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

by Steven Hardesty

  After several turns, Saifallah parked under a street lamp and opened the package. The usual well-thought-out street map. A card with Sheila Bond’s home and office addresses. A loaded thirty eight caliber Police Special revolver with no extra ammunition.

  It amused him that in D.C. they had given him a tiny and womanly automatic with enough bullets to kill a platoon of Reza Horiats. But here in California they gave him a big revolver with only one load of ammunition to kill a woman.

  Perhaps in this Wild West a man is measured by the number of bullets he needs to kill, Saifallah thought. Then these cowboys would learn an important lesson about a SAVAK agent’s skill, he thought, bitterly. He was surprised at his own bitterness.

  Now that Saifallah had the weapon he could not afford to stay longer in San Francisco. According to the map, Bond lived in the hills above the city of Berkeley across the East Bay. A few kilometers distant. He could kill her and be on his way home to Iran in a few hours.

  A flood of bitterness came into him, startling him so badly he shivered.

  Yes, he thought, go do it now. Kill her and get away from this awful America.

  Saifallah put the car into the street and plunged downhill, clattering across trolley car rails. He was in action again. He had no time for more thinking. He was thankful.

  * * *

  Two hours later Saifallah regretted not thinking. It had taken him forty five minutes to discover the on-ramp to the freeway. Because he believed that in California, as in Iran, road signs mean nothing. Now he was driving like a panicked woman toward Los Angeles 450 miles south and it was totally beyond his power to change things. He had never been on a highway as uniform, flat, straight, broad and heavily restricted as this one. Stay within your lane! Speed limit! Police everywhere!

  Saifallah drove in a wild sweat. He knew he had long ago driven past the exit to Berkeley, that the sun was about to appear in the wrong part of the sky and he was heading hopelessly away from his victim. But each time he took another of those amazing double-twisted off-ramps he got himself lost in cities of black faces where no one seemed to sleep and all the streets were filled with people.

  Something happened and now he was heading north! He kissed the steering wheel in happiness. He slowed the car to study each road sign he passed. Drivers honked their horns at him. “Ahrram bashid!” he shouted at them

  He saw the magic word “Berkeley” and turned that way and the torture was over. No more freeway! The road twisted through the Berkeley Hills and again he was amazed at how many trees there are in America. How rich the smell of greenness.

  Dawn.

  He was so exhausted that he was content to see morning coming across the treetops. He stopped in a neighborhood of Hansel and Gretel cottages, pine trees and flowers and was amazed to find that, as the map had promised, that little house across the street with the morning sun just now glinting on its windows was the cottage of Sheila Bond. He was only a few minutes away from buying a plane ticket home. Everything was finishing

  nicely. “Everything,” he said aloud and in triumph, “works in America!”

  * * *

  At eleven P.M., at the moment Saifallah’s aircraft touched down at San Francisco International Airport, Sheila Bond stood on the dark porch of her Berkeley house, leaning on her cane to ease the pain in her bad leg, drinking her last scotch of the day. Inside, her bags were packed for a morning flight out of San Francisco to a safer place until this business over the Ardjovani boy was finished. The TV was on for company.

  She went into the house and poured another last drink of the night. “Prince Charming will make an alcoholic of you yet,” she said aloud, thinking of the prince who no longer wanted to charm her.

  Sheila sprawled in her favorite chair, stretched her pain-throbbing leg on the ottoman and fell asleep. She dreamed of Glynda out of control of herself and out of control of her life, hysterical for her kidnapped child. She dreamed of Patchway. What of Patchway? What would happen to him in all this?

  She woke suddenly with a great unease, staring at the dark ceiling, the TV buzzing. There in the shadows were the nightmare creatures pointing their fingers at her – dead Reza Horiat, dead Madjid Afkhami, the kidnapped boy named Georgie. All pointing their fingers at her to say, Now for Sheila Bond.

  She took from a drawer the revolver she had bought in Iran after a Marxist bomb had put a piece of metal into her hip. She loaded the pistol and put it on top of the thermofax copy of the photograph of Afkhami’s killer. She looked again at the face she could not recognize.

  She fell onto the bed for a last hour’s sleep and dreamed of policemen and killers. Of a policeman in D.C. who had said he would call Patchway. Had he? Should she? What would Patchway think of her call after so much time and that one only night in the orange grove that had, a million years later, driven away from her the man she had married and loved and left her life a wreck and everything else spoiled?

  How could the poison in Patchway do all that from 7,000 miles away? But it did. Because he had put his poison in to her.

  She woke sobbing and then she knew she was stupidly drunk. She heard the quiet throb of a car engine across the street. She fell asleep again.

  * * *

  Saifallah had a piece of wood in his hand that he had found in Sheila Bond’s garage, a club that would be a quieter weapon than the big revolver in his pocket, and plenty good enough to kill a woman.

  He went into the house from the garage. The red-haired woman was asleep fully dressed, a wooden cane propped on the foot of her bed and the ugliest revolver Saifallah had ever seen resting on the nightstand by her hand. The pistol on top of a crude photograph of himself.

  Terror! Where had she gotten that picture? What kind of thing was a pistol for American women to keep in their bedrooms? What mad man’s country is this that women are allowed guns?

  Saifallah stood over her with the club studying Shelia’s sleeping face. Stink of liquor in the room and from her breath. Yes, that was the face he had memorized from a photo – the red hair, pale skin marred by freckles at the nape, elegant curve of knee beneath the hem of her skirt. How could such a woman know anything about pistols?

  Sheila Bond sat up. Looked into his face. Saifallah froze. She reached for the pistol, not screaming in panic as Saifallah expected but grunting with the effort. He swung his club at her head.

  She twisted toward Saifallah as he swung, now grabbing for her cane and throwing up her arm and the cane against the blow. The club struck the side of her head and slid across the top, whipping out her hair and a spray of blood.

  She fell off the bed and staggered to her feet and Saifallah came at her again. She whipped the cane into his groin. He shrieked.

  Sheila’s weak leg threw her against the wall. Blood ran into her eyes. She tried to hit Saifallah again with her cane but the blow was just a tap. The clubbing she took in return threw her across the room and into the closet. She slid down among her clothes, smearing them with blood.

  Sheila lay in a daze, clothes slipping from their hangers to fall down onto her. She saw Saifallah moaning, sitting on her bed, hands cupped over his groin. She wanted sleep to get away from the hammering roar in her head. The bed – so far away! Him on it.

  She tried to scramble to her feet, to find her pistol, her cane.

  No, he was not there on the bed. Gone!

  She was alive and she would stay alive.

  She was no longer afraid. She tried to pull herself up the wall to stand but the arm Saifallah had struck with his club was broken.

  The killer came at her again, grabbing her throat and shouting Persian curses she was too dazed to understand. She began to gag. She put her good hand on his wrist almost tenderly. The roar in her skull ran out to her limbs. Her legs and feet spasmed. She stared into his blurring face. She tried to scream, to fight, to breathe. She felt her sphincter release in her fright. She felt him throw her against the floor like a wasted thing, like garbage, like a dead animal.

  Sh
e was barely breathing through her crushed neck. Was she breathing or was she dead? Did he think she was dead? Was he leaving her here on the floor almost breathing?

  Sheila lay in her blood on the floor a long while without moving, testing her throat and understanding, to her surprise, that he had not crushed her throat after all though he had the strength to crush it. She could breathe! Her throat felt like the pain of blazing fire and stabbing knives, but she was breathing!

  She sank away into a blackness. Oh, no, she thought, if this is death and it’s full of so much pain, so much like life without Prince Charming, then what’s the point of dying?

  * * *

  Saifallah watched the woman’s body sprawled in the blood and urine on the floor until the spasms ceased in arms and legs. He snapped Sheila Bond’s cane over his knee and threw the pieces at her. He rubbed more pain from his groin and went out of the cottage. He was fed up with everything in America. To hell with it all.

  He boarded his Iran-bound airplane in a mood so bitter that the vodka and lime he had ordered from the pleasingly fat stewardess could not sweeten it. It would be a long flight and at the end of it there would be no more peace.

  Saifallah had another drink and demanded a third. They had no effect on his mood.

  He stared out at the empty sky. At least he was safe for a time in this airplane, safe in the air from both West and East. Safe until he reached Shiraz and told Colonel Ardjovani he had lost the willingness to kill. Lost the desire to serve SAVAK. And that Sheila Bond was still alive.

  * * *

  Ahwaz, Southwest Iran – 1978

  Silent desolation. Brown hills sweeping south like ocean waves, their crests sunbaked earth crumbling in the winter heat. The sky thick and dusty from the sandstorms blown out of Arabia across the Gulf and the pollution of the oil field flare towers over the horizon.

  Patchway drove the rattling Chevy carryall along the camel caravan trail that had, in later centuries, been cut and asphalted and re-asphalted and re-asphalted. But the tarmac was no insurance against disaster and every bend of the trail, every lurch across the crumbling hills, held the carcass of a ruined truck, its cargo of oil bled away downhill.

  “For Christ’s sake don’t drive so fast, Agha!” shouted the driver in English, sitting in the rear luggage deck. Then, in Farsi, “I’m damned if I can keep this dead man in one piece the way you drive.” He kicked the body bag against the cartons that were meant to restrain it, then braced himself against the opposite wall, trying to hold the corpse in place with his feet and far away from him.

  The temperature was a winter’s eighty five degrees. The ice packed inside the body bag had begun to melt and to drool onto the floorboards from rips in the bag.

  “I resign!” shouted the driver, kicking the corpse again. “I resign, I resign! Stop the car – I’m getting out!”

  “Not accepted!” Patchway shouted in Farsi over the clatter of the carryall’s fans. “Stay back there with the stiff and shut up.”

  Jahangard sitting beside Patchway with mottled gray hair and immense rice belly was Patchway’s odd-job man here in the south, as Madjid Afkhami had been in the north. Jahangard said to Patchway, “He’s right. He’s a good Moslem and he can’t sit back there with a dead man the whole ride into Ahwaz.”

  “You trade places with him. But do it while I drive. I won’t stop. I want that corpse in Ahwaz before the ice melts.”

  “I’m a better Moslem than he! I can’t go back there!”

  “Then let him suffer.”

  Jahangard shuddered and stared out the windscreen at the huge waste of Khuzistan Province, the towers by the roadside flaring off natural gas from the oil fields and the old stone and mud brick fortresses built forty years ago by Reza Shah the Great when he needed them to destroy the bandits and the tribes that raided this camel caravan trail.

  “One more hour and we’ll be at the hospital,” Patchway said.

  “It’s leaking blood now!” cried the driver.

  The dead man had been one of the 500 Yanks contracted into Iran by the company for which Patchway was a salesman of organizational systems. He was one of the systems Patchway sold. The man was an ex-Marine aviator who, for three times his retirement pay, had come to Iran in a program Patchway had designed to show the Imperial Army how to set up combat helicopter wings.

  The Shah had bought for himself the world’s largest fleet of combat hydrofoils and hovercraft, the world’s fifth largest submarine fleet and now wanted the ex-Marine and more of Patchway’s systems to upgrade the world’s fourth largest combat helicopter fleet. The Shah wanted to be the Xerxes of the twentieth century.

  Patchway found the pieces of the ex-Marine flung into a rocky field outside a fundamentalist village. No one in the company would go collect those pieces. None wanted the same end for themselves. Patchway went. He would leave none of his dead or wounded behind.

  The company’s post mortem would say the ex-Marine had wandered off the reservation the company had carefully staked out for all its employees. Just one more cowboy who could not resist peeking under a woman’s veil or driving his motorcycle through a mosque at prayer time.

  But the truth was something else and made the sound of a Slinky toy falling downstairs. Stretch, rattle, pop! contract. A sound too frightening for the company to include in any official report to its global headquarters.

  The ex-Marine had been a lone Western face hiking past a village of believers in the frenzied mullahs who believed that they, the priests, held a divine right to rule Iran in place of a king who traded Iranian rice and oil for hydrofoils, submarines and helicopters while his people starved for rice and foreigners sucked away the country’s birthright of oil.

  But the ex-Marine was not the only symptom of the religious rebellion spilling across the country. Three hundred miles east of the village in which he had been torn to pieces lay the desert city of Shiraz. In that city was another mad man, a self-proclaimed saint who was a minor chieftain of a minor clan and self-decided rival to Ayatollah Khomeini, the high priest who lived in sullen exile in France dreaming of his own one-man conquest of Iran. The Saint was the man Colonel Ardjovani had been sent south to watch over and guard against.

  “There’s the city! There’s Ahwaz!” cried the driver in the rear with the body bag.

  The road twisted around slate monoliths driven up out of the earth by the pressure of continental drift and past goats picking in the rubble of ruined oil drilling equipment and brought Patchway and the carryall to Jundi Shapour Hospital. Patchway flung open the rear doors. The driver back there was as rigid as the corpse, staring at the mess of water and blood that had soaked his clothes.

  “I resign, I resign!” the driver shouted. He leaped from the car and ran away into the city.

  Attendants came out of the hospital. They would reassemble and repack the corpse for Patchway to accompany to the Indian coroner in Shiraz who alone in all of southern Iran would or could embalm a corpse because he was not a Moslem.

  It was six P.M. The streets of Ahwaz, even in winter, were deserted by a population accustomed to the hot misery that never eases before sunset.

  “After all that, I need a drink,” said Jahangard.

  “Let’s make it real scotch, not that wood alcohol and iodine the Arabs sell across the Gulf,” Patchway said.

  “I’ve gotten a real taste for that poison,” said Jahangard, attempting a laugh. He raised a cigarette to his lips, lit it and nervously sucked it to ash before the body had been hauled out of the car and carried into the hospital.

  “I hate death,” Jahangard said, “almost as much as I hate dead people. But I’ll never do this for you again, Agha Patchway – no more carrying bodies across the desert. Real scotch this time!”

  In the bar of the Royal Astoria Hotel, owned by the Shah’s twin sister as she also owned the tax rights on every highway in the country, they sat at a table overlooking the dying Karoon River. Across the bank, in the distance, was Iraq and the forty year
combat frontier.

  Jahangard drew from his pocket a handkerchief and dumped its contents on the table. “That’s all I could find of his effects in the village,” he said. “I don’t think the villagers would keep souvenirs of a son of Satan, so I’m sure that’s all he had in his pockets.”

  Patchway pushed the dead man’s wallet across to Jahangard. “Count the money.”

  The Persian laughed now and put aside the butt of another cigarette. “Not me. I’m not touching that. I’m just your witness.”

  Patchway took back the wallet and pulled out the bills. He hated touching them. His mind called up the image of a dead man’s wallet in Vietnam, Patchway’s commanding officer pulling out of it two bloodstained postage stamps minted in Hanoi, then stuffing them into his own wallet for his collection of dead men’s stamps. Now Patchway sat in a bar by a river across from the Iraqi combat front with his hand in another dead man’s wallet from another kind of war. He watched his fingers tremble.

  Jahangard watched, too. “Even a brave cowboy fears the touch of a dead man’s things, I see,” he said, with satisfaction.

  Patchway slapped the money on the table. “Count it, damn you.”

  Jahangard used a pencil to separate the bills. “Eleven thousand rials – about twelve dollars in green. Maybe that money there is French. I don’t know how to count it.” He looked up at Patchway, emphasizing the displeasure on his face, but Patchway was staring across the river into Iraq.

  A dead man in Ahwaz, Patchway thought. Dead men in Vietnam. Tearing the scabs from wounds he had hoped were deadened but were alive itching to be opened. He felt the chill of the scar on his belly. Where was the applause this time? There, out there in the combat zone, he could hear it faintly.

  Evening. Patchway was startled when the bar put on its lights. He found they were nearly drunk together.

  Jahangard was drunk enough to be free to ask, “Have you never heard from her? Glynda Heater?”