Among the Ruins

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  35

  It was Vicky’s turn to demand Rachel’s attention on the phone.

  In return for the information provided by her contact, she insisted on a full accounting of Rachel’s discoveries at the ROM. Rachel tried to put her off, Vicky refused to yield.

  “Listen,” she said. “We had a deal. You asked for my help, and I gave it. You can’t back out on me now.”

  Rachel scowled at her phone. “This is a sensitive police investigation, we don’t want it to turn into an international incident.”

  Vicky clicked her tongue in disapproval.

  “No wonder people don’t trust the police. Let me remind you of two things, Sergeant Getty. One, you still don’t have what you need from the video, whereas I might have other ways of finding it.”

  Rachel considered this. “What’s the second thing?”

  Very sweetly, Vicky replied, “There’s nothing to stop me from filing a story now—I have plenty of material. If you want me to keep quiet, you’ll have to keep your word.”

  Rachel’s voice became rough. “Are you threatening a police officer?”

  Though Vicky’s answer was determined, Rachel could hear the uncertainty beneath her words.

  “I’m just standing up for myself. I’ve played fair with you, Rachel. And I’m not a complete novice—I know what I’m doing. There will be a point when you realize you need me, but what if you’ve already burned that bridge?”

  Rachel wasn’t convinced. She found Vicky’s cooperation suspicious.

  “Why would you keep things under wraps? What reason do I have to trust you?”

  “What reason do you have to doubt me? If I accept your terms, there’s a much bigger story just around the bend. And anyway—” Now her voice dropped a little. Rachel seized on it at once.

  “And anyway, what?”

  Vicky sounded rueful. “I really like Inspector Khattak.”

  Rachel had seen his effect on women. That was something she could believe.

  * * *

  Grudgingly, and not at all sure of the wisdom of doing so, Rachel brought Vicky up to speed. When she’d finished with the call, she realized she needed to catch up with Khattak. One of his contacts had mailed her a set of photographs. They needed to be assessed, and if possible, shared with someone in a position of authority. She decided Nate and Vicky could dig into the background of Najafi. His name had now cropped up too often to be ignored. Touka Swan had also sent her a message. Mehran was the father of Max and Roxana. And according to Touka, he hadn’t been seen in some time. That was something Vicky and Nate could work on. Rachel needed to talk to Max without delay.

  But when she called his house, she was told he was in session at a studio on Queen Street. She found it odd he wouldn’t have delayed the session, but the sharp-tongued girl on the other end of the phone informed Rachel musicians had flown in from all around the world to record with Max. The sessions couldn’t be canceled without inconvenience and expense to everyone involved.

  When Rachel asked what was being recorded, the girl on the phone hung up. Rachel was left with a few different options. Meet up with Nate and Vicky, follow Najafi to the studio, or pass the photos on to Sehr Ghilzai. She settled on viewing the photographs at home, a cup of coffee at her elbow. The cat had finished its milk and demanded to be let out. Rachel wasn’t sorry to see it go, though she could still feel the imprint of the little cat’s head in her hand. She hadn’t wanted Zach to see it. She and Zach had had a cat of their own once. Their mother had told them their father had drowned it in a creek—something Rachel no longer believed.

  Now Zach was out with friends. She wondered briefly if one of those friends was Ashleigh, the pretty brunette Zach claimed to have outgrown. It was better than heartache, she thought. She’d had a peek at his room, and the gold-leaf tree was beginning to take shape, a glimmer of promise against a backdrop of sea-green oils.

  She pulled up the photos on her screen, opening a separate tab to compare them to images of Evin on the web. The photographs were as depressing as she’d imagined, the watchtower, the spiked wall, the despairing assembly of women gathered before the gate.

  She zoomed in on a car that appeared in one corner of a photograph. She could make out a shadow in the driver’s seat, but whether it was a man or a woman was impossible to tell. The man in the suit was Radan. He had a long, low side part that reminded her of Newt Gingrich. His skin was the texture of paraffin wax, the tilt of the eyes making her think of a Tajik or Uzbek. Maybe his job was weighing on him.

  A little digging produced a report on the Ministry of Intelligence. Rachel made a quick study of Radan’s background. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. His swift rise through the ranks could be attributed to his taste for authoritarian methods, and his wanton disregard of judicial process, a strange irony; Radan had once held the post of Prosecutor-General.

  He was considered one of the Ministry’s most effective interrogators. When a prisoner needed to be broken, “the Great Fire” was the one they sent.

  Rachel sipped at her cooling coffee, lost in thought.

  Radan was at Evin to apprehend Zahra and attend her interrogation.

  But he was normally stationed at the Ministry in Tehran. So if he’d been on hand to arrest Zahra, it couldn’t have been coincidence, he would have known Zahra’s plans.

  Rachel pondered this. Zahra would have had a minder since the moment she arrived in Iran, it would have been easy to stay abreast of her plans. Her minder would only have needed to pick up the phone to inform Radan that Zahra was on her way to Evin.

  And Radan would be there waiting.

  But Zahra would have known this. So why had she put herself at risk by going to the prison and taking photographs? How would photographs of the exterior of the prison have helped her secure Roxana’s release? That was a question she needed to answer because the answer was linked to the reasons for Zahra’s death.

  A fresh thought struck Rachel. She set her mug on the table with a thud.

  What if Zahra had been tracking Radan’s movements, instead of the other way around? Perhaps she’d gone to Evin because she’d known Radan would be there. The representative of the Supreme Leader may have told her as much.

  Frustrated, Rachel sifted through the photographs.

  Almost as a reflex, she sent the photographs to Sehr Ghilzai with the header PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. For extra measure, she typed in, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.

  There was a second e-mail from the same source. It directed her to study the contrast between two nearly identical photographs of Zahra. The sender had added a blunt explanation.

  Letters on her sleeve. ADTVBMJBT.

  The string of letters reminded Rachel of the Film Reference Library. The letters were like the call numbers on a film recording or an audio file. She made a note to check that out.

  She searched her pockets for the business card she’d taken from Jeremy Engstrom, and sent a quick query to his e-mail address.

  She was trying to make sense out of things that didn’t fit together and was getting nowhere in the process.

  She wasn’t used to working without Khattak at her side.

  * * *

  It was dark by the time Rachel arrived at Max Najafi’s studio, a venture he must have sunk a great deal of money into. It was in the West Queen West area, situated between the Argyle Lofts and Trinity Bellwoods Park, close to tennis courts at the south end of the park. The studio was housed inside a restored Victorian building, a former bakery whose units had been converted. Rachel read the list of patisseries and galleries until she found the studio—Caspian Recordings.

  There was a pause when she announced herself, then someone buzzed her up. The studio was on the third floor, and Rachel took the stairs, glad of the chance for exercise. When she reached the doors of the studio, she took in the name artfully applied to the glass—Caspian Recordings was written in an English script styled to look like Persian. The small reception area with its Eames chair and modular
glass desk was unstaffed.

  Rachel proceeded to the music room. Here, several musicians were gathered in a largely empty space where three tall windows looked out over the park. Maples, ash trees, red oaks, and lindens populated a park intersected by trails. The trees were beginning to bud over the gently rolling green. The musicians played in a circle that made the most of the view.

  Four men and three women, most of them young, were gathered in a space that accommodated a piano, a violin, two guitars, a tombak drum, and other stringed instruments Rachel couldn’t identify. Situated at intervals, microphones amplified the musicians’ efforts. The girl in the black dress, whom Rachel had first noticed at Max Najafi’s house, wore a skintight pair of jeans and a clinging, cowl-necked sweater. She stood before a vocalist’s microphone.

  A Kermanshah carpet in ivory covered the knotted pine floor. A second door on the opposite side of the entrance led to a sound engineer’s booth, where a man with a mustache snapped his fingers in time to a sound only he could hear.

  Max Najafi was at the piano, one of the women was playing the violin, while the other musicians provided a subtle background to their duet. The girl at the microphone broke off in mid-syllable.

  “Max,” she said. “She’s here.”

  No one troubled to introduce her, and she herself was more interested in Max Najafi’s reaction. He was dressed head to toe in black, a silver chain around his neck, a cheap plastic band on his wrist. He’d left his hair untended. It sprang up from his skull like a pompadour, the curls richly textured and shining. There was a strength in his face that suggested the music had reinforced his courage.

  He spoke to the others in Farsi. One of the women took his place at the piano. He nodded to Rachel to follow him to the reception hall, closing the door behind them. Rachel could still hear the music, the fullness of its sorrow wrapping around the delicate finality of the piano. And the violin like an afterthought, expanding and falling in a measured swoop of grace notes.

  She sat down with Max on a patterned green sofa in the reception area.

  “You wrote that for your mother,” she guessed.

  Max shook his head. “It was for the second film. For the follow-up on the students at Evin.” He attempted a smile. “You hear the grief in it, that’s why you think it’s for my mother. Do you have some news for me?”

  Rachel thought about the photographs on her laptop. Sharing them wouldn’t be a kindness. She also didn’t know if that was her choice to make.

  “I have a few questions, for the moment. I thought it would be helpful for us to trace your mother’s movements. I spoke to Vicky D’Souza, who told me your mother had gone to see Charlotte Rafferty at the ROM. Do you know why?”

  Max’s fingers moved in his lap. He wasn’t conscious of it, Rachel realized. He was following the melody played by the pianist, the music instinctual to him.

  “The ROM?” he asked, puzzled. “I thought Charlotte Rafferty was at an auction house.”

  This was news to Rachel.

  “What made you think that?”

  “I heard my mother on the phone. She was talking about a lot—‘Our lot,’ she kept saying.”

  “Do you know which lot? Did it have something to do with the Shah’s coronation?”

  The foggiest outline of an idea rose in Rachel’s mind. Could Zahra have been trying to purchase the Shah’s military cap? But Charlotte didn’t work at an auction house, she worked in Records Management. Was that the perfect place to track down the history of the cap? Charlotte had denied knowing anything about Zahra’s interests—what if she had some reason of her own for withholding the truth?

  Max Najafi seemed bewildered by Rachel’s questions.

  “What interest could my mother have had in the Shah’s coronation? Our work is contemporary. We’re concerned with the present struggle in our country, not the past. No, wait—hold on. Maybe I didn’t understand.”

  Rachel held her breath.

  “The lot,” he repeated, a horrible comprehension taking hold. “Maybe she meant Lot 209, Ward 209. She may have been keeping up with the Greens and didn’t want to involve me.”

  “What’s Ward 209?”

  Max didn’t answer at once. He was listening to the last strains of the violin, a concurrence echoed by the piano’s diminuendo.

  “It’s the detention wing of Evin. Roxana was transferred to Ward 209.”

  But what could the ROM’s archivist have to do with Evin’s detention wing? And what of other unexplained questions: the whereabouts of Mehran Najafi, the photograph in the Silk Road exhibit, the Shah’s arrival at his coronation. The name Vic Mean, the letters on Zahra’s sleeve, the Forouhar letters, the letters sent to Khattak in Esfahan.

  As Rachel saw it, two figures were at the heart of Zahra’s murder: Roxana Najafi and her father, Mehran. And on both these figures, Rachel possessed very little information.

  Her sense of frustration bubbled up again. She would be more useful to Khattak’s inquiry if she could get to Tehran and dig into these questions.

  Max was staring at her, expectant.

  She told him about the photograph of the yacht.

  “It was from your father’s collection. What can you tell me about that? And about your father?”

  Max responded as if he wished to say several things at once, the words tripping over each other in his haste.

  “He was a bit of a charlatan, my father. I suppose you have to be in his profession, importing-exporting. And he traveled all the time, most often to places like Persepolis and Neyshabur. He never said exactly what he was trading, my mother claimed it was caviar. For a time, the business made us very comfortable. My father managed to find favor with whoever swept to power. Maybe it was the caviar, Iranians have a taste for it.”

  His laugh was bitter. The tombak in the next room sounded a hollow beat. The musicians had taken up a different song.

  “Where are Persepolis and Neyshabur?” Rachel asked after a pause.

  “Inside Iran. Neyshabur is the birthplace of the legendary poet Omar Khayyam. Persepolis isn’t far from the city of Shiraz. It’s one of Iran’s most famous attractions—a city of Achaemenid Persia that’s been preserved as a World Heritage Site.”

  Rachel nodded at this. It was interesting, but didn’t seem relevant.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Six months ago. My mother and I went to Iran to see Roxana. We hoped my father would act on her behalf, but he said there was nothing he could do, it was a particularly busy time for him. He was tied up on the Caspian, closing a deal with the Russians. He had a special contact named Mordashov. We saw my father several times during that visit, his answer was always the same. Since then, he hasn’t called, he hasn’t written, as if Roxana and I don’t exist.”

  Wouldn’t Roxana’s father have sweated out her fate in Ward 209? Wouldn’t any father? But the thought of Rachel’s own father was an immediate check on her assumptions.

  “Why did you and your mother have to ask for his help? What about Roxana’s mother? Didn’t she get involved?”

  “Roxana’s mother is a simple woman, she wouldn’t know where to go for help.”

  “What kind of terms were your parents on?”

  The corners of Max’s mouth lifted in the parody of a smile.

  “Even after the divorce, my parents remained close. My father called my mother regularly until the business with Roxana. Then things went sour. My mother called him just before she made her last trip there, desperate to have him do something for Roxana. Something he told her the last time they were together must have given her hope.”

  Rachel wondered what it could be.

  “Did she see him once she reached Tehran?”

  “I don’t know.” The thought was a new one for Max. “And when they talked, I don’t know what they talked about. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If he ever felt his responsibility as a father, he would send my mother home. He would call me, he would share my grief.”
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  He was right. It was strange that Mehran hadn’t called his son at the news of Zahra’s death, especially if the parents had remained on good terms. Which left Rachel at a bit of a loss as to what to pursue next.

  “Do you have any idea how that photograph ended up in the Silk Road exhibit?”

  The vocalist from Max’s band appeared at the door. She tapped at a delicate wrist, displaying a diamond-studded watch. There was a trace of possessiveness in her expression.

  “Your girlfriend?” Rachel asked.

  “Paristesh is a colleague. She also worked for my mother. We are distantly related.”

  Judging from the young woman’s expression, she would close the distance given the chance. Max seemed oblivious to her interest.

  “I’m coming, Pari,” he said. The young woman didn’t leave, so he went on to answer. “My mother knew about the exhibit and convinced my father to lend the ROM photographs from his collection. He was knowledgeable about Persian art, though his real passion was antiquities. Perhaps that’s what my mother discussed with Charlotte. A partnership with the ROM.”

  Paristesh spoke up, a note of surprise in her voice.

  “If you’re talking about the ROM, Zahra Khanom’s contact wasn’t Charlotte Rafferty. She was speaking to someone named Lin.”

  Rachel stood up. She gave a brief explanation of her visit.

  “How do you know this?” she asked.

  Paristesh spoke in the rich tones of a trained vocalist. Her plain face was accentuated with makeup, edging her over the border to a youthful prettiness.

  “I kept her appointments.”

  Rachel tried not to betray her excitement at the words. She should have undertaken a thorough search of Zahra’s belongings after her first interview with Max. She remembered now that she’d wanted to search for Zahra’s diary or her notes on the new film.