“Right until the end,” he said, “the only thing Rahgozar wanted to talk about was the mycotoxins. He never mentioned them to you?”
“Till the end of what?”
Here, he suspected, a stone face could be put to some advantage, and he fashioned it into a laser stare. “Didn’t I say? His life, Miss Lajevardi. The Mashad Komiteh shot him while we talked.”
She laughed in his new face, leaned so close that he could taste her hungry, morning breath. “Is that right?” she said. “You’re not much of a psychologist if that’s the best you can come up with to frighten me into telling you these strange things you want to hear. Zaid is perfectly well.”
“Aren’t you taking a lot for granted, when you haven’t heard from him in forty-eight hours? He phoned twice each day before.”
“You were monitoring his calls,” she said. “It proves you’ve arrested him on some fantastic charge, and he’s in one of your awful jails.”
“Does it?”
She had begun to cry. Powerful sobs shook her and forced out ribbons of moisture that were not so much for Rahgozar, he guessed, as for herself. When he held out a napkin to wipe her cheeks, she twisted away. The dishrag she used instead was not clean, and left yellow streaks from fruit preserves around her eyes.
She stopped to say, “I wouldn’t believe anything you told me.” Then she cried some more until she was drained of tears, becalmed the way a blast of frigid air sometimes leaves a drunk momentarily sober, but, with a red running nose and chattering teeth, looking worse than ever. “I knew something terrible had happened,” she said, still for her own benefit. “He wouldn’t have let me worry—Why did they have to kill him?”
“The Guardsmen claim he was trying to escape.”
“Where could he have run? You were there. You let it happen.”
He didn’t know how to answer. He pulled out his notepad and searched for an empty page. In her agitation she already had forgotten her questions.
“You’re mad to think he was involved in selling drugs.” Maryam looked around the squalid kitchen, and he expected to hear sobs again. “What did he need big money for? To keep me in such luxury? It was his diplomatic work that brought him to Mashad. Did you talk to the Russians? Did you ask
them
what he was doing there?”
“They refused to comment,” he said, although at that point it remained only his assumption that they would. “It’s an option not available to you. I must ask why he made such frequent and regular calls. What was he reporting?”
“His love,” she said defiantly. “Don’t you phone your wife every day when you’re apart?”
Darius returned the notebook to his pocket. “Do you mind if I look around the house while we talk?”
“And if I do?”
He stood on a chair and brought down plain water glasses and cheap stoneware table settings from the cabinets. As he swept the grime from the shelves, dustballs clung to his cuff and Maryam Lajevardi seized his arm and whisked them away in embarrassment, which struck him as the first honest emotion she had demonstrated.
He lifted a corner of the sofray in the living room along with the worn carpet. Underneath, the thick dust was like a feathery rug on the scuffed floor.
“You’ve uncovered my dirty secret,” she said. “It’s damning evidence.”
He checked under every corner of the carpeting, patrolled the center for telltale lumps. The Beatles rattled the crockery as the power surged, and as he went to shut off the music the chorus came around again and he remembered the name of the song: “The Fool on the Hill.”
He raised the bedroom blinds and looked out at the print shop through a break in the garden wall. A workman was steering a fork lift under a wooden skid piled with glossy blue booklets, the Imam’s treatise on
Fighting the Carnal Self; or: Man’s Major Crusade.
Maryam opened her bureau, and he poked through colorful garments of rayon and light cotton. The drawer below contained underwear and a black tangle of pantyhose and stockings. Women caught on the streets with bare ankles were in every bit as much trouble as those wearing makeup; all females over the age of nine kept a large supply of hosiery.
“He never talked to me about his work,” Maryam volunteered after Darius had given up on getting anything from her. “Too much of the time it called him out of Teheran. We spoke twice each day by phone. Does that tell you what you want to know?”
Darius peeled back the covers from a futon clad in yellow corduroy, and felt around the cushion while Maryam hovered over his shoulder, on guard for more dust. “I want to talk to the friends who introduced you,” he said.
“Leave them out of this.”
“Five people have been brutally murdered, among them a Russian envoy who happened to be your boyfriend. I’m not concerned with preserving your privacy, or anyone else’s.”
She brought a man’s handkerchief to her cheek, but there were no tears to dry. “I wasn’t telling the truth,” she said. “I have no friends in Teheran.”
“How, then, did you meet?”
“I—It was in a tea shop on Baharestan Square. I’d gone there for lunch, and didn’t have … had left my money at home, and he very graciously offered to pay for me. He’s like that, a kind and generous man. I was lonely in Teheran, almost as lonely as he. It was natural that we should have become close.”
“You’re being untruthful now,” Darius told her. “I need to see identification.”
She took out a wallet from the chador. Aside from several postage stamps, the clear plastic sleeves were empty, as was the billfold. “Is there a law requiring that I carry any?”
“Give me the names of two relatives who can verify your story about coming to Teheran,” he said.
“I refuse. It’s preferable to go to jail than have my family find out I’m here and be pressured to return to them.”
“Is it?”
Maryam Lajevardi nodded grimly.
She had called his bluff, showed a weak hand, and was prepared to pay the price with her freedom. More than prepared, thought Darius, she demanded it. But if her strategy called for the police to guarantee her safety now that Rahgozar was gone, she was unaware that she would be taken away by Revolutionary Guards at the first opportunity and lodged in a Komiteh prison. Was Maryam so naive that she believed she could charm them, too, or was she looking for a permanent, perhaps painless way out of a hopeless situation? He recognized a reversal in their roles in which he had gone from being her prosecutor to her protector. To take her into custody would make him her prisoner.
Maryam held her wrists together, and extended them toward him. “Well, aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“As of now, there is nothing to charge you with, nothing worth the paperwork. I must insist, however, that you remain here. You have groceries for several days, you’ll be all right.” He gave her his card. “When you feel like talking, call me.”
“I’ll be bored,” she said. “How many times can I listen to one old tape?”
The curtains blew inside the room. Darius stuck his head out the window into a dust storm that had sailed several of the blue pamphlets from the printers into the yard. He leaned over the sill for one. “Here’s something for you to read,” he said. “We’ll talk soon. Good-bye.”
Workmen were draping a silken banner over the street. As he drove underneath, the wind tore it down and he rolled over the shiny material.
He
would talk. Maryam would say nothing, lie, do what she had to to tangle the frayed skein of her life, allow the Komiteh to silence her rather than give up her precious secrets.
Up ahead traffic was funneled into a single lane. An ambulance was parked in the narrow street with the right wheels on the sidewalk, and attendants were kneeling beside two figures wrapped in blankets.
His head began to hurt. He locked his door, placed a gun in his lap as he squeezed past a white Paycon and a Volkswagen that had collided head-on and locked bumpers. The attendants didn’t look up at him, too busy ministering to the motorists in the street. Relief turned to disappointment as he put the gun away. Where were Ashfar and Baraheni now that he needed to talk?
Mehta had come up from his crypt in the sub-basement with some Padkis vodka, a prerevolutionary label, which, while not up to the standard of Caviar brand, was smoother than Caviar, and had its partisans. He filled three glasses, pushed one across Darius’s desk, and gave the other to Hamid. “Where’s Mansur?” he asked. “He won’t forgive us for not waiting.”
Hamid studied the sparkle of sunlight strained through unwashed windows in his glass. “He leaves every day at one, and that’s the last we see of him.”
“Hasn’t anyone reminded him his job comes ahead of his women?” Darius said.
Mehta tasted the vodka, then restored the missing centimeter to his drink. “Only this does.”
Darius sipped, and his frown fell apart. “Where did you find this stuff? Padkis went the way of the dodo in seventy-nine.”
“It was the day the Revolutionary Guards broke into the cellars of the International Hotel,” Mehta said. “A couple of cases were mixed in down there with several million rials’ worth of the finest French wines. The fanatics hauled all of it to a parking lot where they could make a big show of running bulldozers over everything. The heavy equipment operators were late, and I was one of the police who volunteered to guard the site till they arrived. I’ve been guarding the Padkis ever since.” He swallowed more, and again carefully replaced the vodka to the lip of the glass. “A pity it’s not breeding stock,” he said, and put an unopened bottle on the desk along with a manila folder. “Here’s the file you wanted.”
“What file?” On his own Darius looked for the answer in his half-empty glass.
“Maryam Lajevardis.”
“Two weeks ago there was nothing on her.”
“The original description,” Mehta said, “was of a blonde girl possibly from the Caspian, possibly a runaway. No one like that had been reported missing or was wanted anywhere, and she seemed too young to have a record. While you were away, I ran her name through the cards in all categories, both as victim and suspect. You didn’t say she’d been a juvenile delinquent.”
“I didn’t know. What kind of trouble?”
Mehta riffled the yellowing pages inside the folder. “In March of eighty-three, when she was thirteen years old, she was picked up for tossing acid at a woman she claimed was dressed provocatively and wearing makeup, a woman who turned out to be the wife of a visiting Romanian businessman.”
“I don’t remember the incident. It would have been in the newspapers if a European had been mutilated.”
“As it turned out,” Mehta said, “she missed. The businessman’s wife became hysterical, and had to be taken to a psychiatric hospital and left for hours in a room with mirrored walls before she accepted that she had not been injured. Since no real harm was done, the Lajevardi girl was let off with a reprimand. Next month, she pulled the same stunt again.”
“Who was the victim this time?”
“A forty-three-year-old resident of Hamadan, who had come to Teheran on a shopping expedition and was going along Vali-e-Asr Avenue when she was assaulted at the Pesian intersection. She snatched away the bottle while the girl was prying the cork, and held her for the arresting officer. The Komiteh took her off our hands.”
“Any harm done?” asked Darius.
“To Maryam Lajevardi only. Her right leg was burned around the knee.”
“And after that?”
“There are only the two entries,” Mehta said. “Presumably, the Komiteh told her to cut it out before she got into real trouble, and she did.”
Between the incident reports Darius discovered a photo of a girl with shaggy yellow hair he would have guessed was no more than ten or eleven, her rage projected from tight, furious features that would blossom into Maryam Lajevardi’s gorgeous insolence. Nothing in her face hinted at how a teenage religious fanatic had grown up to become a cynical taghouti involved with heroin, murder, and a Russian espionage agent.
“I don’t understand.”
“You mean the blonde hair?”
“No, I was just thinking—”
“The girl’s father was a petroleum engineer who first came to Iran in the late 1960s as a contract worker from Milan, Italy, and converted to Islam before he was allowed to marry into the Lajevardis. They’re a prominent family of bazaar merchants in Tabriz. As is the case with many converts, the old man went overboard with religion. The girl grew up in Khuzestan, in the Maroun oil fields, which,” Mehta went on, “would not have been pleasant under the most ideal of circumstances. And hers certainly were not, not with a father like him.”
“What was she doing on her own in Teheran at thirteen?” Darius asked.
“The father abandoned the family and went back to Italy a few years after the Revolution, and she ran off to the capital to see what the excitement was about. It says here the Komiteh returned her to her mother after both arrests.”
Darius finished his drink. Mehta moved the mouth of the bottle toward Darius’s glass, but Darius covered it with his palm.
“Hamid,” he said, “I want you to go to Maryam Lajevardi’s place and keep an eye on her for us.”
Hamid reached for the photo. Darius put it out of reach. “She’s not a kid anymore. The easy part of the job will be recognizing her.”
“And the hard?” the criminalist asked.
“Not falling in love.”
Hamid’s smile dissolved in vodka.
“If you don’t want to, I can get someone else.”
“Bijan called. He says he has to see you at once.” Hamid fiddled nervously with his glass. “… about the future of the homicide bureau.”
Darius grabbed for the phone. “Does anyone remember the number for the Bon Yad villa?”
“He’s at home.”
“Where?”
“Across from the. Paradise of Zahra Cemetery, near the Fountain of Blood,” Hamid said. “Till one.”
“For the road?” Mehta offered the bottle one more time.
Darius took his hand away, and the vodka came back automatically to his glass, and then to Hamid’s.
“For paradise,” he said.
Darius drove south toward the train station, then south again through mud-brick slums rising from heaps of garbage over corn-colored sand. Turning onto the Qom Highway, he broke into a procession of vehicles plodding after an old Chevrolet convertible, a dinosaur with sweeping tail fins. The top was down, and a man crouched in back bracing a loudspeaker that pulverized the thin desert air with taped prayer. Trailing the convertible were a hearse and a black limousine. Mounted on the trunk, wreathed in red-and-yellow roses, was a portrait-size photograph in a gold frame. Darius pulled close for a better look at clean-shaven features locked in a dour, hopeless gaze—the sensation of staring into a gaudy mirror. Dropping back out of range of the loudspeaker, he followed the cortege along a boulevard edged in blossoming shrubs until it entered the vast Paradise of Zahra Cemetery.