by D J Mcintosh
Nick felt in the guy’s pockets, got his key fob, then grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him over to the side of the street. He shoved refuse containers away from the wall and wedged the body behind them. Then he jerked his head in my direction. “Put your arm around her. Pretend she’s drunk or something.” The woman whimpered as I raised her, holding one hand to her ruined jaw. “Where’s the car?” Nick barked at her.
She had difficulty making her mouth work and so pointed to the cross street she’d come from. The SUV sat about halfway down, partly blocking the short street. “Did Yersan send you?” I asked her. She mumbled something unintelligible and I repeated the question. Again she tried to answer, but her mouth was so damaged I couldn’t make out what she said. Finally she raised her head and nodded.
We got her to the vehicle and wedged her in between us in the front. The woman held her head in her hands and moaned.
As Nick drove the SUV back to the intersection he told me to take off my jacket and stay beside her. He jumped out and half-lifted, half-slid, the guy’s still unconscious form into the back. Then he threw his jacket and mine on top to conceal him as best he could.
When he got back behind the wheel I turned to him. “You didn’t really have to get something from your car, did you.” It was more a statement than a question.
“Nope.”
“I thought you said you’d seen two guys.”
“She wasn’t wearing lipstick at the time and she had on a hoodie.” He cracked a smile. “Don’t rat on me. I’d never live it down.”
Minutes later he pulled up outside the stair leading to our hotel. “Get out, Madison. I’ll take it from here.” He took out his pistol and trained it on the woman.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“They’ll be well looked after, I can guarantee that.” The woman shrank away from him. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. “Wait for me.”
I watched him rev the motor and drive away, praying I’d see him again and that we wouldn’t end up in the hands of the Turkish police. I couldn’t be sure that a window on the alley hadn’t silently opened, that someone wasn’t already talking to them. I threw the knife in a garbage bin. When I reached the hotel I took a few breaths to calm down as I rolled my sleeves back, trying to hide the mass of blood where the woman had cut me. The lobby was empty and I beat it upstairs.
Bennet was curled up in bed when I came in. “Hi—I remember you,” she said. Then she sat bolt upright. “Is that blood on your sleeve?”
“Nick and me—just settling an old score.” I feigned a laugh. “You should see him.” I headed into the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Bennet marched in and stared at me as I unbuttoned my shirt and shrugged off my jeans and briefs.
“That’s a horrible cut!”
“It’ll heal.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“It was nothing serious. You didn’t seem so hot on him, though.”
“Who would, after he played that stupid game?”
“You’ll get used to him. He grows on you.”
“What do you mean ‘get used to him’?”
“He’ll be our security contingent in Iran—if we make it there.” I turned the shower on full tilt and stepped in. The hot water washed the blood away but stung like hell. It wasn’t a deep cut; more like a razor had shaved off a patch of skin on my upper arm. After I dried off, I got band-aids out of my kit. It took five of them to cover the wound. They looked pathetic but they were all I had. I threw on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and went back into the bedroom.
Bennet put her laptop away, lay down, and pulled the cover over her. “Come here,” she said. As I climbed under the blanket, she rolled closer and put her head on my chest. “Tell me what really happened.”
I sighed. “A couple of guys tried to beat up Nick and me. Maybe some local hotheads or something worse. I don’t know. It’s over now.” No sense alarming her if I could help it. I ran my hand along her arm, feeling her soft, warm skin that smelled of soap with a distant hint of the perfume she’d put on that morning.
“Are you going to keep on with it? Strauss could hardly expect you to give up your life for him.”
“He’s quite capable of that. We’re here anyway. No point in wasting the trip. What do you think? Should I continue?”
She heaved a sigh. “You will, no matter what I say.”
“Bennet. You need to go home for your own safety. If Nick can get us into Iran, I’ll keep a complete record of the journey. I’ll even email you as I go along if you want.”
“If you’re going, so am I.” She rolled away from me, plumped up her pillow, and said nothing more.
It took quite a while before I nodded off too. For one, like an anxious parent, I kept waiting to hear Nick’s door across the hall open. Something else kept me awake, too. In the heat of the fight I’d felt triumphant. Gloated over getting the best of the woman. That was only natural. Yet when she’d moaned and held her head in her hands, her agony hadn’t touched me at all. And I couldn’t have cared less what happened to her when Nick drove away, just like when I’d hit that guy in my car on the way to Strauss’s. A coldness at the center of my heart had stolen over me. Now I feared I’d never get my old self back.
I heard nothing from Nick the following day. In the morning, Bennet and I made a return visit to Asklepion. I drank more of the water from the fountain; it did seem to revive my spirits. We saw a slate-colored snake slipping into a rock crevice and I wondered aloud whether it was a descendant of the healing snakes. Bennet disagreed, pointing out it had the triangular head of a viper.
We struck up a conversation with an Englishman, who turned out to be an Anglican priest. He’d noticed the snake too. “The poor maligned serpent,” he chuckled. “Once a sign of wisdom. Our churches have much to answer for. Clever chaps though, the Roman prelates—blame it on them. In choosing an animal to associate with the devil, they opted for one that humans instinctively fear the most. Pagans revered the snake, as you can see among these ruins.” He tipped his peaked cap to us and with a swing of his walking stick trundled away.
It left me wondering again—was it a sacred power Helmstetter sought here? Or had he tried to follow in Faust’s footsteps by conjuring up the devil?
Thirty-One
March 3, 2005
That afternoon, the weather still being fine, we found a café and sat outside with our coffees. Bennet caught up with her writing while I buried myself in the material I’d brought with me and whatever I could find on the web. I’d been intrigued by what the Englishman told us about the Christian devil and his close tie with serpents.
There was now general agreement among scholars that many of the Genesis stories could be traced all the way back to early Mesopotamia. The Sumerian serpent god Ningishzida—called the Lord of the Good Tree, or, if one translated the Sumerian correctly, Lady of the Good Tree—was famously illustrated on the vase of Gudea, dating to 2100 B.C.
Ningishzida, Sumerian Serpent God
In the Mesopotamian legend Adapa and the South Wind, Ningishzida encourages Adapa, Adam’s prototype, to eat the bread and water of life, promising that the food will grant him immortality. The god Enki, who gave Adapa wisdom, warns the mortal he’s being tricked and that if he takes the food and water he’ll die. Adapa listens to Enki and refuses Ningishzida. In this way Enki fools man into denying himself immortality, keeping it for the gods. In time, the story was retold in Genesis as Adam and Eve facing temptation in the Garden of Eden.
Ningishzida, like the devil, occupied the underworld and possessed great knowledge. There, it seemed to me, lay the original concept of the snake in Eden. Until now, I hadn’t realized the Old Testament made no association between the serpent in the garden and Satan. Satan’s name meant “adversary”; he’d started out as God’s prosecutor. Nor was he particularly important—references to him could be found only three times in the Old Testament. It was Justin Martyr, an early
Christian thinker living in the second century A.D., who connected Satan with the serpent in the garden. So it wasn’t until many centuries after the Old Testament was written that Satan began to embody pure evil.
The plethora of serpent gods in antiquity interested me: Apep, an evil Egyptian snake god, opposed the light; Glycon, the Macedonian snake god, had magical powers; Naga, the Hindu god, represented freedom; and Ladon, the Greek god curled around the tree in the Garden of Hesperides, guarded the golden apples.
The texts I leafed through explained that Lucifer meant “the shining one,” and that the passage in the Book of Isaiah, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer!” came to be interpreted as a description of the rebellious Satan cast out from heaven. But the scribes who originally wrote this passage were referring to the King of Babylon, not Satan. Over time, the devil absorbed various pagan attributes and became the dark, fallen angel, the convenient whipping boy, the personification of evil that is a hallmark of Christian beliefs.
Bennet’s eyes were still glued to her laptop, so I had time to take another look at the photocopy I’d made of Helmstetter’s letter to his wife and the strange columns of numbers it contained. Presumably the numbers were some kind of cipher. I made the assumption that Helmstetter had used the modern alphabet. When I applied the simplest substitution code, assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet, commencing with 1 = A, the figures translated into words for numbers—20 8 9 18 20 25 became thirty, and so on. But not all of them: some numbers didn’t translate into any word that made sense. I played around with the code for another half an hour until I threw down my pen.
I’d become so caught up in trying to figure out the numbers that I barely noticed the sun setting. Bennet stretched, leaned over, and tapped me on the shoulder. As we made our way back to the hotel, we questioned Helmstetter’s obsession again. Was his pursuit of knowledge sacred or profane? We got nowhere, talking in circles, postulating theories and rejecting them just as quickly.
Not long before midnight, Nick returned. He’d gone through another change—a haircut, a close shave, and a casual jacket with a clean blue shirt and trousers.
“What’s the occasion?” Bennet asked.
“Better to look respectable if we’re heading into Iran.” He gave us an appraising glance. “Both of you will need to dress conservatively. No bare legs, no jeans, no miniskirts.”
He beckoned for us to follow him across the hall. As we sat down in his room he pulled some documents out of his satchel and dropped them on the bed. “Your visas.”
I whistled. “That was damn fast.”
He grinned. “It helps to know a talented printer in Turkey.”
“You must have great contacts,” Bennet observed dryly.
“Contacts are nice, money is more persuasive.”
He glanced at me. “Can you turn your rental in—here in Bergama?”
“Probably. Let me see.” I scrolled through the rental car website and found an office in the city. “Looks good.”
“Okay. We’ll drive in my car to Izmir and get a flight out to Van the next day. That’ll take us pretty close to where we want to be in Iran. You’re going in under your own names, legitimately. We’ll be joining a custom tour. It’ll leave from Van in Turkey, cross over to Iran, and stop at Tabriz, Esfahan, and Shiraz.”
I frowned. Esfahan and Shiraz would take us pretty far from our real destination. Nick knew what I was thinking. “In Tabriz,” he continued, “one of you will fall ill from food poisoning, forcing us to drop out of the tour. When you’ve recovered, we’ll substitute a sightseeing trip to Kandovan.”
“Won’t the authorities be alerted if we leave the tour?” Bennet asked.
“The tour leader has been in business for over twenty years. He runs contraband into Iran. He knows how to finesse these things. And of course he’ll be well paid.”
“Of course,” I said.
March 5, 2005
Van, Turkey
As the landing gear clunked down, I looked out the window to see Lake Van sparkling blue in the winter sun. Nestled against a backdrop of high, snow-dusted mountain peaks was Van itself, a modern city with ancient roots. I knew it to be an ethnic melting pot—Kurdish territory that also belonged to Armenians, Yarsan, and Assyrians.
At the Royal Berk Hotel we met our tour leader, Helim Rosan, a genial guy with a round stomach and the kind of drooping black mustache favored by Turkish men. He wore three gold rings, one bearing a flashy diamond: a sure sign the contraband business was flourishing. I’d smiled to myself when Nick told me how much Rosan wanted for his discretion. We might well have paid for that diamond ring. But what did I care? Before we left Bergama I’d texted Strauss to tell him I’d been able to hire security and could therefore go to Iran. He refilled the coffers without protest.
Rosan introduced us to the other tour members—a young German couple who spoke very little English and an Italian history teacher. “You are lucky to choose this tour,” Rosan proclaimed. “The United Kingdom is advising no one cross the Iranian border for any reason except in this northwest section. Yes. Very lucky.” He looked each of us in the eye. “You are about to enter a fascinating country but one with very strict rules—never stray from our group.”
He told Bennet and the German woman they had to wear head scarves, long sleeves, and long pants or skirts. Both rolled their eyes. Rosan noticed. “It is for your protection. Ladies of such loveliness will be noticed by many men. And it is not bikini weather anyway.” His attempt to make light of things fell as flat as a burlesque joke at a church supper. Undaunted, Rosan added that since Bennet and I were sharing a room, we should make it look as if we were married.
“But we have different names on our passports,” Bennet said.
Rosan waved his hand airily. “Iranian women may keep their own birth names. It will seem normal. Just pretend—not for real. Like a game. It is better for you in Iran if you are married.”
We set out the next morning in a fifteen-passenger van driven by Rosan’s young cousin. Nick had bought a fake gold ring somewhere and Bennet now wore it on her left hand. It was supposed to be a six-hour drive, but with the border crossing and tough road conditions, Rosan said we wouldn’t reach Tabriz, the first stop on the tour, until dinnertime. As we drove he’d periodically light up a cigarette of sun-cured Turkish tobacco, roll down his window, and between drags hold it out in a vain attempt to avoid filling the van with smoke. Naturally, the breeze from the open window blew the smoke right into the back seats. We suffered in silence until Bennet asked him to butt out for the rest of the drive. Rosan apologized, but perhaps in keeping with his natural high spirits, he kept right on smoking.
In mid-afternoon we reached the border: a naked patch of land, just bare earth and low-lying scrub. On either side of a chain-link fence stood a long building like a trailer park home, one with a Turkish flag and the other an Iranian. Military men guarded both. Given the years of paranoia since Iran’s revolution, not to mention two ongoing wars on its western and northern flanks, I’d expected an elaborate fortress.
We got through Turkish customs quickly and came to a grinding halt on the other side. A man in his thirties stepped out of the trailer with a scowl. Then, noticing whose vehicle it was, he put on a welcoming smile. Nick leaned closer to murmur to me. “Money always changes hands somehow.”
Rosan hit the button to roll down his passenger window. The official leaned one elbow in and spoke in rapid Farsi. Rosan turned to us. “Hand over your passports, please.”
The official took some time perusing the documents. He handed five of them back to Rosan and addressed him again. Rosan cranked his thick neck around to face us. “You Americans, they want you inside.”
Rosan’s cousin got out and opened the side door for us. Here goes nothing, I thought. We’ll be kicked out of the country before we even make it in.
We filed into the trailer. Two armed military men flanked a desk where a third man sat, gray haired and dressed in
civilian clothes. The soldiers’ eyes followed Bennet, taking in her curves and the way her slacks clung to her bottom. She pulled her scarf, patterned with red roses, tighter around her neck as the two of us headed for a row of plastic chairs against one wall.
Nick approached the man at the desk and began speaking to him in fluent Farsi. The official’s eyes lit up with a spark of surprise, quickly extinguished behind his poker face, the universal expression of border officers. He and Nick talked on, the man lobbing questions. Nick maintained a genial expression throughout. I mentally crossed my fingers. Bennet sat stock still, her eyes downcast, her hands in her lap, nervously twisting the gold wedding band. Just as I began to suspect we’d be marched into some windowless room in handcuffs, their conversation ended. The official laughed. All was well. He stamped our passports and said in English, “Please enjoy our beautiful Iran.”
Thirty-Two
March 6, 2005
Tabriz, Iran
The drive to Tabriz through the Zagros mountain range was both stunningly scenic and damn hard on the ass. The van’s shocks left something to be desired, particularly when the highway did a bump and grind along rough asphalt surfaces. We stopped at Khoy for refreshments and a bathroom break, drove south to Salmas, then turned east along Highway 14 to skirt the top of Lake Urmia. “There is a bridge across,” Rosan remarked. “Never finished it. So now—a very long pier.” He shook with laughter.
Just before Sharafkhaneh our route dropped closer to the lake, and Rosan’s cousin made a little detour so we could see it. Like the Dead Sea, Urmia was a salt lake. The water, a deep blue green, glittered like liquid crystal. Sheets of salt turned its shores white; fabulous salt formations shaped like giant brain corals clustered on the beaches. A pillar of limestone sprouted like a mushroom from the water, its narrow base etched by the waves.
“Hey, look.” Bennet pointed with excitement to a rosy cloud rising from the lake’s surface. A flock of pink bodies and flapping pink wings. Flamingos, swarming the sky in such numbers they seemed an organic whole.
