“You can leave. For the moment. Do God’s work.” Impatiently the mullah glanced at one of the Green Bands, a tallish, ugly man. “Ahmed, take him out!” Then to Yusuf, “After Turlak, Police Captain Mohammed Dezi, cell 917 …”
Bakravan felt a tug on his arm and turned and went out. In the corridor he almost fell, but Ahmed caught him and, strangely kind, propped him against the wall.
“Catch your breath, Excellency,” he said.
“I’m - I’m free to go?”
“I’m certainly as surprised as you, Agha,” the man said. “Before God and the Prophet I’m as surprised as you, you’re the first to be let go today, witness or accused.”
“I - is there - is there any water?”
“Not here. There’s plenty outside. Best you leave,” Ahmed dropped his voice even more. “Best to leave, eh? Lean on my arm.”
Thankfully, Bakravan held on to him, hardly breathing. Slowly they went back the way he had come. He hardly noticed the other guards and prisoners and witnesses. In the corridor that led to the waiting room, Ahmed shouldered the way through a side door, out into the western space. The firing squad was there, three men tied to posts in front of them. One post was empty. Bakravan’s bowels and bladder emptied of their own volition. “Hurry up, Ahmed!” the man in charge said irritably.
“As God wants,” Ahmed said. Happily, he half-carried Bakravan to the empty post that was next to Paknouri who was raving, lost in his own hell. “So you’re not to escape after all. That’s right, we all heard your lies, lies before God. We all know you, know your ways, know your lack of godliness, how you even tried to buy your way to heaven with gifts to the Imam, God protect him. Where did you get all that money if not through usury and theft?”
The volley was not accurate. The man in charge leisurely used a revolver to silence one of the condemned, then Bakravan. “I wouldn’t have recognized him,” the man said shortly. “It shows how foul and what liars newspapers are.”
“This isn’t Hassen Turlak,” Ahmed said, “he comes next.”
The man stared at him. “Then who’s this one?”
“A bazaari,” Ahmed said. “Bazaaris are usurers and godless. I know. For years I worked there for Farazan, collecting night soil like my father before me, until I became a bricklayer with Yusuf. But this one …” He belched. “He was the richest usurer. I don’t remember much about him except how rich he was, but I remember everything about his women; he never curbed or taught his women who never wore chador, flaunting themselves. I remember everything about his devil daughter who’d visit the Street of the Moneylenders from time to time, half naked, skin like fresh cream, her hair flowing, breasts moving, buttocks inviting - the one called Sharazad who looks like the promised houris must look. I remember everything about her and how I cursed her for putting evil in my head, maddening me, how we all did - for tempting us.” He scratched his scrotum, feeling himself hardening. God curse her and all women who disobey God’s law and create evil thoughts in us against the Word of God. Oh, God, let me penetrate her or make me a martyr and go straight to heaven and do it there. “He was guilty of every crime,” he said, turning away.
“But - but was he condemned?” the man in charge of the firing squad called out after him.
“God condemned him, of course He did. The post was waiting and you told me to hurry. It was the Will of God. God is Great, God is Great. Now I will fetch Turlak, the blasphemer.” Ahmed shrugged. “It was the Will of God.”
Chapter 28
NEAR BANDAR DELAM: 11:58 A.M. It was the time of noon prayer and the ancient, rickety, overladen bus stopped on the shoulder of the road. Obediently, following the lead of a mullah who was also a passenger, all Muslims disembarked, spread their prayer mats and now were committing their souls to God. Except for the Indian Hindu family who were afraid of losing their seats, most of the other non-Muslim passengers had also disembarked - Tom Lochart among them - glad for the opportunity to stretch their legs or to relieve themselves. Christian Armenians, Oriental Jews, a nomadic Kash’kai couple who, though Muslim, were precluded by ancient custom from the need of the noonday prayer, or their women from the veil or chador, two Japanese, some Christian Arabs - all of them aware of the lone European. The day was warm, hazy, and humid from the nearby waters of the Gulf. Tom Lochart leaned tiredly against the hood that was steaming, the engine overheated, head aching, joints aching, muscles aching from his forced march out from the Dez Dam - now almost two hundred miles to the north - and from the cramped, bone-grinding, noisy discomfort of the bus. All the way from Ahwaz where he had managed to talk himself past Green Bands and onto the bus, he had been squeezed into a seat with barely enough room for two, let alone three men, one of them a young Green Band who cradled his M14 along with his child for his pregnant wife who stood in the narrow corridor crammed against thirty others in space for fifteen. Every seat was equally packed with men, women, and children of all ages. The air fetid, voices babbling in a multitude of tongues. Overhead and underfoot, bags and bundles and cases, crates packed with vegetables or half-dead chickens, a small, undernourished, hobbled goat or two - the luggage racks outside on the roof equally laden. But I’m damned lucky to be here, he thought, his misery returning, half listening to the lilting chant of the Shahada.
Yesterday, near sunset, when he had heard the 212 take off from Dez, he had come out from under the little wharf, blessing God for his escape. The water had been very cold and he was trembling, but he had picked up the automatic, checked the action, and then gone up to the house. It was open. There was food and drink in the refrigerator that still hummed nicely, powered by a generator. It was warm inside the house. He took off his clothes and dried them over a heater, cursing Valik and Seladi and consigning them to hell. “Sonsofbitches! What the hell’d I do to them but save their goddamn necks?” The warmth and the luxury of the house were tempting. His tiredness ached him. Last night at Isfahan had been almost sleepless. I could sleep and leave at dawn, he thought. I’ve a compass and I know the way more or less: skirt the airfield Ali Abbasi mentioned, then head almost due east to pick up the main Kermanshah-Ahwaz-Abadan road. Should be no trouble to get a bus or hitch a ride. Or I could go now - the moon’ll light my way and then I won’t be trapped here if the air base has sent a patrol - Ali was just as nervous about that as Seladi and we could easily have been spotted. Easily. But either way, when you get stopped, what’s your story?
He thought about that while he fixed himself a brandy and soda and some food. Valik and the others had opened two half-kilo cans of the best beluga gray caviar and had left them carelessly on the sitting-room table, still partially full. He ate it with relish, then threw the cans into the garbage pail that was outside the back door. Then he locked the house and left. The forced march over the mountains had been bad but not as bad as he had expected. Just after dawn he had come down to the main Kermanshah-Ahwaz-Abadan road. Almost at once he had been given a ride by some Korean construction workers evacuating the steel mill they were building under contract at Kermanshah - it was almost custom that expats helped expats on the road. They were heading for Abadan Airport where they had been told transport to fly them back to Korea would be waiting for them. “Much fighting at Kermanshah,” they had told him in halting English. “Everyone guns. Iranians killing each others. All mad, barbarians - worse than Japanese.” They had dropped him off at the Ahwaz bus terminal. Miraculously he had managed to talk his way onto the next bus that went past Bandar Delam.