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

by Steven Hardesty

  Saifallah made a tour of the city and left nothing undone. He saw the shrine to the Declaration of Independence and was amazed to realize that the contemptible British had once occupied America, too. He was astonished to find the Library of Congress decorated with barbarous and mystic symbols he could associate only with Jews and Babylonian relics. He made the pilgrimage to Lincoln’s statue and found it gloomy and frightening and could not understand why a race-mixer should be so honored.

  Saifallah found a restaurant in the Smithsonian Museum and ate American mashed potatoes and watched young mothers with squalling infants. Those scenes he enjoyed more than any other because they reminded him of home where children swarm like wild things through the streets and public buildings.

  He saved the White House for last. Saifallah stood outside the iron gates as evening became night. He watched the building, watched its fountains, watched its flag. He turned from the White House to watch the other tourists, most of them American, and studied them studying their President’s palace. He saw in their faces the same wonder and hope he felt. He turned back to the White House and calculated again how he could become an immigrant.

  Saifallah had a dinner of real Virginia ham and real Tennessee bourbon to celebrate his grand day as a tourist in America. He was surprised the meal did not include a plate of rice. He ate as he reread all the postcards and guidebooks he had bought.

  He went out of the hotel on schedule, prompt because he knew Americans expected it. He found a black man standing at the street corner waiting for the light to change.

  Saifallah was not pleased to find that his contact would be black. Not even Alexander the Great, with blue eyes and Macedonian nose, is white enough to satisfy the Iranians who consider themselves the mother race of the Aryans. Alexander also had the distressing habit to favor race mixing and the equality of women. No wonder he died young.

  Saifallah stopped for the light.

  “Cross the street and keep walking north,” the black man said to him. The man thrust a small package into Saifallah’s hands.

  They crossed the street together, another gusting wind tearing at Saifallah’s sweaters and jackets.

  “White car over there is yours,” said the black man. “Key in the driver’s door. Map and instructions on the seat. When you’re finished, leave it at DuPont Circle like the map says.”

  The black man continued his walk away from Saifallah.

  Saifallah got into the car. He opened the package and found a thirty two caliber automatic pistol with an extra magazine taped to the handle.

  He extracted the magazine in the weapon and experimented with the slide action and trigger pull. He gave the pistol a shake. It rattled. Old but serviceable.

  The car engine turned over on the first try. “Things always work in America,” Saifallah murmured in English. He was happy again.

  He drove the car a few blocks, experimenting with the steering and acceleration, and parked to study his map route. He was relieved to find the route had been planned in one simple great circle. A typed paragraph of instructions told him about his second victim’s neighborhood.

  The Madjid Afkhami he had killed in the north was a man Saifallah knew nothing about. He was a traitor to Iran and that was all Saifallah needed to know. But this next man was one of Colonel Ardjovani’s blood clan. Strange where treachery will grow. Even under the roof of a colonel of the secret police.

  Saifallah had as much time as he wanted to handle this second killing but he would do it tonight while he was high with the thrill of being in Washington. A quick kill now freed more time for sightseeing tomorrow.

  He drove to the neighborhood intending only to make a reconnaissance but, as he steered onto the street filled with expensive brownstones, he realized he was in no condition to make careful judgments. He was buoyant from the triumph of his first drive through American traffic. But he was also confused and annoyed to discover that Americans are intolerant of people who drive down the road’s center stripe to avoid hitting camels in the dark.

  The evening had grown cold. The heater in the little car did not work. Saifallah was irritated having to rely on a black man. He hated the wind. Perhaps Washington was not such a great place, after all.

  Saifallah was suddenly hungry to get on to San Francisco where the ocean splashes on the tanned sleek bodies of American women. That had to be a glorious change from this city suddenly so gray and forbidding.

  He saw two white men walking along a sidewalk filled with black children and recognized one of them as Reza Horiat. What a delight! This was a country where anything could be done in a car, fast food or quick murder. Saifallah forgot the cold and his anger with rude Yankee drivers.

  He allowed the car to move ahead slowly, drew the pistol from under his coat and pulled back the slide to cock the hammer.

  As the two men crossed the street, he drew up in front of them. They nearly walked into the car. They stood there startled. Saifallah used the street light to make sure he recognized Reza, a young man he had seen often enough when he bodyguarded at Colonel Ardjovani’s house in Ahwaz.

  Saifallah called the man’s name. Reza leaned toward the open car window. Saifallah jammed the muzzle into Reza’s chest to muffle the sound and let the automatic fire twice.

  It was done! Number two finished! Washington was okay!

  Saifallah turned back to the steering wheel. A man screamed. Saifallah was startled to hear the man scream like a woman. He looked back as Reza’s companion reached for the falling man. The car jumped a curb. The black children scattered from the sidewalk. Reza collapsed and his screaming companion with him.

  Saifallah pulled the car back onto the road and drove away. The heater began to work. He was as happy as he had been that morning on his first walk around the city.

  Saifallah turned the street corner and braked not to hit a police car. The street was filled with police cars. Behind him, a great new building labelled “Police.” He almost yelled protest. All the great glooming horror of that deadly cold night drive through New Hampshire and the weird, awful, changeable, freezing and whipping wind of Washington, D.C., fell on him. He was an impulsive fool. They had him. He was doomed!

  “What the hell are you doing, jerk?” a cop shouted, climbing out of the patrol car. “Get the hell over on your side of the road. Where do you think you are, back in Porto Rico?”

  Saifallah shrank in his seat and swung the car into the correct lane. He inched past the policeman scowling down from beside his squad car and drove very carefully to the next intersection and there turned, putting on speed.

  “Where’s my gun?” he cried aloud. On the seat beside him for the policeman to see. He shivered with cold and fright.

  He hunched over the steering wheel and drove as carefully as he could though he was continually baffled by Americans who honked their horns at him and shouted bizarre obscenities. But he was beyond understanding or caring. He wanted this mad drive to end. He wanted to get away from this car and that pistol.

  Saifallah followed the map route to DuPont Circle and was startled to have found it so easily. He felt better. He parked the car and got out. He left the keys in the ignition, following instructions. That puzzled him as it would only encourage theft of the car. But he did as he was told.

  He threw the pistol down a storm drain and his typed instructions into a sidewalk waste bin. Saifallah wandered the streets in the whipping cold until he found a movie house advertising a cops and robbers film and went in.

  The movie puzzled him. He thought it deadly serious but the audience snickered. He sat uneasily thinking over the evening. He was unexpectedly hungry. When would the Cokeboy circulate through the crowd? Where were the pistachio vendors?

  He grew impatient with the audience. They had no respect for a policeman like him. Each time he glanced at the screen, the film cop’s brutal face reminded him of the policeman whose squad car he had slunk past.

  Saifallah clambered out of the theater. Walked aimlessly.
Went into a bar. Small, overheated, full of hanging plants. He ordered a beer, found a pay phone and fumbled through the directory. There is no directory in any city in the Middle East and he had never before encountered such a book.

  He stared at the pages until the barmaid came with his beer and said, “Let me help. What number do you want?”

  He looked at her made-up face with its sharp brown eyes and neatly cut blonde hair and said, “I’m from foreign.”

  “Isn’t that nice? I could tell. Your English is very good. What number do you want?”

  Saifallah looked into her open bodice. Her breasts were huge and firm. He broke into a sweat. He drank some beer and wiped the foam from his mustache. American beer tasted as weak, fizzy and sweet as Bubble-Up and made him smack his lips.

  “Railroad information, please,” he said to the barmaid. He tried to smile but realized he was leering.

  “Here’s general information at Union Station,” she said, pointing at a figure. “You call this number. If you go out by Union, you can use the Metro to the station and save cab fare.”

  She smiled sweetly. “That’s a dollar for the beer.”

  Saifallah pulled a bill from his pocket and gave it to her. She was pleased to have a five, smiled even more sweetly and went away.

  The buxom barmaid was gone and Saifallah was left with a cold, sweet beer and no change. America was a miserably confusing country.

  But he had only seven days to see all the rest of it and he had to hurry. He booked an early morning train west via Chicago. Ardjovani had ordered him to avoid the southern route through Texas. Just as well or Saifallah would have been tempted to see the fabled Alamo fortress, so dear to all the oil workers in Iran. Instead, he would go to Chicago, magnet for Iranian immigrants because its dreary cold is so much like Tehran.

  Saifallah hung up the phone and looked around for the waitress. She was smiling sweetly at another customer, collecting another five dollar bill and disappearing just as quickly. American women were like Washington, he decided, beautiful and cold.

  He felt depressed. He began to feel some justification in his mission to kill one of these women. Saifallah even felt a sympathy for Colonel Ardjovani, the hard put-upon husband of an American woman who ran away with his son and so humiliated the Colonel that Ardjovani was pulled out of the real work he was doing in Ahwaz on the combat border with Iraq and sent into the dreary routine of the interior in the city of Shiraz.

  Saifallah pulled up his coat collar and left the bar.

  The hotel phone woke him at six A.M. in the middle of a delicious dream about the barmaid. He dressed and rode in the bright little subway car to Union Station, thinking how glad he would be to get to San Francisco and its blonde and roundly tan California girls. A zing of fright – was it one of those women he was expected to kill?

  * * *

  Rain spattered across her windshield as Beverly Mowlavi drove across Key Bridge and into the nation’s capital. Below the bridge the still water of the Potomac threatened to ice. In a part of the city called Northwest, lying on the cold asphalt, rain thickening the fibers of his overcoat, was a dead man she had been invited to meet, a dead Iranian.

  Mowlavi was a professor of Middle Eastern languages and she had been called to the phone at a Georgetown party where the food was not good enough, the booze not free enough and the men not cute enough to please her when she heard a voice that promised murder.

  “Dr. Mowlavi,” said Sergeant Wherry, “I need you for ten minutes’ translation. Persian, I think, this time.”

  No “please.” No “thank you.” Just the certainty in Sergeant Wherry’s voice that she would come. Like an ambulance chaser. A ghoul at a fire. A translator on-call to the police in a city that civil war in too many distant places had suddenly made a refugee center for the world.

  Mowlavi steered into the street past the brownstones to the body beneath a plastic sheet. A uniformed officer pointed her up the stairs to climb. She could hear whimpering up there.

  She climbed up into a hallway where thin light came from an open apartment door. A man with knobby shoulders and a long horse face stood in there. Sergeant Wherry. He had one hand on the shoulder of a crying fat man jabbering frantically in two languages, neither of them English.

  Wherry said to her, “What’s he saying?”

  The fat Iranian cried out, terrified.

  “Ahrram bashid!” she said.

  He shut up, startled, then threw out his arms and clutched her to his chest. Wherry hauled him back.

  “Let him go. He’s harmless,” Mowlavi said. “But he’s going to make a messy interview.”

  She said some words to the frightened man to calm him. He sank into startled silence but he was not calmed.

  Wherry gave her the dead man’s passport.

  “Hot damn,” Mowlavi said, looking at the photo of the dead man.

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him. The dead man’s Reza Horiat.”

  When she spoke the name, the fat man moaned.

  “Horiat is related, can’t recall how, to a chieftain in the Shah’s secret police.”

  Wherry was startled. “Curious all the details a Georgetown professor might know,” he said. “Maybe I should’ve stayed in college.”

  Mowlavi said, “I’m a first generation Yank, Sergeant. My folks emigrated from Iran after the war. I’ve got family back there and if they want to stay out of SAVAK prisons, they learn the score card. I pick it up. That’s how I know this kid’s name. But I don’t know what it means that he would be here.”

  She spoke to the fat man quietly but firmly. His tears stopped. He replied in rapid Farsi.

  She said to Wherry, “Horiat was this man’s best friend and cousin. Every Persian is every other Persian’s ‘cousin’ so the blood title means little. Of the two, only Reza spoke passable English. Can we let him sit down? By the heater? If we can find a chair in this empty place.”

  This was an elegant building and an expensive apartment but it had nothing in it. Blinds drawn, no curtains, a card table, beds of grimy cushions on the floor. Closets that were stuffed with clothes but no telephone, no TV, no radio. No books or magazines.

  “An odd way to live,” Mowlavi said.

  Wherry found a chair for the fat man. He said, “I’ve see it all before. It’s how you live if you can’t speak English.”

  Wherry picked up a shoebox full of letters written in Farsi. “They reread those every night. Their only entertainment. Know what the drawn blinds mean? They mean when the workday is done, they come back here to sleep. They sleep a lot. To get away from an alien society that frightens them and because they’ve nothing else to do. America is a continual misery for them.”

  Mowlavi said, “My folks wouldn’t let themselves live like this.”

  “Maybe they went straight to Georgetown.”

  Mowlavi was startled at the bitterness in Wherry’s tone.

  Wherry said, “For most, being an immigrant is the toughest job on earth. If you fail, you starve.”

  “You’ve got some sympathy for these people,” Mowlavi said to him. “I’ve never seen you sympathetic with any of your cases.”

  “My folks were hardscrabble immigrants,” Wherry said. “They lived like this. I remember living like this.”

  “Reza Horiat was different,” said Mowlavi. “He could tap his uncle for money. He had no reason to this way.”

  “Maybe two reasons,” said Wherry. “Couple of reasons he’s here in a rich but empty apartment and not in Georgetown. Pride. Too proud to go home empty-handed. He needed a college degree or a suitcase full of stereo gear. Or fear.”

  “Fear of what?”

  Wherry nodded toward the fat man. “Talk to him. Find out what made Reza Horiat too afraid to go home.”

  She spoke to the Iranian. He worked to answer her questions and to hide the shock he felt when he realized Beverly Mowlavi had some authority among the police. That this woman with her garishly painted face and dis
graceful clothes, without a husband at her side to protect her, unveiled, somehow had authority over him.

  At last, Mowlavi said to Wherry, “His Arabized Farsi says he’s a country cousin. From a village near Ahwaz in the southwest. That’s an old Arab principality the Shah’s father took over when he found it full of oil. He says a white man in a white Chevy drove up behind them, called Reza’s name and shot him.”

  “How did this guy pronounce the name? Correctly as a Persian or not?”

  “It’s an easy name to say right,” she said. “Even for an American.”

  Wherry tried it. “‘Reza’?” he said.

  “More guttural on the first syllable. Accent on the last. Say it fast and make it faster. Like my name, Sergeant – it’s ‘Moe-la-VI’ not ‘Mao-lay-vy’.”

  “So fair chance the killer is Iranian.”

  “Or Arab or Pakistani or any of a half dozen other countries where ‘Reza’ is a common name. That broadens your suspect pool.”

  “Narrower than it was before you told me that.”

  “Give him a break,” Mowlavi said about the fat Iranian. “Get a friend in here for him. He comes from a society where no one does anything singly and he needs the support. He also thinks all cops are like Persian police and that means Neanderthals. He’s scared to death what you’ll do to him in your precinct house.”

  “He’s just a witness. Tell him I don’t go Neanderthal on witnesses.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  She did. The fat man wasn’t convinced.

  “Now ask him for the name of a friend to be with him,” Wherry said, “and I’ll get him over here.”

  Wherry turned away to his work. No “please,” no “thank you” and no “good night” to Beverly Mowlavi. She had been hauled out of a Georgetown party and brought into this murder and now she was being thrown out of the murder and expected to return to her Georgetown party. Mowlavi felt as dissatisfied as the object of a careless lover.

  Who had killed Reza Horiat and why?

  More, why did she love murder?

  Mowlavi went down the stairs to the street, feeling suddenly angry and bitter. The whipping wind had frozen the blood stained on the asphalt.