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

by Steven Hardesty

  Ardjovani was startled. A ferocious anger came into his face.

  A child of two years peeked around a doorframe into the room. Blond hair and Ardjovani’s eyes and long straight nose. The Colonel called to the boy who ran to him. Ardjovani caressed the child.

  “My son, Saifallah,” he said proudly.

  “I thought your wife had him in Texas?”

  “I have him now. Go!” Ardjovani said to the boy.

  Two serving women followed the child into the room. They carried him away.

  Seeing the child drove from Saifallah his fright of his Colonel and replaced it with a cold and surprising anger. Because the child answered too many questions and raised too many more.

  “Let’s discuss my mission,” Saifallah said to Ardjovani.

  Saifallah neglected to use the word “sir” or to speak in Farsi or use a wheedling tone of submission.

  Ardjovani ignored the oversights and said, “There is more work to do. We’ve one more mission here, you and I, for the Shahanshah Arya Mehr.”

  “What is this mission, Colonel? Show me the farmand with the imperial seal that says what I am to do. Show me now the orders that commanded me to kill Afkhami, Horiat and Sheila Bond.”

  Saifallah’s face mottled, his hands shook. Not fear. Rage.

  “Why did I have to do it, my commander?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you know the story well enough. It’s common gossip.” Ardjovani spoke with embarrassed scorn. But what SAVAK colonel would say anything like that to a subordinate? Or anything like what followed.

  “Like a fool,” said Ardjovani, “I married an American woman…”

  “The Lady Glynda.”

  “She bore me Georgie. Then she left me and stole my son.”

  “You kidnapped the boy and brought him here,” said Saifallah. “That’s where you’ve been the last seventy two hours. That’s a domestic problem. Nothing to do with my mission. Get on with it.”

  Ardjovani ignored Saifallah’s growing lack of courtesy and said, “A son is worth more to a man than a wife or his own life…”

  “Al-lah!” Saifallah cried. “Sheila Bond! She must’ve been the airline officer who helped your wife and son get out of the country!”

  Saifallah began to sob, startling himself and Ardjovani.

  “Allah, the Merciful! I’m a murderer!” he cried.

  “Did you think yourself a hero to your country, you fool?”

  “Yes, yes, I thought that! How else could I have done what I did? Afkhami and Horiat – why did I kill them?”

  Ardjovani relit his pipe. He said, “Afkhami talked my wife past immigration control. Reza Horiat was my nephew – he gave her money. Both traitors to me.”

  “An air ticket and a few rials – are those the cost of two men’s lives? What about my life? You sacrificed my life to satisfy your revenge. You made me a murderer…”

  Ardjovani’s pipe puffed to life. “Control yourself. Be a man. We’ve another task to discuss.”

  “What task?”

  Ardjovani held out an envelope containing Saifallah’s usual neatly typed instructions. “His name is Patchway.”

  “I won’t kill him. I won’t kill again. Not Patchway – I know him.”

  “I set this man for you to kill not for my sake but for your own. You killed his woman, Sheila Bond.”

  “I didn’t know she was his woman.”

  “You’re a secret policeman. You should know everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Patchway will come for you because you killed Sheila Bond. You must kill him or he will surely kill you. Go do it.”

  Saifallah gripped Ardjovani by the collars and hauled him to his feet. He shoved the Colonel against the maroon brick wall and slammed his head against the wall until the white hair spattered with blood.

  Ardjovani did not resist but said, “Don’t be stupid. Get away from me.”

  “I salute you, Colonel, it was a great scheme – the killer who does not know he is a common murderer returns for his reward to find a last victim coming to kill him first.”

  Saifallah released the man and Ardjovani staggered across the salon holding his bleeding head.

  Saifallah shouted, “Will you give me promotion when I return with his severed head?”

  “You disgust me,” said Ardjovani.

  But where was his bluster, where his roar? Where his shout to bring in the SAVAK torturers to drag away Saifallah?

  “How can I disgust you? I’m what you made me, my Colonel. I am your creation.”

  “I didn’t make you a beast. You’ve become that on your own.”

  “Alright. I’ll kill Patchway. I’ll kill him because I have to. I’ll kill him for both of us. Then I’m finished with you. I’m finished with SAVAK. Let this country sink, I’m finished with everything!”

  “You’re a damn fool.”

  “Where is he, Colonel? Where’s Patchway?”

  “Ahwaz. He’s in Ahwaz with his lackey, Jahangard. He’s collecting the body of that ex-Marine who was torn to pieces by the Saint’s…”

  Saifallah went to the door in the foyer and pulled on his shoes and overcoat.

  Georgie stood there gazing at him.

  Saifallah looked at the boy. There was a time when any child would have his hugs and kisses. But Saifallah no longer had any affection in him.

  “Are you the child for whom I traded my life?” he said to the boy.

  Georgie said, “Salaam aleikoom.”

  “Khodah-hafez,” said Saifallah. He went out into the street.

  The storm rolling up from Ahwaz had blackened the air. It drove ice crystals rattling across Saifallah’s shoulders. Garbage bouncing over his feet. A panicked camel, broken from its hobbles, clattered up an alley.

  Saifallah walked down the empty street alone. He would always be alone now. What he had done had permanently and eternally separated him from the human race. He was an outlaw in his species. A traitor to himself. His life would be empty and desolate. You, Saifallah, have taken the lives of human beings for no good cause and you may live life through but it will be a life not worth living.

  Now he would have to go to Ahwaz to kill Patchway to live a life not worth the living. Then where would he go? What would he become? Who would shelter him? Who would love him? He trudged through the storm-blasted city as he wept.

  * * *

  Shiraz Airport

  Afternoon. Mountains pushed cracking up out of a barren high plain by the pressure of Asia ramming into Africa surrounded the oasis city of Shiraz and its little airport. In a different kind of ramming, thousands of screaming men swarmed across the tarmac and had to be driven aside by airport trucks to let Patchway’s aircraft land.

  The plane had been two hours late arriving but that made it on-time for a flight in the Persian Gulf. The temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit on this high plain and that, women believed, justified the mink coats they wore beneath their chadurs. Patchway shoved past the women in mink with their live chickens to get first to the head of the mobile stairway to the tarmac. The body of the ex-Marine was in the hold of this aircraft and Patchway had to be on the ground to receive it.

  From the top of the stairway, he looked out over a mass of grizzled, screaming men with their arms stretched up to heaven and their oddly high-pitched voices roaring, “Alahu akbar!” and swarming around a jumbo jet.

  The aircraft captain at the base of the mobile stairway, his arms thrown up to heaven as he shouted with the crowd, saw Patchway and sent a stewardess scurrying up the ladder to him. She spoke to him in French and German before asking in English, “Are you American or British? Go back inside, quickly, quickly.”

  “What is all this?” Patchway asked the stewardess.

  She shoved him back into the plane. “The Saint has come. Quickly, quickly! Inside. For your life.”

  She pushed him into an empty seat, strapped him down and then, as though she could think of nothing else her stewardess’ duty required of her,
offered him a gumball. “You’re safe here for the moment,” she said.

  It was the first time in her flying career that the stewardess had felt real concern for any of her passengers – she could not afford to be helpful or she would be taken for one of the servant class. She touched Patchway’s forehead in a maternal gesture. Then ran her fingers along his cheek in a very unmaternal way.

  “Call me Laila,” she said. “Remember me. I know you will. Find me on your next flight.”

  She jerked her hand from his cheek and turned toward the open hatch where a short Persian stood gazing at them, his two gold buckteeth glittering below his shaggy mustache. Blue, white and green checked jacket over a yellow shirt open to the waist. He reeked of rose water and sweat.

  “Agha Patchway,” the man said, his gold teeth glittering. “I am Ali Hossein Nagheshineh – the driver sent for you. Give me your luggage tags. I’ll get your bags, if I can in all this mess.”

  “All I have is the body in the hold.”

  Ali Hossein was stunned. “What body?”

  “The one I’m bringing to the coroner. You drove the ambulance?”

  “I’m sent from General Bassari,” said Ali Hossein, his voice sudden and despairing. “No one told me about a corpse.” Ali Hossein gazed with horror at the luggage tag Patchway had put into his hand. “Is this the body?”

  “What does the general want with me?” said Patchway.

  “What does a general ever want? Everything!”

  Another massive cry of “Alahu akbar!” from the crowd on the tarmac shook the aircraft.

  Ali Hossein goggled at Patchway. “All of Shiraz is greeting the saintly Imam out there and I am to carry a foreigner’s body through that mob?”

  Another shout from the crowd.

  “I could be trapped in this plane for hours with this corpse!” said Ali Hossein. He shoved past mink coats and chickens to the top of the stairway. “Agha Patchway, not one word of English now!”

  They went down into the sweaty reek of the chanting mob.

  Men waving placards and green banners stood on the wings and fuselage of the jumbo jet, the huge airplane like a grasshopper smothered in ants. At the jet’s stairway, Patchway saw the Imam, the newest saint in a country littered with the green-domed tombs of saints. He was a withered, sullen-faced desert tribesman with bulbous nose and gray beard, long brown robe and dirty orange turban.

  Even from that distance across that immense throng Patchway could see in the old man’s face a certain canny wonderment at this colossal scene and at his own warped genius that produced it.

  He had been a priest and a khan – chief – of the Bakhtiari tribe that had held and ruled Shiraz since the days of the old kings of Persia. He was not governor of the province or mayor of the city. Not lord of the secret police or commander of the local army forces. But he was the glue that made the city work. He was the godfather of Shiraz.

  A godfather who saw his power shriveling in the heat of a new kind of manic religious fundamentalism centered on the banished Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who wanted to rule a new and theocratic Iran. Where other chieftains ran in terror from Khomeini’s vision, cowering behind their own brutal and bizarre Shahanshah, this godfather made himself a saint, a great Imam, by virtue of his hold on the city, his power in money and rifles and his own ironic genius.

  Patchway felt compelled to fire the Saint a salute as he and Ali Hossein pushed out of the crowd through a clutch of sullen-faced tribesmen in dusty black suits, white shirts buttoned to the throat, leather skullcaps and dull, staring faces. Old carbines. They were not chanting welcome to the Saint. Around them stood a gang of soldiers wearing the Saint’s green armband with their modern automatic rifles, guarding the Imam from these watching dissenters.

  Patchway got into Ali Hossein’s car, an Iranian version of a Japanese copy of a French automobile. Both front fenders had been smashed, the outside mirrors torn off and the tires were bald. It was normal in appearance in Iran. A color portrait of the Saint was pasted to the rear window. They eased through the outskirts of the crowd and found the coroner’s ambulance parked in the road, the driver standing on the roof for his view of the Saint.

  “When I can get through the crowd,” the coroner’s man said to Patchway, “if Allah wills it, I’ll collect your corpse. Now get out of here before you’re spotted for a ferang.”

  Ali Hossein drove the car through the Koran Gate and the low hills surrounding the city. Shiraz is brown, pink, yellow and green – stubby mud brick buildings, jutting plane trees, walled gardens spilling roses over the streets, turquoise domes and sparkling gilt minarets. From across the afternoon haze, they could hear the rhythmic chants of “Alahu akbar!”

  They drove into neighborhoods gutted by the fundamentalist riots before the city’s godfather made himself a saint and regained control of Shiraz. The city was hot, dusty, noisy, teeming with traffic and pedestrians. Ali Hossein performed a high-powered automobile ballet swerving around tribesman jaywalking strings of camels and women like animated bed sheets trailing broods of children who lurched in front of cars. Hundreds of loungers squatted on sidewalks staring at dozens of orange plastic television sets spotted on every street displaying the arrival of the Saint.

  Ali Hossein drove the car up a narrow street beneath the blaring loudspeaker of a mosque and past swarms of men chanting “Alahu akbar!” in cadence with the televised image of the crowd greeting the Saint at the airport. He parked beneath a mosaic of a Persian St. George killing his dragon and in the rose garden of the Hotel Koroush. The hotel was modern and pink, its air coolers pounding away.

  “Check in before your room is given away to a rich pilgrim, Agha,” said Ali Hossein. “Then return to me. Be quick! Don’t leave me out here with these lunatics. For General Bassari’s sake!”

  A middle-aged man with a rice gut and brush mustache dressed in an old suit and new peach-colored shirt shoved into the hotel past Patchway. Then he reconsidered and shoved out past Patchway, gawking at Ali Hossein in his car with his glittering buckteeth. And shoved past Patchway again.

  The plump and pretty receptionist with big sloe eyes, green fingernails and her name “Mahvash” carved in English and Farsi script on a brass plaque assigned Patchway a room at three times the normal rate and said, “Welcome, Agha Pa-cha-vey,” letting her green fingernails graze his hand.

  Patchway’s room was fitted with a bowl of welcoming roses and an orange plastic TV showing the Saint’s progress. Patchway turned off the rhythmic chants and threw his small travel bag on the bed. A corner was stained with the ex-Marine’s blood.

  He watched the silent drama on the television screen. Was he looking at the pop! just before the contraction that would end everything?

  He had a plan. Stick to it. Leave the ex-Marine’s body with the Indian coroner. Fly to Tehran, empty all his local accounts and safe deposit boxes. Fly out for Indonesia or Chile or maybe this time Pakistan. The Pakis love their eternal war with India. Good money to be made there.

  Get out before Colonel Ardjovani tried to kill Patchway as he had killed Madjid Afkhami and Reza Horiat and tried to kill Sheila Bond.

  But that’s the trouble with digging in a gold mine – you’ve got to move all those big lumps of gold you mined and stored away. Patchway had money stuffed in accounts elsewhere around the world. But the richest lumps of money were stored away in Tehran. He had to get bag up all that gold dust before he could fly away.

  He watched the Saint’s chanting on his silence TV. It was not “Alahu akbar!” they were shouting but “Run, Patchway, run!”

  Patchway took from his travel bag a flask of vodka and saluted himself in the bedroom mirror. “Run,” he said, “runaway once more.”

  * * *

  Downstairs in the hotel lobby the middle-aged man in a peach-colored shirt whose name was Homan Rostamkolahi took Patchway’s registration card from Mahvash the receptionist, of whom he had obscene dreams every night, and read the card hoping to find something ther
e that would make his assignment to this hotel less dreary.

  He read the card twice. A third time with no happier result. The man Patchway had arrived through the mob in army car and that should mean something. But the evidence of anything wasn’t here on his registration card.

  Homan sighed dramatically. Mahvash patted his hand in consolation. An electric thrill ran through his arm. Homan, in the usual complicated Gulf fashion, whispered to her a disgusting suggestion which Mahvash passed off with a spectacular glare from her huge brown eyes.

  Homan rapped the card on his rice belly and thought that here was another idiot foreigner on whom to make out yet another boring report that would never get out of secret police files. His was a dull job because there were so few foreigners in Shiraz these days. The chaos boiling across the city had driven them all away. Dreary, he thought, dreary, dreary!

  But this dull job fed his three children and permitted Homan to loaf around air-conditioned hotel lobbies instead of wandering the streets in search of traitors and informants. And he had the joy of gawking at whorish foreign women in their short skirts, at least before all the rioting frightened them away from Shiraz. He wore his peach-colored shirts for them.

  Homan had only one real worry in life and that was his daughter, a good and beautiful child named Laila who was also reckless. She had taken the astonishing step of becoming an airline stewardess. Homan had been horrified when he discovered it but in these modern days women came up with just such fantastic ideas.

  Laila and his wife browbeat him into acquiescence. Even so, Homan had paid heavy bribes to assure that Laila would only be assigned work on domestic flights. He did not want his precious child on any flight to Abu Dhabi or Kuwait where he knew the fate that would befall her – she would be seduced by the damned Arabs and gang raped and, if she complained, her tongue torn out. It happened all the time to British stewardesses and French tourist girls. But they hardly mattered – they were Westerners and whores anyway.

  As for SAVAK, it found Homan a fine agent because he had a good agent’s nosiness, he was gossipy and could not be trusted with a secret. He was an ideal Persian secret policeman because he could be counted on to pass information both ways. SAVAK was not just an intelligence-gathering agency but a communications agency and an effective means for the Shah to talk to his people.