Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “It’s her. All I want is another look, to satisfy myself.”

  The phone was ringing. Baghai’s elbow cleared the table of bottles as he grabbed for it. “He is,” he said, and handed over the receiver. “Lieutenant Ghaffari has been looking all over for you.”

  “You have leads?” Darius said by way of hello.

  “No, I—This is more important. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered you.

  “What, then? A new load of bootleg? This month’s Penthouse?”

  “I’m serious,” Ghaffari said. “It’s about life and death—mostly death.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mine, unless you help. I have to see you.”

  “Meet me at the morgue in an hour.”

  “What better place … ?”

  Baghai was standing medicine vials on end when Darius gave back the phone. “Tell the interns I’m coming by with the lieutenant. I’ll call later to let you know what I’ve concluded.”

  As Baghai replaced the receiver, his arm swept the table clean again. “What makes you think I’m interested in the opinion of amateurs?”

  Desert wind had wafted the smell of the fire all the way to Jamshidabad. Darius followed the spoor downtown to Englehaab Avenue. Mounds of debris had been bulldozed onto the sidewalk in front of the water-filled pit where the bathhouse had been, scorched towels, and sheets, and canvas wet wash carts, a jumble of women’s clothing on a pyre of shattered tile and black timbers topped by a sodden, headless teddy bear. A lone fire truck stood guard over the sizzling rubble. Darius slowed to peer into the foundation at a molten tangle of lead plumbing.

  Ghaffari’s life-and-death problem could be written off in advance as girlfriend trouble. The road focused his thoughts again on Leila Darwish. Had the nascent Arab nationalist established ties with Baghdad? Was her service as a drug courier for the Revolutionary Guards a screen for activities as an Iraqi agent? A yes to both questions still did not explain how she had become exposed to mycotoxins, or whether the poisons were being developed for chemical warfare by Iran’s enemies. Better for all concerned that she had been targeted by a swarm of giant bees. But, then, why was he the one who had ended up in shit?

  The morgue was under siege by ambulances backed up around the block. Spotting Ghaffari parked across the street, he wheeled into a neat U-turn and pulled up alongside him.

  “It’s a madhouse.” Darius was watching the loading platform, where an intern who needed to make up a week’s lost sleep was directing the bodies of the fire victims inside. “I’ll have to come back later.”

  Ghaffari slipped into the passenger’s seat, and went immediately for the bottle in the glove compartment.

  “Who is she?” Darius asked. “A foreign tourist? One of your old flames?”

  Ghaffari looked at him so unhappily that Darius considered it a personality defect that he was unable to feel sympathy for a friend.

  “It’s Sharera.” Sharera was Ghaffari’s wife, whom he had met through an introduction arranged by Farib. “She’s making all kinds of unreasonable demands.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants me dead,” Ghaffari said. “She’s found out about my latest affair.”

  Darius groaned.

  “You, too? Really, what’s the big deal? The girl was just young stuff that I—” He appealed hopefully to Darius, whose expression hadn’t changed except to calcify around the edges. “She was nothing. But Sharera is blowing it up into something huge, and is threatening to turn me in to the Komiteh.” He unscrewed the cap from the bottle. “I don’t deserve this.”

  Ghaffari’s gaze shifted to the morgue, where the line of bodies had turned the corner. He pointed to an empty litter mixed in with the others. “There,” he said, “that spot is reserved for me. I need a ticket out of this crazy country.”

  “What you need is a lock on your zipper.” Darius took back the vodka. “Do you know what they’re handing out these days for adultery? One hundred lashes. And that’s if they’re being lenient. Last month, the Zahedan Penal Court approved a death sentence for a nineteen-year-old girl who had slept one time with her husband’s younger brother.”

  “Please, don’t give me any more good news.”

  “Under the new law the penalty for a married man having sexual relations with a woman other than his wife—”

  “You sound like a lawyer.”

  “I am a lawyer,” Darius said. “… is death by stoning. ‘The condemned shall be hooded and partially buried in the vertical position,’ ” he recited, “ ‘men up to the waist, and women up to the chest. The executioners shall circle the condemned and throw stones at them. The stones should not be too large so that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them, and they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones …’ ”

  “Are you trying to scare me out of fooling around? I’m already scared. See—” Ghaffari snatched the bottle, and brought it to his mouth. “My hand is shaking.”

  “Will the girl confess three times in court?” Darius asked.

  “Huh? She’s not a mental case.”

  “Does Sharera have four male eyewitnesses?”

  “… nor an exhibitionist.”

  “Does Sharera have eight female eyewitnesses?”

  “Like I said—”

  “Then the burden of proof remains with Sharera,” Darius said. “The odds of such a sentence being returned against a male defendant are about a million to one. It’s just something for you to think about.”

  “It’s all I’ve been thinking about. If Sharera goes to the Komiteh, there’s an excellent chance I’ll lose my job. Worse, Nahid’s family are from a powerful clan in Qashqa’i, and I’ll have her brothers, her uncles, her cousins gunning for me. You don’t know these Qashqa’is. They’re primitive people. They shit behind their tent and scrape dirt over it like a dog. They’ll hang my nuts from their camel saddles if word of this gets out.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Speak with Sharera. She respects you, she hangs on every word that passes your lips.”

  “That may have been, before the divorce. She probably hates my guts now.”

  “Not so much,” Ghaffari said. “Someone has to talk sense to her. Have I ever asked you for anything?”

  Darius looked across the street. The line of bodies was endless. The young doctor who had come outside to supervise the loading dock had broken down in tears. Darius took a long pull on the bottle, and locked it in the glove compartment, then sprinted away from the curb.

  Ghaffari’s small single-story house was set behind an ivy-covered wall in a neighborhood near the Azadi monument in the western part of the city that had not changed in twenty years. Its four rooms were furnished in the old style with cushions and pillows on the floors, which were layered with Hamadan carpets that had been in Ghaffari’s mother’s family for generations. A low table in the living room supported a twenty-seven-inch color television and a vase containing a single dog rose. The door was opened by a little girl in a floral-patterned indoor chador who ran into her father’s arms and was covered with his kisses. Over Ghaffari’s shoulder she eyed Darius as though he were a child molester. Shahla was nine years old, the legal mature age for a female, and thus obligated to wear the veil.

  “Where’s your mother?” Ghaffari asked her.

  “In the garden,” she said, suddenly bored. “Digging.”

  “Tell her I’ve brought home company, and then you can go out to play.”

  Shahla took off her chador and whipped it into a corner. Underneath she had on pink-and-yellow spandex shorts and a striped polo shirt. Soon a woman came into the house munching on a cucumber. When she saw Darius, she let her veil fall down around her neck. Darius took her right hand to kiss, but she pulled it away and whisked invisible dirt off her knuckles.

  “It’s been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of a visit from you,” she said.

  Sharera had been Farib’s friend when
they were growing up together in Pol-e-Rumi in north Teheran. Darius still thought of her as a robust, athletic teenager who spent summers on the tennis courts and her winters skiing on Mount Dizin. After the Revolution, tennis was forbidden to women because the skimpy outfits revealed too much of their arms and legs. The ski slopes were segregated by sex to prevent collisions between the sexes. Sharera seemed to have shrunk and put on weight at the same time. Gardening did not burn as many calories as active sports.

  “Sharera,” Ghaffari said, “bring us melon, some tea.”

  “Please don’t bother,” Darius said. “I can’t stay long.”

  “He’s asked you to be our marriage counselor, hasn’t he, Darius? He said he would do it.” Sharera had given up her feeble pretense that she was happy to see him. “There’s nothing to discuss. I’ve warned him time and time again that I won’t put up with his fooling around, and yet he insists on seeing other women. I don’t want to press charges, but what alternative do I have?”

  “Mansur has given me his promise that he will stop.” Even to him it sounded inane. He might as well be telling the wife of an alcoholic that her husband had pledged never to take another drink. “Isn’t that right, Mansur?”

  Ghaffari nodded forlornly.

  “I’ve heard those words one hundred times. A thousand,” Sharera said. “They mean nothing.”

  “You know what the revolutionary courts will do to him?”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  How had he been trapped in the middle of this domestic bloodletting when he could be enjoying an afternoon at the morgue? He would run from the house if it didn’t mean possibly losing his only experienced investigator. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “But do you have any idea of how it will affect you and Shahla? Do you understand the disgrace attached to being an adulterer’s wife?”

  “Understand?” She had begun to shout. She glanced out the window at the little girl playing in the yard, and immediately lowered her voice. “Who understands better than I? I’ve made a career of it—a life. No, Darius, I’ve thought it out and, painful as it will be, anything is better than constant humiliation. Last month, he gave me a disease. Did he tell you that, the great lover?”

  Ghaffari went into the kitchen. He came back with a fifth of Chivas Regal, and poured it over the lip of a shot glass.

  “Sixty-five thousand rials for that bottle,” she said. “He has plenty of money for his pleasures. How much do you think he has for his wife and daughter?”

  Darius felt himself becoming envious of Ghaffari. Rather than turn away from her husband, retire to the baths and the company of friends, Sharera would battle to keep her marriage. Unlike Farib, she remained a modern woman—in spite of the chador, a feminist.

  “I can’t allow you to do it,” he said, “no matter that Mansur deserves it. I’ll vouch for him. If he goes back on his promise, I’ll make him suffer so, he’ll wish the Komiteh had him.”

  “I don’t know why you bothered to come, or why I’m listening.” Sharera paused, and the room filled with the sound of her breathing. She looked toward the window again, and then stood with her back to it. “Okay, I won’t do anything this time, but if I find out he’s been with a woman again, you’ll pay, Darius, just as though you’d slept with her yourself, and it was we who are married.”

  Ghaffari, watching her stalk out of the room, put a glass in Darius’s hand, and filled it. “What a funny thing for her to say.”

  Darius savored the flavor of the premium scotch as Ghaffari stared at him with his head cocked.

  “My God, Mansur, you’re jealous.”

  Ghaffari tossed down the remainder of his drink.

  “I’m not sleeping with Sharera,” Darius said. “If I was, she’d want to turn me in, too.”

  Ghaffari put his arm around Darius’s shoulder, and kissed his cheek. “What you did for me … in more ways than one, you saved my life.”

  “I don’t know what for.”

  “Neither do I, not if I can’t have Nahid.” Ghaffari looked at Darius to see if it was all right to smile, and thought better of it. “Let’s go back.”

  The Paycon’s battery was dead. Ghaffari jump-started it from his old Plymouth, and they headed east.

  “Baghai thinks Leila Darwish was poisoned by her killer,” Darius said.

  “Tortured, shot, filled with drugs, poisoned,” Ghaffari said. “This case has everything.”

  “Except good clues.” Darius showed him the photos from Isfahan.

  “Who’s the kid?”

  “Sousan Hovanian, when she was maybe fourteen,” Darius said. “I want another look at the body.”

  Ghaffari grunted and turned his attention to the traffic. As they came to Hafez Avenue, he glanced toward the facade of the dowdy Park Hotel, Teheran’s oldest. “You can let me out here.”

  Darius touched the brake. “Why? Do you need to use the bathroom?”

  “Don’t ask questions. Just do it.”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “There you go again, damn it.”

  Darius drove up to the curb, and Ghaffari started out of the car. “I can never repay you for—”

  “You have a date,” Darius said.

  “It’s almost a week since I’ve been with Nahid. The Park is the only place where we … where she feels safe seeing me.”

  Darius angled away from the sidewalk. The door swung in against Ghaffari’s knee.

  “Ow, what are you doing?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I told Sharera? I gave her your word, my word, you’d quit.”

  “It’s the last time, I swear,” Ghaffari pleaded. “Just to tell Nahid good-bye. I can’t leave her waiting in the lobby. She’ll worry, she’ll get into big trouble. The hotel will report her.”

  “They’ll report her to us.”

  Darius sped into traffic, which pulled them away from the hotel. Sulking, Ghaffari opened the flapping door wide, and then slammed it shut. The bodies were gone from the streets around the morgue. Darius was reminded of a theater that had put on a late show to accommodate crowds for a surprise hit.

  A new odor stood out from the chemical stew of the autopsy room, a smoky essence that was the flavor of the day. The intern Darius had seen weeping on the loading dock, a Dr. Kashfi, looked up at the detectives from a slab where a boy about four years old lay with his internal organs exposed to bright light like an intimate secret betrayed. Humming tunelessly, he unlocked a refrigerator unit, and wheeled out a steel gurney. “This is her,” he said, and went back to the slab.

  The photo of Sousan Hovanian fluttered to the tile floor as Darius lifted a green sheet. The body was shriveled and black. A point of bone protruded from a disintegrating chin where the girl’s face had begun to slough off the skull. One of her breasts was as firm, as well shaped, as … inviting, he thought, as in life. The other was putrid flesh eaten around to the ribs by maggots.

  “How was this allowed to happen?” he demanded.

  Kashfi hunched lower over the child’s body, and buried his head in the Y-shaped incision. “There have been power outages all summer,” he said, and “there’s no money for gas for the emergency generator. There’s nothing we can do for the bodies we don’t get to right away, but hope they don’t spoil before the electricity comes back on. It’s why I’m working late tonight.”

  “Let me see the laboratory report on Leila Darwish,” Darius said, “and everything you have on this girl.”

  Kashfi wiped his hands on his gown. He went into the coroner’s office, came back quickly with two folders.

  The newest entry in the Darwish file was a letter from a pathologist at a clinical testing lab. Darius had a hard time penetrating the medicalese, which seemed to say that although the doctors could not state with one hundred percent certainty that Leila Darwish had succumbed to mycotoxin poisoning because they never had encountered a case before, the evidence indicated to their satisfaction that that was what had killed her. As Darius looke
d inside the other file, Ghaffari burped into his cupped hand.

  “Get some air,” Darius told him. “You’re green.”

  “Blue,” Ghaffari said. “What have you got there?”

  “The autopsy report on Khalil Pakravan’s girlfriend.” Darius pulled out a color Polaroid. “When was this picture taken?” he asked Kashfi. “I’ve never seen it.”

  “I shot it myself,” the young doctor said proudly. “I’m photographing every cadaver as they come in, until the power problem is rectified.”

  Darius put the photos from Isfahan on the slab beside the Polaroid. The Shush Avenue victim appeared years younger than in her picture, as though it were the parts of her face weakened by the process of aging that had been the first to decompose. From the contour of the head, the general configuration of features, a pronounced widow’s peak on the low hairline, and the European roundness of shallow-set eyes, he was convinced the dead girl was Sousan Hovanian.

  “What do you think?”

  Ghaffari nodded grimly. “She’s the missing piece in the puzzle, the link between Leila Darwish and her killer, and what became of the heroin.”

  Darius switched off the light over the body, and Kashfi returned it to the refrigerator unit.

  “This is the break we needed,” Ghaffari said. “It’s just a matter of time until the pieces fall into place.”

  Darius shook his head.

  “No?” Ghaffari said. “She’s not?”

  “Nothing falls into place unless we put it there. And I don’t see our next move.”

  9

  SLEEPERS WERE AVAILABLE BY reservation only on the night flier to Mashad. Darius purchased a second-class seat, and entered a stifling compartment occupied by a mullah in a black turban. To while away the fifteen-hour ride to Iran’s second holiest city, nine hundred kilometers northeast of Teheran, he had brought along the back issue of the Journal of the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology featuring an article by Professor Manuchehr Karrubi on “New Developments in the Application of Mycotoxins for the Suppression of the Immune System in Human Organ Transplants.” As the station began to sneak away from them, the mullah opened a greasy paper bag of nuts and raisins, and offered some to Darius.