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

by Steven Hardesty

  “A woman with fiery hair for a man who sets fires, Colonel?” said Homan. He was careful not to laugh at his joke before Ardjovani.

  Ardjovani did not laugh. He said, “No change in his plans for tomorrow?”

  “None so as much as anyone can tell me, Colonel. The general has set radio-controlled mines in the garden to shower the place with burning sodium nitrate when the Saint enters the kill zone along the stone path to the palace.”

  “Better a man with a fuse and a match,” said Ardjovani. “I don’t trust radio waves that can fire too soon or too late and see me hanged.”

  Homan was startled. Colonel Ardjovani hanged? Preposterous! He was the most feared SAVAK commander in the south, the most loyal to the Shahanshah Arya Mehr. Was that some other sort of joke and should I laugh? Homan thought, suddenly miserable.

  Ardjovani glanced at Homan with a sharp, disapproving look. “Are you thinking, Homan? Are you going to trouble me with your thoughts?”

  “Colonel!” said Homan, startled at how loudly he said the word, startled enough to say what he was thinking. “What confuses me, Colonel, is why must the General burn the garden, too, Colonel?”

  Ardjovani said with exasperation, “You’re here with me tonight because you are a reliable man, not because you have any capacity to think. Don’t think until I tell you what to think.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Homan said, humbly. Then he burst out, “Yasamin Safavifard!”

  Ardjovani glanced at Homan unhappily.

  “Burn the garden and inflame the tribes, Colonel, and he makes a civil war within this civil war, Colonel!”

  “I see I’ll have to promote you or send you into the Iraqi meat grinder, Homan,” Ardjovani said. “A reliable man who can think is no longer reliable.”

  “I want to be reliable, Colonel!” Homan cried.

  “Then leave politics to me, where it’s safe.”

  “Yes, my Colonel!”

  “Stop shouting. You don’t have the rank.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  Homan stared into the garden trying not to think. Not to let his mind be traitor to his colonel and his king. Not to think, as he had for days now, that SAVAK was less determined to protect the Shahanshah Arya Mehr from the army’s political insanity in assassinating the Saint than in finding a way to betray the army to the king after the murder. And Homan Rostamkolahi was in the center of it all.

  Could all of that be true? An army conspiracy betrayed by a SAVAK conspiracy based on a tribal civil war instigated by the mad burning of a rose garden? Here was insanity, Homan thought. Insanity to equal the lunacy of the fundamentalist radicals sweeping the country.

  But was it true and how could Homan profit by it? He would know tomorrow when the Saint was dead and the garden burnt. He would know because he would be alive to laugh at his fears or dead to confirm them.

  Now Homan was very frightened. He thought with a start of Patchway.

  “My Colonel!” he cried.

  “Stop shouting!”

  “I have to tell you. The General bought Patchway’s explosives and then poisoned him. I saw Ali Hossein Nagehshineh do it.”

  Ardjovani laughed suddenly, startling Homan. “Astonishing!” Ardjovani said. “One less problem for me. Perhaps. Where is Patchway?”

  “At the Hotel Koroush.”

  Ardjovani slapped his hands on the balcony railing and said with satisfaction, “Tomorrow! Everything ends tomorrow, Patchway, too.”

  “What is ‘everything,’ Colonel?” cried Homan.

  “Go find Patchway. Keep him alive for me or bring me his corpse. Either will do. Go!”

  * * *

  Patchway gasped as fresh pain surged through him as though his abdomen were in the grip of a monster twisting his intestines into corded rope. He lay back on the bed in his hotel room exhausted by pain and dripping with sweat. He rubbed sweat from his face. Was his vision narrowing? Peripheral vision fading? Was that more throbbing in his head or merely the pulsing hot air around him?

  He had to have a doctor. Where was he? Is this a car? Is this a hotel room? Where is Mahvash to call a medic? He picked up the phone in his hotel room and, without dialing, said in Farsi to the SAVAK listener, “The Merciful! I’m dying with sickness – get me a

  doctor.” He collapsed into half-consciousness.

  The door to Patchway’s hotel room opened. Homan Rostamkolahi of the peach-colored shirt. A man too trivial for any SAVAK task except eavesdropping on the conversations of foreigners in chilly hotel lobbies.

  Patchway laughed to see Homan or thought he laughed until more pain shot through him and he shivered, flinging off sweat like a wet dog shakes off water.

  There was not enough dawn to brighten the windows of the surgery. Patchway found himself sitting on a hard chair staring through the gloom into the glittering black eyes and mouse face of Dr. Alireza Behrooz Zargoneh. The mouse was talking to him but Patchway could make no sense of mouse-speak.

  Patchway said to the mouse, “I’m going to throw up!” He followed the line of Zargoneh’s pointing finger until he found the toilet.

  Zargoneh said to Homan, “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s been poisoned. You’re the doctor – can’t you tell?”

  “Food poisoning?”

  “A little mang.”

  “He has symptoms of a dozen diseases,” said Zargoneh. “How could you guess mang?”

  “I saw it happen.”

  Zargoneh cried out, “What a treacherous world! Who poisoned him?”

  “General Bassari’s odd-job boy, Ali Hossein Nagheshineh.”

  Zargoneh’s glittering black eyes stared at Homan out of an expressionless mouse face. But he’s the wrong man! he wanted to shout. Nutting is supposed to die, not Patchway!

  “Ali Hossein poisoned him?” croaked Zargoneh. “But that’s all wrong!”

  “What’s all wrong?” said the SAVAK agent.

  The entire conspiracy and the future of the world depended on the poisoning of Terrence Nutting and now Ali Hossein has killed the wrong man and what is one lone doctor in his surgery to do about this immense mistake? Worse, what is to become of the airline ticket Patchway was to obtain for Zargoneh’s daughter?

  Now, with a secret policeman staring at him for an answer to his incriminating outburst, Zargoneh said, as innocently as a mouse might, “It’s all wrong that random people should be poisoned like this, of course. Why would he do such a thing?” Can’t the fool recognize a Brit from a Yank? Zargoneh almost shouted aloud.

  Homan made an irritated tongue click. “I’m one secret policeman who does not have all the answers, Doctor. I don’t even know what to do with him after you cure him.”

  Patchway came out of the toilet shivering in his sweat. He sank into the doctor’s plush chair behind the gilded office desk. He closed his eyes. He said, “What’s wrong with me?”

  Zargoneh played the doctor with thermometers, questions and probes of fingers. It was the same bored routine he used on ignorant desert nomads for whom government insurance paid his bill. He sighed theatrically. “I’ve some bad news, Agha, but it’s a lucky chance Homan brought you to me.”

  “What bad news?”

  “I am perhaps the only man in Iran – in the Gulf – in the world! – who is a real expert in snake venoms. I have a genius for it.”

  Patchway gulped down all the saliva his hot mouth could produce. “I’ve been bitten by a snake?”

  The mouse face beamed at Patchway with weird possessive pride.

  “Bring him water,” Zargoneh said to Homan. “I’ll make a blood test to be doubly certain.”

  Zargoneh drew blood with a rusted needle, carried the syringe into his tiny lab, drained and rinsed the glass cylinder and waited what he considered a suitable time before returning to Patchway.

  He said almost cheerily, “Well! I was afraid it might be something like a Russell’s viper bite which is quite fatal and quick. You begin to bleed from all the internal organs,
you see, and die in agony. But that’s so quick you’d be dead by now so it must be something else.”

  “Good God, what?”

  Zargoneh beamed down on Patchway and the marvelous effects of the poison he had concocted. After all, Patchway was the first healthy person on whom Zargoneh had experimented with his poisons. He remembered his medical role and changed his expression – within the limits of his frozen face – to one of big-hearted concern.

  “I take it you have not been bitten by a snake?” said Zargoneh.

  “No. What the hell could that mean?”

  Zargoneh sighed theatrically, black eyes glittering. Of course, there was an unhappy aspect aside from the fact that Ali Hossein had poisoned the wrong foreigner – the poison was acting too quickly for the good of the conspiracy. But what could Zargoneh do about it now? That was the risk of experimental science!

  He said, “Be brave, Agha Patchway.”

  Patchway’s jaw dropped open. Zargoneh was startled to see that those things actually happen in real life as they happen in foreign movies.

  Zargoneh said, “There is a poison as common to this part of the world as opium. It’s called mang after it’s Indian name. It’s made from the venom of the Indian krait, sometimes called the ‘Two-Step Krait.’ Do you understand?”

  “I’m dying?” Patchway said.

  Zargoneh said with a dramatic sadness, “It’s a nearly perfect poison. Colorless, odorless, et cetera. Only a slight bitter taste.”

  Behind Patchway, Homan stifled a groan, clapped his hand to his face and turned away. This doctor was a mad man to tease Patchway with information like that. Even a Yank, stupid as they are, could deduce that his tea had been poisoned last night. What’s the point of giving a dead man the name of his assassin? Unless, of course, it would be a service to SAVAK.

  “You can buy it in any bazaar in Shiraz,” Zargoneh said to Patchway, “or in Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan. It’s a common assassination tool for the bazaari class.”

  Patchway stared at the mouse face, hearing nothing of its chatter, thinking, Ardjovani! He got to me before I got to him – before I stole the boy. How did he do it?

  Patchway said, “Tell who’s tried to kill me.”

  “Pardon me if I say it, Agha – someone has killed you.”

  “I’m dead?”

  “Mang is almost always fatal.”

  Patchway wiped sweat from his face. “Is this dying?” he said, startling Zargoneh and Homan.

  If so, it meant nothing to him. Nothing. He was surprised it meant nothing and not surprised. This moment that had seemed so awful to him when he was a young man at war meant nothing to him now. It was a nullity. A release into emptiness and escape from the red memories of war and of holding in his hands his own baby dying of the poison he had brought back from war.

  “Dying?” Patchway said again, as though hearing himself say it once more could activate the promised sting of death.

  “Al-lah,” said Homan, “he wants to die.”

  Patchway looked with hot eyes at the secret policeman. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live. I’m an empty man sliding into emptiness and I do not care.”

  Homan goggled at Patchway and said, almost keening, “Oh, I regret everything for you! All of it!”

  “Regret?” said Patchway. “Regret?”

  “Silence,” said Zargoneh, applying his stethoscope to Patchway.

  He stood back from his patient and said, “Normally, Agha Patchway, mang kills quickly and cleanly. But in a careful scientific dilution it can be arranged to kill as much as seventy two hours later.”

  “Seventy two hours?” said Patchway. “I’ll be dead in seventy two hours?”

  “Oh, no, no, dear sir. You’ve had only a moderate dose and you’ve used up man hours already. I give you another twelve. You’ll live twelve hours more.”

  Homan cried, “No, no, don’t tell him that!”

  “Twelve more hours like this?” said Patchway, trembling with the pain of the poison in his belly.

  “A poison you can measure in hours,” said Zargoneh, “is a marvel, isn’t it?”

  Homan waved for the doctor to shut up.

  “The even greater beauty of mang,” said Zargoneh, “is that twenty four hours after death it’s completely dissipated from the blood. No trace for the coroner, you see? Cause of death, heart attack. There you have it!”

  “Heart attack?” said Patchway. “But what about the boy?”

  “What boy?” said Zargoneh, startled out of his happy observation of his poison’s effect on this healthy human specimen. He turned to Homan, “What boy is he talking about?”

  “How should I know? You need to shut up, Doctor. You’ve told him too much.”

  Patchway shouted with pain, anger and despair, “What about the boy?”

  Zargoneh said in fright to Homan, “Has that fool poisoned a boy, too?”

  “How do I know? What do I care? I can’t look at this man anymore, Doctor, he’s in a pitiable state! I can’t stand his misery. Is there no antidote? None at all? Be a doctor and do something for him.”

  “If there was anything worth trying, I would know it and try it, wouldn’t I?” said Zargoneh. “Though why should I?”

  It was then, gazing from Homan of SAVAK who knew nothing about Bassari’s army conspiracy to Patchway, who had been poisoned by Bassari’s minion, that Zargoneh realized there had been a change in plan. Patchway had not been poisoned in error. He and not the Englishman was meant to die to protect the army conspiracy to kill the Saint.

  But that made no sense. The English are always delightful villains in Iran on whom any crime can be hung. But the Yanks drove out of Iran the thieving Brits and the more thieving Russians at the end of the last great European war. The Yanks had plenty of good will in the country. Who would believe it was a Yank named Patchway who killed the Saint? A few mad mullahs, sure, but who else?

  A new and more terrible truth flashed before Zargoneh. No one had told him of this change of plan. Zargoneh was not meant to know the blame for murder would fall on Patchway and not Nutting. That could only mean that some fresh and horrific machination was in progress that could send the innocent Dr. Alireza Behrooz Zargoneh into the torture chambers of the army or SAVAK or both.

  Zargoneh burst into tears of terror.

  “What’s the matter with you?” cried Homan.

  “Everything!” cried Zargoneh. But he could not tell the secret policeman that if Patchway died too soon, in less than twelve hours, his usefulness as a foreign corpse would be spoiled by his putrefaction and then what would the conspirators do – substitute Zargoneh’s corpse as the Saint’s assassin?

  Zargoneh shouted, “As it happens, Agha Patchway, I do have an antidote!”

  Patchway, doubled over in pain, mumbled, “Give it to me.”

  “It’s only experimental…”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “You could feel great for a short time and then collapse but you’d only have to take more medicine to feel better…”

  “Give it to me.”

  “It offers three days remission to get yourself into a good hospital in my care. The Pahlavi University Hospital here in town would do nicely...”

  “Screw your hospital. I’ll go to Europe.”

  Zargoneh was stunned. “But when would you go?”

  Through his haze of misery, Patchway saw the glittering eyes of the enormous mouse that was his doctor. “Now, you damn fool, now!”

  What of Anahita’s ticket? Zargoneh almost cried aloud.

  Zargoneh said to Homan, “Come with me. I’ll need your help in preparing the antidote.”

  Inside the back laboratory with its stained counters, dusty vials and broken test tubes, Homan asked, “What can you possibly give him for mang?”

  “I can’t cure him. No one can.”

  “You saw to that when you made the poison.”

  Zargoneh was startled. “You know that much?”

  “Why did you pois
on this man?”

  “I poisoned no one.”

  “Are you going to answer me or do I take you to a place where I can guarantee you’ll give me an answer?”

  “Is that a threat?” cried Zargoneh.

  “Of course it’s a threat.”

  “You must accept,” said Zargoneh, suddenly haughty, “that I cannot discuss this matter further unless I am sure you are one of us. But I am sure you are not one of us.”

  “What is ‘one of us,’ you fool? Tell me. Tell me why you cannot afford to have Patchway die ahead of your schedule.”

  “I’ve said enough to be hanged already. I won’t say enough to be shot by my compatriots in this awful business.”

  Homan understood. Zargoneh was with the army. In General Bassari’s conspiracy. Why would they include this incompetent fool in their scheme? Astonishing. No matter, Homan had to leave the doctor untouched until Colonel Ardjovani told Homan what to do with him.

  Homan had to backtrack out of his threat. He said to Zargoneh, “Only a very brave man or a damned fool speaks to a secret policeman like that. You are going to be hanged. I don’t know why but I know you will be hanged.”

  “Not by you,” said Zargoneh, sneering as much as his mouse face allowed.

  Zargoneh apportioned pills into a large bottle.

  “What’s that going to do for him?” Homan said.

  “Keep him on his feet for twenty four hours more, long enough to do for us what he must do.”

  “You’re making a dead man walk, you bastard,” said Homan.

  “Why do you care what happens to that man?”

  “I don’t. SAVAK doesn’t care so I don’t care. But seeing him in that much pain sickens me.”

  “You’re a soft secret policeman with his torture threats and hanging ropes.”

  Zargoneh rummaged through a drawer to find a vial and syringe flecked with blood. They found Patchway with his head on the doctor’s desk, his hands on his stomach, groaning. Zargoneh pushed up Patchway’s sleeve and jabbed the needle into the man’s arm.

  “This is a multi-range anti-snake venom anti-toxin, Agha,” Zargoneh said to Patchway. “I invented it. It’s good against ninety percent of all the vipers in this part of the world. It will give you some relief until these pills I’m putting into your pocket take effect.”