“Sorry to make you jump,” Gavallan had said. “What happened, Captain, at Tabriz?”
So Ross had told them, disjointedly, jumping back and forth until he had finished. Exploding out of heavy sleep had disoriented him. His head ached, everything ached, but he was glad to be telling what had happened, reconstructing everything, gradually filling in the blank parts, putting the pieces into place. Except Azadeh. No, I can’t put her in place yet.
This morning when he had come out of a malevolent wake-sleep dream, he had been terrified, everything mixed up, jet engines and guns and stones and explosions and cold, and staring at his hands to make sure what was dream and what was real. Then he had seen a man peering at him and had cried out, “Where’s Azadeh?”
“She’s still asleep, Captain Ross, she’s in the spare room down the hall,” Pettikin had told him, calming him. “Remember me? Charlie Pettikin—Doshan Tappeh?”
Searching his memory. Things coming back slowly, hideous things. Big blanks, very big. Doshan Tappeh? What about Doshan Tappeh? Going there to hitch a chopper ride and… “Ah, yes, Captain, how are you? Good to…to see you. She’s asleep?”
“Yes, like a baby.”
“Best thing, best thing for her to sleep,” he had said, his brain still not working easily.
“First a cuppa. Then a bath and shave and I’ll fix you up with some clothes and shaving gear. You’re about my size. You hungry? We’ve eggs and some bread, the bread’s a bit stale.”
“Oh, thanks, no, no, I’m not hungry—you’re very kind.”
“I owe you one—no, at least ten. I’m damned pleased to see you. Listen, much as I’d like to know what happened…well, McIver’s gone to the airport to pick up our boss, Andy Gavallan. They’ll be back shortly, you’ll have to tell them so I can find out then—so no questions till then, you must be exhausted.”
“Thanks, yes it’s…it’s still all a bit… I can remember leaving Azadeh on the hill, then almost nothing, just flashes, dreamlike, until I woke a moment ago. How long have I been asleep?”
“You’ve been out for about sixteen hours. We, that’s Nogger and our two mecs, half carried you both in here and then you both passed out. We put you and Azadeh to bed like babies—Mac and I. We undressed you, washed part of the muck off, carried you to bed—not too gently by the way—but you never woke up, either of you.”
“She’s all right? Azadeh?”
“Oh, yes. I checked her a couple of times but she’s still flat out. What did…sorry, no questions! First a shave and bath. ’Fraid the water’s barely warm but I’ve put the electric heater in the bathroom, it’s not too bad…”
Now Ross was watching Pettikin who was handing the whisky to McIver and to Gavallan. “Sure you won’t, Captain?”
“No, no thanks.” Without noticing it he felt his right wrist and rubbed it. His energy level was ebbing fast. Gavallan saw the man’s tiredness and knew there was not much time. “About Erikki. You can’t remember anything else to give us an idea where he might be?”
“Not any more than I’ve told you. Azadeh may be able to help—the Soviet’s name was something like Certaga, the man Erikki was forced to work with up by the border—as I said they were using her as a threat and there was some complication about her father and a trip they were going to make together—sorry, I can’t remember exactly. The other man, the one who was friends with Abdollah Khan was called Mzytryk, Petr Oleg.” That reminded Ross about Vien Rosemont’s code message for the Khan, but he decided that was none of Gavallan’s business, nor about all the killing, nor about shoving the old man in front of the truck on the hill, nor that one day he would go back to the village and hack off the head of the butcher and the kalandar who, but for the grace of God or the spirits of the High Land, would have stoned her and mutilated him. He would do that after the debriefing when he saw Armstrong, or Talbot, or the American colonel, but before that he would ask them who had betrayed the operation at Mecca. Someone had. For a moment the thought of Rosemont and Tenzing and Gueng blinded him. When the mist cleared, he saw the clock on the mantelpiece. “I have to go to a building near the British embassy. Is that far from here?”
“No, we could take you if you like.”
“Could that be now? Sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll pass out again if I don’t get with it.”
Gavallan glanced at McIver. “Mac, let’s go now…perhaps I can catch Talbot. We’ll still have time to come back to see Azadeh, and Nogger if he’s here.”
“Good idea.”
Gavallan got up and put on his heavy coat.
Pettikin said to Ross, “I’ll lend you a coat and some gloves.” He saw his eyes stray down the corridor. “Would you like me to wake Azadeh?”
“No, thanks. I’ll… I’ll just look in.”
“It’s the second door on the left.”
They watched him go along the corridor, his walk noiseless and catlike, open the door noiselessly and stand there a moment and close it again. He collected his assault rifle and the two kookris, his and Gueng’s. He thought a moment, then put his on the mantelpiece.
“In case I don’t get back,” he said, “tell her this’s a gift, a gift for Erikki. For Erikki and her.”
AT THE PALACE OF THE KHAN: 5:19 P.M. The kalandar of Abu Mard was on his knees and petrified. “No, no, Highness, I swear it was the mullah Mahmud who told us t—”
“He’s not a real mullah, you son of a dog, everyone knows that! By God, you…you were going to stone my daughter?” the Khan shrieked, his face mottled, his breath coming in great pants, “You decided? You decided you were going to stone my daughter?”
“It was him, Highness,” the kalandar whimpered, “it was the mullah who decided after questioning her and her admitting adultery with the saboteur…”
“You son of a dog! You aided and abetted that false mullah… Liar! Ahmed told me what happened!” The Khan propped himself on his bed pillows, a guard behind him, Ahmed and other guards close to the kalandar in front of him, Najoud, his eldest daughter, and Aysha, his young wife, seated to one side trying to hide their terror at his rage and petrified that he would turn on them. Kneeling beside the door still in his travel-stained clothes and filled with dread was Hakim, Azadeh’s brother, who had just arrived and had been rushed here under guard in response to the Khan’s summons, and who had listened with equal rage to Ahmed relating what had happened at the village.
“You son of a dog,” the Khan shouted again, his mouth salivating. “You let…you let the dog of a saboteur escape…you let him drag my daughter off with him…you harbor the saboteur and then…then you dare to judge one of my—MY—family and would stone…without seeking my—MY—approval?”
“It was the mullah…” the kalandar cried out, repeating it again and again.
“Shut him up!”
Ahmed hit him hard on one of his ears, momentarily stunning him. Then dragged him roughly back onto his knees and hissed, “Say one more word and I’ll cut your tongue out.”
The Khan was trying to catch his breath. “Aysha, give me…give me one of those…those pills…” She scurried over, still on her knees, opened the bottle and put a pill into his mouth and wiped it for him. The Khan kept the pill under his tongue as the doctor had told him and in a moment the spasm passed, the thundering in his ears lessened, and the room stopped weaving. His bloodshot eyes went back onto the old man who was whimpering and shaking uncontrollably. “You son of a dog! So you dare to bite the hand that owns you—you, your butcher, and your festering village. Ibrim,” the Khan said to one of the guards. “Take him back to Abu Mard and stone him, have the villagers stone him, stone him, then cut off the hands of the butcher.”
Ibrim and another guard pulled the howling man to his feet, smashed him into silence, and opened the door, stopped as Hakim said harshly, “Then burn the village!”
The Khan looked at him, his eyes narrowed. “Yes, then burn the village,” he echoed and kept his eyes on Hakim who looked back at him, trying to be brave.
The door closed and now the quiet heightened, broken only by Abdollah’s labored breathing. “Najoud, Aysha, leave!” he said.
Najoud hesitated, wanting to stay, wanting to hear sentence pronounced on Hakim, gloating that Azadeh had been caught in her adultery and was therefore due punishment whenever she was recaptured. Good, good, good. With Azadeh they both perish, Hakim and the Redhead of the Knife. “I will be within instant call, Highness,” she said.
“You can go back to your quarters. Aysha—you wait at the end of the corridor.” Both women left. Ahmed closed the door contentedly, everything going as planned. The other two guards waited in silence.
The Khan shifted painfully, motioning to them. “Wait outside. Ahmed, you stay.” When they had gone and there were just the three of them in the big, cold room he turned his gaze back to Hakim. “Burn the village, you said. A good idea. But that doesn’t excuse your treachery, or your sister’s.”
“Nothing excuses treachery against a father, Highness. But neither Azadeh nor I have betrayed you or plotted against you.”
“Liar! You heard Ahmed! She admitted fornicating with the saboteur, she admitted it.”
“She admitted ‘loving’ him, Highness, years and years ago. She swore before God she had never committed adultery or betrayed her husband. Never! In front of those dogs and sons of dogs and worse, that mullah of the Left Hand, what should the daughter of a Khan say? Didn’t she try to protect your name in front of that godless mob of shit?”
“Still twisting words, still protecting the whore she became?”
Hakim’s face went ashen. “Azadeh fell in love as Mother fell in love. If she’s a whore, then you whored my mother!”
Blood surged back into the Khan’s face. “How dare you say such a thing!”
“It’s true. You lay with her before you were married. Because she loved you she let you secretly into her bedroom and so risked death. She risked death because she loved you and you begged her. Didn’t our mother persuade her father to accept you, and persuade your father to allow you to marry her, instead of your older brother who wanted her as a second wife for himself?” Hakim’s voice broke, remembering her in her dying, him seven, Azadeh six, not understanding very much, only that she was in terrible pain from something called “tumor” and outside, in the courtyard, their father Abdollah beset with grief. “Didn’t she always stand up for you against your father and your older brother and then, when your brother was killed and you became heir, didn’t she heal the breach with your father?”
“You can’t…can’t know such things, you were…you were too young!”
“Old Nanny Fatemeh told us, she told us before she died, she told us everything she could remember…”
The Khan was hardly listening, remembering too, remembering his brother’s hunting accident he had so deftly engineered—old Nanny might have known about that too and if she did then Hakim knows and Azadeh knows, all the more reason to silence them. Remembering, too, all the magic times he had had with Napthala the Fair, before and after marriage and during all the days until the beginning of the pain. They had been married not even one year when Hakim was born, two when Azadeh appeared, Napthala just sixteen then, tiny, physically a pattern of Aysha but a thousand times more beautiful, her long hair like spun gold. Five more heavenly years, no more children, but that never mattered, hadn’t he a son at long last, strong and upright—where his three sons from his first wife had all been born sickly, soon to die, his four daughters ugly and squabbling. Wasn’t his wife still only twenty-two, in good health, as strong and as wonderful as the two children she had already birthed? Plenty of time for more sons.
Then the pain beginning. And the agony. No help from all the doctors in Tehran.
Insha’Allah, they said.
No relief except drugs, ever more strong as she wasted away. God grant her the peace of Paradise and let me find her there.
He was watching Hakim, seeing the pattern of Azadeh who was a pattern of the mother, listening to him running on: “Azadeh only fell in love, Highness. If she loved that man, can’t you forgive her? Wasn’t she only sixteen and banished to school in Switzerland as later I was banished to Khoi?”
“Because you were both treacherous, ungrateful, and poisonous!” the Khan shouted, his ears beginning to thunder again. “Get out! You’re to…to stay away from all others, under guard, until I send for you. Ahmed, see to it, then come back here.”
Hakim got up, near tears, knowing what was going to happen and powerless to prevent it. He stumbled out, Ahmed gave the necessary orders to the guards and came back into the room. Now the Khan’s eyes were closed, his face very gray, his breathing more labored than before. Please God do not let him die yet, Ahmed prayed.
The Khan opened his eyes and focused. “I have to decide about him, Ahmed. Quickly.”
“Yes, Highness,” his counselor began, choosing his words carefully, “you have but two sons, Hakim and the babe. If Hakim were to die or,” he smiled strangely, “happened to become sightless and crippled, then Mahmud, husband of Her Highness Najoud will be regent unt—”
“That fool? Our lands and power would be lost within a year!” Patches of redness flared in the Khan’s face and he was finding it increasingly difficult to think clearly. “Give me another pill.”
Ahmed obeyed and gave him water to drink, gentling him. “You’re in God’s hands, you will recover, don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry?” the Khan muttered, pain in his chest. “The Will of God the mullah died in time…strange. Petr Oleg kept his bargain…though he…the mullah died too fast…too fast.”
“Yes, Highness.”
In time the spasm again passed. “Wh…what’s your advice…about Hakim?”
Ahmed pretended to think a moment. “Your son Hakim is a good Muslim, he could be trained, he has managed your affairs in Khoi well, and has not fled as perhaps he could have done. He is not a violent man—except to protect his sister, eh? But that’s very important, for therein lies his key.” He came closer and said softly, “Decree him your heir, High—”
“Never!”
“Providing he swears by God to guard his young brother as he would his sister, providing further his sister returns at once of her own will to Tabriz. In truth, Highness, you have no real evidence against them, only hearsay. Entrust me to find out the truth of him and of her—and to report secretly to you.”
The Khan was concentrating, listening carefully, though the effort was taxing him. “Ah, the brother’s the bait to snare the sister—as she was the bait to snare the husband?”
“As they’re both bait for the other! Yes, Highness, of course you thought of it before me. In return for giving the brother your favor, she must swear before God to stay here to help him.”
“She’ll do that, oh, yes, she’ll do that!”
“Then they’ll both be within your reach and you can toy with them at your pleasure, giving and withholding at your whim, whether they’re guilty or not.”
“They’re guilty.”
“If they’re guilty, and I will know quickly if you give me complete authority to investigate, then it’s God’s will that they will die slowly, that you decree Fazulia’s husband to be Khan after you, not much better than Mahmud. If they’re not guilty, then let Hakim remain heir, providing she stays. And if it were to happen, again at God’s will, that she is a widow, she’d even betroth him whom you choose, Highness, to keep Hakim your heir—even a Soviet, should he escape the trap, no?”
For the first time today, the Khan smiled. This morning when Armstrong and Colonel Hashemi Fazir had arrived to take possession of Petr Oleg Mzytryk, they had pretended to be suitably concerned about the Khan’s health as he had pretended outwardly to be sicker than he had felt at that time. He had kept his voice wan and hesitant and very low so they both had had to lean forward to hear him. “Petr Oleg is coming here today. I was going to meet him but I asked him to come here because of my…because I’m sick. I sent him word to come here
and he should be at the border at sunset. At Julfa. If you go at once you’ll be in plenty of time…he sneaks over the border in a small Soviet helicopter gunship and lands near a side road off the Julfa-Tabriz road where his car is waiting for him…no chance to miss the turning, it’s the only one…a few kilometers north of the city…it’s the only side road, desolate country, soon little more than a track. How you…how you take him is your affair and…and as I cannot be present, you will give me a tape of the…the investigation?”
“Yes, Highness,” Hashemi had said. “How would you advise us to take him?”
“Choke the road both sides of the turnoff with a couple of old, heavily laden farm trucks…firewood or crates of fish…the road’s narrow and twisting and potholed and heavy with traffic, so an ambush should be easy. But…but be careful, there’re always Tudeh care to run interference for him, he’s a wise man and fearless…there’s a poison capsule in his lapel.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know. He will land near sunset. You can’t miss the turnoff, it’s the only one…”
Abdollah Khan sighed, lost in his thoughts. Many times he had been picked up by the same helicopter to go to the dacha at Tbilisi. Many good times there, the food lavish, the women young and accommodating, full-lipped and hungry to please—then, if he was lucky, Vertinskya, the hellcat, for further entertainment.
He saw Ahmed watching him. “I hope Petr escapes the trap. Yes, it would be good for him to…to have her.” Tiredness swamped him. “I’ll sleep now. Send my guard back and after I’ve eaten tonight, assemble my ‘devoted’ family here and we will do as you suggest.” His smile was cynical. “It’s wise to have no illusions.”
“Yes, Highness.” Ahmed got to his feet. The Khan envied him his lithe and powerful body.
“Wait, there was something…something else.” The Khan thought a moment, the process strangely tiring. “Ah, yes, where’s Redhead of the Knife?”
“With Cimtarga, up near the border, Highness. Cimtarga said they might be away for a few days. They left Tuesday night.”