City of Whispering Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “I told you: he’s here as an errand boy for the Shah.”

  “But what—”

  “I can’t talk to you anymore,” he said, forcing the words through clenched teeth. There were tears in his eyes, tears of rage—or something else that I could not yet comprehend.

  “There’s more to this business, isn’t there?” I asked quietly. “Why can’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Go look for your man in some sewer!”

  My interview with Ali Azad was obviously over, and I walked into the outer office. Anna glanced up at me and smiled nervously. On the opposite wall, pools of reflected fluorescent light danced across the photograph of the ruins. In one corner of the picture the torso of a two-headed bull rested in the dust on its crumbled haunches. Behind it stood the remnants of an archway with men and animals carved into its stone facade. There were other such columns and monuments marching off into the distance where they came to an abrupt halt at the base of a series of steep foothills. Even on the backdrop of mountains men had left their mark, but the mountains were too far away for me to determine exactly what form the marks had taken. As I stared at this surreal jumble, it suddenly struck me that I was dealing with people from a culture that was very old, very complex, and—perhaps—finally beyond the ken of an American who’d actually considered it a big deal when his own country had celebrated its two-hundredth birthday.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to ask you,” I said, turning back to the young man.

  “I’ve said too much already. I’ll speak no more of this matter.”

  “What was happening in Iran last October?”

  Azad’s smile was more a grimace; his eyes remained smooth crystals of brown ice. “You might call it a celebration of a celebration.”

  “You’re being obtuse.”

  “You remember the twenty-five-hundredth-year celebration?”

  “I do.”

  “Oh, that was a sight,” he said mockingly. “The world’s greatest collection of freeloaders all gathered together in one spot, supposedly to honor Iran but eating French food flown in every day specially for the occasion. Anyway, the biggest thing in Iran last October was an art festival commemorating that celebration. I assume that’s what you’re referring to.”

  “I’m not sure what I was referring to, but I think you’ve answered my question.”

  “God, how I hate the arrogance of that man!” Azad spat out. “In a nation where the infant mortality rate is more than fifty percent, where eighty percent of the population is illiterate and more than half do not have enough to eat, our Shahanshah, our glorious King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, spent more than fifty million dollars to celebrate twenty-five hundred years of monarchy.”

  3

  Ali Azad had given me a lot of heat on Iranian politics, but nothing but smoke on Phil Statler’s missing strongman. At the moment I wasn’t prepared to take too much of what the Iranian had said at face value; the man was simply too emotional. It was time to talk to Darius.

  The professor wasn’t in his office, and when I called his home there was no answer. I still had two hours before I was scheduled to teach a seminar; not wanting to waste them, I climbed into my Volkswagen and drove uptown to my brother’s precinct. I was told he was having lunch in the small restaurant across the street.

  I was happy for the excuse to see Garth. The pressure cooker that was New York City was making strangers of us, and I regretted it. Garth, along with my parents, had been the calm eye in the storm of family tragedy that had been my birth. While my other relatives were moaning and debating which limb of the family tree I’d dropped from, my parents had been buying me books and Garth had been reading them to me; Garth had carried me on his shoulders, literally and figuratively, across the bleak, lunar landscape of my childhood, leaving behind a trail of broken noses attesting to his touchiness on the subject of jokes about his dwarf brother. It was this simple kindness toward another human being who was at the same time a source of considerable embarrassment that would always mark Garth, in my eyes, as a truly great man. I loved him, and wished that life could be as kind to him as he’d been to me.

  He’d married young, only to see his wife and twin baby daughters killed in a highway smashup a year and a half later; the loss had seemed to jerk his life permanently off track. Although on the surface he seemed to carry his grief well, I always knew better. His scars had never healed, and he’d traded the isolation of being a sheriff in the Great Plains country for the even greater isolation of being a police detective in the jungle of glass and steel that was New York City. A compleat professional, he was nonetheless—to those who knew him—a lonely, shy man prone to spells of deep depression and chronic insomnia.

  But he’d been deliriously happy—and, I assumed, sleeping like an exhausted lover—for the past few weeks, and the reason for this rejuvenated mental health was sitting next to Garth’s gaunt, rawboned frame at a rear table in the restaurant. Neptune Tabrizi was five feet five of Middle East exotica; physical perfection except, perhaps, for a little plumpness in the bust—which was just fine for a confirmed breast man like my brother. Neptune was thirty-nine, and her jet black hair was naturally streaked with individual gray hairs, providing her with an ebony-and-silver crown that no hairdresser in the world could have matched. She had almond-colored eyes, olive skin and a full mouth with perfect teeth; the constant laughter in her face and voice was the only makeup she’d ever need. She worked for the Celanese Corporation, and she’d met Garth when he’d investigated the burglary of her Riverside Plaza apartment in early February. They’d been inseparable ever since. As far as I was concerned, Neptune was the best thing that had ever happened to Garth—and that included his first wife, whom I’d never much liked anyway.

  “Company!” I announced, executing a little two-step in front of their table.

  “Company,” Garth groaned, while Neptune giggled and clapped her hands.

  “Hello, beautiful,” I said, kissing Neptune on the cheek.

  She put her hand behind my neck and kissed me on the mouth. “Hello, you precious little thing.”

  I sighed and put my hand over my heart. “You’re the only person in the world who could call me a precious little thing and not make me want to hit them.”

  Garth picked up a table knife and grinned wickedly. “Neptune’s the only person in the world who’d think you were precious—little thing.”

  “Arrgh! Gasp! Choke!” I snatched up Neptune’s knife and fenced with my brother until we’d managed to disturb the entire restaurant, at which point I made an apologetic bow to the angry manager and sat down next to Neptune.

  “You’re both crazy!” Neptune whispered with delight.

  “Has my brother found your jewelry yet?”

  She shook her head. “And here I thought I could assure myself of special treatment by falling in love with the investigating detective.”

  That made Garth uncomfortable, although I didn’t think Neptune noticed. “Who’s minding the ivory tower, brother?” he asked me.

  “That task has fallen to my subordinates for the day,” I said archly. “I am exploring the world of the great unwashed, the selfless guardians of our society.”

  “And what role are we playing today?”

  “I have shed my cloak of anonymous, mild-mannered professor to reveal my true identity.”

  Garth almost smiled. “That would be Master Investigator?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  The waiter brought salad and looked inquiringly at me. I shook my head.

  “Bad week for investigators,” Garth said seriously. “Day before yesterday we fished a colleague of yours out of the East River.”

  “Who?”

  “John Simpson. You know him?”

  “No.”

  Garth shrugged and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “What are you working on?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. I’m looking for a missing Iranian.” I showed him Khordad’s photogr
aph. “His name’s Hassan Khordad. I wanted to check the Missing Persons and morgue sheets.”

  “You have his stats?”

  “They’re on the back of the photo.”

  Garth flipped the photograph over and studied the information sheet taped to the back. Neptune had pushed her salad to one side and was watching him with intense interest. “Performer?” Garth asked.

  “Circus; muscle act.”

  Garth copied the name and stats in his pocket pad and handed me back the photo. “I’ll check it out. Get back to me this afternoon.”

  “God, I’ve never seen you so cooperative. It must be love. By the way: if it makes any difference, he was supposed to be on his way to New York when he dropped out of sight.”

  “Mongo should try The Santur,” Neptune said to Garth.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Neptune touched my hand. “It’s a nightclub just down the street. If your man’s Iranian and he’s been anywhere near the city, chances are he may have shown up there at least once. Someone may know him or remember seeing him there.” She turned to Garth. “Garth, let’s go with him.”

  “Uh, I had other plans for this evening, sweetheart.”

  She squeezed his arm hard. “But I’d really like to go,” she said seriously. “It’s all very exciting.”

  Garth shot me an icy warning look; Garth was horny.

  “Sorry, beautiful,” I said, rising, “but I never mix business with pleasure. With you along, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my incredibly exciting, perilous work. Thanks, folks. See you.”

  After shaving and showering at my apartment, I went downstairs and had copies made of Khordad’s photo. Then I drove back over to the university to teach my seminar. In the evening I phoned Garth, who told me that Khordad’s name was on an M.P. list from Chicago, but that was all. His body wasn’t in the morgue, so it looked as though I’d have to do things the hard way, as usual.

  I called a cab, which took me across town. I found The Santur tucked away between a dry-cleaning store and an antique shop. The club was a puddle of laughter in the middle of an otherwise somber neighborhood that barricaded itself behind thick ribbons of steel when darkness came. Neon and music dribbled out into the darkened street; it was still early in the evening, but a steady stream of people flowed back and forth through the painted doors.

  Inside, I found myself sucked into the middle of a milling crowd where all attempts at conversation vied with a wailing din of Eastern music. I steered toward the sound of clinking glasses to my left, wedged myself into a corner of the bar and managed to signal the bartender.

  From the vantage point of my bar stool, I sipped my Scotch on the rocks and studied the layout of the club. There was a slightly elevated platform in the bar area near the entrance; to the rear was a large dining area and dance floor. The music came from a stage to the right of the dance floor, where a group of dark-skinned Middle Eastern musicians held forth. The lead instrument was some kind of reed affair which sounded like a cross between a saxophone and an oboe, its intricate rhythms flitting, sweeping and dancing atop a steady beat laid down by a set of what looked like bongo drums, but were larger.

  After a few minutes the closeness of the room, the Scotch and the strange, haunting quality of the atonal music began to have an effect; I whooped along with the others at a particularly exciting passage of music. People stared, but strangers usually stared; I simply nodded my head and stared back. It was a technique that invariably worked. The staring number finished, I continued my inspection of the club.

  Like the bar, the dining and dancing area was jammed with people. Most of the faces looked foreign and were probably Iranian; they had the same dusky features and dark hair as the man whose picture I carried in my pocket. There were a few Americans—mostly tourist types, with one notable exception; this particular American was dressed in an expensive suit, and his gold watchband glittered somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand dollars. Barely holding his own against a waistline that was running to fat, he had a florid face that was bracketed by thick, reddish sideburns which only served to draw attention to the fact that the rest of his head was bald. I put his age at around fifty.

  What set him apart were his dinner companions and his bearing; unlike the other Americans, he seemed completely at home in The Santur as he laughed and joked with the Iranian men and women on either side of him. Occasionally he would rise and dance with a woman. She wore a quarter-inch-wide gold wedding band; from the way they danced, I hoped she was the American’s wife.

  A man sitting alone at an adjacent table rose and staggered drunkenly toward the exit. I walked quickly across the room and sat down in his seat. The American’s table was directly behind me.

  The dancers were performing a type of circle dance, frequently stopping to clap their hands or stamp their feet as if to punctuate their difficult in-and-out, back-and-forth maneuvers. A few non-Iranians joined in, but they were clumsy and always at least a half beat behind the others. The man with the sideburns was the exception again; he moved gracefully with the music, anticipating every move, swaying with the rhythms. Finally the music soared to a crescendo, then stopped; the exhausted dancers began making their way back to their seats. The American and his Iranian wife, their faces flushed with heat and pleasure, passed close to my chair.

  I smiled and spoke to the man. “That looks like a lot of fun, and you look right at home. I envy you.”

  The woman reacted first, lightly touching my arm and smiling. Her face, like Anna’s, seemed to carry a vast reservoir of emotions close to the surface; her eyes were limpid and hot, too large for the rest of her face, which was thin and ethereal. She filled her dress well, but her magnetism was completely internal. The man projected the opposite image; his eyes were cold, polished green agates pushed into the puffy flesh of his face. Off the dance floor, up close, he seemed stiff and defensive, like a man who’d tried to buy the grace that sometimes comes with culture and been shortchanged. As he studied me his eyes seemed to constantly change focus, as though he were looking at me through a series of emotional lenses. Finally he smiled thinly and asked me something in Farsi.

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “I only know a few words. Actually, my interest in Iran is fairly recent—but growing fast.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place if you’re interested in Iran,” the man said over the easy ripple of the woman’s laughter.

  “Here,” the woman said, indicating an empty chair at their table. “Come and join us.”

  “Bob Frederickson,” I said, extending my hand as I moved to the table. The man’s grip was weak, bony and uneven for his size, as if his hand had been broken and never properly reset.

  “Orrin Bannon,” the man said. “This is my wife, Soussan.”

  The woman and I exchanged pleasantries; then I settled back in my seat and tried to think of a way to gracefully steer the conversation around to the picture and poster folded in my pocket. The band had left the stage for the bar, and the platform was now bare except for a single straight-backed chair and a low, broad bench. The lights blinked on and off.

  Soussan Bannon leaned across her husband. “The man you’re about to hear is the greatest santur player in the world,” she whispered to me. “His name is Omar.”

  “Then a santur is something besides the name of this place?”

  “Yes. It is an instrument. You will see.”

  Omar stepped from behind a green velvet curtain to my left and walked across the floor to the stage. A thin, short man with sharp, angular features and graying hair, he would have been lost in a crowd of three—except for the instrument he carried under his arm; its mere presence seemed to stiffen his spine, and he carried it as a man might carry his soul. The instrument consisted of a hollow wooden sounding board about a yard long and a foot wide. The surface of the board was covered with taut gut strings anchored on either side of the board by steel tuning pegs.

  Omar cocked his head to one si
de and smiled shyly at the audience, then sat down and positioned his santur on the bench in front of him. He removed a metal device from his pocket and began an intricate tuning procedure with a fragile wooden mallet shaped like a toothbrush which he held in his other hand. Occasionally he would merely brush the strings with the side of the tiny mallet and the air would fill with a lush, enameled sound, like the whirring wings of a flock of metal birds.

  There was no pause between tuning and actual performance; one merged into the other, until finally both hands held the delicate mallets which moved in a perpetual blur, like hummingbirds’ wings, over the santur. Separate notes and chords were woven together into a curtain of sound that was exquisitely finespun, yet overwhelmingly powerful with a sinewy, achingly beautiful force that spoke to me of sadness, of mountains and heat and ruined, ghostly cities; I heard the terrible, deadly beauty that must be the soul of the desert.

  The music, even the more spirited passages, seemed built on scales of sadness; the santur was a weeping instrument that worshiped the trinity of life, death and land, dripping tears over this triumvirate of existence that for the Iranian, I realized, must seem one. There was an air of immediacy to the music—thousands of split-second decisions enforced by a pair of flying hands building tiers of chords through which individual notes scampered and dipped like fragments of half-remembered dreams.

  Then it was over, the last delicate chords drifting away like wisps of clouds. The lights came up. Somewhere behind me a woman was softly crying. Omar acknowledged the applause with a slight bow, then stood with his santur and walked back through the velvet curtain.

  Bannon lighted a cigarette. “Did you like it?” he asked gruffly.

  I tried to think of something original to say, and couldn’t. “It was beautiful,” I said simply. “I’ve never heard anything quite like it. Why isn’t Omar in Iran? I wouldn’t think there’d be much demand for santur players in the United States.”

  “There isn’t, but there is some money in it for him here. More than in Iran.”