The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  When she rose up, Oriana had a semi-automatic in her hand. She had apparently found it on the floor. Like Maya’s gun, the barrel had been extended with a tubular sound suppressor. Oriana checked the magazine, then slammed it back in place. She leaned in over the driver and pulled the keys from the ignition. The radio went off. Then she took the keys and the gun and headed toward the back of the car.

  “Oriana?”

  Headlights flared off the outside mirror. A vacant, illuminated city bus noisily rattled by. When it had passed, Oriana used the driver’s key to open up the trunk. As I turned to climb out of the cab, my hand touched down on Maya’s stationery. It felt wet. I picked it up and saw to my shock that a corner was soaked with blood.

  “What the fu—?” I looked down at the floor. Blood was seeping out across it from somewhere behind the seat.

  I turned to look out the back. Oriana stood staring into the trunk. She slammed it shut and walked back to the driver. Without a word she raised the pistol and shot the man through the head.

  32.

  Fake

  THE CLATTER OF HER CHERRY HEELS echoed off the walls. Oriana was scurrying up an alley a few blocks down from the abandoned cab, cutting across to a parallel street, with me trotting close behind her, still struggling to shake the shock. Just like Arshan Azad, another man had been shot in the head a few feet in front of my face. The bullet had blown out his forehead, knocking him onto the steering wheel and spraying his brain on the glass. In the frenzied moments that followed, Oriana shouted orders at me, and unable to think at all for myself I simply did what she said. My consciousness seemed to split off in time, with the splattering red eruption repeating in my mind, while Oriana helped me on with my backpack and urgently prodded me away from the cab.

  After finding the real taxi driver stuffed inside the trunk, his throat cut ear to ear, she had felt no compunction about killing the assassin. I thought it quite possible she’d have killed him anyway, given that he may have overheard our conversation. Then again she might have killed him for the fact of who he was, or because she simply didn’t like his driving. Oriana, I now realized, was capable of anything. For all I knew she might turn the gun on me.

  Surveying the street from the end of the alley, she whispered that we hadn’t much time; they would soon be looking for us. I assumed she meant the Iranians, but when she slipped the murder weapon into a restaurant dumpster, I realized she must have been referring to the police. She said the address of her friend, a man she referred to as “Steinberg,” was not too far ahead, and if we hurried she was certain we could make it there on foot.

  Every passing car sent a fresh shiver through me. The Iranians? The cops? We averted our faces from their headlights, and avoided the gaze of the few nighthawks still prowling the empty streets. Given the several time zones I’d been catapulted through, I didn’t know exactly how much later it was than the ten o’clock hour on my watch. I guessed it was probably two in the morning when we finally reached our destination, what appeared to be a gallery or bookshop. My heartbeat was still raging as we walked up to the door.

  Like every other storefront on the ill-lighted street, the window was dark, the door was bolted, and a security gate had been marched across the front. But Steinberg’s old place had a certain flair about it, an air of refinement that seemed out of place in a neighborhood of sausage shops and pawnbrokers. The Cyrillic lettering on the unwashed window was indecipherable to me, and though the ancient, leather-bound books on display exhibited a variety of languages, I could not spot a single title in English. Above the books hung hand-colored antique maps; sepia photographs of rural peasants and 19th-Century townspeople; striking Japanese woodblock prints of sword-wielding samurai and red-lipped geishas; and several finely-rendered etchings of various characters out of the Bible, including an old engraved depiction of Christ, a distant forerunner of the picture that hung on the wall in Vincenzo’s room.

  Each item in the window was exquisite, but it was age more than artistry that linked them all together. Locked behind the steel grate and the foggy pane of glass, the whole array seemed to capture an atmosphere of timelessness, like a giant Joseph Cornell box or a ship inside a bottle. The simple act of looking at it seemed to calm me down.

  Oriana rapped on the door with her knuckles. Headlights flared, and we pressed into the shadow of the doorway until the dark sedan had passed. She knocked again. Still nothing. Stretching up on her toes, she reached to the top of the doorframe. “He used to leave a key—”

  A light came on in the window. “He’s coming,” I said. A moment later, the bolt unlocked. As the door pushed open, a cat darted out. The man reached down to grab it and missed. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe.

  “Ach,” the man groaned, rising from his slippers. He was heavy and balding with a whiskery beard, and his face was flushed and grimacing, as if he were out of breath. “Man and cat—like cat and mouse.” He gestured inside. “Please.” As we passed he stood against the door, appraising us from behind a pair of magnifying wire-rims, all the while noisily respiring through his nose.

  He closed the door and bolted it, and turned to us once more. A single dangling bulb lit his face. I noticed that his magnified eyes were slightly disproportioned, the left one wide with an open stare, the right more squinty and discerning. Both eyes softened as they fell on Oriana. She was pulling off her headscarf and shaking out her hair.

  “Bubbilleh,” he said wistfully. “I hardly recognize you without your M-16.”

  “They carry the Tavor now,” she said. “Made in Israel.” She extended her hand. “Shalom.”

  He took her hand in both of his and hugged it to his heart. “Too long, Bubbi. Too long.”

  Oriana introduced me in English as “the American, Jack Duran,” then spoke to Steinberg in the same guttural language I had heard her use on the phone. I realized now it was Hebrew. She was telling him what happened in the cab.

  When she finished, he asked several questions. She responded to the last with what sounded like an apology.

  Steinberg waved it off. “It was the only thing to do,” he said, speaking now in English. “But it makes our situation more difficult.” Reaching up with both hands, rasping with the effort, he gingerly unscrewed the dangling bulb until the glowing filament went out. “Please, follow me,” he said.

  He padded off into the darkness beneath towering shelves of books. Oriana indicated I should follow him.

  I stood where I was. “You never told me your surname.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I’m asking now. What is your name?”

  “My name is Oriana Shahar. Would you like to check my driver’s license?”

  “You’re an Israeli,” I said.

  “You make that sound like an accusation.” She headed off after Steinberg.

  I followed. “Why did you pretend to be Italian?”

  “I was in Rome. You know what they say.”

  “Sure—when in Rome, pretend you’re not Israeli.”

  “It wasn’t that much of a stretch,” she said.

  “Oriana’s mother was Italian.” We turned to see Steinberg resting halfway down an aisle, a dim pear-shape in the darkness. “She was a great beauty, too,” he said. “And an even better shot than Oriana. This way, please.”

  The asthmatic shuffled off, wheezing his way through the black labyrinth. We followed more by sound than by sight.

  I asked Oriana if she was still with the Israeli army.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  “Then who are you with? Mossad?”

  “At the moment, I’m with you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. You’re Israeli. They’re Iranian. I’ve stepped into the middle of a dogfight.”

  “You’re an American, Jack. You were already in the middle of it whether you recognized it or not.”

  “One moment, please.” Steinberg reached into the shelf on his right and triggered some latch or lever. The shelf swivele
d open, revealing a hidden doorway. He waved us through and pulled the shelf shut behind us. Fluorescent tube lights flickered on, revealing a white-walled workroom. “We should be safe in here for the time being, but if anyone decides to pay us a visit,” he nodded toward a heavily bolted door at the back, “that exit leads into the alley.”

  I made a mental note of all the locks to be undone, hoping we wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry.

  The room was humid and windowless. Steinberg tugged the chain of an ancient ceiling fan, and its sluggish blades groaned into a whir. Around us lay a clutter of old furniture and equipment: a mahogany writing desk stacked with prints and paperwork, a pair of battered library tables splotched with paint and ink, a collection of vintage typewriters, manual and electric, an adjustable overhead photography apparatus, and a slew of printmaking and copying equipment, from an antique pantographic etching machine to a large-format, inkjet digital printer, a type I had seen used to make Giclée.

  On the table before me was a landscape etching. The style of the drawing looked strikingly familiar. As I picked it up for closer inspection, I spotted the signature: Rembrandt.

  “Mr. Steinberg—this print, the others in your window, are they pulled from the original plates?”

  He removed his glasses to rub them on his robe, blinking at me like a turtle. “Oriana didn’t mention you were an artist.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But I used to give tours in the Vatican Pinacoteca.”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Then you tell me: What do you think?”

  “I’m no expert,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t trust experts. I want your opinion. Have I wasted my money?”

  I brought the paper close. The plate had left an image no larger than my hand. It featured a wooden shack nestled beside a clump of trees. With Rembrandt’s usual rich variety of strokes, the sunlit hut had been crisply rendered, but the darkly shadowed trees appeared velvety and diffuse.

  “It’s actually not an etching; it’s drypoint,” I said. “You can tell with the trees, especially these tall ones on the left. With drypoint you scratch lines directly into the plate, and it throws up residual metal in a burr on either side. That’s why the lines bleed out when they’re inked, and give you this velvety sort of watercolor effect. But the burr wears off slightly with each impression, so the effect is lost in later prints. So this must be a first state, which means…”

  I stopped myself and lowered the picture.

  Steinberg snatched it, donning his glasses. “Means what?”

  “Look, I don’t know. I told you, I’m no expert.”

  He set the picture down and leaned over to examine it. “What you mean to say is that if it were a life print, made by the artist himself, it would be hanging on the wall of a museum somewhere, not gathering dust in a bookshop in Baku.”

  “If that is a first-state print,” I said, “then yeah, very likely, it’s a fake.”

  Steinberg—to my horror—suddenly ripped the print in half. “You’re right,” he said. “In fact, it’s actually a proof. But with another dozen impressions, I’ll pull a print that looks as if it could still be on the market.” He glanced between the two of us, gesturing impatiently. “Passports. Please.”

  Oriana immediately handed hers over. Steinberg looked to me, waiting.

  “Oh. Yeah. Of course.” Having thought of his shop as a refuge from the streets, I’d forgotten why we’d come here in the first place. Oriana had said her friend could get us travel visas quick. Steinberg, I now realized, was a forger.

  “THEY’RE HERE, IN BAKU,” I said.

  The Old Man was silent. “How many?”

  “Three, four. I’m not certain.”

  “But you’re certain they’re our men?”

  “I’m told there was an incident at the hospital. Two bodies were later found in a taxi, one shot through the head. Police say the driver had his throat cut.”

  Again the line was silent as the Old Man ruminated. “The men are taking orders from Mahbood,” he concluded. “I’ve not been able to reach him since your brother was killed in Rome.”

  “Mahbood? But why?” He’d grown up as a knife-puller on the streets with my brother, his viciousness barely tamed by his obeisance to Islam. When I’d worked under him at Kahrizak, he’d tested me repeatedly, questioning my loyalty, skeptical of what he derided as my “lofty, talky” faith. His growing impatience for the coming of the Mahdi fed a maniacal zeal.

  “He was second to Arshan,” the Ayatollah explained. “Now he takes his place. Ask yourself the question why your brother was betrayed.”

  It was obvious. Orders from the Old Man went through his two appointed deputies. With Arshan out of the way, the men would now receive their orders only from Mahbood.

  “There must be some way to go around him,” I said. “They need to be told the truth.”

  “Their cell numbers, emails, everything’s been changed. This devil misleads them, yet they believe they’re guided right, even as he plunges them deeper into error.”

  “But how? Who could be funding him? The CIA? The Hindis?”

  “I suspect there may well be another entity at work. We’ll find out soon enough. Devils take many forms, but their intention remains the same. To lead us astray into the land of confusion. To drive us to the torment of the Fire.”

  “I’ll give no ear to them,” I promised.

  “Seek refuge from their whisperings, hold fast to the Path of Allah.”

  “‘He has adorned the near heaven with the stars,’” I quoted, “‘to guard against every rebellious devil.’”

  I sensed a smile in the Old Man’s voice: “We shall bring them round Hell on their knees!”

  33.

  Tomb of Tomes

  THE WHOLE PROCESS took Steinberg less than one hour to complete. He already had a rubber stamp with the state seal of Turkmenistan. It was pulled from a wooden box chock full of other stamps, seemingly from every country in the world. The real challenge for him was to create the visa stickers. In the bottom drawer of his desk, he pawed through a pile of passports. Eventually he found one with the most current Turkmenistan visa. He photocopied it several times, making various adjustments in the settings of his machine. Finally satisfied with a copy, he set to work removing the handwritten dates and signatures from the intricate, money-like background design intended to thwart counterfeiters. He used an ink-dissolving solution and a pointed razor blade. With a jeweler’s magnifier pressed into his eye, the process was delicate and painstaking, and the intense concentration seemed to quiet down his breathing.

  When I asked him where he had learned his trade, he told me from his father. A renowned Romanian illustrator, he had used his skills during the Second World War to help smuggle fellow Jews out of the country.

  “I was one of them,” Steinberg said. A baby during the war, he was taken by his mother to stay with her family in Azerbaijan. His father survived in Bucharest and joined them after the war. “He often reminded me,” Steinberg said, “it was the art of deception that saved us.”

  Finally satisfied with the sticker, Steinberg made a copy for each of our passports, then forged the necessary signatures and dates. He glued one of the stickers into Orianna’s passport, then began searching for an unstamped page in mine. “You’ve seen a lot of the world,” he remarked.

  I shrugged. “There’s a couple of places I’d rather have missed.”

  “Sorry to tell you, but you’re heading into another. And unfortunately, all these visas will only make you more suspect. The Turkmenistan authorities are notoriously mistrustful. Legacy of the Soviets.”

  He glued the sticker in place, then sealed it with the blue-inked rubber stamp and handed the passport back to me.

  “Beautiful,” I said. A blue band in the circular stamp contained the Islamic stars and crescent, while a blue circle at the center enclosed the tiny silhouette of a horse.

  I told Steinberg I liked the horse.

  “It ought to
be a camel,” he said. “That country is nothing but desert.”

  I pulled out Maya’s map to the archaeological site and asked him if he was familiar with the territory.

  He stretched the sheet out on the table. “This main highway runs along the edge of the desert under the Kopet Dag range. The mountains form the border with Iran. Here it turns west toward the Murgab River. I’m not familiar with this road—it heads north into the desert. Be careful not to lose your way. Most of these side roads are little more than ruts, and dust storms can blow up in an instant.”

  I looked deadpan at Oriana. She ignored me and nodded toward my backpack. “Show him your brother’s book,” she said.

  Steinberg was apparently very knowledgeable in languages. With a quick glance at the cover he identified the text. “It’s a part of the Rig Veda,” he said. “One of the oldest collections of religious verse in the world.” He scanned several pages, running his finger across the lines. “That’s strange…” He picked up the book and started toward the door, then remembered something and went to his desk. From a drawer he retrieved a flashlight and headed back into the shop.

  Once again we found ourselves trailing him. The narrow beam of his flashlight turned the towering aisles into tunnels, and the palpable odor of dry rot grew thick. More than once we stepped up or down from one room into another. Each room seemed to represent a culture or a country, all of them long lost to the past. Wending through the twists and turns, I glimpsed random titles in English: Zhuangzi, Book of Han, Commentaries of Zuo. Semonides of Amorgos. Great Hymn to the Aten. Code of Nesilim, Epic of Erra, Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Distichs of Cato, The City of God, Athenaeus—Banquet of the Learned. The old shop, I realized, was a warren of multiple chambers, a cobbled together catacomb lined with dead or forgotten books.

  And the Vedas, Steinberg was saying, were so old they were not even books.

  “Not in the usual sense,” he said. “They emerged from an ancient oral tradition, predating the written word. Memorized by Vedic priests, they were passed down from one generation to another in a highly metrical form of chanted poetry, with intricate, hypnotic melodies and precisely accented verses. That precise mnemonic metric was the key to their longevity. They’re the oldest surviving poetry of the Indo-European languages.”