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

by Steven Hardesty

  “What shall I do, General?” the officer said.

  Bassari said to Patchway, “Put up your weapon, Agha. You know I’ve not tried to harm you in any way, believe me. That’s an absurd idea. Surely you know that?”

  “Where are your bodyguards?” Patchway said. “This house is empty and on this balcony I find a general and three of his senior officers ready to jump into a helicopter.”

  “My helicopters have taken them all away,” Bassari said. “What would you expect?”

  Patchway glanced down into the chanting mob filling up Bagheh Eram. “What are you going to do with that remote control?”

  The helicopter on its rooftop landing pad reduced its blades’ rotation to a slow whip-whip, as though it were a giant time-marking device and not a means of escape.

  Bassari said to Yasamin, “Time is running out. Help me here.”

  “How can I help you with Patchway?” she said.

  “Make him understand I have to get into that helicopter.”

  “There he is,” said an officer, pointing to a caravan of green Mercedes limousines winding through the chanting thousands, the Saint in his dirty orange turban standing in the lead convertible.

  Bassari said, “Surely you can see I haven’t any more time, Agha Patchway? Let us fly away from here together and we’ll deal with all of your concerns, even cure what ails you.”

  Patchway cocked the revolver. “Why did you poison me?”

  “Yasamin, help me, please,” said the General. “I need a minute more.”

  The self-made Saint in his orange turban climbed out of his convertible limo into the kill zone.

  “What’s going to happen down there?” said Patchway.

  “Patchway!” Yasamin shouted.

  Patchway started by reflex but hers was a shout to distract, not to warn. Bassari’s booted foot clipped his head and Patchway staggered. How could this fat Santa Claus jump like that?

  Yasamin threw herself on Patchway’s gun hand. Bassari struggled to his feet after the leap that had thrown him on his back. The three officers jumped toward Patchway. He fired his pistol and everything stopped, frozen, no one willing to die too soon.

  Yasamin dived for the radio device and she and Bassari wrestled in a turmoil of petticoats until the General put his hand into her orange hair and pulled back her head to the strangling point and she let go of the radio.

  Patchway turned his pistol from the three officers to Bassari and shouted, “Enough of killing, General!”

  “Not enough! Not yet!”

  Bassari pressed the radio trigger. Great roaring fire gouted out of Bagheh Eram, yellow flame shooting up out of the thousands of people crowded there.

  “More!” the officers shouted.

  Bassari howled his war cry and fired the trigger again.

  Patchway fired the pistol. Bassari was thrown screaming away from the radio.

  Yasamin grabbed up the trigger device.

  Thousands of people shrieked in the street far below.

  “What are you going to do with that?” one of the officers shouted at her.

  Yasamin put her fingers on the radio trigger.

  “Don’t do that,” Patchway said.

  She gazed at him with eyes glazed with wildness.

  Bassari, bleeding, pulled himself up by the balcony railing. The officers hauled him upright and began to stanch his wound but he shoved them aside, shouting, “He’s not dead! I see him – he’s alive!”

  “If he survives,” an officer shouted to Yasamin, “he’ll kill us all.”

  “No,” Patchway said to her. “Don’t do it.”

  Yasamin pressed the trigger and blew up her garden.

  Great whacks of metal and stone and huge gouts of orange flame blasted away the face of the fairy tale palace and ignited the roses and plane trees.

  Patchway lunged for her as she cried, “Let me finish it! Let me finish it!”

  She triggered more burn barrels and the garden flamed all over orange and yellow like bursting napalm.

  Patchway yanked the radio control device from here hands and threw it smashing down into the baked earth courtyard.

  “You fool!” she screamed. “We’ll all die! I have to finish it!”

  Out of the shrieking mob came a sudden rising keen of despair and panic as the mob searched for the Saint.

  “Great God, what have you bastards done?” Patchway shouted.

  “The best that could done,” said Bassari, sagging into his own pooling blood on the floor.

  “That was your garden,” Patchway shouted at Yasamin. “Why did you burn it?”

  She stared at him out of a face bruised and bleeding from her fights with Bassari and Patchway. “Don’t you know? Can’t you understand? What a fool you are! Better the Saint and the garden die together then he rules and I have no garden. You’ve killed us, Patchway. The Saint is alive and we are dead. You should have let me finish him.”

  The three officers ran up the staircase to the roof of the mansion. The helicopter whined up to speed, jumped off the roof and fled over the city.

  Bassari, sprawled in his blood, watched the chopper go and said, “The army has abandoned me. SAVAK will come for me now. Be decent, Patchway. Kill me. Don’t let me fall into the hands of the secret police.”

  “Tell me why you poisoned me.”

  Bassari almost laughed. “It wasn’t even supposed to be you. We didn’t want you. We wanted your body.”

  Homan in his peach-colored shirt was there, more SAVAK agents behind him, all arriving with the speed of men who had been observing events on this balcony for a long while.

  “Homan,” Bassari said to him, “I tried.”

  Homan put his pistol against Bassari’s head and fired.

  Yasamin screamed.

  Patchway said, “Is that for me, too?”

  “What does it matter to a dying man?” Homan said.

  “Agha Rostamkolahi!” Yasamin cried. “Help me, help me!” She stood there weeping in torn skirts smeared with Bassari’s blood. “What has happened to the Saint? Where is the Beloved of God?”

  Homan took her arm. “He’s safe, child, and you are safe with me. I’ll see you home myself.”

  Homan called to the others to find her a chadur and bundle her into his car. She went away gratefully.

  “You’re a fool and you have to know it,” Patchway said to him. “She’s a traitor.”

  “She’s tomorrow’s problem,” Homan said. He put out his hand for Patchway’s pistol. “Give me that. You won’t use it here. Now follow me.”

  Homan led into another room of Bassari’s mansion. The mob’s screams and the crackling of the burning rose garden were muted in this room. Homan was calm, professional, focused on what he considered a larger task than the chaos outside.

  He took pen and paper from his jacket pocket and put them on a table beside Patchway’s pistol. “We have to be quick or too soon the Saint’s personal guard will take you away from me. They will stake me and Colonel Ardjovani before a firing squad if you don’t give me what I want.”

  “What do you want and why should I care?” said Patchway.

  “I want a speedy confession from you naming General Bassari, Yasamin Safavifard, Dr. Zargoneh, the soldier Ali Hossein and others I will name for you – including Colonel Ardjovani, if you like, I don’t care – as conspirators against the Saint and the Shahanshah Arya Mehr. They strove to make civil war to satisfy their greed for power – write something like that. Write quickly. Better, I’ll dictate and spell the names. Do this for me, give me my life, and I’ll do something for you.”

  “What could you do for me now?”

  “Kill you painlessly.” He tapped Patchway’s pistol on the tabletop. “No matter what that fool Zargoneh believed about his genius with poisons, you are not going to die fast enough for the tortures that will follow once my new masters in the Saint’s personal guard take command. You may live forever on their torture racks.”

  Homan cracked
open the revolver’s cylinder. “There are four bullets here. I promise you I’ll use just one.”

  Patchway put his hand over the cold patch of scar tissue on his belly and felt the heat of the poison deep inside him. The pain was subsiding. He was surprised. Could he have shaken off the venom? Could Zargoneh’s phony antidote have done him some good after all? Or was Zargoneh too incompetent to have brewed anything but a stomach ache?

  Maybe Homan was right and Patchway would live long enough to be sliced into pieces or burned alive.

  Patchway said, “I want a better offer.”

  Homan was surprised. “You want to bargain with me? A quick death is all I need to offer you. Take the pen. Quickly! Sign the blank paper, if that’s all you can do. I’ll write your confession later.”

  “Fake my signature.”

  “I don’t want a fake. I want something that can be authenticated.”

  “Like a foreigner’s body thrown as scapegoat among the ruins of the garden?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Give me a pistol and let me out of this house.”

  “That’s what you want? A pistol and freedom to live five more minutes?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “What can you do on Television Hill with five more minutes of life?”

  Patchway took the revolver from the tabletop and put it in his pocket.

  Homan slid the blank sheet of paper to Patchway. Patchway signed.

  “Make a very rich five last minutes for yourself,” Homan said.

  “I will. They will redeem everything else.”

  “I think you are a fool not to take my offer to die quick,” Homan said.

  “I’m nothing at all,” Patchway said, “until I finish this.”

  “God be with you, I suppose.”

  * * *

  Patchway walked through the blue cherubed gates left open and unguarded in the enormous confusion of the burning garden down Television Hill. The upper floor windows of Colonel Ardjovani’s house were packed with servants and children gawking out at the chaotic fire, the howling mob and the shrieking emergency vehicles.

  The boy was there alone on the ground floor, stuffing a teddy bear into a small soldier’s pack.

  “Are you Patchway?” Georgie said in Farsi, frightened and anxious. “Mommy told me.”

  He was three years old, precocious and as demanding as Glynda Heater.

  “I’m here to take you to your mother,” Patchway said.

  “Where is she?” the boy cried, puzzlement and yearning in his child’s voice.

  “Texas,” Patchway said.

  “I ran away three times. They caught me.”

  “They won’t catch you this time.”

  The child threw his arms around Patchway. “Don’t lose me again! Let’s go, let’s go!”

  * * *

  Saifallah stood at the blue gate with its cherubs. A mass of soldiers, police and weeping civilians came out of Bassari’s mansion next door, Ardjovani among them. Saifallah said, without raising his voice, “Colonel.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The boy is gone.”

  Ardjovani ran into the house, into the panicked wailing of servant women.

  “Saifallah!” he shouted from a balcony. “My son is gone!”

  “Patchway has him. In a stolen yellow Peykan. From that balcony, I watched them drive the length of Zand Avenue.”

  “You watched them? You let him steal my son?”

  “I let him steal the boy for whom you paid my soul.”

  “The license number, the license number! What is the license number?”

  “I have it – a yellow Peykan, going south.”

  “There are ten million yellow Peykans in this city!” Ardjovani cried. “How can you know which way they went, you fool?”

  “He can only go south. The passes north are blocked with snow. West to Ahwaz is a camel caravan trail – too slow. East is desert and sheep. He goes south to the Gulf and Kuwait. He will not risk being caught on a plane.”

  Ardjovani shouted in rage, “Go bring me my son!”

  Saifallah drew the automatic pistol from under his coat. “Do you recognize this weapon?”

  “Why do you have it?”

  “I stole it to kill Patchway. You and I will kill him together.”

  Ardjovani croaked, “You used my son to bait him?”

  “What better bait?”

  “Are you insane? You are a spent man, Saifallah. Find my boy or I will kill you.”

  “Yes, Colonel, I am a spent man. You spent my soul to murder three people. I used your soul to bait the man who seeks to kill me. We are spent men together and we are finished with each other.”

  “Not until you bring Georgie back to me!”

  “Call your people. Block all the airports and roads. Make it easier for me. But send no one after him but me. No one to interfere. I know this man, I know the hollowness in him. I know how to find him.”

  * * *

  Saifallah drove north until he had pushed out of the swarming traffic fleeing from the burning garden and then drove through the narrow streets of the neighborhoods where the news of the attack on the Saint had not yet sent people strapping their mattresses and goods to the roofs of their cars to run into the safety of the desert.

  Saifallah turned south toward the road to the Gulf and drew up at the southern city gate. He got out of his car to wait for Patchway and the boy.

  Traffic eight cars abreast on a two lane road squeezed slowly out of the city gate and Saifallah, with Ardjovani’s big automatic in his hand, went from yellow car to yellow car, slapping the pistol on the windshield as he peered through dusty glass at the terrified faces of the refugees. One of those faces, sooner or later, would be Patchway’s, and Saifallah would put a bullet into it before Patchway could the same to Saifallah.

  * * *

  It took Patchway, who did not know the city, two hours of horn-honking, threatening and swearing to shove his car through the traffic swarming out of Shiraz. Trucks and cars with carpets tied to the roofs, stuffed with people, chadurs trailing in the dust below closed doors. Goats, donkeys, camels running beside the road. Tribeswomen in huge skirts thrusting their babies at car windows and begging for rides. Patchway was drenched in sweat, sweating out – he hoped – the poison that had failed to kill him on time.

  Time was what he needed now – hours to get to the Gulf, many hours more to sail a dhow across to Kuwait, to put Georgie on a U.S.-bound plane and to put himself in a hospital. Time, time.

  There was no more clenching pain in his belly but a shifting gloom that crowded his vision faded to something like blinders. He had to turn his head to reclaim peripheral vision.

  He turned his head to see a man press his face against the windshield – black mustache, hair gone wild, pistol in his hand. Saifallah!

  Patchway rammed the Peykan through the jam-up and Saifallah was flung off the car. Patchway’s car screeched by other cars, scoring fenders, ripping off chrome, until he had driven it bursting out of the southern gate into the open desert where cars fled from the city in long rattling caravans.

  Saifallah stood in the lurch and bang of traffic, stunned to have found and lost the man for whom he had searched, the pistol in his hand hanging at his side. He marked the position of the yellow Peykan in the vehicles streaming south across the desert and ran to his car.

  * * *

  Two hours more and Patchway, sweated out and dehydrating in the winter desert heat, had pushed the car past the ancient caravanserai that lies below the red and white Zagros Mountains south of Shiraz. Here the country was gray and tan despite the winter rains. Here were the first stalled cars and trucks littering his escape route, their passengers leaping in front of cars to shout for gas or rides. Georgie, staring out the rear window, said, “He’s not there, Patchway.”

  * * *

  Saifallah had driven hard and well and was certain he had made up the distance between himself and the y
ellow Peykan with Patchway and the boy. But each yellow Peykan he passed was filled with mustached men and howling brats. Saifallah beat on the steering wheel in his frustration. Patchway had to be within range now but where was he?

  * * *

  At what should have been two hours south of Shiraz but instead was six, Patchway and Georgie crossed a dry river guarded by an abandoned adobe fortress. In normal times, the road below the fort was filled with children hawking oranges. Now the tribesmen were packing their black tents on camels to escape the Shirazi mob. Georgie slept sprawled on the rear seat. Patchway steered the car off the road into the desert which itself had become a huge road. The boy woke, startled. “What’s wrong?” he cried.

  “Gas.” Patchway took from the trunk the fuel can and water bottle that every driver in Iran must carry. A dozen cars crowded around him, the drivers begging for petrol, the men shouting to gather courage to steal the fuel. Patchway drew the revolver. Poured fuel into his tank, threw down the jerry can and climbed into the car. He gave the water bottle to Georgie and drove away, men pounding their fists on his car in rage.

  “A man is looking at us,” said Georgie.

  Patchway saw a Persian with a bushy mustache and wind-blown hair sitting at the wheel of a black Mercedes of the type common to SAVAK officers. Saifallah stared back at them in surprise.

  Saifallah slammed his brakes as he sideswiped a truck pulling across his path that was itself swerving to avoid the jumble of cars attracted to Patchway’s gas can thrown down in the sand.

  “I saw him before,” Georgie said. “At the house.”

  Over the grind of metal and howl of traffic, there was a crack! like a hammer hitting wood and a rip of metal. Saifallah’s bullet gouged across the roof of Patchway’s car.

  “Get down on the floor!” Patchway shouted to the boy. He swung the Peykan winding through traffic and there were no more ripping gunshots.

  But there was darkness. It came like a blackout of the sun, and into that they escaped from Saifallah. Before Patchway lost all chance of seeing the road and the cars around him, he pointed the Peykan toward a round-shouldered hill taller than its surrounding hills, with a dirt path to a crumbling citadel on its crown. The adobe walls flashed red before the sun vanished.