Silent Partner

by Leigh Brackett

  12

  He couldn’t stay drunk. There was no booze and no way to get any. The small jet whistled them eastward to land at the crack of a sultry, thundering dawn at a military airfield, where Markey hurried him out and across the Tarmac and into a huge bomber, and after that he did not see the ground again for what seemed like weeks. The plane landed twice to refuel and change crews, but Markey would not permit him to get out.

  "Why?” asked Tony. "What harm will it do if I walk around? I’m not going to run away.”

  "I gather,” said Markey, "that you’re a VIP—a very, very important person. Anyway, those are my orders. You stay inside.”

  Tony stayed and worried about the size of his importance. Markey was no help. He had not been briefed in depth; that was not his business. He was a delivery boy with a package, and he sat most of the time in stolid silence, doing his job. Tony managed to sleep now and then, and this was not much of a relief because he only dreamed of all the things he had been thinking about consciously. When the plane landed for the third time and Markey told him to get up and go, he was delighted, thinking it was the end of the line. But Markey said no, it was Ankara, and once again he was hurried across a strip of Tarmac to a waiting plane. This one bore the insignia of the Iranian Air Force. The crew were brisk, able, polite, and uncommunicative. They tucked him and Markey aboard and leaped screaming into the sky, and he thought: They never did this much for James Bond. Look at me.

  He was a slow study, but even he could realize that all this was the measure of their desperation.

  He had begun to wonder what they were desperate about.

  It was during the Ankara-Teheran leg of the journey that he became aware of something new. Something he had never had in his life before. He had a temper and was accustomed to getting mad and flaring up whenever he was annoyed or made uncomfortable. This was a different kind of anger, slow-growing and cold. The kind with staying power. He didn't like it. It cast an ominous foreshadow of change, as though the Tony Wales he had lived with and enjoyed for twenty-eight years were dissolving like an image on film and he could not yet see what was going to replace him.

  He was sure of one thing. Whatever the new Tony Wales might be, he would not be young. Youth had gone forever.

  At long last the lights of Teheran came sliding under the wing. In a few more minutes they were down, accompanied by Markey and a couple of men who had come out to meet the plane, and he was clumping on wooden feet toward a low building. The air was cold, the stars were bright, and the clock inside the building said a quarter to three. Tony wondered if the cloak-and-dagger crowd ever did anything by daylight.

  There were several men in the room, which was dominated on one wall by a huge photograph of the shah, handsome and smiling, and on another by a gilt image of the national lion with the sword in its upraised forepaw and the sun rising over its back. Tony guessed it was a pilots’ briefing room. His escort paused while Markey went to speak to one of the men, who came forward immediately. He was middle-aged, with a smooth, high-nosed face and very dark eyes and one of those pleasant mouths that can convert so quickly to steel-trap sternness. He held out his hand.

  “I am grateful that you are here, Mr. Wales. I am Hanookh Maktabi.”

  Tony shook his hand. “Salaam.”

  “Ah, you speak Persian?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all of it.”

  “Then it is not much,” said Maktabi, “because it is borrowed from the Arabic.” He smiled and bowed. “Salaam alei-kum. Thank you, Mr. Markey. This gentleman will see that you are taken care of.”

  Markey thanked him and nodded to Tony. “So long.”

  Tony said, “Aren’t you going to get a receipt for me?”

  Markey looked at him rather blankly and went out with one of the Iranians. Tomorrow, Tony thought, or rather today, he will board a flight for home, just one more businessman with his little hat and his attaché case. He hated to see Markey go. He was a link anyway, and when the door closed behind him, Tony was alone in a strange land.

  “Come, please,” said Maktabi, and took his elbow.

  They sorted themselves into three cars outside. Tony sat with Maktabi in the middle one. They started off, keeping the intervals between the cars long enough so that they did not look like a caravan, short enough so that they could close up quickly at need. The streets were as quiet as the grave at this hour. The lights were out in the buildings, the pavements deserted. The air was chill, blowing down from the snow peaks of the Elburz above the city.

  Maktabi said. “It is a long journey, Mr. Wales. You must be tired.”

  “I want to get this over with,” said Tony savagely. “Fast.”

  “We too are in haste.” Maktabi spoke clear, scholarly English, a little overprecise, slightly accented. “We will begin as soon as you have slept.”

  “I don’t care about sleep.”

  “I do. Your head must be clear and your eye sharp. I am in sympathy, Mr. Wales. It is not pleasant to doubt a friend.” He paused. “It is not pleasant to doubt a countryman.”

  “Have you found anything yet?”

  “No. The audit has begun. It is being done by a firm of business accountants, who are allowing our men to work with them. But it takes time, especially when we do not know exactly what we are looking for. Mr. Hassani has been fully cooperative; he does not seem to be worried, which worries us that perhaps we are wrong. Although the possible attempts to eliminate Mr. Zacharian and yourself are hopeful, very hopeful.”

  “I’m so glad,” said Tony.

  "We must work with what we have. We wish particularly that you will go over the shipping records, as your friend Mr. Martin attempted to do. You will have our Mr. Sherifian to help you. He speaks several languages and will be able to translate for you where it is necessary.”

  “All right,” said Tony. “Let’s just get it over with.” After a minute he said, “Is there anything more on Ellen Lofting?”

  “No. Officially she left Teheran. Unofficially we have not been able to detect any trace of her. If Karim Hassani has done something with her, he has done it well.”

  At least, Tony thought, they haven’t found a body. Yet.

  The lead car halted beside a high blank wall pierced by a heavy wooden gate. The men got out and opened the gate. The car in which Tony and Maktabi were riding turned through it, into a stone-paved area behind a two-story villa of the old style, built of mud brick, stuccoed and painted, with thick walls and tall shuttered windows. The third car remained outside.

  Tony and Maktabi got out and followed a graveled path through another gateway and around the building to the front. Here there was a garden, completely enclosed by the wall. A pool of water glimmered in the starlight; flower beds and roses in crammed profusion made a cold, faint fragrance. The front door opened, spilling light across a blue-tiled portico. A thick-shouldered, black-browed young man, who looked like an amateur boxer, came out and spoke to Maktabi, who said to Tony, “This is Ali. He will see that you have everything you need. He is extremely capable.”

  “He looks it,” Tony said. “Salaam, Ali.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Wales.”

  They went inside, into a small room with a tiled niche for a fireplace and the inevitable carpets on the floor. The ceiling was adobe laid over poplar poles, the whole enameled a reddish brown and decorated with many-colored designs so that it too resembled a carpet. The furniture was sparse—an inlaid table and some chairs, a few pieces of fine metalwork, some antique tiles.

  “Your bag will be brought in,” said Maktabi. “The villa and garden are yours, but please, I must ask you not to go beyond the inner gate. It is not advisable that you should walk in the streets. For your own safety, you understand. We will keep a guard on the gate.”

  Tony nodded assent. It was the first time in his life that he was a prisoner.

  “I hope you will sleep well.” Maktabi extended his hand, preparatory to taking himself off, but Tony shook his head.


  “Stay a minute. I want to talk. Can I have a drink?”

  Ali fetched glasses and a bottle of Queen Elizabeth I, Irani Scotch. Maktabi politely declined, and so Tony drank alone, gratefully, and found it good.

  “All of a sudden,” he said, “I'm a very, very important person. People at one end are trying to kill me, and people at the other end are flying me halfway around the world at government expense just so I can go over some shipping manifests. Only I don't really know anything, so it seems as though you’re going to an awful lot of trouble for not much. I mean, what’s all the hurry? Even if Karim is mixed up with these bastards and smuggling stuff in, it’s not new. It must have been going on for three, four years. But the minute there’s a faint idea that it might be Karim, everybody jumps off the cliff as if they can’t wait to get to the bottom. What's pushing you?”

  Maktabi’s face lost all its smooth politeness and settled into lines of iron.

  “Does the name Lion mean anything to you, Mr. Wales?”

  “Nothing but a big cat.”

  “To us it has other meanings. The lion is, of course, the symbol of our country, and from ancient times it has been associated with sovereignty and power. At Persepolis the lion of the Achaemenids still conquers its prey. This is interesting because Lion is also a code name, which we heard for the first time only a few months ago. Three men tried to burn the adult education center and the medical dispensary at a village north of Shiraz. They were caught in time, but the leader was a defiant man. He said, 'I have heard it in the wind, that a lion will come from the desert and eat you up.' This was all he knew, but he took great pleasure in it. The Lion, he thought, would set him free. A tribesman, an ignorant man, a fanatic—but he had heard something. Perhaps. We began to listen in the coffeehouses, the bazaars, the villages, the camps of the nomads, and we also heard of this Shir, this Lion who prowls in the desert growing strong, waiting his time to spring. We still had nothing except rumor. Then a cache of arms was found hidden in a cave, and we knew the Lion was real.

  “The Lion intends, we believe, to rouse up a rebellion in Fars.”

  13

  There was no fire in the tiled niche, and the room was cold. The air had an unfamiliar taste, compounded of many things—dusts, smokes, spices, time, the subliminal traces that are the sum total of a city and the way it lives and eats and performs its myriad small actions. Tony found that he was shivering.

  He said, “Rebellion?” He did not know why he was surprised. After all, what else would you use all those guns for? Perhaps it was not surprise, really, but the shock of being associated personally with such a thing, and in a foreign country where they were likely to take a dim view of idiot outsiders who helped it along. If he had.

  Maktabi said somberly, “We are an old country, an old people. Within two generations under the Pahlavis we have become a modern country, a progressive people. Such changes are not made without pain. Rich men are made poor; mullahs cry sacrilege. The powerful tribes who once looted whole provinces resent that they have been made peaceful and forced to obey the law. Some men do not like it that our women are free now to go to school, learning even to be doctors and scientists. They say this is against the will of Allah and the law of Islam, and for the same reason they burn the education centers, believing that the people should have only the teaching of the mullahs and the Koran. It is not easy to change these things. Much, very much, has been accomplished, but resistance in some quarters has been bitter and still remains.”

  “Okay,” said Tony, “but where do the Commies come in? I thought you people were friendly with Russia. I mean, they’re building that steel mill at Isfahan—"

  Maktabi showed his teeth briefly in what might have been a smile. “We have lived with Russia for a very long time. We know her well. Czarist or Soviet, she does not change. Her methods alter with the times, her aims never. Do you know anything of the Tudeh Party? A strong arm of Soviet intervention. They set up an autonomous government in Azerbaijan in nineteen forty-five, at a time when Soviet troops were still stationed in our northern provinces and barring our own forces from our own lands. The Tudeh stirred up the Kurds to revolt—never a difficult task!—and in nineteen forty-six they formed a coalition of the strong and turbulent southern tribes that took over most of the province of Fars, also demanding autonomy. That was twenty-two years ago, and the Tudeh Party has been illegal and disbanded for nineteen. Still it seems that the idea has not been forgotten, and Fars is again the locus of the trouble.

  "At this time Russia would not dream of involving herself openly in such an action. No. It is for actions of this sort that she has gone to the trouble of setting up the network of which Mr. Corbett has told you. It is like this, Mr. Wales: If Iranians wish to make mischief in their own country, that is no affair of Russia’s. If arms and money are supplied to dissidents from some Western country, that is certainly no affair of Russia’s. If the plot should succeed, she would at once recognize the rebel government in the name of self-determination and raise a great clamor at any attempt we might make to regain the province. Egypt and Iraq would immediately join in, ready to support the rebels in exchange for concessions; Fars has a long coastline, for instance, on the Persian Gulf, and our great refinery and oil center at Abadan would be pinched between Iraq and the rebels. It would make an extremely dangerous and difficult situation, with the Middle East already in an explosive state and the Soviet presence now so powerful. It would also be a terrible blow to our pro-Western and democratic nation.

  “Meanwhile, win or lose, Russia takes no risks. The blame for the initial revolt would lie with our own people and the countries of the West, including your own, whence the arms were supplied.”

  Maktabi rose and stood looking down at Tony. The Iranian was a slender man with delicate hands and the abiding strength of a people who have maintained their national identity over more than two millennia of foreign conquest, slaughter, and tyranny, ending each time by civilizing their conquerors and making good Persians out of them.

  "You will see, Mr. Wales, that we cannot permit this thing to happen. That is why you are suddenly so important, why we are in so great haste. We must discover the leaders and the details of this conspiracy before it becomes necessary to shed blood.”

  "Yes,” said Tony. "I see.” My God, he thought, when I get myself in a mess, I really go all the way. He added, feeling like an utter fool, "I’ll do everything I can.”

  "Thank you,” said Maktabi. "Good night, Mr. Wales. Mr. Sherifian will come in the morning.”

  He left. Still stunned, Tony took the bottle with him and followed Ali up some narrow stairs to an upper room, where he went to bed. Tired as he was, he was too restless to sleep, and the barking of the jube dogs disturbed him. They had neither the ferocity nor the lung power of the dogs he had heard in Baghdad, but they were doing pretty well, running the dark streets that belonged to them by night. Presently he got up and went to the window. The shutters were open. He could see out across the garden and over the wall. Beyond the wall, side by side in their ruined gardens, were the wrecks of two villas much like this one, ravished, disemboweled, awaiting final entombment in the foundations of some new office block. The pale tile of the fireplace was still visible in one of the roofless rooms. Away and above, the peaks of the Elburz hung in the sky like clouds. Somewhere off to his left, at the northwestern terminus of the range, was Alamut, the Valley of the Assassins, stronghold of the Old Man of the Mountain, Hasan-ibn-al-Sabbah. He knew about Hasan the Assassin because Karim had told him. It was not a happy thought.

  Unbidden, the memory of Ellen Lofting returned to him, so powerfully that he could see her in every detail, hear her voice, smell the clean fragrance of her hair. He wondered if she were still alive.

  Mr. Sherifian was waiting for him when he came downstairs at half-past ten. He was a middle-aged man, sharp-featured and businesslike. He had brought with him several boxes bulging with bundles of manifests, invoices, and receipts. He greeted Tony cour
teously and accepted coffee, waiting patiently while Tony breakfasted on fruit and goat cheese and flat strips of Iranian bread. Then Ali cleared the table, and Sherifian transshipped his bundles.

  “These are for the year nineteen sixty-five,” Sherifian said. “We will begin with January.”

  By nightfall they had worked their way through to the end of June, and Tony knew more about the affairs of Hassani-Wales and Company than he had learned in the previous four years.

  It all seemed innocent enough. Hassani-Wales exported carpets; Isfahani metalwork in brass, silver, and gold; various handcrafted articles; and a small specialized assortment of silks, jewelry, antiquities, art objects, and the like to specialized customers at extremely high prices. Hassani-Wales then purchased manufactured goods, chiefly radios and household appliances for which there was a booming demand, shipped them in, and sold them at a profit to local dealers.

  “I don’t know,” said Tony. “It looks to me as though Karim’s just the hell of a good businessman.”

  “One must agree," said Sherifian. “Very good indeed.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “From the first he was successful. Markets all over the world opened to him as though by magic.”

  “You mean as though he’d joined the club. Yes. Maybe. Damn it, if there were only something solid to get hold of! Everything seems to slide off around a corner.”

  “What about these?” Sherifian held up two sheets he had set aside from the main lot.

  Tony shook his head. “You asked me for anything at all, so I’m giving it to you, but I don’t know that it means anything.” He took the sheets from Sherifian and scowled at them. “Alvarez and Slate, Alameda Street, Los Angeles, California. Large and Small Appliances, Manufacturer’s Surplus Stocks. I never heard of ’em, and I thought I knew everybody Karim did business with in LA. Maybe he only got this one consignment from them and never made another deal, or maybe they went out of business and there wasn’t any reason to mention them to me. I wasn’t really a working partner, you know.” It was odd that he did not feel like boasting about that anymore. He even felt ashamed.