by Marc Cameron
“I have,” Clark said. “Wasn’t what I’d call pretty.”
“I read online they give the bull drugs, put Vaseline and other stuff in its eyes before the fight so he’s all messed up and disoriented.”
Clark took a long, slow breath. “You read that online . . .” He took another drink of his beer and then pointed at Jack with the neck of the bottle. “Let me ask you this. If you were going into the ring with a thousand pounds of meanness and you wanted to make absolutely sure it charged where you directed it to charge, wouldn’t you want it to be able to see?”
“I guess I would,” Ryan said.
“Not to say they don’t do a number on the poor bastards,” Clark said. “But I wouldn’t trust a damned thing I read on the Internet.”
“So you are bothered by it?” Jack asked. “The bullfights, I mean.”
“You know me, Ryan,” Clark said. “I’m not one to engage in long philosophical debates. But I’ve thought some on this. Commercial beef cattle are customarily finished out in pens where they do nothing but eat and stand around on mountains of their own shit until their appointment with a captive bolt gun in the slaughterhouse—which usually happens sometime between eighteen months and their third birthday. The Spanish fighting bulls that make it into the ring live as near-wild animals until they’re graded and sent to fight at about four years old, at which point they have one bad day.”
“So you’re saying these bulls have a chance?”
“Not a chance in hell.” Clark shook his head. “I mean, a thousand-to-one shot, maybe, if the bull displays such incredible courage that the crowd begs the guy in charge of the fight to pardon it. But for all practical purposes, the bullfight ends with a couple of feet of sharp steel stuck between the bull’s shoulder blades and the dead carcass getting dragged off by a team of mules like the ones you saw clomping down the street a few minutes ago.” He leaned forward, swirling the rest of his beer in the bottle. “You ever read The Dogs of War?”
“Sure,” Jack said. “You assigned it to us.”
Clark smiled. “I guess I did. Anyhow, take it from an old man who’s rapidly approaching his use-by date, Forsyth summed it up about right. I want to go out with a bullet in my chest and blood in my mouth, and a gun in my hand. If I was a bull, I’d take a few spears to the shoulders to get an extra year on the range and a chance to use my horns. It’d be better than getting prodded up some alley with a hot shot in my ass so I can walk into a captive bolt.” He leaned back in his chair and took a drink. “But that’s just me.”
“I’d pick herd bull,” Jack offered. “If I got to choose. A few more years with the added benefits of tending a harem of cows.”
“You young guys.” Clark shook his head. “I’d imagine every steer once aspired to those same goals. But the odds are pretty grim. My way, I get to keep my nuts and have a chance to hook the guy who’s going to kill me . . .” His voice trailed off and he tipped his beer bottle up the street. Jack’s eyes followed slowly.
“That can’t be good,” Ryan said.
Clark reached into his pocket and pressed the PTT switch on his radio. “Heads up,” he said. “We’ve got company. Lucile Fournier—who is now as blond as Adara—is about twenty yards from the Russians and closing.”
20
Normally, the act of simply crossing the street in Tehran was so dangerous that locals referred to it as “going to Chechnya.” Authorities had blocked the streets to control protesters during the hangings, so Dovzhenko was able to cross as if he’d been in a city that gave two shits about the lives of its pedestrians. He walked four blocks south, under the tall sycamores that lined the shaded walks of Valiasr Street, named for a twelfth-century Shiite imam. The crowds soon thinned to the usual mix of people returning home from work in the rain. Dovzhenko would never have known there had been a hanging if not for the incandescent images of the kicking boys that still burned in his brain. He’d not eaten anything since the bread and tea he’d had for breakfast, but even the tantalizing smells of saffron and five spice drifting out of the shops could not tempt him.
The drizzle abated by the time he reached the white subcompact car the embassy had assigned him. Dovzhenko threw his leather jacket in the backseat, which was hardly large enough for a briefcase, let alone a person with legs. He took a moment to light a cigarette before wedging himself in behind the wheel. It was illegal to smoke while driving in Iran, but the law was seldom enforced, and, anyway, Dovzhenko was much too disgusted to care. The pitiful little vehicle did not help his mood at all.
The Tiba—“gazelle,” in Persian—was anything but fast. It resembled a bloated peanut or, perhaps, a Volkswagen Beetle that had been left to melt in the sun. Those sentiments were surely too harsh, but Dovzhenko had too much experience with the little things to be rational. He’d been issued one the year before, during an assignment in Moldova. SVR recruiters tended to draw more romantic images of the life of a clandestine intelligence officer when they spoke to potential trainees. Dovzhenko knew better. The intelligence life was rarely a flashy one. Savile Row suits and Aston Martin sports cars drew unwanted attention. Utilitarian ruled the day, but this, this was ridiculous. The eighty-horsepower monstrosity was more reminiscent of Baba Yaga’s cauldron than a car. It was outside the bounds—for even a Russian spy. Dovzhenko was not alone in his assessment. The English-speaking clerk in the Tehran embassy motor pool had gone so far as to dub the little cars “Axles of Evil.”
But it got him to Maryam’s, so Dovzhenko kept his gripes to himself.
Maryam Farhad lived in Shahrak-e Gharb, an upscale neighborhood in the northwest part of the city, far from the drug rehabilitation center where she worked to the south, where homeless addicts hung in the shadows whispering, “Darou, darou . . .” Medicine, medicine. Selling drugs, even the green stuff, was a tremendous gamble. A usable amount of cannabis might be overlooked by the authorities, but as little as five grams of hash oil was a capital offense. As far as Dovzhenko could tell, the government had decided to combat the exploding opioid problem by handing out so much methadone that it, too, was now sold illicitly. Whatever Tehran’s master plan, he was glad Maryam didn’t live among the lost souls to whom she’d devoted her life.
Dovzhenko could have taken Valiasr Street north and then gone west on the Hemmat Expressway, almost to her doorstep—but he did not have the stomach to see the execution site again, and he wanted to shake any tail Sassani might have on him. IRGC trusted no one. It was the nature of spies. Liars were always the most suspicious of others. In this case, Sassani had good reason. Maryam was a single woman, a Muslim—and Dovzhenko was not. His position in the SVR would save him from execution, but their affair would surely get him expelled from the country, not to mention the black mark it would place on his record. Dovzhenko told himself it did not matter what happened to him, but the consequences to her would be swift and violent. A brutal whipping, reeducation, or, if a judge got it in his head that she was corrupting the earth—Dovzhenko had seen the pit behind the walls of Evin, the hole used to bury men up to their waists and women to their necks, the smooth stones the size of apples arranged in neat pyramids for easy access. Officially, Iran had done away with stoning. What a joke. The members of the Guardian Council did whatever they wished. If stoning went against an official edict, they simply issued a new one, granting themselves permission. World opinion didn’t stop them. It just moved the behavior indoors.
Dovzhenko worked his way north, tamping back images of what could happen to his girlfriend. They were both accustomed to risk. SVR had no rules prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, even in a Muslim country, provided one kept to oneself and did not overindulge. But attending one of Tehran’s numerous underground parties on anything other than official business was not only frowned upon, the prohibition against it was noted specifically in the documented rules new members of the Russian delegation had to sign upon arrival.
Dovzhe
nko found one on his second weekend, in the basement of a flower shop right in Shahrak-e Gharb, less than a mile from Maryam’s apartment. Enforcement by the morality police against these parties, where alcohol flowed and bodies swayed to Western music, came in fits and starts or not at all. Two of the young people at the first party he’d attended were supposedly sons of prominent mullahs. No one wanted to get crossways with them, so for the most part, the gatherings went unmolested.
He’d seen Maryam Farhad fifteen minutes into his first visit. She was about his age, a few years older than most of the college-age kids who smoked and drank absinthe and explored the heady stuff of free thought, even if it was in secret. Dovzhenko had worn his best shirt, open at the collar. Unlike most of the young men at the party, he was old enough to know that wearing a little less cologne and no gold chains caused him to stand out as being more mature. Maryam had smiled at him as soon as she’d removed her coat. Her hips swayed to the music before she’d taken two full steps—as if she’d contained them as long as she possibly could. She wore a silk blouse, tight enough across the chest to pull the buttons just a little and expose an inch or two of lace underneath. This happened all the time in Russia or the U.S., but in Iran, where women wore mandated headscarves and ill-fitting clothes, the look was scandalous.
One of the male officials at the embassy had lamented what he called the nos–grudi paradoks—the observation that the Iranian women with whom he was acquainted who possessed decent breasts also had extremely large noses. Conversely, the more delicate and beautiful the nose, the more barren the landscape when it came to bosom. Dovzhenko had dismissed the sentiment as nekulturny—boorish—but was ashamed to note that Maryam Farhad was a beautiful exception to this apparatchik’s imagined paradox. And as boorish as it was, the thought of her body only made him want to see her more.
But they had to be careful.
Now he used the slow pace of the stop-and-go traffic to keep an eye out for any telltale signs that he was being followed. He felt reasonably sure he was clean by the time he turned west on the Hakim but took the time to get on and off the highway twice, one eye on his rearview mirror, the other on the evening traffic. It seemed that every other car was a Porsche, each a testament to Iranian resiliency in the face of Western sanctions.
He’d seen nothing out of the ordinary in his mirror since leaving Valiasr. It took several cars to conduct rolling surveillance, even against an untrained target. And Dovzhenko knew the tricks. He’d be able to smoke out any IRGC goons like cheap cigarettes.
He got off the Hakim Expressway at Pardisan Park, a collection of wooded trails and unfinished gravel pits that served as home to monkeys, rabbits, and strange, small-eared wildcats that Maryam called cute but Dovzhenko thought looked alien. They’d come here once before, never holding hands but walking side by side, thrilled and terrified at the notion of getting caught socializing as an unmarried couple. They spoke of her love for opera, of great books, and Rome, where he had spent time but she had not.
He drove around the park twice now, as if he were lost, then stopped to check his rear tire at the top of a gravel hill with a good 360-degree view.
Clean. Or as clean as one could be in a place where toxic air turned a white shirt yellow inside a month’s time.
Maryam’s apartment was on 2nd, a dead-end street. Dovzhenko parked the Tiba in a business parking lot on 5th, giving him more than one exit, and walked the block and a half. He enjoyed the walk. Recent rains and the near-constant breeze here in the north kept the air cleaner than in other parts of the city.
Dovzhenko let himself inside with his key. The apartment was well appointed like much on the hillside. Garbage washed downhill, so most things were nice here in the north of Tehran. Still in his damp leather jacket, he slumped in a living room chair and lit a cigarette. A driftwood sculpture dominated the center of a glass coffee table. Pictures of seascapes covered the freshly painted walls. He’d thought it odd at first. Maryam didn’t seem to care so much for the water, and then other inconsistencies cropped up over the course of his visits. It had once taken her several minutes to find the closet where she stored extra toilet paper. And then she could not locate the five spice. This rose petal–based seasoning was ubiquitous in Iranian kitchens, and misplacing it was akin to a Russian wife saying she couldn’t remember where she kept her tea.
Maryam had finally admitted that the apartment was not actually hers, but borrowed from a friend who was traveling. Recalling that conversation now made Dovzhenko feel guilty for smoking, and he stubbed out the cigarette in a clay ashtray beside the driftwood centerpiece. He slipped the extinguished cigarette butt into his jacket pocket, a habit drilled into him by his mother before he even went to training. She could have warned him not to smoke instead of teaching him to erase the clues of his presence, his saliva, his particular brand of cigarette—but such were the lessons of a mother who was also a spy.
A metallic rattle drew his attention to the door. His hand drifted to the 9x18 Makarov in his jacket pocket. He sometimes felt a little outgunned by the larger SIG Sauer .45s the IRGC carried, but the little Makarov had been around since the Cold War, was still issued—and he could shoot it with deadly effect.
He relaxed a notch when Maryam came through the door and pushed it shut with her lovely hip. She flipped the deadbolt while she juggled a briefcase and a canvas bag of bread and vegetables. At thirty-seven, she was a year younger than Dovzhenko. She wore a fashionable pantsuit of dark blue, loose enough to hide the swells and curves that he knew were underneath. With most of her body covered, he was immediately drawn to her eyes—and what eyes they were, wide and round and the color of mossy agate—not exactly brown, but not quite green. She reminded him of the American actress Natalia Wood. Dark hair, damp from the rain, peeked from the front of a compulsory headscarf that matched her blue slacks. Ya rusari ya tusari, she often said. A scarf or a beating.
He rose quickly, taking the bags.
“Any trouble?” he asked.
She’d not had to walk far, but the morality police often patrolled the areas around the metro stations and grocers at this time of the evening.
“None,” she said, voice husky, matching the earthy intensity of her eyes. “I used Gershad to get me past the idiots quite unmolested.”
Dovzhenko would have laughed had it not been so tragic. Gershad was an app used to avoid the Gashte Ershad, or morality police. Similar to mobile applications that warned of a radar trap, users of Gershad posted locations where they had seen the chador-clad women and uniformed officers. Icons of bald, bearded morality goons appeared on a map of the city. To Maryam and other women who wished to wear their scarves pushed back an extra inch or enjoy a cup of tea with a male acquaintance, the app was as normal as using a GPS to navigate to an unknown address.
“I found fresh cucumber and tomato—hothouse, this early in the year, but they looked nice.” She kissed him, grabbing him by the belt buckle when he turned for the kitchen.
“What a cold little hand,” he said, quoting her favorite opera.
She scoffed. “You are aware that Mimì dies in La Bohème?”
“I know,” he said. “But I do not feel like being happy today.”
She pulled him closer. “Do you feel like being hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Nor do I,” she said. “Not for hothouse tomatoes, anyway.”
She turned for the bathroom, as she always did when she got home. He joked that she was conditioned to pee as soon as she saw her own front door. When she came out a moment later, she was minus the rusari and her jacket.
“That is much better.” She sighed, tripping out of her shoes as she led him by the hand into the bedroom.
21
Later, much later, Dovzhenko lay with one hand behind his head, the other tracing the small bumps of Maryam’s spine. She sat hunched forward, arms hugging the tangle of sheets that was pu
lled over her knees. Shoulders bare, she was beautifully exposed down to the twin dimples at the small of her back. An engraved pendant was suspended on a silver chain against her breasts. Usually one for quiet banter, she was silent now, which meant she had something important on her mind. Dovzhenko continued to run his fingers along her skin, and gave her time to think.
At length, she leaned against the headboard and lifted the necklace over her head. She held up the pendant, letting it swing to and fro as if to hypnotize him. “Do you know what this is?”
“A flower,” he said, giving a little shrug. He let his hand slide down her side to touch her knee.
“It is an inverted tulip,” she said. “A lily, actually, that grows on the mountains above us. We call it ashk-e-Maryam—Maryam’s tears.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I tell you this because I want you to know me.”
Dovzhenko sat up beside her and put a finger to her lips. “I know enough to be happy.”
“You Russians,” she said. “You are so fond of fairy tales that you shy away from real life.”
“I am being honest,” Dovzhenko said. “I know you well enough.”
“No,” she said, pulling away. “You do not. But I know you . . . what you do.” She rolled to reach for her cigarettes on the side table, flicked open the metal case, and then held out a trembling palm.
He gave her his lighter and then sat back again, eyeing her.
“Okay, then,” he said. “What do I do?”
“Do you think I am stupid?” She picked a fleck of tobacco from her lip and blew a cloud of smoke at his face, clicking the lighter open and shut, open and shut. “Any Russian who stays in Iran for as long as you have is either a scientist or a spy.” She gave him a wan smile. “And you are not quite boring enough to be a scientist.”
“Maryam—” Dovzhenko began to trace a circle on the hollow of her hip. “I am merely an adviser to your government science programs. I am telling you the—”