Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “This way,” Hamid said, and squeezed past the patrolmen. Outside the bedroom Ghaffari said, “Watch it,” and Darius turned his toe from a puddle of vomit just beyond the door.

  A Japanese lantern softened the light from a frosted bulb over a double bed on which a man and woman lay in one another’s arms. The couple were in their early to mid thirties, Darius estimated, and were nude above a sheet that clung damply to their hips. A black crater in the woman’s forehead might have been made with a rock, or a bit of lead. Rivulets of gore crusting against her face and neck were shiny between globular breasts. A hole in the man’s armpit scarcely had leaked color. More had hemorrhaged through his nose.

  The bedding was soaked with the woman’s blood; the vaguely metallic smell was everywhere in the room. Darius lifted the Venetian blinds, but no light entered. The windows had been blackened with flat paint, and were nailed shut. A scrape in the glass several centimeters above the sill allowed a sliver of a dirt alley pocked with footprints.

  “The neighbor boy brought Najafi, that’s the male, unsweetened tea, coffee cake, and a Daily Jomhuri-e-lslami every morning at nine,” Ghaffari said. “The boy showed up at the usual time today, and when no one let him in he knew something was wrong. He went into the alley, but couldn’t see inside. The house was unlocked. He looked in all the rooms before he came in here. That’s when he lost his own breakfast.”

  “This Najafi—” Searching for an exit wound, Darius found a crisscross of raised stripes between the man’s shoulders. “Do we know him?”

  “Just the name, and what little the kid gave out,” Ghaffari said. “He’d been here six months, and rarely left the house.”

  “He lived with the woman?”

  “No, but he didn’t lack for company. People came and went at all hours.”

  “How the bullet caught him under the arm,” Hamid said. “Someone must have stood over them with the gun, and automatically his hand went up in defense. It wouldn’t shock me to find out the lady had a husband.”

  Darius grunted noncommittally, and drew back the sheet. The girl was in panties, the man nude except for black socks with DEATH TO ISRAEL in stylized script over the ankles. “Who is she?”

  Ghaffari shrugged. “You want to talk to the kid?”

  Darius’s head shook slightly. By bending the woman at the waist, he was able to free Najafi’s arm. A red crescent was tattooed at the base of the thumb. The other four fingers ended in smooth nubs at the knuckles. Darius peeled off the DEATH TO ISRAEL socks. The left foot had been severed cleanly across the instep, and a prosthesis was attached to the stump.

  “Let Mehta know we’re interested in a Mr. Najafi with a record showing convictions for theft.” He noticed raw welts tangled around the elbow. “And possibly drugs.”

  The woman’s arms were waxy smooth, unblemished, and still flickered with heat in the armpit closest to her heart. Black-and-blue marks on her chest did not appear to be fresh. Darius hiked the bloody sheet over both victims. “Print them right now,” he said to Hamid.

  Ghaffari came in with a boy about fourteen. The boy was short for his age, and had oily skin erupting into blackheads between his eyebrows and in the shallow creases around his nose. His eyes darted from Darius to Ghaffari without acknowledging the bed.

  “This is Eskander,” Ghaffari said.

  “You found them?” asked Darius.

  “Yes,” the boy said proudly.

  “Where do you live?”

  Eskander pointed out the blackened window. “Next door.”

  “Did you hear shots?”

  “It’s very noisy on this block, always lots of loud cars. Even at night. I heard nothing.”

  The way Eskander’s stomach was grumbling as he edged away from the bed, Darius was afraid he was going to lose the rest of his breakfast. “Can you tell us Mr. Najafi’s first name?”

  “He told me to call him Jamshid.”

  “Did he mention where he lived before he came here?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but this is all I know. I told the other policeman—”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Darius said. “You can go now.”

  Ghaffari, watching the boy run from the room, said, “He has to have more than that. Why didn’t you get a little tough with him?”

  “He’s too scared as it is. Soon he’ll be answering in yeses and nos, whichever he thinks we want to hear. Give him a day for the colors to fade, to see this in black-and-white, and you won’t be able to shut him up.”

  Somewhere in a far corner Hamid was shouting, “Come here, come quick.”

  The foyer was deserted, except for two of the officers with nothing to do. Darius ran inside a black living room, the kitchen, and through the backyard to an outhouse where Hamid lay on his belly, shirtless, one arm in a squat toilet consisting of an oval hole in the floor edged by two chipped slabs of porcelain. The water hose that is used instead of toilet paper in traditional Iranian homes was tangled between his feet. His face was screwed into an expression of disgust the more grotesque for a losing struggle to hold his breath. A brick of white powder in clear plastic lay against his leg.

  Hamid gagged as he ducked his head into the pit. His fingernails made clawing sounds against the underside of the floor. He wriggled down until the porcelain was a life preserver around his chest. Then his free hand waved weakly in triumph, and Ghaffari pulled him out by the ankles clutching another white brick.

  “I knew if there was dope anywhere,” Hamid said, sucking air, “it would be in here.”

  Darius opened the smaller bag, sniffed the contents, put some on his tongue, swallowed.

  “My God,” Ghaffari said, “you took enough to kill four men. And you still insist the beating didn’t damage your brain?”

  “It’s quinine.”

  Ghaffari tasted the other brick. “This one is milk sugar. He was hiding enough white powder to cut several kilos.”

  “All that’s missing,” Darius said, “is the heroin.”

  “There’s nothing else in there,” said Hamid, who couldn’t stop dry-washing his hands. “Just shit—”

  “You did well,” Darius said to the unhappy criminalist. “I hate to think where we would be without you.”

  To reach Records in the sub-basement of police headquarters Darius had to pass through Supplies, which was mostly bare walls, and Evidence, where the steel shelves were bowed under bricks of Afghani hashish and unprocessed Turkish opium poppies, crates of untagged handguns and counterfeit Seiko watches. A little girl’s chador crusted with blood was wrapped around the serrated blade of an electric carving knife. African elephant tusks seized from a trader in illicit wildlife formed an ivory gibbet for the carcass of a baby mountain gorilla that some comedian had strung up by a silk noose. A dark wall stacked floor to ceiling with green quart bottles reminded Darius of a hotel wine cellar, when such things were allowed.

  In a bare metal cage Mehta was slumped over a table with his head in his arms. Darius rattled the gate, but the records chief didn’t stir. The humid air was overloaded with alcohol spiced with a chemical tang that Darius couldn’t identify, although the taste had found a familiar place on the back of his tongue.

  “Hey,” he shouted into the cage, “Hey Nader, hey you, open up.”

  Mehta raised his head. His elbow collided with a tumbler that emptied its contents across the tabletop before shattering against the floor. Mehta’s chin dropped into his arms, then he picked himself up and stretched. He was wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt, boxer shorts, and solid red socks in scuffed wingtips. Glass crunched underfoot as he stumbled to the gate.

  Darius trod inside cautiously. He bent for a large sliver, and his sinuses cleared when he held it to his nose. “What’s this?”

  “Poison,” Mehta said.

  “One hundred proof, unless I miss my guess.”

  “Don’t know, I wasn’t there when they ran it through the still.” Mehta’s words were indistinct, his breath as powerful as the chemical sme
ll on the glass. “We nabbed another gang of bootleggers while you were away. Six thousand quarts of scotch whiskey were poured into the djoub. The rest were brought here to be held for evidence at the trial.”

  “How much was that?” asked Darius.

  “Fifty bottles.”

  “I must have seen two hundred on the shelves.”

  “Then there’s plenty more to get rid of,” Mehta slurred. “What the hell, trial’s not till winter.”

  “It’s good to see you’re keeping busy.”

  “Stuff’ll kill you, you let it.” Mehta twisted the cap off a fresh bottle, and offered Darius the second swallow. “But it’s slow death: You could make it last into next year, and still have plenty left over to put away the bootleggers for life.”

  A tumbler half full of flat water stood on the table beside an empty pitcher. There was no sink or fountain in the sub-basement, and water was not to be wasted. Mehta followed the example of the Imam, who had learned the value of water in his seminary days at Qom, when the drinking supply was obtained in part from catch basins. Legend was that the Imam would fill a glass, and save what he didn’t use until he was thirsty again, whether eight hours later, or the next day. Darius tightened the cap on the bottle. “What did you find out about Jamshid Najafi?”

  Mehta’s chin jutted at a bank of file cabinets. Darius removed a manila folder from the wire basket on top. “This file is for a Khalil Pakravan,” he said.

  “Jamshid Najafi, Khalil Pakravan, it’s the same guy. Anyway, his prints were on Najafi’s hand.”

  Khalil Pakravan, according to the record, was a native of Ramsar in the Mazanderan region on the Caspian Sea. Upon leaving school at thirteen, he had found work helping his father as bathhouse attendant at the hot springs near the beachfront Grand Hotel. Caught going through the luggage of the West German minister of tourism, he was paroled to his family in lieu of jail time, at the cost of his job and his father’s. From Ramsar he had drifted to Teheran, where he was arrested at nineteen for burglarizing the Vitana Mother Biscuit factory on the Old Karaj Road. At his trial in Branch 139 of the Penal Court, he was found guilty of hadd, or theft for the first time, and sentenced under Article 138 of the Law of Houdoud and Qesas to the loss of four fingers of the right hand. Ten months later, he was picked up in the parking lot of the former Royal Teheran Hilton in the Mercedes-Benz 560 SL of the Saudi oil minister. The sentence for a second-time thief was “the dismembering of the left foot from the lower part of the protrusion so that half the foot and part of the place of anointing remain.” Since his last conviction, Pakravan had kept out of trouble, although a note placed in the folder by a south Teheran patrolman indicated that he had been questioned without charges being pressed in connection with the street sale of a large amount of shireh, a popular narcotic that was the liquid residue of opium. Pakravan’s father and mother were deceased, and the whereabouts of a sister were unknown. A half-brother owned a small restaurant on Hejab Street in downtown Teheran.

  Clipped to the record was a photo of a good-looking boy with a freshly shaven skull. A disembodied hand at the back of his head was forcing his face toward the camera. Darius flipped the picture over. The mug shot was dated less than five years earlier, before Pakravan had made the career change from theft to heroin that had left him a spent cripple at twenty-seven.

  “What have you got on the woman?” Darius flung his jacket over the back of a chair, opened his shirt.

  Mehta’s reply was a snore. His head burrowed deeper into his arms.

  “Nader?”

  “Nothing. She’s clean—never been printed.”

  There was another file that merited the trip to this sweatbox. Letting himself out of the cage, Darius went into a locked storeroom that was the archive of criminal investigations cleared prior to the Revolution. For forty-five minutes he combed the steel cabinets fruitlessly, until under the Ls, where it had no reason to be, he found a folder with his name on the tab. Nothing had ever given him greater satisfaction than to read the reports of the criminalists stymied by the execution-slaying of the mass murderer Farmayan, the most feared inquisitor in all of SAVAK. No fewer than twenty detectives had been assigned to the case, and this in the days when the homicide bureau was a top-flight investigative body. The folder had been thick as his fist when he borrowed it surreptitiously during his first months with the National Police, and must have been pulled and misfiled since the last time he had taken it home. Now it contained only the record of his final questioning before charges were drawn up, and a few yellowing documents from the appeal.

  Because Ibrahim Farmayan’s body had been found in a desolate highway wayside known to be frequented by bandits, the case had fallen under jurisdiction of the National Police as a suspected robbery-homicide. Not until the remains were identified as those of a SAVAK colonel was the investigation taken over by Farmayan’s subordinates in the shah’s secret police. Carbons of subsequent entries to the record routinely were sent to the agency that had handled the initial probe. These, however, had been edited by the military censor, so that the National Police glimpsed only the bare bones of the case against Darius. The huge gaps in the file would be in possession of the Komiteh, which had taken over SAVAK’s functions under the new regime.

  Reviewing the notes of his interrogation by the assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister for National Security Affairs—General Nassiri, the director of SAVAK—it seemed to Darius that the lies he had answered with were so clumsy that he must have wanted to be convicted. Abandoned to the mercies of the military magistrate serving directly over him, he had declined to beg for compassion, instead unburdening himself of a sanctimonious admission to having eliminated a vile monster. There was a snapshot of a very young man in this folder, too, a faded Polaroid documenting the collar-length hair and flared sideburns that even then were nearly ten years out of fashion, except as they were etched in his memory of Washington in the early 1970s.

  The smell of bootleg was assaulting his olfactory nerve. He poured an inch in Mehta’s reserve tumbler, and put it down in a gulp. Surviving this trial by fire, he measured out two fingers more to get him through the transcript of the unsuccessful appeal of his death sentence. Large blocks of text had been blacked out with a marking pen, making piecemeal the thrust of the prosecutor’s statement against him. Left untouched by the censor was the testimony of secret witnesses in opposition to the appeal. Of the four Farmayans who had spoken that day, the victim’s nineteen-year-old nephew, Bijan, then a student at Faiziyeh Seminary in Qom, had argued most persuasively for death.

  Ghaffari drove. Darius, relegated to navigator’s duty by the destruction of his car and residual dizziness from his cracked skull, directed him through a morass of streets renamed to accommodate the new religious-political line.

  “Is this good Hejab Street we’re looking for,” Ghaffari joked, “or bad Hejab?”

  Hejab meant the proper style of Islamic dress and personal grooming. Every Friday, during prayer services at the major mosques, crowds of the faithful would shout, Down with bad hejab. Hejab Street, prior to the Revolution, had been Los Angeles Boulevard.

  A motorcycle accident had stopped traffic in both lanes. As Ghaffari gunned his overheating engine, Darius found himself staring at a woman on the sidewalk whose head scarf was fastened under her chin with a silver brooch. What he had taken, at first, for the evidence of a sleepless night on her face was almost definitely a touch of mascara. He looked back over his shoulder, eyeing the woman, who smiled flirtatiously and immediately turned away.

  Incredible. Had he been present when the Imam returned from exile in France he would not have witnessed a revolutionary more dangerous than the frightened woman. But the Imam was dead for a few years now, and tomorrow perhaps another woman would find courage to push back her veil to reveal a wisp of hair. After that, who could say? A touch of rouge? Some lipstick? And then an exposed wrist, and arm, and—Praise Allah—a bare ankle? From that point it was a short step for the nation to e
mbrace nudity and fornication, all varieties of copulation with beasts as proscribed in the holy texts. It was truly incredible what you saw on the streets these days.

  Pakravan’s Fried Chicken was surrounded by a declining residential neighborhood that had not fared well in the War of Cities. A gas station on the opposite corner had taken a hit from an Iraqi bomb, and the explosion of the underground tanks had transformed several blocks of apartment houses into black ghosts. Pakravan’s was a single-story building with large, inward-slanting windows above a sealed takeout counter, and walls of red-and-white brick trimmed in aluminum. Looking down from the roof was a plexiglass replica of what might have been a Kentucky colonel, but for yellowish paint that had smeared a wispy goatee all over the cheeks, and an open collar sketched crudely on top of a string tie.

  When the homicide detectives entered there were no customers at the lunch counter that was the restaurant’s Formica spine. Above one of six cramped booths was a poster showing a woman’s bare head circled in red with a broad stripe slashing through shoulder-length hair. Superimposed over the illustration of bad hejab was a long scarf wrapped around the hair to conceal every offending strand.

  SISTER, the illustration was captioned, PLEASE BE MODEST.

  Under the poster three women sat at a table sipping tea through sugar cubes clenched in their teeth. The woman facing the oversize windows had opened her chador and was nursing a newborn from her exposed breast.

  A man with a fry cook’s smoky pallor looked up at Darius and Ghaffari from a chopping block on which he was positioning a watermelon as though it were a baby about to be sacrificed. “Today’s luncheon special,” he said, “is honey-fried—”

  Darius intercepted soiled menus. “Are you Mr. Pakravan?”

  Admitting to nothing, the fry cook pulled out worry beads, and passed them through his fingers. Darius suspected that he was performing a divination to find out whether his visitors could be trusted before inquiring who they were. It was hard not to snatch the beads from his hand. He wished, momentarily, that he was back in America, where the superstitious were ridiculed to their face.