“Where do you want to go?”
“Persepolis.”
Her pony tail bobbed around her shoulders as she nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, you’ll love Persepolis! There’s nothing else like it in the world!”
“So I’ve heard. Can we get there by car?”
“Sure, but it’s hard driving through a lot of desert. It’s not at all like in the States.” She paused and thoughtfully ran a pretty finger around the rim of her cup. “Also, there’s something you should know about Iranian drivers. They’re very—”
“I like deserts, and New York taxi drivers are the worst in the world.”
Kathy arched a pale eyebrow; it looked like a warning. “We can go by plane much easier if you have the money.”
Money was no problem; the fact that Arsenjani’s men would undoubtedly be watching the airport was. “I prefer a car; that is, if you don’t mind cars.”
“Are you kidding? I don’t like planes.”
“Fine. How far is it?”
“About seven hundred kilometers to the south. It’s a good nine-hour drive.”
“Any place between here and there we can stop and rest?”
“Oh, I should say so. Persepolis is a few kilometers south of Shiraz, and Esfahan is about halfway. You’ll love Esfahan too.” Kathy was certainly not lacking for enthusiasm, or anything else as far as I could see. She swallowed and shook her head forcefully. “But I must tell you that the drivers are—”
“I want to see some of the countryside,” I interrupted. “Don’t worry; I’m a good driver.”
“Well,” she sighed, clapping her hands together in a gesture that could have been either enthusiasm or resignation, I’m game if you are.”
I wrote out three hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks and gave them to her, along with a list of items. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to pick up these things for me, along with a small, light suitcase. Also, if you would, rent the car. Keep what’s left over as an advance. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, looking at the list. On her open face I could see her wondering why I didn’t do my own shopping, but she didn’t ask questions.
“Good. I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning, same time. And there’s one more thing I’d like you to do for me.” I wrote down the names Nasser Razvan, Mehdi Zahedi as a flyer, Firouz Maleki, Tabrizi, and handed the list to her. “I’d like you to look in the Tehran directory and see if you can find any of these names. If so, write down the addresses.”
She glanced at the list. “There are probably dozens of Tabrizis,” she said. “It’s a common name.”
“All right,” I said reluctantly, “cross that one off.” There was no certainty Neptune’s family lived in Tehran, no time to go traipsing around, and I was certain Garth wouldn’t be with them anyway.
Kathy stared at me for a few moments, her smile slowly fading. “I hope you’re not involved in anything illegal, Dr. Frederickson.”
The question startled me. “No,” I said evenly. “What could possibly be illegal about looking up some names?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “But you must remember that Iran is not the United States. People here do not do things that even appear unusual. The SAVAK is everywhere.”
“Okay, Kathy,” I said, deciding that a little paranoia is a healthy thing to have in a police state, “I’ll bear that in mind.”
I’d originally planned to leave my things behind in my room as a smoke screen, but I changed my mind. It didn’t seem to serve any purpose; once I was gone, Arsenjani would certainly know it. Besides, up to that point I hadn’t done anything overtly suspicious, and I wanted to keep it that way.
The next morning I packed and went down to the hotel’s breakfast room. There’d been a changing of the guard; I picked the tall, swarthy man at a corner table, but it could just as easily have been the fat man who’d just risen and was paying his bill. It was probably both. I ate leisurely, then picked up my suitcase and went to the front desk. The desk clerk, with his expensive toupee and capped teeth, looked like a moonlighting actor.
“I’d like to pay my bill.”
The clerk quickly leafed through his ledger, then glanced up and flashed a pound or so of shiny porcelain. “Your bill will be taken care of, Dr. Frederickson. Are you returning home?”
“No, I thought I’d get out and see a bit of the country.”
“I’ll call for your guide,” he said, reaching for a telephone.
“No, thank you,” I said with what I hoped was just the right amount of firmness. “I prefer traveling on my own.”
“Very well,” he said, looking slightly worried as he replaced the receiver. “Where will you be going?”
“Oh, I thought I’d head north.”
“Ah, the Caspian! It is wonderful this time of year! Be sure to try the caviar; it’s fresher there.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
“May I call you a taxi?”
“No, thanks. I’m traveling light, and I’d like to walk around a bit. I’ll catch a taxi to the airport later.”
“Enjoy your trip, sir.”
I walked quickly from the hotel. This time my tail, whoever he or she might be, was a top professional. Still, I could feel his presence and I knew that Arsenjani wasn’t likely to buy two crowd scenes in a row. This time the break would have to be complete, and I wasted no time. Five minutes from the hotel I ducked into an alleyway, sprinted down it, went into a shop and exited through the front door. Ten minutes later, just to make certain, I repeated the same maneuver before heading for the bazaar.
Kathy was waiting for me in a Peykan, a bulky car that consisted of an Iranian-made frame with a Mercedes-Benz engine. “It looks good,” I said with only a slight trace of skepticism, “but will it run?”
“Definitely, Master,” she said with a wide grin. “It’s not pretty, but it’s sturdy and dependable—the best thing for the desert.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, sliding in behind the wheel and pulling the seat all the way up before turning on the ignition.
“Dr. Frederickson,” Kathy said uneasily, “I’ll be happy to drive—if you want me to?”
“Do dwarf motorists make you uneasy?” I asked gently.
“Oh, no, sir,” she exclaimed, flushing. “You just don’t understand!”
“I like to drive. How did you make out with those names I gave you?”
“I’m sorry, sir. None of the names were listed.”
Somehow I felt that Nasser Razvan, if he really was a member of the SAVAK, should have been, regardless of where he’d been operating for the past year or so. But I wasn’t really surprised. As I pulled out into the traffic, Kathy tensed. Her hands went to her mouth and her face became almost bloodless. I wondered why.
13
It didn’t take long for me to discover the reason for Kathy’s disquiet; driving in Tehran was strictly a question of survival. It took less than a minute at this time of day to find that Tehran’s only rules of the road could be equally applicable to trench warfare. Drivers bore down on me from both sides of the street; I watched a car passing another car, both of these cars passing a third which had wandered over onto the wrong side of a double line. Red lights seemed to serve primarily as a casual warning that there might be cars coming through an intersection. The behavior of the average motorist at any red light was to slow down, then inch out into the path of the oncoming cars until one driver lost his nerve and let the other driver through. Throughout the city, it seemed, driving was one prolonged game of Tehran Chicken. I tried to think of something witty to say, but it came out through clenched teeth as a kind of hysterical cackle.
“It’s strange,” Kathy murmured through her own clenched teeth. “On the one hand, Iranians are the most courteous and hospitable people in the world—that is, when they’re dealing with you on a personal basis. On the road, at the wheel of a machine, they’re not to be believed. Most of the American companies here forbid their
executives to drive at all anywhere in Iran. You can see why.”
“Yup,” I said tightly. It seemed an incredibly sane policy. I would have added a few other things, but I was too busy dodging cars. Two Peykans were crumpled into each other in the opposite lane, halting all traffic while their drivers slugged away at each other.
“But there’s a tension underneath all that courtesy,” Kathy continued thoughtfully. “You can feel it. I guess they build up a lot of frustration opening doors for each other. A car’s so impersonal; I suppose they take out all their anger on each other when they get in one.”
Crazy sociology, but probably true. I nodded my head and mumbled something unintelligible as I continued my life-and-death struggle to get out of the city.
Forty-five minutes later we were on the outskirts of Tehran. Ahead of us, stretching south to the horizon, was the desert. I immediately felt an almost overwhelming sense of isolation; we’d been cast adrift from the cosmopolitan battleship of Tehran in a small, four-wheeled raft on a hot ocean of desert where time seemed to run backward. Kathy, for all her experience, seemed to sense this too. She was hunched down in her seat, hands clasped tightly in her lap as she stared out the window at the wasteland of mountains and sand, a devil’s playground with its own very special kind of barren, deadly beauty.
I was suddenly very conscious of the car; the desert was no place to break down, and the hum of the motor, the orchestrated jangle of thousands of moving parts, became magnified and took on special meaning.
“I have a friend who’s a soldier in the army,” Kathy said quietly, not taking her eyes off the alien world outside. “Twice a year they go out into the desert for maneuvers. Once, near here, some of the jeeps bogged down about three kilometers off the road. The men got out and walked another kilometer, but that was as far as they could go. There are places out there where the sand will suck a man right under.”
I thought she would say more, but she didn’t. I kept my eyes on the narrow, winding road ahead. The desert had thrown a cloak around both of us—a sudden, sharp reminder that life in many areas of the earth is constantly lived in the shadow of death. I remembered the music of the santur.
Kathy’s mood lifted when we reached Ghom, a small city about halfway on the road to Esfahan. She sat up straight and pointed to the crowds of women in chadors. “This is a very holy city,” she said, sounding like a tourist guide. “The Moslem holy men used to literally stone tourists; that is, when they weren’t spitting on them or kicking them.”
“Very holy of them.”
Kathy laughed politely. “Ghom was a very dangerous place for foreigners, even Moslem foreigners. That was bad for tourism, so the Shah decided to do something about it. The holy men, naturally, opposed him. One night the Shah sent in a hundred of his best troops to beat up all the holy men. That was the end of the problem. Ever since then, Ghom has welcomed tourists.” Kathy made no attempt to hide the admiration in her voice. “Now Ghom has grown. It’s entering the twentieth century, and all because of the Shahanshah.” She half-turned in her seat and touched my arm. “He is a very great man.”
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Starved.”
“Is it safe to eat here?”
“It’s all right to eat, but stay away from the water.”
“Cholera?”
She shrugged. “There’s always that danger. At the least, you’re likely to get T.T.”
“‘T.T.’?”
“Tehran Tummy: diarrhea. But there’s a good restaurant around the corner. Great chelo kabob.”
During lunch we spoke of other things while I wondered how Arsenjani was taking the news that I was missing. When we returned to the car I found that it had been washed, and I gave the man standing next to it with a wet rag enough tomans for a meal.
I invented a weak cover story about Nasser Razvan, Mehdi Zahedi and Firouz Maleki being acquaintances from the United States and had Kathy make a few more inquiries. That didn’t take long in Ghom, and she turned up nothing. We headed back out into the desert. Now the heat was a physical presence beating down on the roof of the car, making the air in our lungs heavy and sodden.
The afternoon wore on. I turned a bend and saw the sun setting behind a gargantuan army track that had tipped over on its side. Kathy was sleeping. I gently brought the car to a stop and got out to make sure the wreck was not recent, and that no one was injured. The cab was empty, and there was no way of determining how long the truck had been there; the desert air was dry as the sand, and I imagined that machinery could remain there for a long time without rusting.
A slight movement to my left attracted my attention, and I turned. There was a shack a few hundred yards away, almost obscured by a dune. In front of the shack a man was offering his praise to Allah; he was kneeling on a prayer rug, arms extended in front of him, his forehead touching the cooling sand. The dead, useless truck loomed in the foreground like a mummified dinosaur. I could not even imagine how the man sustained himself; he couldn’t farm the sand, and there was no sign of any vehicle that could transport him to and from Ghom, Tehran or Esfahan. Still, he’d made it through one more day, and that was sufficient cause for him to offer praise and thanks to his God.
I walked slowly back to the car and found Kathy awake, brushing her hair.
“It’s not far now,” the girl said, her voice burnished by sleep. I got back behind the wheel and drove.
The outskirts of Esfahan, unlike those of Tehran, were meticulously clean and neat, the gray streets sprinkled with colorful shops. I’d had it for the day. “Are there any good hotels around here?”
“One of the finest in the world, but it’s expensive.”
“We can afford it.” Considering my situation, I wasn’t going to worry about money; I might wind up a very small overturned truck, but since Arsenjani had funded the trip in the first place, I was going to make sure I went out in style.
“The Shah Abbas is about five blocks straight ahead.”
The Shah Abbas was everything Kathy had said it was, and more. Built on the site of an ancient caravansary—a meeting place of the caravans—the hotel displayed the kind of elegance that millions of dollars in government-supplied oil money can buy. And the elegance wasn’t all facade; the staff was excellently trained, probably in Switzerland, and the service was impeccable. Unfortunately, I was in no mood to enjoy it; I was running low on adrenaline, gnarled taut with tension. I decided we’d fly the rest of the way.
In the morning, Kathy’s face was beaming as she waited for me in the lobby.
“You look cheerful,” I said. “Desert driving suits you.”
“I feel like I’m finally starting to earn my keep,” she said brightly. “You remember those names you asked me to look up? Well, I found one of them.”
That woke me up. “What did you find out?”
“I got up early and checked through the Esfahan directory. There’s a Nasser Razvan listed. I asked a few questions and it turns out that the Razvans are a well-known and very rich family. Their home’s about half an hour’s drive from the city.”
The Nasser Razvan listed could well be the father. It figured: the young SAVAK agent from the well-to-do family. “Can you find out how to get there?”
“I already know. Do you think your friend will be there?”
“If he’s not, I’ll just say hello to the family.”
“We’ll need another car. I turned the other one in last night.”
I motioned to the desk clerk.
The Razvan home could have been more accurately described as a plantation; it stretched for miles in all directions: acres of carefully tilled land filled with crops and fruit trees. I steered the car into the main drive and stopped in front of a massive wrought-iron gate. There was a cluster of servants’ quarters behind and to the left of the gate. Farther up the drive, on the crest of a knoll, was the main compound, a Xanadu of multilevel dwellings all painted a glistening white. The front yard was a meadow boasting thr
ee Olympic-size pools of varying depths.
I pushed the buzzer on the gate. Instantly a man appeared at the door of one of the servants’ houses and trotted to the gate. “I’m Dr. Frederickson,” I said in Farsi. Kathy gave me a surprised sidelong glance. “This is Miss Martin. We’re friends of the younger Nasser Razvan and have come to pay our respects to the family.” The servant pondered this for a moment, then went back inside his house, presumably to telephone the main compound. I turned to Kathy. “From here on in, I’ll do the talking.”
Kathy nodded, her green eyes filled with questions. “You speak Farsi quite well.”
“Just a few polite phrases,” I said, avoiding her gaze.
The servant emerged once more and opened the gate. I got back into the car and drove it slowly up the driveway, then parked in front of the largest of the houses at the top of the knoll. A man and woman on the far side of middle age came out the front door and walked toward us at a brisk pace, the woman a few steps behind her husband. Both had the robust good looks and sheen of health that, after a certain age, are usually by-products of money. Twenty years before, the woman had been ravishing; now she was handsome, dignified. The man had pure white hair, and I put his age at around sixty. His eyes were a clear blue, and he moved with an air of strength and character. I suspected he’d earned his money; a man doesn’t develop the kind of metallic glint he had in his eyes by clipping coupons or sitting around watching oil flow through his backyard.
When I got out of the car, he offered me his hand. His grip was firm. “Our servant tells us you are friends of my son,” the man said in heavily accented but intelligible English.
“Forgive us for imposing on you like this,” I said, “but I was in a discussion involving your son and he certainly sounded like a man I’d like to meet. We were told he lived here, and I thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
The man reached back and squeezed his beaming wife’s hand. “Nasser is not here, but Shayesteh and I are very happy that you’ve come. You will, of course, stay for breakfast. My wife does not speak English, but if she could she would insist as I do.”
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