Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “Darius does not regard the holy Qur’an as a divine blueprint for the elimination of suffering,” she said. “He does not approve of temporary marriage as a ‘brilliant law of Islam’ that meets the need of men to have many lovers without corrupting themselves by engaging prostitutes. I have devoted my life to combating the abomination of celibacy, and the suffering that it brings. Yet, to my only son, I am not a tool of God, but an old whore.” Shahin Khanum began to laugh. Just as suddenly she fell quiet and glared at Darius. “How many years has it been since you came to see me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Six years,” she answered for him. “Six years, four months, and some days. Every one of them is burned into my heart. What have you done to ease your mother’s suffering, my precious son?”

  Darius shifted his weight from one sore foot to the other as his mother glanced into the men’s side of the courtyard, which was filling rapidly in advance of the next summons to prayer. Her body was bathed in a young woman’s perfume that also had been Farib’s favorite, a premium French scent that was prohibitively expensive on those few occasions that any was to be found at the bazaar.

  “To look at me,” she said to Maryam, “would you believe that when I was your age I was considered a fine catch? Darius’s father was so taken with me that immediately after the introduction was made he proposed a one-hour chaste marriage just to have me remove my veil for him.” She paused for confirmation from Darius, which never came. “That is exactly as it happened. And right on the spot he agreed to a two-year marriage.”

  Maryam smiled condescendingly, as she might have if an insane woman had her ear. Darius regretted not warning her that his mother was not crazy, but thoroughly without prurience or doubt, a woman, had she been born a generation later, who would have made a perfect Bride of Blood. Maryam was groping for words, rearranging the failed smile into an inquiry of shallow concern that would fool no one, least of all Shahin Khanum.

  “A member of such a powerful clan as the Bakhtiars …” Maryam said. “You must have been proud—”

  “Bakhtiar? Bakhtiar was a man I lived with when Darius was a teenager. He is the father of Darius’s sister, but was better to Darius than to his own daughter, one of those louts who measures his manhood in the number of his sons.”

  Maryam looked at Darius, but he had turned away from her, and she could not see his face.

  “… Were it not for the daughter we had I don’t know that I would remember him. Darius’s father was a religious pilgrim from a village in the Great Salt Desert, a handsome man, but shy and untalkative except in the company of God. Darius took the name Bakhtiar for himself. But it was I who called him Darius—a good Persian name. The day he was born he was already too independent to be given a name handed down from Arab slavers.” Memory slipped away as Shahin Khanum paused to build a querulous frown. “Why have you come?” she asked Darius. “Is it Oil Day, or Fatemeh’s Birthday, and you wish to honor your poor old mother?”

  “I need a place to stay.”

  “You were living comfortably on Baharestan Square.”

  “A place to hide,” he said. “The Komiteh want me.”

  “Wait here. I will make a good marriage before noon, and you will be my little boy again and live with me and my new husband.” Shahin Khanum laughed so hard that she had to pat herself on the back to catch her breath.

  She wiped tears from her eyes as she took out a leather change purse from her chador.

  “I don’t want money.”

  “No, you never did, you would not let me have the pleasure even of that.” Shahin Khanum held out a tarnished key. “Take this,” she said. “The house is at Mowlavi, intersection of Khayyam. You will recognize it by twin pomegranate trees in the garden. Stay as long as you need to.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “It’s mine. It was the gift of an admirer. I do not have to seegah all the time if I don’t want to. It’s just in my nature, like hunting murderers is in yours. To every life God assigns a purpose …” Still eyeing the men’s side of the courtyard, she stepped out of the shadow of the wall fanning herself coyly with a loose fold of her chador. “We’ve been through all this before,” she said. “I don’t expect I will be coming home tonight. Maybe after the weekend—if you’re not there.”

  Maryam took his arm, and they went out to Modaress Avenue. A cab brought them south past a housing project disintegrating under the sun of fewer than a dozen summers. The site had been Teheran’s red light district before the ayatollahs sent earth-grading equipment against it, and Komitehmen to round up the streetwalkers. The older women who refused to change their ways were executed, but many of the younger ones were brought to north Teheran for rehabilitation. Housed in a grand mansion abandoned by a family that had fled to the West, they spent their days cleaning, cooking, and sewing, acquiring the domestic skills needed in making a new life. To achieve the condition of grace known as “absolution through penance,” they agreed to temporary marriages with their guards, short-term affairs after which they were encouraged to engage in similar relationships with the waves of soldiers returning from the Iraqi front.

  Shahin Khanum’s was at the end of a row of houses on the north side of Mowlavi Avenue. Like Mehta, she lived in a comfortable mix of the traditional and modern, with a kitchen equipped with new appliances, and pillows for sleeping on the richly carpeted floor. There was no vodka anywhere. Darius found a bottle of wine, which he left untouched after prizing the cork, and then stretched out in the living room on a sturdy Bakhtiari rug. Maryam came in with his water, and sat beside him drinking tea through a sugar cube in her teeth. When he put his arm around her, she didn’t stiffen, or lecture him about his health. Why bother, he thought, when he was still so weak he couldn’t keep his eyes open?

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “The refrigerator is full, and I’ll have lunch ready when you wake up. It was kind of your mother to let us have her house. We’ll be safe until the weekend, won’t we?”

  “We won’t stay that long. In a day or two I should be stronger, and we’ll go.”

  “Go where? They’re hunting for us all over. We have no place to go. A couple of days is nothing.”

  “It’s two lifetimes,” Darius said.

  17

  ON A BREEZELESS MORNING IN the minute after midnight when the evening shift had gone home and the caretaker overnight crew was settling into routine, Darius slipped inside police headquarters and went down to the sub-basement by a staircase used only by janitors and the brass. The bulbs in the passageway had burned out, or been stolen, and he kept his hands in front of his face pushing back at the dense blackness. He walked on his toes, easing the weight off his sore heels and arches, making little noise. The footsteps that clattered suddenly all around caused him to flatten against the wall, to become small and quiet, but invisible only to himself.

  Over the hammering of his pulse he located the sound one story above. The footsteps inscribed a misshapen circle in the ceiling, and then shuffled away. After some of the adrenaline had drained from his blood, he continued into Evidence. Two stories below street level the atmosphere of dry, dusty heat would remain constant on the dampest day of winter. Had headquarters been struck by a missile, Mehta would have been the last to find out.

  The shelves had been cleared by someone attempting to externalize the order that Mehta was satisfied to keep in his brain. A huge pile had been left on the floor, to be restacked, discarded, looted. The elephant tusks were gone—probably, it would be his guess, back into the hands of the trader who had brought them into the country. Overlooked was a dagger with a rhinoceros horn handle of greater value, which had been used to kill three women in a case that was famous years before Darius was attached to Homicide. The Kerikkale pistol from Mehta’s trophy collection he found in a box with counterfeit plates for ten-thousand rial notes made obsolete by new methods of printing. Out-of-date fingerprint cards had been sprinkled over a canvas knapsack that he emptied of hundreds of
Uncle Sam party favors. He put the gun inside with a box of shells, and slung it over his back.

  Hours of work had gone into building the evidence pile. Assuming he found a place to begin, it would take as long to tear apart. Solace was to be had inside Mehta’s cage, in the double drawer of the desk where a brown bag held two more bottles of the superior Russian vodka that had been the records chief’s second-best-kept secret. Underneath was a ceramic pipe with an elongated stem, and surgical tweezers for holding a crumb of flaming charcoal over the black, pasty bowl until the opium inside released its heady smoke. Below that, also in brown paper, a large bundle filled the bottom of the drawer. Without looking at the evidence tag still attached he knew it contained the packages Hamid had recovered from the toilet in Dharvazeh Ghor. He brought them out at arm’s length, and tore away the wrapper in the weak light of the desk lamp.

  One package was nearly twice the size of the other, and it was this one that he dissected first. The white powder exploding onto the desktop tasted of quinine, and hid six flat plastic bags. He wet his thumb and rubbed a clear spot in the plastic, a window looking in on more powder. This powder, which was the same color as the quinine, but coarser, and somewhat crystalline, he recognized as Afghani heroin processed in a crude mountain laboratory. He shook out the bag onto the floor until a smaller, tubular bag, a condom filled with a yellow sandy substance, was all that remained inside. Having the mycotoxins at last in his hands he felt no pleasure—the sole change in his emotional tenor a heightened appreciation of dread that made him interrupt what he was doing to guzzle Mehta’s Russian vodka from the bottle.

  Darius placed the five bags of heroin in the bottom of the knapsack and fit the condom carefully among them. Then he went through his suit for a handkerchief Maryam had made sure to put there, and tied it over his mouth and nose. Much of the milk sugar with which the other package had been stuffed had leaked out, exposing four more plastic bags. As if he were delivering frail quadruplets, he brought them out one by one and laid them on their brothers already in the knapsack. The bag he removed last was not full, and appeared to have been opened and retied. The muscular tension his body manufactured as a by-product of intense concentration did not translate into a trembling hand. With the dull edge of the blade he scraped away the milk sugar coating the plastic. The crystalline powder inside was contaminated by an off-white vein that he knew would darken to rich yellow if traced to its source. In the usual accident involving the failure of a condom, he could not help but think, the result was new life that was rarely the tragedy it seemed to be, rather a blessing in comparison to what had happened when the mycotoxins became mixed with the heroin. He exhaled through his mouth, and then held his breath until he had wrapped this last bag in the paper sack from the vodka, and placed it with everything else in the knapsack.

  He heard footsteps again, and though he knew they were being made upstairs, he froze. He turned off the lights and groped for the steps. Edging open the stairwell door, he looked across the lobby toward the empty streets of Ark. Not ten meters away a night shift officer whose name was Adibi was sharing a smoke with Ghaffari in the entrance to the building.

  He continued up another flight. Homicide had been left untended, not even a recruit on hand to keep the samovar fired. His old wood desk had been pushed into the outer office to make room for an executive model with Ghaffari’s name on a plaque with movable letters. His top drawer had been cleaned out, his off-duty gun gone with his black book of informants’ phone numbers. Among a stack of cold case files in which he had kept hidden his confidential papers the French passport was still where he’d stashed it.

  The straps from the knapsack were cutting into his shoulders as he returned to the first floor. After several minutes Adibi went out and Ghaffari squashed the butt under his heel and disappeared inside headquarters. Darius hurried from the stairs, but hadn’t cleared the lobby when Adibi came back with an unlit cigarette between his lips, shaking his head as he patted his pockets. He stared at Darius, obviously confused, and then looked around as if to confirm that he was in the right building. Darius scowled, and then saluted. Adibi returned the salute crisply and let out a puff of air from behind the cigarette when Darius said nothing to him, but continued to the sidewalk.

  A faienced arch topped by copper cupolas marked the boundary of the administrative district. Beyond was the broad avenue renamed after the Imam where Darius would be able to hail a cruising cab. He dipped into his pockets to count the few coins that represented his fortune, and which were scarcely enough to bring him back to Maryam. Sudden, sharp pressure against his back revived the pain of his wounds, and stopped him on the spot.

  “Keep walking!”

  The voice was not Ghaffari’s, or Adibi’s, or anyone’s from headquarters. His former colleagues would not be marching him out of Ark, when his maximum value was behind the bars of his old jail. The tingle of cold metal against his ear steered him into the shadows under the arch, and then turned him around so that he was looking into Djalilian’s gray eyes.

  “You thought you were smart.” Djalilian held the gun high, pointed at Darius’s face. It was an old Browning 9mm Parabellum with an intricately worked barrel, and would not be hard to swipe away, Darius thought, if his arms weren’t constrained by the heavy pack. “It is a recurring problem with you—God only knows why, when you were the last to know you would lead us to the mycotoxins. That is why we let you out of Evin.”

  The queasy feeling that had eluded Darius for days bubbled up in the hollow of his stomach. His dry lips clung to his tongue as he licked them.

  “Kashfi told us everything of your plans.” Djalilian leered at him. “Or, rather, we told him. It was a clever idea for you to break out with the corpses. But it was ours. He must have forgotten to tell you that you are a corpse, too.”

  A Range Rover driven by a man in olive green fatigues pulled up alongside them. Darius was ordered into the backseat, where he hunched forward with the knapsack wedged against his shoulders.

  “Your hopes for escape were doomed from the start.” Djalilian sat next to him as they rolled out of Ark under the great arch. The driver glanced back at them, and under the flat bill of his cap Darius saw bloodshot eyes, a scraggly beard. They turned east on the avenue and raced through sparse midnight traffic. “All of Iran is looking for you. You would have been better off had your mock execution been real.”

  Djalilian switched the gun to his right hand and dug it into Darius’s ribs.

  “How does it feel to know you are going to be dead in the next few minutes?” Djalilian stopped to ponder the question himself. “By now you should be an expert on that particular sensation. Give us a hint of what it is like.”

  Darius looked away from him. He slipped off the pack and was thrown back in his seat as the Range Rover accelerated through a red light.

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable. You won’t be around long.”

  Djalilian jabbed the gun harder, trying for a response to his threats. Darius considered wincing, to give in to him in some way to get him to stop.

  Incapable of any gesture, however, he stared out the window. They had left the avenue at Baharestan Square, and were speeding past the Sepahsalar Mosque. Along the length of the facade GOD BLESS AMERICA stood out sharper than ever where the Komitehmen had scrubbed away decades of grime with the vandals’ paint.

  “Let me see what’s in the pack,” Djalilian said.

  Darius slid the webbed straps out of the buckles and pulled back the flap.

  “This is heroin?” Djalilian nosed the gun inside. “What is it worth?”

  “Millions.”

  The ornate barrel scripted the figure in air. “Did you hear that, Nasair?” Djalilian said.

  The visor of his cap scraped the roof as the lightly bearded man nodded his head.

  “The mycotoxins. Where are they?”

  “In the heroin.”

  Djalilian thought about it, and then he smiled, and poked his gun between
the bags.

  “The plastic is torn,” Darius said. “Keep playing with it, and we’ll all be dead in seconds.”

  “Seconds, or minutes, it shouldn’t make much difference to you.”

  “I’ve opened one of the bags. I’ll show you what the mycotoxins look like.”

  Djalilian withdrew the Browning gingerly. As Darius slid his hand inside and felt beneath the heroin for Mehta’s gun, Djalilian wrenched the pack away and dropped it in his own lap. “I don’t want any of that stuff on me, or in the air. You’re not taking anybody with you.”

  “I have no intention …” Darius probed the bottom of the knapsack until the grips of the Kerikkale rasped against his palm. He rolled his wrist, maneuvering the muzzle toward Djalilian.

  “Well, where is it?” Djalilian said. “What the hell are you doing in there?”

  Darius squeezed the trigger. The grinding sound it produced seemed as loud as a report. But there was no report, or bullet, no change in Djalilian but the look of scorn ripening to hatred.

  “Hey,” Djalilian said, and raised his gun.

  Darius yanked the Kerikkale out of the pack. He snicked the safety switch above the butt, furious with himself for not having checked to see whether the clip was in place and loaded, if Mehta’s prize souvenir was in killing order. A few grams of pressure on the trigger, and the automatic kicked and rode upward, and Djalilian was nailed through the shoulder to the door.

  “Dog’s balls!” he howled. The ferocious glare melted into indignation at lost opportunity as he switched his gun to his good hand.