women allowed) sat in the living room of Laleh’s parents, along with the parents and all the brothers and sisters and in-laws. The Guard guys could see that all the family members were upset, but they seemed more pissed than worried, which they found odd. The Colonel said, “Why do you think something bad happened to her?”
The father said, “Because she’s never done anything like this before. She’s a good girl, she is.”
“What does she do? Is she married? How old is she?”
While the mother answered the questions, the wife of the youngest brother, the person lowest on the totem pole, served the Guard guys coffee in little cups, which they needed to keep awake from this boring assignment of investigating a missing person. They would rather have been duking it out in the trenches with Zionist commandos, or so they thought, none of them ever having actually met an Israeli before, in combat or for lunch. There were five of them on this assignment because the Colonel had to give them something to do once in a while. He had two hundred guys in his group, and work for only about thirty of them. The rest were there just in case the civilian population got uppity, or the Americans attacked. It was lucky for them that Iran has a lot of oil money to pay all the government employees they have on the roles that don’t do any, or much, work. So the four lower ranked guys sat around the living room drinking coffee and wondering if any of the wives and daughters of this clan fooled around.
The Colonel said, “So what does she do on her computer?”
The father said, “She helps us with our businesses. She’s good with numbers and she keeps track of things for us.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like our money, what little there is of it. And our liabilities.”
“Assets,” said the mother.
“What?”
“She keeps track of our assets, not our liabilities, you idiot.” She smiled at the Guard. “He’s not too good with some aspects of some of our businesses.”
The wife of the fourth youngest son, who didn’t like the wife of the third youngest son, Yousef, said, “She keeps track of Yousef’s liabilities, because that’s all he ever has. He has no assets.”
Yousef’s wife, looked daggers at the one who had dissed her husband and said, “At least we didn’t give that thumb drive to the guys from Finland without getting paid for it first, the way Kahleed did with the computer parts.”
Everyone in the room looked at the wives of the third and fourth youngest sons, especially the Guard Colonel. The father was the first to react, and said, “Don’t pay any attention to either of those two; they don’t have anything to do with our businesses. They watch soap operas on TV all day, and get strange ideas. Khaleed, Yousef, get them out of here.” Whereupon the sons grabbed their wives by the arms and led them down the long hall and out the back door.
The Colonel wasn’t sure what to do. Continue the investigation of the missing daughter, or turn his attention to the more interesting issue with Finland. The mother was sharp, getting out of her chair and kneeling down in front of the Colonel. She took his hand in hers and said, “Please, find our Laleh. She’s missing. She’s been gone for three weeks, and we need her back to straighten out our accounts and inventories. We’re going down the tubes, here.”
The Colonel wrote down a few more notes next to Laleh’s name: good with computers, knows money stuff, parents and brothers more interested in her for her business skills than as family member, these people more connected than they want us to know, missing three weeks. That was more than he wanted to know about any of these people, and it was a lot more than any of the other four Guards wanted to know. They wanted to know when they could get out of this place and back to playing cards in the barracks.
When they left the mother rolled her eyes and said, “Our protectors. Jesus !”
The second youngest son said, “Who?”
When Colonel Aliaabaadi got back to the barracks he sat down at his desk and looked at the large calendar that served as a desktop. He counted back three weeks, and in the square of that date wrote, “Laleh woman goes missing.” And promptly forgot all about her. For a while.