Brides of Blood (22 page)

He went back toward the bazaar, and had lunch in the coffee shop of the Iran Hotel. Exhausted, and with nothing to do until the next train left that evening, he paid fifty thousand rials for a room in which to nap.

He woke around 5:00, craving vodka and his own bed, too groggy to try to catch his train, or to care. He shut his eyes again, and slept through the late-afternoon and evening call to prayer.

After a shower, he went downstairs. His reward for the frustrating trip would be supper in Mashad’s former three-star hotel. The last traces of the dining room’s old elegance were fossilized in the antique carpets on the walls, and the gilded, mismatched bone china. He ordered fesunjun, duck in pomegranate juice with ground walnuts, and maol shair, a nonalcoholic beer.

At the height of the dinner hour the dining room was a quarter full. Three tables away a young mullah was feeding chicken to a seegah twice his age. Beside them, four Orientals jabbered loudly in bad, status symbol English. Under a crystal chandelier marred by missing bulbs a lone diner was studying a menu at a round table for eight. Darius gazed at the thin, gray man, who pointed silently when the waiter came for his order. The man’s plump mustaches, his diffidence, recalled Zaid Rahgozar so vividly that Darius preferred to believe he was hallucinating rather than attach credibility to such coincidence.

His salad was like paper in his chalky mouth. The man
was
Rahgozar, had to be, the amazing coincidence no coincidence at all, but a mutual interest in mycotoxins and the leading poison expert in Iran. When Rahgozar walked from the dining room, Darius trailed him as far as the elevators. He watched the indicator light turn red for the seventh floor, and then went to the desk.

“The man who just went upstairs,” he said. “Mr. Rahgozar—”

The clerk looked up from the register. He was a short man with a nose of such prominence that Darius couldn’t understand how his eyes worked in concert.

“Can you tell me what room he’s in? We were supposed to meet in the lobby, and apparently I’ve just missed him.”

“Seven twenty-seven,” the clerk said. “I’ll ring him for you.”

Darius reached over the desk, and pressed the clerk’s hand against the receiver. “That isn’t necessary.”

He slipped into a phone booth from which he could keep an eye on the elevators. The long-distance operator put him through to Ghaffari’s without difficulty. Sharera picked up.

“Let me talk to Mansur,” he said.

“He isn’t home. I haven’t seen him in two nights. Darius, you know where he stays with his slut. Tell me where, tell me, and I’ll go there now and brain the two of them.”

“I would,” he said, “except I need him. If—When you hear from him, have him call me at the Hotel Iran in Mashad.”

“Have you got a girl, too?”

“This is important, Sharera. Tell him what I said, and if he’s out all night tomorrow, you’ll know he’s here with me.”

When Darius stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor, three of the Orientals were loitering in the corridor, cursing in Japanese as their companion tried to force the key into their door. He waited until they were inside, and then knocked on 727.

“Who’s there?”

A good question. In his excitement at discovering Rahgozar at the hotel he hadn’t planned out how to get close to him.

“… Room service.”

“I haven’t ordered anything.”

“Six jujeh kebab dinners were requested for seven twenty-seven,” Darius said. “I’ll be happy to take the cart back to the kitchen, but
someone
will have to pay for them.”

“One minute.” The door was opened by the thin man with the glossy mustaches, who was wiping his face in a towel. He was in tassel loafers, pants from a black suit, and a tattered undershirt. Soapy water ran off his forearms into the carpeting. Darius waggled his gun, but the thin man was dabbing at his eyes and didn’t see it, or chose not to. Darius shoved him inside.

“My money is in my wallet.” He nodded toward a black jacket on the bed, “but hardly adequate compensation for the loss of a hand.”

Remembering their last confrontation, Darius backed him all the way into the room, and chained the door. Rahgozar blotted his eyes some more, but still didn’t seem to recognize him. “I left the water running,” he said, and started for the bathroom.

“Stay where you are.” Darius went first into the bathroom. A toilet kit lay on the edge of the basin. He folded a straight razor into its handle, pocketed it, and then turned off the water.

The thin man grabbed for his jacket. Darius ripped it away, and patted it down. There were no weapons. In the inside pocket was a passport with a red cover. Darius opened it to a photo taken at a time when the thin man was thirty pounds heavier, significant weight in a ferocious ridge of muscle above his eyes. The information under the picture was in Cyrillic. Darius made his way slowly through the Slavonic letters, spelling out Zaid Rahgozar, age forty-two, birthplace, Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. He flipped the passport to the cover, which was embossed in gold with the emblem of the new government in Moscow.

“This is a Russian diplomatic passport,” he said.

“Very good, you get an A in East European languages. Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to speak to my embassy.” Rahgozar put out his hand, and Darius expected him to snap his fingers. “Give me the phone.”

Darius waved his gun, freezing the thin man beside the bed. He poked the muzzle in his side, and Rahgozar sat.

“No calls.”

“You know the law,” Rahgozar said. “As the holder of a diplomatic passport, I’m immune from interrogation and arrest.”

“Is that Russian law?”

“Quit pretending you’re thick between the ears, Bakhtiar. There’s not a nation on earth that doesn’t respect the special rights of foreign envoys.”

“We have no law like that in the Islamic Republic,” Darius said flatly. He shredded the passport. Tossing the pieces in Rahgozar’s lap, he asked himself which statutes he had violated, how much greater the potential penalty he was bringing down on his head than anything Rahgozar was liable for.

Rahgozar rubbed his hands against the prickling flesh of his upper arms, and pulled the jacket over his shoulders. “This provocation will not be overlooked by my government.”

“Which government is that? Why, in these times, is a native Azerbaijani working for the oppressors of his people?”

“Unlike most Iranians,” Rahgozar said, “I know who my real enemies are, and not all of them are to be found across foreign borders. I demand you call the Russian embassy.”

“You’re in no position to make demands on anyone.”

Rahgozar was watching droplets of blood dribble onto the white bedspread. He touched his chin, smearing crimson on his face. “Let me have the towel. I’m bleeding.”

“It’s something you may have to get used to,” Darius said. “You have been attempting to deal in a large quantity of heroin. Possessing narcotics in this country calls for a sentence of death. If you have anything to say in your favor, you had better say it to me.”

“What heroin? There’s no heroin here. Search the room.”

“Your
friend,
Maryam Lajevardi, is a principal figure in a case involving several brutal murders and the importation of opiates into the Islamic Republic. The drugs are from Afghanistan, where the Russians have been involved intimately for more than a decade. Both the woman and the drugs are missing. It doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to see what you were doing at her apartment.”

“Not with an imagination like yours,” Rahgozar said. “You’d better call.”

“The most recent shipment from Afghanistan was deflected from its destination by an acquaintance of Miss Lajevardi. You’ve been trying to find it. You came to the apartment looking for drugs, but the drugs weren’t there.”

Darius’s spiel, the circuitous line of questioning, was the flourish of a magician’s empty left hand as he readied an object to be materialized before a gaping audience. Now he opened his right hand to the spotlight.

“You’ve been observed at the Imam Reza Medical Center,” he bluffed, “in the vicinity of the poison unit. Why is a foreigner interested in Iranian research into substances with the capability of being utilized as chemical warfare agents?”

Rahgozar moistened a finger on his tongue. He rubbed the red spot on his chin.

A lousy bluffer, Darius tried again. “We know about the mycotoxins.”

“The what?”

“We know why you want them …”

“I’m just a simple dope dealer,” Rahgozar said. “This is beyond me.”

“Where they’re going …”

“Then why are you wasting time on me?”

“And what they’re intended for.”

“Is that supposed to shock me into emptying my heart to you? You
should
know—you’re working for the people who had them stolen.”

Darius, wondering too long what Rahgozar meant, groping for a follow-up, saw his advantage slip away while the thin man stared at him disbelievingly.

“Fuck, you don’t know,” Rahgozar said, “you don’t know a damn thing. They let you learn you were looking for drugs, for thirty kilos of heroin and a Russian who wanted them. But you did better than that, didn’t you? Better than they had any right to expect. You found out about the mycotoxins, too. Except they never told you what they’re for, and you still don’t know, and it bothers you.” He used a corner of the bedspread to wipe the blood off his face. “My God, an Iranian with the vestiges of a conscience. Drop the case while you can, Bakhtiar. You don’t want to end up like Leila Darwish. It’s not a comfortable death.”

“And when I find the mycotoxins,” Darius interrupted, “what do you suggest I do with them? Turn them over to the helpful agent of the peace-loving former Soviet Union?”

“It’s too late. Burn them, or take them into the Gulf and sink them in deep water. You’ll be doing yourself … doing the world a favor.”

“Who are you?” Darius asked.

“A dead man.”

“You’ve been exposed to the mycotoxins?”

“I wish I’d come that close. I’d have swallowed the damn stuff, gotten rid of it that way, if I had to. Do you know what Iranian medical researchers are doing with the small amounts of mycotoxins they’ve been able to obtain?” A veneer of perspiration put a keener edge on Rahgozar’s sharp features. “Dozens of Iraqi prisoners of war still listed as missing in action are housed at the poison unit for use as human guinea pigs. From time to time Dr. Karrubi locks one inside a sealed chamber, and then pumps mycotoxins into the air. Sometimes the guinea pig is given a gas mask to wear. No matter. When the poison comes in contact with his skin in sufficient concentration, he’s done.”

“What is the source of your information? Do you expect me to believe—”

“I don’t care what you believe,” Rahgozar said. “I’m dead anyway.”

“How—”

“You killed me. The others were too stupid to see I’d have to come here, but they’re smart enough to follow you.”

What others? Darius was about to ask. But how did it matter? Whether it was the Komiteh that the thin man was afraid of, or Ashfar and Baraheni, or the Revolutionary Prosecutor, or his own men from the homicide bureau, the only difference it would make to Rahgozar was between a public execution and a private one.

“No one knows I’m in Mashad,” he said.

Rahgozar laughed at him.

“We’re a civilized race,” Darius said in a voice so calm that its soothing effect was not lost on himself. “Don’t be too quick to accept the things that have been drummed into your head about us. You’re not going to be harmed. I’ll do what I can for you, but first you have to tell me everything.”

“You’re a flea, Bakhtiar, a flea on the backside of a beast that’s going to scratch you out of its hide when you become too much of a nuisance. What can you do for me?”

“I give you my word, my word as a man of conscience, to help.”

“No good. Call the embassy. It’s my only chance.”

Darius shook his head. “First tell me the connection between the heroin and the mycotoxins.”

“You get nothing till you make the call.”

“The Darwish girl … How was she exposed to the mycotoxins?”

“Time is being wasted.” Rahgozar fished a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket. “Let me have a li—”

Darius followed his gaze to the knob twisting in the door. He drew his shoulder gun as the panel was hammered open and four men rushed inside, a collage of khaki shirts and trousers, short hair and unkempt beards, the other constant the large military revolver clenched in each intruder’s hand. Four weapons trained on him, and he dropped his gun on the floor. Rahgozar sat where he was, chewing fiercely on the unlit cigarette.

The intruders were badly disorganized. They prowled around the room looking in the closets and drawers, going over territory their companions had covered, individually examining the contents of Rahgozar’s new suitcase, and peering out the windows and into the corridor while Darius anticipated the momentary arrival of reinforcements or enemies. None of them said anything until the youngest, a man of no more than thirty, gave up the search and came over to where Darius stood beside the bed.

“We are Revolutionary Guards,” he said. “We heard what was happening and came in to save you.”

“What was happening?” Darius asked. “Nothing was happening here.”

“This man is a Russian agent. He was threatening your life and the security of the Islamic Republic. We have been following him since he arrived in our city.”

“I’ve had him under watch for several hours,” Darius said. “No one else was near him.”

“They’ve been on your tail,” Rahgozar said. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you.”

A Guardsman wearing white socks inside buffalo skin sandals swung his gun across Rahgozar’s mouth, mashing the cigarette against the thin man’s cheek. Rahgozar brushed it away, and with the tip of his tongue flicked out bits of broken teeth as though they were tobacco crumbs.

“We will take over from you now,” the young Guardsman said to Darius, “and continue the questioning.” He transferred the heavy gun to the other hand, and pointed it at Rahgozar. “Put on your shoes,” he commanded.

When Rahgozar made no move to obey, the man in the sandals swung his pistol again. Rahgozar leaned slightly out of the way and took him by the arm. A short, snapping motion of his wrist launched him across the room, where he crash-landed against the window, squirting blood from both nostrils onto the glass. Rahgozar laced his shoes. He removed a fresh shirt from the valise and fastened the sleeves with silver cuff links. He put his jacket on over it and stood with his arms hanging loosely at his sides.