Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “Trying it on for size?”

  “What?” Darius asked him.

  “I saw you sitting here like the dead girl. For a moment I thought you might be dead, too.”

  “Who would harm me? I have no enemies.”

  “Neither did she.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “A theory of mine,” the Komitehman said. “Another is that it would be better for you to concentrate on the burglary at the relatives of Ayatollah Golabi.”

  “There was no burglary.”

  “You have the soul of a prophet. Your calling is to reveal the truth.” Bijan sat next to him with the Uzi between his knees. “But in Islam all truths were revealed long ago. Muhammad was the last prophet, and he is dead more than a thousand years.”

  “New questions come up every day,” Darius said. “The prophets didn’t anticipate the modern age.”

  “Nothing is new,” Bijan answered with conviction, “merely things that are not as they appear to be at first glance. For instance, dig deep at the Golabis’ and, if God wills it, you will uncover a robbery like countless others.”

  “And if I dig here, what will I find?”

  Bijan gazed at the apartment houses. It seemed to Darius that he focused on the bricks rather than glimpse inside the windows. “The girl was an Arab, a narcotics addict. It is not the responsibility of the National Police of the Islamic Republic to sort through the world’s garbage.”

  “How do you know she used drugs?”

  “On reflection it is plain.”

  “Nothing is plain,” Darius said. “Dr. Baghai almost missed it.”

  “We have our sources.”

  “Your people killed her. That’s your source.”

  “Slander against the Committee for the Revolution is a crime for which the penalty is years at hard labor,” Bijan said. “If you persist in such remarks, be prepared to back them up with fact.”

  “She was yours.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by yours. The Pasdars found her body. We alerted the police, who took her away. So it follows that now she is yours, am I right? I came to tell you that pursuing more relevant investigations will enhance your worth to the Revolution. If you would rather waste time on a prostitute, it is up to you, of course, but—” Bijan slid his hand along the oiled barrel of the Uzi, fondled it—teased it, Darius thought. “But not useful to anyone.”

  “How did you know—”

  “That the girl used drugs? I told you—” Bijan stroked the muzzle, and wiped his hand on his pants. “The Komiteh has its sources, even in the morgue.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Darius said.

  “What?”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  Farib lay on her small piece of the mattress with her elbows like barbed wire around her body. Vaguely, Darius remembered when she sprawled across the bed and could not sleep unless he was pressed tight beside her. Over the years she had gravitated to one side from which he was excluded except upon invitation. He noticed a leg almost off the mattress. If he did not repair his marriage, soon she would be sleeping on the floor, or else he on the couch. In the morning he would offer to go shopping with her, look for nice things to put in her new valise.

  Stepping out of his clothes, he raised the blanket. Without benefit of surgery Farib’s body was nearly as perfect as her nose. It was Darius’s complaint, never expressed, that he slept each night with the Venus de Milo, and worried about leaving smudges. Perversely, he anticipated her rages, when bloodless lips or the clumsy gesture that proved her to be human inspired new love—and more frustration. His eyes full of her cool beauty, he climbed under the covers trying not to brush against her.

  He was awakened by the phone. Too tired to move, he lay on his chin and listened to it ring. When it stopped, he opened his eyes. He was alone in bed, the room flooded with late-morning sun. The ringing began again. He hurried into the kitchen, and picked up on the extension.

  A whisper he couldn’t put a name to asked to speak to the lieutenant colonel. With the receiver against his shoulder he brought the teapot under the faucet. Running water washed away the cobwebs, and he recognized Farhad on the line.

  “I’ve been thinking about the girl,” he was saying. “Possibly, there are other things I remember about her.”

  “What things?”

  Farhad had his own agenda. “Before I tell you, there’s a small favor you can do—”

  “Keep out of trouble,” Darius said, “and you won’t need favors.”

  “It’s not for me—for a friend, a girl very much like the one we talked about.”

  “What kind of trouble is she in?”

  “Evin Prison,” Farhad said. “That kind.”

  A sound meant to be ironic laughter came out of Darius a grunt. “No one has influence there. Not even the Komiteh can get people out of their jails.”

  “If they know someone is interested in her case, they’ll go easier on her.”

  “I have some doubt about this sudden improvement in your memory,” Darius said.

  “I’ve always given you good stuff.”

  “You have the same credibility as any other informant, which is to say not much.”

  “She’ll be just like that girl, if you don’t help.”

  Darius put a light under the teapot. “Give me a taste of what you have, and I’ll tell you what it’s worth.”

  “Nothing for nothing.”

  “Bye, Farhad. I’m not going up against the Komiteh, and then find out you’ve been building castles in air.” He heard other voices, one inquiring about the price of a valise.

  Farhad said something he didn’t catch, and then, in a whisper: “The girl told me she had twenty, maybe as much as thirty kilograms of Afghani white heroin, very high-grade, almost pure. And she knew specifically who she wanted to move them to—a mutual acquaintance in Dharvazeh Ghor, who she could not locate. I told her where to look.”

  “And then?”

  “The buyer—do what you can for my friend, and I’ll give him up to you.”

  “You appall me, Farhad. Where’s your criminals’ code of honor?”

  “What does he know about honor? He’s a fucking thief who’s beating me out of a ten percent finder’s fee.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “This is all you get for free. Will you help?”

  Darius forced hesitation into his voice. “I’ll be at the bazaar in a couple of hours.”

  “No, I’ve already been seen too much with you. How well do you know Dharvazeh Ghor?”

  “I can find my way around.”

  “On Martyr Rafizadeh Street there is a school that was bombed during the War of Cities, and never torn down. If you want to know about the girl, about both girls, be there at seven.”

  “I can’t give you any guarantees about your friend.”

  “If you won’t try—then it’s guaranteed what will happen to her.”

  Dharvazeh Ghor, at the retreating edge of the desert, was home to the poorest of Teheran’s poor, day laborers and sweepers in small factories, who lived in iron-roofed shanties for which a single squat toilet over an open sewage pit served dozens of families. The Martyr Rafizadeh Street School had been a pet social project of the new regime. It was less than a year old when an Iraqi missile crashed into the lunch room, killing and maiming nearly two hundred children. No funds were available to rebuild the structure, which stood now as a memorial to the slaughtered youngsters. Though the roof was gone, the walls remained intact but for empty windows and door frames. Dharvazeh Ghor in its entirety appeared to Darius as a monument to shattered hope. New construction had been limited to wedding bowers for the war dead, waist-high shrines decked with colored pennants, and tin amulets in the form of St. Abbas’s consoling hand.

  Darius had assumed that Farhad would be waiting outside. For fifteen minutes he paced the sidewalk before clambering through the wreckage into a classroom. The cinder block walls were papered over with revolu
tionary posters showing Muslim warriors being raised to heaven on the backs of white horses. Rows of splintered desks faced a blackboard that was a Rosetta stone of juvenile script. A rat half as long as its hairless tail paddled away from a yelping dog that followed it around the edge of a water-filled crater. The walls, the floors, the sliding door of the coat closet were black with ancient blood.

  Spasms of light glinted off rubble piled in a doorway like tailings from a vein of base metal. Darius stood on the broken brick eye to eye with a picture of the Imam that stared down on a mahogany desk set among file cabinets and empty bookcases. Farhad was slumped behind the desk in an oversize leather chair with his head against his shoulder. He was wearing a knit skullcap and a long-sleeve shirt rolled up above one elbow. A shoelace was knotted around his scarred bicep; the vein bulged purple in sallow skin. A burning candle was glued to the desktop beside a spoon that was bent back against its rusted handle.

  “Hey,” Darius said. “Hey, you, wake up. The party’s over.”

  Farhad’s shoulder was a spindly lever that propelled him toward the floor when it was disturbed. Darius grabbed him under the arms and let him down slowly on his back. He pressed an ear to Farhad’s chest, but heard only his own blood pulsing through his head. Like an errant dart in the suitcase maker’s pants cuff was a hypodermic needle attached to a reddish eyedropper.

  Ghaffari arrived behind the morgue attendants, who stood out of the way while he photographed the body. With each flash the dead man’s image was fixed as indelibly in Darius’s brain as on film. Ghaffari swept a light into the corners, got down on his knees to follow a trail of white powder under the desk to a crushed bit of chalk. He took a second set of pictures to be safe, then went outside to wait with Darius while the body was strapped onto a gurney.

  “It’s a successful man who dies doing what he likes best, so it’s fair to say he led a fulfilling life.” Ghaffari loaded a fresh roll of film into his camera.

  “Besides, with an addict what else can you expect? I know what you’re thinking, but have you ever heard of one dying of old age?”

  “The timing is too convenient,” Darius said. “If he’d kicked off tomorrow, or the day after, then I might be persuaded it was accidental.”

  “That’s all it was. No one needed him silenced, because he had nothing of importance to say. He was toying with you. He didn’t know any more than we do.”

  “Possibly.” Darius was distracted by the corpse being carried out through a window. “Still, for my only witness to die just as we were about to talk—”

  “Is pure coincidence,” Ghaffari said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “You go with him to the morgue. Stay till Baghai tells you exactly how he died.” They walked across the street, and Darius poked his head through the beaded curtain of a wedding bower. Edged in candle stubs on a bed of withered roses was a framed portrait of a teenage boy who had died on the Basra front. Droplets of red wax clung to the cheeks like tears of blood. “I’m going back to Shemiran.”

  “Why?” Ghaffari snapped two pictures of the school building. “We’ve squeezed that lemon dry.”

  “What else is there?”

  The lights were on at the apartment complex, but OUT OF SERVICE signs were taped to the elevator doors. Darius climbed to the top floor, and worked his way downstairs through tenants who insisted they were asleep, or not at home when the body was placed in the court. The tenth-story landing resonated with Beatles music, which he traced to an apartment in the line whose fourth-floor resident was the old man with the rugs. He knocked. A noisy argument started up in another unit, and he let his eyes drift past the elevator and back along the other wall through the garbage strewn around the incinerator. When he turned to the door again, a pinpoint of light was focused between his eyes.

  “Who is it?”

  The voice was a husky contralto in counterpoint with the music. The fifth Beatle, he thought, like the Twelfth Imam—the Lord of the Age, who had disappeared in the ninth century—was fated to walk the earth unrecognized into eternity. He pulled out his ID and dangled it up to the peephole like a small fish he’d caught. “Police,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Open up, please.”

  “I’m not that interested.”

  “Immediately.”

  Two dead bolts turned, and he was looking at a green-eyed girl whose straight blonde hair danced on her slight shoulders. The pale glow of her cheeks he credited to an insufficient diet and golden down that was faintly visible in harsh lamplight. More startling than her beauty was her boldness in not hiding it. She was wearing a sleeveless, above-the-knee dress of thin summer fabric, the neckline a gentle V between lightly freckled breasts.

  The first question was automatic: “Is your husband at home?”

  “I have no husband.”

  Single women were discouraged from living alone. Women like her did not remain single for long. His experience had been that few homicide investigations didn’t pose more questions than they answered. Contradiction was the skeleton on which the best cases were fleshed.

  He stepped inside without being invited. He had seen the same shabby broadloom rug and convertible couch, the bruised table and chairs in other apartments that he had come to recognize as furnished units. The music blared from a tape player on the bathroom sink beside several articles of soapy underwear. He shut off the water, which the young woman had seemed to believe masked the sound.

  “I’d like to ask you about the body found in the courtyard.”

  She fixed him in a venomous stare. “I didn’t kill her. Does that answer the question?”

  “In part.” Though he believed himself to be incapable of blushing, Darius’s face felt hot. “Were you awake at that hour? Did you notice anything?”

  Her expression didn’t change, but the effort in holding it started her lower lip to quiver. “I heard sirens, but was too sleepy to get out of bed. In the morning the neighbors told me what had happened. Everything I know is second-hand at best.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Maryam Lajevardi.”

  Darius jotted it in his notepad. “And what did the neighbors say?”

  “That a girl had been shot, and her body left downstairs to be discovered. And the police had been here for most of the morning.”

  “To be discovered? What do you mean by that?”

  “Those are their words,” she said. “You’ll have to ask them.”

  “And, you say, you slept through it all?”

  “Like the dead.” Maryam Lajevardi palmed the cassette, as though she were concealing vital evidence.

  “I assure you,” Darius said, “this concerns only murder. I don’t care about music.”

  “One mustn’t close one’s mind to anything. You may find you enjoy the Beatles.”

  “It’s forbidden.”

  “There’s the crime.” She dropped another tape in the machine, turned up the volume on a heavy metal group.

  Her lip was fluttering wildly. She clamped it under her front teeth as Darius went into the living room. The apartment looked down on the courtyard, affording an unobstructed view of the benches where a tired-looking old man sat smoking a cigarette. Yellow draperies wafted from the window in a light breeze.

  “Are you a student, Miss Lajevardi? Do you work?”

  “I’m employed at the D. Azadi currency exchange on Firdowsi Street.”

  Darius rubbed the yellow cloth between his fingers.

  “You haven’t written it in your little book.” Her lip was out of control. “Selling traveler’s checks,” she said to quiet it.

  Obscured by an accent Darius couldn’t quite place, her voice had softened to a throaty whisper. “Miss Lajevardi,” he asked, “what are you doing living here alone?”

  “Is it against the law to have my own apartment?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  Her lip was still. She bit it anyway as she sniffed back tears. “You w
on’t make me go back?”

  “Back where?”

  “Bandar-e-Shah.”

  “That’s where you’re from?”

  She nodded. “My father is the manager of the state caviar factory there.”

  “What brings you to Teheran?”

  “What has this to do with the girl—”

  “Will be for me to decide,” Darius said.

  Without exhaling, she took a deep breath. “Last month I turned twenty-two. In the eyes of my father I officially became an old maid. It was arranged for me to marry the foreman of the factory. He’s forty-seven, coarse, crude, uneducated—a religious fanatic as well. I took what money I had saved and came to Teheran. I’ve been living here for six weeks.”

  “And?”

  “And? And?” Maryam Lajevardi blew her nose in a man’s colored handkerchief. “Isn’t that enough? Are you asking what comes next for me? How can I tell you, when I don’t know myself?”

  Darius touched his pen to his notebook, and the young woman stopped sniffling. “You won’t report that you found me?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not my job.”

  “Because if I’m forced to go back, it will be the murder of two girls you’ll be investigating.”

  “One more question. How do you live in Shemiran on what you bring home from the currency exchange?”

  Maryam Lajevardi went into the kitchen, and tore open the cabinets above the sink. Waxy white paper lined the bare shelves. “I starve.”

  A blue service taxi had run an Iran Peyma bus into a streetlight, and emergency vehicles blocked all lanes of Saltanatabad Avenue. Darius drove onto the sidewalk around the accident, and then continued downtown. Of nearly three dozen witnesses he had spoken to, Maryam Lajevardi alone merited a follow-up interview. How much of that could he credit to her short dress and the warm promise of her silken skin? How much to the melodrama of her escape from a brokered engagement? Even if her story had been delivered to wring the last drop of sympathy from him, in its endless complications he’d heard it too many times before to discount it out of hand. Minus the tears supplied on cue, the lip willed into a spastic bout of vulnerability, he had little cause to view it with skepticism.