Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “I vouched for you,” Darius said, unmoved by Ghaffari’s plea for sympathy. “You’ve made me a liar in Sharera’s eyes.”

  “No, no, I did nothing like that.” Ghaffari gave him the cup, which he crumpled in his fist. “Really, I was trying to break off with Nahid. It just took longer than I thought. I know I failed you when you needed me in Mashad, and you hate me for it. All I ask is that you let me make it up to you.”

  Ghaffari’s rush through the perfunctory apology, taken for granted as a nuisance for both of them, annoyed Darius less than the feeling that he was holding something back, that more dismal revelation would follow.

  “You can begin by helping me to put the squeeze on Maryam Lajevardi.”

  “You found her?” Ghaffari stared disbelievingly. He twisted the cap off the bootleg, and gulped from the bottle. “You didn’t need me after all. Where was she?”

  “Everything is in my report. If I don’t have the time to obtain the information we want from her, then you must.”

  Ghaffari wiped his mouth on his hand. “What do you mean, ‘If you don’t have time?’ Are you going somewhere?”

  “I’m being made to disappear,” Darius said. ‘The Revolutionary Prosecutor has ordered me replaced as chief of homicide.”

  “You can’t—He can’t be serious. No one else here can even find a paper clip. How does he expect a new man to keep the bureau functioning?” Ghaffari took another long swallow. “Who is the dumb bastard bringing in, which suckass?”

  “He wants you, Mansur.”

  Ghaffari’s grin was a secret betrayed, which he wrestled back into the dark with white lips. “I’m not qualified.”

  “I’m out, and you’re in,” Darius said. “It’s a sentence without appeal.” No need to tell him he would be responsible to Sarmadi, the Bon Yad’s adviser, and see the grin dead and buried; he would find out soon enough. “In the meantime I’ll bring you to meet the Lajevardi girl.”

  “Since when do you want my help in getting someone to talk?”

  “Positive inducements have no effect on her, and neither do threats. She doesn’t care whether she lives, dies, or is jailed for a long period of time. And I don’t have time.”

  “Is heroin so important to her, is she that far gone? Or is it the money she can get for it?”

  “It’s sheer obstinacy—hardened by military discipline. She was in Lebanon, in the guerrilla camps with the other girls. There’s some of the fanatic in her as well.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “I’ve established myself as her antagonist. I want you to be—”

  “To be her friend? That’s kindergarten stuff. What criminal won’t see immediately through that?”

  “She’s no criminal,” Darius said. “You’ll play super-antagonist. Anyway, I’m tired of being the bad guy.”

  “But you’re a natural …” Ghaffari stretched, raising his fists overhead. “Can’t it wait? I’m beat. I’d feel plenty more ferocious after a nap.”

  Darius looked at his watch, stifling a yawn.

  “You could stand a few winks yourself,” Ghaffari said.

  “Go home, read my report, patch things up with Sharera as best you can, and sleep.” Darius took the bottle from him. “I’ll call when I’m ready for you.”

  Darius walked downstairs to the basement. Fluorescent strips had been installed in the supply room, lending a sheen of newness to the blank arrest forms and reams of paper stacked haphazardly on the shelves. No, he thought, he wasn’t the only one who knew where to find the paper clips. Maybe it was time for Mehta, once Homicide’s bright boy, to be cast in fresh light, too, and given something to do.

  Or Hamid, or one of the untried men whose names he still had not learned. Ghaffari was becoming increasingly unreliable, taking on the immature traits of the young officers like garments they had outgrown. He foresaw the new chief’s tenure as a brief, unhappy period that would end with Sarmadi assuming formal control of the bureau, and Ghaffari a discarded figurehead in limbo with himself.

  The new lighting did not reach to Evidence, where the single bulb above the shelves was out. Inside the records cage Mehta dozed with his head in his arms, his usual posture when his elbow wasn’t bent. Darius could not say with certainty that Mehta still left headquarters at the end of his shift; none of the men had been to his home in years. Mehta’s wife was dead, and he had no children. His private life revolved around thinning the cases of whiskey that he catalogued by day. Everything of importance to him was in arm’s reach in these musty rooms. Darius rattled the gate. Mehta’s head rose from the cradle of his arms, and his hand swept the table. Grasping at nothing, it circled around, and he was snoring again before it settled under his ear. The air was treacly with the aftershave that Mehta used alternately to mask the evidence of his drinking and to guzzle when even the most poisonous labels of bootleg were unavailable. This morning, there were no bottles in the cage, none of the empties filled with his urine that collected regularly in the corners and were sent upstairs as a bonus with every request for evidence or a file.

  “Hey,” Darius shouted, “what’s so valuable in there, you’ve got to keep yourself locked up with it?”

  Mehta rose disjointedly, gathering himself together piece by piece as he swayed over the table. To Darius the records officer appeared to have deteriorated since the last time they had talked, or rather—remembering that they had conferred just hours ago—since the last time he actually had looked at him. Mehta had been buried in the basement for so many years that no one really saw him anymore. He existed inanimately, a part of the building like the paint on the walls, the sandy dust. Even Mehta failed to see himself, overlooking the impression made by his rat’s nest of hair and chalky skin. He came to the gate with long skating steps, as though fearful that if he raised his feet they would lose the floor and not find it again. He squinted through the mesh, and then unlocked the cage, and went back to the table and buried his head in his arms.

  “Nader, you ought to ease up on the booze,” Darius said, “and give your liver a break.”

  Mehta snored with his eyes open. “You woke me.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here at this hour.”

  “… To protect and serve,” he mumbled.

  “Tell me something, and I’ll let you back to sleep. Is there any mention of Bijan Farmayan in the files?”

  Mehta opened one bloodshot eye, scraped at the scaly lid with a black fingernail. “You can’t count the piddlyshit cases he’s handed over, the poor bastards in jail on his testimony.”

  “Not that. Has there ever been a time when his loyalty was suspect?”

  “… being absurd. The regime’s his life’s blood. He’d sooner turn against his family.”

  Darius shook his head at Mehta’s back. “His loyalty to the nation.”

  Mehta turned slowly into the light like a sunbather adjusting to afternoon shadow, his skin stretched thin and glossy across the bristling thrust of his jaw. He wore a tweed jacket and vest over a long-sleeve shirt with a high starched collar. Darius found it incredible that he had been entertaining company for several minutes without going to the evidence room for a bottle.

  “When things are slow, I like to see what’s in the files. If I’d noticed anything to make him squirm, you would have been told a long time ago. Why do you ask?”

  “I heard his family was from Iraq, and he might still have ties there. It offered an interesting avenue of investigation.”

  “He wouldn’t betray his country. He’s too straitlaced. What could he be bribed with? He wouldn’t know what money is for if he had it in his hands.”

  Darius, recalling the fat woman on Khayyam Avenue and the silver package that had gotten Bijan past her door, said, “Not as straitlaced as you’d think. But, if there’s nothing on him—”

  “Is this what you ruined my sleep for?”

  Files that had been brought down from the shelves never to be returned were heaped on the table, the chair
s, the floor with odd bits of evidence that Mehta kept as trophies from the bureau’s best cases, a rare Turkish Kerikkale pistol Darius remembered from the holdup-murder of a cab driver that remained unsolved for two years before an arrest was made, the timing device recovered intact from a pipe bomb planted by fanatics in a north Teheran cinema that claimed thirty-seven lives.

  “Nader,” he said, “as your friend I have to tell you, you don’t look well. You ought to try to eat once in a while, and get out for some fresh air. It wouldn’t be hard to develop tuberculosis in this dungeon.”

  “I plan to die here,” Mehta said with finality, “so why bother? Worry about yourself instead. You don’t look that good either—and where’s your excuse?”

  For years Darius and Mehta had been locked in a contest of dissipation, making a battlefield of their bodies as they thumbed their nose at the regime. Now that Mehta had opened a lead it struck Darius as unfair to change the rules, to declare that it had not been his intention to play until one of them was more dead than alive, a near-winner. He put his arm around Mehta’s shoulder. “I meant that you should take care. I … all of us would be lost without you.”

  “Good Muslim that you are, at least indulge me in my despondency.”

  Darius laughed because he thought he was expected to, but Mehta didn’t join in. “I’m as good a Muslim as any oil sheik at the roulette tables of London. It’s an accident of birth I recovered from ages ago.”

  “I would have given thirty years of my life to be party to the same accident.”

  Mehta was slurring his words, bogged down in a sibilant quagmire. Darius glanced around the cage. What was the records officer drinking these days?

  “After Islam conquered Persia,” Mehta said, “we Zoroastrians believed that Ahura Mazda, the god of Good and Light, had forgotten us. Our sages had prophesied that the Messiah would appear, and instead the Arabs arrived and forced our faith underground. For fourteen centuries we have clung to our beliefs while Muslims ruined this land.”

  “What do you intend to do about it?”

  “Persia will be redeemed when over three thousand years three saviors will appear, each one a son of Zoroaster.”

  “You’re forgetting something, aren’t you? Zoroaster’s been dead a long time. How can he have kids?”

  Darius was waiting for Mehta to confess that he did not subscribe to the old mythology any more than Darius did to the stories in the Qur’an. But the records chief looked at him gravely and said, “His sons will be born to a virgin who has bathed in a lake that preserved Zoroaster’s semen. It is written in our holy books that one day the Messiah will help God in displacing the Islamic demons.”

  “Is that who I am? A demon from the forces of darkness?”

  “As the spawn of invaders, you’ve worn out your welcome.” Mehta straightened his wilted lapels. “What you have before you is a casualty of the holding action until the Messiah comes to put you smug bastards in your place.”

  “The son of Muslim invaders? More like the invaded, you mean. You haven’t an inkling about my parents, the people I come from. Never—never talk to me like that again.” Darius rarely raised his voice, not to Mehta, of whom he genuinely was fond, and now he was raving, shouting himself hoarse.

  “You’re a fool,” Mehta said. “Every Muslim is a prince in this miserable land. If I were you, I’d—”

  Drink twice as much, Darius finished the thought for him, invent crazier reasons for destroying yourself. He went out of the cage, too far for his anger and embarrassment to carry back. “Yes, Nader, what would you do in my shoes?”

  “… I’d—something …” Mehta sputtered, and, groping for more, rested his head on the table.

  Darius remained where he was until he heard snoring. Mehta’s reputation at headquarters was that of a brilliant mind ruined by drink. But his genius was overrated, consecrated in vodka and improved upon and made gospel by friends invited to share in his alcoholic bounty. This morning, Darius would credit him with rare passion—unless it was simply a better brand of bootleg that had added conviction to his drunken banalities.

  He began hunting for the file on Sousan Hovanian, who had not yet been closely linked to Maryam Lajevardi at the time her body was found in Dharvazeh Ghor. The folder was not on the shelves, and he returned to the cage and searched futilely around the dozing records officer. Mehta was so far gone that he had ceased functioning on the job. Something had to be done about restoring order to the files. But not by Darius. The new homicide chief could lobby for his own man.

  The door to his apartment opened without his turning the dead bolt. He remained on the threshold letting adrenaline bring him to alertness, then went inside with his shoulder gun drawn. The bureau had been torn apart, and his clothes dumped on the floor. The heap was not tall, or distinguished by style or taste; it must have taken all of a minute to go through everything. His suits and jackets were in another modest pile at the bottom of his closet. Consolation was a quick inventory that determined nothing to be missing. Had he recovered the heroin, or mycotoxins, and hidden them here, they would have been lost to him for good. His ineptitude again had proved its worth. Too tired to open the convertible bed, he lay on the sofa with his feet dangling over the armrest. Immediately, he was lost in a black void of sleep. It was late afternoon when he woke, not rested or energized. He poured a glass of juice and drank it in the living room, digging through his underwear for his last clean white shirt, which he found on the floor wrapped around an accordion envelope that wasn’t his. He had seen letter bombs in envelopes thinner than this one. A disarmed bomb sent by Mujahadeen hypocrites to Islamic Republican Party headquarters had been the prize exhibit in Mehta’s trophy room until it was taken for evidence in court. He walked in wide circles around it, as though it were a wild beast chained to a stake, or else he was, and then raised the blinds and turned on all the lights, when what he would have liked was to run it through an X-ray machine. Using scissors from the medicine chest he sliced through the flap without extricating the envelope from the shirt. He inserted a finger into the opening, widened it and slid in another, pinched out a sheaf of papers five centimeters thick.

  His heart was still lodged against his Adam’s apple as he examined a voter registration card for the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, a driver’s license, and a French passport with his photo on the first page. Had Ashfar and Baraheni expected to find anything in the apartment, or was their sole purpose to remind him of the power they had over him? As if he didn’t understand. As if he had to be told that by leaving Iran on their safe passage he would incur a debt from which he never would be allowed to free himself. All of the documentation they had promised him, and more, was here. He returned it to the envelope, and dropped that inside his suit coat. He would see the ex-SAVAK men again soon, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to make them eat the packet.

  He called Ghaffari at home, but the line was busy. He tossed his things inside the drawer, and dressed in a hurry. He was impatient to get back to Maryam’s. When he dialed again, Sharera answered. Without asking how he was, she brought Ghaffari to the phone.

  “It’s time to talk to the girl.”

  “You haven’t heard?” Ghaffari asked him.

  Watching his reflection in the window, Darius constructed a fat knot in a red-and-blue striped tie. “Heard what?”

  “Nader’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about? I was with him this morning. Six hours ago he was fine.”

  “He’s dead now. His housekeeper found him in bed, not breathing. I was trying to reach you at the bureau when she called it in. Baghai’s already on the way.”

  Darius’s mind was racing, spinning off thoughts faster than he could articulate them, jamming the filter of his subconscious. All that registered was the fact that he had just seen Mehta, really seen him for the first time, and now, impossibly, his friend was gone.

  “Meet me there,” he said. “The girl will have to wait.”


  In a traditional house off Shabbaz Avenue near the power plant in the eastern part of the city Mehta had lived for six years with his wife, and alone for fifteen years after her death. A truck from the coroner’s office was contesting space at the curb with several police cars when Darius arrived. A white Paycon from the motor pool was Ghaffari’s favorite. Uniformed officers saluted as they let Darius inside, and closed the door behind him with the finality of dirt being shoveled onto a grave.

  Mehta’s living room was as immaculate and well ordered as the records room once had been. But then, thought Darius, a housekeeper didn’t come to the basement of police headquarters twice each week to tidy up. The housekeeper in question was a woman in her fifties whose unlined features, not accustomed to grief, resisted the solemn mask occasioned by her tears. She was a short woman, the top of her head barely reaching to the chest of her interrogators, who formed a semicircle around her. They were led by Ghaffari, still in the same dirty shirt. He pointed Darius into a corridor filled with uniformed officers and coroner’s assistants with nothing to do but rock on their heels and trade comments on the certitude of death and bad weather.

  Baghai was in the bedroom, bent over rumpled sheets on which Mehta sprawled on his side in his undershorts and argyle socks. Like his patient the coroner appeared to have shriveled in the heat of his underground workplace until only the heavy wool suit that he wore like armor retained the original shape of his body. To Darius he still did not look well; there might have been two dead men in the room, except that Baghai moved from time to time, probing Mehta with swift hands that suddenly motioned toward the bed.