Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  She was no stranger to wrestling. It was as common in the town squares and fields of Armenia as it was in Iran. But in the sepia-toned memories of her childhood—increasingly fragmentary and elusive—the grappling men were usually in bars. Knocking over chairs and breaking heads. In Iran, wrestlers were the mercenaries of the diplomatic world. The equivalent of Nazir’s pit diggers. They took money from all comers. Sold their knowledge and their fists. They carried messages and guns for anyone willing to pay, no questions asked.

  Here in the arena, they were kings. And she was an interloper.

  There were serving women, of course, moving among the men. But even their eyes swept Siranoush with disapproval. The men were more vocal. She descended the sloping aisle between the ranks of seats, toward the sunken octagonal pit, where two young wrestlers—naked above the waist, sweating profusely and swaying—fought for submission. She ignored the catcalls, hissing, and guttural insults. She did not speak Farsi. Ignorance—and her obvious Western dress—might protect her.

  She was looking for Dutch.

  The Polish pilot still had a room at the Park Hotel. She had left a note for him at Reception only forty minutes ago. But it was the hotel bartender—who had an eye for a pretty blonde—who told her where Dutch went most days. He was gambling on koshti with Bond’s money and doing quite well for himself. In fact, the bartender suggested, he might stay in Tehran indefinitely.

  She raked the crowd, looking for the Pole. Easier than it might seem, because the zurkhaneh was divided into specific sections: athletes sat on one side of the sunken pit; musicians on another. The audience was confined to a third.

  Dutch was gray-haired and clean-shaven, and he insisted on wearing a Polish Air Force cap that was as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin. She picked out the cap first, in the third row of seats up from the pit’s edge. Like most of the men, he was looking at her instead of at the wrestlers.

  At that moment, a pair of hands seized her by the shoulders and turned her roughly around. A young Iranian, obviously drunk. His fingers slid up to the nape of her neck and seized her hair in a painful grip. With a grin and what was probably an insult, he dragged her back toward the door.

  She had been trained for stupidities like this.

  She allowed herself to be dragged for a few seconds, then twisted like an eel and kicked the man hard behind his knee. His leg doubled beneath him. He let go of her.

  She turned and looked for Dutch.

  He had torn himself away from whatever bet he was nursing and leapt for the aisle. Before her bruiser could force himself upright, Dutch had reached them. For an instant, she thought he might slug the man in the jaw. She caught his wrist in midair and said, “Mistake.”

  His eyes grazed hers.

  “You’ll bring the whole place down on us.”

  He nodded once. And then they ran.

  —

  “BOND’S GONE MISSING?” he repeated, as they settled down with drinks in the Park Hotel bar.

  Twelve minutes and a world away from the Tehran zurkhaneh. Siranoush sipped her martini and felt some of the tension ease from her chest. They were both drinking vodka. Nobody in Cairo liked it, and most of the Westerners she’d met had barely heard of it. Vodka was Russian. Polish. Armenian. Dutch had ordered an entire bottle and had tossed back several shots. The two of them understood each other.

  “Not missing,” she said. “I know where he is. I just don’t know where he is.”

  Dutch laughed. “Clear as mud.”

  “My people took him away in the night. To a safe house. They left me behind. They should have been back by now—somebody should have returned. They haven’t. I need to find the safe house.”

  “And?”

  “I thought you might know where it is.”

  Dutch poured himself another slug. “There are probably a dozen NKVD places in this town. If there aren’t fifty. Fatima, my dear—wouldn’t you just rather fly back to Cairo?”

  She tasted her vodka. “This is a different kind of house. It used to belong to the Nazis.”

  Dutch pushed the shot glass aside. “Then stay away. Far away.”

  “We turned them.”

  “You never really turn a Nazi, darling.”

  “Dutch,” she said, pouring him another shot of vodka, “you know people.”

  “On four continents.”

  “Wrestlers, for instance. They’re the tough boys of Tehran.”

  He simply looked at her over the rim of his glass.

  “The tough boys work for whoever pays. You’ve made a lot of money, lately. From wrestling.”

  He sighed. The air was filled with vodka fumes. “You expect me to go back into that lion’s den. The arena. Now that you’ve thrown them all meat.”

  “I expect you to ask questions.” She smiled at him brilliantly. “One of those wrestlers knows where Bond is.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Otto Skorzeny needed to clear his head.

  It was late Tuesday afternoon and they had come down from the hills on Saturday. There had been a little food in the isolated farmhouse the five of them had taken at gunpoint that evening at dusk; an old woman lived there alone with a herd of goats. They’d forced the woman to give them goat stew and what bread she had in the place. It was only two rooms, and the goats held down one of them. But it was isolated, and that was all Skorzeny cared about. He’d waited until midnight to be sure the old woman had no son who might walk through the front door. The fact that she didn’t bought her another twenty-four hours.

  Skorzeny would not let her out of his sight, and he refused to allow his men to go in search of food. It was essential, he thought, that they all lie low.

  On Sunday, Hoffman killed one of the goats and Skorzeny forced the old woman to roast it over her open fire. She wailed and berated them in her foreign tongue until Hoffman pulled his gun and threatened to shoot her. That night, to Skorzeny’s relief, the Fencer made contact.

  Long Jump. Operational. Proceed per instructions.

  He had unstrapped the radio pack from young Fuchs’s back Saturday after the boy was dead. Fuchs’s body he’d dragged farther under the tree that had proved the death of him. The snow had already formed a well around the trunk, and Fuchs would lie there, frozen, for the rest of the winter. Skorzeny was the only Enigma-trained trooper left among the five of them. When he emerged from the trees near the Jajrood River and rejoined his men, none of them asked about Fuchs. They knew a gunshot when they heard one.

  The tension and fear had been building in them ever since. They were too well trained to question him directly, but he’d caught each of them averting their eyes. If the Fencer hadn’t given them the green light—a reason to radio their German contacts and storm the safe house last night—Skorzeny might have had a mutiny on his hands.

  He tossed the dregs of his coffee down the safe house kitchen sink and turned back to the men bound in their chairs. There had been too many hours of groaning and blood with too little to show for it. He would have to interrogate them himself.

  DAY SEVEN

  TEHRAN

  WEDNESDAY,

  DECEMBER 1, 1943

  CHAPTER 35

  How’s the President’s stomach?” Hudson asked.

  “Seems A-OK,” Schwartz replied. “He hasn’t eaten much, of course—just pushes the food around the plate. Says the spices in all these Oriental countries are playing havoc with his system. But it’s nothing a little good straight whiskey can’t put right. He should eat more with the Brits and less with the Russians.”

  Hudson laughed. “Ain’t that the truth. I’ll be glad to see the back of this part of the world.”

  “Me, too,” Schwartz said. “At least we’ll be home for Christmas.”

  Christmas. There was a scent of snow from the Caucasus on the air. Hudson and Schwartz were strolling around the withered back garden o
f the Russian Embassy during a break between final conference sessions. Both men were smoking, and the good scent of tobacco mingled with the clean smell off the mountains.

  “Seriously, though,” he said. “Is it possible Mr. Roosevelt was poisoned that first night he was here?”

  Schwartz glanced at him sidelong. “Dunno. If he was, they didn’t try too hard. And what would be the point?”

  Hudson shrugged. “Uncle Joe gets a leg up on the Poland question. He wants part of East Prussia, I hear, so he can get an ice-free port. Roosevelt’s got a lot of voting Poles back home. Sideline him in the discussion, maybe Stalin gets what he wants.”

  “You’ve got a very suspicious brain, Mike,” Schwartz said admiringly. He took a drag on his cigarette. “Could be right. But I know for a fact the President plans to raise the Polish issue with Uncle Joe tonight.”

  “Better hope he’s got no appetite for dinner afterwards.” Hudson kicked a piece of gravel into a dormant fishpond and watched it skitter across a thin layer of ice. “Then what?”

  “We go home.”

  “Just like that? Drive right out the gate of the embassy compound, and wave goodbye as we pull up to the plane?”

  “More or less. What’s eating you?”

  Hudson hesitated. He wanted to know Schwartz’s plans. But he didn’t want to tell him about Ian being in Tehran or his conversation with the NKVD girl, Siranoush. If he reported what she’d said about Nazi paratroopers, Schwartz might go talk to his opposite number in the British Embassy. And then Hudson’s ability to control what happened would diminish rapidly.

  “Just wondered if you’d heard any more about that Fencer guy the Sovs were all het up about.”

  “We both know that was bullshit. Just a way to claim bragging rights for averting disaster—and convince the President to move in with Uncle Joe and his microphones.”

  “Yeah,” Hudson faltered. “Only . . .”

  Schwartz came to a stop and tossed away his cigarette. “Only what? This place giving you the heebie-jeebies?”

  “Something like that.” Hudson stuck his hands in his pockets against the cold. His shoulders were hunched. He looked more than ever like an elongated bird—a heron, perhaps. “This is Franklin Delano Roosevelt we’re talking about. The greatest president the U.S. has ever known. You can’t be too careful with cargo like that. So maybe you err on the side of caution.”

  Schwartz clapped Hudson on the shoulder. “That’s the Service’s first rule, buddy. We take nothing for granted.”

  “And tomorrow—”

  “We trot out our presidential double and send him off with all possible fanfare at 0900 hours. Motorcade, adoring NKVD troops, flags of three nations and a twenty-one-gun salute from the Kid Shah. We carry FDR himself to a plain sedan and I drive him by the back road to the Sacred Cow. Works like a charm.”

  Hudson frowned. “You mean you’re driving the two of you alone? You got no protection?”

  “Sure. Nobody’ll look at us twice. They’ll all be riveted on the car they think has the Old Man.”

  Unless they know he’s not in it, Hudson thought. He hoped Schwartz hadn’t shared his plan with half the delegation. But he wasn’t about to teach the Secret Service chief his job.

  “Sam,” he said, “is there any chance you’d let me ride in that car?”

  Schwartz studied him for a long moment. “You really are worried, aren’t you?”

  Hudson nodded.

  “Know how to pull a trigger?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’d never deny you the chance to serve your country. You can ride shotgun. Be waiting at the back gate of the embassy compound at 0830 tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you,” Hudson said. “I won’t forget it.”

  “Keep this close to your vest,” Schwartz warned. “A plan’s no good if the whole world knows.”

  So he’s figured that out, Hudson thought. And hoped it wasn’t too late.

  —

  THE WRESTLER’S NAME was Mostafa, Dutch said, and he spoke enough French to make himself understood among the foreigners who had sprung up overnight in his country. He had listened to Dutch’s questions and, more important, to the rials Dutch had offered. Then he took the rials and meandered slowly among the athletes waiting in their section of the zurkhaneh. Two of them—older men with families to feed and long memories—thought they knew where the former Nazi safe house might be. For enough cash, they were willing to show Dutch.

  “You’re an expensive girl, Fatima,” he told her. “I’ve gone through a quarter of my winnings in the past hour. The gods of wrestling bestow, and the gods take away.”

  “Then let’s hope it’s the right house,” she said.

  Now, looking at the run-down shack from the far side of the street as the wrestlers accepted Dutch’s cigarettes and murmured in their sibilant Farsi, she wondered for an instant if the safe house was even inhabited. The windows were shuttered and no smoke came from the tin pipe on the roof that served as a chimney. “They’re sure,” she muttered to Dutch doubtfully. “This is where the Germans lived?”

  Dutch lifted his shoulders. “There are a lot of Germans,” he reminded her, “even in Occupied Tehran. Who knows if they got the right ones?”

  They were standing on the broken paving stones that fronted what appeared to be a closed factory. Something to do with rugs and weaving, Siranoush thought. She had veiled her bright head and now stood suitably a few paces from the knot of men, with her face slightly downcast. She’d forced Dutch to stuff his tattered Air Force cap into her handbag before they’d climbed into the taxi with the wrestlers and wound their way through the poorer parts of the city.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked her now. “Ring the doorbell?”

  She was about to reply when they heard the scream.

  It was a man’s voice, high-pitched in agony. A scream that was forced from the body and ended in a gasp.

  Siranoush stared at Dutch, her pupils dilating.

  “Gówno,” he whispered.

  A Polish expletive even Siranoush did not understand.

  —

  THE MOST SENIOR of the five paratroopers was named Otto Skorzeny, Ian learned. He carried the rank of colonel and moved with such consummate assurance that it was unsurprising he and the men he commanded had survived the drop into enemy hands a few weeks ago. He spoke German with a Viennese accent and the right side of his face was fantastically scarred from cheekbone to jaw. It looked as though somebody had once tried to slice his face in half.

  “You’re a fencer,” Ian muttered at one point, when the pain exploding from his groin was too much for his clenched jaws. It made a change from the raw hatred that spewed forth from his mouth in English whenever the length of chicken wire tore at his scrotum. He was sweating profusely, and the moisture mingled with the spatters of blood that covered his thighs. Clenching his fists, he’d dug his fingernails so tightly into the flesh of his palms that these, too, were streaked with red.

  “Yes.” Otto brought his face close to Ian’s. He had a glorious mustache that was probably a point of pride and an attempt to distract the eye from the livid scar that carved a trailing half-moon through his cheek. “You fence also? What is your weapon?”

  “My brain,” Ian gasped.

  Otto threw back his head and laughed.

  “And now let me ask you again, Commander Bond. How many in Mr. Churchill’s party travel armed?”

  “I don’t know,” Ian said. He clenched his teeth. It was just another type of birching, after all. He’d endured Pop and he would endure this.

  The chicken-wire rod swung viciously upward. He screamed.

  This time, the pain knifed through his stomach and he knew he was going to be sick. He retched, black dots swarming in his vision. Otto forced his head down. It was a difficult maneuver when a man’
s arms were tied behind the back of a chair. But Ian’s eyes cleared. He stole a second to glance at Zadiq. He thought the NKVD commander had slipped into unconsciousness about an hour ago. Zadiq was still bound to his chair, and his skin was goosefleshed. A pool of blood was congealing beneath his seat. Ian retched again.

  Otto tugged impatiently on his hair.

  “Churchill carries a pistol,” he muttered.

  “And the others? There are soldiers? Bodyguards?”

  “Of course. A couple of pretty girls. You’ll like killing them.”

  Stupid answers. Banal. Nothing worth dying for. But he would die in the end, anyway, and the small child in his brain was begging for relief.

  Otto pulled his head up. “How many bodyguards?”

  “Just the one,” Ian said. “His driver has a gun, too.”

  The door to the front room was ajar, and he could hear the German boys playing cards and talking. He concentrated his anguished mind on their words. Parsing out the language. They wanted food and drink, and Otto had ordered no one to leave the safe house on pain of death for desertion.

  “One bodyguard. You know how many men watch the Führer when he takes a piss?” Otto asked softly. “Eight. Never mind how many put him to bed. I’m glad you’re starting to answer me, Commander. But I don’t believe a word you say.”

  The chicken wire flashed again.

  “Colonel!”

  Erich’s voice from the doorway. Excited. Urgent.

  Otto glanced over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “The radio. It’s beeping.”

  The wooden rod slapped hard against Ian’s scrotum. He felt something burst—and went howling into black.

  —