A conversation between two women was bleeding onto the line. Darius screwed the phone against his ear. “And the father?”
“He’s a hardheaded old bird, still an ardent Bolshie. We keep an eye on him, but there’s never anything to report. It’s doubtful he has illusions about Leila. His fantasies are too precious to waste on a daughter.”
From the derelict used-car lot of the motor pool Darius selected a green Paycon, and test-drove it north toward the old Shemiran Road. Several blocks from headquarters traffic detoured around police barricades. He continued onto the sidewalk, and inched through the pedestrians massed on the curb. A patrolman stormed toward him, snorting through a whistle in his teeth. “You can’t get through.” The officer pointed to a sign on the barrier:
ALL BELIEVERS ARE SUMMONED TO TAKE PART IN THE FLAGELLATIONS IN OBSERVANCE OF IMAM HUSSEIN
. “It’s the celebration of Ashura,” he explained.
Darius threw the Paycon into reverse, but was pinned there by the swelling crowd. Children moved through the traffic jam on foot, offering sweets, newspapers, and American cigarettes for sale to a captive clientele. Yesterday, the Ninth of Muharram, legions of the devout had marched along the boulevards wailing, “Yah, Hussein,” in memory of the third imam slain at the seventh-century massacre of Kerbala. On Ashura the men returned to flay their bodies with leather thongs and chains. The Pahlavis had banned the religious parades on the grounds that too often the celebrants mutilated themselves in their passion. Under the ayatollahs they were not only permitted, but encouraged.
Darius heard ritual chanting as broad columns of men dressed all in black appeared whipping themselves over one shoulder and then the other with chains attached to a short pole. They were followed by a man clanging brass cymbals to set the beat for their flagellations, and by more marchers, who pounded their hearts with the flat of their hands, and wore red headbands proclaiming,
IRAN HAS BECOME PALESTINE. HOW CAN MUSLIMS NOT SPEAK UP?
and
ISLAM IS AN ETERNAL TREE. IT NEEDS THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS TO BLOSSOM
. A man in the last row split open his skull with a chain, and collapsed into the djoub as the throng rounded the corner and moved on.
Ashura had drawn even Shemiran’s taghoutis, or unbelievers, and bad hejabis to the parade downtown. The desk at the apartment complex on Saltanatabad was unmanned, guarded by a doorman’s cap. Outside Maryam Lajevardis apartment, expecting more of the Beatles, Darius was treated to a chorus of furniture skating across the floors. Perhaps, he thought, there was more truth to her story than he had admitted. But if Maryam were moving out as she’d said, she wouldn’t be taking the rental stuff with her. He knocked, and the racket stopped. No one answered, though; not even when the doorbell triggered somber chimes, and the unlocked door yielded to his shoulder.
A bookcase had been emptied onto the foyer floor. He went into the living room over leather-clad Persian poets, and back issues of
Today’s Woman,
the monthly magazine of the Iranian Women’s Association, offering tips to the middle-class mothers of large families on how to raise a dowry for their youngest daughters. “Miss Lajevardi,” he called out. “Miss—”
Imported underwear and dark hosiery were strewn inside a bedroom whose walls were a gallery of psychedelic art and British airline posters showing miniskirted girls in bouffant hair, a tardy summons to Swinging Sixties London. A man in a Harris tweed jacket with leather elbow patches stood with his back to the window, shoulders rocking from side to side as though he were trying to slice himself through the Venetian blinds. The gray skin had slipped from his cheeks, and collected in folds under his jaw. Only his eyes and the haggard skin around them were three-dimensional behind lenses in steel frames. A sparse beard was set off by a luxuriant mustache. Darius had the impression that the effort to raise facial hair was so draining that he had been able to pull off the trick only on his narrow upper lip.
“Who are you?” asked Darius.
The man came forward around an unmade bed. After a false start the thin lip went to work behind the mustache. “I might ask the same thing.”
He spoke too rapidly for Darius to place his slight accent. When Darius flashed ID, he took it from him and studied it for twenty seconds. “A friend of Maryam’s,” he said finally.
“Her friend’s name?”
“Zaid Rahgozar.”
“Where is Miss Lajevardi?”
“Maryam was called home.”
“I was told her family didn’t know where to find her.”
“It was on very short notice,” Rahgozar said. “Her relationship with her parents has improved a great deal recently.”
“Is that why you’ve taken it upon yourself to ransack her apartment?”
A smile retracted Rahgozar’s lip under the glossy mustache. “Maryam has found a more affordable place to live, and she asked my help in bringing some things there. I’m going to drive them over, so they will be waiting when she returns.”
Darius booted a yellow dress onto the bed. “Where is her new place?”
“I … I have the address written on a piece of paper.”
“Let me see it, if you don’t mind.”
Rahgozar’s left hand frisked the right side of his body, then the procedure was repeated right on left. Darius unbuttoned his own jacket, and reached into the sweat circle under his arm.
“It’s here somewhere,” Rahgozar said, and sprang before Darius had the gun out.
Darius sidestepped the flying body. He dipped a shoulder, prepared to slam Rahgozar onto the mattress, and opened himself to a sharp elbow to the forehead. The blow had no immediate effect. He was a couple of steps behind the fleeing man, and gaining, when his legs quit suddenly and he stood paralyzed as Rahgozar ran out of the apartment.
Darius staggered to the wall intercom, waited through ten rings for the hat on the security desk to answer. A tingling sensation in his limbs was moving into his torso. The room began to revolve like an amusement park whip. As it picked up speed, it spun him onto the bed. Stretched out on his back with the gun on his chest, he listened for Rahgozar’s return, chewing the inside of his cheeks so he wouldn’t black out.
He had no idea how long he lay there. There was a triptych mirror on the dressing table, but he decided he didn’t want to know how he looked. When his vertigo passed, he went to the refrigerator for ice, which he held to his forehead in a dish towel compress. A search of the apartment turned up nothing that interested him more than would the intimate possessions of any beautiful woman. Either Rahgozar had taken what he came for, or it was an item of little obvious significance.
Finnish vodka hidden in a scuffed armoire saved the morning from utter disaster. The cap had never been unscrewed. Expensive, black market vodka was not a practical source of calories for a woman with nothing to eat. So the bottle was the gift of an admirer, who wanted alcohol on hand when he visited. Some lamb and fresh vegetables would have been faster to warm Maryam Lajevardi’s heart.
One last time he went through the rooms, and then called Ghaffari at the office.
“Put out an alert for a Zaid Rahgozar, about forty,” he said. “One hundred and eighty centimeters, seventy kilos, blue eyes, graying hair, and eyeglasses in metal frames, dressed in a brown tweed sport jacket, black pants. Broadcast it citywide and to the Mazanderan. He’s wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Leila Darwish.”
“You’ve found a new lead?”
“Lost it,” Darius said.
“Are you okay? You sound groggy.”
Darius wrung water from the dish towel. “I bumped my head.”
“Better get yourself together. The Komiteh’s been calling all morning.”
“What do they want—a progress report on the robbery at the Golabis’ that never happened?”
“They want you,” Ghaffari said. “At two. At Bon Yad headquarters.”
A block from the old American embassy, officially renamed the U.S. Den of Espionage, Darius spotted a parking space on Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue. Angling toward the curb, he was extra careful not to drop a wheel in the deep djoub. The djoub was dry, the Teheran water department having decided to flush clean the Ashura parade route by diverting water through the system of underground tunnels that was as old as the city. Takht-e-Jamshid was now Taleqani Avenue, but not even the Komiteh called it that.
The Bon Yad Monkerat mansion was a three-story dwelling of Mediterranean design with stucco walls and a tile roof. Through the side gate Darius glimpsed a patio of broken bricks edged in lank grass, the only green in what had been a large desert garden. A gummy puddle that was dark red at the property line ran to pink over the sidewalk and into the djoub. It was not unheard of, Darius knew, for a sheep to be slaughtered outside the Bon Yad’s door by the family of a prisoner putting up a substitute for the blood of their relative. Darius felt suction against his heel. He glanced back at scarlet tracks that followed him like a guilty conscience inside the gray wall.
Leaded-glass windows projected a mosaic of colored light onto the floor of a corridor crowded with Komitehmen. A teenager swaggering under the weight of his Uzi and the two sets of handcuffs on his belt loop brought Darius upstairs, knocked on double doors, and pushed them open without waiting for a summons inside.
Darius stood in the threshold of an airy office that had been the master bedroom when the merchant family still lived here. Two desks were positioned too close to the walls to take advantage of a pool of strong natural light. The eastern exposure afforded a view of the old embassy used now as a school for Revolutionary Guards. In shadow to his left a man in gray-black camouflage pored through files like those Mehta kept. There was one folder on the other desk, where Bijan sat picking his teeth with the corner of a matchbook.
“It’s good to see you back and feeling yourself.” Bijan was wearing tailored fatigues with razor-sharp pleats that reminded Darius of Fidel Castro in his custom military uniforms thirty years after the institutionalization of the Cuban Revolution. Bijan looked inside the folder. Underneath was a bowl of red pistachio nuts, which he nudged toward Darius. “A moment, and I’ll be with you. Have a seat.”
Gilt scrollwork showed through the whitewash under the high ceilings. Darius looked outside into a kidney-shaped swimming pool clogged with brown leaves. Behind the graffiti-scarred wall of the embassy compound young men in khaki were walking from the large brick building that had been the chancery. Three empty pools and two netless tennis courts, the smokeless stacks of a small power plant, gave the vast complex the look of a country club gone to seed. In a cathedral of tall pines was the marble mansion where the ambassador had lived.
“A beautiful home with a glorious view.” Bijan stared at him over the top of the folder. “Too bad the family who lived here had to leave the country.”
“Maybe they’ll return someday.”
“In their fondest dreams,” Bijan said. “I doubt they will come closer than that. The family were supporters of the Pahlavi dynasty, as loyal as the people who lived in that other fine house with the marble walls.”
“Maybe they’ll come back, too—”
A full-throated scream, not manly, but unmistakably from a man, rose from the lower floors. The harsh acoustics of the bare office reassembled it into a shriek of terror that froze Darius in his chair.
Bijan put down the folder. “Yes?” he asked. “You’re all right?”
“What did you want to see me about?”
“In its own time. We were talking about the family whose home this was. I met them once myself; they were not bad people. In 1953, when that bastard Mossadegh was prime minister and wanted to hand over the government to the Tudeh, Ayatollah Kashani lectured the faithful on their duty to support the shah against him. The family acted in the best interests of the nation. They were very patriotic …”
“Yet they’ve been forced to flee.”
“Politics!” Bijan pronounced the word with a sneer of contempt rather than the polite sarcasm that had been his tone up till now. “As I remember, the first director of SAVAK was a General Bakhtiar, Teymour Bakhtiar. Was he any relation?”
The question was a bludgeon; the denial it begged would put Darius on the defensive. He dodged it with silence.
“No?” Bijan answered for him. “It was just a hunch I had. Still, you must be proud of a clansman achieving a position of such authority under the monarchy.”
“Did you send for me to trace my family tree?”
“Genealogy is a hobby of mine. Until I told him, the boy who brought you here did not know that his great grandfather was Ayatollah Bafqi, who Reza Shah dragged by the beard into the yard of Fatemeh’s shrine because he opposed the 1928 statutes forbidding the wearing of turbans. Bafqi was a saint, and it shows in the boy’s blood. There are other families whose lineage is not as noble.”
Darius had nothing to say to that either. Bijan said, “Narcy?” and the man in the gray-black fatigues went out of the office.
“I have news about your murder case,” Bijan said in a voice devoid of enthusiasm. “Through our network of informants we’ve been able to determine the identity of the girl found slain in Shemiran. Her name is Leila Darwish, from Lahijan. Her father was an Iraqi, who relocated to Khuzestan in the early 1940s. According to our information, the girl had been living in Teheran as a prostitute.”
“By which I take to mean she was a bad hejabi.”
“Try to refrain from speaking as a lawyer. Time is too precious to waste quibbling over semantics. The girl had given herself to dissolution. Whether she sold her body, or yielded it for her own corrupt pleasure is of minor concern.”
Darius cracked open a pistachio between his teeth. The meat inside was rotten. “When can I see your informant?”
“That is impossible. Our people in the street operate under guarantees of confidentiality, the same as yours.”
“I need to know where he obtained his facts.”
“There is little I can’t tell you myself. The informant made Leila Darwish’s acquaintance in north Teheran, and briefly they were sexually involved. When she took her things from his apartment, she didn’t tell him where she was going. He learned of her death by seeing her picture in the newspapers. You’ve been trying to connect the killing to the murders of a couple of drug peddlers near the railway station; but all that the victims have in common is they were taghoutis not deserving the honor of a homicide investigation.”