The religious police raided Leila’s club — the pious hypocrites had been some of her best customers — and when the raids couldn’t shut her down, the government stepped in. They confiscated her bank accounts. They dumped her liquor stock down the sewer. They issued a warrant for her arrest. What kept Leila out of prison were her connections to the Armenian community. We tried staying in touch. I couldn’t get in back in those days, and she refused to leave. She once told me, “If I give up on my country, I give up on myself. The same way you feel about America.”
After that, we met maybe a dozen times or so over the years. By then, she was a divorced woman. She wanted more from our relationship, but it wasn’t possible. We didn’t talk much about life under the heel of the Islamic regime, but every once in a while she’d tell me things. About the oppression. About the mood of the people. About the dwindling opportunities. It wasn’t pretty. A land of progress and prospects had spiraled into a land of tyranny and stagnation.
I knew how risky it was meeting her like that. Risky for me, even more risky for her. But it was hard to resist. Here was a woman who made every day seem like a brush with spring. I hadn’t seen Leila for ten years, not since surviving an assassination attempt in Kazakhstan. After that, I was called home permanently. I sent letters for a year, but she never returned them. I didn’t hold it against her. There was no future. There never had been.
And now she was three feet away, and all I could do was stare.
The sparkle in Leila’s eyes burned as mischievously as ever. The dress she wore hardly accommodated the Islamic dress code — Leila had no patience for the sad attempt of men to hold women to some standard they would never tolerate for themselves — and the way the fabric clung to her was a three-alarm fire waiting to happen.
“Rahim,” she said to the muscle-head attending the cash register. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’m out running errands.”
Rahim shot me a jealous glare. I didn’t need another enemy, so I said to him, “Relax. I’m just a guy visiting an old friend.”
Leila held the curtain open and beckoned me through. I followed her down the hall, trying my best not to get distracted by the obvious distractions of her exceptional legs and firm, round bottom. The hall doglegged around the corner, and she glanced back at me, her grin just a bit mocking. “Just an old friend, huh?”
“He didn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to piss off,” I replied.
“Rahim is very protective, that’s all.”
We approached a shelf stocked with bags of rice and cans of mango juice. Leila grasped a bracket on the shelf and pulled. The bracket clicked and the rack of shelves swiveled, revealing a secret door. She passed through, and I followed.
We entered a room furnished like a miniature Fifth Avenue lounge. A narrow wooden bar, polished within an inch of its life, ran across the far wall. It was backed by a beveled mirror, and bottles of top-shelf liquor were arranged in front of the mirror. A velvet love seat and leather chairs were positioned over a Persian carpet. Soft light spilled from wall sconces made of smoked glass. Leila swiveled the secret door closed again and turned a dead bolt.
I took in the room and tried to make sense of it. “Side business?”
“I supply beverages of the alcoholic kind for private entertaining,” she told me. “You don’t think running that little store pays the bills, I hope?”
I dropped my backpack onto a chair. Leila glanced at it but knew me well enough not to ask. Instead, she stepped close and clasped my hands. Her eyes smoldered with a look that brought back memories of long, sleepless nights and sweaty bedsheets.
“Jake, I missed you.”
It would have been so easy, and so wrong. I had Cathy, kids, and a life that had taken me far from the world I had known for all those years. Still, I told Leila what she wanted to hear, and maybe what a part of me still felt. “I missed you, too.”
She squeezed my hands and gave me a perceptive grin. “Thanks for saying that.”
Then she let go and leaned against the bar. She studied me now with the eyes of a long-time survivor of turmoil and uncertainty. “Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, tell me what brings you to Tehran? Business?”
“Business,” I said, gazing at the bar and the bottles. Liquor was contraband — strange for a city that had once been the cosmopolitan rage of the Middle East — so it was a safe bet that she was buying wholesale from someone with his hands deep in the smuggling business. And no one had his hands deeper in the rackets than Charlie. “I’m looking for Charlie Amadi, Leila.”
“Charlie!” Leila chuckled. Then the chuckled faded, and her eyes flashed with an odd and enticing mix of concern and interest. “Why in the world would you have business with a man like Charlie Amadi?”
“I need his help. It’s important.”
“Important how?”
“I’m back on the job.” She at least deserved a certain amount of honesty. “Where can I find him?”
“You can’t. He finds you.”
“I don’t have that kind of time. Make it easy on me and tell me where he is.”
“Charlie doesn’t like surprises, Jake.”
“He’ll make an exception for me. We go back a long time.”
Curiosity and surprise fanned out around Leila’s eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
“Back when we were both young and stupid.”
Leila turned and stared at her reflection in the mirror. It was like she was trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle I had just scattered across her already difficult life. After a long moment, her gaze slid to mine, and I could see she’d made a decision.
“He lives just east of Azad University on Malek. Very private. Very tight security,” she said. Then she raised her shoulders in a reluctant shrug. “But this time of day you might just find him at the Park of the Reluctant Martyrs.”
“Why there?”
She grinned. “There’s a playground there. And swing sets.”
“Charlie has grandkids!” Now I was grinning.
“I can drive you.”
This brought me back to reality in no uncertain terms. “No,” I said firmly.
She smiled at me, her head just slightly tilted to one side, like a statue filled with inspiration and sympathy. “I always liked your business, Jake. It was a business with a purpose. And I always liked the fact that you’d do whatever it took.”
“Leila…”
“I know why you’re here.”
“No, you don’t.” I didn’t want her to know why I was here. I didn’t want her to know that my mission was to secure evidence worthy of an attack on her country. But then maybe it wasn’t her country anymore, not really, not the one she grew up loving.
She touched my cheek. “I’ll get my wrap.”
It wasn’t a wrap that she reached for but an abaya hanging behind the bar. It was black and gray and hung to the floor like a cloak. She made it look almost fashionable. It wouldn’t stop people from seeing her with a man who had been banned from Iran many years ago, however.
“I have a car out back. It’s not much, but it’ll get us where we’re going.” She pointed to a door set against the opposite wall. “This way.”
I picked up my backpack. The door led to a dimly lit hall that exited into a narrow alley. A gray Toyota Camry was crunched against the wall, leaving just enough room for another vehicle to slide by. There were five or six other cars parked exactly the same way up and down the alley. It was already hot and the air smelled of curry. I covered my head with my baseball cap and put on my sunglasses.