by Salar Abdoh
He turned to the woman in charge of the safe-deposit. “I want all the money you keep on this table, bitch.” He slammed his hand on her table and returned to the customers. “Hurry!”
People were nervously emptying pockets and opening handbags and overturning briefcases.
Robber #1’s attention went to the bald man who was still scratching his head with his mortgage booklet. He lingered for a second on the man before deciding to address the vice-manager instead. “Take this.” He threw a black bag at him. “I want everything that’s on the floor in that bag. Cash, phones, rings, everything.”
Robber #2 was standing watch by the exit, one eye on the bank and the other on the street. There was a moment when everything seemed to come to a standstill, and then Robber #1 ran back to the safe-deposit woman.
“Didn’t I tell you to put all the money on this table?”
The woman was watching him with a bewildered expression. There was a bruise on the side of her face the size of a ping-pong ball. This fact seemed to make Robber #1 more angry. He yanked her hair and pulled her out of her seat. The woman started screaming so loudly that Robber #2 had to run over and wrench Robber #1 off of her.
The two bank robbers whispered something amongst themselves while the woman, crying, shuffled to where the others were still busy getting rid of their valuables.
Just then a cell phone went off. The sound of a noha lamentation was coming out of it. The phone belonged to the man with the red prayer beads who had been standing with the vice-manager.
Robber #1 stormed up to him. “You old fart, didn’t I tell you to cough up everything?” He smacked the man in the forehead with the gun. The phone fell out of the guy’s hand, but the infernal dirge coming out of it continued.
“Shut it up!” Robber #1 screamed. “What kind of stupid ringtone is that? Kill it.” He pointed his king-killer to the ceiling and pulled the trigger. There was an awkward click but nothing happened. The barrel had jammed. “Shit!” He tried again. Nothing.
The man he’d just hit, his face bleeding, seemed to come alive all of a sudden. He fingered the side of his coat, took a glance at the broken camera, pulled out his own gun, and released the safety. Robber #2, who was still standing by the safe-deposit table, now came running, rifle in hand, and immediately received a bullet to the throat.
“My daughter . . . hospital . . .” The prayer-bead man who’d just shot his gun off murmured these words to himself. No one heard him, of course. It was pandemonium in there. For a second the man even seemed to want to bend down and reach for the phone that had momentarily stopped ringing. People were screaming. A woman had passed out.
“Mercy!” Robber #1, standing there shaking, now croaked.
The phone started back up. The same song of lamentation. Robber #1’s legs went limp and he fell to his knees next to Robber #2’s body.
“Mercy,” he repeated, this time barely managing a whisper.
The man fingered his red prayer bead and his face went dark. He put the gun to the masked man’s forehead. “Mercy? Mercy, you say? Don’t you know a king-killer that actually works knows nothing about that word?”
THE GROOM’S RETURN
BY MAHAK TAHERI
Behesht e Zahra Cemetery
He told the man at the car wash he wanted the Peugeot made spotless for the wedding.
The man remarked, “Looks like you’ve been on the road a bit.” Behdad nodded as the guy went around knocking some dried-up mud from the back wheels. “I’ll wash it so good you’ll think it just came out of the factory.”
Behdad nodded again.
The man wanted to start with the inside of the car. Together they pulled out the oversized carton filled with old newspapers and clippings from the backseat. Then Behdad stood to the side and lit a cigarette. A crow perched nearby and stared right at him. There was loathing in the bird’s expression, as if it had been witness to and could recall every wrong with this city. He thought: That bird is the opposite of Tehran. Tehran’s memory is empty. It doesn’t exist. After five years of being on the road, Behdad was sure of this. He found it incredible that a murderer could so easily come back to the scene of his crime and no one would remember him. The car wash guy said something he didn’t hear. When his smoke was finished he began skimming through the old newspapers in the box looking for nothing in particular, just skimming them: On Wednesday, the district inspector reported the body of a woman found in her own residence off of Si-e-Tir Street.
The guy was working on the top of the car now, soaping and scrubbing as hard as he could. He called out to Behdad again, telling him he could wait inside if he wanted to. Behdad said no and went back to the newspaper clippings with her pictures in them. Elahe had resembled a movie star at those initial proceedings in court. She was beautiful and hardly needed makeup. Most of the later pictures were good too. But in those later ones she seemed more like a movie star in mourning. Behdad didn’t like them so much. You could see some hair sticking out of her headscarf, showing the white at the root of her black hair. In the very beginning, when he’d first noticed her coming to the bank, she’d been blond. But the blond disappeared after a while in jail. Behdad knew that was part of her new act too. The white and black hair. The bereaved look. Elahe had been a first-rate role player. She loved to act. Loved refrains and catchwords. The whole time after the verdict, while waiting to be executed, she kept telling reporters how much she’d loved him. “You must see him through my mind,” she’d insisted to them. Even back then he’d thought how Elahe’s mind could turn the stink of a toilet into the scent of a rose.
A woman who took money from the bank account of the victim’s husband on the day of the murder has been arrested. Judge Jafarzadeh of the criminal court stated that the murderer also confessed she had an illicit affair with the victim’s spouse for the past four and a half years. The victim’s spouse had been renting an apartment for her in a northern section of the city.
After five years the car’s natural blue was finally coming out from under all that dirt and grime. The guy kept calling out all the little extras he was doing to the car, hustling for a good tip. And Behdad kept nodding yes to everything. It had been the same with Elahe. She labored for the love they had for each other by asking him yes/no questions. Do you love me? Yes. Do I look pretty today? Yes. You’ll never leave me, right? No. She named the apartment he’d rented for her “Our Tehran Afternoons.” She called him her man. But always made sure to remind him she wasn’t trying to take the place of his wife. “No, I’m not like that. I don’t want to be a burden to you. I won’t ever let her find out. Just tell me when you don’t want me anymore and I’ll go away. No questions asked.”
She’d talked like that in jail too. There was no wall separating her words of love to him and the words she said to the newspapers: My only crime is love. This is the story of our love, me and him. Love is not an illusion. It’s real. My captivity for his freedom. I am good with that. None of this is fantasy.
“Now you can really see the car,” the man announced with satisfaction. His job was done. Behdad finally turned to him. And then both their gazes followed the crow who had begun to stir on the roof of the car wash. “Only a bird that size can survive in the pollution of this city,” the guy said. “The sparrows couldn’t last here. They’re gone. Everything’s gone.”
Behdad, too, had left this city. But it wasn’t voluntary. The order had come from above. They’d sent one of their messengers and made it clear: Disappear and don’t ever come back if you know what’s good for you. But who were they? He still didn’t know. All he knew was that Tehran was theirs. The country was theirs. Regular folks called these kinds of people the “shadow government.” You didn’t see them. You just received orders. Once you were in their orbit, there was no getting out.
Behdad knew he was trapped from the first time they’d asked him to falsify bank documents. Later, when they were done with him, they worked on his wife. Your husband is seeing a woman called Elahe. He
spends his afternoons with her. When he comes home, it’s her perfume he’s carrying on him. His wife never told him how she knew all this stuff. There were countless fights. She’d had no idea that these fights were what the shadow men were aiming for; they were setting her up for the day she’d be killed.
And he never figured out where these men were. Everywhere and nowhere. They only sent their henchmen. They sent guys on motorcycles who brought you directives, commands, threats, warnings. Until your entire life became a cycle of permanent anxiety. Until you were scared to pull down the window in case a motorcycle thug passed by.
Behdad peered to the north of the city, toward the mountains that you could barely see through the smog. Five years ago he had left this place via the Karaj Highway only to return on the same road. He had stayed in hundreds of no-name places that didn’t even earn a spot on most maps. The longest he’d stayed anywhere was in a village not far from Bandar Abbas, off the Persian Gulf. His real home was this car and the teahouses along the road. If there was one thing he’d learned from his travels, it was this: you can’t build a home on the white lines of the freeway. And now he was here, because . . . well, because the dead had finally summoned him.
In the hallway of the criminal court a reporter had asked him, “What verdict do you think they’ll give Elahe?”
He didn’t even have the energy to hate the reporter, and all the dozens of others who had hounded him during those days. He’d answered, “Verdict? The verdict they give will be for me too. We’re both on trial.”
“No,” the reporter had said, as if Behdad was daft. “I’m asking so you can give a passionate answer for our readers. Don’t be so cold about it, sir.”
“You have your answer. Let your pen invent the passion.”
The crow circled and landed on top of the car. The car wash man shooed it off. “Good as new,” he said to Behdad. “Only I couldn’t get some of those scratches off. For that I’d have to give it a thorough polish. It would take some time.”
Behdad took a wad of money from his pocket and peeled off several large bills. The man examined the money with surprise. It was way more than the price of a car wash. “You can give the rest to the other guys,” Behdad said.
There were no other guys, of course. The man smiled. “I’ll get pastries and take them to the wife and kids. Make them happy. You are too generous.”
He wanted to tell the man that dirty money never brought good luck. And this money—this very money that he had just taken out of his pocket—had passed through their hands, people who turned everything they touched to scum. But what did this car wash man know about all that? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Seven years! That was how long he’d worked at the bank before they approached him. Approach was too weak a word for it; more like they’d made him an offer he could hardly refuse. They’d made it seem easy, and in fact it really was easy to create false letters of credit for imports. The imports were nonexistent. This way they managed to receive government-subsidized exchange rates and then flush the precious dollars out of the country but bring nothing back in return. It was the perfect setup. They’d bought him for peanuts because saying no was not in the equation. Then, when the little extras started coming in, he’d grown too comfortable with the good life, especially with the apartment called Our Tehran Afternoons.
He placed more bills in the man’s hand. “Do something for me, then: get your family some really nice pastries. The very best.”
“May God always provide for you. May your wedding bring you and yours fortune.”
The murderer tried to deny her involvement in the crime. But in no time she confessed, stating that it was out of love that she committed the heinous act. Having taken the key from the victim’s husband’s pocket, she entered the house without being noticed and killed her victim with multiple knife wounds.
The newspapers devoted full-page articles to her. The story sold. It especially sold if they included pictures of her. There was always a waiting list of reporters to interview her. And she always obliged. She was in her element that way, playing the role of the brokenhearted lover to the very end and appearing carefully fragile and sorrow-stricken in the photographs. He recalled how she had always loved taking pictures, often insisting they go to one studio or another where they could get romantic shots with dreamy backgrounds. Funny how his own wife had been the exact opposite of that. A woman of no frills. Never spent money that she didn’t have. Even when she noticed that their living situation had improved far beyond what a simple bank employee pushing thirty could afford, she still refused to spend. Maybe she suspected from the start that the money was dirty and didn’t want to touch it.
The car wash man took the box of newspapers and placed it in the passenger seat up front. “You like reading newspapers obviously.”
“Old newspapers.”
“Good for cleaning windows.”
Behdad said nothing. At the bottom of the box were copies of all the false documents he had ever put through at the bank. Everything was there. And this morning he’d sent scanned copies to every newspaper that had ever run articles about Elahe. In case the papers were too afraid to publish them, he’d taken the precaution of posting them online and forwarded the link around widely. Would they bite? He didn’t know. But he had done his job. At last.
As soon as he sat back in the car, Elahe’s voice was everywhere. She swam alongside the traffic and lingered behind the honk of cars stuck on Hafez Bridge. She was a symphony that never left him, confessing to all who would listen: Yes, I did love him. And yes, I did kill. But who did I kill? I killed our own child. The one-month-old baby that was in my belly. That’s who I killed. All of you whose job it is to collect evidence, why won’t you try to find out the truth? I didn’t kill his wife; I killed US.
A motorcyclist stopped near him at the red light. Must be one of their messengers, he thought. Behdad didn’t turn to look, but rolled his window down to see what the man had to say or deliver to him. A bullet maybe? Even before they’d killed his wife and thrown Elahe behind bars, it was always these bike riders who brought him the messages. Do this, do that . . . get lost and never show your face in this city again.
It had been that easy for them. As easy as creating fictitious bank documents. In the end they had themselves a fictitious murderer too, and were done with him.
The motorcycle rode away without a message or a command.
The offender’s attorney insists that the method of procuring the confession was not legal and that the actual clues found at the crime scene do not correspond to Elahe’s original admission of guilt under duress. Particularly, the attorney adds, the powerful thrusts of the knife to the victim’s body cannot have come from a woman of Elahe’s size and strength.
Elahe’s grave was still warm. He was sure of it. People lied when they said the earth around the dead goes cold. Five years had passed and he still could not put her out of his mind. She was alive for him. And as he turned on Jomhuri Avenue, where a thousand TV screens in the windows of the electronics shops blinked at him, he imagined they’d all simultaneously show the same thing: Elahe’s court appearance. All those LCD screens, large and small, had to be in on his secret. But, of course, they were mostly showing cartoons of fish swimming in the ocean and cats and mice chasing each other. He thought of how the true pulse of a city was always just underneath such wallpaper images. All you had to do was change from the cartoon channel to the city channel and then you’d know the truth. You’d really know. Who am I to take someone else’s life? Life comes from God and only He can take it back. Elahe had wept and wept when she said those words to the judge.
But not once had she ever cried when they were home together in Our Tehran Afternoons.
He parked in front of a flower shop and told the wise-looking old man that he wanted wedding flowers fastened to the car. Lots of them.
“Anything in particular?”
“A few of everything.”
The old guy smiled. “I co
uld do that and charge you a lot of money. You’re the customer and the customer is always right. But it’s a wedding we’re talking about. The flowers attached to the car need to have harmony. There’s an art to it. We shouldn’t overdo it.”
“You decide then. As long as it’s colorful. I want plenty of color.”
It was the one thing his wife and Elahe had had in common: they both loved flowers. They both said they could understand the language of plants. He wondered if he had ever really understood either one of these women. His wife was gone and he’d barely thought of her these five years. As for Elahe, he could never get past those memories of her in court, talking: They write that I like to watch violent movies. Somebody tell me, is Gone with the Wind violent? Is Doctor Zhivago violent?
She had created a stir with such words and the judge would sometimes glare at her as if he wanted to hang her right then and there. Her attorney had protested to the court that from the very first day they’d taken to calling her “the murderer” rather than “the accused.” It was branding someone who had not yet been proven guilty. It was this same lawyer who had insisted on yet a third appeals court. But by then the Elahe who showed up at the stand was hardly the Elahe of Our Tehran Afternoons. Her skin had turned ashen and she played the part of a lover who had been completely defeated. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it wasn’t me. I’ve proved my love already. I could not see him suffering like that.
He had visited her in jail and said, “If you admit to the murder, these guys will leave me alone. I promise after that I’ll get you out of jail myself. It’ll be easy. I was her husband; I have the right to ask the court to let you go. It’s the law.”
