Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  Baghai straightened Mehta’s left arm, and twisted it outward. Inside the crook of the elbow a hypodermic needle protruded from a greenish vein. This was not the crude eyedropper and needle combination favored by the addicts of Dharvazeh Ghor, but the finest professional equipment. Darius noticed black-and-blue marks and a few fresh ulcerations below Mehta’s bicep, but none of the scarring of a habitual user.

  “Did you know he was injecting himself with drugs?” Baghai asked.

  “Nader was a confirmed boozer. You see his house, the old furnishings, not even a TV or radio. He was not the kind to abandon his regular vices for something new.”

  “But he did—and beginning not long ago. These marks on his arm aren’t old. For a man of his age, with no prior history of narcotics use, to experiment with heroin was no different than taking up Russian roulette. Even a normal dose might have killed him, and I’m skeptical he had a good idea what a normal dose was. The assumption must be that he gave himself a hot shot, either injected too much dope, or dope of such purity that his system wouldn’t tolerate it.”

  “Mehta wasn’t stupid.”

  “I didn’t say he was. Had he been depressed?”

  “He was born depressed, and then things went downhill.”

  “This was not an accident,” Baghai said. “He had access to large amounts of drugs seized as evidence in criminal cases, and knew basically what he was getting himself into. I’m ruling suicide, and you can hold a departmental funeral tomorrow.”

  The bedroom was hotter than the records cage, the windows shut tight to guarantee the sweltering ambience Mehta had loved. Darius unbuttoned his collar, and blew inside his shirt. His socks were soaked through, his pants legs glued to his thighs. “Why not call it liver failure, so we can bury him with some of his pride intact? It’s how his friends expected him to go.”

  “How many friends did he have? Who will be scandalized to find out that he did himself in this way?” Baghai lifted the wounded arm, and plucked out the needle. “Have you a more plausible interpretation for this? He was sick, miserable, alone, physically an old man at forty-eight, with nothing to live for, or even to die for, but alcohol. Until he found heroin. What are drugs and liquor anyway, but intermediate stages of death? He killed himself. Don’t ask me to lie for him.”

  “Make out the death certificate as you see fit,” Darius said.

  “Will you come to the morgue to sign it?”

  “Ask Ghaffari. I’m needed elsewhere.”

  Mehta’s housekeeper had been excused by her questioners, and stood by herself in the same spot in the living room, nervously picking lint off damask bolster pillows. Ghaffari leaned against the wall with his back to her, writing in his evidence pad.

  “You saw how he died?” Ghaffari looked up from the page, disgusted, a bluenose forced to compose a pornographic essay. “I didn’t suspect he’d sunk so far.”

  “I’m leaving for Maryam Lajevardi’s now.”

  “Wait a moment and we’ll ride together. I’ve had the white car tuned.”

  “Baghai wants you at the morgue. Possibly, Hamid can be encouraged to throw a fright into the girl in your place.”

  “If he isn’t more afraid of her,” Ghaffari said. “Where is she staying? I’ll join you after I’m done.”

  “On the Old Karaj Road, next door to a small printing plant about six kilometers beyond the Azadi Monument. Unless you can make it in the next hour or two, don’t bother to come.”

  “I’ll be there,” Ghaffari promised. “For her benefit, I’ve primed myself to be the meanest son of a bitch on two legs. If I don’t let it out soon, there’ll be no living with me.”

  “I hadn’t noticed the difference,” Darius said.

  13

  MARYAM QUIT PACING. SHE walked to a club table where Hamid sat opposite an empty chair, and scarcely looking at the board, not having to think about it, moved a black bishop four spaces, sweeping up a pawn, which she added to a captive white army. “Check,” she said wearily.

  Darius looked over Hamid’s shoulder at an impending three-move checkmate. “I’m glad to see you two are getting along.”

  “I’ve always regarded the police as my friends.” When Darius declined the gambit, she asked, “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’m sure you’ve never been more truthful.”

  “The problem with you,” Maryam said, “is you don’t know who your friends are.”

  Hamid hunched over the board, studying the position of the pieces. Chess, while not illegal under the law, had been frowned upon by the Imam. Chessboards and chessmen were hard to come by, traded on the same black market as Hollywood videotapes and rock CDs. No one still remembered the logic that had chased the game out of the parks and public places, and relegated it to the backrooms where card playing and Monopoly, certified evils, still held root.

  “Okay, then,” Darius said, “we’re agreed that we’re all friends. Tell your friends where you went the other night.”

  “I forget.”

  “Try to recall.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I’d be glad to tell you,” Maryam said, “if I knew why I left.”

  “You should have kept going, and saved us all this trouble.”

  “What, and miss such a good time?”

  Hamid wisely was sitting this out. Darius couldn’t see him as a convincing bad guy if he sprouted fangs. Worse than ineffectual, he was small and cuddly, a puppy for Maryam to cling to while Darius assumed the ogre’s role. Why was Ghaffari always someplace else … ? “Damn it, we’ll be here forever.”

  Darius pounded his fist on the table. Hamid embraced the chessboard, steadying the wobbly pieces.

  “We will,” Maryam said, “won’t we?”

  “If not forever,” Hamid said, “at least into the foreseeable future.”

  And while Darius considered braining the criminalist for interrupting his good guy-bad guy soliloquy, Maryam said, “I went to see Sheik Salehi.”

  Darius stared at Maryam, who seemed to have gone into shock, the most amazed of any of them that she had answered. “You’ve known all along he was at Manzarieh?” he said.

  Incapable of further speech, she nodded.

  “What business did you have there?” Darius attempted to channel the rage that had startled her before. But with no one to play off he had let too much dissipate. “Why do you resent us?” he said. “Can’t you see we’re trying to help you?”

  “I have no feelings about you one way or the other. In case you haven’t heard, the National Police are of little consequence to anyone but themselves. Let me go, and I promise never to think of you again.”

  “She didn’t reach Manzarieh,” Hamid said without looking up from the board.

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s no possibility she would have been allowed to leave the camp. Therefore,” Hamid said confidently, “she never arrived.”

  “True?” Darius asked her.

  Maryam shrugged. “What’s another secret among friends?”

  “You weren’t allowed past the guards?”

  “If it’s so important to you, I never came near Manzarieh.” Hamid pushed another pawn ahead one space. Maryam’s knight pounced on it, and added it to the casualties on her side of the table. “Check—After you told me Rahgozar had been killed I was afraid to stay here by myself. Sheik Salehi had helped me before when I was in trouble, so I phoned him to say I would be there soon, and then called for a cab. As I rode through the plaza under the Azadi Monument I saw a woman my age knocked from her motorbike by a heavy truck. The car ahead of me ran over her, and, like the truck, kept going. I told my driver to stop, but he said it was a waste of time for him to look after a girl who was going to die anyway. I offered to pay what he asked to bring her to a hospital; he didn’t want her bloodying his cab. I got out and went to help her myself. She stopped breathing while I was holding her hand. Then and there I realized there was no on
e I could depend on if it meant getting my blood on them, not even Sheik Salehi. I used the rest of my money to come back here.”

  “Who would spill such precious blood?” Darius asked.

  “The same people who murdered Rahgozar.”

  “The Komiteh?”

  “Is that who you say it was? We’ve been over this so many times.”

  “And never gotten anywhere. Look, you need us. Whoever put Leila Darwish’s body outside your window in Shemiran will find you sooner or later. Unless you’re frank with us, your blood will also be on people who meant only to help.”

  “I’ve told you everything. If you care what happens to me, leave now, and don’t come back.”

  “You told us nothing,” Darius said. “You didn’t say that before coming to Manzarieh Salehi headed a guerrilla camp in Lebanon where drug smuggling evidently was a major activity, and that when Leila and Sousan Hovanian were at the camp they were involved in transporting heroin. Nor have you explained your relationship with the other girls, and your involvement in drugs—”

  Maryam started to walk away. Darius stepped close to the table, blocking her.

  “And mycotoxins.”

  “I’ve never heard that term, except from you. What are they for?”

  “To be used in chemical warfare shells that may kill millions of innocent people. Do you still deny that Rahgozar was attempting to obtain them for himself?”

  “I don’t know what I deny anymore.” Maryam slid her queen into a cluster of white pieces and confiscated a rook. “It’s your move.”

  Hamid’s remaining bishop snapped up the queen. Only then did he examine the board for a trap.

  “Even the notion of drugs was repellent to Salehi,” Darius said. “He would have destroyed his end of the smuggling network, but he saw in it something more, a method for bringing mycotoxins into Iran over the same route the drugs traveled. You know the details.” He paused to allow her to take over the narrative.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” she said.

  “… know them because you were one of the couriers sent to bring heroin from the Bekaa Valley and Afghanistan into Iran, and, on your last trip, to carry back the mycotoxins. This much you didn’t tell us.”

  Maryam tipped over her king, which rolled off the table. “I resign,” she said.

  “… or what the intended destination of the mycotoxins was, whether they ever reached it, and where they are now.” With the side of his hand he wiped all the pieces off the board.

  In law school Darius had been taught to win a conviction from a jury by staking out a clear line of questioning and not deviating from it over the course of a trial. But that was the United States, where a preponderance of evidence was a prosecutor’s strongest tool. In Iran, where confession was the goal of most legal actions, the standard prod for a recalcitrant witness, or suspect, was torture—and this he would not use. As an interrogator, psychopaths were his specialty, maniacs oblivious to pain, or else eager for it, and so to be deprived of their pleasure and tricked and cajoled out of their secrets. When these were in short supply, he withdrew from the questioning, and made himself useful by ferreting information from physical evidence and with the deductive work that guided most investigations. Against someone like Maryam Lajevardi, who was at least sane enough to recognize his games, his advantage was lost, and all that was left to him were empty threats of suffering.

  Maryam was on her knees, picking chessmen off the floor. When her obfuscation had caught up to her, it seemed to Darius that she had nothing to fall back on, not the alcohol that sustained Mehta in his “holding action,” or the Islam that once had fed her fires and left her spiritually vacant when they burned out. She was especially not afraid of the police, probably not even of whoever wanted her dead. She was simply afraid, so that much harder to reach.

  “We’re waiting for your answer,” he said.

  A sound like wind chimes in a sandstorm defined itself as shattering glass.

  As Maryam turned toward the window, Darius felt under his arm for his gun. Yellow light sparkled in a thousand shards that were like a diamond field in the carpeting, and then fused into a fireball that devoured her couch.

  A searing wind sucked a scream from Maryam’s lips. Tendrils of flame backed her against the wall. The heat brought moisture to Darius’s cheeks, but his body was bathed in sweat from an icy reservoir. Hamid, closest to the heart of the blaze, was agitated the most by it. He let it chase him into a corner, where he stayed too long, and with retreat cut off dashed through the flames and tore open the door.

  “Get back,” Darius yelled.

  Hamid tottered in the doorway. His shadow danced into the yard ahead of him, flickering, struggling to break free, suddenly flying away as he fell inside. Darius saw blood erupt from the criminalist’s forehead and neck before he heard shots, and afterward from his upper lip and nose. Leaping into the line of gunfire, he bowled over Maryam, who continued in Hamid’s footsteps.

  He lunged for her and missed, scrambled after her on hands and knees and tripped her up clutching at an ankle, climbed on her back and covered her with his body as a second fusillade stitched a circle low in the wall. “Keep your head down,” he shouted into her ear. “Got that?”

  She nodded, her muscles so tight that he felt the motion like a wave running down her spine. He eased his weight off her, and she slithered away on her belly. He caught up to her in the kitchen crouched between the refrigerator and stove.

  “He’s dead,” she said. “His brain—” She choked, and flicked red matter from the back of her hand.

  Darius expected tears again; but her features were set in a scowl directed not at whoever had killed Hamid, but at him for making her a part of it. “How could this happen?” she asked him.

  “Do I have to tell you? Or have they dropped Molotov cocktails from the curriculum at the camps in Lebanon where you and your friends did such fine work for the glory of God?”

  It was something to say to keep her anger focused on him instead of turning inward and making her want to give up right there. He peered across the yard at the crenellated roof of the printing plant rising like a washboard over the brick wall. He lifted the window and swung his legs over the sill. When he looked for her, Maryam still hadn’t moved, and might have been making up her mind whether to become catatonic.

  He came back in, and brought her to the window. She didn’t resist as he helped her outside. He dropped down next to her, and they ran for the shadows in the furthest corner of the yard.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” Maryam clutched at his sleeve, but didn’t try to hold him there.

  His answer was a finger across her lips. He walked away from her hugging the side of the house, poked his head around the corner as two men dragged Hamid onto the doorstep and knelt beside the body to wipe the blood from the criminalist’s face. One of them stood up shaking his head. His heel left its imprint on Hamid’s chest as both men went inside.

  Darius glanced back into the yard. Maryam was plainly visible between the house and the wall, and took two quick steps toward him when he waved her further away. He ran up to the door, and slammed it, and then dashed back around the corner. The man who had cleaned Hamid’s face came out on the doorstep shooting blindly in the dark. Darius squeezed off a bullet that caught him in the shoulder and spun him around, offering an easy shot at the white triangle of his shirtfront that Darius wasted. The man fired twice more before Darius’s third bullet struck above the belt buckle and put him on his back beside Hamid.

  Backlit by flames, the second gunman was looking out the kitchen window. Disdaining a headshot, Darius waited as a leg, then an arm, and a shoulder emerged. His bullet missed anyway, splintering the jamb. The gunman’s body stiffened as he tried to pull back inside. In that instant Darius placed his next shot where he wanted to, in the rib cage under the arm. Angry at himself, the gunman said, “No—” He let go of his weapon, pitched forward, and hung head dow
n over the sill.

  Darius pulled him outside. The man’s cuff was smoldering, a. ribbon of fire around his ankle. Crimson froth bubbled from a hawk nose that anchored the craggy features of a thirty-year-old Darius had never seen before. Darius looked into the shadows again, but couldn’t find Maryam. When he backed away, she was behind him. He took her hand, and they ran to the front of the house where the other gunman lay still but for the heaving of his broad, bloodied chest. The sound he made was like a nursing baby. Exhausted by the effort that went into one large breath, he didn’t take another.

  “Who are they?” Maryam asked.

  “You don’t know them either?”

  “No,” she said, and as Darius looked intently from the body back to her she added, “It’s the truth. Do you think I’d be less than honest with you now?”

  He bent over the dead man to search for identification. Maryam stepped in his way and pressed her hand against his chest. “You have to believe me.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why?” she repeated, fighting tears. “Why? Because I’ll go out of my mind if you don’t.”

  In late evening the industrial neighborhood was devoid of pedestrians and auto traffic. On the next block a streetlamp covered the nearest house in an umbrella of gray light. Somewhere a siren resounded, and its shrill call was answered by a pack of dogs that worshiped it. Darius put Maryam in the Paycon, and they raced eight blocks—until he pulled over for an oncoming fire company—without her taking her eyes from the gun he was holding in his lap.

  “Where are you bringing me?” she asked him.

  “As far away from here as we can get.”

  “But where?”

  It was a question he was counting on to answer itself. Headquarters was as secure as his apartment. He had no close friends left, no one he trusted with a life. His only relatives were his mother and three half-sisters from whom he had been estranged forever. Someplace would come up, because it had to. In the meantime it was enough to keep moving.