Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “You are possibly European?” he asked.

  Darius nudged the bag back toward its owner. “What makes you say that?”

  “The way you are dressed, and your taste in literature.” The mullah showed Darius his own reading, the Epic of the Kings, by the tenth-century Persian poet Firdowsi. “It is not unusual to see foreign tourists at this time of year. Unbelievers are not encouraged at Imam Reza’s shrine in early summer, and what other reason can there be to make such a long, hot journey?”

  While Darius read, the mullah dozed until the evening call to prayer, when he dropped to his knees facing the rear of the train and, at an oblique angle beyond that, Mecca. After prayers, dinner was announced. Darius waited till most of the passengers had returned to their compartments before going to the dining car. The menu was limited to cello khoresh, lamb on a bed of rice topped with a spicy vegetable-and-meat sauce flavored with walnuts. Though he was hungry, he kept walking to the lavatory at the end of the car. Inside his jacket was a rare bottle of Caviar brand vodka that he had found hidden among his old clothes when he moved. Caviar brand was a light Iranian vodka that had sold for about three dollars a fifth before the Revolution shuttered the distillery, and which had inflated in cost at a rate exceeded only by black market dollars. He drank standing over the toilet, which was stopped up with an empty pint bottle of bootleg not good enough to piss Caviar onto, although that was what he did.

  At ten, two hours late, the train pulled into the station in the northeast corner of Mashad. Sharing his taxi downtown was the mullah from his compartment, who would not think of allowing him to his destination without a glimpse of the golden dome and turquoise blue cupola of the shrine of Imam Reza that was the focal point of the summer pilgrimages.

  The mullah left the cab at the old bazaar and disappeared in a sea of weathered Mongol faces, of men in the baggy, pajamalike pants of central Asia and Afghanistan, and women wearing blue chadors. Darius instructed the driver to take him east from the city. The Imam Reza Medical Center was housed in a grimy brick building in the center of a grimy brick complex that had been a large factory. Darius left the cab along the access road, and proceeded on foot to a double chain link fence topped with concertina wire. In a corner of a flat expanse of land in which nothing grew a backhoe scooped out the pebbly soil and crafted it into low mounds. Darius watched as the bucket of the backhoe carried the remains of several lambs and young goats to an open trench perpendicular to the fence. None of the animals appeared healthy. Many were deformed, if not mutants, the fur discolored and the raw flesh blistered, in some cases eaten through to the bone. A pink umbrella shielded the operator of the backhoe from the sun. He was a totally bald man, without eyebrows, lashes, or hair anywhere on his pitted cheeks, and he wore a surgical mask over his mouth and nose. As he pulled away from the fence, he squinted at Darius with a lone, milky eye.

  Darius cut back through a wooded area to the main entrance of the medical center, and showed his police identification to a guard. He was brought into the lobby and told to take a seat and wait. He waited—ten minutes in alert anticipation, and after that lost in thought, a wide-eyed sleep from which he was summoned when his name was called by a red-haired young man who brought him to the elevator. His escort was slim, in his late twenties or early thirties. He was wearing a lab coat speckled with scorch marks either from a caustic chemical, or the harsh TIR cigarettes that he smoked furiously, racing to consume as many as he could before they were outlawed as the health hazard they obviously were.

  A black skull and crossbones was stenciled on the wall of the top-story corridor through which cool air was propelled by a series of hissing vents. Skylights angling upward from the dark ceiling allowed dusty light into an otherwise modern laboratory. The red-haired man flicked a fingernail against a beaker on a centrifuge, and then started the machine by whacking it. The noise it made, or his unhurried manner, made Darius’s skull throb where the stitches had been. “I don’t have all day,” he said. “Tell Dr. Karrubi I’m here.”

  “Í am Dr. Karrubi.”

  He turned up the flame under an alembic, then brought Darius into a windowless office cooled by floor fans in three corners, and leaned against the edge of his desk. On the walls, among framed degrees from German universities, was a photo of the Imam in his student days at Qom glowering at the camera. “What information have you come for all this way that could not be obtained from competent sources in Teheran?” he asked.

  “It concerns the death of a woman named Leila Darwish.”

  Karrubi, apparently uninterested, was looking above Darius’s head. Darius turned around and saw more diplomas, more pictures of the Imam, whose hooded eyes were fixed on the young pharmacologist.

  “She was found in a northern suburb of the capital. The coroner’s office sent specimens from her organs to the poison unit for a determination of the cause of death.”

  “The particular case eludes me,” Karrubi said. “We are swamped with work from medical examiners all over the country.”

  “How many cases of mycotoxin poisoning do you see?”

  “As I said, I don’t recall—”

  “Mycotoxins are your specialization. How can you not remember someone dying like that on the streets?”

  “I am just a simple researcher,” Karrubi said. “There is not that much that I know about the subject.”

  “Such modesty is an admirable trait, but somewhat out of character,” Darius said. “I’ve seen your article in the Journal of the Iranian Research Organization, and just several months ago you were clamoring for recognition of the breakthroughs you’ve made. I doubt anyone in the world knows as much as you.”

  Karrubi took cigarettes from his lab coat and lay them on his desk. He lit a fresh one from a five-centimeter butt.

  “I need to find out how Leila Darwish ingested the poison that killed her,” Darius said. “From my understanding of the article, mycotoxins are rare in nature.”

  “I can’t answer.”

  “You must have some hypothesis.”

  “I prefer not to make guesses”

  “Not even educated ones? It would be negligent of you to have no theory to explain the death of this woman. If people are succumbing to mycotoxin poisoning in Teheran, the implications are grave.”

  “It’s outside my purview. Our experimentation is limited to the possible uses of mycotoxins in overcoming autoimmune rejection of transplanted organs.” A gray worm of ash dropped onto Karrubi’s lap. He whisked it to the floor, and crushed its glowing tail under his heel. “Since you lack a theory, consider that she ate bad mushrooms. That is the most common manner of death from mycotoxins.”

  “The poison that killed Leila Darwish was from the same strain of wheat or grass fungus utilized by some countries in chemical weapons. Among the tissue specimens sent to you were sections of skin marred by severe burns and rashes. The woman did not receive those injuries rubbing up against a poisonous mushroom.”

  “May I say politely that I do not know what you are getting at. Or, to be more accurate, that you don’t. We are in the business of medical research,” Karrubi said, “of learning to save lives, not to study more horrible ways of taking them.”

  “Perhaps as a by-product of your experimentation such discoveries are being made.”

  “Definitely not. The singular application of the knowledge obtained here is a reduction of suffering.”

  “Mycotoxins killed that girl,” Darius said.

  “If you are interested in the murderous uses of chemical agents, I would advise you to focus your investigation on the criminal scientists of the Zionist regime of Baghdad. It is a well-known fact that they have been engaged in that kind of research for years.”

  “The girl was never to Iraq.”

  Karrubi took a step away from the desk. “The laboratory that performed the analysis for you will be pleased to provide additional information, I am sure,” he said. “There is nothing left for us to discuss.”

  “Doct
or Karrubi—” Darius was out of his seat, toe to toe with the pharmacologist. “You’re not a suspect in this homicide, yet you’ve evaded my questions as if you were. Why is that?”

  Karrubi patted his pockets, then reached down for his cigarettes. “I won’t stand for being badgered. You have no jurisdiction in Mashad. Leave now, or I will call the guards to have you removed.”

  But the choice was not Darius’s to make. Men in uniform burst into the office and dragged him through the lab in a brawny pas de deux in which his toes scarcely brushed the floor, one of the guards hustling him along the hissing corridor while the other went ahead opening fire doors. The freight elevator was waiting to catch him. The operator, a worn man in a vested suit with white broadcloth showing through the elbows, and alligator skin showing through that, brought him to the basement tilting his nose as though he were another load of garbage.

  Somewhere he’d lost his sunglasses. He went outside squinting against the noonday glare. His stomach was grumbling about the meals he had missed since leaving Teheran. There was no place to eat around the campus, no place where he would eat. A city whose wealth was imported in the pocketbooks of religious pilgrims could not be recommended for its cuisine.

  He went back toward the bazaar, and had lunch in the coffee shop of the Iran Hotel. Exhausted, and with nothing to do until the next train left that evening, he paid fifty thousand rials for a room in which to nap.

  He woke around 5:00, craving vodka and his own bed, too groggy to try to catch his train, or to care. He shut his eyes again, and slept through the late-afternoon and evening call to prayer.

  After a shower, he went downstairs. His reward for the frustrating trip would be supper in Mashad’s former three-star hotel. The last traces of the dining room’s old elegance were fossilized in the antique carpets on the walls, and the gilded, mismatched bone china. He ordered fesunjun, duck in pomegranate juice with ground walnuts, and maol shair, a nonalcoholic beer.

  At the height of the dinner hour the dining room was a quarter full. Three tables away a young mullah was feeding chicken to a seegah twice his age. Beside them, four Orientals jabbered loudly in bad, status symbol English. Under a crystal chandelier marred by missing bulbs a lone diner was studying a menu at a round table for eight. Darius gazed at the thin, gray man, who pointed silently when the waiter came for his order. The man’s plump mustaches, his diffidence, recalled Zaid Rahgozar so vividly that Darius preferred to believe he was hallucinating rather than attach credibility to such coincidence.

  His salad was like paper in his chalky mouth. The man was Rahgozar, had to be, the amazing coincidence no coincidence at all, but a mutual interest in mycotoxins and the leading poison expert in Iran. When Rahgozar walked from the dining room, Darius trailed him as far as the elevators. He watched the indicator light turn red for the seventh floor, and then went to the desk.

  “The man who just went upstairs,” he said. “Mr. Rahgozar—”

  The clerk looked up from the register. He was a short man with a nose of such prominence that Darius couldn’t understand how his eyes worked in concert.

  “Can you tell me what room he’s in? We were supposed to meet in the lobby, and apparently I’ve just missed him.”

  “Seven twenty-seven,” the clerk said. “I’ll ring him for you.”

  Darius reached over the desk, and pressed the clerk’s hand against the receiver. “That isn’t necessary.”

  He slipped into a phone booth from which he could keep an eye on the elevators. The long-distance operator put him through to Ghaffari’s without difficulty. Sharera picked up.

  “Let me talk to Mansur,” he said.

  “He isn’t home. I haven’t seen him in two nights. Darius, you know where he stays with his slut. Tell me where, tell me, and I’ll go there now and brain the two of them.”

  “I would,” he said, “except I need him. If—When you hear from him, have him call me at the Hotel Iran in Mashad.”

  “Have you got a girl, too?”

  “This is important, Sharera. Tell him what I said, and if he’s out all night tomorrow, you’ll know he’s here with me.”

  When Darius stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor, three of the Orientals were loitering in the corridor, cursing in Japanese as their companion tried to force the key into their door. He waited until they were inside, and then knocked on 727.

  “Who’s there?”

  A good question. In his excitement at discovering Rahgozar at the hotel he hadn’t planned out how to get close to him.

  “… Room service.”

  “I haven’t ordered anything.”

  “Six jujeh kebab dinners were requested for seven twenty-seven,” Darius said. “I’ll be happy to take the cart back to the kitchen, but someone will have to pay for them.”

  “One minute.” The door was opened by the thin man with the glossy mustaches, who was wiping his face in a towel. He was in tassel loafers, pants from a black suit, and a tattered undershirt. Soapy water ran off his forearms into the carpeting. Darius waggled his gun, but the thin man was dabbing at his eyes and didn’t see it, or chose not to. Darius shoved him inside.

  “My money is in my wallet.” He nodded toward a black jacket on the bed, “but hardly adequate compensation for the loss of a hand.”

  Remembering their last confrontation, Darius backed him all the way into the room, and chained the door. Rahgozar blotted his eyes some more, but still didn’t seem to recognize him. “I left the water running,” he said, and started for the bathroom.

  “Stay where you are.” Darius went first into the bathroom. A toilet kit lay on the edge of the basin. He folded a straight razor into its handle, pocketed it, and then turned off the water.

  The thin man grabbed for his jacket. Darius ripped it away, and patted it down. There were no weapons. In the inside pocket was a passport with a red cover. Darius opened it to a photo taken at a time when the thin man was thirty pounds heavier, significant weight in a ferocious ridge of muscle above his eyes. The information under the picture was in Cyrillic. Darius made his way slowly through the Slavonic letters, spelling out Zaid Rahgozar, age forty-two, birthplace, Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. He flipped the passport to the cover, which was embossed in gold with the emblem of the new government in Moscow.

  “This is a Russian diplomatic passport,” he said.

  “Very good, you get an A in East European languages. Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to speak to my embassy.” Rahgozar put out his hand, and Darius expected him to snap his fingers. “Give me the phone.”

  Darius waved his gun, freezing the thin man beside the bed. He poked the muzzle in his side, and Rahgozar sat.

  “No calls.”

  “You know the law,” Rahgozar said. “As the holder of a diplomatic passport, I’m immune from interrogation and arrest.”

  “Is that Russian law?”

  “Quit pretending you’re thick between the ears, Bakhtiar. There’s not a nation on earth that doesn’t respect the special rights of foreign envoys.”

  “We have no law like that in the Islamic Republic,” Darius said flatly. He shredded the passport. Tossing the pieces in Rahgozar’s lap, he asked himself which statutes he had violated, how much greater the potential penalty he was bringing down on his head than anything Rahgozar was liable for.

  Rahgozar rubbed his hands against the prickling flesh of his upper arms, and pulled the jacket over his shoulders. “This provocation will not be overlooked by my government.”

  “Which government is that? Why, in these times, is a native Azerbaijani working for the oppressors of his people?”

  “Unlike most Iranians,” Rahgozar said, “I know who my real enemies are, and not all of them are to be found across foreign borders. I demand you call the Russian embassy.”

  “You’re in no position to make demands on anyone.”

  Rahgozar was watching droplets of blood dribble onto the white bedspread. He touched his chin, smearing cr
imson on his face. “Let me have the towel. I’m bleeding.”

  “It’s something you may have to get used to,” Darius said. “You have been attempting to deal in a large quantity of heroin. Possessing narcotics in this country calls for a sentence of death. If you have anything to say in your favor, you had better say it to me.”

  “What heroin? There’s no heroin here. Search the room.”

  “Your friend, Maryam Lajevardi, is a principal figure in a case involving several brutal murders and the importation of opiates into the Islamic Republic. The drugs are from Afghanistan, where the Russians have been involved intimately for more than a decade. Both the woman and the drugs are missing. It doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to see what you were doing at her apartment.”

  “Not with an imagination like yours,” Rahgozar said. “You’d better call.”

  “The most recent shipment from Afghanistan was deflected from its destination by an acquaintance of Miss Lajevardi. You’ve been trying to find it. You came to the apartment looking for drugs, but the drugs weren’t there.”

  Darius’s spiel, the circuitous line of questioning, was the flourish of a magician’s empty left hand as he readied an object to be materialized before a gaping audience. Now he opened his right hand to the spotlight.

  “You’ve been observed at the Imam Reza Medical Center,” he bluffed, “in the vicinity of the poison unit. Why is a foreigner interested in Iranian research into substances with the capability of being utilized as chemical warfare agents?”

  Rahgozar moistened a finger on his tongue. He rubbed the red spot on his chin.

  A lousy bluffer, Darius tried again. “We know about the mycotoxins.”

  “The what?”

  “We know why you want them …”

  “I’m just a simple dope dealer,” Rahgozar said. “This is beyond me.”

  “Where they’re going …”

  “Then why are you wasting time on me?”

  “And what they’re intended for.”