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

by Steven Hardesty

  In mid-afternoon the town’s population staggered to the ski slopes for a parade like none Saifallah had seen before: No goose-stepping guardsmen and camel battalions but drunks in bizarre costumes skiing into the crowds dancing to portable radios while more drunken men and women crawled into vans drawn up off the roads. America was proving just as wonderful as he had hoped.

  Out of this mob sprouted a dozen huge orange balloons hauling up into the sky another crazy-costumed drunk seated in a lawn chair. The chair was tethered by ropes. Saifallah thought it ingenious and manic. He laughed to see the drunk below the balloons play a trumpet call thirty meters above the crowd to announce the start of the parade already underway. The balloonist used an instant camera to take photographs. He dropped the prints fluttering down on the outstretched arms of the crowd.

  It was then Saifallah spotted his victim. Another man with a bushy black mustache. He crossed the snow to him. Saifallah opened his jackknife and spoke the man’s name to be sure. “Madjid Afkhami!”

  Afkhami turned startled to hear his name pronounced properly and cried, “But I know you!”

  Saifallah drove the long knife blade up under Afkhami’s ski parka. Afkhami sagged to his knees in the snow. Like any of these jolly American drunks. His bulky parka hid what had happened to him.

  The mob had abandoned the drunk floating overhead in the balloon-chair and followed the parade to the slope. But the balloonist cried down from the sky, “I saw what you did! Hey, I saw you! Help! Help me, someone, help!” He blew the trumpet.

  Saifallah slashed the tethers and the drunk lurched into the sky and away, the crowd laughing until he disappeared beyond the trees, his trumpet call forlorn and fading.

  Saifallah climbed into the van past the Irishman at the wheel, assuming the boy’s horrified gape at having seen Saifallah let a witness rise into the sky alive to be admiration for such a swift kill.

  The Irishman cranked the van onto the road out of town, driving fast. He called for no beer or cigarettes. His good cheer was gone.

  “Take off your coat,” the boy shouted at Saifallah.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “You’ve got blood on it,” the girl said, appalled.

  “Open the window,” the boy said to her. “Throw it out into the trees.”

  Saifallah saw the red death on his gloves and coat sleeves. He ripped off his coat and gloves and threw them into the forest. He did that groaning like a wounded man.

  The boy and the girl stared at him big-eyed.

  Saifallah fell back against the carpeted wall of the van, searching his hands for blood. Was there blood on him anywhere else? He twisted and turned and yanked at his clothes. He was clean. Death was out there, flung into the trees, and gone away from him.

  Saifallah forced himself to breathe. He had been suffocating himself, holding his breath. But all that redness was away from him now. The whiteness of hands shown clean.

  The girlfriend grabbed a beer for herself and faced out the windshield and sank into a stunned silence.

  Saifallah was confused with these people and annoyed. Everything had gone beautifully. Now was the time for celebration. Beer! Pot! Woman! But the giddy half-drunk they had shared driving into New Hampshire was gone. What was the matter with these two Americans?

  He sat on the ice chest drinking beer alone, watching the passing trees and hoping for this miserable ride to end.

  The Irish boy and his girlfriend escorted him through Logan’s air terminal as far as they could. They read his ticket for him to be certain it was correct. And to tell their superiors they had put the foreign killer on the plane that would return him to Iran and outside the jurisdiction of their masters and American police.

  They waved him off. Saifallah saw the last expressions on their faces. No longer polite or giddy or friendly. The expressions of fear. Fear had killed their good time together. But fear of what?

  These Americans were more complicated than he thought. Or maybe of a split personality.

  Saifallah had had enough of Boston and the cold north. He stuffed into his pocket his international ticket, walked to another boarding lounge and produced an interstate ticket, Boston to Washington, D.C.

  His wait for the new plane was short. The plane was on time and left on schedule. The stewardesses were not as fat as Iran Air hostesses but cute all the same and efficient. He began to forget the split personalities of the Boston Irish and marveled to have found a country that thought it necessary for things to be on time and efficient.

  That thought made him forget his lost Boston friendships. He settled into a comfortable flight to find another man to kill.

  Saifallah Vakili-Mohseini had been trained in English by an American oil company in Tehran where he had worked undercover for SAVAK as a telephone electrician. He considered returning to that job for the chance the company might send him to America. He thought of immigrating to Emrika as often as any Iranian with a desire to retire from the oil-country rat race with enough youthful years to enjoy his profits among whorish American women and in a place where being on time meant something.

  This trip, his first foreign assignment, would be America’s trial to help him decide. So far, America looked good to him, outside of strange Boston.

  * * *

  Despite the wind, they heard Arfy before they saw him, drifting in his balloon chair a hundred feet above firs shawled in snow, blowing his trumpet to save his life.

  “Been up there two hours, Constable,” said the deputy. “Damned if I know how he keeps his lips from freezing to the mouthpiece.”

  “Too full of scotch, William. Use your thirty-thirty. Peck at one of those balloons before Arfy drifts away again.”

  William fired his Winchester rifle at the uppermost balloon. It banged apart.

  Arfy screamed from his floating chair. “What the hell are you bastards doing?” he shouted.

  The ridiculous flying machine sagged down thirty feet.

  The deputy raised the rifle again.

  Arfy cried, “Watch what you do down there, William!”

  “Take out another,” said the constable.

  The constable lit a cigar that he had lit and allowed to die and relit many times that day as he and William had sped around the town keeping the drunks just short of riot and mayhem. But they hadn’t expected Arfy in his balloon chair.

  Another crack of the Winchester in the chill air.

  Arfy’s chair hesitated, then dropped before it was buoyed by a fresh breeze. Arfy began to scream new and inventive insults at the officers.

  “One more ought to do it,” said the constable.

  Another crack.

  Arfy and his chair tumbled out of the sky, trailing balloons like failed parachutes, Arfy screaming oaths.

  Arfy hit crusted snow and was flung out of his chair. His head was driven into the snow. Free of his weight, the remaining balloons hauled the chair into the sky and vanished over the fir trees.

  The constable pulled Arfy to his feet but Arfy collapsed to his knees, teeth chattering, face blue. William rolled him in a blanket and fed him scotch from a pocket flask.

  “What do you say,” the constable asked Arfy, “before we turn you over to your wife for appropriate punishment?”

  “I saw it,” Arfy stuttered. “Damn, I saw it! Bastard smiled at me. Tried to kill me!”

  “Almost did,” said William. “Three rounds was all I was willing to waste on you.”

  “You’d let me go over them trees?”

  “You’d have come down sooner or later.”

  “In the Atlantic!”

  “You can swim, can’t you?”

  “I’ll remember this, William! Don’t ever come into my café again, I tell you.”

  “What did you see?” the constable said to Arfy.

  “Some damned foreigner,” said Arfy. “Ayrab or Eye-talian.” Arfy pulled the instant camera from under his ski parka. “Kept this warm and safe. In case you found me dead and you’d know who kille
d me.”

  Arfy pulled a photo from the camera. “It’s his picture. The murderer.”

  “The murderer of who?” said the constable.

  “Your pal Afkhami. He’s dead back there. Who you think I’m talking about?”

  They drove to the site where Arfy had tethered his balloon. The constable and his deputy tramped across the snow that had been compacted by a thousand pairs of feet. There, at the tree line where the skiing parade had begun, was a bundle of bright parka with a man inside folded over himself clutching his stomach, out of which hung a thick ribbon of frozen blood.

  * * *

  The Dulles International Airport terminal outside Washington, D.C., was vaulted like a caravanserai, the ancient motel for camel caravans, and reminded Saifallah of the Mehrabad Airport terminal in Tehran before unswept snow piled on the roof caved it in, killing dozens including five SAVAK agents on undercover duty watching for the contemptible English. He gathered his bags and hurried to an exit.

  Saifallah found another refreshingly rude Yank, took his advice and climbed on a bus for a cheap ride into the city. The ride was long, evening had come over the east coast of the United States and again he drowsed dreaming of the forests of Lebanon and the columns of Persepolis and Babylon, amazed that America could be so beautiful and so much like home.

  Saifallah woke as the bus bounced up onto Key Bridge, the Potomac icy and slow-moving beneath. He looked to the southeast and saw the monuments that the oil company Americans had told him to be certain to see some day. He came fully awake, excited to be on this new adventure trying out a new life in the bosom of his friends, the Emrikaniha.

  Yet it remained to poison his excitement that these killings he had begun were so difficult to understand. He was not supposed to think about or know the reasons for what he was told to do. He was expected to know that his orders were in the national interest. But it seemed dangerous and irregular that his commander Ardjovani, the only SAVAK officer he had ever known to be allowed to take – and, even more disgracefully, to lose – an American wife, was the only human being who knew what Saifallah was doing and knew that it was rightfully done in duty to his king.

  But Saifallah had just twenty four hours to see the sights and could not waste them in morbid thought. He had a man to eliminate in Washington and then he must be gone quickly to San Francisco for the last, a woman. There was only one reason they must die – treachery to the king – and his orders proved the charge. It was not worth further thought.

  Besides, he was tired, night had come, Washington was very cold. Wind whipping down the long avenues bit at him fiercely. He checked into a small hotel and called for a taxi to drive him past all the great buildings dressed in their evening lights.

  * * *

  It is surprising how fast American police can work when they have a personal interest in the matter. The usual routines of paperwork and documentation are suspended. Financial and manpower constraints are forgotten. Rules bent and snapped.

  The constable in a New Hampshire town who had held his dead and frozen friend in his arms sent Saifallah’s photo to the FBI identification center in Washington, D.C., and did one more thing, the only thing he could do himself – he ransacked Madjid Afkhami’s home, working around the hysterical wife and weeping adult children, until he found something from Afkhami’s past life to which the constable could tie an assassin with Mediterranean features.

  The constable called Patchway in Tehran.

  Patchway could hear weeping in the background, the sounds of mourning.

  The constable said, “I’m in Madjid Afkhami’s home with his family, Mr. Patchway.”

  Patchway cut him off. “What’s going on there? Who are they weeping for? Let me talk to Madjid.”

  The constable pushed on saying, “You were Madjid Afkhami’s supervisor when he worked for your company in Iran, right?”

  “More like partners in most things,” Patchway said. “But you have to know that or his family wouldn’t have put you onto me. What’s happened? I want to talk to him. Is he alright?”

  “He’s dead, Mr. Patchway.”

  Patchway said nothing. There were 7,000 miles of silence between them.

  “What happened?” said Patchway at last.

  “He was murdered.”

  Something cold touched Patchway in a place he had not thought he ever could be touched again.

  Gitty came out of the bedroom in her night robe – it was deepest night – and said, “Patchway! What’s the matter with you?”

  He was squatting on the floor beside the telephone table. He had sagged to that place without knowing. Holding the phone to his ear, listening to the policeman’s story. Hearing none of it, understanding none of it, his hand over his eyes shutting out the horror.

  Gitty took the telephone from Patchway and listened to the constable who had not realized she had taken over the phone.

  Gitty said nothing. She put the phone on the table. She went into the bedroom and began to pack her suitcases. It was time for her to leave this man if she wanted to stay alive.

  Patchway where he squatted took down the telephone from the table. Patchway said, ignoring and interrupting the constable’s questions, “Who killed him?”

  “We don’t know. I have a photograph and the FBI is pushing it through all its records. It could be a vicious drunk at the ski festival. A chance encounter, a jostle, some anger. It wasn’t robbery.”

  Patchway put down the phone and cut off the constable.

  He went into the bedroom and took up the glass of vodka he kept covered with a saucer beside the bed. He drank it. He saw Gitty was packed. Dressed in her mink coat. Refining her make-up.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  She was too hurried for English and said to him in Farsi, “You know what this means.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Glynda Heater has done what she swore she would not do. She’s communicated with Colonel Ardjovani. He’s killed Madjid. Because we stole his son.”

  Patchway said, “This has nothing to do with us or what we did nine months ago.”

  “You think not? Then you are more dangerously stupid than most other foreigners.”

  Gitty picked up her purse and checked it for the small automatic pistol she kept there, her police issue.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said. “I should have left you months ago, before all of this started. “I’ve been such a fool for you.”

  Patchway held her in her bulky mink. He was surprised at the sudden loss he felt, something he had not felt for a woman since the loss on the Great Plains of the woman to whom he had been married, and the loss of the baby.

  Gitty said, surprised, “I believe you’ll miss me!”

  She kissed him. It was a goodbye kiss.

  “It’s been fun,” Gitty said, “but now it’s dangerous to be near you.”

  He clutched her ferociously and was surprised again to find himself doing that.

  “Patchway,” she said, startled, “I think you really feel something for me. You’re a surprising man but it’s too late. I have my family to worry me. The danger is coming and I have to get away from you.”

  Gitty pulled free from him and went to the door out of the apartment.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t denounce you to Ardjovani or to the police.”

  She left.

  One more divorce for Patchway. Another loss. This time it was a loss he could almost feel.

  He found the glass of vodka in his hand. He drank it down. A toast to another ending of love. To putting his feet once more on the only road that mattered. On the road to money. Where there is no risk of dying friends, of lost love. Because money is indifferent and most indifferent to the man who is indifferent to life.

  * * *

  Saifallah’s first morning in Washington, D.C., broke bright, clear and cold. He got early out of bed, dressed in a rush of enthusiasm and hurried into the hotel’s restaurant. He was the brightest and mo
st enthusiastic of the restaurant’s early morning eaters.

  He ordered what he thought of as an “American breakfast” – scrambled eggs with catsup, sugared orange juice, white bread toast, greasy sausage and chocolate ice cream. He had seen the American children at the oil company’s school cafeteria eat ice cream with breakfast and thought it natural to Americans. He had only once before eaten sausage – in that same cafeteria – and it had been better than his first time at sex. Sausage was glorious because it was forbidden and because it was part of the West where it helped make a man confident and rich.

  He gobbled his food, bundled on his jackets and sweaters to make up for the loss of his heavy coat in New Hampshire and went out to see everything there was to see.

  Saifallah gasped unbelieving at the intense cold but the evil wind could not damage his delight. Iran can be boiling on the Gulf coast while Tehran at 7,000 feet altitude is bitter with snow. But there is there no wind in Tehran like this one in Washington, D.C., he thought. He bulled into the blast and walked along gawking at the strangely low buildings. He decided they had been built short for safety in winter when ice being shoveled from the rooftops had only a few stories to fall and pedestrians could usually survive that.

  Saifallah came to the great Mall with all its monuments and, in the distance, he recognized the Capitol Building. “I’ve made it!” he shouted in English, startling people rushing past him to work. He walked on, giddily enjoying under his shoes the feel of thick grass, a forbidden pleasure in Iran where green things are too precious to tread upon.

  He sat on a bench to watch the passing limousines. He waved to the Americans in their cars. Some waved back. He decided that Americans are a childishly friendly people. He was filled with a rush of good feeling for the oil company crowd back home. He forgot that most of those Yanks had ignored him.