Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “Is that supposed to shock me into emptying my heart to you? You should know—you’re working for the people who had them stolen.”

  Darius, wondering too long what Rahgozar meant, groping for a follow-up, saw his advantage slip away while the thin man stared at him disbelievingly.

  “Fuck, you don’t know,” Rahgozar said, “you don’t know a damn thing. They let you learn you were looking for drugs, for thirty kilos of heroin and a Russian who wanted them. But you did better than that, didn’t you? Better than they had any right to expect. You found out about the mycotoxins, too. Except they never told you what they’re for, and you still don’t know, and it bothers you.” He used a corner of the bedspread to wipe the blood off his face. “My God, an Iranian with the vestiges of a conscience. Drop the case while you can, Bakhtiar. You don’t want to end up like Leila Darwish. It’s not a comfortable death.”

  “And when I find the mycotoxins,” Darius interrupted, “what do you suggest I do with them? Turn them over to the helpful agent of the peace-loving former Soviet Union?”

  “It’s too late. Burn them, or take them into the Gulf and sink them in deep water. You’ll be doing yourself … doing the world a favor.”

  “Who are you?” Darius asked.

  “A dead man.”

  “You’ve been exposed to the mycotoxins?”

  “I wish I’d come that close. I’d have swallowed the damn stuff, gotten rid of it that way, if I had to. Do you know what Iranian medical researchers are doing with the small amounts of mycotoxins they’ve been able to obtain?” A veneer of perspiration put a keener edge on Rahgozar’s sharp features. “Dozens of Iraqi prisoners of war still listed as missing in action are housed at the poison unit for use as human guinea pigs. From time to time Dr. Karrubi locks one inside a sealed chamber, and then pumps mycotoxins into the air. Sometimes the guinea pig is given a gas mask to wear. No matter. When the poison comes in contact with his skin in sufficient concentration, he’s done.”

  “What is the source of your information? Do you expect me to believe—”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Rahgozar said. “I’m dead anyway.”

  “How—”

  “You killed me. The others were too stupid to see I’d have to come here, but they’re smart enough to follow you.”

  What others? Darius was about to ask. But how did it matter? Whether it was the Komiteh that the thin man was afraid of, or Ashfar and Baraheni, or the Revolutionary Prosecutor, or his own men from the homicide bureau, the only difference it would make to Rahgozar was between a public execution and a private one.

  “No one knows I’m in Mashad,” he said.

  Rahgozar laughed at him.

  “We’re a civilized race,” Darius said in a voice so calm that its soothing effect was not lost on himself. “Don’t be too quick to accept the things that have been drummed into your head about us. You’re not going to be harmed. I’ll do what I can for you, but first you have to tell me everything.”

  “You’re a flea, Bakhtiar, a flea on the backside of a beast that’s going to scratch you out of its hide when you become too much of a nuisance. What can you do for me?”

  “I give you my word, my word as a man of conscience, to help.”

  “No good. Call the embassy. It’s my only chance.”

  Darius shook his head. “First tell me the connection between the heroin and the mycotoxins.”

  “You get nothing till you make the call.”

  “The Darwish girl … How was she exposed to the mycotoxins?”

  “Time is being wasted.” Rahgozar fished a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket. “Let me have a li—”

  Darius followed his gaze to the knob twisting in the door. He drew his shoulder gun as the panel was hammered open and four men rushed inside, a collage of khaki shirts and trousers, short hair and unkempt beards, the other constant the large military revolver clenched in each intruder’s hand. Four weapons trained on him, and he dropped his gun on the floor. Rahgozar sat where he was, chewing fiercely on the unlit cigarette.

  The intruders were badly disorganized. They prowled around the room looking in the closets and drawers, going over territory their companions had covered, individually examining the contents of Rahgozar’s new suitcase, and peering out the windows and into the corridor while Darius anticipated the momentary arrival of reinforcements or enemies. None of them said anything until the youngest, a man of no more than thirty, gave up the search and came over to where Darius stood beside the bed.

  “We are Revolutionary Guards,” he said. “We heard what was happening and came in to save you.”

  “What was happening?” Darius asked. “Nothing was happening here.”

  “This man is a Russian agent. He was threatening your life and the security of the Islamic Republic. We have been following him since he arrived in our city.”

  “I’ve had him under watch for several hours,” Darius said. “No one else was near him.”

  “They’ve been on your tail,” Rahgozar said. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you.”

  A Guardsman wearing white socks inside buffalo skin sandals swung his gun across Rahgozar’s mouth, mashing the cigarette against the thin man’s cheek. Rahgozar brushed it away, and with the tip of his tongue flicked out bits of broken teeth as though they were tobacco crumbs.

  “We will take over from you now,” the young Guardsman said to Darius, “and continue the questioning.” He transferred the heavy gun to the other hand, and pointed it at Rahgozar. “Put on your shoes,” he commanded.

  When Rahgozar made no move to obey, the man in the sandals swung his pistol again. Rahgozar leaned slightly out of the way and took him by the arm. A short, snapping motion of his wrist launched him across the room, where he crash-landed against the window, squirting blood from both nostrils onto the glass. Rahgozar laced his shoes. He removed a fresh shirt from the valise and fastened the sleeves with silver cuff links. He put his jacket on over it and stood with his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

  “This man is my prisoner,” Darius said.

  “And you,” the young Guardsman said, “if we see fit, are ours.”

  “So long, Bakhtiar.” Rahgozar allowed the gunmen to push him around the bed. “Thanks for making that call.”

  As Rahgozar walked to the door, the Guardsman he had flung into the window fired his gun. The large-caliber bullet caught him high on the shoulder. Rahgozar’s back twitched, and he broke stride, but kept moving. A second shot dropped him to his knees in a Christian attitude of prayer. It was the young Guardsman who fired the third slug that entered the back of Rahgozar’s neck, and put a hole the size of a small coin in the wall.

  “He should not have tried to escape,” the young Guardsman said.

  Darius drew his other gun, and swept it around the room. It felt light in his hand, a harmless affectation.

  “You don’t seem to appreciate that we saved your life,” said one of the men who hadn’t spoken before. “Possibly, you know better than we. I would suggest that you were in collusion with the Russian.”

  “What is a homicide investigator from Teheran doing in Mashad?” asked the Guardsman in the buffalo skin sandals.

  “You had better go,” the young one said to Darius, “while you have the chance.”

  Darius walked around the body. Rahgozar had fallen reaching for the door. His lifeless fingers closed over Darius’s wrist as Darius moved him out of the way.

  Darius went upstairs and barricaded himself inside his room. His mind was racing, wild images out of synch with the narration from his own frightened voice like a film dragged through a projector without catching in the sprockets. Vodka had the opposite effect of what he sought, speeding his brain so the film ran off the reel and spilled onto the floor. And still he drank. In SAVAK he had taught himself to assume guilt for nothing he was not directly responsible for, and not much of that; otherwise it had been impossible for him to function. But there was no escaping
culpability for Rahgozar’s death. Not for refusing to call the embassy—history showed that the Revolutionary Guards were not squeamish about abusing the entire legation of a foreign power. What he blamed himself for was an improbably efficient job of finding Rahgozar. Better to have let him go about his business unmolested than to lead his killers to his door. On some level, instinct told him, their interests coincided.

  He shut off the lights, leaned over the low railing of his balcony. Three cars were parked on the sidewalk, and men in khaki strutted in the entrance to the lobby. A noisy crowd was forming in front of the hotel despite commands from the Guardsmen to keep moving. The spectators fell silent as two of the gunmen came out with the body trussed like a slaughtered deer, and slung it in the back of one of the cars. The young Guardsman brought Rahgozar’s suitcase, followed by his companion with the bloody nose, who had exchanged his buffalo sandals for the dead man’s new shoes. The crowd dispersed as the caravan raced away.

  Darius ran downstairs to the seventh floor. A chambermaid unhappy to have been summoned at that late hour had pushed her cart outside Rahgozar’s door. Darius waved his badge in her face as he squeezed past her. “I want a few minutes here alone,” he said, “and then you can come in.”

  Squatting beside a splotch of blood on the runner, he might have been trying to remember the incantation that would restore life to the man from whom it came. The room had been torn apart, but not by the chambermaid. Linens were heaped on the floor along with the bedspread and blankets; the stripped mattress stood on end against a wall. The closets were empty, as was the bureau. Everything Rahgozar had carried with him had been returned to the suitcase and taken away. The chambermaid came inside uninvited, and began scraping the rug with a vacuum cleaner.

  He went to the lobby, and bullied the clerk for a look at the invoice from 727, and the record of Rahgozar’s phone calls. The thin man had been at the Hotel Iran two nights prior to his death. He had paid cash in advance for a week’s stay, charging several breakfasts and a few bottles of overpriced mineral water to his room. The home address he had registered under was a joke, a street in northeast Teheran that he’d probably pulled from an out-of-date tourist guide: Roosevelt Road had been renamed Shahid Mofatteh in the first weeks after the Revolution.

  Out of loneliness, or duty, Rahgozar had made long-distance calls approximately every other waking hour. All of them were to Teheran, to three different numbers. The shadow of the clerk’s prominent nose moved across the page as Darius read.

  “Do you know if Mr. Rahgozar had any visitors while he was a guest here?” Darius asked him.

  “You mean a woman, sir? In his room? That is strictly forbidden.”

  “I mean anybody.”

  “I never saw him, except when he was alone. He would leave in the morning about ten and was back by noon, and did not go out again until the following day.”

  “Did he receive any letters?”

  “No sir,” the clerk said, and then turned away to steal a look at the empty box for 727.

  “Did you talk with him?”

  “Only to pass the time of day.”

  “Did he mention what he was doing in Mashad?”

  “Yes.” The clerk smiled, but then thought better of it. “He said he came to get away from it all.”

  10

  OF TWENTY-SIX CALLS billed to Zaid Rahgozar’s Iran Hotel room no fewer than fourteen had been placed to the Russian embassy in Teheran. The bulk of the remainder, a telephone company service representative reported to Darius, were rerouted via central switching to Moscow and could not be traced further. Others had been dialed each morning precisely at 8:00, and again twelve hours later, to a number in an industrial area of western Teheran on the Old Karaj Road. Not one of these had lasted as long as a minute.

  By 7:30 on the morning of his first full day back in Teheran, Darius was parked outside the Old Karaj Road address, a small, square house between a factory where steel pipes were bent to shape and cut, and a commercial printer. An unusually high brick wall served as the first line of defense around an overgrown garden ringed by poplars whispering in the light breeze. The kidney-shaped goldfish pond was a dead sea capped by a mat of green scum. When his knock went unanswered, Darius peered inside the living room at flat cushions on threadbare rugs. Stale air still warm from yesterday’s sun seeped from the partly open window. Darius pushed up the glass and slipped in.

  The bedroom, too, was unoccupied. He turned on the single bulb in the ceiling that shined down on an unmade bed as fiercely as the fluorescent strips over Baghai’s slabs. There were no papers or envelopes in the drawers of a plain pine bureau on which oak grain had been hand-painted. No mail seemed ever to have been delivered to the house, or newspapers allowed inside. The closet contained several summer dresses perfumed with sweet female perspiration that aroused him in a manner that, he decided, must violate some unwritten law. He went into the kitchen kneading the bruised ribs that had begun to hurt again, and put a flame under a pot of water. Though it occurred to him that whoever lived here had panicked when they didn’t hear from Rahgozar at the usual times and were en route to Mashad—if not out of the country—he waited.

  At 9:00, as he was emptying the sugar bowl into his third glass of tea, the garden gate creaked open. A shadow bobbed along the walk prodded by a woman wearing a pushiyih, a facial veil that obscured her features completely below green eyes. She set down a couple of paper bags beside the pond, and broke off a piece from a loaf of naan lavashe, pit oven-baked bread, which she tossed under the poplars. Two black birds immediately swooped down from the trees and declared a cawing tug of war. She threw another crust, but only the first was satisfactory to the birds, who carried it into the air with an end locked between their beaks. Scooping up her packages, the woman went inside to the living room and plugged a cassette player into the wall. Soft rock music manipulated the heavy air, a Beatles tune that Darius had heard a million times before, but whose title eluded him. Not until she was in the kitchen did she see him, and the pushiyih fluttered against her mouth.

  The woman removed the veil, and Darius was staring at Maryam Lajevardi. She looked drawn, taller than he remembered her, and prettier, the lightness of her skin and hair not of the Caspian, or Iran. Darius could not have been startled more had she taken off all her clothes. Not because she had shown herself so casually—strange women did that all the time—but because the effect it was having on him was not much different than if he had, in fact, spied her naked.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m someone else, can’t you see?” She laughed without smiling. “The person you want doesn’t live here. I would invite you for tea, but apparently you’ve already helped yourself. Good-bye,” she said. “Don’t forget to lock the gate on your way out.”

  She reached for a cabinet above the refrigerator, presenting a lush silhouette that her chador only partially obscured. She had to stand on her toes to hoist a small sack of rice inside. Darius took it from her, and slung it on the top shelf.

  “Who, Miss Lajevardi?” he asked again.

  “I believe I answered all your questions the last time we spoke.”

  “With lies,” he said. “No one at the Azadi currency exchange has ever heard of you.”

  “They’re the liars. I can’t be held to account for the things they say. I’m resented there because I was a diligent worker and the rest were laggards.”

  “You mean ghosts. Azadi has been out of business at least a year. There’s nothing but an empty storefront.” Darius paused to study her reaction. It was he who had lied, although he would have called it probing. He had meant to go to Firdowsi Street to check out her story on a hundred occasions, but hadn’t. Still he felt he was on solid ground in assuming she had never worked there.

  Maryam Lajevardi took off her chador. Underneath she had on a short V-necked dress like the one she had worn in Shemiran, but of a washed-out yellow. “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

  �
�Rahgozar told me.”

  She looked at him, puzzled, to say she had never heard the name before. If she was still acting, she was very good. He decided that she was.

  “… Lean, unhealthy-looking fellow attached to the Russian embassy,” Darius went on. “He can’t stop talking about you.”

  Her chin dropped. “Where did you see him?”

  “In Mashad,” he said. “A few days ago.”

  Whatever it was that differentiated fake puzzlement from the real thing vanished from her expression. What remained was made imploring by her helplessness. Darius saw that she was struggling not to ask him how he had known Rahgozar had been there. She had more questions than he did, but feared him finding out what she didn’t know. It was a cumbersome way of conducting an interview—bluffing, posing misleading questions to obtain nonverbal cues to determine the next tack and then plugging ahead with more misdirection. Cumbersome for the two of them. Maybe, thought Darius, it was weariness brought on by too many interrogations like this that had driven Baraheni to take up boiling samovars and the bastinado, but he didn’t like to consider it. “How does a woman from the Caspian become acquainted with a Russian diplomat?” he asked.

  “In a most casual way,” she said coolly.

  “That isn’t how it appears. I ran into him once before, at your old apartment, and he seemed at home.”

  Maryam said nothing.

  “What was he doing there?”

  “What were the police?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “I was hiding,” she said. “I was afraid you’d send me away.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “You would find a place. I’m sure you’re good at that.”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “You’d find a reason, too.”

  “So you came here instead?”

  “It was his idea,” she blurted. The change in tone struck Darius as artificial, the time having come for her to inject emotional drive into her narrative. He let her go on. “We had met through friends, and began seeing a lot of each other. He was convinced he was being watched—by his people, as well as the Komiteh—and that soon our affair would become public knowledge with all the trouble that brings. He rented this house for me. It’s convenient, yet out of the way. I like—” The printing presses chugged into action next door, and she raised her voice over the racket. “I like the quiet.”