The Laine who waited for him to hang up his coat and shake off his umbrella without moving from her seat or changing her expression was new. He would have guessed at it as depression, and not something she was putting on as a means of garnering his interest.
He took the seat across from her, wondering if he should have thought to bring her a gift.
Laine loved gifts, the more expensive the better.
But he wasn’t her hapless fiancé anymore.
“It’s good to see you,” he said for want of anything better, regretting it at once when she answered him with that same eerie calm, her eyes on his face.
“Is it?”
Of course it wasn’t. He didn’t know why he’d said it, not normally beholden to social niceties. He waited for the sleepy waitress to take their order before explaining his reason for seeing her. In stumbling sentences, he told her about Esa’s work in Iran and Rachel’s efforts in Toronto, both aimed at uncovering Zahra’s activities, and answering the question of whether those activities had led to Zahra’s death.
“I thought Esa was on leave,” she said tonelessly. “And I don’t understand how Esa or his partner would have jurisdiction over this matter.”
Nate re-directed her. “What about the RCMP? Is there any involvement on their end?”
The waitress brought their drinks: an Irish coffee for Nathan, a jasmine dragon tea for Laine. She took a sip, studying the porcelain handle of the cup like it was a curiosity.
“None. Zahra Sobhani’s murder is a diplomatic matter.”
“So you can’t help me,” he said, deflated by the response.
She transferred her gaze to Nate.
“I wouldn’t have made you drive four hours if I had nothing to offer.”
His interest quickened. An Édith Piaf song began to play in the background. The passion in the singer’s voice squeezed at Nate’s heart.
He’d nearly married this woman. Once everything to him, now nothing at all. She seemed to feel it, too, choosing her words carefully.
“There’s no formal inquiry into Zahra’s death. Our government asked for one and was refused. With the nuclear deal in place, we would have begun the process of normalizing relations between our countries, now that process is stalled.”
Nate sensed she wanted him to pursue the subject.
“What would get it started again?”
“The return of Zahra’s body. An admission of responsibility, perhaps a lesser official prosecuted for the crime.” Her mouth formed a misanthropic smile. “Everyone wants to get back to business. Zahra’s death is inconvenient.”
“Her murder, you mean.”
“Her murder,” Laine echoed. She nodded as if satisfied by the correction.
“Do you think the government will make a serious effort? Given that Max Najafi isn’t going to let it go. He can’t travel to Iran—he’s insisting on the return of his mother’s body.”
“So you haven’t heard,” Laine said. “They’ve buried her. They offered Zahra’s mother a pension as compensation.” And at Nate’s quick look: “She’s refused it, of course, as a matter of principle.”
Something about the way she toyed with the words made Nate realize Laine had agreed to meet him for reasons unrelated to his inquiry. She poured herself a second cup of tea.
“You’re still angry with me,” he said.
Laine’s body tensed. She shook her head.
“I’m angry at myself. What I did, the game I played—it was despicable. Esa’s made it quite clear there’s no forgiveness to be had.” Her long lashes swept down. The solemn curve of her mouth stabbed at Nate’s self-assurance. He shouldn’t have come, he realized.
“Did you come because of Zahra?” she asked. “I could have told you what you wanted to know on the phone: our government’s efforts to recover Zahra’s body have been genuine. It’s the other side that has to decide if an opening from the West is worth paying the price over. They buried Zahra at midnight last night. To me, that suggests they’ve decided.”
“And you don’t know why Zahra was willing to risk her safety to return to Iran?”
“I don’t know,” Laine said, smoothing her napkin over her lap. She was wearing a sleeveless dress in muted gold, Nate’s favorite color. A thin gold rope wound about her neck, another on her wrist. His eyes sparked. These were gifts he’d given her. “But from what I’ve heard, Zahra was convinced she would be able to secure her stepdaughter’s release from Evin. She had a card to play. I don’t know what that card was, I’m sorry I don’t know more.”
It was Nate’s turn to question her.
“Are you? Why?”
She examined him—his face, the nervous set of his shoulders.
“I took a wrong turn,” she told him. “I’m trying to correct it.”
“Implicating Esa, you mean? The false report you convinced me was true?”
“Yes,” she said bluntly. “I’ve taken steps to set the record straight, I wanted you to know.”
“Why?” Nate attempted to joke. “Has something catastrophic happened?” But he knew Esa would be stunned by the news. Laine’s complaint had been a lingering black mark.
“Is that what you think it would take?”
He looked away from her curious dark eyes, ashamed of himself.
“Don’t celebrate yet.” Her smile was enigmatic. “I’m not in the least bit ill.”
“Then what?”
“The same thing I did to Esa—to you, really. I’ve had to taste my own poison, pay the same price. It’s why I was shunted around the RCMP.”
Confused, Nate replied, “But you have a good posting now, an enviable one.”
She shrugged, a graceful gesture of slim shoulders.
“I don’t deserve it. I did some despicable things, I wasn’t used to being told no.”
A reference to her pursuit of Esa, her onetime colleague and friend.
Nate didn’t want to ask this because he knew it made him look weak. He was weak. But he had always wondered.
“I wasn’t enough? I couldn’t erase Esa from your thoughts?”
She smiled sadly. “You shouldn’t have had to. You were more than enough, I should have told you long ago.”
She rose from the table, reached for her coat, collected her handbag.
Nate rose as well.
As a means of stalling her, he asked what she made of Zahra’s interest in the coronation. Laine tipped back her head.
“At a guess, I would say that was the card she had to play.”
She shrugged into her coat. She made no mention of her second meeting.
“Where are you going now?” Nate asked. His voice rasped in his throat.
She gave him the smile that could bring Pharaohs to their knees.
“I have a room at the Chateau.”
She left without looking back.
Nate paid the bill. His restless thoughts drifted to Rachel. After a moment, he followed.
* * *
Sehr received the news about Zahra’s burial with dismay. A drilling rain persisted outside the windows of her office, a suitable accompaniment to her mood. She called Rachel to give her an update on her efforts, Rachel swore in response. Sehr liked her for her genuine outrage. Rachel charged at walls and tilted at windmills. She wouldn’t have accepted the smooth assurances of Sehr’s government contact that Zahra’s death was a function of realpolitik and what could anyone do? Zahra had chosen to go to Iran, confident of her powers of persuasion, or confident of her trump card.
Sehr told Rachel the rest, hoping she’d be impressed at what Sehr had managed to uncover. She didn’t want Rachel to think of her as the frantic woman at Esa’s bedside in the hospital, which was where their second meeting had taken place. Or as the prosecutor too compromised to keep her job.
She admired Rachel’s dogged devotion to the truth. More than that, she admired her quickness of mind in calculating risk and deciding a course of action. She couldn’t have made the choice Rachel had made a
t Algonquin, she wouldn’t have had the courage. Even now the thought of Esa in such danger made Sehr’s blood run cold.
She wanted to be Rachel’s friend. She didn’t see the difference in their worlds as an obstacle. The two women had something in common.
They were linked by Esa Khattak.
She would ask about him when she’d finished with the subject of Zahra, it would make the inquiry seem natural.
“We checked Zahra’s phone records. Before she left for Iran in January, she made six calls to the same number, a number registered to Mehran Najafi. The number was disconnected just after Zahra arrived in Tehran.”
“Any idea what the calls were about?”
“What’s interesting is their location. The calls were made to a business in the city of Shiraz. Mehran had a stake in the business.”
“Shiraz—the city near Persepolis? Why does that matter?” Rachel sounded doubtful.
Sehr didn’t think it was worthwhile to get into the background. Her answer was to the point, based on information Rachel had shared about the Iranian Yellows.
“It’s in the south, maybe a ten-hour drive from Tehran. It’s the business that’s interesting—it’s a jeweler’s shop.”
Rachel’s voice broke up for a moment. When it came back, it was louder.
“Sorry, I’m driving back home. Did you say jewelry shop?”
“Yes. My contact told me Zahra made a trip to Shiraz one week after arriving in Tehran. She stayed for two days and came back.”
“Did she go to Shiraz to meet Mehran?”
“Not that I know of. Mehran hasn’t been seen in weeks. Zahra didn’t meet him in Tehran or anywhere else. And there’s no record of him having re-entered Canada.”
“The Iranian Yellows have never been out of the vault,” Rachel mused. “I’m wondering about this exhibition for the Chinese. What exactly was on display?”
Even as Rachel asked the question, Sehr knew the person best suited to answer it was Esa. She could ask about him now as part of the flow of their conversation.
“Esa could find out for you, Rachel. You should let him know what we’ve found.”
“I will. But I think I’ll have to do more than that.”
She explained her plan to travel to Iran. The investigation was becoming too dangerous for Esa to pursue on his own. Larijani was onto him now. She worried he would end up like Zahra. He needed her at his back. She left out the details, but made her point clear.
Sehr felt sick as Rachel laid out the reasons for her decision. She had been anxious enough on Esa’s behalf. Now she had real reason to be afraid.
When Sehr took too long to comment, Rachel finally offered, “I wouldn’t be much of a partner if I let him risk himself alone.”
Sehr’s eyes widened. The conversation had become much more personal. She’d never before considered the depths of Rachel’s attachment to Esa. And she realized that whenever Esa needed help, Rachel was the one he called. She was the one he wanted at his side. He hadn’t asked after Sehr.
“Promise you’ll be careful,” she said hoarsely. “It’s equally dangerous for you.”
Rachel shrugged this off. “I can’t go anyway until I get a visa. Nate’s been looking into it for me.”
They discussed the leads in the case for a few more minutes.
At the end of the call, Sehr said, “Tell Esa to come home.”
She hoped Rachel would understand. And would pass on her message.
44
Forty Days of Mourning
No beatings, no interrogations, no Joojeh, no Piss-Pants, no son of a cleric. No word from the outside world, no word from the inside world. I’m here alone, scraping out the days with my fingernails. I haven’t spoken to another soul. If it was Darius or Ali or Omid, Mousavi could have done something for them—but what am I saying, am I crazy? Locked inside his house, Mousavi can’t even do anything for himself. He couldn’t save Khanom Sobhani, citizen of a foreign nation—there’s no chance he can save me.
My apologies to Jason. I understand now what it means to be erased, what it is to see no one, hear no one, to retreat into the darkest places inside yourself—to forget your own face, your twin sister’s face.
I’ll be the Kurd who died in Kahrizak of some mental disease, missing my teeth and my sanity. Joojeh brought me a bottle of pills weeks ago.
I struggle not to take them.
45
Winterglass in the spring. If anyone had told Vicky D’Souza she’d be invited to cross its threshold one day, she wouldn’t have believed it. Rachel had sidelined her from the interview with Franklin Yang, but Vicky’s warning had proven true. Rachel wanted help—both in digging into the background of the Yellows, and in terms of finding out more about Winfield Park. She’d had to share what she’d learned in order to count on Vicky’s help. But first she’d treated Vicky to another lecture on the risk to Khattak, if Vicky were to publish her story prematurely.
Remembering it, Vicky drew a breath and gave herself a pep talk as she perched on her tiptoes to ring the bell.
They can’t shut me out, I’m useful. This will give me the chance to prove it.
And then, more wistfully, Maybe they’ll learn to trust me.
Nathan answered the door. He was unsteady on his feet and looked disheveled, his longish hair uncombed, a golden-brown fuzz shading the line of his jaw. He wasn’t drunk, he didn’t smell of liquor, more of some aromatic spice like cedar or sandalwood. Indian background notwithstanding, Vicky couldn’t tell the difference.
He led Vicky through the magnificent great hall to a spacious retreat at the back of the house. Here wood-encased, cantilevered windows offered an enchanting prospect of the lake. Woodbine and tangled dog rose framed the windows, an extravagantly wild garden grown on the crumbling roof of the Bluffs. A bright gold light spilled from the clouds, illuminating Rachel’s progress at a table hewn from a single block of wood.
Rachel was sipping cocoa from a porcelain cup so transparent, Vicky could see the dark swell of liquid inside. She sat down on a chair patterned in vivid chrysanthemums, taking in the laptop on the table near Rachel.
She gave her mouth a moment to catch up with her thoughts. Otherwise, she would have pointed dumbly and said to Nate, “You live here? In this spread from Architectural Digest?”
Rachel seemed undaunted by her surroundings. She’d even tucked up her long legs on her chair.
Nate offered Vicky the choice of tea or hot chocolate, Rachel gave him a deadpan look.
“Don’t forget the espresso.” When he’d left, she said to Vicky with a casual sweep of her arm, “You get used to it.”
A fuzzy warmth spread through Vicky’s thoughts. Could it be that Rachel was starting to like her? It sounded like an invitation.
“Did you get it?” Rachel asked.
She meant Winfield Park’s home address. Vicky withdrew a slip of paper from the pocket of her vintage handbag.
“What about you?” she asked. “How did your research on the Yellows come along?”
“No luck with the Yellows, or with Jeb Taverner. And I can’t find a single article online about a private exhibit for visiting dignitaries. If you think about it—how and why would the Central Bank risk moving any part of the treasury? I’m still making my way through the book.”
“May I?”
Vicky helped herself to Nate’s laptop. She had a reporter’s knack for details and for inventive queries. She tried several dozen search terms before concluding that Rachel was right. The exhibit was a dead end. If Max hadn’t been reeling from the news of his mother’s burial, they could have asked him to check the Farsi-language papers.
“Any luck there?” She nodded at the tome supplied by Franklin Yang.
Rachel showed her the page that featured the Iranian Yellows.
Vicky whistled at the size of the stones. She’d be thrilled if someone managed to scrounge up half a carat on her behalf. These were 120- to 130-carat stones, yellow because of their size, chri
stened cape and silver cape stones.
“I’ve been thinking about Zahra’s sleeve,” she said to Rachel.
Rachel’s sour response told her this wasn’t a particularly inspired observation.
“All right, I know. The initials on her sleeve: ADTVBM. But doesn’t that tell us the last set should also refer to initials? JBT? Can you show me the picture Inspector Khattak sent you?”
Rachel swiveled the laptop in her direction, opening a dormant window.
Her look at Vicky was quelling. “You can see it. You can’t save it.”
Vicky pretended she didn’t mind.
Khattak had photographed the writing on the wall in the house of the Greens.
Vicky zoomed in on the name. It did look like Zahra had written “Jebby Taverner.” But tacking up the wallpaper again could have smudged the charcoal. She flicked to the second photograph, the one that resembled a coffin.
Could someone have killed Mehran Najafi? Had Zahra been searching for his body? Is that what the coffin meant? They’d had to rule out the possibility of Zahra having meant Lot 209 with the discovery of Arlotte Tushingham’s authorship of the book on the national treasury.
She clicked back to the writing, magnifying the relevant section, the swoops and flourishes of Zahra’s hand.
“Rachel.” She could see it clearly now. “Does the book have an index? Did you check?”
“Not yet,” Rachel said. “Why?”
“Because I think it is JBT. J. B. Taverner, not Jebby, not Jeb. Look it up.”
Rachel flipped to the back of the book, using the pen behind her ear to bookmark the page on the Iranian Yellows.
“There’s a glossary. A chronology of kings,” she added doubtfully. “Did you know Fabergé’s in here? God, what tiny printing.” She flipped another page, running her fingers down a list of names. “Tamerlane, Tatars, Taverner. It’s here!” She flashed Vicky a jubilant smile. “No, wait. It’s not Taverner, it’s Tavernier, no first name. Could that be it?”
J. B. Tavernier.
Vicky tried Googling the name as Rachel flipped back through the book, searching for the reference. The name “Tavernier” was listed a dozen or more times.
Nate joined them, bearing coffee on a small enameled tray. He seemed to catch the mood, his gold eyes brightening as he looked from Vicky to Rachel. He seated himself next to Vicky, who swallowed her coffee so fast she scalded the roof of her mouth.
Among the Ruins Page 23
