Messenger from Mystery

by Deno Trakas

  “So you hurt me instead.”

  Just then an angry male voice called down, “Delaine, who’s there?”

  “It’s Jay, my friend from the restaurant, Dad.”

  “Well, tell him it’s late and some people have to work in the morning.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  He was right, I was being inconsiderate, but his gruffness was embarrassing, and it gave Delaine a new level of complexity—she was a young woman who still had to live with a strict father.

  She said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “Maybe when—”

  She turned, closed the door in my face, and locked it twice.

  That night it rained, soft, then hard, a thunderstorm that boomed and knocked a dead limb onto my roof, and I watched for a while as the lightning flashed and expected a wet spot to develop in the plaster above my bed, but it didn’t, and eventually I fell into fitful sleep. The next morning I returned to Nadia’s apartment complex, but her car still wasn’t there. I sat in my car, parked in the merciful morning shade of some pine trees, but I sweated anyway in the steam rising from the wet parking lot. I tried to study while I waited for her but couldn’t concentrate.

  She arrived about eleven and, although she must have seen me, she went inside without speaking. I knocked, and when she didn’t answer, I let myself in. She sat on the couch, Indian style—she was wearing jeans and a long sleeve T-shirt with CK on the front and the sleeves pulled down over her hands, as if some ruthless judge had hacked them off. She watched me. I sat in the armchair facing her. “I’m sorry about last night. But it was a misunderstanding. Delaine and I are not dating.” No response. “She started to work at the Peddler right after I did. Sometimes all of us go out together after work, but that’s it.”

  “You screw her?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You kiss her?”

  I had to think about that for a second, then said, “I’ve kissed her on the cheek, you know, like a greeting or to say goodbye.”

  She said, “It look like more. It look like she is your new girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just what I said she is, a girl I work with.”

  “A pretty girl.”

  “Yes, she’s pretty.”

  “More pretty than me.”

  “Nadia, don’t do this.”

  “I can’t help, Jay. I’m jealous.”

  I got up, went to her, sat beside her, and she let me take her in my arms and comfort her. She cried. I stroked her hair and back. With the side of her face pressed to my chest, she said, “I am sorry. I am afraid I lose you. I love you.”

  She had never said that before, and I was surprised and thrown by it, and I knew she wanted me to say it back, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t know what to say in its place, but I came up with, “I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  She pulled away, and I thought she might be mad, but she squeezed my arms, looked into my eyes, and said, “Just don’t lie, o-kay? If you are dumping me, tell me?”

  I wanted to laugh but she was serious. “Okay. I’m not dumping you.”

  Then there was a knock at the door. Neither of us made a move and the knock came again. We still didn’t move. A man’s voice called, “Plumber.”

  I got up and opened the door to a skinny guy, about my age, with a red beard and red hair sticking out under his NASCAR cap, carrying a bucket filled with tools. “This isn’t a good time,” I said. “Can you come back later?”

  “I don’t know when that’ll be. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.” I looked at Nadia and she nodded. “Okay. Come on in.” I pointed the way. “In there.” He nodded again, passed, and, once inside, had the decency to close the bathroom door behind him. I returned to the couch and sat next to her.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, facing me, gulped down a couple of breaths and said, “You still love Azi?”

  I hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in nine months.” Not much of an answer but the best I could do.

  She let go of her knees, lunged forward, flung her arms around my neck, and the motion pushed me onto my back with her on top of me. I held her and she soaked my shirt with her tears.

  “Sounds like you got bigger problems than a leaky toilet,” the plumber said. He’d followed me out—he needed something from his truck and had probably waited until the intermission of our drama so as not to interrupt us.

  “Yeah. You have anything in your truck that can fix it?”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Nope, but I can fix the toilet.”

  “You’re a better man than I.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The phone call came the next day, but not from the CIA. Instead, Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s Chief of Staff, an old friend of mine, caught me as I was about to leave my apartment on the way to school to pick up some books, saying that he was sending an aide to Columbia and wanted to know if he could drop in on me. He wouldn’t say why, just that the aide would explain when he got here. It had to be about Azi, I knew, and offered to pick him up at the airport.

  Ham and I reminisced briefly on the phone, and all day thereafter my attempts to study were interrupted by flashbacks to my University of Georgia days when I was a scared freshman and he was a confident young alum working for a peanut farmer who wanted to be governor of Georgia. Four years before that, Ham had been a senior at UGA and had directed Carter’s first campaign against the bat-wielding-racist Lester Maddox. At campaign headquarters on election night of the first run for governor, when it became clear that Carter would lose to Maddox by a few thousand votes, Carter slipped away, but Ham stood up on a folding chair, beer can raised, and said, Look out Lester—in four years we’ll be back to kick your ass! And that’s what they did, Jordan and Carter. I was a volunteer, excited to be politically active in those days when political activism was cool, and I activated my coolness by putting up signs and running errands because it made me feel grown up and important.

  I would’ve liked to see Ham again, but instead I had to deal with his aide, John Michaels, whom I recognized because, as Ham said, he was a Greek boy like me.

  Michaels was shorter than me, and his dark hair was curlier and thinner than mine, but we had the same nose and skin tone. The reason I took an immediate liking to him, though, was his quick smile. He shook my hand and slapped me on the shoulder as if we were old friends. “Ham told me a lot about you, some of it good.”

  “He must have a forgiving memory. You have any luggage?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s going straight to Atlanta. This is it,” he said, holding up a briefcase.

  “Okay, where to?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to go downtown. I’ve scheduled a meeting at campaign headquarters, to fire up the troops, you know. We gotta carry some Southern states besides Georgia. Then I’ve got to be back here by 8:00 to catch my flight.”

  “Sure. I’m glad to help.” As we headed for the parking lot at a brisk pace, I tried some generic conversation. “How’s it look for November?”

  “Well, we’ve taken a beating. We won the primaries but we still couldn’t get Kennedy to concede, the lard ass—he just couldn’t believe that a KENNEDY could lose to a peanut farmer from Georgia. The numbers against Reagan don’t look good at the moment. And the economy sucks—unemployment just ticked up to 7.5%. One of the reasons for this trip is that Hamilton was recently transferred out of the White House to work full time on the election.”

  “What was he working on before?”

  Without breaking stride or looking my way, he said, “The hostage crisis.”

  I stopped walking. Even though I’d expected as much, I was still surprised. “What was his role?”

  Michaels looked around, as if the janitors in the shiny, nonchalant lobby of the Columbia airport might be spies. “He did lots of things, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss, even though he told me to trust you like a f
ellow Greek—of course he doesn’t know that Greeks don’t trust each other worth a damn.”

  “Did he meet with the Iranians? With Ghotbzadeh?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. As Jenkins had pointed out, the Ayatollah had forbidden contacts with Americans, and our media had never even hinted that clandestine meetings had taken place, as far as I knew. And I had seen little to suggest that Ham was directly involved in the hostage crisis. “Why was he transferred? Who took his place?”

  Michaels smiled. “Do you always ask two questions at once? I promise I’ll tell you almost everything, but let’s keep walking, okay?” We crossed the lobby and waded into the steamy parking lot before he continued. “He had to stay at the White House to deal with that phony cocaine rap. And he was hoping that the Iranian parliament would take some action. But then he was exonerated, and the Iranians got constipated, as always, so he was transferred because the campaign needs him in the field. The Party has been a mess since the primaries, and we need Ham to pull it together before November. He hasn’t given up on the hostages, though. He’s been working on getting them out since day one. From what I understand, he’s been damn close too, more than once.”

  I took a minute to let all this sink in, to imagine Hamilton meeting in Europe somewhere with Bani-Sadr or Ghotbzadeh, to realize that there must have been a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we never heard of. I said, “I guess you’ll tell me eventually what I have to do with this.” We had reached my Toyota, I unlocked the passenger side door for him, and he climbed in.

  I went around, got in, and revved up for the trip to downtown Columbia, nudging my mind off the hostage crisis just enough to apologize, “Sorry I don’t have air-conditioning.”

  “That’s all right.” He rolled down his window and loosened his tie. “Look, we’re talking high security here, so you need to keep this to yourself.”

  “Yeah, the guy who came to see me mentioned that. No problem.”

  “Okay. By sheer coincidence, at a party, Ham heard about the CIA dropping in on you. Usually in Washington nobody knows what the hell anybody else is doing, except when they’re sleeping with interns and other people’s spouses, and then everybody knows. But when it matters, especially CIA, nothing. We just lucked out. When Ham heard your name, he checked and found out it really was you, and the CIA believed you had a viable contact, so he thought he ought to give you a call. And here I am. The problem is not just getting the hostages released—we’re about 80% sure they’ll be released unharmed eventually—our problem is getting them out before November 4th. It may give us the push we need to beat Reagan.”

  Good ole Ham, always the politician, always thinking about the campaign, but that was his job, and he was good at it, good enough to make a peanut farmer the President of the United States. “But if Ham can meet personally with Ghotbzadeh, why do you need other contacts?”

  “I never said he did, but let’s just say that if people high in the administration had such a meeting, it might be wise not to try it again.”

  “Got it, but what can I do?”

  “We want you to go to Athens to meet with Ghotbzadeh’s niece, as the CIA suggested.”

  “Really? I’d just about given up. She’s his cousin by the way. But why Athens?”

  “Athens, unlike, say, Paris or London, is an unlikely place for any kind of negotiation. And we can use your Greek background to disguise the mission. The CIA will have to direct the show—I won’t have anything to do with it—but they could communicate with Azadeh by telegram from Greece. They could write to her from J. Alexandra Nicolaides, or something like that—we figure her family would be more likely to let her go to see a girlfriend than a boyfriend—requesting that she come for a visit. Would Azadeh understand that?”

  “I think so. Can’t I just call her or write her?”

  “No, too dangerous. They’ll wire her the money and help her get the proper papers, or whatever—none of the details have been worked out. We’re not sure what internal restrictions on travel the Iranians have put into effect—everything over there is so fucked up—and they may not let her go, I mean the government. Do you think she’ll be able to talk her family into it?”

  “She lives with her mother now. Her father has married again, but I don’t know if he’s moved out or is filing for a divorce or what. I hope you realize that I know very little about her situation. I’ve gotten only two letters and one call, and I’ve heard some things from her friend Nadia, who lives here.”

  “Maybe we could send the telegram from Nadia. Which would she be more likely to respond to?”

  “My God, this is too much. I have no idea.” My head spun with the wonder of it, and the complications—Azi and Nadia—which I couldn’t explain to Michaels. “Nadia is from Kuwait—that’s where her family lives—but she goes to school here and was Azi’s roommate. She’s gotten a couple of letters from Azi, just as I have.”

  “Hmmm. We need to involve as few people as possible.”

  “Look, Azi and I were very close, but I haven’t seen her in nine months. I think she would like to see me, but I can’t be sure. And I’m sure she’d like to see Nadia. But asking Azi to go to Greece to do it is probably asking a lot. I have no idea what she’ll think of all this. What’ll happen if she agrees to it?”

  “The CIA will want to meet with her and ask her questions . . . . I don’t know. Those details will come later. But all our other negotiations are deadlocked right now, and the mullahs are increasingly suspicious of Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh. We believe that Ghotbzadeh is the key to the solution, the only one in power who understands how important it is for Iran to end the crisis, and the only one with the balls to do anything. Azadeh, as his cousin, might be a valuable contact and ally. I’m here to find out if you’re still interested and if you think she’ll roll with us. If so, then we’ll probably give it a try since we’re desperate.”

  “And what if she comes but doesn’t want to talk when she realizes what’s going on?”

  “Then our gamble didn’t pay off and we pack it in, but you still get a free trip to Greece.”

  “How long would I be gone?”

  “Probably a few days, three or four, depending on flights. You’re not in summer school, are you?”

  “No, but I have a job, school’s about to start, and I’m studying for comprehensive exams. I could probably get a few days off if I knew in advance.”

  “You won’t have much notice.”

  “Is this going to be dangerous for Azi?”

  “No. The CIA will handle the security.”

  “Okay then, damn, let’s do it.”

  “Great. Do you have a valid passport?”

  “I don’t know. Wait, no, all my papers were destroyed in a fire this spring.” I considered telling him about Saad but decided to leave it for another time.

  “We can get you one. We’ll need to send you up to CIA headquarters for a briefing anyway. Can you spare a day for that? Maybe you can leave for Athens from there.”

  “Why don’t you make a tentative schedule and call me?”

  “Sure. I’ll report back to Ham, and we’ll be in touch. Meanwhile—”

  “This is it.” I pulled up in front of an empty store that had been converted into the South Carolina democratic headquarters and had Carter campaign posters taped to the front windows. “Meanwhile?” I asked.

  “Remember, don’t tell anyone about this.”

  “I’ll have to tell Nadia, of course, if she’s going to be involved.”

  “Don’t say anything yet. We’ll trust you to use good judgment, but the more people who know about it, the more danger you’ll be in. Azi too.”

  “What’s your best guess as to when this will get started?”

  “Could be as soon as a week from now, but probably two, maybe three. We’ll give you as much notice as possible.”

  “Okay. I’ll start working on it.”

  “I’ll call your mana
ger if you want me to—I’ll make up some reason for your needing to go to Washington.”

  “Thanks, but I can probably make up my own excuse—my mother might get sick.”

  He held out his hand and we shook. “Fine. Ham’ll be glad to know you’re on board.”

  “I’m happy to be able to help. It’s exciting, and I’ll be thrilled to see Azi again, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “This is a big deal, and I’ve never done anything like it. What if I screw it up?”

  “It is a big deal. We’re desperate and Carter won’t be re-elected if the hostages aren’t freed, and this mission might help.”

  There it was again, the mission, for me, the asset, the plane flying under the radar, the nobody.

  “But your role isn’t that big,” Michaels continued, echoing my thought, “and you’ll have lots of support. In case you didn’t know, Ham is like the third most important person in the Carter administration, maybe the second, so if he tells people to watch your back, they will. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER 12

  AUGUST

  1980

  When I awoke, a man was sitting on the side of the bed, applying a wet washcloth to my head. “Here,” he said, “hold this on that cut.” For a moment I thought I was dreaming and wondered if he was my father. Then I knew it was Baizan, then I knew I was in Athens, and it all came back in a single throb.

  I pushed his hand away, sat up, and said, “Where’s Azi?” I looked around, got up, took dizzy steps toward the light in the bathroom, fell on my knees in front of the toilet and threw up.

  “You okay?” he asked from the doorway.

  I pushed myself up and washed my mouth out at the sink. “I’m okay, but where’s Azi?”

  “We don’t know. Tell me what happened.”

  I spun around, swayed, stumbled into him and pushed him. “You tell me what happened, you sonofabitch.”