“An example of what? There’s not another country that would attempt to reinstitute a death sentence after so long.”
“Do you dare to criticize the legal system that is the most merciful in the annals of man?” Zakir nudged the blunt tip of a pencil into the gray box. “You know what this device is,” he said. “It is evidence of the compassion of Islamic justice. For centuries, when hadd was proved, and the thief sentenced to have his fingers or a hand removed, the amputation was done in an awful manner with a sword or an axe. Under the Imam’s guidance the best minds of our nation, experts from the Ministry of Health, the medical faculties of Beheshti and Teheran universities, and the Islamic Scientific Institute were taken from urgent tasks to find a more humane means of performing this necessary job.” Darius heard the hum of an electric motor as Zakir pressed the pencil into the box, which returned a stub to him. The other piece was expelled from the bottom, and rolled across the desk. “So spare me your complaints about the harshness of the law, because here is my rebuttal.”
Zakir tore the flap from a box of pencils and lined them up beside the machine. “You were an exemplary policeman who performed his job with dedication. But that is irrelevant. Your past is bad, and the past leaves indelible stains on the present. Good deeds do not outweigh the bad, which cast a shadow over them.”
Darius’s outrage had been spent before Zakir’s tirade was over. His fate was a foregone conclusion. The mysteries that remained he would as soon leave unanswered: how much pain could he stand, and how long would he endure beyond that; the degree of suffering before he was rewarded with the ultimate expression of Islamic justice, and then an unmarked plot in a distant corner of Behesht-e-Zahra out of sight of the Imam’s mausoleum. The door opened behind him, and his hands were pinned to his sides while his gunbelts were taken away by the basij from the outer office. Five men armed with Uzis formed a circle around his chair.
“Have you anything to say?” the Revolutionary Prosecutor asked.
Darius stared straight ahead. The only crime he would admit to was not fleeing while he had the chance.
“If you will,” Zakir said to the basij, “please transport Mr. Bakhtiar to Evin Prison. Show him every courtesy a former homicide chief of the National Police commands.”
A
LIGHT RAIN, THE SEASON’S
first, turned the dust to gray-brown paste that the wipers painted across the windshield. In utter blackness they climbed the heights of the city into cool air fragrant with oleander. On the fringes of the Evin district the driver pulled over to scrub the glass with his handkerchief. As Darius strained for a glimpse of the prison wall, the basij tied a blindfold around his head.
What did they think they were hiding from him? What secrets so great that a look in that direction was a breach of security? Didn’t they know that Evin had been SAVAK’s prison,
his
prison, that its best secrets had been devised by him? Had it been torn down and rebuilt brick for brick on some undisclosed site? Or did they believe that, knowing as much as he did about what went on there, he would go crazy at a view of its bland facade?
They rolled into an area just inside the walls where there was no movement of air and the oleander was overpowering. Darius remembered the garden he had given permission for some prisoners to plant and where later he had worked himself, a green tangle of waxy shrubs and native desert bushes, and in one corner where the shadow of the high wall did not reach, a jungle patch that hadn’t done well in the sandy earth, treeless, but for four malevolent trunks without leaves, bark, or limbs, sprouting leather straps at the height of a man’s shoulders and ankles. On the side looking back to the cells bullets had eaten into the wood.
Steel doors creaked open, and the miasma of despair leaked out. The hands on his shoulders passed him on to others, hard, bony hands that felt him everywhere as they shunted him into the building. He stumbled over something like a rotted log, and would have fallen had the bony hands not seized the shackles between his wrists and jerked him upright.
A concrete maze unfolded under his feet as the plan of Block 209 winding toward the administration offices. On his right would be interrogation rooms, and opposite them the holding pens where mobs of prisoners were kept close to the engines of justice that ran round the clock. An alcoholic vapor intoxicated him; momentarily he had no idea where he was. In the map in his mind’s eye he filled in the understaffed hospital where prisoners were restored between sessions under torture. By tilting his head back, he was able to see under his blindfold. Inmates lay on the floor handcuffed to the radiators, or else leaned against the wall on bloated legs while waiting their brief turn with a doctor.
To maintain an atmosphere of terror the bloodstains on the floor were never washed away. Yet no one looked anywhere else; for if they did, they would see in every doorway a man suspended by the handcuffs behind his back from a bar hammered into the lintel so that his toes barely touched the floor. Darius was ordered to halt, and his blindfold was removed. After he had blinked the improbable tableau into focus, he was brought to the end of the corridor and shoved inside one of the few doorways without a hanging sentry.
He sat in a straight-backed chair shivering in his cold sweat. Here the blood on the floor had not been left for show; it collected too fast and was crusted too thick to mop up. A picture of the Imam looked down at the blood with approval, and at Darius with regret that none was his. In half an hour a young man assumed the interrogator’s place behind a plain desk. He offered Darius a cigarette, and took it for himself when it was refused. The flame from the match was reflected in his constricted pupils, which burned into Darius’s eyes.
“Confession is good for the soul,” he intoned in a dry voice. “Although the soul is not our concern at Evin, you will be afforded every opportunity to perfect it. You are Darius Bakhtiar, am I correct, lieutenant colonel in the National Police, Teheran district?”
“Until tonight,” Darius said.
“I am Sabbagh. It is good you understand that you are no longer who you were.”
“Who am I?”
“You are nobody.”
“If I’m nobody, then how can I be—” Darius stopped, wary of cheap victories. The logic that was his best weapon was no match for the irrationality that was theirs. He would not fight back until he found a battlefield to his liking. “What, specifically, have I been charged with?” he asked. “Under the administrative regulations governing the revolutionary courts and public prosecutor’s office I have the right to know.”
“You have no rights.” Sabbagh removed a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, and clicked the point in and out. “The charges will depend on the quality of your confession.”
By this, Darius was made to understand that his crimes would be extrapolated from the information he gave up to them. It was axiomatic that the greater the pain inflicted the more encompassing the guilt acknowledged. The agonies of interrogation were but a consequence of the vile deeds they elicited, and thus the prisoner’s fault. Liberation in the form of death was the hard-won gift of his torturers. And so nothing had changed since the former landlords turned over the prison to their former tenants, and took up residence in the cells.
“Have you anything to say for yourself?” Sabbagh asked. “Anything you would like me to know before we start?”
“No.”
“You have a long history of anti-Iranian activity. From the time you went abroad to study you were hostile to the nation’s interests. This was proven by your subsequent employment in SAVAK. When you killed the enemy of God, Ibrahim Farmayan, you were viewed as a man who had come belatedly to his senses, and so were set free by the Revolution and your past not held against you.” Sabbagh studied the bare top of the desk. “This was a mistake, which we see in a continuing pattern of seditious behavior. In short, you are a saboteur.”
Sabbagh’s interrogatory style was amateur, grand inquisitor stuff picked up from Russian novels. Darius dropped his gaze below the table, and was surprised not to see shiny cavalry boots. “The allegation is preposterous,” he said. “I demand to see a lawyer.”
“You are a lawyer. Why should you have two lawyers on your case when other prisoners have none?”
There were no shortcuts through Evin Prison. Darius would not be allowed to make his confession now if he begged to tell everything. By extending the questioning over a prolonged period of time, Sabbagh expected to be rewarded with something more—whether a nugget of truth with which the prisoner hoped to buy release from pain, or a lie of nearly equal value. Though words were suspect, they were the product this harsh factory was geared to produce. There was a ready market in the press and propaganda bureaus for everything that came off the assembly lines.
Sabbagh lit another cigarette. Darius filled his lungs with its lingering smoke and pretended it relaxed him.
“I want to make a call,” he said. “My friends will be alarmed when they don’t hear from me.”
For whom was this ruse meant? To fool Sabbagh into thinking they could not do what they wanted to him because somewhere there were important people who would raise a stink? Or was he bluffing only himself, bolstering his spirits with a fiction that Sabbagh would see through easily—that there was someone on the outside to whom he mattered.
His wrists were yanked back above his shoulders, and he was dragged from the chair.
“We will resume shortly,” Sabbagh said. “In the meantime, no calls. Better that you reflect on your situation and consider the advantages of being forthcoming.”
He was brought to the hospital and chained to a radiator. What was this? If he needed a doctor he would have to wait days to see one, and now, still quite well, he was given a choice place in the waiting area. Ahead of him was a prisoner whose swollen arms were thicker than his waist. Aspirin was administered by a young medic Darius recognized as Kashfi, Baghai’s temporary assistant with the least affection for coroner’s work. The line of patients crept around the radiator, but Darius’s name wasn’t called; and he realized he was not here for a checkup or treatment, but to be acquainted with the stench of ruined men and women.
When the new shift of guards came on duty he was moved to a cell with two other men, a space less than three meters by two constructed to house a single prisoner. There had been a time when it was a de facto death sentence for a SAVAK renegade to be locked up among the general population. In light of the severe crowding brought upon by revolutionary vigilance the old customs no longer applied. Or maybe they still did.
A man about his age dressed in the remnant of a fine suit was snoring on the lone mattress. Stretched out on the concrete floor was an emaciated youth whose sandy hair was pomaded with dry blood. Bare-chested, he was wrapped in a blanket. Both feet were bandaged in black rags that had been a blue shirt. By moving them out of the way one at a time with his hands he made room for Darius.
“It is Anvari’s turn in the bunk,” he said. “You can have it next, I can’t sleep.” He shifted position with difficulty, and settled back against the wall. “My name is Rajab, of the Peoples Mujahadeen. You are—”
Darius looked away from him.
“I know it is none of my business, but there has been no one for me to talk to in a long time. This one is a fanatic, although to his eternal credit he embezzled from the government, and will not acknowledge my existence. They are counting on us to tear each other apart.
“It’s not good here,” he continued after giving up on a response from Darius. “Once I needed to go to the bathroom, and when I called for the guard he beat me and kicked out two of my teeth.” Rajab lifted his upper lip to expose jagged nubs festering in the gum. “Then he threw a tin can at me and told me to piss in that. For two days they did not take the can away, or feed me, or give me water. Another guard came in and asked what I was saving in the can. When I told him, he said to drink it. Naturally, I refused, but then he attacked me with a club, and beat me so bad that I did what he wanted. After, they put sweet tea in the can, and I was forced to drink it, too. I tell you these horrible things so you will know what you are up against.”
Whether Rajab’s story was true or not, whether he had told it out of loneliness, or because he had been instructed to, the recitation had served the purpose of focusing Darius’s thoughts—as Sabbagh suggested.
“That one there,” Rajab spit on the sleeping man’s shoulder, “is an antenna. Have no part of him.”
“What’s an antenna?”
“A spy. Every word you say around him is transmitted to the administration.”
Darius wanted nothing to do with either of them. Both men could be spies, or neither. Rajab could be the antenna, and his goal to isolate his sleeping enemy; or he could be the frightened man he claimed to be. The possibilities in Evin were limited only by the holding capacity of the cells. Conundrums were built upon conundrums until the process of sorting everything out, of thought itself, became torture that begged for the release of confession.
“Last night,” Rajab said, “returning from being questioned, I saw a man open his wrists with a piece of glass he had secreted in the cuff of his pants.”
There was no window in the cell. Light came from a metal cage in which a forty-watt bulb never went out. Darius’s sense of time was the first casualty of his incarceration, but his body craved sleep. He listened to Rajab, making a pillow of his arms, letting this grisly bedtime story render him unconscious.
Breakfast was lukewarm tea and a piece of bread that he wouldn’t touch. Rajab and Anvari eyed the morsel, circling like buzzards. “It’s yours,” Darius said, and while Anvari answered, “Thank you, sir,” Rajab snatched it for himself and gobbled it in a corner with his back to them.
Waiting, a trick he had not mastered, was now an end in itself, prelude to a performance he would as soon miss. He filled his head with daydreams, and populated them with women he’d had. Farib alone eluded him. Maryam Lajevardi came uninvited in her place, her image so vivid that he saw the faint character lines around her eyes. Less clearly defined was her body, which he stripped naked and supplied with Farib’s form, and then tinkered with until it was more to his liking. By taking away several centimeters from the bust, adding a slight angle to the hips where Farib was graceful curves, he attached personality to the perfect shape. He imagined Maryam as a red-head, and then with raven hair, and without having to concentrate hard as his to do with as he wanted, let his inventiveness run wild until a scream from a distant cell chased her away.