There was no answer at first. Then, uncertainly: “This is Criminalist Hamid.”
Darius was sorry he had gotten up from the comfortable sofa. For Hamid to call so late a catastrophe must have occurred or was in the works. He tightened the tourniquet, plucked jagged glass from around the base of his big toe.
“She’s gone,” Hamid said.
“What? Who—”
“Maryam Lajevardi. You told me to watch her place.”
“Gone where?” Darius reached back for the Padkis, but couldn’t get a hand on it. “She doesn’t have money to go anywhere, doesn’t know a soul.”
“An hour ago a telephone cab came to the house and brought her east into the city. I kept close as I could without alerting the driver. It was easy. Traffic wasn’t bad—”
“How did she get away?”
“There was a Pasdar roadblock on Azadi Avenue, near the freeway. The cab was waved through, but the basij had to smell my breath, and then to have me walk a straight line while they inspected the car. When they found out I was police, they tore everything apart. By the time I was let through, the cab was nowhere in sight. I tried to find it, but it was no use.”
Hamid spoke quickly, bunching his words. Darius had a hard time understanding him. “Were you drinking?”
“No, absolutely not,” Hamid pleaded. “I went back to the house. I hoped she had gone on a simple errand and would return soon. I didn’t want to bother you, I was going to wait till morning; maybe she’d show up then.” He sounded close to tears. “But she won’t—I know it. What do you want me to do?”
Darius swiped at the bottle again, then gave up and carried the phone to the couch, backtracking along a trail of blood and broken glass. “Go home,” he said.
“You don’t want me to look anymore?”
“And get drunk, like you should have in the first place.”
Darius tried to lose himself in a travelogue on the troglodyte villages of the Khandejan region that had bumped the weightlifters from the air. Blame for losing Maryam Lajevardi did not lie with Hamid, but with himself for not taking her into custody. The immediate order of business was finding something to prop up Hamid’s dwindling self-esteem. When Ghaffari took charge of Homicide, the young criminalist would be indispensable to him, if his confidence hadn’t already been destroyed.
He felt completely sober, as though his system had purged itself of alcohol through the gash in his foot. Hamid was right: there was nothing to do but wait until morning, when there would be nothing left to wait for. Another search of the house was pointless. Maryam’s secrets lay within herself, rather than inside her closets and bureau drawers. He turned up the volume on the television, but was uninterested in the troglodyte villages, nor in
Adventures in Arabic
on the other channel. Unable to sleep, too tired to open the bed, he hobbled into the bathroom to apply iodine and a bandage and to wake himself fully by shaving with cold water. Dressed in his banker’s charcoal wool suit, soon he was back in the Paycon, speeding through the black streets of Ark.
Maryam Lajevardi’s file was where he had left it on his desk, the tan cover smelling strongly of vodka. He gleaned little from the few documents inside. The girl’s photograph already had told its full tale. The two episodes of her criminal career, authored by arresting officers who were not natural storytellers, were spare in detail; Mehta had left out nothing of significance in his briefing. The signatures at the bottom of each page were potentially more revealing than the accounts they attested to. Possibly the officers could be induced to remember additional facts, if they were still in the department or could be located. Darius squared one of the forms under a goose-neck lamp. The name was that of a detective who had died of a heart attack while on duty six months before. Underneath was the bunched scrawl of the Komitehman to whom the girl had been released. Darius concentrated the light through a magnifying lens until the paper gave up the name Javad Salehi, Hormoz’s former student who was now a leading faculty member at “The Institute.”
Salehi’s signature was pure gold, which was to say that he could not refine the clue. A return to Manzarieh, even if not fatal, would accomplish nothing. Under no circumstances did he envision Salehi seeing him again, or consenting to an interview. The sheik’s strained friendliness had been for Hormoz’s nephew, not Darius in particular, and was exhausted by the time they had said good-bye. Some of the facts he needed on Salehi’s link to the Party of God, and its camps in Lebanon, might be stitched together from secondary sources, however, and he asked the long-distance operator to dial Qom for him. The phone had rung once when he broke the connection. The summons to morning prayer would be Hormoz’s alarm clock, not a 3:00
A.M.
call from a desperate homicide detective, formerly his niece’s husband.
He drove aimlessly from headquarters, craning for the first indication of dawn as a mariner scouts the horizon for weather. The wheel was a Ouija board that pulled him to the Old Karaj Road, and then due west. When he stopped outside Maryam Lajevardi’s the black of night was still intact, enveloping the hazy moon and a single bulb that the woman evidently had overlooked in her haste to flee.
He brushed aside the bedroom curtains to play the light from a five-cell flashlight on the floor. Then he climbed in through the open window. The bed had not been slept in. He heard footsteps receding into the inner rooms, and strode purposefully after them, a warning that there was no place to run. A chair fell over in the kitchen, and silverware rattled in a drawer. The darkness swallowed the beam of light, which bounced back off a carving knife held high in a tremulous hand.
“Couldn’t you have knocked?” Maryam Lajevardi lowered the blade, and Darius followed it with the flash till it hung loosely at her side, “and used the door like everybody else?”
“What are you doing here?”
“You may remember I live here. And if you don’t—” Maryam’s sweet, mocking tone hardened into muted anger, “then why are you in my kitchen at this hour?”
“I was informed that you’d run away. I came to see for myself.”
“You were
informed
?” Maryam looked outside at the quiet commercial buildings, then pulled down the shade, stifling the dry breeze. “I have nosy neighbors, but not very reliable as witnesses,” she said to him. “You can’t believe what they say about me. They, or anyone else.”
Darius tugged at the light string above the table, switched off his flash. “Where did you go?”
“I was bored. And lonely. I found a few thousand rials I’d forgotten about in the pockets of my chador, and went to see a friend. What’s wrong with that?”
“You also told me you had no friends in Teheran.”
“It could be that I was looking to make one. Is that against your rules, too?”
“Possibly the rule should be written,” he said.
“If I was running away, would I be talking to you now?” She relaxed when he did not come back at her with another question. “I’d been cooped up so long I couldn’t stand it by myself another minute. I called a cab and went into the city, and stopped for something to eat. Are there rules against that, too?”
It was senseless to pursue it. If he did, she would tell him the name of the restaurant and what she had ordered, how much the meal had cost and what the waiter had said when he came to her table, and how he had tried to shortchange her. And none of it true, and totally beside the point.
“I find that hard to accept,” he said.
“Well, that’s your prob—”
“Hard to accept anything you say. You’ve been consistently untruthful, about working at the currency exchange, your whole past. In 1983, you were arrested for trying to toss acid at two women downtown. Do you deny it?”
“I was a naive child then, a baby. I didn’t know how to think for myself. I believed in all the promises of the Revolution. Every one. If the government had allowed girls to string plastic keys around their necks and dance through the minefields of Basra, I would have been first to volunteer. That was a long time ago. Two years later, I was in high heels and lipstick, and buying Rolling Stones records on the black market. That’s where my history begins.” She stared into his stony face to see if any of it was sinking in. “You know nothing about me. Absolutely nothing. You’ve taken an isolated incident that happened half a lifetime ago, and no doubt built it into a fantastic biography.”
“We know also,” Darius went on as if he hadn’t heard her, “of your relationship with Sheik Javad Salehi.”
The color drained from Maryam’s cheeks. Her brows, normally two pale smudges, emerged like invisible ink in the white ridges above her eyes.
“… And that he is living these days in Shemiran—”
“Is that so?”
“At the Manzarieh guerrilla camp less than two kilometers from Saltanatabad Avenue. A remarkable coincidence, your settling so near your former benefactor without knowing he was there.”
“Coincidence is all it is.” Maryam’s tone was so reasonable that he felt himself, if not believing her, starting to consider that he had overlooked an obvious explanation. “You must give him my phone number when you see him.”
“This isn’t funny. Don’t treat it as a joke.”
“Do you hear me laughing? I’m being kept prisoner in my own home because of these crazy notions that I’m involved in murder and drugs, with no way to prove I know nothing about them. Where do you get your ideas?”
“From facts, and what must be inferred from them. Sheik Salehi is a principal instructor at Manzarieh. Considering your past relationship, it’s hard to believe you’ve never been to the Party of God camps in Lebanon.”
“He wasn’t teaching anybody to be a guerrilla ten years ago. He was working for the Pasdar in central Teheran, counseling troubled youngsters to channel their energy into productive activities. After I got into trouble, it was he who returned me to my family. I shudder to think where I would be today without his kind care.”
“Far from here,” Darius said, “and from being the subject of a police investigation.”
“Ask Javad yourself,” Maryam said. “I’d love to see him again, to be able to thank him for what he did for me. How soon can you arrange a meeting?”
As tempting as it was to use her to get to Salehi, he was unwilling to try it. If the Komiteh were looking for Maryam, he’d be giving them a free chance at her, and, if not, she would be in contact with a powerful protector. He found the telephone on the living room floor and dialed in the dark, counting the holes in the rotary dial with his fingertips. “It’s me, Bakhtiar,” he said. “I’m sorry to wake you, but I need you to—”
Maryam had wandered in after him, and now she nudged the receiver from his ear. “No, wait. I don’t—”
“One second, Hamid.” Darius cupped the mouthpiece. “What do you want?” he asked her.
“Nothing.” Already she had begun to walk away.
Darius still felt the pressure of her hand on his, her tag in their undeclared game. “Come back to the Old Karaj Road address,” he said into the phone, “and bring a good book to read. Yes, she’s here now … minutes ago. I want you inside this time. You’ll sit twelve-hour shifts, alternating with one of the other men.”
When Darius returned to the kitchen, Maryam had switched off the light and was somewhere near the table, tapping the handle of the knife against the Formica top.
“An officer is being assigned to the house, so you can’t run away again,” he told her.
“I didn’t run away before.”
“Hamid will stay indefinitely. He is a criminalist, about your age. He likes the Beatles, too. You won’t be bored anymore, or lonely.”
“Does he have a rich fantasy life like yours?” Maryam was a disembodied voice in the dark. “I don’t want him here. Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“You have information I need.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. And if I could guess what it is, I suspect you’d lock me up. You’ve placed me in an impossible position.”
“But a safe one. You realize the police aren’t alone in wanting to listen to your story. Others are getting close, and they can be persuasive.”
“I see now, you’re here for
my
benefit. Draw up a confession, and I’ll sign it. The more heinous the crime, the better—the better for me. There isn’t a thing I won’t admit to.”
“Not for your benefit, Miss Lajevardi.”
“For whose, then? The dead girls? I would have thought it’s late for them.”
Darius saw himself pulling at slack strings as he attempted to manipulate her loyalty, playing the same sorry game with her future that Ashfar played with his. “You’re not accused of anything,” he said.
“Then it must be for your benefit. What will you give me in exchange? Isn’t that the way the police operate? Promise me something, Lieutenant Colonel, and you’ll have the words you need to hear, whatever you say they should be. I won’t drive a hard bargain.”
“It’s not a confession we want.”
“Nothing?” She taunted him. “That’s your best offer? It seems unfair that you should profit from my remarks, and I’m to have nothing in return.”
“Not a confession; but the truth.”
“Oh, that’s different. I’ll sign right now. I’ll talk,” she said. “But first you have to tell me what it is.”
Not as prosecutor, jailer, nor interrogator did he awe her. She tugged at the light string again, and he was blind in her pale beauty. In that instant she was nearer to all his secrets than he was to learning any of hers.
“The truth,” he said again. “Is it asking so much?”
“Don’t you see?” Maryam shook her head, flinging tears against his dry lips. “Don’t you see that’s all I have?”
A
WOMAN WITH A
Kurdish accent was asking the price of melons in Qom. Darius spoke louder, but was unable to drown out the cross talk in the line.
“It’s good to hear your voice …”
Darius paused, straining to make out the words. An elderly man he thought had answered the Kurdish woman seemed to be talking to him.
“I was beginning to be afraid I had lost my favorite nephew.” Over the racket Hormoz’s breathy rasp was becoming clear.
“Your only nephew.” Darius brushed Maryam Lajevardi’s folder out of the way, and sat on his desk with his heels hooked in the handle of the bottom drawer. “How have you been, uncle?”