The man pounded the cans with a rubber mallet that did not mar the labels stamped with a picture of a tree burdened with sun-ripened peaches. When they were reshaped to his satisfaction, he wove them into a mat of Pepsi-Cola cans. These he fashioned into a suitcase, which he finished off with a leather handle. Looking up to admire his handicraft, he saw Darius, and turned away.
“Farhad, don’t you say hello to an old friend?”
“You’re no friend of mine,” the suitcase maker answered.
“That depends on your point of view. I’d say I’m the best friend you have in this world, and maybe the next.”
Farhad placed another can on the bench. A glancing blow scraped the green crown from the peach tree, and he threw it away. “I can’t work with you jabbering at my back.”
“Then look at me.”
Reluctantly, Farhad faced him. His skin was loose beneath hollow black eyes. Thin on top, he was going gray at the temples. Farhad was twenty-four. “You don’t have any business with me,” he complained. “I’ve been clean.”
Darius smiled unpleasantly. “It’s a new service of the National Police. We look after the health of all our old friends.”
Farhad didn’t see the humor in it. “Ask the Komiteh,” he said. “They’d know if I was using.”
“But I’m already here.” Darius grabbed the suitcase maker’s wrist, and rolled his sleeve above the elbow. Farhad’s bicep was a shriveled knot of scars, but there were no fresh abscesses or punctures.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful, instead of bothering me, and hire out as a bodyguard for a mullah?” Farhad said.
He buttoned his sleeve, hammered another can. Darius watched over his shoulder, then kicked him behind the knee. Farhad went down, grazing his jaw on the bench and recoiled onto his back. Darius was all over him. He tore off the suitcase maker’s shoes and flung them into a pyramid of spoiled cans. Farhad’s feet were two sizes too large for his shrunken body, the skin yellow as parchment. Along the instep the veins were swollen red, and drained into suppurating wounds between his toes.
“I
should
call the Komiteh,” Darius said. “You’d learn who your friends are.”
“Eat rooster shit.”
Farhad’s heels swept under Darius’s chin. Darius poised a jab at the scarred soles, but pulled it when the suitcase maker screamed in anticipated pain. Disapproval became the verdict in the murmuring at his back. A crowd stretched to the rug merchants, all eyes on him. “Keep moving,” he said coolly. “The show’s over. Let’s go.”
Grumbling, the shoppers drifted in search of the next attraction. Darius pulled Farhad to his knees, and backed him over the bench.
“What do you want?”
Getting information from an addict was next to impossible, Darius knew, even when there were funds to pay for it. Properly softened up, however, Farhad would not be as quick to fall back on the lies that were his natural line of defense. Darius brought out the picture of the girl. There were few heroin users in Teheran that Farhad did not number among his friends, and enemies. “Ever see her before?”
The suitcase maker scarcely glanced at the snapshot. He shook his head as he picked up his mallet.
“Look again.”
“I never—”
Darius stamped on his foot.
“Monday,” Farhad moaned. “This time of day.”
“Where?”
“In the Shah’s Mosque, here at the bazaar. You crushed my—”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Darius tapped his foot beside the suitcase maker’s. I swear it.
“But you talked?”
Farhad made a gasping sound that Darius took for a yes.
“What about?”
“What do you think?”
Farhad’s thin smile irked Darius, who ground his heel into the suitcase maker’s toes. “How much did you sell her?”
“
She
was the one with the goods.” Moisture was running from Farhad’s eyes. “Her price couldn’t be beat.”
“Your lucky day.”
“I told her to get lost.”
“Why?”
“She wouldn’t say where she’d got my name, or how she knew I was in the market for good stuff.” Perched on one leg Farhad caressed his wounded toes.
“Everyone knows your name.”
“She was moving kilos.” Farhad looked sadly around the tiny stall. “Grams are my speed now.”
“Who did you send her to?”
“That kind of weight, I don’t know anybody who could handle it.”
Darius lifted his heel.
“… It’s the truth.”
“Any idea why she was desperate for quick cash?”
“What does anyone want with serious money these days? It’s not cheap to find a place in Beverly Hills.”
From the top shelf Darius brought down a grip fabricated from small cans that formerly had contained baby French green peas. “How much?”
“Seventy thousand rials,” Farhad said. “Planning a trip, too?”
Darius moistened his thumb as he counted out the bills. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Darius drove back to his place on Baharestan Square. Exhausted, he was nevertheless too keyed up for sleep, and continued into the suburbs. The electric was off at the apartment complex in Shemiran, the black surface of the courtyard like a subterranean sea. He sat on the bench where the body was found, looking up at the buildings. Why had the girl been left here? Why not in a park, or vacant lot, or any of a thousand bombed-out ruins downtown where she would have remained undiscovered for weeks? Had she been killed upstairs, he asked himself, and her body gotten rid of at the first opportunity? Or was it more than convenience that linked the mutilated Arab girl to Saltanatabad Avenues déclassé elite.
He slunk down until the back of his head rested against the top slat, and he was looking into a window covered by a yellow curtain. Shoe leather scraped the tiles with the hiss a blade makes on a barber’s strop. A flash of khaki and then the barrel of an Uzi caught his eye. He reached for ID, but quickly showed his empty hand. The assumption being formulated by the man with the rifle was not necessarily that he was going for his wallet.
Red-rimmed eyes and drawn cheeks insinuated themselves as a mirror image of his own. Bijan’s day had been longer even than his.
“Trying it on for size?”
“What?” Darius asked him.
“I saw you sitting here like the dead girl. For a moment I thought you might be dead, too.”
“Who would harm me? I have no enemies.”
“Neither did she.”
“Is that a fact?”
“A theory of mine,” the Komitehman said. “Another is that it would be better for you to concentrate on the burglary at the relatives of Ayatollah Golabi.”
“There was no burglary.”
“You have the soul of a prophet. Your calling is to reveal the truth.” Bijan sat next to him with the Uzi between his knees. “But in Islam all truths were revealed long ago. Muhammad was the last prophet, and he is dead more than a thousand years.”
“New questions come up every day,” Darius said. “The prophets didn’t anticipate the modern age.”
“Nothing is new,” Bijan answered with conviction, “merely things that are not as they appear to be at first glance. For instance, dig deep at the Golabis’ and, if God wills it, you will uncover a robbery like countless others.”
“And if I dig here, what will I find?”
Bijan gazed at the apartment houses. It seemed to Darius that he focused on the bricks rather than glimpse inside the windows. “The girl was an Arab, a narcotics addict. It is not the responsibility of the National Police of the Islamic Republic to sort through the world’s garbage.”
“How do you know she used drugs?”
“On reflection it is plain.”
“Nothing is plain,” Darius said. “Dr. Baghai almost missed it.”
“We have our sources.”
“Your people killed her. That’s your source.”
“Slander against the Committee for the Revolution is a crime for which the penalty is years at hard labor,” Bijan said. “If you persist in such remarks, be prepared to back them up with fact.”
“She
was
yours.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by yours. The Pasdars found her body. We alerted the police, who took her away. So it follows that now she is yours, am I right? I came to tell you that pursuing more relevant investigations will enhance your worth to the Revolution. If you would rather waste time on a prostitute, it is up to you, of course, but—” Bijan slid his hand along the oiled barrel of the Uzi, fondled it—teased it, Darius thought. “But not useful to anyone.”
“How did you know—”
“That the girl used drugs? I told you—” Bijan stroked the muzzle, and wiped his hand on his pants. “The Komiteh has its sources, even in the morgue.”
“I don’t mean that,” Darius said.
“What?”
“How did you know I was here?”
Farib lay on her small piece of the mattress with her elbows like barbed wire around her body. Vaguely, Darius remembered when she sprawled across the bed and could not sleep unless he was pressed tight beside her. Over the years she had gravitated to one side from which he was excluded except upon invitation. He noticed a leg almost off the mattress. If he did not repair his marriage, soon she would be sleeping on the floor, or else he on the couch. In the morning he would offer to go shopping with her, look for nice things to put in her new valise.
Stepping out of his clothes, he raised the blanket. Without benefit of surgery Farib’s body was nearly as perfect as her nose. It was Darius’s complaint, never expressed, that he slept each night with the Venus de Milo, and worried about leaving smudges. Perversely, he anticipated her rages, when bloodless lips or the clumsy gesture that proved her to be human inspired new love—and more frustration. His eyes full of her cool beauty, he climbed under the covers trying not to brush against her.
He was awakened by the phone. Too tired to move, he lay on his chin and listened to it ring. When it stopped, he opened his eyes. He was alone in bed, the room flooded with late-morning sun. The ringing began again. He hurried into the kitchen, and picked up on the extension.
A whisper he couldn’t put a name to asked to speak to the lieutenant colonel. With the receiver against his shoulder he brought the teapot under the faucet. Running water washed away the cobwebs, and he recognized Farhad on the line.
“I’ve been thinking about the girl,” he was saying. “Possibly, there are other things I remember about her.”
“What things?”
Farhad had his own agenda. “Before I tell you, there’s a small favor you can do—”
“Keep out of trouble,” Darius said, “and you won’t need favors.”
“It’s not for me—for a friend, a girl very much like the one we talked about.”
“What kind of trouble is she in?”
“Evin Prison,” Farhad said. “That kind.”
A sound meant to be ironic laughter came out of Darius a grunt. “No one has influence there. Not even the Komiteh can get people out of their jails.”
“If they know someone is interested in her case, they’ll go easier on her.”
“I have some doubt about this sudden improvement in your memory,” Darius said.
“I’ve always given you good stuff.”
“You have the same credibility as any other informant, which is to say not much.”
“She’ll be
just
like that girl, if you don’t help.”
Darius put a light under the teapot. “Give me a taste of what you have, and I’ll tell you what it’s worth.”
“Nothing for nothing.”
“Bye, Farhad. I’m not going up against the Komiteh, and then find out you’ve been building castles in air.” He heard other voices, one inquiring about the price of a valise.
Farhad said something he didn’t catch, and then, in a whisper: “The girl told me she had twenty, maybe as much as thirty kilograms of Afghani white heroin, very high-grade, almost pure. And she knew specifically who she wanted to move them to—a mutual acquaintance in Dharvazeh Ghor, who she could not locate. I told her where to look.”
“And then?”
“The buyer—do what you can for my friend, and I’ll give him up to you.”
“You appall me, Farhad. Where’s your criminals’ code of honor?”
“What does
he
know about honor? He’s a fucking thief who’s beating me out of a ten percent finder’s fee.”
“Tell me more.”
“This is all you get for free. Will you help?”
Darius forced hesitation into his voice. “I’ll be at the bazaar in a couple of hours.”
“No, I’ve already been seen too much with you. How well do you know Dharvazeh Ghor?”
“I can find my way around.”
“On Martyr Rafizadeh Street there is a school that was bombed during the War of Cities, and never torn down. If you want to know about the girl, about both girls, be there at seven.”
“I can’t give you any guarantees about your friend.”
“If you won’t try—
then
it’s guaranteed what will happen to her.”
Dharvazeh Ghor, at the retreating edge of the desert, was home to the poorest of Teheran’s poor, day laborers and sweepers in small factories, who lived in iron-roofed shanties for which a single squat toilet over an open sewage pit served dozens of families. The Martyr Rafizadeh Street School had been a pet social project of the new regime. It was less than a year old when an Iraqi missile crashed into the lunch room, killing and maiming nearly two hundred children. No funds were available to rebuild the structure, which stood now as a memorial to the slaughtered youngsters. Though the roof was gone, the walls remained intact but for empty windows and door frames. Dharvazeh Ghor in its entirety appeared to Darius as a monument to shattered hope. New construction had been limited to wedding bowers for the war dead, waist-high shrines decked with colored pennants, and tin amulets in the form of St. Abbas’s consoling hand.
Darius had assumed that Farhad would be waiting outside. For fifteen minutes he paced the sidewalk before clambering through the wreckage into a classroom. The cinder block walls were papered over with revolutionary posters showing Muslim warriors being raised to heaven on the backs of white horses. Rows of splintered desks faced a blackboard that was a Rosetta stone of juvenile script. A rat half as long as its hairless tail paddled away from a yelping dog that followed it around the edge of a water-filled crater. The walls, the floors, the sliding door of the coat closet were black with ancient blood.