“Okay, you can pass.”
Darius let go of the Browning. As he steered through the roadblock, he looked back once. The man in the blue suit had taken off his jacket, and lay on his stomach across a low table. When the older Guardsman raised the whip high overhead, the Shahsavan woman fainted.
“How did you know he’d let us go?” Maryam asked.
“He’s illiterate,” Darius said, “at least in Farsi, and probably in his own language, but would have lost too much face in admitting that to us. You handled him well.”
“There were plenty of little prigs like him in Lebanon,” she said. “For him a woman is strictly an instrument of pleasure, otherwise best to be avoided. The only thing he fears worse than a woman is that he’ll miss out on paradise, and the women who will be his slaves there.”
“Why did you say you were my seegah?” His tone had chilled, assuming a policeman’s formal inquisitiveness.
“Have you been defamed? Is it inconceivable for such a thing to happen?”
“You should have told him we were married. It’s more believable.”
“Any dumb kid can see I’m not your permanent wife. Your attitude toward… toward things in general, I doubt it’s much different from his.”
Darius rejected the notion with a burst of speed. “I know there’s no paradise,” he said.
P
ASSING THROUGH THE GATE
of the Builders, the last sight of Tabriz was a train station of white stone and a Chaldean church crowned with a blunted cross. A blue blaze parallel to the highway came into focus as the landing strip of a regional airport. Widening circles of light scrubbed the night from the tarmac, and Darius slowed to watch three helicopters, old American Hueys, drop out of the void discharging men in khaki into the sandstorm they had brought with them.
Maryam, who had curled up on the seat with her legs under her, turned her back against the flying dust. “What is it?”
“So many refugees are trying the mountains,” he said, “the Revolutionary Guards must be moving reinforcements to the border regions.”
Her eyes were shutting again as she stretched to the ceiling. “Oh … ?”
Darius opened his window, and Maryam’s loose hair whipped his cheek, the current from that sporadic contact all that was keeping him alert. Then her head lolled against his shoulder, and he tried to imagine what it would be like if she
were
his seegah, and this the first night of a two-week pleasure marriage. A preposterous idea—except that already he was lost in it. Feelings of embarrassment were complicated by a curious detachment, as though peeping through a window he had caught himself in an unsavory act and didn’t know which one of him should feel the greater shame. Had Maryam never been a Bride of Blood, and not transferred her zealotry to causes still to be invented, there might have been more between them than his medieval fantasy. The reality of the situation was that he was delivering goods to an unknown destination, and she had gone along for the ride.
He reached for a sack of fruit Maryam had bought in Tabriz, and gorged on dried figs to stay awake. Low-flying aircraft were somewhere overhead. With his face close to the windshield he craned toward the Hueys he had seen on the ground as they swarmed in the direction of the border. The next major town was Marand, a place he knew nothing about other than that it would be heavily patrolled by troops from a nearby military installation. More inviting was a dot on the map called Sufian, from which secondary roads wandered around Lake Urmiya to Turkey, two hundred kilometers to the west.
Hunting for the Sufian turnoff, he saw red lights strung across the highway on a wood semaphore. Men in Guardsmen’s khaki came out of a floodlit shack to wait for the Paycon alongside the barricade. As he moved his hand toward Maryam’s shoulder, her eyes opened and settled on the lights.
“Better get up.”
“Huh? I wasn’t—” She yawned, and would have smiled had the significance of the lights not begun to register: Turning her face to the breeze, she drank in cool air, then pulled the chador over her forehead and felt for stray wisps of hair. “Leave everything to me.”
The red lights suddenly swept upward. Darius fed more gas, but slammed the brakes when the semaphore came down again after releasing a Bedford truck into the lane. The Paycon swerved around the truck, and continued to the barricade, where the Guardsmen shined electric lanterns into the front seat. Shielding his eyes from the glare, Darius did not see the man who asked him, “What are you doing on this road at such an hour of the night?”
“We are going to Maku.”
“The border area is restricted to commercial traffic. What is your business there?”
“I am employed by a customs brokerage in Teheran. I have been sent to pick up a consignment of precious gemstones that are locked up in the customs warehouse.”
“Have you proof of who you work for?”
“They know my name in Maku.”
“Let me see your passport.”
Darius’s hand brushed the pocket where he kept his French ID. “We didn’t bring passports,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Of what use would they be when we are going only as far as the border?”
The light moved away from his face, and he squinted at a handsome man of about thirty whose green eyes had the Mongol cast of a native Azerbaijani, and whose lips formed an unkind smile. Why was he being given a hard time about passports? Why didn’t they ask about Maryam, a grilling for which he had come well rehearsed? He looked into the sky as one of the giant Hueys floated over the checkpoint and then descended into an oat field behind the shed. The Guardsman shut his eyes, and turned his back on the whirlwind while Darius sized up his chances of crashing through the checkpoint. Since leaving Teheran he had anticipated having to make a decision like this, but wanted more than a dust cloud to cover his escape.
“Show some identification,” the Guardsman said.
Maryam said, “Let us through. It’s late, and we need to find a hotel. We can’t waste all night here.”
“Neither can we. After we have examined your papers, we will be glad to let you on your way.”
Darius’s hand settled on the Browning. The men with the G-3s were no more an impediment than the flimsy wood of the semaphore. As the gun slid from his pocket, a voice declared, “I know them,” and Darius strained to see into the oat field, where the helicopter was cooling its engine, the rotor pinwheeling in the wind.
Three men had emerged from the Huey. One of them, clad in fatigues and black military boots, walked up to the barricade with the stiff, forceful gait of an athlete gone to seed but still to be reckoned with. Darius didn’t recognize him as Baraheni until he strode into the light.
In his hurry to get at the car Baraheni pushed the Guardsman out of the way. “Did you really, in your fondest dream, believe we would let you near the border?” he said to Darius. “We have been following you in the air since before you entered Azerbaijan.”
“We came this far,” Darius answered. “Who is to say how far our luck would take us?”
“Luck was all you had, and already you have used up every bit of it. We are better prepared.” Baraheni snatched the light from the Guardsman, and shined it into the Paycon. “Where are the mycotoxins?”
“What makes you think we found them?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. You would not leave Iran without them. We know how tenacious you are. In your way, you are also a fanatic. That is why we put obstacles in your path, so you would look that much harder.”
More Guardsmen came out of the shed to surround the car on three sides, and then Ashfar broke through the circle and bore into Darius with his gaze. “We know you have them,” he said. “Where are they?”
Darius eyed the knapsack between his heels.
Ashfar could not help but smile. “Personally, I would have kept them in the trunk. What if, God forbid, you had an accident?”
“Hand them over.” Baraheni tugged at the driver’s door. “Open it, and then step out. You, too,” he said to Maryam.
As Darius hoisted the bag onto the seat, Baraheni reached inside the car. Reflexively—his hand two steps ahead of his brain, which subsequently would be asked permission for what he was about to do—Darius grabbed him by the hair, and rolled the window under the big man’s chin.
Baraheni shouted, “Fuck your—”
Darius whipped out the Browning, and stuffed the barrel into Baraheni’s mouth. The Guardsmen leveled their weapons and looked toward Ashfar, who said nothing as Darius tromped on the gas. The Paycon lurched ahead with the suddenness of a desert animal, but none of the grace, dragging Baraheni along with it.
Maryam covered her head in her arms as the semaphore splintered against the windshield. “You can’t believe we’ll outrun them.”
She glanced back at the barricade. The Guardsmen were still waiting for instructions; some had pointed their guns toward the ground. Bijan stepped into the light with a finger aimed at the highway, and a ragged fusillade spurred the car faster. Maryam pressed her chin against her knees as another volley rang out, and then slowly she raised her head. “Look at
him.
”
Baraheni’s snub features had gone waxen, and were melting into his face. The back of his head flapped like a loose door in the wind before flying off as the Paycon picked up speed. Darius withdrew the gun, and the big man’s mouth snapped shut, and then it sagged. Blood exploded into the car from both nostrils, as though an artery had been sectioned through them. Darius grabbed the window crank, but couldn’t budge it.
“Steer,” he said.
“I can’t drive.”
He wrapped her fingers around the wheel. He pushed the glass down into the door with his left hand, while trying to work Baraheni’s head out through the enlarged opening. The crank still did not move, then twirled uselessly as he forced it with both hands.
A flatbed truck rounded a curve riding the center stripe, and the rear end swung into their lane. Darius took back the wheel and angled the Paycon to the right. A long load of scrap metal flying a red rag flag clipped the body dragging from his door. The Paycon caromed onto the weedy shoulder, a dry breeze sweeping the front seat over the jagged glass where Baraheni had been.
The lights in his mirror brightened while the car plodded through the tall brush. Two vehicles—possibly more—had left the checkpoint after them. Their pursuers slowed as they came alongside the truck, and a short distance beyond it they stopped. Darius saw men on the pavement. They walked six abreast, then crouched in a circle as the lights became pinpoints and then went out.
The Paycon’s high beams flushed mulberry trees from the night in tidy groves behind mud-brick walls. A hairpin turn coming up without warning threw Maryam against him. She said, “Oooh,” as the breath was jarred out of her, but made no comment, her silence questioning his hurry when there was no place to go. He held the Paycon at high speed for ten minutes, and just as his nerves had started to lose their edge, and Maryam was saying, “They’ve stopped following us,” the highway was bathed in bright light.
“What’s that?” Maryam lowered her window, and poked her head outside.
The eggbeater sound of the helicopter was everywhere. Darius pulled her in as gunfire raked the blacktop. He kicked harder at the gas, but his foot was already on the floor. The Huey dropped to treetop level, daring them to enter the splash of light it claimed for its own. Darius veered onto the distant shoulder as more rifle fire rained down. The helicopter floated away to position itself three hundred meters ahead. A bus was approaching in the left lane, and Darius came back onto the pavement and timed their entry into the light so that the Paycon was side by side with it. The Huey held fire, then bounded off to set up another ambush.
The farmland confined them to an asphalt corridor. Beyond the distant shoulder the mulberry trees stretched on indefinitely; but outside Maryam’s window they gave way to an almond orchard surrounded by a tumbledown wall. Darius cut his lights, and the Paycon left the pavement through a gap in the brick, which it widened with its fenders. The helicopter hovered over the grove like a gargantuan dragonfly rustling the leaves with the beat of its wings, inscribing circles in the green-black canopy that encompassed a smaller area around the car with each pass. Then it banked sharply, and settled on the highway, and Guardsmen in full battle dress jumped out.
Edging through the trees, Darius did not let the speedometer needle much above five. The powdery earth afforded little traction to the light car, which spun its wheels in frustration. The grove was larger than he had anticipated, the almond trees yielding to walnuts and then a stand of immature chestnuts before the Paycon crashed through the ruins of another wall into neat grain fields pampered like garden plots. Darius estimated they had traveled two kilometers when he felt a hard surface again, and they came out onto a rutted lane of crushed rock.
“Which way?” Maryam asked.
Darius flashed his lights. In a pasture across the lane a donkey was tethered to a wagon without wheels. Darius got out of the car murmuring softly to the animal, which ignored him as it browsed on brown grass.
“What are you doing there?” Maryam said.
Darius stroked the animal’s coat, and scratched behind the ears. “We’d blend into the countryside lots easier with a donkey.”
“I don’t want to blend in.” Maryam said. “I want to get out.”
He untied the animal, and tugged at the rope. The donkey did not move. He slapped its rump and the donkey stepped back without raising its head from the grass.
“Apparently, he thinks he’ll be safer without us,” Maryam said.
The donkey was nibbling between Darius’s feet as a farm truck jolted to a halt not five meters away. One headlamp was not aimed properly. Like a wandering eye it probed the man in the patchy field. Someone called out to him in Azerbaijani, and Maryam responded in the same language.
“What did he say?” Darius asked her.
“We don’t belong here. I told him to mind his own business, but he’s not going to leave till he has a better answer.” She cocked her head while the man said several more words. “He wants to know what we want in this field.”