“As well as can be expected. Which is, truth be told, not as well as I would like to feel, although not as bad as my enemies wish.”
During an instant of quiet following a false start by all the parties on the crossed wires, Darius re-created Hormoz’s playful smile on his own lips. “You have no enemies,” he said.
“Every man, every man who has lived as long as I, has enemies,” Hormoz said, “although others may have lost some good ones along the way.”
Darius missed the rest of what Hormoz said, but learned that melons had been going up all summer in Sanandaj, and now was a bad time to buy.
“… Are you surviving? Has it been hard for you, having your freedom?”
“I’ve been too busy to appreciate it,” Darius said.
“You’re putting it to its proper use. I heard from Farib just yesterday. She is in good health, but there are hints she’s unhappy.”
“How’s that?”
“She says she will remarry soon.”
“I didn’t know she was seeing anyone,” Darius said. “We don’t have the same friends anymore. We never did, really.”
“He is an older man, a goldsmith. In no way is this a love match, but he is said to be quite well off. Alas, if that is what she wants I hope he gives her all the happiness she deserves.”
A pain that was lodged permanently under Darius’s ribs metastasized in his heart. He had given Farib little thought since the divorce, only in part because he was wrapped up in the investigation. A compulsive side of his personality was taunting him, making her desirable now that she would be unavailable to him forever. Though he saw through the trap, it did nothing to ease his hurt.
“I’ve recalled several facts about my former pupil since our last conversation,” Hormoz was saying, “and talked to other people who knew him from his time at Faiziyeh.”
“I didn’t call about Bijan—” Darius stopped, no match for the woman inquiring about melons.
“… Did you know he is from a family whose roots go back ten centuries in the Iraqi city of Najaf? It was his father’s father who moved to Iran, settling in Khuzestan in the 1920s. During the Imam’s exile in Najaf Bijan was part of his entourage until he fell from favor and was ordered back to Teheran, where he has labored in deserving obscurity ever since.” Hormoz coughed. His lungs made hissing sounds as he struggled for breath.
“The phones are not secure,” Darius cautioned him.
“These are not secrets. Do you need more?”
“I don’t know what I need. I wanted to ask about another of your old students.”
“Which one?”
“Javad Salehi.”
“I hadn’t been told he was in Teheran.” Hormoz’s voice was a feathery whisper. “He isn’t murdered?”
“There hasn’t been a killing in weeks. I have to find out about his past, same as Bijan’s.”
“We are talking about two completely different men. There are professors at Faiziyeh who to this day hold up Javad as a shining light to each new class of students. He was unusually disciplined, with no interest in worldly things, and dogmatic to a fault regarding the pronouncements of the Imam. He favored qital, the purest form of holy war, a war without mercy to convert the infidel at the point of a sword, but favored it to guarantee his redemption rather than the converts.”
Darius heard a harsh click. “
Hormoz
?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
“Where did he go from Faiziyeh?”
“We lost contact for several years. Around 1984, I received a letter of apology for having broken off with me. He had accepted an appointment to the National University, which recently had been established by the Party of God.”
“I remember it,” Darius said. “It was located at Evin. But it was no university. The official name was the Revolutionary Research Facility. There were a thousand students, mostly PLO.”
“Javad was resident lecturer in Psychology of the Jihad. He had made himself an expert on inflicting terror on civilian populations. The National University supported what were referred to euphemistically as extension campuses at Firoughkoor and Manzarieh. The graduate centers were in south Lebanon, close to the Israeli border, and in Beirut.”
“Say again?”
“After two years at Evin, he wrote to tell me he had taken up directorship of the camp in Lebanon.”
“Did he mention the name?”
“No, but I recall that the student body was entirely female. Three hundred foreign women who had come to Iran to be converted to Islam had embraced a martyr’s fate and were brought to the camp to await a suicide mission. There were girls from Nicaragua and El Salvador, from Germany and North Korea and Northern Ireland—”
“Were Iranian girls among them?”
“A few. The majority were Lebanese Shi’ites, and Syrians. But the loyalty of the Syrians was suspect, and they were booted out of the camp.”
“Why?”
“Syrians in Lebanon care more about drugs than holy war. The dictator Assad’s brother is personally in charge of the drug trade in the areas of the country under his army’s control. All revenues are supposed to go to furthering the fight against the infidel West, but most of it lines the pockets of the Assads. In the camps near Israel drugs were the primary curriculum.”
“Salehi told you this? He could have been shot.”
“He was troubled by the commonplace hypocrisy. He had faith that the camp could do important work if the dealing in drugs ceased.”
“What did you advise?”
“Javad had no business there. This I could not say directly to him. I quoted from a commentary on the chapter of the holy Qur’an on the prophet Houd:
“ ‘Let us be under no illusion about holy war. If we are not prepared to fight for our faith with a pure heart, our lives will be forfeit, and our resources used against us by our enemies.’ ”
“You meant for him to quit the camp?”
“Yes, and to divorce himself from drugs. They are an abomination in the eyes of God.”
“Salehi misunderstood,” Darius said. “He thought you meant he should use them to further his cause.”
“He knows better. He chose deliberately to interpret my remarks that way.”
Someone had come into the outer office. Darius swiveled around in time to see Ghaffari slip behind his desk like a schoolboy late for class. He lowered the receiver, and snapped his fingers to get Ghaffari’s attention. “Where have you been?”
Ghaffari gestured dismissively. He looked exhausted and needed a clean shirt. Darius hadn’t noticed before that his hairline had begun to recede, and he was graying at the temples. Ghaffari was thirty-two.
Hormoz was trying to impress upon Darius how perplexed he was that a man as principled as Salehi would have twisted the meaning of his words. “I will write to him today, better to explain—”
“It’s late.”
“I accept the blame for the damage that cannot be undone. Still, there is opportunity for him to acknowledge his error and find the correct path.”
Another click signaled twenty seconds of static, and then Hormoz faded beneath a younger man’s complaint about constant sandstorms and the unavailability of air filters for General Motors cars. Darius stared at Ghaffari, who sat frozen with his head in his hands. He screwed the receiver against his ear, listening for Hormoz, but it was the frustrated motorist who dominated the line.
“I can’t hear you,” Darius shouted, “and I’ve got to go. Don’t send your letter till we’ve talked again.”
Ghaffari had returned to life, and was rooting in his bottom drawer for a bottle of bootleg. “I know, I know,” he said contritely when Darius got off the phone. “Listen first, then give me shit.” He put a paper cup on Darius’s side of the desk, and looked all over for another.
“It’s Sharera’s fault,” he said. “She informed on me like she said she would, told the Bon Yad I was screwing around with Nahid. Lucky for me, she couldn’t wait to let me know I’d be going to jail. I had one chance left, to drive through the night and hide Nahid in Tabriz, where I have cousins to look after her. We had to crash through two Pasdar roadblocks just to get out of Teheran. Nahid was in a panic—and I wasn’t much better. The Komiteh grilled me for six hours straight when I got back. Without male witnesses it was my word against Sharera’s, though, so she was outnumbered four to one, like in a court of law.” Ghaffari’s strained smile came apart when Darius didn’t rise to it. “They didn’t believe the first thing I told them, but what could they do? They had to take my word. The law regarding adultery is
their
law, the religious law. They let me go.”
“I vouched for you,” Darius said, unmoved by Ghaffari’s plea for sympathy. “You’ve made me a liar in Sharera’s eyes.”
“No, no, I did nothing like that.” Ghaffari gave him the cup, which he crumpled in his fist. “Really, I was trying to break off with Nahid. It just took longer than I thought. I know I failed you when you needed me in Mashad, and you hate me for it. All I ask is that you let me make it up to you.”
Ghaffari’s rush through the perfunctory apology, taken for granted as a nuisance for both of them, annoyed Darius less than the feeling that he was holding something back, that more dismal revelation would follow.
“You can begin by helping me to put the squeeze on Maryam Lajevardi.”
“You found her?” Ghaffari stared disbelievingly. He twisted the cap off the bootleg, and gulped from the bottle. “You didn’t need me after all. Where was she?”
“Everything is in my report. If I don’t have the time to obtain the information we want from her, then you must.”
Ghaffari wiped his mouth on his hand. “What do you mean, ‘If you don’t have time?’ Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m being made to disappear,” Darius said. ‘The Revolutionary Prosecutor has ordered me replaced as chief of homicide.”
“You can’t—He can’t be serious. No one else here can even find a paper clip. How does he expect a new man to keep the bureau functioning?” Ghaffari took another long swallow. “Who is the dumb bastard bringing in, which suckass?”
“He wants you, Mansur.”
Ghaffari’s grin was a secret betrayed, which he wrestled back into the dark with white lips. “I’m not qualified.”
“I’m out, and you’re in,” Darius said. “It’s a sentence without appeal.” No need to tell him he would be responsible to Sarmadi, the Bon Yad’s adviser, and see the grin dead and buried; he would find out soon enough. “In the meantime I’ll bring you to meet the Lajevardi girl.”
“Since when do you want my help in getting someone to talk?”
“Positive inducements have no effect on her, and neither do threats. She doesn’t care whether she lives, dies, or is jailed for a long period of time. And I don’t have time.”
“Is heroin so important to her, is she that far gone? Or is it the money she can get for it?”
“It’s sheer obstinacy—hardened by military discipline. She was in Lebanon, in the guerrilla camps with the other girls. There’s some of the fanatic in her as well.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I’ve established myself as her antagonist. I want you to be—”
“To be her friend? That’s kindergarten stuff. What criminal won’t see immediately through that?”
“She’s no criminal,” Darius said. “You’ll play super-antagonist. Anyway, I’m tired of being the bad guy.”
“But you’re a natural …” Ghaffari stretched, raising his fists overhead. “Can’t it wait? I’m beat. I’d feel plenty more ferocious after a nap.”
Darius looked at his watch, stifling a yawn.
“You could stand a few winks yourself,” Ghaffari said.
“Go home, read my report, patch things up with Sharera as best you can, and sleep.” Darius took the bottle from him. “I’ll call when I’m ready for you.”
Darius walked downstairs to the basement. Fluorescent strips had been installed in the supply room, lending a sheen of newness to the blank arrest forms and reams of paper stacked haphazardly on the shelves. No, he thought, he wasn’t the only one who knew where to find the paper clips. Maybe it was time for Mehta, once Homicide’s bright boy, to be cast in fresh light, too, and given something to do.
Or Hamid, or one of the untried men whose names he still had not learned. Ghaffari was becoming increasingly unreliable, taking on the immature traits of the young officers like garments they had outgrown. He foresaw the new chief’s tenure as a brief, unhappy period that would end with Sarmadi assuming formal control of the bureau, and Ghaffari a discarded figurehead in limbo with himself.
The new lighting did not reach to Evidence, where the single bulb above the shelves was out. Inside the records cage Mehta dozed with his head in his arms, his usual posture when his elbow wasn’t bent. Darius could not say with certainty that Mehta still left headquarters at the end of his shift; none of the men had been to his home in years. Mehta’s wife was dead, and he had no children. His private life revolved around thinning the cases of whiskey that he catalogued by day. Everything of importance to him was in arm’s reach in these musty rooms. Darius rattled the gate. Mehta’s head rose from the cradle of his arms, and his hand swept the table. Grasping at nothing, it circled around, and he was snoring again before it settled under his ear. The air was treacly with the aftershave that Mehta used alternately to mask the evidence of his drinking and to guzzle when even the most poisonous labels of bootleg were unavailable. This morning, there were no bottles in the cage, none of the empties filled with his urine that collected regularly in the corners and were sent upstairs as a bonus with every request for evidence or a file.
“Hey,” Darius shouted, “what’s so valuable in there, you’ve got to keep yourself locked up with it?”
Mehta rose disjointedly, gathering himself together piece by piece as he swayed over the table. To Darius the records officer appeared to have deteriorated since the last time they had talked, or rather—remembering that they had conferred just hours ago—since the last time he actually had looked at him. Mehta had been buried in the basement for so many years that no one really saw him anymore. He existed inanimately, a part of the building like the paint on the walls, the sandy dust. Even Mehta failed to see himself, overlooking the impression made by his rat’s nest of hair and chalky skin. He came to the gate with long skating steps, as though fearful that if he raised his feet they would lose the floor and not find it again. He squinted through the mesh, and then unlocked the cage, and went back to the table and buried his head in his arms.