Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  At a red light Darius shut his eyes and conjured the image of the young woman. His mind’s eye could be counted on to circumvent the cleverest guise while going to the heart of uncooperative witnesses and suspects. What came to him most vividly about Maryam Lajevardi was her breathy voice, the defiance of authority that she was at loose ends to contain. Hearing it again in his head he decided the tone was too excitable for a native of the Caspian; he had supplied her brash words with the wrong accent—or she had. Her speech, as well as her coloring, seemed in part foreign, which might explain why he had gotten nowhere with the bullying tactics that as a rule produced quick results with men and women made docile through generations of submission to Islamic decree. Intrigued now, he played over the voice until he had located the faint accent in central Europe, or the shores of the Mediterranean, or else, he thought briefly, in a corner of his brain that would invent a lonely, beautiful woman who was also an outsider in her own land. Already he was looking forward to their second talk. When no good reason came to mind for putting it off, he angled toward the curb, prepared to wheel into a U-turn.

  He never heard the car that ran up his tail and slammed the Thunderbird into the intersection. Returning to consciousness, he was vaguely aware that if he hadn’t had his foot off the brake, the whiplash would have snapped his neck. He doubted he’d been out for more than twenty seconds. His nose was running. He wiped it on the back of his hand, and blood spilled between his knuckles. Two teeth had been driven through his lower lip. In the mirror was a caricature from a new school of realism of a helpless Dracula with bloody fangs. Touching his tongue to a jagged incisor, he went out to inspect the damage to his car.

  The bumper was dangling, the trunk lid jack-knifed over the spare tire. He was sick on the blood and the smell of gasoline. The other vehicle appeared to be unscathed. It was an American limousine, an old Chrysler with a grille like the jaws of a road-grading machine. As it disentangled from the Thunderbird, the loose bumper came away with it.

  “Stop right there!” His words were thick, shaped by a swollen tongue as clumsy as a big toe against the roof of his mouth.

  Silvered glass offered little of two figures in the other car’s front seat. The Chrysler shifted into drive, the torn bumper throwing off sparks like a lit fuse. Darius stuck out his palm, but the heavy limousine kept coming. It was ten feet away, and gaining speed, when he flung himself onto the Thunderbird’s trunk. The impact put him on the asphalt on his back.

  The Chrysler stopped, and two men in shiny jackets stepped out and watched him struggle to his knees. They were heavily bearded, and wore aviator’s lenses of the same mirrored glass as the Chrysler’s windows. The shorter one, from the driver’s side, steadied him against a lamppost. A tire iron came out of his companion’s sleeve like a snake shedding satin skin. Darius shied away, and a muffled gong hummed against his back. He tried to run, but his legs weren’t up to it. The driver held him there with one hand.

  The taller man rubbed his wrist, took a practice swing with an overhand motion. Darius slithered behind the lamppost. The tall man shortened his arc, and the blunt end of the iron found Darius’s heart.

  Darius toppled sideways into the street. He looked up into reflective sunglasses that pictured a tortured beetle on its back. His finger was through the trigger guard of his shoulder gun when the short man took it away. Tears distorted his vision as the tire iron came down against his ribs.

  Too slowly he was losing consciousness; he cursed his high threshold of pain. He bicycled his legs, and a shoe flew off, and his foot collided with something soft, the sensation like kicking a pillow. One of the men said, “Unnhhh,” and there was the sound of puking, and then the smell.

  Darius closed his eyes. Numb, he might have been dreaming it was someone else being worked over but for the feeling in his chest that he was suffocating, which grew worse with each blow. The metal bar clattered in the gutter, and he was hauled to his feet and then pushed toward the Chrysler. He planted his feet, but had little strength to resist.

  “Move, damn you!”

  The squawk of a car horn startled him, and he gagged on a mouthful of blood. The return of his senses came with a fresh rush of pain, and the realization that kidnapping would precede his murder. He fought back with energy drawn from a closed account.

  The driver shouted, “Let’s go, he’s done anyway,” and Darius felt himself falling into the street.

  The man he had kicked grunted in assent. He snatched up the tire iron, and pounded it in his open palm. Darius buried his head under an umbrella of his arms. The bar sizzled in air, then crashed against his bare sole. All the pain in the world traveled the length of his spine and exploded in his skull. A blessing, it sent him reeling into blackness.

  4

  IT WAS NIGHT, AND he was moving. Of that much he was certain. The road was a washboard beneath the wheels of the vehicle, a panel truck of some kind. Through greasy windows in the back doors he made out hardscrabble farms in sandy fields. These were obscured by swirling dust storms, the gerd bad, or round winds, which meant he was being brought south into the desert. When he raised his head to see more, pain put him flat on his back. The top of his skull was jouncing like a loose lid. His brain issued the command to press down on it, but his hands didn’t respond. Adrenaline washed a heavy weight over his heart.

  In the light from an overtaking car he glimpsed a leather strap across his chest that pinioned his arms to his sides. A woman sat beside him, and slightly behind. Blackness sloughed off her chador, and spread over the desolate country. The torn road jarred him to alertness in which he questioned why the men from the Chrysler hadn’t killed him when they had the chance. Thinking made his head hurt that much more, and he craned for a landmark instead. A cool hand on his cheek forced him back against the pillow.

  “You’re awake?”

  Let them find out for themselves. If it was his secrets they were after, not even torture would unseal his lips.

  “Darius?” The intimate tone invaded his spirit. What had he blabbed while he was out? “How are you feeling?”

  He laughed—and the cool hand pulled away. The voice was a hallucination. So why not the pain?

  The woman’s head grazed the roof as the truck hit a huge pothole. She bent over him, and the veil came away from her face. Farib’s smile lasted several seconds before disintegrating under its own weight. “Lie still,” she said, “you have a fractured skull.”

  Her fingers traced a gauze dressing around his forehead. Did the doctors, he wondered, use black gauze for the fractured skulls of descendants of the Prophet?

  “Where are we? Why am I tied?”

  A blatting sound escaped him as the truck shuddered on a patch of gravel. They were over pavement again when Farib unbuckled the strap. He brought up his right hand sheathed in a gauze mitt. Farib snipped the tape, and the mitt fell apart. The hand felt dead against his cheek.

  “You, wouldn’t stop clawing at the bandages,” she said. “We had to wrap your hand.”

  Darius made a clammy fist around the railing of his stretcher. “I don’t remember.”

  “At Pars Hospital,” she said. “The doctors didn’t know at first if you would surv—You’re not a good patient, Darius.”

  “What day is this?”

  “Monday. You were in the hospital four days.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To Qom.”

  “Tell the driver to turn around.”

  “You need quiet,” Farib said. “Three ribs are broken, and you’ve suffered internal injuries. Your kidneys are bruised.”

  “I’ll recuperate as quickly at home. Faster …”

  Farib filled a paper cup with water from a pitcher. At the next stretch of smooth road she brought it to his lips. Darius hiked himself up on her arm. The lukewarm water felt as good on his face as down his throat.

  “It’s better for you to be away from Teheran,” she said. “The men who did this to you, Mansur says they may
try again to kill you.”

  He had an answer for that. He had a good answer for every argument she could raise. But being right didn’t seem so important now as getting some rest. He shut his eyes, but just for the moment, till he had strength to explain why it was pointless to hide. Next time he looked, the moon had dimmed as the sun edged into its territory, and then a rough equilibrium was achieved in which the stars were extinguished and pink streaks opened the sky from east to west. He sat up, answers at his command, but it was Farib’s turn to sleep.

  The desert gave way to hillside vineyards, and then to a city the color of the reddish brown sand. The ambulance stopped at a house listing into a small garden as though an earthquake had yanked it from the foundation and only the windblown dirt propped it up. Farib squeezed his hand as the doors opened, and two men carried his stretcher outside. Darius guessed the temperature was well over one hundred. The superheated air was thick with dust and the stench of open sewers. Blue flies dived at his head, but he was too weak to fight back. The stretcher levitated, put down wheels like a plane, and he landed in the shade of a pomegranate tree beside a goldfish pond. Green finches nesting among the red-and-white flowers had bleached the ground around the roots. Farib took the veil from her teeth, and motioned in the direction of the tilted house. “In there, please.”

  The pink sky ran up against the whitewashed ceiling of a corridor that opened onto a room with two sealed windows. No air moved through the wind towers, ventilation chimneys built into desert homes to catch the meager breeze. Darius was parched. He called for water, but Farib didn’t come. The men wheeled him into a corner, and left him there like a stick of broken furniture.

  A shadow was moving over his body, and he followed it with his head like a sunflower in thrall to the sun. A turban and a silver beard running to white were too close to focus on. Having seen all he cared to, he lay still to wait for more sleep, which didn’t come. When he looked again, the turban and beard were arranged around Uncle Hormoz’s worried face.

  Darius smiled, thought he did. The men from the ambulance brought him to a bed that creaked like a boat in high seas when he was set down on it. Someone told him he needed sleep; and easily persuaded now, he complied.

  It was the hottest part of the day when he woke. A cot had been placed near the bed, and Farib was sprawled across the mattress under a thin sheet. On a yellow sofray between them was a water pitcher and a salad plate topped with chunks of goat cheese. When he reached for the food his arm refused to cooperate, and he knew he had been strapped down again.

  The buckle was positioned so that he could free himself without help. Like a diver rising from great depths, he sat up slowly, and dangled his legs. The heat had spoiled the cheese, but he wolfed it down before the taste could register. Tonight he would dream of kebabs and vodka.

  He drank four cups of water, bitter Qom water filtered through the salt flats on which the city was erected, and then he walked around the bed without taking his hand from the mattress. Farib’s new suitcase lay open on the floor. Beneath patterned chadors were his tan slacks and some rayon shirts. He dressed himself, but hadn’t the dexterity to fasten the buttons. Tasseled loafers were cached in knit shoe bags; but in a traditional home it would be a grave insult to his host to wear them inside, and so he padded about the room in stocking feet. A faint breeze seared his wounds through the bandages. Farib moaned in a sexual dream, and kicked off the sheet.

  He was an encyclopedia of pain. Although he had few pretensions of vanity, his facial injuries troubled him most. He gazed into the window, which returned little of himself in the filthy glass. Farib disdained mirrors, but he thought there might be one in the bathroom. On butter legs he stumbled down the corridor until he was too weak to go further or turn back. His knees sagged then, and pawing at the wall he surrendered to powerful hands that gathered him around the middle, and held him upright.

  “It’s not the first time you’ve had to bear the consequences of my impulsiveness.”

  “God willing, let it be the last. You weigh a ton.” Hormoz swept him toward unpainted double doors. “Are you looking for someone?”

  Darius’s fingertip followed the unfamiliar outline of his lips. “In a manner of speaking …”

  Hormoz was Farib’s favorite uncle. As her father’s eldest brother, and a highly respected cleric, he might have been expected to provide a bridegroom for her from the most brilliant of Qom’s religious students. At the start of their three-year engagement, when Darius had found out that Farib was the pampered niece of a professor at the Faiziyeh Theological Seminary, he had despaired of the family allowing the match. But Hormoz had turned to Islam late in life, after amassing a fortune trading tobacco in Europe, and had encouraged his own sons to emigrate to infidel Paris, where he was rumored to support two younger, illegitimate children. He had raised little objection to Farib receiving a Western education, or for choosing as her future husband a young lawyer in Washington on a government scholarship to study the American legal system for reforms applicable to Iranian courts.

  In Qom Hormoz was venerated as a marja, a mullah whose behavior was an ideal to be emulated by other clerics. The old man was seventy-one, the only relative Darius had regular contact with.

  Hormoz’s windowless room was little larger than the back of the ambulance, hotter even than the inferno where Darius slept next to Farib. A candle sent its flame straight up into dead air suffused with the flavor of mint leaves and tobacco. A man whose suit jacket hung loosely from round shoulders waited for Hormoz beside a satin pillow. Desert dust seeded clouds of his stale sweat.

  “Excuse me for a minute, please.” Hormoz left Darius slouched against the doorpost. “A good friend is here to see me.”

  Hormoz took his place on the pillow. His visitor came forward, and Hormoz allowed him to kiss his knuckles. Hormoz took back his hand with a few crumpled bills pressed into the palm. He squared the edges between his fingers, and transferred the currency to his other hand, then slipped it back to the man, who bowed graciously and shuffled out of the room.

  “Nuri is unusually devout.” Hormoz motioned Darius to a green pillow beside the wind tower. “As a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Endowments he’s greatly inconvenienced by the Shi’a strictures against accepting government employment until the Twelfth Imam comes back as the Lord of the Age. Since he cannot in good conscience take his salary, he gives it to me, and I return it to him as a present. It’s his now to do with as he sees fit.”

  Hormoz produced a dull mirror the size of a postcard. Darius buffed the glass on his pants leg, and leaned toward the candle.

  “What do you see?”

  “They say that inside every fat person there’s a trim beauty struggling to break free. It’s not so different for the rest of us. Allow me to introduce the inner Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar of the National Police.”

  “He’s no beauty,” Hormoz said.

  “A homicide investigator makes his living off the carnage of predators more remorseless than himself. His is a buzzard’s face—an occupational hazard.”

  “A fool’s. You weren’t spared from execution to die piece by piece.”

  Darius tilted the mirror, watching as his cheeks blanched. “For what great purpose, then?”

  “Don’t be impertinent. Farib has her hands full with you. You drink too much, and too openly.”

  “Vodka eases my nerves.”

  “You have the steadiest nerves a living body could want,” Hormoz said. “You drink because it is forbidden. You’ve sabotaged your career by going out of your way to antagonize everyone in a position to hurt your interests.”

  “The fact that I’m breathing antagonizes those people.”

  “All the more reason to watch your step.”

  “It antagonizes Farib, too.”

  “She doesn’t see the harm in adopting a civil line, rather than cornering your adversaries and applying pressure until they feel they have no choice but to strike back.”

  “T
he bastards who cracked my head did not lack breathing space.”

  “Must I play devil’s advocate for the shah’s former magistrate?” Hormoz used a chain of stone prayer beads to count silent repetitions of Allahu Akhbar, God Is Great, while Darius studied his injuries from every angle. “Very well—over ten years ago, you disposed of the SAVAK murderer Colonel Farmayan, whose pleasure was to broadcast the taped screams of those he tortured so that he might destroy the will of new victims. Unlike the killings he prided himself upon, Farmayan’s death was clean and painless. Good men and women are alive today thanks only to you. And what was your reward? To be thrown into SAVAK’s most infamous prison. For what you did, you should have been given a medal.”

  Darius did not feel deserving of a medal. A better prize was never to be reminded of his crime and the Evin condemned cell from which his resurrection was still not complete. Crushing despair lingered in his system, a microbe that flared up when his resistance was weakened by memory or bad dreams.

  “The Revolution reprieved my life. It’s enough.”

  “The ayatollahs got off cheaply. Farmayan was the embodiment of the sickness of the reign of the Pahlavis. Shooting him was a gift to the nation.”

  “You’re forgetting something.” Darius clutched his ribs as he shifted his weight. “He was my boss. Evin Prison was my workplace as well.”

  “Darius, do you know who the Malamati Sufis are?”

  Anticipating real pain, Darius groaned. “With all due respect, your sermons accomplish more when you save them for Friday prayer services.”

  “The hypocrite is corrupt in his heart,” Hormoz intoned, “but makes a show of being good. The Malamati, the self-reproacher, is good inside, but pretends to be evil so that people will hesitate to invest their trust in him. I think you may have some Malamati Sufi in you.”

  “It would have been news to my father. He raised me as a Twelver Shi’ite, the same as you.”

  Hormoz snorted at the interruption. “The point is that it is forbidden to be Malamati. A man’s self-respect goes beyond his own concern. A believer is forbidden to engage in any action that will damage his honor or his prestige in the community. Islam forbids us to pretend to be what we are not, and pretending to be evil is no different than assuming the guise of a man of virtue.”