The wheels ran over a bump, bloodying his nose against his knee. The ambulance was still rocking on its springs when he was dragged outside with the blanket bunched around his head and brought along a gravel path. A cat in a bag, he thought, would know the feeling. The voice he had heard before said, “You’re coming to steps now.” Raising his foot for them, he would have pitched headlong down the flight had someone not pulled him back by the shoulders.
He descended into a haze of camphor and turpentine. A door opened on dry hinges, and he was thrown onto a bare mattress and chained to a pipe against the wall. Left alone on his knees, he wore himself out trying to pull down the building. By tossing his head like a horse he was able to shake off the blanket. The room was in darkness; he’d gained nothing but a twinge in his neck and a view of a strip of dim light beneath the door. His eyes stung with foul, anxious sweat. Voices penetrating the low ceiling were lost to him when a refrigerator chugged loudly into its cooling cycle.
Lacking alcohol, he wanted sleep—any means of blanking his fear. Measured breaths stilled the hammering in his chest, but not the wild thoughts that made a kidnapper of everyone he knew. His enemies were too numerous to sort out, delineated unclearly from those few of his acquaintances he believed to be friends. He shut his eyes to slow the rush of ideas. When he opened them seconds later, it was like waking from a long nap.
A man was paused several steps inside the room. He was about twenty-five, wearing a broad-billed infantryman’s cap and leather sandals. Loose-fitting corduroy trousers were hitched around his pinched waist with a web belt. The automatic rifle in his hands was loaded with the straight clip of an American M-16. He tugged a cord overhead, and Darius bowed his head in the glare of an unshaded bulb.
“Do you recognize me?” he asked, positioning himself directly under the light.
“No.”
“That’s because you’re not looking closely.” The muzzle of the M-16 levered Darius’s chin into the glare. “Take a good look.”
Darius squinted at gray eyes in grayer shadow under the soiled cap, smooth features that would not be improved by the character beginning to shape them.
“I am Saeed Djalilian, the son of Daoud Djalilian. Do you see his face in mine?”
What Darius saw was the kind of anger he associated with the relatives of criminals he had been responsible for putting away, so volatile he equated it with possession of a dangerous weapon.
“You knew him as Dave Djalilian. The same Dave Djalilian whose memory you profaned by working for the Komiteh.”
The name might have been taken from another man’s past. The threat of the M-16 alone was personal.
Two men came quietly inside. One of them, still wearing his paramedic’s jacket, wrapped a heavy arm around Djalilian, who sank under its weight. The other, ten years older, thirty-five kilos lighter, was a wiry man of about fifty whose cheeks were cloaked in a yellow beard. Djalilian stared at him with angry eyes, which were turned away by his soft gaze. Soft, Darius thought, but sure, and infinitely unyielding. He recognized those eyes, and now the face behind the flowing beard, but took no comfort from familiarity. As a young lawyer in Sazeman Atelaat Va Amniat Keshvar, the State Organization for Security and Intelligence, SAVAK, he had been assigned to the Special Intelligence Bureau under the directorship of Colonel Massoud Ashfar, who for the slightest lapse in judgment, and sometimes for none at all, had turned that penetrating gaze on him. Ashfar had fled as power dwindled from the shah, and was rumored to have sold state secrets to finance his getaway. Incredibly, here he was, having aged little over the years, except that his beard, which in the old days was already long and gray, was now the ragged mask of a sage.
“Saeed,” Ashfar said, “this is not the way we treat a guest. Would you be so kind as to bring food and something to drink? Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar must be hungry after all he has been through today.”
Djalilian didn’t move. The man in the paramedic’s jacket released him with a shove that sent him stumbling through the door.
“Be patient with Saeed,” Ashfar said to Darius. “He is impulsive, and allows emotion too often to interfere with doing his job.”
Darius scraped his chain against the pipe. “I have no patience.”
“What better opportunity to acquire some?” Ashfar put out his hand toward the heavyset man. “You remember Baraheni.”
Darius had said, “No,” when the name came to him. Khosrow Baraheni had been a ranking interrogator in SAVAK’s Anti-Sabotage Committee headquartered on Farrokhi Alley, which was chartered to launch investigations into the activities of anyone it desired without seeking the approval of the courts. Baraheni was a SAVAK legend, a Galileo among torturers, who had turned his particular world upside down when he discovered that by applying a samovar to the small of the back and heating the water inside to the boiling point, he could reduce the most taciturn of men to a babbling font of information.
“You would be advised to be cautious in Saeed’s company,” Baraheni said suddenly. Trained as a listener, Baraheni rarely had anything to say in the past. “He doesn’t like you.”
“Because of his father?” Darius addressed the question to Ashfar. Someone else always had answered for Baraheni, who in the intervening years at least had acquired the use of language and no longer seemed to go around drenched in the blood of his victims. “I never heard of him.”
“He was an obscure cipher clerk on the Iraq desk, who may have brushed past you once or twice in the halls,” Ashfar said. “The new regime was still looking for the keys to the toilets on Farrokhi when he was bringing the fanatics his codebooks. They put him in Evin, and hanged him during the first wave of executions in seventy-nine. The kid has built him into a great hero; and you, for having the temerity to survive, as a devil. We told him to be gentle with you that time in Shemiran, but he isn’t with us to be gentle. It’s going to take a while for you to get to know and like each other.”
“What do you want?” Darius asked.
Ashfar furrowed his brow to suggest that he was considering every nuance of a deceptively complex question. “We want you, Darius. We want you.”
Darius shook his head.
“You haven’t heard us out,” Ashfar said.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“He’s living too well.” Baraheni’s voice was the rumble of a slow freight. “He’s a big shot in the National Police, in bed with the Komiteh on the side. Why give up everything that goes with that just to help the people?”
“You’re judging him too harshly. Darius Bakhtiar is a man of high moral conviction who would never place his selfish interests ahead of those of the nation.” Ashfar put up a boot on the mattress. Darius smelled dog excrement on the heel. “… Or his former comrades.”
“Aren’t you curious about us?” he asked Darius. “What has it been—it must be close to fifteen years since we’ve spoken.”
“We made it out of Teheran just in time,” Baraheni cut in. “Another twelve hours, and the fanatics would have had us swinging from the gallows with Saeed’s old man. For months we lived like animals, till we expropriated the funds to get started in Europe. Since then we’ve stayed in London, twice in Germany, all over Switzerland and Belgium. Last year we came to France.”
“We’re settled in a little suburb of Paris,” Ashfar said. “Wonderful place. Great wine cheap as water, terrific food, more blondes than you could have in a lifetime.”
“Too bad you didn’t leave Iran, too,” Baraheni said.
“He was in prison. You remember—that sorry business about Farmayan.”
A muscle twitched in Baraheni’s cheek, drawing a sneer on that side of his face.
“But what is best about Paris,” Ashfar went on, “is the community of loyal countrymen that has settled there around the royal family. Quality people—the senior commanders of the Army Aviation Service Group, two thirds of the air force generals from the Soviet and Turkish borders. It would warm your heart to see how many of our compatriots have established themselves comfortably in Europe. And every last one of them doing whatever is in his power to restore Crown Prince Reza to the throne as head of a modern, incorruptible constitutional monarchy. That’s why we’ve come back, to lay the groundwork for his return.”
Where in years gone by Ashfar had the relief of pain as a prime selling point, reduced circumstances, thought Darius, had forced him to support his positions with argument before announcing his terms. But even without the authority of government backing he remained imposing, exuding the threat of bodily harm as other men gave off a bad odor.
“You’ll let me know when the baby shah is ready to leave France,” Darius said. “After looting the treasury, I doubt the Pahlavis have any great desire to see Iran again.”
Ashfar laughed. Baraheni joined in, covering his mouth with a massive hand, the slow freight rumbling through a tunnel.
“Did I say something funny?” asked Darius.
“It’s quite sad, actually.” Ashfar held on to a frozen, joyless smile. “They told us the masses were waiting to rise up against the fanatics and were hungry for leaders to organize them, that they would forget the past and welcome us with open arms. It hasn’t been like that. Your friends in the Komiteh, they would be glad to have us. But they are the only ones.”
Djalilian came in with bowls of the thin stew called abgusht and naan, oval pancake-shaped bread, and set the tray down at the edge of the mattress. Ashfar unscrewed the lid from a plain glass jar, and poured an inch of clear liquid into each of four tumblers. Darius pulled his head away when Ashfar brought a glass to his lips.
“Did you snatch the right man? The Darius Bakhtiar I used to know never refused a drink.”
“Maybe bootleg isn’t good enough for him,” Baraheni said.
“I think it’s our company he finds distasteful. I think he would rather be someplace else.” Ashfar emptied Darius’s glass into his own. “Well, no one is forcing him to stay against his will.”
Baraheni inserted a key into the handcuffs. Darius’s numb hands swung around his hips, and he looked at them as if he had never seen them before. His eyes shifted toward the open door, and back to Ashfar, whose gaze could have burned through the steel shackles. He estimated the chances at close to even that he could be up the stairs before the others were on their feet or drew guns—even though that was what they were expecting him to do. The refrigerator went off. He heard footsteps on the upper floor, and he sat down and tasted the stew.
“Saeed,” Ashfar said, “apologize to Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar for hurting him in Shemiran and treating him so shabbily today.”
Djalilian’s spoon went dead in the air. He stuffed his face with bread, and gestured that he couldn’t talk with his mouth full.
“You have to.”
Baraheni pinched Djalilian’s cheek in mock affection, squeezing pasty saliva onto the mattress.
“… Sorry,” Djalilian mumbled, and rubbed color into a white streak alongside his lips after Baraheni let go.
“Saeed’s a good boy,” Ashfar said to Darius. “A hard worker. Almost as hard as you were at his age. But it’s less than two years since he fled west; he still has rough edges. That’s why we tolerate his excesses, why we’ve been willing to tolerate yours. We don’t want much—just some help in getting back home.”
“I don’t work for the passport office. You can leave the way you came in.”
“That’s a fact,” Ashfar said. “But, frankly, we arrived in Iran with limited funds, and those are all but gone. What fun will there be in returning to Paris to live in poverty?”
Darius was about to shake his head again, when Baraheni pressed his cheeks between meaty hands and tilted his face at Ashfar. Darius heard bones creak, felt his skull compress …
“In the six weeks we’ve been back,” Ashfar said, “we’ve found out that Afghani heroin is being brought regularly into Iran.”
“Where did you get your information?”
“Listen.” Baraheni squashed Darius’s mouth shut. “He’s telling you.”
Ashfar swilled vodka. “The fanatics have a low opinion of narcotics smuggling, and enjoy nothing so much as stringing up drug traders side by side in public places. They regard their part in this filthy business as doing the work of God, as they describe any criminal enterprise that serves their purposes. None of the drugs remain in Iran. They’re destined for transshipment to North America, where they can be applied to subverting the will of the despicable Great Satan, while bringing in badly needed hard currency for the Islamic Republic. The most recent shipment, as you know, has been diverted. It is our patriotic duty to retrieve it, and spoil the plans of the fanatics.”
“… And save the Americans from the consequence of their illicit appetites,” Baraheni said.
“Good point.”
“How did you learn about the heroin?” Darius asked.
“You mean, how did we know you were working to find it?” Ashfar said. “Have you forgotten the old days, what good spies we were? You were one of the primary contacts we wanted to establish in Teheran. Before we made approaches, however, we had to learn your current thinking. So we started following you around. Every time the heroin changed hands, sooner or later you turned up. That morning on Saltanatabad Avenue when the girl was found slain, you were too busy with the corpse, or else you might have noticed Saeed and myself among the crowd of spectators. Or maybe not, as we had on chadors. When you connected the heroin so quickly to Najafi, Baraheni suggested you must be working with the smugglers. I had to remind him that you’re a policeman trying to run down the drugs for legitimate ends, the same as we.” Ashfar smiled; but not Djalilian, nor Baraheni, who shifted his grip to Darius’s arms.
“Saeed and another friend were supposed to bring you here for a talk—not to beat you and leave you bleeding in the street because some people came by and frightened them off.”
Knowing the answer, asking because it was expected of him and he was afraid to deviate from Ashfar’s script, which so far as he could tell called for him to remain alive at least into the foreseeable future, Darius said, “What are you proposing?”
“Help us to put our hands on the drugs, and we’ll bring you out of Iran with us.”