Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “Maybe they’ll return someday.”

  “In their fondest dreams,” Bijan said. “I doubt they will come closer than that. The family were supporters of the Pahlavi dynasty, as loyal as the people who lived in that other fine house with the marble walls.”

  “Maybe they’ll come back, too—”

  A full-throated scream, not manly, but unmistakably from a man, rose from the lower floors. The harsh acoustics of the bare office reassembled it into a shriek of terror that froze Darius in his chair.

  Bijan put down the folder. “Yes?” he asked. “You’re all right?”

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  “In its own time. We were talking about the family whose home this was. I met them once myself; they were not bad people. In 1953, when that bastard Mossadegh was prime minister and wanted to hand over the government to the Tudeh, Ayatollah Kashani lectured the faithful on their duty to support the shah against him. The family acted in the best interests of the nation. They were very patriotic …”

  “Yet they’ve been forced to flee.”

  “Politics!” Bijan pronounced the word with a sneer of contempt rather than the polite sarcasm that had been his tone up till now. “As I remember, the first director of SAVAK was a General Bakhtiar, Teymour Bakhtiar. Was he any relation?”

  The question was a bludgeon; the denial it begged would put Darius on the defensive. He dodged it with silence.

  “No?” Bijan answered for him. “It was just a hunch I had. Still, you must be proud of a clansman achieving a position of such authority under the monarchy.”

  “Did you send for me to trace my family tree?”

  “Genealogy is a hobby of mine. Until I told him, the boy who brought you here did not know that his great grandfather was Ayatollah Bafqi, who Reza Shah dragged by the beard into the yard of Fatemeh’s shrine because he opposed the 1928 statutes forbidding the wearing of turbans. Bafqi was a saint, and it shows in the boy’s blood. There are other families whose lineage is not as noble.”

  Darius had nothing to say to that either. Bijan said, “Narcy?” and the man in the gray-black fatigues went out of the office.

  “I have news about your murder case,” Bijan said in a voice devoid of enthusiasm. “Through our network of informants we’ve been able to determine the identity of the girl found slain in Shemiran. Her name is Leila Darwish, from Lahijan. Her father was an Iraqi, who relocated to Khuzestan in the early 1940s. According to our information, the girl had been living in Teheran as a prostitute.”

  “By which I take to mean she was a bad hejabi.”

  “Try to refrain from speaking as a lawyer. Time is too precious to waste quibbling over semantics. The girl had given herself to dissolution. Whether she sold her body, or yielded it for her own corrupt pleasure is of minor concern.”

  Darius cracked open a pistachio between his teeth. The meat inside was rotten. “When can I see your informant?”

  “That is impossible. Our people in the street operate under guarantees of confidentiality, the same as yours.”

  “I need to know where he obtained his facts.”

  “There is little I can’t tell you myself. The informant made Leila Darwish’s acquaintance in north Teheran, and briefly they were sexually involved. When she took her things from his apartment, she didn’t tell him where she was going. He learned of her death by seeing her picture in the newspapers. You’ve been trying to connect the killing to the murders of a couple of drug peddlers near the railway station; but all that the victims have in common is they were taghoutis not deserving the honor of a homicide investigation.”

  “Where did her dollars go? Where is the heroin?” Having evaded Bijan’s bludgeon, Darius tossed back darts.

  “The Committee for the Revolution is duty-bound to share its information with the criminal police, and to make its resources available wherever they may be of use. The informant must remain anonymous, though. He has nothing to add concerning money or drugs.”

  Bijan slid the folder toward Darius, who looked inside at photocopies of the autopsy report on Leila Darwish, her death certificate, fingerprint card, and typed notes on her personal history that read as if they had been transcribed from his conversation with Captain Eshragi. Not one fact extra. The Komiteh routinely tapped the phones of the National Police, but Darius ran the homicide bureau under the assumption that the Revolutionary Guards were alternately too lazy and arrogant to monitor the bugs. It was a tribute to the progress he’d made that they had seen fit to appraise what had been gleaned. Unless it was to give him a hard pat on the back, however, he didn’t see why Bijan had wanted him here.

  “I need more than this.”

  Bijan tunneled through the nuts before finding one he liked. “Talk to the girl’s family. Although I am not trained as a detective, they seem the obvious source of clues.”

  “Phone service to Guilan Province is spotty at best. Order the informant … to meet with me.” The informant who doesn’t exist, he’d nearly said, but for a look from Bijan that the talk might suddenly end. “His identity will not be compromised.”

  Bijan snatched another nut off the top of the pile. “You are not trying hard, if you let bad phones interfere with your investigation. Lahija? is less than three hours by car.”

  “Outside Teheran the National Police have none of the prestige of the Komiteh to compel witnesses to talk.”

  “Authority can be extended to you,” Bijan said. “But, as the suggestion is mine, I should advise you not to take it. The Caspian is far from the capital, and politically unstable. The Komiteh can’t ensure your safety in a region still inflamed by the brutalities perpetrated by your former colleagues.”

  So this was what he had been summoned to hear: the choice between graceless surrender and being goaded into a trip far from Teheran, where he might be removed from the case by harsher means. He accepted it as further praise, a tacit understanding that he was closing in on something important.

  “I don’t see the risk.”

  “Hassan Darwish was long active in leftist radical circles. He may not appreciate that you’ve taken it on yourself to intrude in the affairs of his family.”

  “Knowing I’ve come about his daughter—”

  “His daughter is dead. Your investigation is no favor to her—or to him,” Bijan said. “After reviewing the record on Darwish that was inherited from SAVAK, we don’t regard the possibility of an arranged attack on your life as farfetched. The man is an accomplished provocateur. The communists recruited Darwish as a teenager in Iraq in 1941, and sent him to Khuzestan to build up Arabic-speaking cadres in the Tudeh Party. In 1944, he received the attention of the nation when he organized mass strike meetings at a factory in the holy city of Qom. The mullahs responded by dispatching a gang of seminarians to fight the atheist claque. But Darwish and the Tudeh beat back the students, and the strike went on for some time.”

  Bijan showed him a photo of a pockmarked man with thick black hair and a flowing mustache clad in a military-style shirt and a flat cap with a star above the cloth bill.

  “Stalin?” Darius said.

  “Hassan Darwish. In those days every member of Tudeh, every man who could raise them, had mustaches like those.”

  Bijan gave Darius the picture to keep. “For six, maybe seven years, Hassan Darwish’s activities are a mystery to us. In 1953, when Mossadegh was under attack from all sides, we know that Darwish was with his wife in south Teheran, organizing in the big locomotive factory near the railway station. The Darwishes, like the rest of the Tudeh, believed their moment had come. But Mossadegh was not the stooge they took him for. With the Soviets breathing down his neck, he sought help from the Americans. What he got was more than he bargained for. He got the CIA.”

  “I’m familiar with Iranian history.”

  “Thousands of Tudeh were rounded up and slain,” Bijan went on. “Hassan Darwish was more fortunate than many other communists, such as his wife, who did not survive her stay i
n the shah’s prisons. After ten years he was paroled to Lahijan, where he found work in the tea farms. Today he is remarried, and the assistant to the manager of one of the largest plantations in Guilan Province—”

  Another shriek echoed in the hollow room. It choked, and then it died, releasing Darius toward the door.

  “In the Caspian he is like a pasha,” Bijan said after him. “If I were you, I would trust no one.”

  6

  OVER THE ELBURZ’S ICY SADDLE the dry Iranian plateau drops through cypress forest and jungle to the Caspian shore. Darius skirted the high snowfields via the winding Chalus River Road, arriving at a drab riviera of shuttered dance halls and cheap family hotels, beaches segregated by sex where women bathers floated on the languid water like black jellyfish in the billowing folds of their chadors. Dunes edged the coastal road that brought him gradually into slopes stitched with emerald tea plants. Women protected from the sun in white head scarves were stooped over the bushes like pale, flightless moths. No men worked the rolling fields. Only a woman’s hands were gentle enough to pluck the fragile plants.

  Outside Lahijan Darius spotted the tile roof of the mausoleum of a forgotten saint, and followed rutted switchbacks to a plantation in the hills. A Bedford truck swung around him into the lot, spraying gravel against the wall of a barracks-like building. The driver performed a few deep knee bends, mounted the porch, and dropped coins in a machine that dispensed four brands of orange soda. Darius, disdaining calisthenics, went stiff-legged after him. “Where do I find Mr. Darwish?” he asked.

  The trucker pressed the frosted bottle against his forehead, then held it at arm’s length as though the soda had been spoiled by the heat. He tilted the neck toward a man staring out a screen door at the fields. The man’s stern features were expressionless; to Darius it seemed he couldn’t make up his mind what sort of lousy mood to be in. “That’s him there,” the trucker said.

  Darius entered a breezeless cubicle behind the door. “You’re Hassan Darwish?”

  Anger accumulated in the orbits of the man’s eyes, and spilled over his face. “Which sons of bitches sent you? I was told only that someone would be here to waste my time.”

  Darwish turned his empty gaze back to the fields. Viewing him in profile, Darius decided that the revolutionary of forty years ago had learned to make himself elusive by surrendering only his smallest fragment to public scrutiny. Though he appeared younger, Darius estimated him to be in his late sixties. His flowing mustaches were silver-gray, as was the hair that was still so thick it seemed to be all of one piece. But there was a peculiar absence of luster from his dark eyes and skin. The Red Army-style cap and cossack tunic of a Tudeh agitator had been exchanged for a pinstriped shirt with a starched collar, a gray suit, and red-and-blue striped tie that called more attention to itself than anything in Darius’s closets.

  Darius flashed his identification too quickly to focus on. “National Police,” he said. “I’m here about your daughter, Leila.”

  Darwish’s face went slack, and hung on his cheekbones like an identity that had outgrown him. “If Leila’s brought you this distance, you must know more than I.”

  There were vacant chairs in the office, but no invitation to sit. Darius pushed a seat close to the desk. “When was the last time you spoke with her?”

  “I haven’t heard from Leila in more than two years. But—” Darwish’s laugh sounded like impolite coughing. “I don’t have to tell you. A report is filed every time I wipe my ass. Probably on the original paper.”

  Taking into account his weathered look, Darius judged Darwish’s health to be sound enough to tolerate the details of his daughter’s death. He spread four photos over a Teheran Times on the desk.

  “Do you know these people?”

  Turning slightly from the window, Darwish stabbed a finger at the girl found dead in Shemiran. “That’s Leila.”

  There was no change in expression, but the lusterless eyes had acquired a thin gloss. Impassivity was a trait that Darius often found had been refined to the greatest degree in an Evin Prison torture cell.

  “What about the others?”

  Darwish separated Farhad and the Shush Avenue victims from his daughter. As he studied them through half lenses, his eyes gradually lost their sparkle. “I don’t recognize them.”

  Darius retrieved three of the photos. Darwish folded his glasses inside his vest, alone again with Leila. “When did she die? The police here are kept deliberately in the dark about everything.”

  “Two weeks ago. Her body was found in north Teheran.”

  “Why was she killed?”

  “There are few leads. It’s why I’ve come to talk to you.”

  “Do you expect me to believe you traveled from Teheran without knowing in advance the answers you want to hear? I won’t lend my name to an attempt to frame any comrades.”

  “I have no expectations,” Darius said. “There was a bullet in her head, but it may not have been the cause of death. And she was—It’s all I can give you, but my condolences.”

  “Save them. Leila and I fought bitterly, and had stopped communicating some time before she disappeared. The estrangement was more deep-seated than postadolescent rebellion. It would be condescending to her memory to say I thought we would ever be reconciled.”

  “You heard from her last when she was still at the university in Moscow. With your friends in high position there, someone would have responded to an appeal for information.”

  “My friends are either dead, or in disgrace,” Darwish said. “The Gorbachevites removed them from power, those they didn’t make my enemies.”

  Darwish adopted an expression like Hamid’s when he was about to poke his head in Najafi’s toilet. He looked up from the picture so Darius would have its full benefit.

  “Hasn’t Mrs. Darwish got any contacts in Moscow?”

  “Leila’s mother is not political. She knows no one in what was once the Soviet Union, or even Teheran. I met her in Lahijan at a time I was forbidden to leave Guilan Province. The arrangement suits her to this day. It was her decision to report our daughter missing to the authorities. I wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction.”

  “You cared so little for her?”

  “Leila was a self-sufficient girl, who always had a clear idea of what she wanted, and what she had to do to obtain it. Considering our differences, I didn’t find it worrisome that she had distanced herself from her parents.”

  “Such disregard for a daughter,” Darius said, “is outside the bounds of human decency.”

  “From your crude interrogatory manner, I gather you’re an expert on what goes on beyond those bounds. I spent some years in a jail of yours where it was the mode—”

  “I’m not here to discuss my background. You didn’t inquire into your daughter’s whereabouts because you didn’t want to know where she was. Why not?”

  “That’s untrue. Leila was a disappointment even as a child. We were never close.”

  “Stop, please,” Darius said. “You communists, despite your contempt for the customs of the bourgeoisie, are not well known for the latitude you allow your children to run their lives. You would have followed her every move.”

  “From which textbook did you make a study about us?” Darwish glared haughtily, but then sucked back a sigh as he stared at the picture.

  Darius realized that the old radical remained the prisoner of his discipline, helpless to ask about the facts of his daughter’s murder out of fear that he would give up more information than he received.

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “I refuse to answer any questions of yours. Your story about my daughter’s death is a fabrication. If not, you probably share complicity. Under neither circumstance will I dirty myself talking to you.”

  Darius had had his fill of the aging tyrant, whose sensibilities he no longer felt compelled to protect. “There were facts I neglected to mention, because I thought you should be spared the unpleasantness,�
� he said. “I was mistaken; you’re entitled to know everything. Before she was shot, your daughter was sexually mutilated.”

  “In what manner?” Darwish asked formally.

  “The coroner found that she had been infibulated.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with the term.”

  “It means—” Darius’s anger failed, and he softened his voice. “Suffice to say she was hurt gravely.”

  “I have the right to know,” Darwish demanded. “Explain what you mean by infibulated.”

  “Her clitoris was surgically removed, and her vagina sewn shut.”

  “It has the ring of something a former agent of SAVAK would invent in his spare time.”

  “He might, if he were Arab—” Darius slammed the bottle on the newspaper. “Are you too pure to cooperate in finding who maimed and murdered her?”

  Darwish’s chair came closer, but his head scarcely moved. Slouching, he maintained his distance from Darius. “Leila was proud of her heritage. Although she was raised in a progressive, internationalist household, she considered herself foremost a Pan-Arabist. Nothing came ahead of her people’s fight against the imperialists and the Zionist entity. As this was a struggle we shared, I was supportive of her decision to play an active part.”

  The trucker came back through the office. Darwish paused until the screen door swung shut behind him. “Her mother has never been told, but after Leila’s last year in Moscow she was recruited for training in a guerrilla unit that would be sent to southern Lebanon to infiltrate Israel’s upper Galilee.”

  Darius said, “The mutilations were not performed by Israelis.”

  “Nor by Palestinian Marxists,” Darwish snapped at him. “The quality of the volunteers the guerrilla camps attract is not high. The ignorant dregs of Iran and the Shi’ite villages of the Bekaa that are monuments to backwardness find playing soldier to their liking.”

  “You dismay me, Darwish. I thought communists transcended concepts of national pride, and all men were brothers.”