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

by Steven Hardesty

  Yasamin put a hand on Patchway’s knee under the table and said to him in whispered English, “These children” – her entourage – “bore me. Stay with me this evening. Let’s be Americans together in bed.”

  Ali Hossein watched the waiter clear away the princess’ table in preparation for the sweet and the final tea. He followed the waiter into the kitchen.

  The fat waiter said, “Who are you? What are doing? Get out!”

  Ali Hossein took from the waiter one of the individual tea pots and dumped into it the poison. “I will deliver this one,” he said to the waiter. He carried the pot to the table and put it beside Patchway’s cup. In a few moments, he would be free to celebrate his personal victory in the first step in the killing of the Saint.

  Ali Hossein said to Patchway, “Drink up your tea, Agha!”

  “Go away, you fool,” Yasamin said to Ali Hossein.

  “But I must drive him on an errand of mercy, Princess!”

  “What errand of mercy?” she said to Patchway. She said to Ali Hossein, “I’ll drive Agha Patchway, I’ll drive him to frenzy. Provided it’s not to another woman.”

  “Pardon, Khanoum?” said Ali Hossein, puzzled.

  “Go away, go away.”

  “It’s to the airline director, Khanoum,” said Ali Hossein.

  “Why do you want to go there?” Yasamin said to Patchway.

  “For a ticket.”

  “You want to buy a ticket tonight?”

  “For the first flight out tomorrow. For the daughter of a friend. Dr. Zargoneh.”

  “That’s no errand of mercy,” said Yasamin. “It’s merely treason against the conscription law and very, very boring. Use Ali Hossein and his army car.”

  “What?” cried Ali Hossein, stricken with understanding of the price Zargoneh had exacted from the General for his part of the conspiracy. It was a price that told Ali Hossein the fiendish doctor had no intent to marry Anahita to Ali Hossein.

  Ali Hossein stumbled away from the table agog. He fell into his chair in the far corner of the room. His brain would not work. He was a man who had been turned off.

  He watched without appreciation or delight as the drunken Nutting grabbed up Patchway’s poisoned tea pot, crying, “Hot tea! Shall I be mother? Will you have some, Patchway?” Nutting poured full Patchway’s cup and poured his own and went around the table crying that absurd “Shall I be mother?”

  Each person who tasted Nutting’s tea found it too bitter and put it aside.

  Ali Hossein raised his own tea cup to his lips. It was hot. It was bitter. He poured more sugar into the cup and drank it, numbly, dumbly, hopelessly.

  He watched Patchway do as he had done and sugar the poisoned tea until it was drinkable. He watched Patchway drink. Drink enough! Ali Hossein wanted to shout.

  A grim pleasure came into Ali Hossein. He was looking at a dead man still on his feet. He had killed Patchway. If all else had gone wrong tonight, Ali Hossein had accomplished his mission. He was a hero. A hero can have his Anahita.

  Ali Hossein was so pleased with his certain future that he drank down his own bitter tea and felt a jolt of pain in his stomach. What was that? Excitement? Fright? The poison? Had he mixed up the little pots of tea and poisoned himself?

  He wanted to vomit! He wanted to scream! He burst into sweat. He lurched into the toilet and threw up. He forced himself to vomit again, until he had nothing at all in his stomach.

  Ali Hossein sagged against the toilet wall, letting the sweating and trembling subside. He checked the mirror to see if his eyes held the glazed signs of death. He rinsed his mouth with tap water, straightened his hair and clothes, and went out holding his ruined stomach, his knees so weak he could barely walk.

  The fool Nutting was there at Ali Hossein’s table, a tea pot in his hand, crying drunkenly, “Shall I be mother?”

  “Al-lah, no!”

  “You look very pale, Ali Hossein,” Yasamin said to him. “Drink Agha Nutting’s tea.”

  “No!” he cried, staggering away from the princess and her jeering entourage.

  At the restaurant doorway, Ali Hossein saw the man in the peach-colored shirt – Homan Rostamkolahi of SAVAK – seated at a corner table and staring at him curiously. Homan raised a French fry in salute as Ali Hossein gripped the doorframe to steady himself. He staggered out into the night that vibrated with distant chants for the Saint.

  Yasamin sent her entourage scurrying ahead past Ali Hossein. They dragged Nutting with them.

  Yasamin said to Patchway, “Go do your errand of mercy, Agha Patchway, and then return to me here in Bagheh Eram. We’ll make for ourselves the kind of party that will please us both, and hope we survive to see morning. Now go, go! Do your trivial errand and come back to me before I find another Patchway I like better.”

  Patchway turned away to find Ali Hossein and he army car but Yasamin clutched his arm and drew him back.

  “I did not expect it would be a man like you,” she said to him. “But I have to have my garden. Look out there,” she said, gesturing to the great garden stretching away from the little restaurant.

  Deep night had slid over the Garden of Eram and its tall plane trees and mud brick garden wall. A tiny Qajar palace in the garden’s center, with painted frescoes, arches and glittering bits of inset mirror, flung sparkles of light on the roses in their thousands of colors and on the partiers in mink and diamonds among the flowers. Strangely unrhythmed Persian music masked the distant, rumbling chants of the Saint’s faithful.

  “This garden,” Yasamin said, “is the soul of my people, the Gashghaie.” Her tone was no longer girlish or flirtatious. “My garden has 25,000 blossoms in 300 varieties. A single one of these bushes may give fifty flowers in a year but each bloom lives barely five days. That’s the rule in the desert – a sweet life but short. We Persians invented the rose. Some call it our only contribution to world civilization. It’s enough for me. Enough, if this garden were still mine.”

  “Who owns your garden?” said Patchway.

  “General Bassari believes he owns Bagheh Eram for the army. But he’s only the caretaker of my garden. That’s his house on the hill there.”

  Yasamin pointed to a brilliantly lit white hulk against a skyline of barren hills. Its flat desert roof was supported by Egyptian columns with Greek capitals between mosaics where Moslem heroes slew dragons in gleaming tile work.

  Next to Bassari’s mansion Patchway recognized a whitewashed Temple of Karnak with blue gates and cherubs. Ardjovani’s own house on Television Hill.

  Yasamin said, “My garden legally belongs to a man who was once the godfather of Shiraz and a khan and is now a saint. By right of conquest. The loss of this garden to him has kept the Gashghaie in thrall to the Saint’s family for forty years. But I’ll have it back. My people demand it. It is our soul, this gentle thing in a harsh world. When the khan’s grandfather took power in the city, he was clever enough to steal our garden. No one has ever beaten the Gashghaie – no Pakistani prince or Persian shah or Shirazi khan. But my tribe will not fight the man who holds their garden hostage.”

  She looked at Patchway with a savage hunger and a surprise melancholy. “Perhaps tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll have Bagheh Eram for my tribe again. You will be the man to do that for me. Come again, Patchway. Run your errand and return to me quickly.”

  Chapter 6

  Bagheh Eram, Shiraz

  “What glorious lies are you telling the late Agha Patchway about my garden, Princess?” General Bassari said from the shadows as he watched Patchway follow the stomach-clutching Ali Hossein through the roses to the army car.

  “I don’t know what I told him,” Yasamin said. “I never know what I say. Except this garden is mine and I’ll have it tomorrow.”

  She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  Bassari said, “You always bring the most offensive sort of men to my garden but Patchway! Him I did not expect. That man’s too smart or too stupid for you to take such risks.”

/>   “I brought him here to keep you honest,” said Yasamin.

  “You’re a woman as hard as your ferocious tribe.”

  “Remember that tomorrow.”

  “I’ll give you your reward, don’t worry,” Bassari said, with irritation. “You’ll have this garden tomorrow.”

  “I expect to have this garden, one way or another. From you or from the Saint or the Shahanshah Ayra Mehr.”

  “How well I recall in my youth that all women were brown-eyed, fat and docile. These days you young women are all greedy and murderous.”

  “One fruit of the Islamic revolution is that a woman with a machinegun in her hands quickly realizes she is the equal of any man with a machinegun in his hands.”

  “When did you ever handle a machinegun?” Bassari said.

  Yasamin lit another cigarette. “I’ll tell you my war stories one day.”

  “I imagine I could make a case against you and your machinegun if the Islamic cause fails,” said Bassari.

  “Or the cause of the Shahanshah Arya Mehr.” She spat out a flake of cigarette.

  Bassari said, “How would those fine breasts look in prison rags?”

  “Or with your bullet holes punched in them,” she said.

  “No, no, no. I’m an old man but a charming woman still can touch my finer nature.”

  Yasamin ground her cigarette beneath her shoe. “Half the reason I must have my garden tomorrow is to keep me safe from your ‘finer nature,’ General. If we kill the Saint and sweep the Islamics from Shiraz for the glory of the Shahanshah Arya Mehr, that will raise you to power in this city. I’ll need my garden to rally around me the Gashghaie just to keep me safe from you.”

  “Don’t think that tomorrow brings a return to the old tribal anarchy your clan would like to die for,” said Bassari. “That cannot happen.”

  “It’s a modern age now, General. I’d never think to be so medieval. When I have so few guns.”

  “We can’t have more civil war,” Bassari said in sudden irritation. “You cannot allow that. We have to agree on that. We have to make peace between ourselves, even though you’ve been a thorn in my side all my life.”

  “From the moment I developed these fine breasts, you mean.”

  “Why didn’t you marry me then?”

  “Marry my rapist? Don’t be absurd.”

  “That was the way things were done then,” said Bassari. “But even then you had too many Western notions. I would have made you a good husband. I was rich, important, virile!”

  “You were.”

  “I am most of those things now. I’ll be all of them again tomorrow.”

  “How odd it is,” Yasamin said, “that so many of us expect so much from the killing of one old desert rat, yet the man we’re going to frame for the murder has all the qualities we want.”

  “Patchway? He’s a tool. What qualities could he have to interest me?”

  “He’s a soldier.”

  “I’m a soldier,” said Bassari.

  “You’re a general,” she said. “There is a narrow but breathtaking difference. Too bad it’s necessary for us to kill this soldier.”

  “What does that mean?” Bassari said, annoyed.

  “It means I was bored and he unbores me. I’m going to party with him tonight.”

  “You’re going to what?”

  “Screw him.”

  Bassari snorted.

  She drew another cigarette from her purse. She breathed in the cloud of smoke she had created and let it out slowly. She said, “We may have chosen the wrong man to blame for this. Nutting was good enough.”

  Bassari made a negative tongue click. “It can never be wrong to blame a well-known man. Who knows Nutting? No one. Who would believe anyone would conspire with that drunk to murder the Saint? No, Patchway’s the best target.”

  “He has too many friends in Tehran to defend him,” said Yasamin.

  “To defend his memory, you mean. Has he made you sentimental?”

  “All my sentiment is for my garden.” She looked sharply at the general. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  “We will succeed but it will look like disaster. I’m afraid of the ‘army’ I command tomorrow. Half-trained teenage recruits and too many of your half-civilized Gashghaie warriors. That worries me, nothing else.”

  “Preserve my garden for me,” Yasamin said, “and you can expect my Gashghaie warriors to win your fight tomorrow. Goodnight, General.”

  “Goodnight?” he said, startled. “Is that all? Goodnight to me and you go to Patchway?” Bassari clutched her arms. “I’ve seen you through two husbands, poverty and now wealth. Tomorrow I’ll give you power. You helped me bury a wife who was a mother to you. How can you still hate me?”

  “Because of the way it started between us – in fear.”

  “You’ve never liked it any other way,” he said.

  “You’ve never done it any other way.”

  He clutched her mouth to his.

  Later, Bassari left Yasamin in his private room in the Qajar palace, left the party crowd that still howled and whooped through the palace, and went into the rose garden.

  “We’re nearly done, General,” said an officer not in uniform.

  “No attention from anyone?”

  “None, General. I simply took the barrels.”

  “All the barrels have ‘Made in U.S.A.’ painted on them?”

  “I painted them myself.”

  Bassari and the officer watched soldiers without uniforms hide the last heavy barrels of sodium nitrate among rose bushes.

  The officer bowed to his general and Bassari watched him go away through roses glowing in light spilled from the palace. Bassari gazed at the blossoms – red, white, yellow, pink – and was content that he would be the man to burn them all to ash and cinders.

  * * *

  The Ahwaz Road

  By mid-morning of that day, Saifallah had given up hope of finding an oil company plane to fly him into central Iran to kill Patchway. All aircraft were fleeing the desert for safe harbors in Kuwait or Bahrain, carrying foreign families and rich and panicked Iranians out of the growing chaos in the south.

  Saifallah hired a taxi and driver and the two of them alternated duty at the wheel, churning through axle-deep sand on 250 miles of the camel caravan trail connecting Ahwaz and Shiraz. That is what passes for a highway in southern Iran and has for 3,000 years. Saifallah arrived in the city, forcing the green and white cab through the howl and clatter of city traffic and the night air pulsing with the chants of the Saint’s followers. Here was madness but what did it mean to him?

  Saifallah went to SAVAK headquarters. The building was empty. He took up a telephone and called Ardjovani. He said in English without realizing he was speaking English, “Patchway was not in Ahwaz. He’s here.”

  “Yes,” said Ardjovani, replying in English, “at the Koroush – Homan Rostamkolahi will help you.”

  “I need no help to kill a man. Send him away.”

  “Be discreet. This line is tapped.”

  “Everything is tapped,” said Saifallah. “There’s panic in Ahwaz and madness here. What’s about to happen?”

  “I’m going to hang up this telephone,” said Ardjovani.

  Saifallah said, “It was told me in Ahwaz – the Saint is to be assassinated.”

  “We can’t talk about this on a non-secure line.”

  “What we discuss on this line is heard,” said Saifallah, “and that assures me you will have to do something about it.”

  “Am I supposed to do something about everything?”

  Saifallah hung up the phone.

  He went into Ardjovani’s office – chocolate velvet drapes, chandeliers, massive white desk – and kicked open the Colonel’s weapons locker. Pistols, shotguns, rifles. He took from his pocket his own SAVAK issue revolver and replaced it with a big automatic from Ardjovani’s collection. If he had to kill to save himself, then he would kill Patchway with the Colonel’s weapon and
they would share the sin. It was all he could do to the man who had wrecked his life and whose death was beyond Saifallah’s power of will. Patchway was the end of it all. But after Patchway, what?

  Worn and filthy with dust, filled with a rage that exhausted him, Saifallah stretched out on the leather sofa in the Colonel’s office and slept – to restore the energy he would need to kill a man he did not want to kill.

  * * *

  Bagheh Eram

  “Where’s your four wheel drive, Nutting?” Patchway asked the Englishman. “Give it to me.”

  “Are you well, dear fellow?” Nutting asked. “You’ve gone all over pale.”

  “Stomach cramps.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d learned how to avoid all that – drink their vodka, not their water. I’ll drive you to your hotel, then.”

  “No. Give me your car. What time is it?”

  “Four A.M. What do you want my car for at this hour?”

  Patchway clutched at sudden pain in his stomach. “I’ll find the boy,” he said.

  “What boy? A boy, not a woman? What are you saying, Patchway?”

  Patchway climbed into the car and backed it into the street, Nutting running beside it shouting, “What is this all about? Patchway! Patchway! What boy?”

  * * *

  Colonel Ardjovani stood on the balcony of his house on Television Hill overlooking Bagheh Eram and its mirrored palace with General Bassari’s noisy pre-victory party. Across the hill was Bassari’s grotesque mansion in clear view of the powerful binoculars, cameras and listening devices installed in Ardjovani’s house.

  Homan Rostamkolahi in his peach-colored shirt stood beside the Colonel on the balcony, proud to be there with his commander and puzzled that this harsh and arrogant SAVAK chieftain had chosen him for the difficult action to come.

  They looked down into the rose garden as a door opened on the little Qajar palace. A woman whose hair shone brilliant henna-orange left the party with Bassari. “Ah,” said Ardjovani, with a harsh laugh. “There goes our general with his catch for the evening.”