Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  This, at least, was not as crazy as it sounded. Interrogation continued throughout the legal process. Before arrest, during trial, or after sentence was pronounced a prisoner was grilled until prosecutors were satisfied they had every last bit of information out of him.

  At the end of a week (Darius guessed it was a week—his new calendar was the arrival of his meal tray; but this was sporadic, and for long stretches he received no food) he had a cold that the Imam’s confessed assassin had brought into the cell, and his head lice as well. His mental illness was contagious, too. If Habibi didn’t shut up soon, Darius would declare himself a plotter in his infamous crime, and demand his help in escaping by being taught to walk through walls.

  In what he believed to be his eighth day there Darius was taken from the cell. The weak light at the end of the corridor blinded him. A blanket was tossed over his head and he was marched out of the block while Habibi called after him, “You can’t believe anyone, anyone but me.”

  He was left inside an interrogation room where a prisoner who would not speak to him used electric clippers to cut off his hair. He ran his hand over his scalp feeling the small, still painful bumps where his stitches had been. He was eager for the questioning to start. Sabbagh’s studied formalities would be a relief from the raving of his cellmate. But the interrogator who arrived toting a fat leather briefcase was Bijan.

  “You are to be congratulated,” Bijan said as he spread papers over the desktop. “Your warders say you are a model prisoner, a marja among the inmates, to be emulated if not admired.”

  Darius held himself still. “I would rather be set free.”

  Had he faltered? To his own ears he seemed to be pleading. He did not see how he could keep from showing cracks in his demeanor that Bijan would widen until he was destroyed. Since being brought to Evin, he had been led constantly to expect torture, but the limits of his fear had not allowed for Bijan to be the arbiter of his fate. Better to have been thrown alive to the wolves.

  Bijan, for his part, was as ever, but for a smile that blossomed as he sensed Darius’s quandary.

  “Virtue’s reward must be its hunger for more of the same.” The Komitehman riffled the papers, but did not consult them. “You are charged with the murder of Ibrahim Farmayan in the year 1979, a crime for which you have already been convicted once and sentenced to death.”

  “You are disqualified from these proceedings,” Darius said, “as you cannot pretend to be impartial. The man I’m accused of killing was your blood relative. It’s too much to expect justice under these circumstances.”

  “Too much to expect of me?” Bijan glowered at him. “What kind of justice are you asking for? Western justice—which is no justice at all, but the juridical whims of a society that has turned its back on God? Who is acquainted better than I with the consequences of your crimes, and can express grievance with them?”

  “I insist that you remove yourself from the case.”

  “Justice is what you want? Then justice is what you will receive.” Bijan paused for Darius to signal consent to the rules. “Since your guilt is not at issue, we will confine the questioning to your motivation.”

  “The only issue is guilt. I was convicted unjustly. The evidence was heard by a SAVAK court-martial. Has the government revised its opinion of SAVAK’s commitment to fair trial?”

  “There is no record of the murdered man’s illegalities having been directed at you,” Bijan bore on. “He was one of the rare officers in SAVAK whose patriotism cannot be called into question. What excesses he may have been responsible for fell on the deserving heads of the Tudeh Party cadres rather than the Muslim faithful.”

  “He was a sadist who raped and killed prisoners of both sexes. In the week before he was slain he tortured to death a girl not yet sixteen years old, but would not be prosecuted for it. These are crimes under Islamic law, no matter who the victims may be.”

  “The country was not governed by Shari’a at the time. Now that it is, why has your commendable ardor to see justice done faded?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When it suited your ends, you took it upon yourself to do away with your superior in SAVAK. Yet, as a leading investigator for the National Police you were not nearly so aggressive in rooting out the enemies of society.”

  “Are we discussing the people who stole Ayatollah Golabi’s rugs?” Darius asked.

  “Zaid Rahgozar.”

  “I found him as you asked. He was in my custody when the Komiteh executed him.”

  “You were engaged in a vast ongoing conspiracy with him. When our men entered his hotel room, you were assisting his flight.”

  “This is pure fabrication,” Darius said. “Where do you get your information?”

  “In the future you may be allowed to confront your accusers. Do you dispute that upon returning from Mashad you went to the home of another conspirator, a woman you advised also to flee before the Revolutionary Guards located her?”

  Using the tip of his toe Darius swept his hair into a lusterless pile. He was going gray faster than Ghaffari.

  “With you, there is always another innocent victim who must be saved from the legally constituted authorities. Always a young and beautiful woman.”

  “No one was saved.”

  “Not even your soul. The persistent pattern of antistate activity stretching across three decades cannot be misread. We want to know who you are working for. For what foreign power? With which subversive elements inside Iran?”

  “This kind of questioning is outside the scope of your lawful mandate. It has nothing to do with the Farmayan case.”

  “Everything is connected,” Bijan said. “The links that are not obvious will be examined in a fresh light until they are brought out clearly.”

  “There are no links.”

  “That will not be determined by you.”

  He was dismissed with the flick of a finger. Resigned to another confinement with Habibi, he wanted to shout that a terrible mistake was being made when he was brought to the one-way stairs. As he descended the steep flight, his legs were kicked out from under him, and he skidded to the landing on his chest. His arrival was hailed by a cry of pain from a dark basement passage, another inside his head.

  An antiseptic glow beckoned to a room with walls of blood-smeared tile. It bent his gaze to the floor, away from the bank of bulbs shining down on a hospital bed. An operating theater, he would have thought, but for the thick straps dangling from the railings. A cardboard sign read: USE OF SALT FOR DECONTAMINATION IS NECESSARY.

  “Take off your shoes and socks,” his guard commanded.

  The tiles were cool under his bare feet. Given the chance he would perch on this small, safe spot forever. He was shoved into the glare and slammed facedown on the mattress, which smelled of blood and stale urine. The straps were buckled around his wrists and his feet elevated slightly and tied over the rail at the end of the bed. His modest wish was that he had been assigned to a disinterested, impartial torturer, who would not perform as effectively as a zealot.

  A man came in treading heavily over the tiles, and walked around the bed. His broad shadow eclipsed the bright light in Darius’s face. Darius stared incredulously at Baraheni, who, preoccupied with other things, did not look back. He was surprised, and yet not surprised, his capacity for astonishment overwhelmed. Had they brought in a trained ape to work him over now, he would only shrug and ask if it was done all the time.

  The guards did not order Baraheni about. Darius noticed that he still had on his shoes, black brogans like those he always wore. He rolled up his sleeves, and rubbed his hands over his burly forearms. From a hook on the wall he removed several long strips of electric cable. The way he gripped each piece individually as he measured the degree of flex reminded Darius of an American baseball player deciding on a favorite bat. When he found a length to his liking, he whipped it around his head. The humming sound it made accelerated into a shrill whine, and then a whistle. He examined the c
able again, and, still not pleased, used a curved blade to whittle the insulation from the frayed bundles of copper wire at the ends.

  What was apparent to Darius was inconceivable; so it followed that everything was a hallucination. Why trust his senses that he was strapped beneath the broiling lights of the whipping bed, when it was as easy to accept he was taking the sun on a tropical beach? Nothing was more real than that—certainly not Baraheni lending his skills to the fanatics.

  “They’ve turned you,” Darius said. “How? What tortures were your weakness?”

  Whistling filled the air, and then the soles of his feet were on fire. The guard jumped on his back and stuffed a filthy cloth in his mouth to catch any screams. The cable lashed out again as he struggled for breath, and white-hot pain ran up his legs and settled in his hips.

  “You still don’t understand what I’m doing here?”

  He saw Baraheni looking at him with the same measure of disgust he’d had for Rajab when his cellmate tried to teach him the things that were essential to know in Evin.

  “… Why there are no answers that will end your agony?”

  The cable shrieked in his ears. His legs twitched, but the point of impact was the middle of his back.

  “The trick to this,” Baraheni confided, “is to leave you wanting to talk, and still able to. If I had hit you a couple of centimeters closer to your kidneys, you would piss blood for a week and be in no condition to say much of anything. Plenty of trial and error went into perfecting my stroke. You will forgive me if I am rusty. To answer the question of why I have no questions—I’m warming up.”

  Darius felt the presence of another person in the room. Baraheni, for all his inventiveness, was a puppet who did not act without guidance. He raised his eyes, but saw only the copper plaits glinting in the light as the cable swung in a widening arc. The skin tearing from his feet was not a hallucination, nor the fire in his legs that flared hotter and brighter until it went out suddenly, and he thought his nervous system had overloaded.

  “The perfect means of inflicting pain is yet to be discovered,” Baraheni said. “Even the whipping bed has its drawbacks. After one hundred, one hundred and fifty strokes, the most obstinate man’s legs go numb, and it is wasted effort after that.” The cable came down higher on Darius’s back, and the guard slid off and stood behind Baraheni to watch. “And so secondary areas of sensitivity must be utilized. I can beat you across the shoulders all night, but the pain has nowhere to travel. You might still resist talking.”

  Darius’s head bobbed up and down as the cable slashed the nape of his neck; but he was unconscious, and Baraheni was talking to himself.

  Opening his eyes in blackness, he feared that he had gone blind. The pressure of the blanket on his back brought tears. Someone was talking to him from far away, though he could feel hot breath in his ear.

  “You see, you see—” He recognized the voice as Habibi’s. “I am the only one you can trust.”

  When they came for him again he couldn’t stand, and toppled over when he was put on his feet. More guards were called to carry him to the interrogation room.

  “It was Leila Darwish who stole the mycotoxins,” Bijan said, “but I do not have to tell you. If she yielded to the entreaties of a foreign power, or the Mujahadeen hypocrites, or if she had reasons of her own, or just went insane, you were in the best position to find out.”

  “I was unable to learn,” he answered mechanically.

  “That will be examined fully. Leila Darwish was an obedient member of Hezbollah who had prepared for a martyr’s fate. Her defection was an insult to God. I personally blame the Lajevardi woman for turning her head. She was the corrupter who spoiled everything.”

  “My investigation did not lead in that direction.”

  Bijan leaned across the desk. “There is no alternative explanation. Maryam Lajevardi’s disloyalty is not at issue. Among her lovers was a Russian agent working to deprive the Islamic Republic of a powerful chemical weapon.”

  “If you hadn’t killed him, he would have told me where the mycotoxins are.”

  “Do you think we are idiots? Maryam Lajevardi had tricked him as she tricked you. He knew nothing. He was eliminated because he had made an obstacle of himself in affording her the protection of his privileged status in Iran. She was playing for higher stakes than a Russian boyfriend and a communal apartment in Moscow. By providing our enemies with the mycotoxins, she hoped to make herself a millionaire many times over.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard.”

  “Please, spare me your denials,” Bijan said. “It is out of character for the brilliant homicide chief of the National Police to be so badly informed about the subject of a major investigation. We know of the time you spent alone with the Lajevardi woman, that you became her protector after Rahgozar was gone. She drew you into her confidence with the promise of her body and of untold riches. But she would have betrayed you as she betrayed her former comrades, her lover, and her country. Although it is too late to save yourself, you can still tell us about the mycotoxins and earn the gratitude of all good Muslims. Or would you rather I returned you to the mercies of Baraheni?”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Darius heard Maryam’s words, but without her coyness, her charm.

  “No?” Bijan pushed back in his chair. “Then maybe you will tell him.”

  Darius clenched his teeth, held himself so tight that the muscles in his shoulders went into spasms. The cable, humming softly, spun a long, lazy arc, then crashed against his soles. His body rocked with the impact, and he convulsed against the straps. Pain was an afterthought, what he guessed it must feel like to be consumed gradually by flames.

  “You are beginning to show signs of neurological impairment,” Baraheni said. “Nerve tissue does not regenerate once it has been destroyed. You may never be able to walk again.”

  “Am I going somewhere?”

  The cable screamed in air. “Well, is he?” someone asked. Baraheni dropped his arm, and the cable coiled like a black snake around his ankles.

  A cold hand rested on Darius’s shoulders. “You are to be commended on your perseverance, if not your intelligence.” Icy fingers drummed against the quivering muscles, but did not relax them. “SAVAK training has stood you in good stead. It is always gratifying to see someone who puts principle ahead of pain.”

  The straps were unbuckled. Darius rolled onto his back and looked up at Ashfar.

  “The tragedy in this sorry affair,” Ashfar said, “the tragedy that unites the three of us, is that we did not come together again under more favorable circumstances. We could have restored Iran to its former greatness, saved it from itself.”

  “We tried,” Baraheni said.

  “Yes, we did. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Do you, Darius? Are you blushing? You’re all red.”

  “Why aren’t you dead?” Darius said.

  Baraheni laughed. “We owe our lives to you. Without you, we would be dead.”

  “Dead a long time,” Ashfar said. “Did I once tell you we lost our democratic zeal in our first days back in Teheran? To be precise, it was at the moment of our arrest. We had been betrayed by someone in our organization. The nature of émigré groups is that they are havens for spies.” He picked up the cable, and slapped it repeatedly into his palm. “When we were brought to Evin, the fanatics were in disarray. Their precious mycotoxins had just been stolen, and they were frantic to have them back. Everyone in counterintelligence was executed immediately after the Revolution. And then suddenly here we were. The deal they broached to us was extremely attractive: return the mycotoxins, and we would be allowed to live. Otherwise, you see for yourself how vindictive they can be. We’re pragmatists at heart, Darius—hardly the idealist you are. How could we say no?”

  “It can be done.”

  “But why? What is in that for us besides an early grave? It’s easier to give them what they want—or to hunt for it.”

  “They told you wher
e to look for Leila Darwish,” Darius said.

  “They couldn’t find their ass in the dark. All we had to go on was that three girls were missing, and with them the mycotoxins. Through Saeed, we already had turned up Sousan Hovanian. And Sousan knew where Leila was. They thought we were geniuses, bringing such quick results.”

  “You mutilated her because she wouldn’t talk.”

  “Leila knew less about mycotoxins than we did,” Ashfar said, “less even than you. Her interest was strictly in the heroin. We concluded it was the third girl alone who understood the real purpose of their mission to Afghanistan. Leila was hurt so that Maryam Lajevardi would see what was in store if she didn’t cooperate with us.”

  Baraheni had gone away from the bed to scrub his hands in water from a steel pitcher, and now he came back and said, “I was experimenting with infibulation in the old days, but regrettably never had the chance to try it in the field. You would be amazed at the anxiety it creates in women who are threatened with it, the despondency that sets in after the procedure has been performed.”

  “Yes, amazed,” Ashfar muttered. “We never got near Maryam,” he said to Darius. “Rahgozar was constantly at her side. But we knew she had received our message through Leila. When Maryam continued to shun us, we went after Leila again. She was near death from an overdose of heroin when we found her. We put a bullet in her head so that our warning could not be missed, and left her body in the courtyard on Saltanatabad, where Maryam would have a good, long look at it. Then Rahgozar took it upon himself to move Maryam out of the apartment. We didn’t know where.

  “Still, we were not at a dead end. Sousan, after all, had been to Afghanistan, and we went to her place to ask again about her journey. Her boyfriend was touchy about late-night callers. He misinterpreted what we were there for. Baraheni killed him before he could tell us what we wanted to know. This, you may remember, is a recurring problem with Baraheni, but never mind. Sousan became sulky after that. We had no choice with her.”

  Baraheni patted his hands in a fluffy towel and left the room.