Messenger from Mystery

by Deno Trakas

  I pulled on Azi’s arm and ran, but she stumbled, so I held her tight against my hip, kept her up and moving as fast as we could go toward the gate while Garrison began shooting at what was behind us. Still shooting, he pushed the heavy gate open with his backside, and we ran through. Then we were outside in what seemed to be a different world, the normal chaos of Tehran’s streets—Oman wasn’t there. I looked around, frantic, as Garrison pulled the gate closed behind us, and then I saw our car, the white Nissan, backing up against the traffic, partly in the street, mostly on the sidewalk, to meet us, so we ran, Garrison and I on either side of Azi, supporting her, then lifting her and carrying her, as if she were a child who wanted to fly.

  CHAPTER 19

  Garrison had probably killed three men and I was an accomplice, but what I felt was the exhilaration of having helped Azi escape from the jail . . . and being alive . . . we were all alive. I felt this euphoria for the first time in my life as I sat beside her and watched through the back window the fading entrance of the jail as Oman sped away.

  “What do you see?” Garrison asked.

  “A guard just ran out into the street, and another one—they’re aiming rifles at us.” I pushed Azi down and ducked, but if they fired we didn’t hear it and nothing happened.

  “Keep your eye on our tail. Lare, take a right.”

  I watched for a troop carrier or a car crammed with revolutionary guards and their weapons, but in my last glimpse of the gate before we turned out of sight, there was no vehicle coming after us, and I reported that to Garrison.

  As before, the streets were jammed with cars and trucks that seemed to paw and snarl, and every time we stopped I was sure the guards would catch up with us. But Oman quickly caught on to the Tehran technique, which was to search for an opening, stomp on the gas and hit the horn. We weren’t followed as far as I could tell, and Garrison knew the streets well enough to direct us circuitously, if not quickly, out of the center of town.

  The farther we drove and the more turns we took, the more I relaxed, and finally, as we entered an area where the traffic was less congested, I looked down at Azi, who lay on her side across the back seat with her eyes closed. I lifted her head, slid over, and rested it on my thigh, then nudged the chador back so I could see her face—she looked peaceful, as if she were asleep, as if this were all a dream. Again I noticed the rough twine tied around her neck. With one finger I traced it to the base of her flushed throat and lifted from inside her prison dress a faded snapshot of Azi’s spread legs, with her focused face in the background, and my fuzzy face hovering over her stomach. Azi looked at me then, her eyes saying, Don’t, don’t look, but I’d already seen it, and the guilt was overwhelming. I slid the twine around—it was tied with a tight knot. “Garrison, can I use your knife?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered and fumbled the murder weapon out of his front pocket as he shifted his glance back and forth from the side rearview mirror to the street ahead. “Take the next left, Lare. And Nichols, keep her down like that, but put her chador back on—we don’t want to get stopped by the Pasdar.”

  I pulled the chador into place and then cut the twine holding the photo. “What you got?” Oman asked.

  “One of the pictures from Athens. They made her wear it.” I ripped it into confetti, and fed it out the window to the dirty air of Tehran. I handed Garrison his knife and looked at Azi again. I touched her cheek. Instead of smiling, as I hoped she would, she closed her eyes again and for the first time I noticed scars on her eyelids. I asked her what had happened, but she didn’t answer.

  We passed a square with an empty pedestal where a monument had stood, probably one of the replicas of the Shah that had been demolished since the revolution. On the next corner stood a butcher who had just slaughtered a lamb, and a boy dipping his hands into the blood.

  I looked back at Azi—what to make of a diminished thing? I took one of her hands and held it. It was warm; the nails were chipped or bitten, but they hadn’t been torn off. I wanted to ask what else they had done to her, how badly she’d been hurt, how much more guilt I deserved, but I just stroked her as if she were a baby too sick to cry.

  Finally we entered a tree-lined residential neighborhood and stopped in front of a large, flat cement house, guarded by a green iron fence. Garrison jumped out, opened the double gate, and motioned Oman to drive into the walled courtyard. We followed Garrison inside, into a room about twice as big as the living room at my mother’s house. The walls and doors were made of rich, dark wood.

  “Azadeh, you rest here,” Garrison said, pointing to a long sofa faced by a table and two matching chairs. The only other furnishings were a small TV, lamp, and radio sitting on the table, and some empty bookshelves along one wall. “Nichols, you come with me so we can contact your friend in Kuwait and make adjustments to the plans.”

  I held Azi’s hand as she eased herself down onto her side on the sofa. “Are you all right? What can I get you?” She shook her head, but I looked to Garrison.

  “Lare, check the refrigerator. I think there’s some cheese and fruit, and there should be Nescafe and Pepsi under the counter by the stove.” Garrison pointed down a hallway.

  “No pizza and beer?” Oman asked.

  Garrison ignored him and signaled for me to follow him through the hall to a smaller room with a wood desk and a black phone. For a moment he just stood in front of the phone, flipping his worry beads into his palm, as if he were in a hurry but couldn’t remember what for.

  “Garrison, I’m worried about her. She won’t speak. Is there any way we can get her to a doctor?”

  He looked at me as if I were a fool and said, “I just killed three revolutionary guards, and we have to get the hell out of the city. We can give her some aspirin—I think we’ve got some—but for anything else she’ll have to wait until we get to Kuwait. Go look in the bathroom, see what you can find, while I make some calls.”

  I found the bathroom, searched the drawer at the sink, came up with band aids, soap, a brush and comb, and what looked like a bottle of aspirin, which I took to Oman, who had brought a couple of Pepsis from the kitchen and was opening one for Azi. When I rejoined Garrison, he handed me the receiver. “Your turn. Where are you calling?”

  “Baizan told Nadia not to tell her parents about any of this if possible, so I’m supposed to call the American embassy in Kuwait. She said she’d check there for messages twice a day. I have her home phone number in case of emergency.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “What do I say? When do we expect to arrive at Bubiyan?”

  “Say everything’s the same, 9:30 P.M., except one day earlier. We’ll try to call again within twenty-four hours to confirm, and if there’s any other change in plans, we definitely will call.”

  I took the numbers out of my wallet and called the embassy; a pleasant woman with an Arabic accent told me that Nadia had been in earlier to check for messages. I asked if I could leave a message now and she said yes. “Tell her,” I said, “the Gamecocks called and they will meet her at the same time and same place but one day earlier—that’s important. Have her leave a message with you to confirm, and we’ll call back within 24 hours.” She repeated the message efficiently and correctly.

  When I hung up, Garrison looked at me and said, “You sure we can count on her?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t worry. The guys at Langley think it’s going to work, and they’ve cleared the message thing with the embassy.”

  “Yeah, but they’re at Langley and don’t know shit about what it’s like here. I want to talk to her. I want to know what kind of boat she has and who’s going to be with her and”-

  “Okay, here, copy the numbers. Call her yourself.”

  “I will, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like counting on people I don’t know when the stakes are high. And they just went up a lot, a hell of a lot.”

  “Nadia’s one of the most dependable people I know, and she knows how important this is.”

&n
bsp; “Maybe we shoulda gone north through Turkey.”

  “Why didn’t you set it up that way?”

  “Mainly because that’s what they’ll expect, and they’ll be looking for us for sure at all the border crossings. The Kuwait angle, especially with your contact, is interesting, but there’s a lot of unknowns, and that makes me nervous.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about Nadia.”

  “Okay. Go back inside with Azadeh. Explain the plan. We’ll leave as soon as it gets dark.”

  “What about our stuff at the hotel?”

  “Can’t you do without it?”

  “They kept our passports at the desk.”

  “Shit, with the change of plans and all, I didn’t think of that.” He swung his worry beads. “Well, it’ll be better if you check out properly anyway. Let’s go talk to Lare.”

  Oman was stretched on the carpet in front of the sofa, while Azi lay curled on her side next to him with her eyes closed.

  “Lare, if I give you directions, do you think you can find your way to the Intercon so that you and Nichols can check out and get your passports back?”

  “Yeah, if you give me good directions. If I get lost, we’ll be in deep shit.”

  “We’re already in deep shit. But you’re right, forget that. I’m going to put you in a taxi. Yeah, that’ll be safer. They’ll be looking for the car anyway. No. Shit. I better go with you.”

  “What about Azi?” I asked.

  “You stay with her,” Garrison said.

  “What about my passport and stuff?”

  “We’ll have to talk them into letting us have it. Go in the other room—there’s some paper in the desk—and write a note, explaining why you can’t come, and ask them to give your passport to Lare. They can compare your signatures. If they won’t do it, I’ll come back and get you.”

  “What excuse should I give?”

  “I don’t know, but remember you’re Mexican . . . use broken English, say there’s been a change of plans . . . say you’re out at the Hemmat Industrial Complex with some government officials, and you don’t have time to get back to town before your plane leaves. Come on, I’ve got to make another phone call anyway.”

  We went back to the room with the desk, and while I wrote my letter, Garrison talked in Farsi on the phone. When he got off, I handed him my note. He read it and said, “Good enough,” then folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “A buddy who’s helping me get a truck.”

  “Do we still have to roll Azi in a carpet?”

  “Yeah, there’re often roadblocks, and they’ll be looking for her.”

  We went back inside where Oman was peeling and slicing an apple for Azi, who was half lying on her side, propped up on pillows like a sick princess being attended by a servant. Oman looked up at Garrison, who gave him my letter and said, “Let’s go.” Garrison turned to me and said, “We should be back in an hour or two. You should be fine. Don’t answer the phone unless . . . if it rings three times, then stops, then rings three times again, pick up—it’ll be me. Otherwise, just stay put.”

  I nodded, and Garrison and Oman left.

  I sat down in Oman’s place and fed Azi the rest of the apple. When it was all gone, I said, “I need my clothes.” She looked confused for a moment, but then she sat up, loosened the chador, and took out the two rolls that were my pants and sweater, but she wouldn’t give them to me.

  “Where you go?” she asked in a barely audible voice.

  “I’m just going to change.”

  “Stay.”

  “Okay.” She handed me my pants and sweater, turned her head, and lay down on her other side, facing away from me. I still had the guard’s gun in my belt, so I put it on the table and changed right there, stripped out of the uniform of an Iranian policeman, or whatever he was—he was dead—and became a fake Mexican again. I wondered if I would ever be a teacher again, and if so, would that just be another costume after all of this? I made a note to myself to apply the mustache before we left, then I sat on the floor in front of her, and Azi turned over to face me. I put a hand over hers and she tucked them both against her stomach. She closed her eyes, and her face went blank again.

  CHAPTER 20

  Garrison and Oman made it to the Intercon, Oman persuaded the clerk to release my passport, and they made it back without incident. Then Garrison went out again in the white Nissan and came back in an old Ford truck with an extended bed. We carefully and loosely rolled Azi into an 8´ by 10´ carpet and placed it diagonally in the bed. The thick carpet held its cylindrical form and we couldn’t tell there was a body inside. We laid two slightly smaller carpets on either side, four even smaller ones on top, and covered them with a layer of bolts of black cloth and our luggage, being careful not to put much weight on Azi. Garrison threw a tarp over the bed and tied it down. Azi had to be miserable, but she spoke from her cocoon, saying she was positioned on her side and okay.

  Night fell reluctantly over the city, as if it knew there would be trouble, but for us it provided cover, and we left our safe house with just enough confidence for me to ask Garrison to drive us by the U. S. Embassy, the epicenter, the place where the hostages were taken and where they might still be held.

  “There it is,” Garrison said as we passed. The large compound shared a street with a burned-out bank and a dark cinema. The ten-foot wall blocked our view, and we couldn’t see much through the iron gates as we drove by the entrance, just a semi-circular hedge in front of a nondescript building and a few Iranian men in uniforms milling around, one with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. My attention was drawn to two tattered posters on the wall, one of the stern Ayatollah, the other of a wildly grinning Jimmy Carter—in his mouth stood the Shah, holding bags of money. Then I saw some writing in English and read: “DEAR AMERICAN MINORITY BROTHERS, SISTERS, BLACKS AND INDIANS, STUDY THE KORAN. . . .” Finally, I noticed that some local vendors were closing stalls on the street where they had been selling head scarves and blue jeans, as if this were a tourist attraction, which I guess it was. The scene was familiar, having been beamed by satellite from here to my TV in Columbia every night for a year, but also different up close, so ordinary, especially without the camera crews and throngs of shouting, flag-burning Iranians.

  “How’d the bastards break in?” Oman wondered aloud.

  “A few of them just climbed the gates. The guards were under orders not to shoot anyone and retreated to the main building, fired a few canisters of tear gas, which only pissed ’em off, and the rest, as they say, was on the six o’clock news. In a few hours they’d captured the staff and most of our files and documents, some of them pretty damn sensitive.”

  “Who were they?” Oman asked.

  “Hard to say, but at first I think it was just a bunch of hot-headed students and trouble-makers, but when the world saw that they’d been successful, all our enemies started sending people over, especially the P.L.O. and the communists, and eventually they were running the show.”

  “Were you there, Garrison?” I asked.

  “Not as it was happening, but I was in the crowd outside plenty of times after that. One day, about a month after the takeover, I was walking down the street when I heard shots and saw someone trying to escape over the wall. The Pasdars shot at the guy and hauled him back inside. Turned out to be one of the hostages, a guy named Belk.”

  “Belk? Really? That’s the guy from Columbia,” I said.

  “Could be.”

  “Were you involved in the freeing of the hostages who were hidden by the Canadians?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Yeah, a little bit. That was crazy, a movie crew. I didn’t think it would work, but Mendez, the CIA guy in charge, did his homework and got the details right, and the hostages played their parts, and what do you know. Somebody oughta make a real movie out of it.”

  “What’s your cover?” Oman asked.

  “Basque father, Iranian mother, moved he
re as a teenager when my parents were killed by a bomb in Barcelona, now studying engineering at the University and living with an uncle who has a rice shop in the bazaar. The bazaar isn’t far from here, in the old city. I’d take you by there, but we’d pass a little too close to the jail for comfort.” Without signaling, he turned right and stomped on the gas.

  “How long have you been in Iran, Garrison?”

  “Three, almost four years.”

  “What’s your assignment?” Oman asked his questions without taking his eyes off the street scenes—I could tell he was filing away details, like the boys working the lines of cars stuck in traffic jams, trying to sell Marlboros, newspapers, and candy, and one of them pissing on the rear bumper of a Mercedes whose driver had turned him down.

  “That’s classified, but all of us gather intel, and for the last year I’ve been doing damage control. As usual, the boys in Washington didn’t listen to our warnings about the revolution, so it caught them by surprise. One day we’re strutting around just like the Shah, finding it easy to make friends and recruit assets, and the next day we’re the Great Satan, and our friends are burning American flags and our people are turning up dead.”

  “Did you ever meet Ghotbzadeh, Azi’s cousin?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but just in passing. He likes to be in front of the camera, but he’s smart, shrewd enough to play both sides, Soviets against Americans, but secretly I think he likes Americans and is afraid of the Soviets—if they can invade Afghanistan, they can invade here.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “Because he pissed off the Ayatollah.”

  “Really? I thought he was like a son to the Ayatollah.”

  “He was. He worked with him in Paris, and sat right next to him on the plane when they returned to Iran to start the revolution. But Ghotbzadeh is the rebellious son, the one who talks back, the one who tells the Ayatollah he can’t let the mullahs dictate policy, or censor newspapers, or arrest people without cause, progressive shit like that. The Ayatollah doesn’t like it, so he had him thrown in jail to teach him a lesson. He didn’t have to stay in long, though.”