The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved

by Steven Hardesty

  Reza watched Glynda put the bundle of money under her shift between her breasts. It was like creating a third breast there. They both laughed and this time the laughter was real.

  Reza rubbed his face among her three breasts and realized he was happy.

  * * *

  Tehran – 1977

  There was too much money to be made in the Shah’s Iran for Patchway to squander more than a few hours a night on sleep. In less than two years he had become a moderately rich man. He wanted to be a richer man. The making of money is antidote to abandoned love and the red dreams of lost war. It brought the applause to his ears.

  Patchway stood at the window of his apartment, the same he had shared with Glynda and which he now shared, secretly, with black-haired and black-eyed Gitty Kharabian, a businesswoman from the western province of Azerbaijan who was as hungry to help herself from the Iranian gold mine as he was. Gitty also was the police spy set to watch him.

  Their mutual hunger for money and the need for Gitty to keep herself close to Patchway had evolved, unexpectedly for both, into sudden sex and a peculiar love affair of predator and prey. Neither knew which of them was prey and which predator. Each of was both.

  Patchway gazed out the window at the gray pall that lightens the air before a desert sunrise. He had worked all night and missed the snowfall. Workmen shoveling from the flat tops of tall buildings sent snow and ice crashing into the street below.

  A bang like the firing of a pistol on the frosted glass of his apartment’s front door.

  Patchway hauled the big revolver from a drawer and stood away from the frosted glass. He turned on the light on the landing outside the door.

  He saw the shadow of a veiled woman.

  “Who are you?” he said in Farsi.

  “It’s Glynda,” she said in English. “Let me in.”

  Patchway felt a surprise zing of the old hunger for her. He opened the door.

  Glynda pushed into the room and let the chadur fall from her shoulders. She had a child asleep in her arms, less than eighteen months old. Was it that long since Patchway had last seen her? Was this Ardjovani’s boy, the child who, had Patchway allowed it, might have been his own?

  “Give me tea,” Glynda said.

  She was filthy and ragged but still she had a sexual power over him and that surprised him. She was in a torn wool shift, thick winter leggings, long johns that showed from the sleeves of her dress, mannish shoes and the chadur. He put his hand to the scar on his belly and felt that it was cold. The chill reminded him why he could not love this woman, or any other.

  But the baby, as dirty and ragged as the mother, surprised him more. The child appeared a marvel to him. A wonder. For a moment he felt a choking throb as though this infant were telling him there is more to life than unlife, more to life than the making of money.

  “I want tea,” Glynda said again.

  The baby woke and fretted.

  “What do I give him?” said Patchway.

  “I’ll feed him. It’s the only food I’m sure is clean enough for him.” Glynda opened her bodice to feed the baby. “He’s no different in his tastes from you – both greedy. But he’s not afraid to love me.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Georgie.”

  “‘Georgie Ardjovani’?”

  “It’s ridiculous, I know, but that’s what his father wanted. I’ll give him my family name when we get back to the States.”

  Patchway made her tea and brought her flat bread and yogurt.

  “He beats me,” Glynda said.

  “I can see that.”

  “There was a time early on when I thought the beatings would stop but he wants me pregnant again. He gave me a year’s rest. He’s surprisingly advanced in some ways. Of course he has his whores. Now he wants another son. I’m his brood sow. That’s all I am to him. He’s beating me to give him one.”

  “He’s a handsome boy,” Patchway said of the baby.

  “Like his father. But I don’t want him anything like his father.”

  Here was a child who could grow up in this society as well as in the States. Here he would have a huge family to love him. As the first male heir, he would be a little prince, spoiled and wild as Huckleberry Finn. His life would be grand. It would be life in a different society than the one in which Glynda had been raised yet not necessarily inferior. The Middle East might even be a better place to raise young men.

  But the child could not grow up on a battlefield between two cultures – the mother’s and the father’s. Not unless there were also much patience and more understanding. Two things always in short supply in human relationships.

  “You’ve got to help me,” Glynda said. “I’ve run away from him and I can’t let him find me. He’ll beat me to death this time. I’m going home. I’ll find my mother. We’ll get lost there. He’ll never find me again. Georgie and I will live like civilized people.”

  “I can’t hide you here,” said Patchway. “I’ll have to find you another place. I’m watched.”

  “I don’t want to hide. I don’t want a hideout. Get us to Mehrabad Airport and past immigration control. That’s all. Do it now.”

  “How do I get a SAVAK colonel’s runaway wife past immigration control?”

  “You’ll think of something. You always do.”

  “Do you have passports?” he said.

  She gave him her brown Iranian passport. The child was listed there, too. Good.

  “How did you get him to do this for you?” Patchway said.

  “Pride. How else do you appeal to a man? Any man but you.”

  “Have you got any money?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars, very hard earned,” Glynda said.

  “You did damn well,” Patchway said. “I don’t suppose you got him to write you a letter of permission for travel?”

  “I tried to forge it but it was no good. He didn’t teach me any but kitchen and bedroom Farsi. I don’t have the vocabulary. What’s next or can we go now?”

  “You need plenty of stamps and visas in this passport,” he said. “You need exit visas and proof of payment of some heavy departure fees.”

  “You’re making obstacles! I’m talking about getting out of Tehran on the first flight this morning, before my husband’s goons find me. I can be dead, Patchway.”

  He looked at her and saw a Persian with the blond hair of the Caspian shore. The hair that caused the Arabs across the Gulf to send raiding parties to the Caspian to kidnap women for their harems. She was dressed in the rags of a bazaar woman. She looked authentic enough to pass ordinary scrutiny, if she had her papers in order.

  “Gitty Kharabian,” he said.

  “What?” said Glynda, startled.

  Gitty in her night robe stood in the shadows of the room. She was Armenian and all contrasts – white-white skin, black-black hair, dark eyes drawn out to points at the sides of her head and a chill glitter in her voice. She was Christian. No veil for her.

  “Good God, you!” said Glynda, frightened.

  “You’re safe with me,” Gitty said to her. “For Patchway’s sake.”

  “How can I be safe with you?” said Glynda. “You’re a police spy!”

  “Who isn’t?” Gitty took the passport from Patchway and examined it. “Where’s the Iranian birth certificate for Georgie?” she said to Glynda.

  “I’ve got nothing but him.”

  “I’ll have to fix you something plausible or you won’t get out of this country and into States.”

  “What can you do?” said Patchway.

  “A birth certificate from one of the foreigner hospitals here showing the boy’s mother is a Yankee and too stupid to have gone through all the right protocol,” said Gitty. “I can have it in two hours.”

  Gitty looked at Patchway. “You are putting her on a plane to States?”

  “That’s what she wants.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What I have right now.”

  That was
the right answer and Gitty was satisfied with it.

  “Then I’ll do it for you,” Gitty said to Patchway. To Glynda, she said, “If you ever return to Iran, if you go back to your husband, I’m dead and so is Patchway.”

  “I can never do that.”

  “More women do than you want to believe,” Gitty said. “Now we can all be friends again. You’ll need Western clothes and makeup. I’ll bring them to you. Bathe yourself, you stink. Find her some rose water, Patchway. And keep her away from the windows. Don’t use the phone. Don’t use the radio. Everything that can radiate in this flat is tapped.”

  “Just a minute,” Glynda said to Gitty.

  “What is it now?”

  “You hate me. I know you hate me.”

  “Of course I hate you.”

  “Why should I think you won’t call Ardjovani?”

  “Oh, don’t be completely stupid,” Gitty said to her. “I’ve hated you since you first arrived in this country and moved in on Patchway. I hated you months after you married Ardjovani and I moved in on Patchway. I hate you enough to prefer to have you out of Iran than in Iran where you can pop in on us in the middle of the night and remind this fool man that he once loved you.”

  “He never loved me,” said Glynda.

  “That’s what he says,” said Gitty. “But he’s a fool.”

  Glynda knew the story of the high, sere Western plains land, of the smell of buffalo grass and saddle leather, of the baby who had died in Patchway’s arms, of Patchway’s red war time and the hollowness all of this had made inside him. Of the old war wound on his belly that never warmed to the temperature of his body. Of the applause only he could hear.

  “Maybe not quite a fool,” Glynda said, “but a runaway man.”

  “That’s enough, isn’t it?” said Gitty. “In a world like this, I want a runaway man. You don’t. Remember that.”

  Is that what I am? Patchway thought. Maybe it was enough. It would have to be enough. What else was there for a man like him?

  Gitty dressed. At the front door, she called Patchway to her. “No pang of old desire when you see her now? No tug of conscience when you look at that baby?”

  “None of that,” he said.

  “I’ll believe you when she’s gone.” Gitty pulled on her mink coat. “Do you know what we’re doing? I don’t mean for her. For the boy. A man may ignore the theft of his wife. But steal his first-born son and he’ll hound you across the Earth to get the boy back. Ardjovani will never forgive. He’s a killer by nature and he owns killers. Can you really trust this stupid woman to keep silence when she gets back to States?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you really want to do this? We can push her out into the street and save ourselves.”

  “I’ll put her on the plane. That will be the end of it.”

  “You do this for old times’ sake?”

  What could he tell her, that he would do it for the cold patch of Vietnam on his belly?

  “You frighten me,” Gitty said. “I love you better when all you think about is making money. Kiss me. In front of her. Then I’ll go.”

  He kissed her. Gitty left.

  Patchway said to Glynda, “I’ll leave you here a couple hours.” He pulled on his winter coat. “I’ll find Afkhami. I’ll go in person, I can’t trust the phones. He’ll talk us through immigration and I’ll need him at the airline with Sheila Bond. He knows her and her airline better than I do.”

  “Give me the key to the door and your big revolver,” Glynda said.

  He did. He put into his pocket the little pistol he kept under the rice cooker.

  Patchway went out into the first glimmer of dawn and found Madjid Afkhami as he hoped to find him – alone and away from secret police watchers on the street outside Afkhami’s apartment building, bringing home the breakfast bread.

  “I have a woman and child to put on the morning flight to the States,” Patchway said to him.

  “So? Buy a ticket,” said Afkhami.

  “Ardjovani’s wife and child.”

  “The American woman? Are you insane? Do you realize what can happen to us?”

  “It won’t happen if we work it fast and get her out now.”

  “What’s this to do with me?” said Afkhami.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then I won’t do it. You shouldn’t have asked me. This bread is getting cold out here. My family is hungry.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” said Afkhami. “I’m surprised you’d ask me that. We’re friends. I don’t take bribes from friends. Not for something like this that could get me killed.”

  “Who will do it?”

  “You really want to do this?”

  “No choice.”

  “My cousin, Zargoneh the Mouseface, the doctor. He has yet another daughter called up for the draft. He wants her safe from going to war against the Iraqis. That’s a war that never ends and eats up our children. Zargoneh makes babies and unmakes them. Half the senior officers in immigration control bring their wives and whores to him. Ask Zargoneh.”

  “What do I give him?”

  “What you’re going to give a SAVAK colonel’s wife – a free pass for his daughter out of the army and out of the disaster the Shah is making for Iran. An escape to a safe life.”

  Three hours later, Patchway, Gitty and Dr. Zargoneh put Glynda and the baby on one of Sheila Bond’s 747 airliners bound for New York City. They watched the plane power up and slide up into the sky. The runaway wife and the stolen child flew away.

  This time, Patchway heard no applause. That zing of hunger for Glynda that had begun when Patchway had opened the door to find her on his threshold frightened and ragged faded in him. It slid away with the aircraft disappearing into the west. A love he had closed out of his life was closed out once more. He would keep it closed.

  But Patchway thought of the boy who could have been his. He was surprised to think of the child that way. He thought of his war and of Agent Orange and the pollution of it in his own body. He thought of the baby that had been his so brief a moment of love.

  He thought of the red time. He thought of the rot in him that his cold scar covered.

  A self-fury came into his face that startled Gitty, watching him.

  “Is it really over?” she said to Patchway, fright in her voice.

  “It’s over,” he said, grimly. He had his hand over his scar, not realizing he was doing that. “Let’s get back to making money.”

  What else was there to do?

  Chapter 2

  Boston – 1977

  On the American calendar it was two days past Thanksgiving when a 747 brought the sleeping killer into Boston’s Logan Airport.

  Saifallah, Colonel Ardjovani’s bodyguard and now protégé, the pompadoured man of correct manners, his hair sweet with rose water, had forced himself awake for the previous three hours so not to miss his first sighting of America. But there was little for him to see had he been awake. The Bay water beneath the plane was muddy, the sky ashen and the great brown city smog bound. He woke startled as the plane touched down and was immediately angry with himself for missing this great moment.

  But his annoyance passed as he walked through a quick customs check using his made-in-Tehran English on rude Yankee officials who were not patient stewardesses. Obviously their rudeness proved the excellence of his English because Americans are never rude to foreigners, only to each other. He was delighted.

  Saifallah was short, copper-faced, with a bushy black mustache, thick dark hair and brown sloe eyes. He was easy to spot in Logan’s swirl of red-faced Boston Irish. The Irishman with his pretty girlfriend found him. Saifallah followed them to their van. The van was a marvel of color, carpeted walls and floor, and a huge bed. Like a moving bedroom. He felt cozy in there. He was delighted again.

  They drove into New Hampshire, Saifallah passing the Irishman and the girlfriend beers from the ice chest and they handing him cigarett
es. They got a little drunk but non-drinking Saifallah already was drunk on his first hours in America.

  It was a cold ride, as cold as any Tehrani winter but cold far too early in the year for Saifallah to have come prepared for it. Evening, too, came too soon. That and the monotonous white countryside with rows of firs shadowing the road from moonlight put Saifallah in a drowsing stupor.

  He dreamed of the forests of Lebanon before its cedars were stripped for Solomon’s temple, for Phoenician warships and for the palaces of Darius the Great. For the inlaid cedar floors of the palaces in which dwelt his own Shahanshah Arya Mehr.

  The New Hampshire town was a few cabins and one hotel filled with Bostonians and New Yorkers awaiting tomorrow’s official opening of the ski season. The Irishman got the three of them one hotel room. The floor creaked and each wall was papered in a different color. They collapsed onto the bed and slept half-dressed in a tangle of arms and legs. No different from Saifallah’s youth in an impoverished family during the wartime British occupation of southern Iran.

  That memory was bitter and sweet. What the West called World War II. His parents were now dead and so were the brothers and sisters with whom he had slept. Wartime starvation killed his parents and stunted and finally killed his brothers and sisters. What had a European war meant to them except as another contemptible British scheme to steal Iran’s oil, caviar and women and drive the nation into eternal poverty?

  But Saifallah’s last thought before sleep was an excitement for the morning when he would at last see American people on American snow beneath an American sun and have the chance to kill a man for the Shahanshah Arya Mehr.

  * * *

  The morning was crisp, the air biting on his ears. New Hampshire snow was a luxurious image from an Arabian Night’s dream. It was awesome for a man born in a city on the edge of the Great Salt Desert.

  With a long-bladed jackknife heavy in his pocket, Saifallah followed the Irish couple on their rounds of the cabin parties where all the booze and marijuana were free and every one wore a costume wild and obscene enough to shock and delight him. He drank as no good Moslem should drink and smoked pot against the laws of his king and enjoyed himself in raucous female company as should no good government man.