Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “I was my own man well before the Revolution,” Darius said.

  “Especially you. With you there’s no compromise, no complexity. You oppose them on all counts. Your type is not a mystery, merely a case for the cleaver instead of the scalpel.”

  “Is it part of your complicated nature to let them get to you through a girl?”

  Ghaffari shook his head.

  “You deny it? I saw Nahid.”

  “Through my family,” Ghaffari told him. “Nahid was a weakness they exploited to threaten what would happen to Sharera and Shahla after I’m gone. They caught me with Nahid before you went to Mashad. Those days I spent with her here.” He stripped off his jacket, and then his shirt, and swiveled around for Darius to see a Crosshatch of scabs on his back. “I never wanted to be homicide chief. I didn’t know they would send killers after you to the house on Old Karaj Road.” When Darius said nothing, he added, “I can’t stand punishment like you.”

  “What are they offering?”

  “Tell them enough so they can recover the mycotoxins themselves, and you will have a painless death.”

  “It’s not much of a bargain. What if I don’t accept?”

  “Then they will continue to torture you until you are just as dead, and Maryam Lajevardi will be declared in enmity with God. You know what that means, I’m sure.”

  “The penalty is crucifixion,” Darius said.

  “She will be tied to a cross and left there three days, or till she dies. They will get the information from her that way.”

  “She won’t talk.”

  “Then they will have blood,” Ghaffari said. “For them it’s almost the same thing.”

  “Has she been told?”

  “Yes.”

  Darius tried to put himself inside Maryam’s head. Her obduracy was less complicated than his—a tropism, perhaps, or a primitive response lost over millennia of human evolution, but retained in her DNA as a fossil stubbornness so absolute that the Komiteh had to focus on him as the likelier to crack.

  But what if it were not Maryam’s stiff neck that made him the more attractive target? What if he did have what they wanted? An interesting thought, except that it meant going along with Ghaffari’s notion that he had assumed the role the Revolution demanded of him—a repository of information he was too blind to recognize for what it was.

  Ghaffari buttoned his shirt as Bijan came in and dropped his briefcase on the desk.

  “How has the prisoner received our generous terms?”

  “Ask him yourself.” Ghaffari drenched the words in venom, and spit them like darts, and for that instant Darius forgave him everything.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t—”

  “Yes, yes, I seem to have heard this before.” Bijan unlocked the briefcase and ran his thumb over the stacks of papers. “It is pointless to continue. Since you refuse to cooperate, your interrogation has ended. You will be executed immediately,” he said without any change in tone. “There is no appeal.”

  Guards came to hustle him the length of the cellblock, and then they walked three or four steps behind him through the yard. The late sun had stalled above a water tower, oozing orange light into the garden. Wintry drafts rolled down from the mountains and stirred the loose soil. Darius was brought to one of the bare trunks in front of the wall, and made to stand there while four men carrying carbines over their shoulders lined up facing him not ten meters away. He found himself asking who would be sent the bill for the bullets used to kill him, where they would find someone to whom he meant enough to share that final insult.

  His wrists were lashed together behind the post, and the other strap was fastened around his knees. The ground at his feet was dark and boggy, although the rest of the yard was dry sand. In some way he felt cheated by not being given the time to unravel the mystery that had brought him to this place. Here, he decided, was his epitaph: had he lived longer, he might have found something important that was lost inside his brain.

  A black hood was dropped over his head and closed with a drawstring around his throat. The cellblock door squeaked open again. Assuming that witnesses were being assembled, he listened for a woman’s gait.

  Bijan asked, “Do you have any requests?”

  “I would like the hood removed.”

  “That is against the regulations.”

  Darius heard him walk away. His footsteps hadn’t stopped when he called out, “Ready.”

  The firing squad shouldered rifles, cocked them, and there was a moment of remarkable clarity in which the sensation of the wind moving the hood against Darius’s cheek was as fulfilling as the finest meal he had eaten, the best vodka. His heart was hammering harder than it had when the samovar was fired; but the frenzy of thought he anticipated was absent with most of his fear.

  His sore shoulders ached as he backed against the trunk. Filling his lungs, he forced himself to relax. Calmness would be his small triumph over them.

  “Aim.”

  Dust from the hood was tickling his nose. He would start sneezing if they didn’t get it over with soon. A sad commentary on his spiritual decline that this would be his final concern.

  “Fire!”

  A ringing sensation filled his head and the concussion from the reports sent tremors through his body. His knees buckled, and he felt himself blacking out. But if he were dying, why was his heart still pounding? He wanted to consider the problem at his own pace, but someone was rushing toward him faster than he could think. He smelled the oil on the gun that would fire the coup de grace, and then there was light pressure behind his ear. As he awaited the shot the hood was yanked off, and he squinted at Bijan’s thin smile. Baraheni was clapping enthusiastically beside Ashfar, who was showing his terrible gaze.

  “Bravo,” Baraheni shouted. “You were heroic in your fortitude. You have done the old gang proud.”

  “Bring him back to solitary,” Bijan ordered the guards.

  To Darius he said, “We have not begun with you.”

  Following the call to evening prayers he was taken from his cell. Marched through the block he knew the serenity of being tapped dry of fear. Whatever was in store for him held no threat after the things he’d been put through; having already experienced the moment of death, even fresh pain would be a bonus. He was left outside the clinic, but not chained. One old man was waiting in the corridor, and soon Kashfi came out and sent him away with aspirins. The young doctor did not take Darius’s outstretched hand. He looked at him with annoyance for presupposing upon a friendship that did not exist.

  “I didn’t ask to be brought here,” Darius said.

  Kashfi ran water in the sink. He spoke in whispers. “I sent for you.”

  “You got word to Baghai?”

  “The coroner is a well-meaning man, loyal to those he likes, but ineffectual away from the morgue. He would try to save you, and would fail. The single comfort you would have from him would be his company in your cell. I cannot allow that.” During a long pause, Kashfi appeared to be trying to catch his breath. “… I have devised a plan for your escape.”

  “Dr. Baghai is an old man prepared to accept the consequences of his failures. You’re still young. Should the Komiteh find out—”

  “Do you wish to be free, or not? It will not require a brilliant argument to persuade me to be the coward I normally am.”

  “What do you know about breaking out of prison?”

  “Next time they are done whipping you, demand to be brought to the hospital. I will hold you for treatment past midnight, when most of the guards go home. Then I will sign a death certificate, and wrap you in a shroud, and put you with the corpses that are taken before dawn to Behesht-e-Zahra. From there you will be on your own.”

  Of the two of them, Darius decided, Kashfi was the more grateful for the opportunity to save his life. “That’s not good enough,” he said.

  “It puts you outside the walls. What more can you ask?”

  “You have two chances to establish you
r credentials as a jailbreaker. Someone is coming with me.”

  Kashfi went back inside the hospital, and began putting away his equipment. Darius noticed a tray of surgeon’s instruments beside a bloodied sheet on the examining table.

  “Aren’t you the doctor with no stomach for cutting?”

  Kashfi grunted. He washed his hands without soap, and dried them on his gown.

  “Do you perform many operations here?”

  “Some.”

  “What kind?”

  “Skin grafts. I have become expert at taking flesh from prisoners’ hips, and replacing it on their soles when they have been tortured too harshly.”

  “Do they walk again?”

  “Right back to the whipping bed.” Kashfi took a deep breath, and then he sighed. “Tell me, who is the other person?”

  “She’s an inmate of the women’s wing.”

  “Forget I agreed to do anything for you. The plan will fall apart, and we will both be killed—if we are lucky. A woman … it’s dangerous enough as it is.”

  “Yes,” Darius said, “and nearly perfect.”

  Several chairs had been arranged close to the whipping bed. Like judges at an erotic competition Maryam sat with Ashfar and Baraheni, who was whittling the insulation from a strip of electric flex.

  “We nearly started without you today,” Ashfar said when Darius was brought in.

  “Don’t put yourself out for me.”

  “But, you understand, we must.”

  Baraheni coiled the cable around his shoulder and adjusted the straps on the bed. His guards threw Darius on the mattress, and held him down while his feet were bound.

  “What’s this?” Baraheni ran his thumbnail against Darius’s arch, scraping away a salve that Kashfi had applied. He wiped both feet with a hand towel, buffed the soles as though he was putting a shine on them.

  Maryam’s chair was positioned so that when Darius raised his head he was staring at her. She focused on the floor, but gradually her gaze was drawn back to him. Her expression changed from second to second, but never seemed comfortable, and as the cable began humming like a bass string she shut her eyes. The first stroke broke the scabs over the deep cuts in his feet that scarcely had begun to heal. Maryam forced herself to look, to let him know it was all right to scream.

  The next blow was delivered to his heels, and was followed by others against his back. Baraheni was not in top form, possibly arm weary at the end of a long day. The cable came down across Darius’s thighs, and though the pain was not unbearable, he shouted. Baraheni let up noticeably after that, and Darius rewarded him with an occasional yell.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Ashfar said. “Let us try it the other way.”

  Darius was unstrapped and dumped in Baraheni’s chair. As he waited for the samovar to be wheeled in, Ashfar extended his arm to Maryam. “If you do not mind …”

  Maryam recoiled from him. She walked alone to the bed and swept her hand against the mattress, rubbed the grime from her fingertips.

  “On your stomach, please.”

  Maryam glanced toward the door, and her body swayed in that direction. But then she lay down and Baraheni buckled the straps and tied her ankles to the rail.

  “Notice how we do this in strict accordance with Islamic precepts.” Ashfar was speaking to Darius, but his words were aimed at the ceiling. “The woman is not bared on the whipping bed, but for the soles of her feet.” He brushed back the hem of the chador. “And what lovely feet these are.”

  Baraheni had gone to a locker for a feather pillow, which he placed under Maryam’s head.

  “We do not want you thrashing around and injuring your pretty neck.” He hovered over the bed swinging the whip high overhead, the copper plaits shooting out sparks as they whisked the ceiling.

  “One last time we are asking you,” Ashfar said to Darius. “Where are the mycotoxins?”

  It was clear now why they had tortured him—their purpose not to encourage information they knew he didn’t have, but to get him to hate Maryam for witnessing his humiliation, and her to despise him for his helplessness, to destroy the symbiosis that preserved their silence. He lunged at Baraheni, but had no strength; Ashfar caught him before he was out of the chair, and slammed him back down.

  “You are going to tell us eventually,” Ashfar said to Maryam, “so why lose your pride and endure needless suffering? To allow your body to be broken is a hollow gesture. Not long ago I was in a position similar to yours. The Komiteh was determined to have everything about our organization. I am no coward, but neither am I a fool. It went against all my instincts to breach solidarity with my comrades. But I must tell you I don’t lose any sleep over it. I pass on this advice because I would not like to see you hurt. Take a moment to reflect on it.”

  Darius was gathering himself for another charge at Baraheni when Maryam said, “I don’t need a moment. They’re in a locker at Mehrabad Airport. They’ve been there all along.”

  “There are thousands of lockers.” The whistling began, and picked up in intensity. The cable became invisible, Baraheni’s arm a gray blur. “What is the number?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have the key?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give it to us now.”

  “It’s in my house.”

  “The residence was razed by fire,” Ashfar said. “A convenient excuse for not being able to turn it over.”

  “I kept it in a cookie tin in the kitchen. You’ll find it there, if the ruins haven’t been picked clean.”

  Ashfar placed a hand on Baraheni’s shoulder, and the cable materialized, flickering in the harsh light. As the whistling died, it slipped from Baraheni’s grasp and flew into a corner.

  Maryam strained to make eye contact with Darius. “I had to,” she pleaded. “… they would have gotten it out of me sooner or later. “She began to sob. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t—”

  “Had I known you were a woman susceptible to reason, much of the unpleasantness that preceded your admissions could have been avoided.” Ashfar glanced triumphantly at Darius, who had gotten up from the chair and was looking toward the doorway, where Bijan stood watching them.

  “It is about time,” Bijan said. “Men will be sent to guard the fire scene until a search can be started at dawn.” He moved to the bed where Maryam was crying softly into the pillow, and untied her feet and hands. “Pray that nothing there has been touched. You see how it will go for you should you be lying.”

  Maryam focused again on Darius, whose cold stare offered nothing. He did not acknowledge her when she came across the room to him, and she wrapped his arms around her shoulders and buried her face in his chest.

  “Such behavior in a couple not united in marriage is immoral and may lead to stiff penalties.” Bijan leered at them, immensely pleased with himself. He returned to the corridor, and Darius heard him giving orders to round up a crew for the Old Karaj Road.

  Ashfar’s body was rocked by great peals of laughter, which Baraheni seized on and amplified. “It must be love,” he said to Maryam.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That is Bijan’s way of showing affection. He wants you for his seegah before it is decided what to do with you. He says it is unhealthy for a woman your age not to have regular sexual relations because the natural flow of hormones will back up into your glands. The greater tragedy, the one he will not allow, is for you to go to your grave a virgin. He will do you the great favor of permitting you to become his temporary wife.”

  Ashfar was laughing so hard he was having difficulty getting out the words. “Darius, have you learned the best place in Evin to obtain vodka? We would like to celebrate Maryam’s betrothal.”

  Darius waltzed her around so that his back was to them. He took her hand from his shoulder, and slipped a sharp sliver of clear glass from his pocket against the palm.

  “What’s this? A diamond? I’m flattered,” she said, “but as you heard I’m alre
ady spoken for.” She opened her hand, but Darius caught the glass and curled her fingers around it.

  “More valuable than any diamond,” he whispered. “A key.”

  How long he had been a corpse he didn’t know. He lay on a gurney inside the tiny hospital with his suit folded under the linen shroud that was all he wore. His shoes made inconspicuous bulges against his hips. Several hours more went by before he heard wailing in the corridor. He raised himself on his elbows to see what the commotion was about, and then, remembering he was a dead man, lay back again.

  The lights went on, and it was all he could do to keep from shading his eyes with his hand. Several women were at the door, but the cries were Nahid’s.

  Rubber wheels skidded on the bare floor, and his gurney was bumped by another. Kashfi was talking over the women’s voices, his adolescent drone a poor instrument of condolence. The death of her cellmate, he told Nahid, was God’s will. The girl would have none of it, though, and berated herself for not taking better care of her only friend in Evin. Darius brought shallow draughts of air into the top of his lungs, and tried not to break a sweat under the hot lights till the guards took Nahid back to her cell.

  Kashfi’s hand was on his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he saw Maryam motionless on the gurney next to his with her right arm dangling over the edge. Redness gushed from inside her wrist and branched into separate streams along her fingers. Her cheeks were pure white; even her hair seemed to have leached color onto the floor. She sat up slowly, staring at her wrist in wonder that it belonged to her.

  “Who told you to open your arm like this?” Kashfi asked. “Just to show some blood would have been enough.”

  “I wanted to be convincing.”

  “You’ve convinced me. A few minutes more, and you could have bled to death.” Kashfi began sewing her arm with a needle and black thread. “Why did you cut so deep? Why cut along the vein like you meant it, instead of across?”

  “The guards are jaded by gore. They wouldn’t have taken notice of anything less.”

  “Maryam is a true daughter of Iran, an expert at fabrication,” Darius said. “She dissembles more persuasively than the worst murderers.”