compassionate people, and the judicial application of pain traditionally was limited to the bastinado, the melancholy flogging of the soles of the feet.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon at the train stations and airport, searching for witnesses to the girl’s arrival in the city. The photo he showed, a black-and-white Polaroid snapped at the crime scene, made no impression on anyone, perhaps—as the baggage clerk at Iran Airlines told him—because the young woman he was looking for appeared to be sleeping. When he returned to headquarters there was a note on his desk that Baghai had called. He reached the coroner at the morgue as he was going home.
“What news?”
“In all the hubbub of finding the mutilations,” Baghai said, “I didn’t examine the body as carefully as I should have. In the crook of the left arm was a crusting sore, extremely deep. My assumption was that it was a severe rash, like several others I saw, but when I looked closely I noticed a cluster of tiny punctures in the skin.”
“She’d injected herself regularly?”
“There aren’t enough marks to indicate she had taken narcotics over a long period of time. She may have become an addict recently, or previously smoked the drugs before graduating to the use of needles.”
“Could she have died of an overdose?”
“Of an overdose, of bad dope, of intentional poisoning. Of anything else,” Baghai said. “In any event, it’s no longer our case. This is about drugs, and drugs are the Komiteh’s jurisdiction.”
“No,” Darius said. “It’s about torture. And murder.”
Darius thanked him and hung up. Heroin addicts were a rarity in a country where the illicit drug of choice was opium. He rubbed his smarting eyes, and the room pinched in at the walls. As it rebounded, he felt compressed in turn. A blurry figure in a blue suit came into the office and stood at the door. “Yes?”
A bearded face with high, sloping cheeks and black hair the texture of iron filings assumed character as Nader Mehta stepped close to the desk.
“The girl’s fingerprints are not on record.”
Mehta once had been chief of investigations for the homicide squad, the brightest of the rising stars in the National Police. A Zoroastrian by birth, he was officially a “believer,” like Jews and Christians of “the people of the book,” to be treated with deference, although not as equal to Muslims. When the Revolution dead-ended his career, he had retreated into the records department and the mysticism of fire-worshiping ancestors who had ruled Persia before the Muslim conquest. Though such interests officially were frowned upon, Darius—like many Iranians—was fascinated by his country’s pre-Islamic past, and every spring on Red Wednesday, during the Now Ruz new year’s celebration, he joined Mehta in a leap over three bonfires of desert thorn, chanting, “My troubles and my pallor I cast into your flames. Your warmth and rosy cheeks for me.”
Darius said, “Send her card to Khuzestan Province. She may be an Arab. If not from another country, then one of ours.”
Mehta made no move to go. “What do you call Jewish babies that are not circumcised?”
“Huh? I’m no good at riddles. You tell me.”
“Girls,” Mehta said, but didn’t laugh. “With them it’s girls.”
“You’ll send the card?”
“The files in Khuzestan are in worse shape than here.” Mehta looked at him sadly, the curator of a museum with no capital for acquisitions. “The only decent records are the Komiteh’s. You might ask … No, you might come to them on your knees, and beg for a peek.”
“They’ve told me to mind my own business.”
“Then why are we chasing all over to identify her?”
“What would you do instead?”
“Seek solace from God.”
“God won’t find her killer.”
“And from this.” Mehta lifted the flap on his jacket pocket, and Darius saw the neck of a pint flask. “Let the sin be on me.”
Darius took the bottle
He spent the remainder of the afternoon at the train stations and airport, searching for witnesses to the girl’s arrival in the city. The photo he showed, a black-and-white Polaroid snapped at the crime scene, made no impression on anyone, perhaps—as the baggage clerk at Iran Airlines told him—because the young woman he was looking for appeared to be sleeping. When he returned to headquarters there was a note on his desk that Baghai had called. He reached the coroner at the morgue as he was going home.
“What news?”
“In all the hubbub of finding the mutilations,” Baghai said, “I didn’t examine the body as carefully as I should have. In the crook of the left arm was a crusting sore, extremely deep. My assumption was that it was a severe rash, like several others I saw, but when I looked closely I noticed a cluster of tiny punctures in the skin.”
“She’d injected herself regularly?”
“There aren’t enough marks to indicate she had taken narcotics over a long period of time. She may have become an addict recently, or previously smoked the drugs before graduating to the use of needles.”
“Could she have died of an overdose?”
“Of an overdose, of bad dope, of intentional poisoning. Of anything else,” Baghai said. “In any event, it’s no longer our case. This is about drugs, and drugs are the Komiteh’s jurisdiction.”
“No,” Darius said. “It’s about torture. And murder.”
Darius thanked him and hung up. Heroin addicts were a rarity in a country where the illicit drug of choice was opium. He rubbed his smarting eyes, and the room pinched in at the walls. As it rebounded, he felt compressed in turn. A blurry figure in a blue suit came into the office and stood at the door. “Yes?”
A bearded face with high, sloping cheeks and black hair the texture of iron filings assumed character as Nader Mehta stepped close to the desk.
“The girl’s fingerprints are not on record.”
Mehta once had been chief of investigations for the homicide squad, the brightest of the rising stars in the National Police. A Zoroastrian by birth, he was officially a “believer,” like Jews and Christians of “the people of the book,” to be treated with deference, although not as equal to Muslims. When the Revolution dead-ended his career, he had retreated into the records department and the mysticism of fire-worshiping ancestors who had ruled Persia before the Muslim conquest. Though such interests officially were frowned upon, Darius—like many Iranians—was fascinated by his country’s pre-Islamic past, and every spring on Red Wednesday, during the Now Ruz new year’s celebration, he joined Mehta in a leap over three bonfires of desert thorn, chanting, “My troubles and my pallor I cast into your flames. Your warmth and rosy cheeks for me.”
Darius said, “Send her card to Khuzestan Province. She may be an Arab. If not from another country, then one of ours.”
Mehta made no move to go. “What do you call Jewish babies that are not circumcised?”
“Huh? I’m no good at riddles. You tell me.”
“Girls,” Mehta said, but didn’t laugh. “With them it’s girls.”
“You’ll send the card?”
“The files in Khuzestan are in worse shape than here.” Mehta looked at him sadly, the curator of a museum with no capital for acquisitions. “The only decent records are the Komiteh’s. You might ask … No, you might come to them on your knees, and beg for a peek.”
“They’ve told me to mind my own business.”
“Then why are we chasing all over to identify her?”
“What would you do instead?”
“Seek solace from God.”
“God won’t find her killer.”
“And from this.” Mehta lifted the flap on his jacket pocket, and Darius saw the neck of a pint flask. “Let the sin be on me.”
Darius took the bottle
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