Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “That boy,” Maryam said, “Hamid. He died to save my life. He didn’t even know me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. He lost his head, and paid the price. There’s a lesson in it for you.”

  “Just because you killed those two doesn’t mean others like them aren’t looking for me. They’ll never stop.”

  “You have an exalted opinion of yourself,” he said. “What makes you so sure it’s you they were after?”

  “Who else was there? You mean you? You’re the police. Your methods may be smoother, but basically you’re on the same side as them.”

  “How do you—” He hadn’t meant to sound like that. But when he repeated the question, it came out with the same derision for everything she’d said. “How do you know whose side I’m on?” Except he’d almost added, When I don’t know, myself.

  He turned off the main road to avoid the Komiteh roadblocks. They wove through loud streets where whole families sought a rare night breeze on rooftop mattresses, and parked at a house behind an ivy-covered wall.

  Maryam was shivering despite the heat returned by the pavement, which lingered in late summer almost till dawn. He hustled her from the curb past neighbors who looked away from her bad hejab as though bare arms and legs had the power to strike them blind. He punched the bell, pounded on the door before the ringing faded.

  Light footsteps inside tapered off well back of the door. “Did you forget your key again?” an angry voice shouted. “Good. Stay out all night for all I care.”

  “It’s Darius. Open up.”

  There was no more from inside. He shook the knob, rattled it till the door quivered in the frame.

  “You’ll tear the house down,” the voice said, and then Sharera stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. Her jet black hair was in curlers. A scowl directed at Maryam held special hatred for Darius.

  “Mansur is not at home?” he asked.

  “He’s at the morgue. Where he belongs.”

  “Sharera, meet Maryam Lajevardi,” he said, and pushed inside before Sharera could lock them out. “If it’s all right with you, she’ll be your houseguest for several days.”

  “Nothing is all right.”

  Darius would not have been surprised if Sharera went for Ghaffari’s off-duty gun and came back shooting.

  “She’s one of Mansur’s sluts, isn’t she?” Sharera spat. “Or is she yours? You’re no better than he. Why did you bring her here?”

  “Maryam is in hiding for her life,” he said.

  “Hiding from who? From another woman like me, who she betrayed? Let her hide somewhere else.”

  “Stop, Sharera—we’ve been friends too long. I know you’d never turn away anyone in danger. You and Mansur are the only ones I can depend on.”

  “I depended on you once, too, Darius. You promised to keep Mansur in line. Where were you then?”

  “You have to take her in,” he said stubbornly. “It’s another debt to add to my account.”

  “I have a nine-year-old daughter. I can’t subject Shahla to this. Put her wherever Mansur keeps his girls.”

  “Anyplace else, and they’ll find her and kill her for sure.”

  “That’s not my problem.” Sharera held her ground as she groped for the right combination of words that would banish her enemies from her house.

  Maryam shivered and rubbed her hands against her arms. She moaned softly, and lifted her hem to inspect a running wound above the knee.

  “This girl is hurt,” Sharera said. “What’s wrong with you, Darius? Why didn’t you say something?”

  Stepping aside, she allowed them into the living room, where Shahla was scribbling in a coloring book on the floor. “Bring mother the first-aid kit,” she told the child as she tore away a fringe of charred cloth over Maryam’s thigh. “How did this happen?”

  “Maryam has been burned out of her house,” Darius said. “She needs a place to stay until arrangements can be made for her.”

  “What kind of arrangements?” Sharera’s tone was sharp, rebuking him for not taking better care of Maryam. Having saved her life, who better than he should understand that preserving it had become his responsibility?

  “I’m working on it.” Darius decided that he was jealous of Maryam for having someone, even someone like him, to look after her. Why was there no one to relieve him of the nuisance of keeping himself alive? Hamid had tried, it could be argued, but when he had gotten himself killed for his effort the weight of two lives had shifted to Darius’s overburdened shoulders. “May I use your phone?”

  “You know where it is.”

  He went into the kitchen, and dialed Homicide. “This is Bakhtiar. Criminalist Hamid has been fatally wounded at a house six kilometers west of the Azadi Monument on the Old Karaj Road. Send men right away. They’ll know the address. The fire department has already responded to the scene.

  “I’m going to Maryam’s now,” he told the women. “When Mansur gets home, tell him everything.”

  “When will you be back?” Maryam asked.

  “Not until we’re ready to move you. I can’t risk leading anyone here. You’re in good hands with Sharera and Ghaffari.”

  He could have been returning to a place he hadn’t seen in years. The house was a black shell a third of its former size; the rear section alone had been left standing. The roof had caved in, and one wall was down, leaving the kitchen exposed, more like a stage set than a structure where someone had made her home until an hour ago. Firemen dragged hoses through the rubble, pouncing on hot spots that flared up at them with the crackle of sniper fire. Three bodies covered in green blankets were arranged in the yard in an orderly row that reminded Darius of the captured pieces beside Maryam’s chessboard. But now the players were a uniformed sergeant and Ghaffari.

  “I came as soon as I heard.” In his hurry to reach Darius’s side Ghaffari had left the sergeant talking to himself. “What happened here?”

  Darius turned back the blanket. The men he had shot lay on either side of Hamid, the criminalist’s escort into the next world. Though they were strangers to him, he was familiar with their rough type—uneducated, underemployed, deeply religious men from the southern slums who embraced the Revolution unquestioningly and achieved status commensurate with the blindness of their devotion.

  “These two tossed a firebomb in the living room and then started shooting. Hamid acquitted himself with more courage than I gave him credit for, but wasn’t as lucky as I.”

  “You’re unhurt?”

  Darius nodded.

  “Praise Allah,” Ghaffari said. “What about the girl? Where is she?”

  Darius walked him out of earshot of the sergeant. “At your house, Mansur. For safekeeping.”

  Ghaffari yanked his arm from Darius’s grasp. “What right do you have to jeopardize my family?”

  He had no right—nor anything to say to Ghaffari, who knew as well as anyone that the better part of being a policeman was going along with unreasonable demands. Darius went back to the bodies alone. Murder’s ruddy patina lent tragic dignity to Hamid’s immature face; but embarrassment was crusted on his lips. In the moment of his death the criminalist had realized his mistake. The men who had killed him wore the slight smiles of martyrs they had not planned to be that day, still straining for a glimpse of the gates of paradise—a dumber mistake.

  Darius sorted through the pockets of both corpses, finding identification for a Pihzman Bahunar, thirty-five years old, and Mahdi Attarha, twenty-eight, both of Dharvazeh Ghor. Attarha was also carrying stone worry beads and the keys to a Peugeot automobile. Darius looked across the street toward a jaunty blue sedan mixed improbably among the police cars. Neither man had as much as ten thousand rials with him. He lifted a corner of the blanket under which two .38-caliber revolvers, newer models of his own American weapon, had been collected with a pencil jammed into the muzzles.

  “You can’t keep the girl at my house forever.” Ghaffari played his one-note song over Darius’s shoulde
r. “What now?”

  “Will your cousins in Tabriz put her up?”

  “They have their hands full with Nahid. She’s not easy to live with.”

  “Another one like her won’t be noticed,” Darius said.

  The morgue wagons that he had left behind at Mehta’s pulled up to the house ahead of a Paycon junker. Baghai limped out of the lead truck leaning heavily on an attendant’s arm. “Don’t you ever quit?” he asked Darius. “You’re wearing me out.”

  “We’ll try to arrange the next slaughter for a convenient hour.”

  “A good piece of shooting,” Baghai said. “Unambiguous death is in short supply these days.”

  The driver of the Paycon approached the men standing over the bodies. After taking a few steps, he stopped and looked back, and the sergeant pointed at Darius.

  “Sir,” the young man said, “I have an important message.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am instructed it is for your ears only.” He backed off four long strides, and looked disappointed when Darius didn’t follow.

  “I am Probationary Patrolman Banani,” he confided. “Be advised that the Revolutionary Prosecutor, Mr. Zakir, wishes to speak to you tonight, and is in his office now.”

  Bijan’s warning that the invitation was coming had never been far from Darius’s consciousness. A great weight lifting from his shoulders was not the pleasant release he had anticipated, though, and immediately was reasserted over his heart.

  “If this man has brought news of another bloodbath …” Baghai was saying.

  A basij brought Darius into the outer office to wait until the Revolutionary Prosecutor finished with a matter of national concern. The draft from the adjacent toilet pumped currents of lemon-flavored air around his head. After a long while, a bald man in a tailored suit came out of Zakir’s office with an uncommonly attractive red-haired woman. Darius had seen the woman before, on more than one occasion, but couldn’t say where. As the couple went past him, he heard her whisper, “Does that bastard think for one minute I would subject myself to something like that? I would die sooner than—”

  “Yes, you would,” her companion agreed, silencing her.

  Zakir sat at his large desk jabbing a pencil without a point into a gunmetal gray box that looked to Darius like an oversize electric sharpener. On the blotter were about two dozen other new pencils sawed cleanly in half.

  “Did you happen to notice the woman who just left?”

  “She was quite handsome,” Darius said.

  “She is stunning. She is Niloofar Bihruzi, the film actress, one of the most famous faces in Iran. She finds herself embroiled in a serious conflict with the Komiteh, and has come to me for advice.”

  Zakir’s pause was not a hint for Darius to interrupt. It was a statement that he would not proceed to such mundane business as the police until he had finished with his adventures with the movie star.

  “It is an unusual case. In every one of Niloofar’s films she is called upon to make love with her leading man. She is an accomplished performer; by any standard the scenes are steamy. You might say they are her bread and butter. The Komiteh have taken offense. As Niloofar is not married to the men she is kissing, they want to bring charges of prostitution against her.”

  “Don’t they understand she’s acting?”

  “Ah, but you are missing the important issue they have raised. What are the faithful to conclude when they see such a beautiful woman making love with legions of men? Forget that these are movies. Are her kisses not real? Are they less than a kiss because they are captured on film? Are they anything else? Pressure is being brought to bear against Niloofar to do something about allegations of immoral behavior. Her manager advised her to see me. We have been working together on her problem for some time.”

  It dawned on Darius that, like Zakir, he found the movie queen’s dilemma more interesting than his own, or at least was in no hurry for word that he had been relieved of his duties.

  “In consultation with Ayatollah Mahallati I have decided that, starting with her next picture, Niloofar must seegah for her leading man, whoever he may be. She will become a temporary wife for the duration of each movie she makes, and her kisses will be blessed by holy law. Even better, Niloofar and her leading man can spend their nights in real lovemaking, which will lend authenticity to their performances. It is a brilliant solution, if I say so myself. No?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Darius said.

  “Unfortunately, not all cases lend themselves to such happy resolution. I did not summon you here so you could catch a glimpse of Niloofar Bihruzi, but to let you know that after much hard debate it has been decided to reopen the investigation into the killing of Colonel Farmayan, your former boss in SAVAK. It will be necessary for you to resign from the National Police, and to surrender your weapons.”

  So Bijan and Sarmadi had spared him the best part, letting the news break gradually, so that he wouldn’t go to pieces—or run.

  “I executed the shah’s torturer. For this the government wants to bring me to trial a second time?”

  “Shooting Farmayan was a praiseworthy act. Even the so-called victim’s nephew has come to applaud it. Does Bijan seem hostile to you? Do you have strained relations? No, the real offense is that for too long you were an obedient agent of SAVAK, an organization that perverted its charter to crack down on the activities of the communists, and instead repressed the Muslim faithful. But you will be tried for murder because it is necessary to make an example of you, and murder is the strongest charge we can prove.”

  “An example of what? There’s not another country that would attempt to reinstitute a death sentence after so long.”

  “Do you dare to criticize the legal system that is the most merciful in the annals of man?” Zakir nudged the blunt tip of a pencil into the gray box. “You know what this device is,” he said. “It is evidence of the compassion of Islamic justice. For centuries, when hadd was proved, and the thief sentenced to have his fingers or a hand removed, the amputation was done in an awful manner with a sword or an axe. Under the Imam’s guidance the best minds of our nation, experts from the Ministry of Health, the medical faculties of Beheshti and Teheran universities, and the Islamic Scientific Institute were taken from urgent tasks to find a more humane means of performing this necessary job.” Darius heard the hum of an electric motor as Zakir pressed the pencil into the box, which returned a stub to him. The other piece was expelled from the bottom, and rolled across the desk. “So spare me your complaints about the harshness of the law, because here is my rebuttal.”

  Zakir tore the flap from a box of pencils and lined them up beside the machine. “You were an exemplary policeman who performed his job with dedication. But that is irrelevant. Your past is bad, and the past leaves indelible stains on the present. Good deeds do not outweigh the bad, which cast a shadow over them.”

  Darius’s outrage had been spent before Zakir’s tirade was over. His fate was a foregone conclusion. The mysteries that remained he would as soon leave unanswered: how much pain could he stand, and how long would he endure beyond that; the degree of suffering before he was rewarded with the ultimate expression of Islamic justice, and then an unmarked plot in a distant corner of Behesht-e-Zahra out of sight of the Imam’s mausoleum. The door opened behind him, and his hands were pinned to his sides while his gunbelts were taken away by the basij from the outer office. Five men armed with Uzis formed a circle around his chair.

  “Have you anything to say?” the Revolutionary Prosecutor asked.

  Darius stared straight ahead. The only crime he would admit to was not fleeing while he had the chance.

  “If you will,” Zakir said to the basij, “please transport Mr. Bakhtiar to Evin Prison. Show him every courtesy a former homicide chief of the National Police commands.”

  14

  A LIGHT RAIN, THE SEASON’S first, turned the dust to gray-brown paste that the wipers painted across the windshield. In utter blackne
ss they climbed the heights of the city into cool air fragrant with oleander. On the fringes of the Evin district the driver pulled over to scrub the glass with his handkerchief. As Darius strained for a glimpse of the prison wall, the basij tied a blindfold around his head.

  What did they think they were hiding from him? What secrets so great that a look in that direction was a breach of security? Didn’t they know that Evin had been SAVAK’s prison, his prison, that its best secrets had been devised by him? Had it been torn down and rebuilt brick for brick on some undisclosed site? Or did they believe that, knowing as much as he did about what went on there, he would go crazy at a view of its bland facade?

  They rolled into an area just inside the walls where there was no movement of air and the oleander was overpowering. Darius remembered the garden he had given permission for some prisoners to plant and where later he had worked himself, a green tangle of waxy shrubs and native desert bushes, and in one corner where the shadow of the high wall did not reach, a jungle patch that hadn’t done well in the sandy earth, treeless, but for four malevolent trunks without leaves, bark, or limbs, sprouting leather straps at the height of a man’s shoulders and ankles. On the side looking back to the cells bullets had eaten into the wood.

  Steel doors creaked open, and the miasma of despair leaked out. The hands on his shoulders passed him on to others, hard, bony hands that felt him everywhere as they shunted him into the building. He stumbled over something like a rotted log, and would have fallen had the bony hands not seized the shackles between his wrists and jerked him upright.

  A concrete maze unfolded under his feet as the plan of Block 209 winding toward the administration offices. On his right would be interrogation rooms, and opposite them the holding pens where mobs of prisoners were kept close to the engines of justice that ran round the clock. An alcoholic vapor intoxicated him; momentarily he had no idea where he was. In the map in his mind’s eye he filled in the understaffed hospital where prisoners were restored between sessions under torture. By tilting his head back, he was able to see under his blindfold. Inmates lay on the floor handcuffed to the radiators, or else leaned against the wall on bloated legs while waiting their brief turn with a doctor.