“Of course not.”
“I always suspected you helped her run away.”
“That would be worth my job. I won’t risk a job that’s making me rich.”
“Too right,” said Jahangard. He coughed over a fresh cigarette as he lit it from the dying ember of the last one. “Let’s get drunker and richer together. What else have we to do tonight?”
Jahangard shouted for another bottle of real scotch.
Late at night Patchway got a phone call from a Washington, D.C., policeman named Wherry, the call routed down to Patchway’s hotel room from his office in Tehran. Wherry told him such a preposterous story of murder all across the United States that Patchway believed himself so happily drunk he must be hallucinating.
He slept an hour and awoke with a peculiar dread. Patchway decided to test the reality of the phone call. He telephoned Sergeant Wherry in Washington. Then he believed. Believed that Madjid Afkhami had been murdered by Colonel Ardjovani. That a man named Reza Horiat was murdered by Ardjovani. That Sheila Bond had been attacked by a murderer sent by Ardjovani and barely survived. That Georgie had been kidnapped from Glynda in Texas.
Wherry said to Patchway, “Ms Bond says someone’s got the names of all the people who helped Glynda Ardjovani run away from her husband and the people on that list are dying. You’re one of them, Mr. Patchway, aren’t you? On that list, I mean.”
At dawn, Patchway woke again into an alcoholic haze and still could not say which was real and which dream – the sleeping or the phone calls – until Jahangard hammered on the door saying, “Gitty called me from Tehran to tell you – you are a dead man! I’m leaving you, Agha Patchway! I resign! Farewell, farewell!”
Patchway heard Jahangard scramble away from the door as though to stay too long near Patchway would be his own death sentence.
The scramble away told Patchway that none of the night had been a dream. It all was real.
He knocked a cockroach from the plate over the glass of vodka by his bed and drank to clear the haze.
Time for him to abandon this collapsing gold mine and find another, far, far away from murdering secret policemen, deluded kings and manic revolutionaries.
Yes, do that. Now. Quickly. He had one last chore in Iran and then he would go. He had to deliver the body of the ex-Marine to the coroner in Shiraz for embalming and shipping home to his family. No wounded or dead left behind.
Then Patchway would run. To some other, safer and richer isolation. Away from memory of the red time. Away from haunted dreams. Away from life, from love. Toward emptiness.
But he did not hear the applause.
Chapter 4
Tehran
Saifallah was awake for his arrival over Tehran after the dragging misery of his flight from San Francisco. His bitterness had not let him sleep any of those twelve long hours. He did not care if he ever slept again. He may not have the chance ever to sleep again.
He looked down on Tehran and saw patches of burnt out buildings and heaps of blackened cars. Had so much gone so wrong in the few days he had been away? Or was it now, after time spent in peaceful America, he finally saw these signs for what they were – the skirmishers for a coming disaster?
In six months of rebellion by fundamentalists, by students, by bazaaris, Saifallah had allowed himself to ignore all of the growing chaos and merely carry on with the tasks assigned him because he knew SAVAK and the Shahanshah Ayra Mehr had the country in their grip. They could not lose it to traitors and religious lunatics. Now he looked down on the city with a confused fright.
Shoving through the swarming crowds in Mehrabad’s terminal building to recover his bags, Saifallah saw the place stuffed with foreigners and their frightened children struggling to escape Iran. Rich Persians screaming for tickets to Rome, Paris, anywhere. Military men in civilian clothes anxiously shoving to the head of the boarding queues. Was this SAVAK’s Iran?
Even more disturbing, he discovered that his commander was not in Shiraz and not in Iran. What was Colonel Ardjovani doing out of Iran at this moment? He was supposed to be supervising Saifallah in the American killings. He should be at his headquarters. He was the only safety Saifallah had in the doing of a job of murder for which there was no paper record.
Saifallah waited in Tehran in two days of lonely and evil speculation before he had orders from Colonel Ardjovani to proceed to Shiraz. Iran Air was on strike once more. Saifallah called the Imperial Air Force and had them bump an officer passenger to give Saifallah a seat on the last cargo flight of the evening.
Saifallah was relieved to be ordered back into action and to be free once again to ignore the chaos around him. To be confident once again that SAVAK and the Shah could squelch any rebellion. To receive Colonel Ardjovani’s clap on the shoulder for the American work well done. To be told what these murders were all about.
Then Saifallah would tell Ardjovani what he must tell him. Saifallah was finished with SAVAK. Saifallah would kill no more. Saifallah had not killed Sheila Bond.
* * *
Shiraz, South Central Iran
Storm clouds lay over the city of Shiraz sparking lightning in the night but offering no rain to the desert. The clouds had pushed up from Ahwaz in the south in a whirl of dust that drove across Shiraz wild dogs that rule every Iranian city after dark. Garbage skittered through alleys. Sand rattled over garden walls and through the roses. The winter greening of grass turned brown with sand. Saifallah had flown into this birthing storm to be on time for his commander.
A SAVAK messenger took him to Ardjovani’s immense white house far up on Television Hill, above the riot-gutted shops. The weather and this scenery matched Saifallah’s mood.
The messenger pushed open a blue gate with wrought iron cherubs and stood back to let Saifallah go alone into the gravel garden. The front door of the residence was set at the end of a corridor off which were rooms throwing out dinner smells of fresh flat bread, goat cheese and hot tea. He was admitted to the house and went in, taking off his shoes. He threw his overcoat to an old servant who hobbled out of the foyer to find the Colonel.
Saifallah sat quietly, knees and feet together, hands in his lap, in the appropriate and automatic gesture. He stared at the immense foyer painting of Ardjovani bowing to shake the hand of the King of Kings. Saifallah clapped his hands to his stomach and wished he had eaten something on the plane. The old servant returned on his velvet slippers to sit idly by the door and stare at Saifallah.
“Take your eyes elsewhere, son of a dog,” Saifallah said to the old man.
With grave dignity, the servant turned his chair to face the wall.
Saifallah began to tremble. He had never before come into Ardjovani’s presence with fear. A little good-sense paranoia but never before fear. A tea boy ushered Saifallah into the salon. Ardjovani nodded his white head from the divan where he was sitting. He motioned Saifallah to sit and continued his shouted discussion with an army general and a colonel.
Everything in the room was maroon. It had a hypnotic feel. The tea boy set a small glass of tea and a saucer before Saifallah and offered him rock sugar. The sugar was maroon.
The discussion with the officers stopped abruptly. The general got to his feet. The colonel jumped up. Saifallah rose and bowed to them.
Ardjovani, the SAVAK colonel, rose slowly. He languidly extended his hand, still shouting his conversation. The general shook hands as he bowed to Ardjovani.
“My sword! My sword!” cried Ardjovani, pushing past the officers as they left.
Saifallah began to make his bow but Ardjovani clapped him on the shoulders and shouted into his face, “You look exhausted! Have some tea! You haven’t slept well?”
Ardjovani shoved Saifallah to the divan and sat beside and against him. The tea boy brought more glasses.
“I am very pleased with the success of your mission, Saifallah!” shouted the Colonel. “I’ve read of it in the American newspapers and my reports!”
He laughed and added, confidentially
, “You know, they have a marvelous thing in America called a ‘clipping service.’ A public spy program! Tell them what you want and they cut out newspaper articles for you from every paper in the country. I’ve had those read to me over the telephone. I’ll make you a scrapbook of them!”
Ardjovani squeezed Saifallah’s knee and laughed again.
“Thank you, sir,” said Saifallah, trembling and staring at his commander as he knew he must for courtesy. At the hawk nose and the very unPersian white hair and arched white eyebrows.
“You accomplished everything thoroughly and professionally,” Ardjovani shouted, “confirming my confidence in you! You see where I am now, Saifallah?” Ardjovani waved his long arms at the lush maroon salon. “I’ve risen from obscurity in Tehran to a lesser obscurity in the provinces where at least some – that general – have the sense to fear me and to honor me. He’s an emissary from General Bassari – you know that fool?”
“No, sir.”
“Avoid him! My work in Shiraz is temporary, of course, but I’ve told you that before.” Ardjovani leaned closer and threw a fatherly arm over Saifallah’s shoulders. “I can make this to your advantage, too. I need reliable men with me wherever I may go next. I have some important assignments to distribute but I have few here in the south I can call my own men. Few as reliable as you. I want you here with me, by my side, always!”
Ardjovani rapped a hand on Saifallah’s knee.
“Are you married yet?” Ardjovani asked. “Too bad! You’ll be an old man soon. You must marry. Surely you’ve a cousin someplace? If not, so what? This is the city of roses and love. These southern girls can drive a man mad with the look of them, plump and black-eyed. Distant as it is from the Shahanshah Arya Mehr, Shiraz really is the only livable city in the country and you need a wife to enjoy life here. Don’t let others say differently! Take a wife here and make your home in the south where you’ll stay my man forever. Who knows what can follow?”
Ardjovani clapped a hand on Saifallah’s bicep. Saifallah felt his stomach twist. He raised his small tea glass and drank it down to soothe his stomach.
“No sugar?” asked Ardjovani, surprised. Saifallah set down the glass and the tea boy poured it full.
“Four lumps, please,” Saifallah said to the tea boy, dropping the lumps in the tea American style, astonishing the tea boy.
“You take your sugar like that?” said Ardjovani.
“Too much of America, sir.”
Both the Colonel and the tea boy laughed.
“America is like a drug, that’s true! A fantasy,” cried Ardjovani, taking the tea pot from the boy and waving him out of the room.
Ardjovani poured full Saifallah’s glass and added four lumps of sugar.
Then he said, “I’ve had little rest myself these last seventy two hours, Saifallah, and none of it due to my hunger for southern women, unfortunately, but to home.”
Ardjovani’s voice had sunk from his official shout to a commanding conversational tone that Saifallah had rarely heard.
“Let’s talk of the country,” said the Colonel. “I’ve been working to keep myself – and you – part of the inner core of SAVAK.”
Ardjovani ran a hand through his white hair, an uncharacteristic nervous gesture.
So the subject, thought Saifallah, was to be office politics, not me?
Saifallah put a lump of sugar between his lips to sip tea through it, the fear slackening its grip on his stomach.
“I am exiled from Tehran to Shiraz, Saifallah. I made enemies and I am here but I can overcome them and you and I can return home. It may be better for us that we are out of the capital these days. The threat to the Shahanshah Arya Mehr, the interminable Iraqi war, the rise of the Khomeini parties, the latest disaster in the Saudi royal family and the threats against the oil route through the Straits of Hormuz make politics in the capital more dangerous and volatile than I like. Shiraz is a fine place to wait out the changes that will come. Then you and I can pick up the pieces and become great men.”
The pain of fright had left Saifallah’s stomach. A new wariness crept in.
Ardjovani poured more tea. Saifallah was astonished to see the Colonel do it himself.
“I believe this radical storm called Khomeini and his fundamentalists will do us a favor,” Ardjovani said. “I doubt we’ve had a single peaceful day since the bazaar riots last January But Khomeini’s radicals are giving us the chance to purge the bazaar and the students. You’d think that rioting is all these students learn at university! The Shahanshah Arya Mehr gives them free education with room and board and those he can’t keep here he ships off to States. It’s the bad example they all see on American television programs that makes this problem for us!”
Ardjovani shouted, “Did you hear a student painted ‘Screw the Shah’ on the chemistry building of Pahlavi University here in town? He wrote it in English because it won’t translate in Farsi and even in English none of the other students could figure it out! But it took courage to do that, damn him.”
“Lunacy would do as well as an explanation, sir.”
“The democratic disease is the cause,” said the Colonel, switching to English.
“I doubt it,” replied Saifallah, also in English. “Not in Iran. We love to paint slogans but there is not enough of that disease to worry SAVAK.”
Ardjovani looked at Saifallah narrowly. “When you speak English you are less polite and more assertive, Saifallah.”
Was that a threat? Saifallah felt no fear of his commander and that surprised him.
“I’ve noticed that same lack of respect in many of the students we get back from study in States. America tends to corrupt them for Iran, don’t you agree?”
Saifallah gawked at his Colonel. He returned to Farsi to say, “I agree, sir.”
“No, no, keep it in English. I have servants in the house.”
Ardjovani clapped Saifallah’s knee and said, “This is a quiet house because I myself designed it and built it. I watched its construction. We’re safe here. No bugs, no listeners, just us.”
Saifallah stared at the man who had the power of life and death over him – the man who knew everything about the American murders, who had ordered them yet kept no record of them but his own memory, the man who was now telling Saifallah that he, Ardjovani, had things to fear.
“What?” croaked Saifallah.
“‘The door has a mouse and the mouse has ears,’” said Ardjovani.
Saifallah burst into sweat. “I see your point about corruption of the students,” he said in English, miserably hoping for this conversation to end.
“Ah, there it is again! If you’d said that in Farsi I could’ve predicted the wheedling tone you’d be compelled to use with your chief. Why is it your English is much more – what is it more, Saifallah?”
Sweat ran over Saifallah’s face. “More corrupt?” he whispered.
“I don’t think so. Not in your case. Not Saifallah, my own sword.”
Saifallah dragged his coat sleeve across his wet forehead.
“Have you a fever?” asked Ardjovani.
Saifallah jerked his hand from his face. “None, sir.”
“You sweat when you talk to me. But your answers grow shorter and ruder. Are you no longer afraid of me?”
Saifallah felt the sweat start under his shirt. He kept his eyes steadily on Ardjovani’s.
“What do you want to know?” Saifallah said. “Your orders are on my eyes – tell me what you want and I’ll answer.”
Ardjovani drew a pipe from his coat pocket. “Tell me about your mission. Leave nothing out.”
The Colonel lit his pipe as Saifallah told him everything except for a night of doubt cuddling a whore on a train streaming beneath American stars. Nor did he tell Ardjovani that Sheila Bond was still alive.
“All very interesting,” said Ardjovani, “but it’s not what I’m asking.”
“What are you asking, sir?”
“I imagine you saw some troubling thing
s in U.S.A., Saifallah.”
Saifallah had no idea how to answer that question. “My loyalty was never troubled, sir.”
“How can you miss my point? Tell me, what was the most impressive thing you saw there?”
“I made love in the view car of a train crossing Ohio!”
Ardjovani choked out his surprise and laughed.
“Oh, I’m confident that was your most important revelation,” Ardjovani said.
Ardjovani drew on his pipe. “Listen to me. We Iranians are a highly symbolic race. Sometimes I suspect I chose you for this work for your name’s sake – Saifallah, ‘the sword of God.’ Many Iranian youngsters go to States for school and among those who return home we in SAVAK find they have lost interest in the symbols that hold together our nation. The symbols that prevail in the West are more abstract than our own. Ours are more concrete for our more ancient civilization. We whipped the Romans 2,000 years before Columbus and our Shahanshah’s throne is older than the Christian religion. But the democratic disease is the loss of faith in our Iranian symbols.”
“I understand, sir, I do.” Saifallah began to tremble. He understood nothing.
“More hot tea? You’re shivering.”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
Ardjovani poured. What an absurd and terrifying thing, Saifallah realized, to be served tea from the hand of a SAVAK colonel.
“Then you understand, Saifallah, what answer I want when I ask if you have the disease?”
Saifallah shrank back into the divan pillows, fear twisting his belly. He had slept in a train beneath the stars struck by the pointless horror of his mission to kill. He had known then he was ill but he had not known the name of the disease. He could harbor the disease, nurture it, and he would die for it in a SAVAK dungeon. That was the meaning of Ardjovani’s lecture.
“Have I the disease badly?” asked Saifallah.
“I can see that something plagues you.”
“It occurred to you that your killing machine might run amuck on that disease, did it?” Saifallah said with sudden bitterness. “What did you suspect might happen?”
The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved Page 9
