There was no returning to the party. She had to walk up the street until she shivered with cold penetrating her coat. Then she would find a drink. Maybe get drunk. Forget a young man shot down on a street in her hometown.
* * *
American trains are said not to be the world’s best but to a man from Iran whose idea of public transport is a seat in the back of a truck with the goats, Amtrak out of Union Station bound through West Virginia, Ohio and all points in between to Chicago was a marvel, another high example of American technical skill. Saifallah gloried in the view from his window and the lulling rock of the train. The fascination of all that he saw drove from his mind the cold of Washington, D.C.
Saifallah had not thought to buy a sleeping berth but, when he discovered the vista cruiser car stuffed with students, he was again delighted with American foresight. How thoughtful to provide such a view from high up on the train! What a wonderful place to spend the night drifting under the cowboy stars.
He was hungry and discovered the food car with its machine vendors. How clever! He fed on stale sandwiches and Coca-Cola as he stood in the chill breeze of an open window watching little towns sweep past. There seemed to him so many factories along the rail line that it was a marvel America still had all that vast open space for the orchards and farms he saw from the vista cruiser.
A berth door opened behind him and a pretty girl came into the corridor. Gray eyes from a heap of blondeness looked at Saifallah. Tight blue jeans and a silk blouse with no bra. Her hair needed brushing.
As she passed, her breasts raked his arm. He felt through his shirtsleeve the hard points of her nipples. He gazed after her. Yes, yes, there was not much good that could be said for the chadur!
He realized he had a piece of sandwich in his mouth and returned to chewing it as the girl went into the next car. Perhaps, he thought, it’s time to marry.
A huge black porter in a bigger white jacket had been resting his arms on the adjacent window. “Long trip for you, Mister?” he asked without turning to Saifallah.
“Chicago.”
“‘Cha-cha-cha-cawgo’? Where you from? What’s that accent?”
Saifallah was stunned. He had failed to take elementary precautions, to be alert, and now he was being interrogated by a common trainman. “Lebanon,” he said.
“Lebanon, Ohio? You serious?”
“No, the country.”
“Where’s it at?”
What sort of interrogation was this? Saifallah named the one country in the Middle East which he knew would please a Yank, “Near Israel.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Traveling alone?”
Saifallah nodded, preparing himself for whatever was to come next.
“Do ya like it?” The porter waved at the countryside.
“I think it’s wonderful.”
“She’s ‘wonnerful,’ too.”
“Who?”
“Blondie.”
The door to the berth from which the blonde girl had emerged swung open and a flush-faced traveler came out. He spat out the window and went up the corridor into another car.
“Twenty five bucks,” said the porter.
Saifallah nearly shouted in surprise. Then the monstrous, delicious realization struck him. He could not prevent the hungry smile that came onto face.
“‘Course,” said the porter, “we got two working this train. The other’s cheaper.”
“Give me the blonde.” Saifallah reached into his pocket for money.
“Which’s your berth?”
“I haven’t got one.”
“I’ll put you in the baggage room for another five.”
“It’s got to be better than that.”
“For ten I’ll put you in the vista car – I’m about to clear out the passengers and put a private party up there. Sort of a tradition of mine. A little wine, a little pot, whatever
else shows up. And the two girls working the train. You’ll have to share but you get some variety that way. Sound good?”
Another point for Yankee trains and ingenuity! An orgy under the cowboy stars!
Saifallah hurried up the stairs to the vista car, gawking around the dark seats, the glow of cigarettes, a guitar, the thumpings of bodies and the giggles of women. He almost clapped his hands with delight. A drunken woman took his arm. She was not the blonde but when her hand raked across the front of his trousers it was no longer important.
Very late at night he found the blonde drunk on sweet wine and bitter marijuana. He held her as they glided beneath the stars, wishing that this perfect moment would never end.
Saifallah woke sweating and trembling in the stale dawn, the others around him groaning in sleep. Even drunk and asleep he could not escape the question that frightened him more with each mile as he approached San Francisco: Where did a wife-disgraced and exiled secret police colonel named Ardjovani get the authority to send a killer to a foreign nation to murder a weak and insignificant female? A foreign female.
He was angry and displeased with himself to have accepted all of his orders for these three killings – especially the woman’s – directly and solely from Ardjovani. He had no witnesses and nothing in writing. What could Colonel Ardjovani do with that lack of evidence and what might SAVAK choose to do with Saifallah if things went badly for him here in America?
Saifallah was the son of a country that discourages private initiative and private thought, that encourages group endeavor, that favors the family and approves action orders coming from the Leader or the Father or the Older Brother. He was not trained to think for himself. Initiative frightened him. He was intended to be conservative in all things and he was happy to stay that way.
Now Saifallah knew his lonely tour of America was a mistake. This country was polluting his mind with bizarre and treacherous thoughts. It frightened him to be alone physically and spiritually. Too much privacy would force him to find questions that would violate all the life he had lived and that would make him a traitor.
Saifallah trembled so badly in his fright that he woke the blonde. She crawled away, leaving the killer-tourist utterly alone in the middle of America.
Chapter 3
San Francisco
Twenty four hours. That and no longer since Sheila Bond had finished with the man who was supposed to have been hers to the end of time. The divorce was final. She slapped the clock onto its accustomed place on her desk and took up a glass of Persian vodka, the only thing in this office – or in the world, she wanted to say – that belonged to her.
She drank it down. An end to wild hopes. To youthful schemes. An end to adventuring in places like Iran where morning cockroaches and SAVAK wiretaps outweigh the joy of the local vodka and the lamb and rice and the beautiful men. And where a Marxist bomb had flung a piece of metal into her hip and left her walking with a cane.
Time to grow up before it’s too late. Forget prince charming. The dutiful suburban husband. Think about the pension and life insurance. She was thirty three years old. She had to plan and live a careful life now. There was going to be no man for her. She had to rely only on herself alone if she wanted to survive into the kind of ancient old age her parents had enjoyed. To live long and comfortably and alone.
Sheila used her cane to sweep from her desk the clock and the empty glass and everything else. She wanted to scream, Is this all there is to life?
The phone rang. She answered, “This better be good.”
The caller ignored her threat and said, “Sheila Bond? Right. This is Sergeant Wherry, Washington, D.C., police.”
“So what?”
“I’m investigating a criminal case here and need to ask you some questions.”
Sheila Bond was not sober but not so drunk she could not ask, “Am I going to need a lawyer for this?”
“Never ask a cop that question,” Wherry said. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Am I being charged with using a telephone while under the influence?”
/>
“I’ll call back when you’re sober.”
“I plan never to be sober again. Talk to me or go to hell.”
“Do you know a man named Reza Horiat?”
“Who?”
“A boy named Georgie Ardjovani or his mother Glynda Heater, also Glynda Ardjovani?”
Now she lied. “No.” She had a career to protect. It would do that career no good for the airline to learn she had helped smuggle a woman and child out of Iran away from her husband contrary to local laws and good business practice. Especially as the husband was a secret policeman who could find plenty of ways to cancel an airline’s landing rights in the Tehran gold mine.
Wherry said, “We found you in Horiat’s address book.”
“So what’s this about?”
“Reza Horiat was murdered here last night.”
“I still don’t know him.”
“Why would he have your name and address in his book?”
“Lots of people had my name in Tehran. They passed it around. It’s a country of favors. My name was money in the bank to some of them. Good old-fashioned pull. A lot of them had my address whether I knew them or not.”
“There’s also Glynda Heater. Did you know her in Iran?”
“Listen carefully as I say it again. No.”
“I found her in the address book, too. Called her in Texas. Hard to track down but the Rangers found her. In hiding.”
Sheila Bond was silent.
Wherry said, “She had a lot to say.”
“So I’m well and truly caught,” Sheila Bond said. “The stupid bitch.”
“No interest to me what happened in Tehran,” said Wherry. “I’m looking for information on Reza Horiat here in D.C.”
“You’re very polite and almost convincing, Sergeant, or am I so drunk I think it’s polite?”
“I’m going to have the San Francisco police to talk to you for me,” Wherry said. “Will you feel better in a couple of hours?”
“I’m not going to feel well for a long time.”
Sheila Bond slammed down the phone.
Screw divorce. Screw prince charming. Screw everything.
She sat alone in her office a long while thinking about Reza Horiat and Glynda Heater. It was not as dramatic a story as Sergeant Wherry wanted to find. Runaway Western wives were everyday business in Iran. What made it different is that this woman was running away from a husband who was a secret policeman.
Had it been a few hours already? She found a San Francisco detective in her office asking questions in the same voice Wherry had used, impersonal and urging. She was sober now. She was on her feet and leaning on her cane because she felt she had to be standing, as though sworn to it in court, to tell him as much of the story of Glynda and Colonel Ardjovani as Patchway had told her.
“What’s wrong with divorce out there?” said the detective. “It’s simpler than all this running around.”
“Who gets the boy?” Sheila said.
“The mother,” said the detective.
“The father,” said Sheila Bond. “No Iranian court would award custody to a woman, especially a foreign woman. What court would expect a man to give up his rights to his heir and the symbol of his power and family pride?”
The detective said, “Well, the boy’s missing.”
Sheila Bond felt a heavy silence around her. “Good God, he’s been kidnapped.”
“Texas Rangers think so.”
“Colonel Ardjovani has him.”
“That’s what Heater says.”
“She’ll never get him back.”
“There’s extradition,” said the detective.
“Good luck with that.”
“At least it’s a parental kidnapping,” said the detective. “It can’t be too bad growing up with his father in a country like that. Almost like the Wild West, isn’t it? Camels for horses, I mean.”
“The boy won’t be unhappy there,” Sheila Bond said. “He’ll grow up to be a macho his mother won’t like but he’ll grow up okay.”
She thought of another macho she did not like, the man who would not be hers forever, and she understood what Glynda would feel.
The detective said, “How about Reza Horiat. Did you know him?”
“No, and that’s the truth.”
“Turns out he’s a nephew of Heater’s husband. He gave her the money to leave Iran.”
“I still don’t know him.”
“There’s another peculiar circumstance. We’ve just learned from the FBI that another Iranian’s been murdered. This one in New Hampshire.”
“Now I’m beginning to feel frightened,” she said.
“Must be 200,000 Iranians in college here,” said the detective. “Then businessmen and everyday tourists. What’s two lost in a crowd like that? But why two dead in a two days?”
A great vacant cold came over Sheila Bond.
“How am I supposed to know the answer to that?” she said.
“You’ve lied to me,” said the detective. “I want to hear something that isn’t a lie.”
The cold growing inside her made Sheila Bond say, “What’s the name of this other guy?”
“Madjid Afkhami.”
She felt tears on her cheeks and put her hands to her face. They were not tears of fright for herself. They were tears of surprise that such an ordinary and decent man should be murdered.
“Yes, I knew him,” Sheila said. “He was Patchway’s jack-of-all-trades. He was an operator when you had to have an operator. When you had to get things done that couldn’t be done in a country full of other operators.”
When, Sheila thought, you are the mouse-faced Dr. Zargoneh sneaking daughters out of Iran and away from the reach of military conscriptors. When you need documents and contacts quickly to get a woman and her child past immigration control and out of the country. When you are a man like Patchway who wants to make money and needs someone to show him where to find it quickly.
Now Sheila Bond told the detective what she knew about Afkhami and Patchway and everything else. She very nearly told him about the lover who was never quite a lover – about that one moment with Patchway among the orange trees. It had been a happy, drunken lark but a very stupid lark. Because it had become part of the spoiling of her perfect love and the divorce and, right now, her sudden hunger for Persian vodka.
Sheila began to weep. It just came out of her. She could not say why she was weeping. She was weeping for everything that had gone wrong. For the too much that never could go right for her.
The detective waited until she had stopped weeping and took a thermofaxed photograph from his pocket. “Here’s a photo of Afkhami’s murderer. Can you identify the man?”
She looked at the picture of a man with dark and dramatic sloe eyes and a brushy mustache. “I don’t know him.”
“You might be the only person in the United States who could know him. Look again.”
“I’ve stopped lying. I don’t know him.”
The detective put away the picture. “I ought to warn you…”
“You don’t have to warn me.”
An American mother and son had escaped from an Iranian father and two of the people who had helped them were dead. Would revenge end now that the boy was in his father’s hands or would it continue?
Sheila Bond let the detective leave without saying goodbye.
She searched through the still unopened and dusty boxes of her freight from Tehran to find the pistol.
* * *
On the other side of the world was Patchway, waiting for his own call from a Washington, D.C., Police Sergeant without Patchway’s knowing he was waiting. Waiting for something to happen that would distract his mind from the red time.
Women were a distraction. Love was not. It was for Patchway a curious experience to be without a woman. No more Gitty. She was gone from him. No more black-black hair. No more white-white skin. No more of her dramatic red capes and glittery French handbags. No more woman to occupy his thinking. To
fill the space Vietnam had emptied in him. Nothing but the vodka to help him now.
The Army pilot banked the helicopter and Patchway looked down on Firebase Southern Cross with its sandbag watchtower and Dixie battle flags in the Vietnamese highlands. At the neat concentric rings around the place. First, an outer defoliated ring of brown earth burnt into the hills by the flower-killer Agent Orange. Second, a ring of hard earth filled with silvery rings of concertina wire like Slinky toys, and black oil drums packed with napalm. Third, a triple tier stack of concertina, a fence of barbwire, then an oiled dirt ring road as firebreak and auxiliary landing zone for choppers. And, finally, the bare upslope toward the perimeter machinegun bunkers and the artillery.
The ground-down white earth nub of a ridgeline on which sat the six artillery pieces was like the spine of a whale breaching through the jungle. With its smoky spume from the artillery firing and its tattered flags on spears stuck into its sandbag bunkers it looked like the hide of Moby Dick, harassed and hounded through seas of jungle.
Beside the breaching whale, like an island in a green sea, was a cluster of refugee shacks, a makeshift village of farmers impoverished by American war machines and enemy war taxes.
All this was the firebase that was to protect Sergeant First Class James Evan Patchway, the GI recon team and twenty five Vietnamese soldiers with him. This was the village that sheltered the wives and children of the Vietnamese soldiers.
This chopper and the four behind it ran out over the jungle and hills until Patchway could no longer see the Southern Cross or the rising mist of its gunfire directed at some distant part of the jungle.
The helicopters dropped in succession into a clearing in the trees and Patchway and his five GIs and the twenty five Arvins jumped out and ran into the brush. They huddled there lying on their bellies, rifles aimed into the trees, ready to fight, until all of their number had assembled behind Patchway and the Vietnamese officer. Then they rose and crept silently through the leaves to find some war.
Some wars have purpose but the war in Vietnam had no purpose, so far as Patchway could see, except to make more war. He had come into the war young and confused and now he was old and confused and just one birthday had passed in the war zone and still he could see no purpose to the war.
The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved Page 6
