Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  But he could no more interfere than walk away from the restaurant without answers to his questions. Something in his own character that also rejected pure reason had weighed in his decision to leave the United States; as a homicide investigator in a poor country he had come to rely on intuition over costly technology. Yet, if he had abandoned the West to escape the tyranny of reason, he had gotten more than he bargained for when he returned to Iran. In the clash between science and religion he remained an observer, holding his allegiance for the more civilized system, whichever that turned out to be.

  The fry clerk put away the beads and did not look at Darius again. He tested his blade against a callused thumb, and then hacked through the melon’s thick rind.

  “What kind of trouble is Khalil in now?” he asked Ghaffari.

  “His troubles are over,” Ghaffari said. “He was shot dead yesterday in a house off Shush Avenue.”

  Pakravan was preoccupied with replacing the menus against a napkin holder. Darius read his bland reaction as a shield against grief. The blade divided the melon into quarters, and eighths, and Darius made a mental note to inquire into bad blood between the Pakravans, and to mark the fry cook as a suspect if any were found to exist.

  Ghaffari, waiting for tears, and then information, said, “This is your brother we’re talking about. Do you understand what I told you?”

  “Too well. If you’re here to see me shocked, you’ll go away disappointed.”

  “Some sorrow would be sufficient,” Darius said.

  “Khalil exhausted my capacity for sorrow years ago. The Komiteh used to come by regularly to let me know of each new scrape he’d gotten into, and warn me he had better change his ways. After the last time, I told them what I’m telling you now, that he wasn’t my brother anymore, I’d cut him out of my life as permanently as they had cut off his foot.”

  “Even so,” Darius said, “we need to learn what he was doing at the house.”

  “Selling heroin? Fencing stolen goods?” Pakravan avoided looking at Darius’s ID. He hunched his shoulders to say, Why ask me? “Those were the only occupations that suited him.”

  The melon slices were arranged like pink flower petals on a cracked plate. A counterman brought them to the nursing woman.

  “Khalil was the light in my father’s eye. He had been accepted as a student at the Madreseh of the Shah’s Mother in Isfahan. I had big plans for him. As the older brother, I would support him with my restaurant until he completed his education and became a famous mullah. But with puberty, Khalil changed. He was interested only in earthly pleasures. It wasn’t long after that he lost his hand, and was deprived even of the satisfaction of touch. So much for the life of a sybarite.”

  “Who were his friends in Teheran?” Darius asked.

  “Not mine.”

  “His enemies, then?” Darius spread the photos of the Shush Avenue victims on the counter. “This is Khalil?”

  Pakravan nodded.

  “Who’s the woman?” Darius asked.

  “I never saw her before.”

  Darius added a morgue shot of the girl found murdered in Shemiran. “What about her?”

  Pakravan blotted his fingers on his shirt, and snatched up the photo. “That’s Leila. She was my sister’s friend when they were growing up.”

  “You’re certain? Look again.”

  “Well, she’s lots more mature than the last time I saw her, and here she looks—But, yes, the timid mouth, it’s definitely her.”

  “What’s her last name?”

  “Darwish. What happened to her?”

  “Like your brother,” Ghaffari said. “Tell us everything about her.”

  Pakravan’s shoulders heaved, and he took a short breath. “She was just a little kid who lived several streets away, and went to school with my sister. She was always hanging around our house, but I can’t say I ever talked to her. I heard she went away to college … but who remembers?”

  At last Ghaffari had his tears. “Does her family still live there?”

  “I see her mother sometimes when I’m back in the Mazanderan. She’s a fine woman. Her husband is Arab, but Shi’ite. Originally from Iraq.”

  “What else?”

  “What else can there be? In my head Leila is always eight, my sister’s playmate, dressing up their dolls for formal tea parties. I didn’t make a study of her. I didn’t know she would end up like this, and the police would be interested in every little thing.”

  “Where’s your sister?” asked Darius. “We want to talk to her, too.”

  “Like Khalil she went her own way.” Pakravan wiped away his tears—more than Ghaffari could use. “A second time my parents’ hearts were broken. I cut her out of my life, too.”

  The caller, a Captain Eshragi, had a reedy voice that long-distance transmitted to Teheran in pulses of barks and hisses.

  “I apologize for taking so long, but the Darwishes live on a plantation outside Lahijan. Phone service is undependable at best, and no one was at the house the two times men were sent out. It’s only because a patrolman ran into the mother at the post office that we have anything to report.”

  “You’re acquainted with the family?” Darius held the receiver away from his ear. He spoke loudly, as if to a deaf man.

  “We’ve had certain dealings with them.”

  “Concerning the daughter?”

  “The daughter, and the father.” Through the clutter Darius made out a Caspian accent that was the basis for Maryam Lajevardi’s artless imitation.

  “Leila Darwish should be twenty-four now. Six years ago, she was one of a few students allowed to attend the University of Moscow on a scholarship made available by the Soviet-Iranian Friendship Society. Despite her father, Leila was nonideological. She had no links to communist organizations, else she would not have been let out of the country.”

  “The Komiteh in Guilan Province permit the National Police to examine their subversives’ files?”

  “To compile them.” Brittleness crept into Eshragi’s voice, making his accent nearly impossible to decode. “I myself was the officer designated to assess her political reliability.”

  “Please, go on,” Darius said.

  “Leila Darwish rightly viewed the scholarship as her only opportunity for advanced education. When she came home after her second year, she was interviewed again and was determined to be unsympathetic to the socialist system. She didn’t enjoy her stay in the Soviet Union, and spoke of little other than starting a teaching career here. Over the next couple of years she wrote often to her family of those plans. Shortly before she was to take her degree, the letters stopped coming. Her parents contacted Moscow but received no cooperation from the authorities. This was at the height of the campaign against the Red Satan, when there were few lines of communication between the two countries. The girl was reported missing to us, and we put out a nationwide alert in case she surfaced in Iran. Since that time the family has been in the dark. Now you announce that she’s been found murdered on a bench in Teheran. It’s hard for the mother to accept.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Mrs. Darwish had consoled herself with the fantasy that her daughter had fallen victim to political intrigue, and would return as some sort of post-revolutionary heroine. She is grieving as much over the manner in which Leila died as for the fact of her death.”

  A conversation between two women was bleeding onto the line. Darius screwed the phone against his ear. “And the father?”

  “He’s a hardheaded old bird, still an ardent Bolshie. We keep an eye on him, but there’s never anything to report. It’s doubtful he has illusions about Leila. His fantasies are too precious to waste on a daughter.”

  From the derelict used-car lot of the motor pool Darius selected a green Paycon, and test-drove it north toward the old Shemiran Road. Several blocks from headquarters traffic detoured around police barricades. He continued onto the sidewalk, and inched through the pedestrians massed on the curb. A patrolman stormed t
oward him, snorting through a whistle in his teeth. “You can’t get through.” The officer pointed to a sign on the barrier: ALL BELIEVERS ARE SUMMONED TO TAKE PART IN THE FLAGELLATIONS IN OBSERVANCE OF IMAM HUSSEIN. “It’s the celebration of Ashura,” he explained.

  Darius threw the Paycon into reverse, but was pinned there by the swelling crowd. Children moved through the traffic jam on foot, offering sweets, newspapers, and American cigarettes for sale to a captive clientele. Yesterday, the Ninth of Muharram, legions of the devout had marched along the boulevards wailing, “Yah, Hussein,” in memory of the third imam slain at the seventh-century massacre of Kerbala. On Ashura the men returned to flay their bodies with leather thongs and chains. The Pahlavis had banned the religious parades on the grounds that too often the celebrants mutilated themselves in their passion. Under the ayatollahs they were not only permitted, but encouraged.

  Darius heard ritual chanting as broad columns of men dressed all in black appeared whipping themselves over one shoulder and then the other with chains attached to a short pole. They were followed by a man clanging brass cymbals to set the beat for their flagellations, and by more marchers, who pounded their hearts with the flat of their hands, and wore red headbands proclaiming, IRAN HAS BECOME PALESTINE. HOW CAN MUSLIMS NOT SPEAK UP? and ISLAM IS AN ETERNAL TREE. IT NEEDS THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS TO BLOSSOM. A man in the last row split open his skull with a chain, and collapsed into the djoub as the throng rounded the corner and moved on.

  Ashura had drawn even Shemiran’s taghoutis, or unbelievers, and bad hejabis to the parade downtown. The desk at the apartment complex on Saltanatabad was unmanned, guarded by a doorman’s cap. Outside Maryam Lajevardis apartment, expecting more of the Beatles, Darius was treated to a chorus of furniture skating across the floors. Perhaps, he thought, there was more truth to her story than he had admitted. But if Maryam were moving out as she’d said, she wouldn’t be taking the rental stuff with her. He knocked, and the racket stopped. No one answered, though; not even when the doorbell triggered somber chimes, and the unlocked door yielded to his shoulder.

  A bookcase had been emptied onto the foyer floor. He went into the living room over leather-clad Persian poets, and back issues of Today’s Woman, the monthly magazine of the Iranian Women’s Association, offering tips to the middle-class mothers of large families on how to raise a dowry for their youngest daughters. “Miss Lajevardi,” he called out. “Miss—”

  Imported underwear and dark hosiery were strewn inside a bedroom whose walls were a gallery of psychedelic art and British airline posters showing miniskirted girls in bouffant hair, a tardy summons to Swinging Sixties London. A man in a Harris tweed jacket with leather elbow patches stood with his back to the window, shoulders rocking from side to side as though he were trying to slice himself through the Venetian blinds. The gray skin had slipped from his cheeks, and collected in folds under his jaw. Only his eyes and the haggard skin around them were three-dimensional behind lenses in steel frames. A sparse beard was set off by a luxuriant mustache. Darius had the impression that the effort to raise facial hair was so draining that he had been able to pull off the trick only on his narrow upper lip.

  “Who are you?” asked Darius.

  The man came forward around an unmade bed. After a false start the thin lip went to work behind the mustache. “I might ask the same thing.”

  He spoke too rapidly for Darius to place his slight accent. When Darius flashed ID, he took it from him and studied it for twenty seconds. “A friend of Maryam’s,” he said finally.

  “Her friend’s name?”

  “Zaid Rahgozar.”

  “Where is Miss Lajevardi?”

  “Maryam was called home.”

  “I was told her family didn’t know where to find her.”

  “It was on very short notice,” Rahgozar said. “Her relationship with her parents has improved a great deal recently.”

  “Is that why you’ve taken it upon yourself to ransack her apartment?”

  A smile retracted Rahgozar’s lip under the glossy mustache. “Maryam has found a more affordable place to live, and she asked my help in bringing some things there. I’m going to drive them over, so they will be waiting when she returns.”

  Darius booted a yellow dress onto the bed. “Where is her new place?”

  “I … I have the address written on a piece of paper.”

  “Let me see it, if you don’t mind.”

  Rahgozar’s left hand frisked the right side of his body, then the procedure was repeated right on left. Darius unbuttoned his own jacket, and reached into the sweat circle under his arm.

  “It’s here somewhere,” Rahgozar said, and sprang before Darius had the gun out.

  Darius sidestepped the flying body. He dipped a shoulder, prepared to slam Rahgozar onto the mattress, and opened himself to a sharp elbow to the forehead. The blow had no immediate effect. He was a couple of steps behind the fleeing man, and gaining, when his legs quit suddenly and he stood paralyzed as Rahgozar ran out of the apartment.

  Darius staggered to the wall intercom, waited through ten rings for the hat on the security desk to answer. A tingling sensation in his limbs was moving into his torso. The room began to revolve like an amusement park whip. As it picked up speed, it spun him onto the bed. Stretched out on his back with the gun on his chest, he listened for Rahgozar’s return, chewing the inside of his cheeks so he wouldn’t black out.

  He had no idea how long he lay there. There was a triptych mirror on the dressing table, but he decided he didn’t want to know how he looked. When his vertigo passed, he went to the refrigerator for ice, which he held to his forehead in a dish towel compress. A search of the apartment turned up nothing that interested him more than would the intimate possessions of any beautiful woman. Either Rahgozar had taken what he came for, or it was an item of little obvious significance.

  Finnish vodka hidden in a scuffed armoire saved the morning from utter disaster. The cap had never been unscrewed. Expensive, black market vodka was not a practical source of calories for a woman with nothing to eat. So the bottle was the gift of an admirer, who wanted alcohol on hand when he visited. Some lamb and fresh vegetables would have been faster to warm Maryam Lajevardi’s heart.

  One last time he went through the rooms, and then called Ghaffari at the office.

  “Put out an alert for a Zaid Rahgozar, about forty,” he said. “One hundred and eighty centimeters, seventy kilos, blue eyes, graying hair, and eyeglasses in metal frames, dressed in a brown tweed sport jacket, black pants. Broadcast it citywide and to the Mazanderan. He’s wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Leila Darwish.”

  “You’ve found a new lead?”

  “Lost it,” Darius said.

  “Are you okay? You sound groggy.”

  Darius wrung water from the dish towel. “I bumped my head.”

  “Better get yourself together. The Komiteh’s been calling all morning.”

  “What do they want—a progress report on the robbery at the Golabis’ that never happened?”

  “They want you,” Ghaffari said. “At two. At Bon Yad headquarters.”

  A block from the old American embassy, officially renamed the U.S. Den of Espionage, Darius spotted a parking space on Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue. Angling toward the curb, he was extra careful not to drop a wheel in the deep djoub. The djoub was dry, the Teheran water department having decided to flush clean the Ashura parade route by diverting water through the system of underground tunnels that was as old as the city. Takht-e-Jamshid was now Taleqani Avenue, but not even the Komiteh called it that.

  The Bon Yad Monkerat mansion was a three-story dwelling of Mediterranean design with stucco walls and a tile roof. Through the side gate Darius glimpsed a patio of broken bricks edged in lank grass, the only green in what had been a large desert garden. A gummy puddle that was dark red at the property line ran to pink over the sidewalk and into the djoub. It was not unheard of, Darius knew, for a sheep to be slaughtered o
utside the Bon Yad’s door by the family of a prisoner putting up a substitute for the blood of their relative. Darius felt suction against his heel. He glanced back at scarlet tracks that followed him like a guilty conscience inside the gray wall.

  Leaded-glass windows projected a mosaic of colored light onto the floor of a corridor crowded with Komitehmen. A teenager swaggering under the weight of his Uzi and the two sets of handcuffs on his belt loop brought Darius upstairs, knocked on double doors, and pushed them open without waiting for a summons inside.

  Darius stood in the threshold of an airy office that had been the master bedroom when the merchant family still lived here. Two desks were positioned too close to the walls to take advantage of a pool of strong natural light. The eastern exposure afforded a view of the old embassy used now as a school for Revolutionary Guards. In shadow to his left a man in gray-black camouflage pored through files like those Mehta kept. There was one folder on the other desk, where Bijan sat picking his teeth with the corner of a matchbook.

  “It’s good to see you back and feeling yourself.” Bijan was wearing tailored fatigues with razor-sharp pleats that reminded Darius of Fidel Castro in his custom military uniforms thirty years after the institutionalization of the Cuban Revolution. Bijan looked inside the folder. Underneath was a bowl of red pistachio nuts, which he nudged toward Darius. “A moment, and I’ll be with you. Have a seat.”

  Gilt scrollwork showed through the whitewash under the high ceilings. Darius looked outside into a kidney-shaped swimming pool clogged with brown leaves. Behind the graffiti-scarred wall of the embassy compound young men in khaki were walking from the large brick building that had been the chancery. Three empty pools and two netless tennis courts, the smokeless stacks of a small power plant, gave the vast complex the look of a country club gone to seed. In a cathedral of tall pines was the marble mansion where the ambassador had lived.

  “A beautiful home with a glorious view.” Bijan stared at him over the top of the folder. “Too bad the family who lived here had to leave the country.”