“Please, I would like to know.”
“Very well,” Darius said. “A woman with the same name as your little girl was found murdered in Teheran. It’s plainly a case of mistaken identity.”
“How old was she?”
Static crackled on the line. “What?” Darius said. “I can’t hear.”
“How old was this Sousan Hovanian?”
“About thirty.”
“Once, I had another Sousan. She was my eldest, a secretary in the National Committee for Health Planning.” The poor connection didn’t mask Maria Hovanian’s struggle against tears. “When the Revolution came, she lost her job. They said to her there was no place for a Christian in the government of the Islamic Republic. Sousan sat doing nothing in the house, except for several hours every day when she went to the cathedral to help us clean, and to pray to the Blessed Mother. After two years, her prayers were answered. The Blessed Mother told Sousan to convert to Islam, things would be better. Sousan became Muslim and went to live on the other side of the river. Ten months later, my other Sousan was born. My Sousan is … would be her sister.”
The woman paused to take a mouthful of air.
“Conversion wasn’t enough for Sousan. She needed to show the people of her new faith that she was as observant as they, that she was more religious than God. She joined the Isfahan Pasdar, and went looking for bad hejabis. One day she went out with them as usual, and vanished. My late husband spoke to the Komiteh more times than I can remember. They didn’t know where Sousan was, they told him, and it would be better if he stopped bothering them. He reported her missing to the police, but we never heard anything from them either.”
“The National Police in Isfahan?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“They have no record for her.”
To talk to a stranger was to dare trouble for an unbeliever. To talk openly to the authorities was to encourage it. Mrs. Hovanian shouted her defiance: “Why would I lie to you?”
Why hadn’t she, thought Darius, when no one had been truthful with her, not even the mother of the prophet she worshiped as God.
“I have good reason to believe the woman found dead in Teheran is your daughter,” he said. “Will you accept a bus ticket and come here to identify her?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Hovanian—”
“I mourned long enough. I won’t begin again.”
“Can you send us her photograph? Even one old picture might be useful.”
“Take them all,” Maria Hovanian said. “I haven’t looked at them since she went. It’s more than I can bear to dream of her.”
When he arrived at headquarters at noon the next day, a package wrapped in newspaper was sitting on his desk. Hamid followed him into the office accompanied by a clean-shaven man of about seventy, whose fine white hair curled over gnarled ears and flounced against his forehead.
“Mr. Garabedian is from Isfahan,” Hamid said. “He won’t let anyone open it but you. It might not be a bad idea to have it X-rayed.”
“I come to Teheran each week to visit my son,” the old man said. “Maria Hovanian told me to see the parcel personally into your hands. The mails—” He made a spitting sound. “They are worse than useless.”
Darius sent him away with a thousand-rial note pressed into his palm. The newspaper was taped around three black-and-white photographs of a pleasant-looking girl with large, liquid eyes. The blurred background was an unrecognizable expanse of beach crowded with bathers in rubber caps. The girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen, was wearing a modest one-piece swimsuit that would have landed her in jail had she shown herself in it since the Revolution. On the back of each photo was written
Sousan Hovanian, summer 1975.
A magnifying glass brought out the girl’s begrudging smile, but not Darius’s conviction that he had seen her face before. The bland optimism of the pretty teenager was long gone from the woman found shot to death in the Shush Avenue dope den. Maria Hovanian could not have provided pictures more ill-suited for identifying a murder victim had she selected some of Sousan in a chador.
The phone rang. A fit of coughing answered Darius’s quick hello. He pulled the receiver from his ear and listened from a distance to Dr. Baghai’s raspy, “Bakhtiar?”
“I was about to call you,” Darius said. “I’ve obtained pictures of the girl I believe was killed with Khalil Pakravan. They’re not the best, but—” Darius thought it out of character for the coroner not to have interrupted to correct him about something. “This doesn’t concern her?”
“No,” Baghai said. “We’ve been able to determine conclusively the cause of death of the other woman, Leila Darwish.”
“Poisoning, as you suspected?”
“It’s not something that can be explained over the phone.” The coughing began again, harsher. “I’m at my place in Jamshidabad, near the old race course at Elizabeth II Boulevard, or whatever it is they call it these days. Come over right away.”
The road was a speedway for fire engines. Darius placed a blue flasher on the dashboard and pulled close behind a tank truck, drafted it to a communal bathhouse off Englehaab Avenue that was engulfed in a cyclone of flame. Screaming sirens bled into the hysteria of women crying their pain to whoever would listen. The women beat their breasts wandering dazed and blind, or crouched on the sidewalk, while those too badly burned or injured lay moaning among rows of corpses. Swarms of children shrieking for their mothers ran through the inconsolable mob. The block was ringed by Revolutionary Guards, Uzis leveled at a crowd of spectators.
As Darius got out of his car, a section of blackened tile crashed down on a young mother cradling a toddler in her lap. The woman toppled over dead, and the child fell on his head and went into convulsions under her body. Darius ran onto the sidewalk. A Guardsman rammed a rifle into his chest, and drove him off the curb. “Stay back,” he commanded.
Darius pushed his ID at the Guardsman, who batted it away with his gunstock. Darius drew back a fist, and was grabbed from behind and wrestled into the gutter.
“Let go,” he yelled. “The baby—”
“You can’t do anything for him.” A firefighter in a coal scuttle hardhat pinned Darius’s arms behind his back. “The Komiteh has given orders to shoot anyone who tries to help.”
“What? Are they out of their minds?”
“The women who were in the baths … many were naked; none are properly dressed. The Guardsmen say it is worse for them to be seen like that than to die in the fire.”
Darius quit struggling. The sirens relented, and brownish smoke lifted anguished sobs through the bathhouse’s torn skylight.
“The building is very old,” the fireman went on, “at least one hundred and fifty years. Not twenty minutes ago, when the baths were filled with women and little children, the floor gave way. Many of the bathers fell through to the furnace used to make the hot water. Few were uninjured. There are scores of them still trapped in the basement. We pulled out eleven women and fourteen children before the Guardsmen forced us out …”
Darius stood out of the way as other firefighters trained hoses on the blaze. The weak flow from the tankers was overmatched by flames feeding on the wood framework of the structure. The bathhouse burned to the level of the street before disintegrating into the basement, where the fire was extinguished in huge cisterns and pools of water.
It was a numbness of the spirit that kept him there. Was there any nation but his that valued the modesty of its women above the sanctity of their lives? What men were so shamed by their obsessions that they had invented a God to quell the instincts that made them human? In the middle of an idea he switched his thoughts to English, distinguishing himself however little from the mob. Another fire engine pulled up, and he turned quickly away, fearful that the face he would see reflected in the polished brass was no different from the rest.
The women’s screams followed him back to his car. Shutting the windows served only to trap the horror inside with him. He continued north spinning the knob on the dead radio, racing the engine to drown it out.
Baghai lived in an apartment house erected in the 1950s, before the new construction code had been drawn. It was of a common design put together around a flimsy skeleton of light steel I-beams, defying earthquakes and gravity on the integrity of the pasty mortar between the bricks. Darius had seen more than one building like it collapse without warning, perhaps nudged by the breeze, the floors sloughing off like pancakes on a tilted platter. Entering one filled him with the same apprehension he experienced each time he belted himself into a plane.
Yet the electricity rarely went out in Jamshidabad, which was several blocks north of the University of Teheran, and Baghai’s elevator most always was in service. Out of habit he took the stairs to the third story, to a dark studio that reeked of the morgue. Darius was undecided whether Baghai brought the smell home in his clothes, or if he had captured it in the medicine bottles covering a table beside the convertible sofa on which he lay on his back like a frail, invalid bird.
“Are you trying to scare me?” Darius asked him. “Or do you really feel as bad as you look?”
“Pull up a chair, and be quiet.”
“You’re not up to this. Call me at the homicide bureau when you’re better. We can talk more comfortably over the phone.”
“But not so privately. My telephone is tapped, and eavesdroppers are everywhere. And there are things that should go no further than you and I.” Baghai pushed himself into a sitting position. “Have you learned enough about Leila Darwish to tell if she had been anywhere near Indochina?”
“That’s a peculiar question.”
“Answer it anyway.”
“The final months of her life were spent in a guerrilla camp in Lebanon with occasional excursions through the Middle East and possibly into Africa. I’ve heard nothing about Indochina. Why do you want to know?”
Baghai’s body was racked with coughing. He pointed to the table, and Darius uncapped a bottle of red fluid that the coroner measured on his tongue and swallowed. Another spasm shook him, and then he lay back, exhausted.
“It was a hunch I had—” The stink of the morgue was on Baghai’s breath. “I sent specimens from her body to the laboratory we usually use for that kind of work. The lab was not qualified to perform the necessary tests, and I had to send them to place after place until I found one that could do what I wanted. By the time the results came back, I was sick, and didn’t learn until this morning that the cause of her death was mycotoxin poisoning.”
Darius looked at him blankly.
“Mycotoxins are a rare strain of poison produced by certain fungi, in this case grass or wheat fungi, which prevent human body cells from manufacturing protein. In sufficient dosage death is the result.”
“How much is sufficient?”
“A very, very, very small amount.”
“How did the mycotoxins get into Leila Darwish’s system?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Well, who would have had enough to prepare a lethal dose?”
“Another mystery,” Baghai said. “I know little about them, and most of that comes from a single article I recalled seeing in a scholarly journal several months ago. The article was written by a pharmacologist from the Poison Unit at the Imam Reza Medical Center at Mashad Medical Sciences University, in Mashad, whose previous fame had rested as coauthor of a study on the effects of mustard gas.”
“He did the lab work for you?”
Baghai coughed into a tissue, and crumpled it under the pillow. “… Some other medical school. He refused to acknowledge my request.”
“And there’s no indication of how the poison was administered?”
“None at all,” Baghai said. “That’s why I asked if the girl had been in Southeast Asia. You see, in the early 1980s, the U.S. Defense Department charged that the Soviets had supplied mycotoxins to the communist forces in Laos, who used them as chemical weapons against the Hmong tribespeople allied with the Americans. People coming into contact with the substance developed headaches, nausea, skin sores, intestinal bleeding, and difficulty in breathing before ultimately dying. Whole villages were wiped out, their populations eradicated. But in the confusion of war, and the remoteness of the area, few reports of mass death reached the attention of the world press. The Hmong, those who survived, called the goo they found spattered on the devastated villages ‘yellow rain.’ Biologists in Canada and Malaysia scoffed at the U.S. claims, asserting the yellow was in reality the droppings of giant Asian honeybees,
Apis dorsata,
which swarm over the countryside on extremely hot nights in mass defecation flights.”
“Mass what … ?”
“The bees’ larvae are sensitive to temperatures above ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. During these flights the bees shed about twenty percent of their body weight, and thus are able to cool themselves and their hives. The skeptics insisted that mycotoxins were next to useless as chemical weaponry because they are hard to work with, and not nearly so effective as, say, various nerve gasses—or mustard gas.”
Baghai reached for a paper cup. Darius carried it into the kitchen alcove and brought it back with a pitcher of ice water.
“Those are skeptics,” Baghai went on. “Among realists are U.S. scientists who obtained samples of yellow rain from leaves and rocks and in water collected near battle sites in Laos. Analysis determined them to be a chemical called T-2, a mycotoxin that is a product of a common mold which often contaminates cereal grains. Later, the Americans obtained a Soviet gas mask which contained a spot of T-2. The conclusion was that the Russians were employing mycotoxins in a test program of new chemical agents in conflict situations.” Baghai’s body shook again, and Darius guided the cup to his mouth. “In this part of the world there has been recent talk of Iraq rebuilding improved stores of chemical agents that were ruined in the war with the Americans. After the combat, you may remember, United Nations inspectors destroyed a gun barrel not quite a meter in diameter and forty meters long that would have enabled the Iraqis to hurl chemical shells as far as northern Israel and eastern Iran. If they are producing mycotoxins in large amounts, millions of people throughout the Middle East are in jeopardy of a hideous death at the whim of the madman Saddam.”