Chapter 7 – Missing Person
The male and female members of Laleh’s family were doing absolutely no fantasizing, whether about fashion or jewelry or wine or little lobsters from Norway. They were running around their houses and offices royally pissed off because Laleh wasn’t there doing work for them for no pay other than the rent on her one bedroom apartment. Her father was sure she had run off with an inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the group that had been trying to get into Iran’s nuclear facilities for the last ten years. Her mother thought she was in a dorm at Tehran University, because one time when she was younger she had said she wanted to be an architect, and she thought Laleh now was revolting against being locked up in her apartment all day doing work for her younger brothers. Her younger brothers thought she was in the house of one of their competitors, spilling the beans on some of their clandestine business operations, getting even for being locked up in her apartment all day doing their work for them. Her older brothers thought she finally had found a guy on her own; not one of the business jerks they kept bringing around to inspect her suitability for a profitable marriage; and was shacked up with him in some secular hostel down in the one square block area of the city known as the arts district.
The entire family met at the parents' house and sat around drinking gallons of coffee and arguing their points of view. The only thing they could agree on was that their businesses were going to go down the tubes if she didn’t knock off whatever it was that she was doing and get her ass back to work. Where the hell was she?