Brides of Blood (8 page)

Spasms of light glinted off rubble piled in a doorway like tailings from a vein of base metal. Darius stood on the broken brick eye to eye with a picture of the Imam that stared down on a mahogany desk set among file cabinets and empty bookcases. Farhad was slumped behind the desk in an oversize leather chair with his head against his shoulder. He was wearing a knit skullcap and a long-sleeve shirt rolled up above one elbow. A shoelace was knotted around his scarred bicep; the vein bulged purple in sallow skin. A burning candle was glued to the desktop beside a spoon that was bent back against its rusted handle.

“Hey,” Darius said. “Hey, you, wake up. The party’s over.”

Farhad’s shoulder was a spindly lever that propelled him toward the floor when it was disturbed. Darius grabbed him under the arms and let him down slowly on his back. He pressed an ear to Farhad’s chest, but heard only his own blood pulsing through his head. Like an errant dart in the suitcase maker’s pants cuff was a hypodermic needle attached to a reddish eyedropper.

Ghaffari arrived behind the morgue attendants, who stood out of the way while he photographed the body. With each flash the dead man’s image was fixed as indelibly in Darius’s brain as on film. Ghaffari swept a light into the corners, got down on his knees to follow a trail of white powder under the desk to a crushed bit of chalk. He took a second set of pictures to be safe, then went outside to wait with Darius while the body was strapped onto a gurney.

“It’s a successful man who dies doing what he likes best, so it’s fair to say he led a fulfilling life.” Ghaffari loaded a fresh roll of film into his camera.

“Besides, with an addict what else can you expect? I know what you’re thinking, but have you ever heard of one dying of old age?”

“The timing is too convenient,” Darius said. “If he’d kicked off tomorrow, or the day after, then I might be persuaded it was accidental.”

“That’s all it was. No one needed him silenced, because he had nothing of importance to say. He was toying with you. He didn’t know any more than we do.”

“Possibly.” Darius was distracted by the corpse being carried out through a window. “Still, for my only witness to die just as we were about to talk—”

“Is pure coincidence,” Ghaffari said. “Where do we go from here?”

“You go with him to the morgue. Stay till Baghai tells you exactly how he died.” They walked across the street, and Darius poked his head through the beaded curtain of a wedding bower. Edged in candle stubs on a bed of withered roses was a framed portrait of a teenage boy who had died on the Basra front. Droplets of red wax clung to the cheeks like tears of blood. “I’m going back to Shemiran.”

“Why?” Ghaffari snapped two pictures of the school building. “We’ve squeezed that lemon dry.”

“What else is there?”

The lights were on at the apartment complex, but
OUT OF SERVICE
signs were taped to the elevator doors. Darius climbed to the top floor, and worked his way downstairs through tenants who insisted they were asleep, or not at home when the body was placed in the court. The tenth-story landing resonated with Beatles music, which he traced to an apartment in the line whose fourth-floor resident was the old man with the rugs. He knocked. A noisy argument started up in another unit, and he let his eyes drift past the elevator and back along the other wall through the garbage strewn around the incinerator. When he turned to the door again, a pinpoint of light was focused between his eyes.

“
Who is it?
”

The voice was a husky contralto in counterpoint with the music. The fifth Beatle, he thought, like the Twelfth Imam—the Lord of the Age, who had disappeared in the ninth century—was fated to walk the earth unrecognized into eternity. He pulled out his ID and dangled it up to the peephole like a small fish he’d caught. “Police,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“Open up, please.”

“I’m not that interested.”

“Immediately.”

Two dead bolts turned, and he was looking at a green-eyed girl whose straight blonde hair danced on her slight shoulders. The pale glow of her cheeks he credited to an insufficient diet and golden down that was faintly visible in harsh lamplight. More startling than her beauty was her boldness in not hiding it. She was wearing a sleeveless, above-the-knee dress of thin summer fabric, the neckline a gentle V between lightly freckled breasts.

The first question was automatic: “Is your husband at home?”

“I have no husband.”

Single women were discouraged from living alone. Women like her did not remain single for long. His experience had been that few homicide investigations didn’t pose more questions than they answered. Contradiction was the skeleton on which the best cases were fleshed.

He stepped inside without being invited. He had seen the same shabby broadloom rug and convertible couch, the bruised table and chairs in other apartments that he had come to recognize as furnished units. The music blared from a tape player on the bathroom sink beside several articles of soapy underwear. He shut off the water, which the young woman had seemed to believe masked the sound.

“I’d like to ask you about the body found in the courtyard.”

She fixed him in a venomous stare. “I didn’t kill her. Does that answer the question?”

“In part.” Though he believed himself to be incapable of blushing, Darius’s face felt hot. “Were you awake at that hour? Did you notice anything?”

Her expression didn’t change, but the effort in holding it started her lower lip to quiver. “I heard sirens, but was too sleepy to get out of bed. In the morning the neighbors told me what had happened. Everything I know is second-hand at best.”

“Your name, please?”

“Maryam Lajevardi.”

Darius jotted it in his notepad. “And what did the neighbors say?”

“That a girl had been shot, and her body left downstairs to be discovered. And the police had been here for most of the morning.”

“To be discovered? What do you mean by that?”

“Those are their words,” she said. “You’ll have to ask them.”

“And, you say, you slept through it all?”

“Like the dead.” Maryam Lajevardi palmed the cassette, as though she were concealing vital evidence.

“I assure you,” Darius said, “this concerns only murder. I don’t care about music.”

“One mustn’t close one’s mind to anything. You may find you enjoy the Beatles.”

“It’s forbidden.”

“
There’s
the crime.” She dropped another tape in the machine, turned up the volume on a heavy metal group.

Her lip was fluttering wildly. She clamped it under her front teeth as Darius went into the living room. The apartment looked down on the courtyard, affording an unobstructed view of the benches where a tired-looking old man sat smoking a cigarette. Yellow draperies wafted from the window in a light breeze.

“Are you a student, Miss Lajevardi? Do you work?”

“I’m employed at the D. Azadi currency exchange on Firdowsi Street.”

Darius rubbed the yellow cloth between his fingers.

“You haven’t written it in your little book.” Her lip was out of control. “Selling traveler’s checks,” she said to quiet it.

Obscured by an accent Darius couldn’t quite place, her voice had softened to a throaty whisper. “Miss Lajevardi,” he asked, “what are you doing living here alone?”

“Is it against the law to have my own apartment?”

“Answer the question, please.”

Her lip was still. She bit it anyway as she sniffed back tears. “You won’t make me go back?”

“Back where?”

“Bandar-e-Shah.”

“That’s where you’re from?”

She nodded. “My father is the manager of the state caviar factory there.”

“What brings you to Teheran?”

“What has this to do with the girl—”

“Will be for me to decide,” Darius said.

Without exhaling, she took a deep breath. “Last month I turned twenty-two. In the eyes of my father I officially became an old maid. It was arranged for me to marry the foreman of the factory. He’s forty-seven, coarse, crude, uneducated—a religious fanatic as well. I took what money I had saved and came to Teheran. I’ve been living here for six weeks.”

“And?”

“And? And?” Maryam Lajevardi blew her nose in a man’s colored handkerchief. “Isn’t that enough? Are you asking what comes next for me? How can I tell you, when I don’t know myself?”

Darius touched his pen to his notebook, and the young woman stopped sniffling. “You won’t report that you found me?”

“No,” he said. “That’s not my job.”

“Because if I’m forced to go back, it will be the murder of two girls you’ll be investigating.”

“One more question. How do you live in Shemiran on what you bring home from the currency exchange?”

Maryam Lajevardi went into the kitchen, and tore open the cabinets above the sink. Waxy white paper lined the bare shelves. “I starve.”

A blue service taxi had run an Iran Peyma bus into a streetlight, and emergency vehicles blocked all lanes of Saltanatabad Avenue. Darius drove onto the sidewalk around the accident, and then continued downtown. Of nearly three dozen witnesses he had spoken to, Maryam Lajevardi alone merited a follow-up interview. How much of that could he credit to her short dress and the warm promise of her silken skin? How much to the melodrama of her escape from a brokered engagement? Even if her story had been delivered to wring the last drop of sympathy from him, in its endless complications he’d heard it too many times before to discount it out of hand. Minus the tears supplied on cue, the lip willed into a spastic bout of vulnerability, he had little cause to view it with skepticism.

At a red light Darius shut his eyes and conjured the image of the young woman. His mind’s eye could be counted on to circumvent the cleverest guise while going to the heart of uncooperative witnesses and suspects. What came to him most vividly about Maryam Lajevardi was her breathy voice, the defiance of authority that she was at loose ends to contain. Hearing it again in his head he decided the tone was too excitable for a native of the Caspian; he had supplied her brash words with the wrong accent—or
she
had. Her speech, as well as her coloring, seemed in part foreign, which might explain why he had gotten nowhere with the bullying tactics that as a rule produced quick results with men and women made docile through generations of submission to Islamic decree. Intrigued now, he played over the voice until he had located the faint accent in central Europe, or the shores of the Mediterranean, or else, he thought briefly, in a corner of his brain that would invent a lonely, beautiful woman who was also an outsider in her own land. Already he was looking forward to their second talk. When no good reason came to mind for putting it off, he angled toward the curb, prepared to wheel into a U-turn.

He never heard the car that ran up his tail and slammed the Thunderbird into the intersection. Returning to consciousness, he was vaguely aware that if he hadn’t had his foot off the brake, the whiplash would have snapped his neck. He doubted he’d been out for more than twenty seconds. His nose was running. He wiped it on the back of his hand, and blood spilled between his knuckles. Two teeth had been driven through his lower lip. In the mirror was a caricature from a new school of realism of a helpless Dracula with bloody fangs. Touching his tongue to a jagged incisor, he went out to inspect the damage to his car.

The bumper was dangling, the trunk lid jack-knifed over the spare tire. He was sick on the blood and the smell of gasoline. The other vehicle appeared to be unscathed. It was an American limousine, an old Chrysler with a grille like the jaws of a road-grading machine. As it disentangled from the Thunderbird, the loose bumper came away with it.

“Stop right there!” His words were thick, shaped by a swollen tongue as clumsy as a big toe against the roof of his mouth.

Silvered glass offered little of two figures in the other car’s front seat. The Chrysler shifted into drive, the torn bumper throwing off sparks like a lit fuse. Darius stuck out his palm, but the heavy limousine kept coming. It was ten feet away, and gaining speed, when he flung himself onto the Thunderbird’s trunk. The impact put him on the asphalt on his back.

The Chrysler stopped, and two men in shiny jackets stepped out and watched him struggle to his knees. They were heavily bearded, and wore aviator’s lenses of the same mirrored glass as the Chrysler’s windows. The shorter one, from the driver’s side, steadied him against a lamppost. A tire iron came out of his companion’s sleeve like a snake shedding satin skin. Darius shied away, and a muffled gong hummed against his back. He tried to run, but his legs weren’t up to it. The driver held him there with one hand.

The taller man rubbed his wrist, took a practice swing with an overhand motion. Darius slithered behind the lamppost. The tall man shortened his arc, and the blunt end of the iron found Darius’s heart.

Darius toppled sideways into the street. He looked up into reflective sunglasses that pictured a tortured beetle on its back. His finger was through the trigger guard of his shoulder gun when the short man took it away. Tears distorted his vision as the tire iron came down against his ribs.

Too slowly he was losing consciousness; he cursed his high threshold of pain. He bicycled his legs, and a shoe flew off, and his foot collided with something soft, the sensation like kicking a pillow. One of the men said, “Unnhhh,” and there was the sound of puking, and then the smell.

Darius closed his eyes. Numb, he might have been dreaming it was someone else being worked over but for the feeling in his chest that he was suffocating, which grew worse with each blow. The metal bar clattered in the gutter, and he was hauled to his feet and then pushed toward the Chrysler. He planted his feet, but had little strength to resist.

“Move, damn you!”

The squawk of a car horn startled him, and he gagged on a mouthful of blood. The return of his senses came with a fresh rush of pain, and the realization that kidnapping would precede his murder. He fought back with energy drawn from a closed account.

The driver shouted, “Let’s go, he’s done anyway,” and Darius felt himself falling into the street.