Brides of Blood

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Brides of Blood Page 2

by Joseph Koenig


  Darius pushed the number two man’s light at the body. With his thumb and forefinger he separated the charred fringes of skin around the wound behind the girl’s ear. A metal nub glinted dully in yellow bone like a poisoned pearl. “The angle of the bullet, where the gun was fired, that’s lost for good.”

  “Whatever.” Bijan shrugged. “The case is unimportant. She was a prostitute. When the Pasdars found her, her nails and face were painted. She was half naked. You know these people better than I, the sordid nature of their squabbles. It is only thanks to God they haven’t all destroyed themselves yet.”

  Darius rolled the girl onto her back. Scratches from her hairline to her swollen eyes had crusted into a brown grid.

  “This woman was beaten on several occasions before tonight,” he said.

  “It was God’s will.” Bijan leaned his Uzi against his leg. He carved a block of halvah with a penknife, and gave the other Komitehman the larger piece. “Violence is a way of life for them, existing as they do. A beating was something she asked for, the natural preliminary to such a death.”

  “Since you know so much, why did you send for me?”

  “Do I have to spell out everything, Lieutenant Colonel?” Bijan chewed with his mouth open. “The National Police must attend at all such tragedies, no matter how wearisome. It is the law.”

  Darius looked into the mountains. Teheran was built on a plateau that angled sharply into the Elburz. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a giant hand had curled back the north end and was poised to spill everything—cars, sidewalks, acres of new skyscrapers—into the endless desert to the south. It occurred to him that, if he could find a place to stand, it would be a sight to see.

  He scratched his smooth chin. Where trimmed beards, like yellow Thunderbirds, were considered unbecomingly decadent, to be clean-shaven was to skirt the borders of criminality. Bijan had a point. What was the use of knocking himself out? With a few strokes of lipstick the girl knowingly had signed away her future. Under the dress code of the Komiteh the use of makeup carried a penalty of seventy-four lashes. The girl, if she were a believer, already was at the gates of heaven. If not, at least she had escaped from hell. In Darius’s hand, the light traced bold parabolas around the benches, then returned to the body. “Tell me,” he asked, “where is all the blood?”

  Bijan examined his Uzi, wary of a trick question.

  “She’s been shot,” Darius said impatiently, “but there’s hardly any blood.”

  “The Pasdars cleaned it.”

  Bijan turned to the women for confirmation. The leaders eye blinked like a slamming door. “Only the face.” She held the veil an inch from her mouth. “The nails, her hair—we touched nothing else.”

  “In that case, it’s simple,” Bijan said. “She was killed someplace else and brought here.”

  “In that case,” Darius said, “nothing is simple.”

  Evidence was deteriorating, the investigation—not begun yet—in a mire from which there was slight likelihood he would be able to extricate it. Even so, he had several hard facts to work with. The victim was not a married woman caught in flagrante delicto with another man. Had that been the case there would have been no need to dispose of the body here, since an aggrieved husband had the right, under the law, to kill his errant spouse without being prosecuted for murder.

  Darius shooed the Pasdars away. He straddled the body and pressed his lips to the girl’s neck. His eye was so close to the partially exposed bullet that he was tempted to pop it out.

  “What do you want from her?” asked Bijan.

  “She’s started to cool. It’s hours since she was killed.”

  “You are taking her temperature?”

  “In a manner, yes.”

  “Orally, I assume.”

  Bijan’s mouth was distorted by the halvah, but Darius couldn’t fit a smile anywhere on it.

  “… Then we can go now.”

  “Not yet,” Darius said. “I want you to secure the scene till officers arrive. Also, you haven’t told me what things looked like when you got here.”

  Bijan was shepherding the Pasdar women to the street. “You don’t need our help. Before Islamic justice replaced the old system, the criminal police were ten times as busy as today. Still, they performed their duties.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Darius said.

  “A plague of murder afflicted the people. Killers understood they would not be dealt with severely, so they kept the city in terror. Under the new law it has been made clear what punishment awaits them, and everyone can walk the streets in peace.”

  Darius glanced back at the corpse. “Tell her.”

  “You are wasting your time,” Bijan said. “If you should bring this probe to a successful conclusion, no one will care. The girl is not worth the effort; to find her killer is no accomplishment. He has done the nation a service. If you don’t recognize what has happened, let me paint you a picture. It was a lovers’ quarrel—if love is the word for what transpires among their kind. They had battled before, you said so yourself. Tonight it got out of hand.

  Perhaps she even liked it that way. The boyfriend shot the girl, executed her, judging by the location of the wound, and left her where she would not be traced to his place.”

  “You’ve found witnesses?” Darius said. “Spoken to people who saw the body being dumped?”

  Bijan cut another piece of halvah without finishing what he had in his mouth.

  “Did you try? How many hours did you let go by doing nothing before you called?”

  “Not long,” Bijan said. “First we had to satisfy ourselves that the matter was of sufficient seriousness to bother the National Police.”

  “An idiot would know right off that this was murder.”

  “Good, good.” Shouldering his rifle, Bijan went after the women. “I see you are already on your way.”

  The old man’s ranting began again as the Paycon scurried from the curb. Unformulated questions suggested answers inside the tall buildings; but without the Komiteh on his side Darius was beating his head against the walls. The investigation, molded in official apathy, would bind him to sterile routine until an improbable resolution was delivered from above. Had the girl eluded her killer, and the crime been merely the flagrant use of makeup, resources would have been made available to prosecute her. With the assault on public order having climaxed in her death, however, only a cursory probe was demanded. The logic was unassailable—and the system grew fat on its perversity. For proof there was Bijan, the Komiteh’s crown prince, who had chalked up another success by declaring the murder not worth solving. In no aspect of the case did Darius see profit for himself. While a good arrest might earn a few pats on the back, to accede to the failure desired of him eventually would cost him his job. He turned his face into the breeze. Cool air dispersed some of the fog in his brain, and heightened the sadness that never went away. Clear thought, he decided, was an acquired taste, a luxury well beyond his means and narrow prospects.

  Again he crouched over the girl. Judging by her perfect teeth, she had been well off, rather than poor, likelier a city resident than her country cousin. In her pockets he found eighty thousand rials and a tortoiseshell compact; nothing else he might use to identify her. There was no label or laundry mark in the black garment.

  He wandered away from the benches to call for assistance and to search perfunctorily for additional evidence. When he looked back, a boy of about fifteen was standing over the body. On a string around his neck Darius saw the Key to Paradise with which thousands of children had walked the Iraqi warfront as human minesweepers, secure in the knowledge that their entry to heaven was guaranteed by the talismans stamped in a Taiwan plastics factory. The boy poked at the corpse with an aluminum crutch and lifted the girl’s hem above her thigh.

  “Get lost,” Darius said.

  The boy hammered the ruined face. “Shit on your mother’s grave.” His shout Ping-Ponged between the buildings as he vaulted away on one leg.

/>   Darius smoothed a bloodless gash under the girl’s eye. Wounded again, she appeared younger—a vulnerable sixteen—her untanned skin blemished only by the old scabs and the assaults suffered after death. Dissolved in acetone was an expression to attach personality to her bland remains.

  Police cars rolled up where the Pasdars had been parked, and men in baggy uniforms got out and rubbed the tightness from their thighs. The rumpled procession could not be blamed on the hour. Under the new order, neckties, too, indicated a pronounced lack of piety; but the fashion of the National Police had not been restyled to accommodate the revealed truth. Buttons were left undone, and undershirts and tufts of hair sprouted from open collars. A black Paycon was edged out by a Nissan for the last spot at the curb. The Paycon slunk away, then roared back head on and bounced up onto the sidewalk and over the tiles.

  The plainclothes investigator behind the wheel caught Darius in his lights. “If I made no sense on the phone,” he called out, “it’s because I was having a bad dream, and you woke me. What have we here?”

  “Another nightmare,” Darius said.

  Mansur Ghaffari dropped his high beams as he steered toward the benches. A slender, almost gaunt blond man, he was half a foot taller than any of his colleagues. Ghaffari was third-generation National Police, his mother’s father having been one of a handful of Swedish army advisers imported in the early 1920s to establish a constabulary under Reza Shah. “Do I remember your saying she was shot behind the ear?”

  “Don’t take my word.”

  Ghaffari kept his distance from the body. “The photographer is done with her?”

  “You have my permission.”

  Ghaffari’s nostrils twitched as he took the dead girl in an awkward embrace. “A nightmare for us,” he said, and whisked away a fleck of red from the mouth. “Damn witches, they did everything but steam-clean her. It’s incredible they had the presence of mind to call.”

  “The Komiteh did,” Darius told him. “She’s their gift.”

  Ghaffari tilted the girl into the light. A uniformed officer leaned over his shoulder, watching them cuddle. Darius asked, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I was just …” He was not much older than the dead girl, a recruit patrolman returned to duty after three months at the National Police Academy. Though the young man had been sent for schooling in criminal investigation, Darius suspected a field of study along the more practical lines of issuing traffic citations. The role of the police gradually had been usurped by the Komiteh, until its police duties consisted primarily of writing tickets. Because salaries had been cut commensurately, most officers moonlighted as security guards. “We just want to know if there is anything special you need.”

  “Second sight.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. Cordon a wide area around the body; this court soon will be as busy as the bazaar. Videotape the entire scene. Include the buildings and sidewalks, then hunt for clues. Go along both sides of the street and note the license plates of every car parked within four blocks.”

  The patrolmen had wheeled a gas-fired generator onto the court. Roaring like a motorcycle, it was hooked up to arc lights, which were positioned around the benches. Ghaffari looked behind the girl’s ear. “A contact wound.”

  “But not the cause of death,” Darius said. “There’s no blood on the tile—”

  “The Pasdar is fanatical also about cleanliness.”

  “Or on her chador, not in the amount you’d expect. Someone wasted a bullet on a perfectly dead girl.”

  Ghaffari patted down the black garment. “No papers.”

  “No nothing.”

  “I can take her fingerprints on the spot. If the Bon Yad Monkerat is involved, this is top priority.”

  “They want to make an example of her,” Darius said.

  “What example? She’s been murdered.”

  “The kind that’s buried in an unmarked grave.”

  The uniformed officers strung a rope between the benches and a triangle of iridescent traffic cones, and then clustered around like fighters hungry to enter the ring. The twenty-four-year-old criminalist who doubled as police artist, seeing Ghaffari move the body, put away his sketch pad to hunt for the mother lode of clues. Eighteen months out of the academy, in over his head in a job spurned by veteran investigators because it allowed no opportunity for graft, he kept a criminology text inside his evidence kit at all times. The tiles were as clean as a dinner plate. For want of anything to do he scraped some of the dust between them into a clear envelope.

  Darius stepped over the rope and started across the court with Ghaffari hurrying after him.

  “The girl was roughed up over a period of time,” Ghaffari said. “Last night was simply the coup de grace. When we get her to the morgue, I’ll bet we find she’s been tortured.”

  “No bet.”

  “Why are we looking for witnesses, when there won’t be any? You know whose work this is.”

  “I do?”

  “It has all the earmarks of one of theirs.”

  “What do theirs look like? Has anybody seen one in years? Aren’t theirs planted at night near the Fountain of Blood at Behesht-e-Zahra? … No,” Darius said, “the Komiteh has its reasons for wanting us to go easy on this, but not because they’re responsible.”

  “Such as?”

  “They say the girl is a whore. It could even be they’re right.”

  They entered the sweltering lobby of the building closest to the benches without waking a doorman nodding beside the intercom phone.

  “Apparently security at this complex is not a problem,” Ghaffari said.

  “What doesn’t exist rarely is a problem.”

  The elevators were out of service: Full electric power was limited to daylight and evening hours in most areas of the city. Water was available part of the day on the days it was available at all. The air was sticky from bathtubs kept filled all the time.

  The investigators sprinted up several flights of stairs and came out in a corridor reeking of the spicy sauce called khoresh. Ghaffari pounded on a door on the side of the building overlooking the death scene. “Police!” both men said.

  Light footfalls faded inside the apartment. “Open up,” Ghaffari demanded.

  Darius conjured a family frozen in mid-step, holding its collective breath until the angel of death had passed by. “Try somewhere else.”

  Two apartments away a door was edging shut. Darius wedged a foot in the space and straightened his leg. The panel gave slowly, then flew back, and he staggered into the arms of a man wearing striped pajamas.

  “Thank you for inviting us in.” Darius flashed ID.

  “You can’t—This is a religious household. My wife and daughter are not dressed.” The three-day growth on his cheeks Darius attributed to lazy grooming or a recent conversion. “If you would return later, when they are properly clothed—”

  “It will be too late.”

  A head popped out behind a corner, and a girl of about fourteen in a VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS T-shirt dashed barefoot across the doorway. Darius pushed into the living room. Flat woven carpets were piled three deep beneath a floral print oilcloth, a sofray, used as a tablecloth for eating on the floor. On a convertible sofa a handsome woman in her mid-forties inhaling through a cigarette holder made the same sucking sound as someone lighting a pipe. Her frosted hair was in curlers, and blue tears were frozen under her eyes. The woman clutched a robe around her throat but didn’t hide her face or run away. A violin concerto floated through the smoke she kept moving with the back of her hand.

  “Bastards,” she said, “what crime is this?”

  Music corrupts the minds of our youth, the Imam had said. There is no difference between music and opium. Music leads to fun, and Allah did not create man to have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be tested through hardship and prayer.

  All this Darius knew by rote. If an existence devoid of pleasure was at the heart of the divine plan, then he had
moved closer to God than ever had been his intention. With nothing in life but his work, it was the difference between opium and homicide that had become obscure for him. For the doggedness with which he broke the great majority of cases he was in debt to the mullahs who ruled the land and were the generals in God’s war against fun.

  The woman slid a portable tape player from between the cushions. Training it like a death ray at his heart, she turned up the volume full blast. Her husband made a grab for the machine, and she twisted away and shielded it behind her back.

  “Bring me to Evin Prison,” she sobbed. “See if I care.”

  Darius held out his palm. Sobbing, the woman surrendered the cassette. Darius drew the curtains from glass doors and stepped out onto a terrace that looked down on a kidney-shaped rock garden.

  “Where are we in relation to the courtyard?” he asked.

  “Just around the corner. The apartment has a northern exposure,” the man boasted.

  Darius leaned over the railing to study the rare flora below. How many weeks since he had been this close to grass and a handful of shrubs? There were few parks in Teheran, and most of them were sodded in concrete. In the courtyard the gas generator coughed.

  “I apologize for the music,” the man was saying. “My wife is very tense. There was some disturbance outside, and she couldn’t sleep. The classics help soothe her nerves. Please, do not mention it to the Komiteh.”

  “Have you or your family heard anything out of the ordinary tonight?”

  “The Imam’s sermon on the Jews, if that is not ordinary.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “The sirens of the police.”

  “You shouldn’t play music so loud.” Darius returned the tape.

  “I understand.” The man smiled knowingly.

  Darius didn’t smile back. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

  “What was that racket about?” Ghaffari asked in the corridor.

 

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