Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  Baghai searched the lace for a zipper. “Cut her out,” he told the attendant.

  Darius blocked the scissors. He snapped open a panel at the crotch, and the attendant eased the girl out of the bustier.

  “I see you’ve had experience of a hands-on nature,” Baghai said.

  Darius inspected the label, then folded the garment as though the girl would be slipping into it again when she was done on the slab.

  “We will start now,” Baghai said.

  “First let me have the bullet. Try not to scratch it.”

  Baghai’s arthritic fingers moved deftly as he trimmed the ragged skin around the mastoid bone. “We should be done in an hour. Get some fresh air. I’ll send for you when we have compiled the preliminary report. Only a word of warning: don’t eat before you return.”

  He tweezed the slug, let it fall into Darius’s palm. “Small caliber. A twenty-five, at most.”

  Darius sealed the bullet in an evidence envelope. “I’ve had my fill of fresh air.

  “Very well, then, we will begin with the external examination. If it agrees with you, stay for the cutting.”

  Baghai lowered the light. “Deceased is an unidentified female,” he began in his dry voice, “approximately eighteen to twenty-five years of age. The body is generally well developed and well nourished. Weight …”

  “Fifty kilograms,” the attendant said.

  “Height …” Baghai referred to a ruler etched into the slab. “One point six meters.

  “Body found on 3400 block of Saltanatabad Avenue, Shemiran, approximately five A.M., August twenty-first. Time of death, from eight to twelve hours. Gunshot wound of the right mastoid bone. The bone shattered but not swollen. A black hole, eight millimeters in diameter, rimmed by abraded skin with powder tattoos in a radius of seven centimeters. Body was found by the Pasdars and cleansed with acetone prior to examination. Body pale in color. Rigor mortis apparent in the limbs, and …” Baghai manipulated the head, a chiropractic adjustment. “Neck muscles.

  “Deceased’s hair is black and straight. Eyelashes black and mascaraed. Pupils round; irises dark brown. There is a purplish swelling around the left eye, and scabs approximately nine centimeters long and one half centimeter wide across the left cheek to the edge of the upper lip. Slight swelling on the left side of the jaw.”

  Darius noticed that outside the lace corset the breasts were flaccid, the colorless nipples inverted. Baghai dictated similar observations to the attendant.

  “… No surgical scars.” Baghai placed his hand on the flat, fishy stomach. “Pubis clean-shaven. Subdural hematoma approximately three centimeters in diameter on the upper right thigh, and …” He spread the legs indecently, and readjusted the light. “My God, this girl has been infibulated.” With a speculum he opened her. “In a lifetime I thought I had seen everything, but this—”

  The voice was not Baghai’s. Baghai had no feelings. When a cluster bomb had crashed into a Rey kindergarten during the war with Iraq, Baghai by himself had autopsied the mangled remains of thirty-seven children, and then gone out to a fine Firdowsi Avenue restaurant to explain his findings to military intelligence.

  “This woman may well have been Arab,” the imposter said. “I pray she is not Iranian, that we haven’t come to this.”

  Darius stared at the coroner.

  “You’re the expert on Arab women. Do I have to explain?”

  “An amateur expert,” Darius said. “They’re a hobby. Once were.”

  “This is not for amateurs.” Again the voice of dispassion. “Among our coreligionists on the Arabian peninsula, it is not unknown for the external genitalia of female children to be surgically removed. The rationale is that a woman will have no interest in engaging in illicit sex when she is incapable of taking pleasure from it. In West Africa, there are tribes that perform female circumcision because they believe the clitoris is a dangerous organ that makes men insane. This much, at least—” Baghai smiled halfheartedly, “is accurate.”

  “That’s what was done to her?”

  “And more. During infibulation, after the exterior genitals are removed, the legs are bound together for several weeks to prevent the scar tissue from being torn apart. The vulva is sealed; and a splinter of wood placed in the wound to allow for elimination. The vulva remains closed until it is cut again, or forced open. Infibulation permits virginity to be proven before the brideprice is paid. Our Arab cousins are obsessed with all this.”

  “At her age the scar is still intact?”

  “There was no scar,” Baghai said. “The operation was performed no more than two weeks ago, and the stitches ripped out before the wound healed. For a child, a baby, it would be torture. In a woman the agony must be indescribable. Why she would submit is beyond my understanding.”

  “There was a gun at her head last night. Probably it wasn’t the first time.”

  Baghai put down his instruments. He attached a flash to an old Japanese box camera, and tunneled between the girl’s knees.

  “The coroner’s office maintains a black museum,” he said. “The record of this case will have a special place. If you would like prints for your friends at the Komiteh and Pasdar—”

  Darius was blinded by the flash. “Don’t give them ideas.”

  He was in the viewing room, watching the frozen parade on the carousel, when the attendant reached him with the preliminary report. He scanned it while hurrying downstairs. “You haven’t listed any cause of death,” he said to Baghai.

  “I could no more find a cause than a reason. I’ve removed the internal organs for laboratory analysis. It’s possible she died of sepsis. Infibulation generally is performed by a barber using the same filthy razor with which he shaves his male customers. Coarse horse hair is used for the sutures. Infection is the rule. Medical science can’t explain why someone would shoot a girl who is already dead, or why she had to suffer mutilation.”

  “When will the lab results be ready?”

  “In several days. Until identification is made, I’ll keep the body. I may want to look at her again.”

  “You’ve seen torture before,” Darius said. “Could she be one of theirs?”

  “When the Komiteh learn of a new cruelty, they don’t hesitate to employ it. Lately, we are finding Coca-Cola in the lungs of people who have died of painful means. By shaking the bottle into a nostril they make the most laconic prisoner talk. But they can’t take credit for her. Let me show you why.”

  Darius averted his eyes as the coroner lifted the sheet.

  “You can look.”

  Baghai had exposed the girl’s feet and was stroking her arches. “Unmarked,” he said. “She hasn’t been subjected to the bastinado. Nor are there scars. The Komiteh may come up with the odd new trick, but they never forget the old.”

  Ghaffari was gone from headquarters, no one knew where. Darius went to the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, formerly Shah Avenue, to see the Revolutionary Prosecutor.

  Fayegh Zakir was a painfully thin man with an oversize head and blunt, swollen features that gave the impression he was feeding on himself. His office was next door to the men’s room, the air saccharine with disinfectant.

  It was a windowless cubicle furnished plainly with an old desk and chairs left by previous administrations. The trappings of modesty, Darius knew, fell away at the property line of his home in the posh north Teheran neighborhood of Africa, which he had purchased for cash equal to forty-seven years’ salary.

  Darius touched his perfumed tie to his nose, and went in with the preliminary autopsy findings. Zakir gestured to a seat in the cloying draft from the men’s room. “What is this?”

  The Revolutionary Prosecutor regulated the activities of the Komiteh, issuing the warrants under which they entered houses, seized property, and made arrests in questions of security and intelligence. Under the law, the Revolutionary Guards had little power without his authorization, and could be dismissed or jailed at his order. In point of fact, Zakir lived in fear o
f the Komiteh, whose grumblings about insufficient vigor had hounded the last four of his predecessors from office.

  “A fresh homicide.” Darius didn’t sit. “A girl was discovered by the Pasdar murdered at the new apartment complex on Saltanatabad Avenue below Niavaran. We don’t know who she is, or how she died. Baghai dug a bullet out of her head, but it was put there after death. There was evidence of sexual mutilation.”

  Although he was alerted to major crimes by the Komiteh, Zakir demanded a separate briefing from the police. The feeling of both agencies was that they were working at cross purposes, which often they were.

  “Fourteen rapists, plus eight killers were stoned to death last week at the Sports Stadium in Bushehr.” Zakir slid a Daily Kayhan from under the report, and tapped his finger against the front page. “You’d think that would put the fear of God into anyone contemplating murder. The crazy bastards don’t read the papers, though. What leads do you have?”

  “None.”

  “Is Ghaffari working with you?”

  “He inspected the apartment houses for witnesses.”

  “He is a capable officer. The investigation can be left in his hands without worry. There is a more pressing case I want you to take over.”

  “What’s more urgent than murder?”

  Zakir leaned across the desk, lowered his voice. “Last night, four armed men broke into a house on Bobby Sands Street.” Bobby Sands Street, at the rear of the British embassy, had been Royal Street prior to the Revolution, when it was renamed after the Irish Republican Army gunman who had starved himself to death in an English jail. “They roughed up the occupants, bound them with adhesive tape, and made away with carpets and furnishings valued at many millions of rials.”

  “How many killed?”

  ”None, praise to Allah, but the family received a terrible fright. They are the son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren of a big turban man from Isfahan, Ayatollah Golabi. We must find the people who did this, and put them quickly in the ground with those bastards at Bushehr.”

  “This is more important than murder?”

  “If people like the Golabis lose their key, and are locked outside the house, that is of greater concern than the death of such a girl.”

  “Give me the report,” Darius said. “I’ll find someone to look into it.”

  “You will handle it personally.”

  “When I have time—”

  “First the robbery. You are not in the U.S. now. This is how we do things here.”

  He did not need to be told. A jumble of priorities ensured that every job in Iran was infinitely more complicated than it appeared on the surface. The diligent worker was the one who took on more than he could accomplish, promising that sometime in the future, with God’s help, surely he would fulfill his task. Held to that standard of endeavor, Darius’s performance as a criminal investigator was found to be wanting. Having closed virtually every case to cross his desk, he was faulted for a lack of initiative. What more could he do? he had asked Ghaffari. Go on a murder spree himself? Arrange for mountains of unsolved cases secure in the knowledge that he could put a killer behind bars for each one? It was either that, Ghaffari had advised, or forget that he’d ever lived in the United States, or else go back there to stay. And because the three strategies were equally attractive, and one was as improbable as the next, Darius had settled on another way out of his bind and shut his ears to all criticism except the flood that came from himself.

  “Ayatollah Golabi is extremely powerful,” Zakir said. “He will make our lives miserable until we find who did this. After he has his carpets back there is nothing he won’t do for us. What can the girl do?”

  The question was not meant for Darius, who got up to leave.

  “You are not working for the shah anymore. You’re in no position to dictate. If it weren’t for the turban men, you’d wish you had been sent to Bushehr.”

  Darius sniffed his tie as he went to the door. “She can give us peace of mind,” he said.

  The young criminalist, Hamid, was pacing the corridor when Darius returned to headquarters. “We have learned something of major significance,” Hamid said. “The superintendent of the apartment complex says the electric ran well into the evening yesterday; it was not until midnight that power was cut, and the lights went off in the court. Obviously, the body was brought sometime after that, and before four-thirty, when the Pasdars arrived.”

  “Why?” Darius asked.

  “Because …” Hamid reviewed the case in his mind before committing himself. “… those are the hours when it was dark.”

  “Where is the rule that a body cannot be gotten rid of in broad daylight without being noticed?”

  Hamid held himself stiffly. He gave Darius a sheet from a yellow legal pad. “Here are the license plates that you wanted noted. All but two are registered to residents of the neighborhood. Of the others, one is from Azerbaijan Province, and another reported stolen from Rey last week. We have taken over an apartment on the top floor, and are keeping our eyes on the vehicles. Tomorrow morning, we’ll set up roadblocks to ask motorists if they saw anything.”

  Darius entered his office to find Ghaffari at his desk, making a paper plane of yellow paper like Hamid’s.

  “Doesn’t miss a beat, that boy,” he said. “I’m one hundred percent convinced he’ll find whoever stole the car from Rey.” He refolded the paper, streamlined the wings. “This is a list of all convicted sex offenders in the city over the last fifteen years. The computer is not working. Records compiled it by hand.”

  “Why go back so far?”

  Ghaffari test-flew his plane without letting go. “When the penalty is death, recidivism is discouraged. I suggest we look for someone who left prison prior to seventy-nine.”

  “Sex fiends don’t wait that long before going after their next victim. Not any longer than you.”

  “I’ve been good, a faithful husband. I—” He protested too vehemently. “You briefed Zakir?”

  “Yes—And I almost forgot. Congratulations. The Revolutionary Prosecutor has put you in charge of the case.”

  “What about you?”

  “As of now, I’m looking into a big one, a break-in at the relatives of a turban man near the British embassy.”

  “That’s nuts. Who is he protecting?”

  “Don’t be insulted, Mansur. Soon as you show progress, he’ll replace you with Hamid. And after him, one of the recruits. And then he’ll order an arrest, somebody the Komiteh wants out of the way.”

  The yellow plane made a belly landing next to the trash basket. “Farib called.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She had the same question about you.”

  “Did you explain?”

  Ghaffari put his feet up on the desk. “Go home, Bakhtiar. That’s an order from the new homicide chief. Tell her about this girl yourself.”

  Darius wove through the noonday crush, taking whichever streets the traffic offered. Policemen stood out of the way as drivers ignored signals, rode on the sidewalk to avoid bottlenecks, and converged on gridlocked intersections where honor was stained by yielding the right of way. Although an official car was at his disposal, he preferred the old Thunderbird with its German radio that pulled in snatches of popular music from U.S. Armed Forces Radio in the Persian Gulf. He drove past the Muslim Theological School at Baharestan Square, and parked in the underground garage of a twelve-story apartment house. Orange letters were spray-painted on the whitewashed wall behind his spot:

  THE ROAD TO SALVATION:

  FAITH, HOLY WAR, AND MARTYRDOM

  The floorboards groaned beneath the carpeting. He stepped over dusty suitcases in the foyer, and tossed his jacket on the couch. The three-room apartment had been considered luxurious when the building went up during the early 1970s oil boom. But the thin walls were no match for the stench of dombeh, frying lamb fat, and the gulping toilet next door. On the television was a photo of him at the former Shahyad Tower on the western
approach to the city with a curly-haired girl who was wearing a green head scarf and had stolen his smile. Colorless images flittered across the screen. Darius stared absentmindedly at a mullah sermonizing on the evils of idolatry and sexual deviation.

  In the bedroom a sleeping woman held herself tightly on a sliver of the double mattress. He sat next to her, and studied the aquiline nose that plastic surgeons had whittled a step beyond perfection. Gold droplet earrings were lost in her thick curls. “When did you come back?” he asked.

  Her lips parted, and the red tip of her tongue tasted them. Her eyes darted around the room. Not happy with what she saw, she closed them again. Propped on an elbow she rubbed the lids with her knuckles like a child. “Where were you?”

  “A woman was murdered. I had to work all night.”

  A knife edge of sun sliced across her cheek. Held to the scrutiny of natural light her complexion was flawless, which she attributed to having given up makeup and alcohol.

  “Tell me about Qom.”

  “Uncle misses you,” she said.

  “He’s well?”

  “It was 118 degrees yesterday, and the pollution does his asthma no good. But he will never leave.”

  “You spent time with him every day?”

  “When I was not at the mosque.” Farib scratched her forehead. Just below the hairline was a thin callus from the stone that she pressed her head against while crouched in prayer. The Qur’an forbade touching any man-made object during discourse with God. “You might visit sometime.”

  “You know my feelings,” he said. “It would be hypocritical—”

  “It’s your duty as a Muslim to go to the holy city and pray to the Almighty.”

  “Your uncle is a turban man, and he doesn’t object.”

  “If uncle forgives you for not attending to your religious obligations, it’s because he is a saint. As a woman, such forgiveness is beyond me. You can make an appearance at the mosque, even if it means nothing to you. For what he did for you he is still criticized everywhere.”