by Deno Trakas
He flopped onto his bed and tried to catch his breath. “The desk clerk said . . . the Iraqis bomb the city . . . it’s usually over in fifteen minutes . . . the damage is usually minimal . . . he was pretty nonchalant . . . but it scared the shit out of me.”
“Where were you?”
“At the park.” He bent his right knee and rubbed it. “I don’t think I’ve run that hard . . . since basic training.”
“You want me to get you some ice?”
“Yeah . . . call room service . . . and let’s get some food too . . . and maybe a couple of beers . . . and a good night’s sleep . . . order two of those.”
We ate a surprisingly good meal, tried to watch Iranian TV but gave up when we couldn’t find anything in English, went to bed, and followed Garrison’s orders: we slept late, if not well, ordered a big American-style breakfast, ate less than we thought we would, waited nervously, went over Garrison’s instructions, and when it was time, I wrapped myself in the chador and stuffed it with hotel towels to give myself breasts and a belly. Oman looked me over and shook his head but said, “Just keep your head down and act like a stout, old Iranian woman.”
I tried to feel like and imitate the women I’d seen in the airport; I shuffled around the room with my head down and the chador clasped with one hand to cover most of my face. He said, “Pretty good. Try to hide your hand more.” I wrapped the chador around it too. “Good. That’ll do it. Someone would have to get right in your face to see that you’re a Spartanburg boy.”
We wished each other luck and he headed out. Fifteen minutes later I followed. When the elevator opened at the lobby, I saw that the desk clerk was talking to another guest, looked down and walked slowly toward the front door. I had a scare when the clerk said something in Farsi that might’ve been directed to me, but I paid no attention, kept going, he left me alone, and I made it out into the congested, loud, cloudy, fall day.
I walked along the street bordering the park, which looked like any park anywhere—trees, walking paths and benches—except that there was trash on the ground, and I could’ve sworn I saw a rat in the gutter, and the women, walking, sitting, or watching their children, were dressed like me. Otherwise, old men sat on benches, reading newspapers or talking animatedly in pairs, the children played on swings and kicked balls, and a few young adults walked briskly, carrying books as if they were on their way to class. I was almost at the end of the park, beginning to worry that something had gone wrong, wondering what we would do if Garrison disappeared, when a white Nissan pulled up beside me. I stayed in character, moving slowly, until I settled into the passenger seat and Garrison pulled away. “Not bad,” he said. “But put these on.” He handed me a pair of old, scratched glasses, with an ugly, heavy black frame. “They’ll help to hide your eyes if anyone looks.”
He drove like an Iranian, aggressively and arrogantly, and asked if everything was okay at the hotel. I said yes, but what about the bombing? He said, as the clerk had, that it was occasional and unpredictable, but the Iraqi planes caused a lot more damage than the Iranian media reported.
When we got to the other park, Oman wasn’t where Garrison expected him to be. Garrison parked at the curb and turned on his flashers, but doing so set off a cacophony of blaring horns and screaming curses, so Garrison told me to get out and wait nearby in case Oman showed up, and he’d circle the park and look for him. I got out, watched the Nissan nudge its way into the traffic, then I puttered over to the only unoccupied bench that wasn’t far from the street. It was surrounded with litter, but I wiped off the end of it with my chador and sat down anyway.
After a few minutes, a young woman in chador sat down beside me and spoke. I slid my feet back under the bench to hide my shoes, kept my head down, and slowly shook my head. I don’t know what the woman thought, but she gave up her effort to converse. The incident started me worrying again about all the things that could go wrong—what if Oman was lost, what if he’d been arrested, what if a policeman questioned me and saw through my disguise?
Five, ten minutes passed. The woman left and a little boy, about five, came over, stood right in front of me, looked at me and asked a question. I shook my head as I’d done before, but he kept talking. I didn’t answer and he slapped my knee. I made a motion to shoo him away and he started hitting me. I wished I knew how to say, “Get lost you little shit” in Farsi, but I just fended him off with my arms, and finally I heard a woman shout a name. He ran away, and I watched a woman chase after him for a minute before giving up. I thought she’d come over to apologize but was relieved that she had no better manners than her son.
Finally, a taxi stopped at the curb and Oman spilled out. He seemed bewildered and looked around. I wanted to wave at him, but instead I got up and slowly moved in his direction. Even before I reached him, the Nissan pulled up and we piled in, Oman up front and I in back.
“What took you so long?” Garrison growled and pulled into the traffic even though there was no space to do so.
“You won’t believe it,” Oman said.
“Tell us,” I said.
“Well, I got into an orange taxi, even though when I opened the back door there were already four people in the back seat. But the driver shouted at me and motioned for me to get in, and the others scooted over about an inch, so I climbed in on top of some guy who was shouting at the woman in the front passenger seat with a child on her lap, his wife and daughter, I guess. So the driver took off and started swerving through traffic—I was rolling side to side on top of people, banging my head here and there—and the whole time the guy under me was yelling at his wife. It sounded like he was accusing her of infidelity or something, and the taxi driver was yelling at him. Finally she turned and yelled something back at her husband. He yelled something else—it must’ve been ‘Stop’ because the driver slammed on the brakes right in the middle of a busy road. The guy opened the door, squirmed out from under me, jerked open the front door, pulled his wife and child out into the street, got into the front seat, and yelled at the driver to go. The driver must’ve said no because he didn’t move, so the guy reached over and pressed the accelerator with his hand, and we lurched forward, then stopped as the driver stomped on the brakes and cut the engine. Meanwhile, the woman, still holding her kid, was standing there in the middle of about three lanes of traffic, except that nobody pays any attention to lanes, and when she saw that the taxi had stopped, she ran toward us, and a guy on a scooter had to swerve to miss her and slammed into the side of a truck . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Garrison said, “enough already. We’ve got business to take care of.” Then he gave us detailed instructions for handling our initial meeting with Azi and answered our many questions.
Two ten-foot-tall steel doors blocked our entrance to the jail compound, but when Garrison spoke in rapid Farsi to the guard glaring at us through the window in his sentry box, he swung open one of the doors for us. With Garrison supporting me by the elbow, I hobbled in like a stout, old woman, holding my towel padding in place with one hand, clasping the chador to hide most of my face with the other, and keeping my head down. I could barely see through the glasses that Garrison had given me. We waited as the guard closed the door behind us.
As Garrison had described on his map and on the way, we stood in a courtyard with a driveway encircling a defunct fountain filled with litter and leaves. Beyond stood the jail, a five-story cement building, and to our left stretched a one-story wing with barbed wire on the roof. Hunched over, I stared at the ground in front of me, waiting, terrified that the guard would search us and discover my disguise. But, as Garrison had promised, the guard merely led us into the one-story building, where another guard relaxed behind a desk, holding a mirror and trimming his nose hair with scissors. He asked Garrison some questions, looked at his I.D., made him sign in, glanced without much interest at me, and waved us on to the visiting room.
The room was empty and bare except for a photo of the Ayatollah on one wall, a wooden bench below
it, and a table in the middle with two heavy wooden chairs on opposite sides. Garrison pointed to the table where I should sit and walked around the room. He glanced out the window, which looked onto an alley bordered by a wall behind the building, and was evidently satisfied. He came over and stood behind me. He reminded me that I was a deaf-mute aunt, so I wouldn’t have to speak in case anyone asked me a question, but he whispered, “See how slack they are—they don’t even have a guard on us. But Azi will have one with her. Remember, keep your head down and look confused.”
After a tense twenty minutes, a guard brought Azi into the room through the back door, and there she was, a fuzzy dark angel. After that first glance, I looked down, pretending to be unaware of her presence. Garrison went around the table to greet her, so I looked up again. She walked slowly, shuffling her feet, holding her left arm over her stomach. She wore a short chador over a long, gray bag of a dress, droopy socks and plastic slippers. Her face was thin but not pale. Her eyes looked confused but alive—they darted back and forth between Garrison and me as she tried to figure out this strange and unexpected visit.
The escorting guard stood just inside the door, checking his watch, not interested in us, and Garrison, leading Azi to me, began to talk loudly in Farsi, probably explaining to both Azi and the guard that he’d brought the aunt all the way from Isfahan to visit, her mother’s sister, the one who sent Azi the red earrings for Christmas. He tugged on his ear, my signal to rise, and as I did, I smiled behind my chador, and Azi’s eyes saw through my glasses and opened wide with a mixture of recognition and disbelief. Hardly the joyful reunion I’d hoped for, but miraculous nevertheless. She stepped forward and flinched as I hugged her. She felt like a scared girl, frail and trembling. I kissed both her warm cheeks and turned us slightly so that her head would block the guard’s view of my face. Satisfied that he couldn’t see me, and with Garrison’s loud chatter for cover, I put my mouth right to her ear and whispered, “Yes, it’s me, Jay.” Then, for a long moment, I choked and couldn’t say more.
Garrison dragged the other chair around the table so we could sit side by side with our backs to the guard, then he went over and spoke to the guard according to plan about the sentimental meaning of this meeting of the aunt and her favorite niece whom she hadn’t seen in years and whose incarceration was all a big misunderstanding. Sitting close, I petted her and put my face against hers, cheek to cheek, overwhelmed with emotion, which wasn’t an act. Slowly, softly, words whispered out. “Don’t talk, just squeeze my hand.” She squeezed my hand. “We’re going to get you out, tomorrow, during visiting hours, just like now. Do you understand?” She squeezed again. “Good. Be ready, but act normal. We’ll tell the guard we’re coming back tomorrow to bring you some medicine.” I pulled away to try to get a focused look at her, but she dropped her head as if she didn’t want me to.
That’s when I noticed what appeared to be the corner of a photograph tied with twine around her neck. I was about to reach for it but was interrupted by the sounds of a scuffle at the back door, and we turned to see Garrison behind the guard, choking him with an arm around his neck. The guard was squirming, trying to reach for his holstered gun with the hand that Garrison had pinned behind him; he tugged at Garrison’s arm with the other. “Help me,” Garrison hissed. I looked around for something to use as a weapon, but the only things in the room were the bulky chairs and table. Garrison said, “Get his gun.”
I ran over and jerked the gun from the holster. “Hit him,” Garrison growled. I grabbed the guard by the hair, pulled his head forward slightly, away from Garrison’s face, although he strained to keep it back. I paused, never having done anything like this, then smashed his temple with the butt of the gun just as the Iranian in Athens had done to me. He slumped and Garrison let him down to the floor. He took the gun from me and whispered, “We have to move now. They changed the schedule—there’re no visiting hours tomorrow, and we can’t wait.” He looked around quickly and put his ear to the door until he was satisfied the struggle hadn’t been heard. Azi had joined us and the three of us stood over the body. She leaned against me as if she had to, and I put my arm around her. Then she kicked the guard in the ribs, then again, harder, making a grunting sound, and again, but she lost her balance—I caught her and guided her to a chair. “Let’s get this guy out of sight,” Garrison said.
Garrison and I dragged him to a corner, and Garrison took off the guard’s uniform while I took off my chador. The man began to moan and stir, so Garrison took out a pocketknife, opened the four-inch blade, and slit the man’s throat as though he had done this a thousand times before. He wiped the blade on the man’s underwear and put the knife away. Azi watched without expression. I was stunned. I didn’t feel horror, moral outrage, or even doubt—I was simply stunned by the gruesome necessity and reality of what we were doing. This was the mission. Garrison said, “Get moving.”
I took off my glasses, pants, and sweater and put on the uniform, which was conspicuously tight and short, while Azi wrapped herself in my long chador and stuffed it with my clothes and towels. Garrison sat Azi at the table where I had been and positioned me behind the front door with the other chair raised above my head. “I’m going to try to get the bastard to come in here. As soon as he walks through the door, hit him like you want to kill him. You got it? If he won’t come, I’ll be back.” I nodded. “Azadeh, you’re the mute aunt now, okay? You can’t speak.” She nodded too, and Garrison sauntered out.
During the infinite minutes that he was gone, I stood with the chair raised and glanced back and forth from Azi, who looked down at the table, to the door. I wondered what Oman was doing, and I worried, what if someone questions him or makes him move the car? What if the guard at the desk won’t follow Garrison? What if I fail to knock him out. . . .
But the guard didn’t follow Garrison, so Garrison returned and closed the door nonchalantly, then motioned for me to put down the chair. “Sonofabitch wouldn’t bite.” He looked around quickly, glanced at his watch, glanced at the guard on the floor and the spreading pool of blood, and turned to us. “Okay, I’m going back out to talk to the guy. Azi, give me one of those towels.” He wrapped his gun in it and held it as if it were a package that was open at one end so he could slip his hand in. “You, Nichols, watch through the crack, and when I’m close to him, open the door a little and wave. That ought to distract him for a second, and I’ll shoot him. We’ll have to move quick and then silence the guard at the gate. You got it?”
I nodded although I still had a dozen questions. Before I could ask any of them, he left the room. I watched through the crack. As he approached the guard, who was still sitting at the desk, now cleaning his fingernails with a paperclip, Garrison greeted him in a friendly way. As he got close, the guard laughed and said something, so I opened the door and waved at him. He looked at me, but before he could respond in any way, Garrison lunged across the desk, jammed the gun into his stomach, and fired—the sound was somewhat muffled but much louder than I expected. The guard slumped to the side but didn’t fall.
Garrison went around the desk, checked the pulse in the guy’s neck, lowered the body to the floor so it couldn’t be seen through the window, then looked out into the courtyard. “I don’t see anyone. No sign of alarm.” He waved us in. “Okay. Same thing with the guard at the gate. I’ll try to talk him into coming inside. If he comes in, hit him, or take the other guard’s gun and shoot him—take it anyway. But he probably won’t come, so I may have to take him out—keep watch, and if you see a struggle, both of you walk out, right away, calmly but quickly, across the courtyard and out the gate. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
The phone on the desk rang. Garrison said, “Leave it. Just watch me.”
I got the other guard’s gun, stuck it in my belt as I had seen on TV cop shows, and took up my position between the door and the window so I could watch Garrison. Azi stood close to me, both of us out of sight of anyone looking in. Again, Garrison sauntered, cocky,
across the courtyard. The phone kept ringing and I twitched with every ring. Azi and I looked at each other—her eyes registered pain and fear—but we didn’t move. I saw the guard step out of his box, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The phone continued to ring. Garrison looked as if he were asking for directions and gestured to the office where we waited. The guard shook his head and spoke briefly. Garrison shrugged as if it didn’t matter, reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, gave it to the guard, and lit it. The phone stopped ringing, which was even more frightening. The guard nodded and turned back toward his post. Garrison let him take a step, then reached under the back of his coat and pulled out his gun. The guard was about to step into his box when Garrison shoved him forward so that his face smashed into the window inside his box, and fired into the small of his back.
“Let’s go,” I said to Azi as I opened the door and took her arm. “Not too fast. Don’t turn around. If you hear anyone calling to us or approaching us from behind, ignore them. If there’s shouting or shooting, we’ll run for it.”
At first the courtyard was still. The day was still, as if nothing had happened. The five-story jail stared at us with a hundred barred windows, but I stepped forward as if my fear was energy and kept going. Garrison was propping the guard up on his stool, leaning him against the window, and looking over his shoulder for trouble. He saw something, and I heard a man shout. Garrison waved and shouted back in Farsi, but at the same time he took the guard’s rifle and said, “Run.”
