“It’s almost a week since I’ve been with Nahid. The Park is the only place where we … where she feels safe seeing me.”
Darius angled away from the sidewalk. The door swung in against Ghaffari’s knee.
“Ow, what are you doing?”
“Didn’t you hear what I told Sharera? I gave her your word,
my
word, you’d quit.”
“It’s the last time, I swear,” Ghaffari pleaded. “Just to tell Nahid good-bye. I can’t leave her waiting in the lobby. She’ll worry, she’ll get into big trouble. The hotel will report her.”
“They’ll report her to us.”
Darius sped into traffic, which pulled them away from the hotel. Sulking, Ghaffari opened the flapping door wide, and then slammed it shut. The bodies were gone from the streets around the morgue. Darius was reminded of a theater that had put on a late show to accommodate crowds for a surprise hit.
A new odor stood out from the chemical stew of the autopsy room, a smoky essence that was the flavor of the day. The intern Darius had seen weeping on the loading dock, a Dr. Kashfi, looked up at the detectives from a slab where a boy about four years old lay with his internal organs exposed to bright light like an intimate secret betrayed. Humming tunelessly, he unlocked a refrigerator unit, and wheeled out a steel gurney. “This is her,” he said, and went back to the slab.
The photo of Sousan Hovanian fluttered to the tile floor as Darius lifted a green sheet. The body was shriveled and black. A point of bone protruded from a disintegrating chin where the girl’s face had begun to slough off the skull. One of her breasts was as firm, as well shaped, as … inviting, he thought, as in life. The other was putrid flesh eaten around to the ribs by maggots.
“How was this allowed to happen?” he demanded.
Kashfi hunched lower over the child’s body, and buried his head in the Y-shaped incision. “There have been power outages all summer,” he said, and “there’s no money for gas for the emergency generator. There’s nothing we can do for the bodies we don’t get to right away, but hope they don’t spoil before the electricity comes back on. It’s why I’m working late tonight.”
“Let me see the laboratory report on Leila Darwish,” Darius said, “and everything you have on this girl.”
Kashfi wiped his hands on his gown. He went into the coroner’s office, came back quickly with two folders.
The newest entry in the Darwish file was a letter from a pathologist at a clinical testing lab. Darius had a hard time penetrating the medicalese, which seemed to say that although the doctors could not state with one hundred percent certainty that Leila Darwish had succumbed to mycotoxin poisoning because they never had encountered a case before, the evidence indicated to their satisfaction that that was what had killed her. As Darius looked inside the other file, Ghaffari burped into his cupped hand.
“Get some air,” Darius told him. “You’re green.”
“Blue,” Ghaffari said. “What have you got there?”
“The autopsy report on Khalil Pakravan’s girlfriend.” Darius pulled out a color Polaroid. “When was this picture taken?” he asked Kashfi. “I’ve never seen it.”
“I shot it myself,” the young doctor said proudly. “I’m photographing every cadaver as they come in, until the power problem is rectified.”
Darius put the photos from Isfahan on the slab beside the Polaroid. The Shush Avenue victim appeared years younger than in her picture, as though it were the parts of her face weakened by the process of aging that had been the first to decompose. From the contour of the head, the general configuration of features, a pronounced widow’s peak on the low hairline, and the European roundness of shallow-set eyes, he was convinced the dead girl was Sousan Hovanian.
“What do you think?”
Ghaffari nodded grimly. “She’s the missing piece in the puzzle, the link between Leila Darwish and her killer, and what became of the heroin.”
Darius switched off the light over the body, and Kashfi returned it to the refrigerator unit.
“This is the break we needed,” Ghaffari said. “It’s just a matter of time until the pieces fall into place.”
Darius shook his head.
“No?” Ghaffari said. “She’s not?”
“Nothing falls into place unless we put it there. And I don’t see our next move.”
S
LEEPERS WERE AVAILABLE BY
reservation only on the night flier to Mashad. Darius purchased a second-class seat, and entered a stifling compartment occupied by a mullah in a black turban. To while away the fifteen-hour ride to Iran’s second holiest city, nine hundred kilometers northeast of Teheran, he had brought along the back issue of the
Journal of the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology
featuring an article by Professor Manuchehr Karrubi on “New Developments in the Application of Mycotoxins for the Suppression of the Immune System in Human Organ Transplants.” As the station began to sneak away from them, the mullah opened a greasy paper bag of nuts and raisins, and offered some to Darius.
“You are possibly European?” he asked.
Darius nudged the bag back toward its owner. “What makes you say that?”
“The way you are dressed, and your taste in literature.” The mullah showed Darius his own reading, the
Epic of the Kings,
by the tenth-century Persian poet Firdowsi. “It is not unusual to see foreign tourists at this time of year. Unbelievers are not encouraged at Imam Reza’s shrine in early summer, and what other reason can there be to make such a long, hot journey?”
While Darius read, the mullah dozed until the evening call to prayer, when he dropped to his knees facing the rear of the train and, at an oblique angle beyond that, Mecca. After prayers, dinner was announced. Darius waited till most of the passengers had returned to their compartments before going to the dining car. The menu was limited to cello khoresh, lamb on a bed of rice topped with a spicy vegetable-and-meat sauce flavored with walnuts. Though he was hungry, he kept walking to the lavatory at the end of the car. Inside his jacket was a rare bottle of Caviar brand vodka that he had found hidden among his old clothes when he moved. Caviar brand was a light Iranian vodka that had sold for about three dollars a fifth before the Revolution shuttered the distillery, and which had inflated in cost at a rate exceeded only by black market dollars. He drank standing over the toilet, which was stopped up with an empty pint bottle of bootleg not good enough to piss Caviar onto, although that was what he did.
At ten, two hours late, the train pulled into the station in the northeast corner of Mashad. Sharing his taxi downtown was the mullah from his compartment, who would not think of allowing him to his destination without a glimpse of the golden dome and turquoise blue cupola of the shrine of Imam Reza that was the focal point of the summer pilgrimages.
The mullah left the cab at the old bazaar and disappeared in a sea of weathered Mongol faces, of men in the baggy, pajamalike pants of central Asia and Afghanistan, and women wearing blue chadors. Darius instructed the driver to take him east from the city. The Imam Reza Medical Center was housed in a grimy brick building in the center of a grimy brick complex that had been a large factory. Darius left the cab along the access road, and proceeded on foot to a double chain link fence topped with concertina wire. In a corner of a flat expanse of land in which nothing grew a backhoe scooped out the pebbly soil and crafted it into low mounds. Darius watched as the bucket of the backhoe carried the remains of several lambs and young goats to an open trench perpendicular to the fence. None of the animals appeared healthy. Many were deformed, if not mutants, the fur discolored and the raw flesh blistered, in some cases eaten through to the bone. A pink umbrella shielded the operator of the backhoe from the sun. He was a totally bald man, without eyebrows, lashes, or hair anywhere on his pitted cheeks, and he wore a surgical mask over his mouth and nose. As he pulled away from the fence, he squinted at Darius with a lone, milky eye.
Darius cut back through a wooded area to the main entrance of the medical center, and showed his police identification to a guard. He was brought into the lobby and told to take a seat and wait. He waited—ten minutes in alert anticipation, and after that lost in thought, a wide-eyed sleep from which he was summoned when his name was called by a red-haired young man who brought him to the elevator. His escort was slim, in his late twenties or early thirties. He was wearing a lab coat speckled with scorch marks either from a caustic chemical, or the harsh TIR cigarettes that he smoked furiously, racing to consume as many as he could before they were outlawed as the health hazard they obviously were.
A black skull and crossbones was stenciled on the wall of the top-story corridor through which cool air was propelled by a series of hissing vents. Skylights angling upward from the dark ceiling allowed dusty light into an otherwise modern laboratory. The red-haired man flicked a fingernail against a beaker on a centrifuge, and then started the machine by whacking it. The noise it made, or his unhurried manner, made Darius’s skull throb where the stitches had been. “I don’t have all day,” he said. “Tell Dr. Karrubi I’m here.”
“Í am Dr. Karrubi.”
He turned up the flame under an alembic, then brought Darius into a windowless office cooled by floor fans in three corners, and leaned against the edge of his desk. On the walls, among framed degrees from German universities, was a photo of the Imam in his student days at Qom glowering at the camera. “What information have you come for all this way that could not be obtained from competent sources in Teheran?” he asked.
“It concerns the death of a woman named Leila Darwish.”
Karrubi, apparently uninterested, was looking above Darius’s head. Darius turned around and saw more diplomas, more pictures of the Imam, whose hooded eyes were fixed on the young pharmacologist.
“She was found in a northern suburb of the capital. The coroner’s office sent specimens from her organs to the poison unit for a determination of the cause of death.”
“The particular case eludes me,” Karrubi said. “We are swamped with work from medical examiners all over the country.”
“How many cases of mycotoxin poisoning do you see?”
“As I said, I don’t recall—”
“Mycotoxins are your specialization. How can you not remember someone dying like that on the streets?”
“I am just a simple researcher,” Karrubi said. “There is not that much that I know about the subject.”
“Such modesty is an admirable trait, but somewhat out of character,” Darius said. “I’ve seen your article in the
Journal of the Iranian Research Organization,
and just several months ago you were clamoring for recognition of the breakthroughs you’ve made. I doubt anyone in the world knows as much as you.”
Karrubi took cigarettes from his lab coat and lay them on his desk. He lit a fresh one from a five-centimeter butt.
“I need to find out how Leila Darwish ingested the poison that killed her,” Darius said. “From my understanding of the article, mycotoxins are rare in nature.”
“I can’t answer.”
“You must have some hypothesis.”
“I prefer not to make guesses”
“Not even educated ones? It would be negligent of you to have no theory to explain the death of this woman. If people are succumbing to mycotoxin poisoning in Teheran, the implications are grave.”
“It’s outside my purview. Our experimentation is limited to the possible uses of mycotoxins in overcoming autoimmune rejection of transplanted organs.” A gray worm of ash dropped onto Karrubi’s lap. He whisked it to the floor, and crushed its glowing tail under his heel. “Since you lack a theory, consider that she ate bad mushrooms. That is the most common manner of death from mycotoxins.”
“The poison that killed Leila Darwish was from the same strain of wheat or grass fungus utilized by some countries in chemical weapons. Among the tissue specimens sent to you were sections of skin marred by severe burns and rashes. The woman did not receive those injuries rubbing up against a poisonous mushroom.”
“May I say politely that I do not know what you are getting at. Or, to be more accurate, that you don’t. We are in the business of medical research,” Karrubi said, “of learning to save lives, not to study more horrible ways of taking them.”
“Perhaps as a by-product of your experimentation such discoveries are being made.”
“Definitely not. The singular application of the knowledge obtained here is a reduction of suffering.”
“Mycotoxins killed that girl,” Darius said.
“If you are interested in the murderous uses of chemical agents, I would advise you to focus your investigation on the criminal scientists of the Zionist regime of Baghdad. It is a well-known fact that they have been engaged in that kind of research for years.”
“The girl was never to Iraq.”
Karrubi took a step away from the desk. “The laboratory that performed the analysis for you will be pleased to provide additional information, I am sure,” he said. “There is nothing left for us to discuss.”
“Doctor Karrubi—” Darius was out of his seat, toe to toe with the pharmacologist. “You’re not a suspect in this homicide, yet you’ve evaded my questions as if you were. Why is that?”
Karrubi patted his pockets, then reached down for his cigarettes. “I won’t stand for being badgered. You have no jurisdiction in Mashad. Leave now, or I will call the guards to have you removed.”
But the choice was not Darius’s to make. Men in uniform burst into the office and dragged him through the lab in a brawny pas de deux in which his toes scarcely brushed the floor, one of the guards hustling him along the hissing corridor while the other went ahead opening fire doors. The freight elevator was waiting to catch him. The operator, a worn man in a vested suit with white broadcloth showing through the elbows, and alligator skin showing through that, brought him to the basement tilting his nose as though he were another load of garbage.
Somewhere he’d lost his sunglasses. He went outside squinting against the noonday glare. His stomach was grumbling about the meals he had missed since leaving Teheran. There was no place to eat around the campus, no place where
he
would eat. A city whose wealth was imported in the pocketbooks of religious pilgrims could not be recommended for its cuisine.