The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved

by Steven Hardesty

  Sudden silence in the bar.

  “But who are you?” Jahangard said, the only voice in the still room.

  “I said come with me.”

  Jahangard was drunk enough to be brave. “And I say, ‘Who are you?’”

  Saifallah did not reply.

  “Should I go with him?” Jahangard asked his drunken friends.

  “Go with him,” said one, “or he’ll bring more of his kind and take us all.”

  “True friends!” said Jahangard. He put aside his glass in an effort to sober. “Where are you taking me, Agha, or may I ask?”

  Saifallah said nothing.

  Jahangard got up. “This is the world we live in,” he said to his bar mates. “A stranger comes to me and takes me away and I do not know him or what he wants and he is not obliged to tell me. And my friends? What do they do? Nothing!” He burst into tears.

  “Go with him, go with him,” said another at the bar.

  Saifallah went to the door. Jahangard looked around the room, found no help, and followed.

  In the street Saifallah said, “Be a man, you old fool. Wipe your drunken tears. I’ve a question to ask you.”

  “Ask! Anything you want is yours!”

  Saifallah said in English, “You disgust me. I disgust myself so much that it takes a great deal to disgust me further.”

  Jahangard followed into English, saying, “You’re the strangest secret policeman I’ve ever met. Do I have reason to hope?”

  “Every reason if you answer my question truthfully.”

  “Ask me, Agha, I am hungry to hear it!” Jahangard said in Farsi.

  “Patchway has checked out of his hotel. Where is he?”

  “But all the world knows! He’s taken the corpse to Shiraz. To the coroner.”

  “Shiraz!” cried Saifallah.

  Jahangard cowered away from the enraged secret policeman.

  “How long will he be there? In what hotel?”

  “One night or two, depending on the needs of the coroner. Always at the Hotel Koroush. But all that will change now, of course.”

  “Why will it change? What about Patchway?”

  “Because they’re going to kill the Saint.”

  Saifallah stood in the dust, the howl of traffic around them, gazing at the drunken old man who had just delivered the news that, a week ago, even a day ago, would make Saifallah’s promotion in SAVAK. Now it meant nothing to him, as SAVAK meant nothing to him. He had just one task – to kill Patchway to stay alive. But alive for what?

  Saifallah turned into the dusty street and tramped away through traffic, ignoring cars lurching around him.

  Jahangard shouted after him, “Ask me more about it – ask me anything – everything I know is yours!”

  He watched Saifallah vanish into the shaded arcades. He stood in that spot for many minutes waiting for the secret policeman to return to arrest him.

  Saifallah did not come back. Jahangard was a free man.

  Jahangard shouted into the street, “You are the strangest policeman I ever met!” Then he began to weep with joy.

  * * *

  Ahwaz Airport

  Saifallah shoved through the small airport terminal jammed with men in black jackets and knit caps leading goats and frightened foreign women leading children. He said to the ticket agent, “Shiraz immediately.”

  The agent behind his counter pushed aside the score of arms reaching for him, shoving tickets at him, shouting demands and pleading, and said, “Immediately is tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Any flight into Shiraz, then, but today, now.”

  The agent took some tickets and stamped them. Hands snatched those tickets and thrust more toward him. He shouted replies to their questions as he said to Saifallah. Then the ticket agent looked into the silent space occupied by the secret policeman and was frightened.

  The agent pushed away the men and women with their tickets and said to Saifallah there in the silence the secret policeman had made around himself, “Pardon, Agha, but don’t you know that Iran Air has gone on strike?”

  “It’s nearly always on strike. What of it?”

  “For the rebellion.”

  “Rebellion is every day. Give me a ticket.”

  “But you know Khomeini has been exiled from Iraq to France?”

  “That makes this?” Saifallah gestured at the frantic crowd.

  “It makes uncertainty here, Agha, so far from where the Shahanshah Arya Mehr sits on his throne. Pardon me for being so blunt,” said the agent, alarmed that he had said too much or too little, depending on which secret agency controlled Saifallah.

  Then the ticket agent said, with surprising courage, “But there is little evidence of government attention this far south. We need help, Agha. This city was once an Arab principality – a Khomeini in the north, an Arab emir down here, who knows what will happen to us next?”

  “Panic makes treason,” said Saifallah. “You, little man, belong in a SAVAK cell screaming your life away for the spreading of rumors. But what is that to me now?”

  “What? What?” cried the ticket agent, terrified.

  “Any plane to Shiraz. Put me on any aircraft. I must be there instantly.”

  “Agha, there are some oil company planes but they are cargo planes. They ferry police agents to the oil field riots and haul the ferang wives and children to safety.”

  “Put me on any of those toward Shiraz.”

  “Everyone is going to Kuwait, Agha. Give up Shiraz and book passage across the Gulf on some Arab airline. Go to Kuwait now before the real panic starts and the planes are crammed with not just foreigners but Persians.”

  Saifallah surveyed the crowd baying for tickets. “All these are certain the Khomeini revolution is coming? What fools.”

  “What is Khomeini?” said the ticket agent. “He’s only a mad man. But after his revolution come the Russians! For 200 years, they wanted their channel to the Gulf and warm water. That’s us! If you go to Shiraz the Red army will have you on their bayonets. Don’t be foolish, Agha, go to Kuwait. I’ve sent my own family there.”

  “None of this means anything to me,” Saifallah said.

  “It doesn’t?” cried the ticket agent. “How can it not?”

  “Get me to Shiraz.”

  * * *

  Shiraz

  Patchway’s taxi cab drove along a dirt road between dirt fields heaped with camel bones and cracked engine blocks. This is where the camel caravans end their trek out of the desert. Where one of the city riots had caught a caravan and butchered it. Patchway got out of the cab. Afternoon. Dust. From across the city came the muffled chants of men parading for the Saint.

  Terrence Nutting threw open the double iron grille gates to his house and cried, “Dear Patchway! What a delight. I thought you were more mad murderers.” Nutting put behind the wall the shotgun he had in his hands.

  Nutting was English and tall, pale white and gaunt. He did not offer his hand to shake. “Where is Ali Hossein?” he said. “He’s supposed to be your tail.”

  “He’ll be along.”

  Nutting led into a concrete pillbox of a house with barred windows, gasoline-polished terrazzo floors and a rear glass wall looking into a walled garden of winter roses large as softballs. He had an official orange TV set, sound off, showing the Saint’s progress through Shiraz.

  “Liquor?” said Nutting, opening a drinks cabinet. It was well-stocked, and the booze was not the counterfeit of grain alcohol and iodine sold up across the Gulf by Arabs in dhows.

  Nutting admired his collection of bottles. He said, “We barely know each other, Patchway, but I’ll be honest with you anyway. I’ve learned to be a drunk of the first order. Only the insane are sober in this country. Have something to drink with me and we will become jolly friends.”

  “Give me a vodka lime,” said Patchway.

  “I’m a drunk because I like it,” Nutting said, “and because I find it convenient. In this country being drunk is the perfect defense against any c
rime. The courts consider drunkenness a mental affliction and forgivable. I often need to be forgiven. One more reason to love this country. Of course, I’ve sent my lady wife home to Wiltshire. No need for her to take the risk. But I can’t afford to leave the gold mine any sooner than the last possible moment. So long as Riley keeps command here and doesn’t stick the ‘going out of business’ sign in a palace window, I’ll happily rake it in.”

  “You look outside your door at camel bones and burnt engine blocks and you think the Shah is going to stick it out?” said Patchway.

  “He’s stuck it through so much more, he will survive this, too, and keep me happy digging at the rock face.”

  “He didn’t do too well in the Fifties.”

  “Mossadegh’s rebellion.” Nutting sighed. “The West was a force to be reckoned with in those days. We still believed in a remnant British Empire. We saved his Peacock Throne for him. We will do it again, if these mad mullahs and a crazy Saint force us to it. Refresh your vodka, Patchway? You are not drinking half quick enough.” Nutting poured himself a third drink. “Has no one at head office read my reports?”

  “No one reads your ravings,” said Patchway. “You live in a bone pile and rave about Riley the Eternal when he’s a gaudy, medieval prince with delusions of dragging this country forward into the twentieth century in one long pull.”

  “Are you bailing, dear Patchway? You make all the noises.”

  “As soon as I can find a plane out of Shiraz.”

  “Oh, well, this little confusion in the city will pass soon enough,” said Nutting. “The Shah will hang the Saint and that will be the end of it. But it will be days before any but military flights leave Shiraz. Meantime, dear Patchway, tell me what you want from me.”

  “Twelve drums of sodium nitrate.”

  “I’ve already refused Bassari that purchase. Did the General tell you what he wants to do with the material?”

  “I don’t care what he wants to do with it. It’s a sale and it helps me get out of here.”

  “On a military flight? I see. But he wants to burn the Saint with it. Well, that’s the story around town.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Nutting. You’re drunker even than you pretend.”

  “Are you the only man in Shiraz aside from the great unwashed” – Nutting gestured at the chanting mob on the TV screen – “who doesn’t know that Bassari wants to kill our saintly khan or khanly saint, whichever his propaganda machine is calling him today?”

  “He can kill him any way he wants,” Patchway said, “but using a low grade explosive like sodium nitrate is low efficiency and no guarantee of success. I wouldn’t use it. I’d use old-fashioned plastic explosive or a machinegun or drop a brick on his head. I don’t believe what the whole town is saying.”

  “Nor do you care?” said Nutting.

  Patchway gazed out at Nutting’s rose garden, browned by the blown desert sand. The brownness on the flowers was like the brownness of defoliated leaves in another time and place. He felt the chill of the wound scar on his belly, its cold pricking into him like tendrils of emptiness.

  Patchway said, “No, I don’t care. I don’t care much about anything. I haven’t for a long while.”

  Nutting swallowed down the last vodka in his glass. “I don’t think I like you, Patchway.”

  “Are you going to send him the drums or do I find a truck and do it myself?”

  “Dear Patchway! You are from the mighty head office that reads none of my reports. If you say ‘sell,’ I sell. Let us sell-sell-sell and kill-kill-kill the Saint and make more money-money-money. I’ll have the drums to him this hour.”

  Nutting poured himself another drink. He decided not to weaken it with a lemon peel. He drank. His mood changed.

  “Princesses!” he cried. “Now that the unpleasantness of our having to engage in common trade is concluded, have you eaten? I am invited to a garden party in General Bassari’s Bagheh Eram. He’s got a little Qajar palace there filled with all sorts of princesses of this and that tribe, each fatter and more delicious than the last. Each like a bright burst of vodka on the nerve endings. You can shake his hand for his dozen drums and ask what he really intends for them.”

  “Send the drums and I’m clear to go to the airport,” Patchway said. “I’ll skip the party.”

  “No flights tonight,” said Nutting. “Not a one. The Saint’s jolly boys turned off the radars! I think they were just meddling with things as boys will and threw the wrong lever, but there you have it. His jumbo jet is grounded. Not even the military can fly out.”

  “Then I’ll drive. I’ll take your company four wheel drive. Give me the keys.”

  “In the night across a desert full of refugees and brigands? No, no,” said Nutting. “Wait for daylight. Then fly. Did I say General Bassari ordered me to bring you to his garden party? He loves us dearly and wants us close. Tomorrow, who knows? The Saint may want his head. Or ours.”

  Nutting poured himself another vodka and seasoned it with a lime pip.

  “You’re not as drunk as you seem,” said Patchway.

  “I’m never so drunk as I seem but always more stupid. Another glassful, dear Patchway?”

  “What’s happening in the garden tonight?”

  “I do not know. What I don’t know worries me. Why Bassari wants us both there worries me. Why a desert princess should be in attendance when she despises Bassari even more than she despises saints and shahs worries me. Why he wants a dozen drums of a poor explosive worries me. Why I cannot get drunk when I want worries me!”

  Nutting drank down his vodka and spat the pip onto the gasoline-polished stone floor. He watched the pip slide away.

  “Too many things worry me these days, Patchway. Especially when I have so much more gold dust to sweep up and such a very small dustpan.”

  “I’ll join you,” Patchway said.

  “I knew you would!”

  “I’ll want your car there. Bring it.”

  “I can promise you to meet a desert princess or did I promise her already? Not one of Bassari’s sluts. Yasamin Safavifard. She’s a power in the city and may herself have a curious interest in sodium nitrate. Perhaps we can sell her more?”

  “Bring the car and your shotgun,” Patchway said.

  “I always do,” said Nutting.

  * * *

  Ali Hossein parked his army car behind Nutting’s house and come in through the kitchen door. He shoved past the house servants huddling listening at the door to the main room. He put his ear to the door to hear Nutting’s conversation with Patchway to report it all to General Bassari.

  The reference to a shotgun puzzled him but a garden party with princesses? Excellent! he almost cried aloud. He would shadow Patchway into the party and who knew what great thing a man of Ali Hossein’s caliber could make of the night, the garden and a princess?

  He felt in his pockets the weight of the poison vial, the carbon dioxide injector and Anahita’s hand grenade and rejoiced at this vast good fortune. What better place than a bustling nighttime party in the great rose garden of Bagheh Eram to feed Patchway the venom that would kill him slowly?

  Slowly enough to be of value to General Bassari and to Ali Hossein at the moment they began to remake the world.

  * * *

  Late at night, away from his sexually demanding wife, his spying live-in aunts and his hectoring mother, hidden even from his favorite child, the only daughter left him in Iran, the beautiful Anahita, Dr. Alireza Behrooz Zargoneh worked on perfecting his snake bite venoms. He worked on them for Anahita.

  Each time Dr. Zargoneh saw Anahita’s precious, round face, he sickened at heart and turned in hotter fury to his snake bite research. She was dying. Only his venoms could save her. But his research also would be Zargoneh’s contribution and extortion payment to General Bassari’s conspiracy, a conspiracy that would keep Zargoneh alive long enough to save Anahita.

  But all of these overlapping plans meant nothing if Zargoneh could not send Anahit
a out of the country, as he had her two older sisters, to escape the clutches of the military conscriptors who wanted to stuff her into the meat grinder of the endless war with Iraq. For that, Zargoneh needed an airline ticket, and Patchway.

  Dr. Zargoneh parked his yellow Mercedes before the Koroush Hotel beneath the lightning and the clouds of the sudden storm that had run up from the Gulf. He found Patchway just returned from Nutting’s house.

  “Are you well?” cried Zargoneh, the words sounding strained coming from his frozen mouse face. Zargoneh gripped Patchway’s hand and held it. “Shall we have tea in the lobby? Excellent!”

  Zargoneh hauled Patchway by the hand to a tiny table in a corner of the many-shades-of-green lobby, away from the blaring orange television set and the fiftieth repetition of the Saint’s latest morality lecture. The dwarf waiter in a stained white jacket whipped away the flies crawling on the sticky tabletop and said to them, “What do you want – pistachios and tea?”

  “That will be good enough,” said Zargoneh.

  “That will be all at this hour.” The dwarf left.

  “Now, Agha Patchway,” Zargoneh said, “are you mentally and physically prepared to hear my latest case?”

  “Another daughter to be shipped to the States?” said Patchway.

  “A prescient man!” cried Zargoneh, his black eyes glittering above his long nose. “You know, I am sure, the local director of the airlines, not Iran Air but the foreigner airline here? You carry the authority to give him directives and countermand the decisions born of his foolish opium addiction as you are so far superior to him in status, prestige and wisdom among the ferangs? Then it’s settled!”

  “What’s settled?” said Patchway.

  “My daughter Anahita’s air ticket, of course. You can set aside the airline’s frivolous objections, my daughter Anahita can marry well in States, her life with be perfect and all will be well for me, her despairing father.” The plump little man sighed happily.