Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “But not you.”

  “In the U.S. I was more American than American. I was only fooling myself—and then not even me. That’s when I came home.”

  “Your objectivity alone qualifies you to be a moral preceptor. The basij will respect your honesty.”

  “There’s nothing I can tell the volunteers, nothing they want to hear. All I can do for them is find who murdered their comrade.”

  “Without my assistance,” Salehi said. “For security purposes one camp very often is unaware of what the next is doing, or even where it is.”

  Under Salehi’s thin beard Darius noticed a scar that reached around his chin to both cheeks. “What about the camp of the Brides of Blood?” he asked. “Is its location secret, too?”

  “It would be impossible, strictly speaking, for any of the Brides of Blood to turn up near Manzarieh.” Salehi’s friendly tone had become neutral. “They are headquartered far from here, and have no business in the capital.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside the country. If you have to ask—How much do you know about them?”

  “Next to nothing,” Darius confessed.

  “The Brides of Blood are the most esteemed young women volunteer fighters for Islam. Each one is a virgin, who has dedicated herself to avenging Imam Hussein by doing battles with the enemies of the faith.”

  “What kind of missions do they take on?”

  “To kill, and to die for the faith. The girls who drove trucks filled with dynamite into the Zionist positions in southern Lebanon, they were Brides of Blood. Their reward was a martyr’s death, and instant admission to paradise, where Ayatollah Aqda’i has said that Hussein will select husbands for them from the most devout and physically beautiful of young men.”

  “But where—”

  “Lebanon,” Salehi said.

  “Be specific. I need details, every fact you have.”

  The jeep cut between them, and the driver flung open the passenger’s door. Again Salehi shook his head, and put a foot up on the bumper.

  “In southwestern Beirut,” he said, “in the harbor district known as Ouzai, is an elite encampment whose volunteers are mainly Shi’ite girls from Lebanon, plus a few Iranians. They are divided into a number of fighting units. The one that has brought the most glory on itself is the Sayyidah Zaynab Brigade, which has embraced a martyr’s fate to drive the Israelis out of the land. Theirs is the forward base of the Brides of Blood.”

  “You’d be doing an immeasurable service by writing a letter of introduction into the camp.”

  “A service? For whom—for you? For Leila Darwish? Not the girls.”

  “Please, you’ve given me this much. A little more and, I think, I can wrap up the case.”

  “You’re deluding yourself, Bakhtiar. If there was a chance you might succeed, I wouldn’t have told you anything.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Seven weeks ago, commandos from Acre, in the belly of the Zionist beast, landed four rubber dinghies just south of Beirut. From the beaches they proceeded unmolested to Ouzai and massacred the innocent girls. After taking what they wanted, they planted explosives in all the camp structures. For eight hours fire raged in the rubble. There were no survivors. The coffins returned to the families for martyrs’ funerals contained only blackened bones. That is why I don’t want to talk about it: each girl’s memory is too precious to be defamed by such a death. And that is why the girl found slain in Shemiran cannot have been a Bride of Blood—because the Brides of Blood no longer exist.”

  Salehi climbed into the jeep, and tossed out Darius’s guns. “Do you want to know more? Ask the Jews. They have the duty roster, the order of battle, the names of informants and spies, all the records. They can tell you everything about the Brides of Blood.”

  Two volunteers escorted Darius back to his car. The semaphore went up when he was fifty meters from the perimeter, and the guard came out and waggled the Kalashnikov good-bye. His evidence pad was in the glove compartment, but not the flask that he had filled from two cases of premium bootleg that he had moved into his new apartment ahead of his clothes. He saw himself as a moral preceptor lecturing thirsty fanatics on where in Teheran to find the best vodka. Who was to say it wouldn’t be his most valuable service in the cause of the Islamic Republic?

  His subconscious already had begun to process the new information. He scribbled furiously, taking notes on his talk with Salehi before the facts were tainted by sober opinion. Whether Leila Darwish had known about the destruction of the camp, or had tired of life there, was beyond the range of his inquiry. Safe to say that she had been on a foreign mission at the time Ouzai was overrun and, instead of returning to Lebanon, likely had spent her final weeks dodging the Komiteh in Teheran while she tried to dispose of several kilograms of heroin. Slow to discover what poor material she was for a Shi’ite martyr, she would seem to have compounded the error by attempting to finance a new life out of proceeds expropriated from the old.

  He stopped writing. Safe to say that nothing was safe to say, or to commit to paper. Thinking was safe; but, without alcohol as a lubricant, too often created painful friction and heat. He had allowed Bijan to steer him down one blind alley after the next in the belief that it was he who was doing the manipulating, which he saw now for the same arrogant delusion that had brought Leila Darwish to Teheran to deal heroin under the nose of the Komiteh.

  Bijan’s agenda was the mystery within the mystery. Having failed to persuade Darius to drop the investigation, he had joined it as a partner generous with information detectives had gathered on their own. Darius put no faith in the notion that he wanted simply to be kept abreast of progress he could not prevent from being made. Nothing at Homicide remained hidden for long from the Komiteh. Bijan’s interest in the case was in controlling its direction, now urging Darius to delve deep into Leila’s past. It was as if a secret had been forgotten by the last person on earth to know it, and Darius was needed to bring it to immediate light, to whisper it in Bijan’s ear. Had Leila been that person? Had Farhad? Darius did not anticipate a future brighter than theirs if the Komitehman wasn’t given what he wanted. And if Darius didn’t fail? Bijan did not need excuses to get rid of anyone. Hatred for the murderer of his uncle burned bright as ever in his eyes.

  The sun descending through a pall of soot colored the city in liquid orange. Below Niavaran a steamroller ground layers of steaming asphalt into the road. Traffic was detoured through steep avenues of grand villas erected in the last years before the Revolution. As he was admiring what was meant to be a Tudor-style estate in an English garden, a white Chevrolet hurtled across two lanes of traffic and cut him off. He slammed the brakes. The Chevrolet slowed with him, and he was forced to wheel around the corner to avoid a crash.

  The near miss was accomplished reflexively with little anger directed toward the driver of the other car. Who better than a policeman understood the Iranian penchant for reckless driving? Traffic signals were meant to be ignored. The rules of the road were as theoretical as the Imam’s outline for the working of the Islamic state. Under the law it was legal to run down jaywalkers.

  He had been shunted onto a street of smaller houses, which he followed downhill assuming that it would rejoin the old Shemiran Road. At a cross street called Qods the way narrowed to a single lane that was blocked by an ambulance. Two paramedics sat on a litter in the middle of the street smoking cigarettes beside a body under a gray blanket. On an average day six Teheranis lost their lives in traffic accidents, most of them at night when women in black chadors virtually were invisible, and there were days when it seemed he witnessed every one. More than moral preceptors, he thought, what were needed in the camps were instructors in defensive driving.

  One of the paramedics, a huge man with a stethoscope like calipers around his bull neck, came over to the Paycon. “We are sorry, sir,” he said, “but he cannot be moved until the police arrive.”

  Darius shifted into reverse, but the white Ch
evrolet was on his bumper now. “I’m a police officer,” he said dispiritedly, “let me have a look.”

  From the compact form outlined under the blanket, the body already had been disturbed. There was no blood, or broken glass, or skid marks in the street, nor vehicles other than the ambulance.

  “Were there witnesses? Did anyone see the car that ran him down?”

  The medic on the stretcher blew smoke through thin, cracked lips. “No.”

  As Darius peeled away the blanket, a jab to his kidneys doubled him over in pain. “Don’t move, don’t say anything,” the big man ordered.

  The corpse flung its gray shroud over Darius’s head. Darius’s shoulder gun was taken away while other hands probed for his reserve pistol. Another kidney punch started him toward the ambulance. When he felt the bumper against his leg, he locked his knees and wouldn’t go further.

  “Get in!”

  Two quick, hard blows came down on the top of his head. Someone said, “Don’t, you almost killed him last time.” Lighter punches raining on his shoulders wearied him and put an end to his resistance. Holding himself still, he listened for Farib’s husky voice to tell him that she was bringing him someplace quiet and safe, then shut his ears to his labored breathing and the click of handcuffs behind his back, the shriek of tires as the ambulance hurtled down from the mountain carrying him into the steaming city.

  7

  IN BLACKNESS DARIUS CONCENTRATED on tracking the movement of the ambulance, which immediately had turned onto a level street and veered left again without slowing. A long, straight decline gave the sensation of increasing momentum. The next turn, a sharp right, spilled him across the floor. To imprint the route in his memory he began a silent litany of “Left-downhill left-right—” then “Left-downhill left-right gentle left—” knowing that the imprecise directions could be plotted as easily over the map of any large, hilly city. Nevertheless, he didn’t quit until the ambulance raced around a small park, or square, spinning him in circles on his back. After that, he occupied himself with staying wedged against a wheel well, where he best could keep from becoming goods damaged in transit.

  The wheels ran over a bump, bloodying his nose against his knee. The ambulance was still rocking on its springs when he was dragged outside with the blanket bunched around his head and brought along a gravel path. A cat in a bag, he thought, would know the feeling. The voice he had heard before said, “You’re coming to steps now.” Raising his foot for them, he would have pitched headlong down the flight had someone not pulled him back by the shoulders.

  He descended into a haze of camphor and turpentine. A door opened on dry hinges, and he was thrown onto a bare mattress and chained to a pipe against the wall. Left alone on his knees, he wore himself out trying to pull down the building. By tossing his head like a horse he was able to shake off the blanket. The room was in darkness; he’d gained nothing but a twinge in his neck and a view of a strip of dim light beneath the door. His eyes stung with foul, anxious sweat. Voices penetrating the low ceiling were lost to him when a refrigerator chugged loudly into its cooling cycle.

  Lacking alcohol, he wanted sleep—any means of blanking his fear. Measured breaths stilled the hammering in his chest, but not the wild thoughts that made a kidnapper of everyone he knew. His enemies were too numerous to sort out, delineated unclearly from those few of his acquaintances he believed to be friends. He shut his eyes to slow the rush of ideas. When he opened them seconds later, it was like waking from a long nap.

  A man was paused several steps inside the room. He was about twenty-five, wearing a broad-billed infantryman’s cap and leather sandals. Loose-fitting corduroy trousers were hitched around his pinched waist with a web belt. The automatic rifle in his hands was loaded with the straight clip of an American M-16. He tugged a cord overhead, and Darius bowed his head in the glare of an unshaded bulb.

  “Do you recognize me?” he asked, positioning himself directly under the light.

  “No.”

  “That’s because you’re not looking closely.” The muzzle of the M-16 levered Darius’s chin into the glare. “Take a good look.”

  Darius squinted at gray eyes in grayer shadow under the soiled cap, smooth features that would not be improved by the character beginning to shape them.

  “I am Saeed Djalilian, the son of Daoud Djalilian. Do you see his face in mine?”

  What Darius saw was the kind of anger he associated with the relatives of criminals he had been responsible for putting away, so volatile he equated it with possession of a dangerous weapon.

  “You knew him as Dave Djalilian. The same Dave Djalilian whose memory you profaned by working for the Komiteh.”

  The name might have been taken from another man’s past. The threat of the M-16 alone was personal.

  Two men came quietly inside. One of them, still wearing his paramedic’s jacket, wrapped a heavy arm around Djalilian, who sank under its weight. The other, ten years older, thirty-five kilos lighter, was a wiry man of about fifty whose cheeks were cloaked in a yellow beard. Djalilian stared at him with angry eyes, which were turned away by his soft gaze. Soft, Darius thought, but sure, and infinitely unyielding. He recognized those eyes, and now the face behind the flowing beard, but took no comfort from familiarity. As a young lawyer in Sazeman Atelaat Va Amniat Keshvar, the State Organization for Security and Intelligence, SAVAK, he had been assigned to the Special Intelligence Bureau under the directorship of Colonel Massoud Ashfar, who for the slightest lapse in judgment, and sometimes for none at all, had turned that penetrating gaze on him. Ashfar had fled as power dwindled from the shah, and was rumored to have sold state secrets to finance his getaway. Incredibly, here he was, having aged little over the years, except that his beard, which in the old days was already long and gray, was now the ragged mask of a sage.

  “Saeed,” Ashfar said, “this is not the way we treat a guest. Would you be so kind as to bring food and something to drink? Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar must be hungry after all he has been through today.”

  Djalilian didn’t move. The man in the paramedic’s jacket released him with a shove that sent him stumbling through the door.

  “Be patient with Saeed,” Ashfar said to Darius. “He is impulsive, and allows emotion too often to interfere with doing his job.”

  Darius scraped his chain against the pipe. “I have no patience.”

  “What better opportunity to acquire some?” Ashfar put out his hand toward the heavyset man. “You remember Baraheni.”

  Darius had said, “No,” when the name came to him. Khosrow Baraheni had been a ranking interrogator in SAVAK’s Anti-Sabotage Committee headquartered on Farrokhi Alley, which was chartered to launch investigations into the activities of anyone it desired without seeking the approval of the courts. Baraheni was a SAVAK legend, a Galileo among torturers, who had turned his particular world upside down when he discovered that by applying a samovar to the small of the back and heating the water inside to the boiling point, he could reduce the most taciturn of men to a babbling font of information.

  “You would be advised to be cautious in Saeed’s company,” Baraheni said suddenly. Trained as a listener, Baraheni rarely had anything to say in the past. “He doesn’t like you.”

  “Because of his father?” Darius addressed the question to Ashfar. Someone else always had answered for Baraheni, who in the intervening years at least had acquired the use of language and no longer seemed to go around drenched in the blood of his victims. “I never heard of him.”

  “He was an obscure cipher clerk on the Iraq desk, who may have brushed past you once or twice in the halls,” Ashfar said. “The new regime was still looking for the keys to the toilets on Farrokhi when he was bringing the fanatics his codebooks. They put him in Evin, and hanged him during the first wave of executions in seventy-nine. The kid has built him into a great hero; and you, for having the temerity to survive, as a devil. We told him to be gentle with you that time in Shemiran, but he isn’t with us to be ge
ntle. It’s going to take a while for you to get to know and like each other.”

  “What do you want?” Darius asked.

  Ashfar furrowed his brow to suggest that he was considering every nuance of a deceptively complex question. “We want you, Darius. We want you.”

  Darius shook his head.

  “You haven’t heard us out,” Ashfar said.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “He’s living too well.” Baraheni’s voice was the rumble of a slow freight. “He’s a big shot in the National Police, in bed with the Komiteh on the side. Why give up everything that goes with that just to help the people?”

  “You’re judging him too harshly. Darius Bakhtiar is a man of high moral conviction who would never place his selfish interests ahead of those of the nation.” Ashfar put up a boot on the mattress. Darius smelled dog excrement on the heel. “… Or his former comrades.”

  “Aren’t you curious about us?” he asked Darius. “What has it been—it must be close to fifteen years since we’ve spoken.”

  “We made it out of Teheran just in time,” Baraheni cut in. “Another twelve hours, and the fanatics would have had us swinging from the gallows with Saeed’s old man. For months we lived like animals, till we expropriated the funds to get started in Europe. Since then we’ve stayed in London, twice in Germany, all over Switzerland and Belgium. Last year we came to France.”

  “We’re settled in a little suburb of Paris,” Ashfar said. “Wonderful place. Great wine cheap as water, terrific food, more blondes than you could have in a lifetime.”

  “Too bad you didn’t leave Iran, too,” Baraheni said.

  “He was in prison. You remember—that sorry business about Farmayan.”

  A muscle twitched in Baraheni’s cheek, drawing a sneer on that side of his face.