She pushed harder. His muscles contracted, and he flung himself onto his side.
“Are you all right?”
He moved his arms in front of his face, but they were heavy, and he dropped them and tried to get out of bed. The rash covered the back of his hands and ran up his other cheek in broad streaks that continued under the hairline. Thick clots of blood were stuck to his lower lip. When he opened his mouth to tell her something, he vomited up more of them, and Maryam thought she was going to be sick, too.
“Burning up,” he mumbled. “No strength. Can’t breathe—”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Is there a doctor we can trust?”
“No. You—”
“I wouldn’t know the first thing to do.”
He fell back against the pillow. She lifted his head to her ear, held her breath as he tried to speak.
“Call the morgue.”
Fifteen minutes went by from the time she reached the coroner’s office until Baghai came on the line.
“I’m calling on behalf of Darius Bakhtiar,” she said.
There was another extended silence during which she thought Baghai would hang up on her. Then she heard him clear his throat, and in an old man’s reedy voice he asked, “Who is this?”
“A friend of his. He needs your help.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar has been taken to Evin Prison. Who am I talking to?”
“He doesn’t believe me,” she said to Darius, and put the receiver to his mouth.
“
Baghai…
”
“It’s you? When did you get out?”
“Yesterday. I—”
“That’s wonderful news. I scarcely dared hope I’d ever hear—wonderful. Now I have some news for you.”
Darius tried to interrupt, but couldn’t get in a word. He shook his head, and Maryam took back the phone.
“He’s very sick,” she said. “He isn’t able to speak.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s throwing up blood, and can’t catch his breath. His muscles are weak. He was tortured a long time in prison. He may have suffered internal injuries.”
“It’s a possibility.”
Darius pawed at the phone until Maryam put him on again.
“I’ve been poisoned.”
“Why do you say that?” Baghai asked.
“My skin … like the Darwish girl’s.”
“
Mycotoxin
poisoning? How would you have been exposed?”
“… No idea.”
“You didn’t ingest any?”
“Don’t see how I could have.”
“You need fluids in copious amounts to flush out your kidneys before they are permanently damaged. Drink at least three dozen glasses of water each of the next several days. Also you must remove all of the poison in contact with your body and hair. Is there a bathtub where you are?”
Darius nodded, and Maryam said yes into the phone for him.
“Take a shower right away. Put on clean clothes, and apply mineral oil to the rashes. Where are you?”
“… Better not say.”
“Well, I suppose you have your reasons,” Baghai said. “What I was going to tell you is that the lab work just came back on Mehta, and it was determined conclusively that he died of mycotoxin poisoning. He took it with heroin, same as Leila Darwish. His body was one big running sore. But that doesn’t explain how you got sick.”
“Caught it from him.”
“Don’t be absurd. If you can come to my office, or I can see you there …”
“The Komiteh is looking for me.”
“I understand. Then it is essential that you follow my instructions.”
Darius touched Maryam’s hand, and she put back the receiver.
“What did he tell you?” she asked. “Why were you talking about poison?”
“The mycotoxins … they’ve gotten into my system.”
“How?”
He pushed her away from the bed. “Bring me water. Lots of it.”
When she returned from the kitchen with a glass in each hand he had taken off his underwear and was struggling to get out of bed. Naked, he appeared mad to her; she considered that his brain had been affected. Reaching for a glass, he toppled against her, and she held him on his feet while he drank. When he finished she tried to make him sit, but his legs were churning and she couldn’t move him.
“Get back into bed. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Shower,” he said. “I need to wash it off my body.”
She pulled his arm around her shoulder, and steered him out of the room. For a lightly muscled man he seemed inordinately heavy, a highly efficient machine that had run out of gas. By the time they were in the bathroom she had as little strength left as Darius, who clutched at the shower curtain rod while she lifted his feet over the side of the tub. She saw him totter on the slippery bottom, and then stepped in after him and propped him up under the hot spray.
He was staring at her with his first smile since he had come out of prison, maybe his first ever, she thought—if a smile was what it was, and not just the sloppy grin she attributed to his loss of muscular control. She followed his gaze to the sodden rag of her dress, which was transparent over her breasts, and noticed that he had become aroused; his meager strength concentrated in that one area of his body separate and apart from him and yet at his heart. She turned him around and soaped his back. His skin came away in ragged strips that spiraled down the drain.
She worked thin lather into his scalp, rubbed it thick with her fingertips. His body was sliding down against hers. She wrapped her arms around his chest and squeezed until he had his legs under him again, and all the while he never stopped grinning. Then she sat him on the side of the tub and pulled a towel from the rack.
“A clean one,” he demanded. “And a fresh change of clothes.”
She came back with Turkish bath towels slung over both shoulders, covering the wet dress almost to her waist. He took one to dry his body, another for his hair, and tossed the remainder on the wet tiles.
“We have to leave now,” he said. “Why?”
“The house is full of mycotoxins.”
“How can that be?”
“You tell me.”
“
Me?
I’ve never been here before.”
“I didn’t absorb the poison with drugs like Leila and Mehta, I was exposed when it got on my skin. Some was in the heroin that fell into Mehta’s bed the last time he injected himself. You still haven’t told me how the drugs were used to smuggle the mycotoxins into Iran.”
Maryam gave him clean underwear, and helped him balance while he put it on. “Inside each bag of heroin was a smaller bag containing the mycotoxins in their raw state. The Revolutionary Guards at the border were under orders to overlook any heroin coming into the country, and to allow us to continue unmolested to Teheran. They knew nothing about mycotoxins. No one did.”
“Except for you.”
“Not until I was informed by Rahgozar.”
“Had you let me know that much—”
“At Manzarieh,” she said, “all students are instructed in the art of khod’eh, the telling of half truths to guard the faith. If I was less than forthcoming, it was to save Iran.”
“How did you serve the nation by losing her chemical weapons?”
“I saved it from itself.”
“That’s garbage. Had you told me, Mehta might still be alive.”
“I never suspected the mycotoxins had become mixed with the heroin. All I knew was that they were transported in the same packages that disappeared after they were stolen by Sousan. Can you explain how they came to be here?”
Darius had found baby oil in the medicine chest, and was rubbing it into his raw skin. His breath caught every time he touched a rash. Maryam poured some into her hands, and patted it on gently.
“Can you?” she asked.
“I’m beginning to think so.”
“What? Well, then, after you’re better, return the mycotoxins to the Komiteh. No doubt they’ll forgive everything, and honor you as a national hero.”
“They may let me live,” Darius said. “That would be plenty.”
He started into the bedroom, and she followed after him ready to catch him if he stumbled. There were other clean shirts in the closet, more old lady dresses for her to choose from. Mehta’s second-best suit had never been worn, and did not fit Darius badly after Maryam basted the cuffs.
“Where can we go with little money?” she asked, “when you’re so weak you can’t walk?”
“Call a telephone cab. Tell them we want the Sepahsalar Mosque on Baharestan Square.”
“It’s late to start praying.”
“Not to pray,” Darius said. “To appease.”
Eight stout minarets, yellow and pale blue, reached to the heavens from the wall of the Sepahsalar Mosque. Darius stood beside the djoub on Modaress Avenue looking at the long facade of stones from a Mashad mosque destroyed in an earthquake and rebuilt on the campus of the old Army Commanders’ School, which was now the Muslim Theological Seminary. A crew of Komitehmen charged with eliminating counterrevolutionary graffiti was attacking the wall with mops and chemical solvent where vandals had spray-painted
GOD BLESS AMERICA
in English and Farsi. The shaded courtyard was crowded with knots of men carrying rolled prayer rugs under their arm. Darius brought Maryam across to the women’s side, to the corner informally reserved for worshipers seeking to contract a temporary marriage. Here none of the women wore facial veils. Each stood in the teeth of a steady breeze that blew her chador back on her head and held the black cloth tight against her body. Darius scanned the forced smiles, looking away when any lingered too long on him. He moved toward the wall where a woman with a luxuriant figure had been following him with her eyes since he came in off the street.
“Well, now I have lived to see everything,” she said. “What do
you
want at a mosque? Is some terrible crime being committed here? Or have you given up police work to become an anthropologist?”
“Perhaps both.”
In her sardonic smile there was no room for his moral superiority. A short staring contest between them ended with Darius the loser. He bowed his head, allowing her to kiss him, and some of the acid went out of her expression. A resemblance to Darius became obvious the longer Maryam looked at her; but she could not guess what their relationship was, nor the woman’s age, which seemed to vary between the late thirties and early sixties, depending upon which aspect of her appearance was the gauge. The smooth complexion of her handsome face was belied by slack skin under tired eyes. Delicate hands unaccustomed to hard work or household chores were heavily veined on the backs, and spotted brown. The frilly bodice of a party frock was worn to be noticed underneath her stylish chador. Although she lacked the high sculpted cheekbones that were Darius’s best feature, the wide-set intelligent eyes and silky black hair, the brooding gaze, were his.
“What
are
we doing here?” Maryam asked him.
“Didn’t you tell her who you’ve come to see?” the woman asked. “Are you too ashamed to introduce me?”
“… I would like you to meet Shahin Khanum,” he said to Maryam.
“Madame Shahin?” The smile softened into a pleased exaggeration of itself. “Since when have you become so formal?”
“Shahin Khanum,” he said, “is my mother.”
“This is Farib?”
“I’m divorced. Maryam is a friend.”
“You don’t look well,” Shahin Khanum said. “Your friend is not taking good care of you. Too many women these days don’t know how to look after a man.”
“I’ve been sick.”
“Marriage has made you unwell. It is a stultifying institution when it goes on for so long that inertia takes the place of love. I’m happy to learn you’re single again—and that you have such a lovely friend.”
“How have you been?” Darius asked.
“There is little for me to complain about. For three years on and off I was married to a mullah, a learned marja from a madreseh in Tabriz. We lived together in a nice house off Jaleh Square for a year while he had a teaching appointment in Teheran. After that he would have me for his seegah in the summer, when he would return for a month on his vacation, and pay me a generous brideprice every time.
“Now things are not so good. I have been seeing several gentlemen when their wives are having their menstrual period and are impure to them. The length of each contract is just one week, and afterward, as you know, I cannot marry again for three months. It is hard like that. Sometimes I don’t wait the whole ninety days. But…” Shahin Khanum tucked her loose hair primly under her chador as she turned to Maryam. “But what can be more satisfying than to do God’s will as the Qur’an commends us? I wish I could seegah for every man in Iran.
“Darius does not regard the holy Qur’an as a divine blueprint for the elimination of suffering,” she said. “He does not approve of temporary marriage as a ‘brilliant law of Islam’ that meets the need of men to have many lovers without corrupting themselves by engaging prostitutes. I have devoted my life to combating the abomination of celibacy, and the suffering that it brings. Yet, to my only son, I am not a tool of God, but an old whore.” Shahin Khanum began to laugh. Just as suddenly she fell quiet and glared at Darius. “How many years has it been since you came to see me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Six years,” she answered for him. “Six years, four months, and some days. Every one of them is burned into my heart. What have you done to ease your mother’s suffering, my precious son?”
Darius shifted his weight from one sore foot to the other as his mother glanced into the men’s side of the courtyard, which was filling rapidly in advance of the next summons to prayer. Her body was bathed in a young woman’s perfume that also had been Farib’s favorite, a premium French scent that was prohibitively expensive on those few occasions that any was to be found at the bazaar.
“To look at me,” she said to Maryam, “would you believe that when I was your age I was considered a fine catch? Darius’s father was so taken with me that immediately after the introduction was made he proposed a one-hour chaste marriage just to have me remove my veil for him.” She paused for confirmation from Darius, which never came. “That is exactly as it happened. And right on the spot he agreed to a two-year marriage.”
Maryam smiled condescendingly, as she might have if an insane woman had her ear. Darius regretted not warning her that his mother was not crazy, but thoroughly without prurience or doubt, a woman, had she been born a generation later, who would have made a perfect Bride of Blood. Maryam was groping for words, rearranging the failed smile into an inquiry of shallow concern that would fool no one, least of all Shahin Khanum.