Read Online Brides of Blood by Joseph Koenig - Free Book Online Page B

Darius a grunt. “No one has influence there. Not even the Komiteh can get people out of their jails.”
    “If they know someone is interested in her case, they’ll go easier on her.”
    “I have some doubt about this sudden improvement in your memory,” Darius said.
    “I’ve always given you good stuff.”
    “You have the same credibility as any other informant, which is to say not much.”
    “She’ll be just like that girl, if you don’t help.”
    Darius put a light under the teapot. “Give me a taste of what you have, and I’ll tell you what it’s worth.”
    “Nothing for nothing.”
    “Bye, Farhad. I’m not going up against the Komiteh, and then find out you’ve been building castles in air.” He heard other voices, one inquiring about the price of a valise.
    Farhad said something he didn’t catch, and then, in a whisper: “The girl told me she had twenty, maybe as much as thirty kilograms of Afghani white heroin, very high-grade, almost pure. And she knew specifically who she wanted to move them to—a mutual acquaintance in Dharvazeh Ghor, who she could not locate. I told her where to look.”
    “And then?”
    “The buyer—do what you can for my friend, and I’ll give him up to you.”
    “You appall me, Farhad. Where’s your criminals’ code of honor?”
    “What does he know about honor? He’s a fucking thief who’s beating me out of a ten percent finder’s fee.”
    “Tell me more.”
    “This is all you get for free. Will you help?”
    Darius forced hesitation into his voice. “I’ll be at the bazaar in a couple of hours.”
    “No, I’ve already been seen too much with you. How well do you know Dharvazeh Ghor?”
    “I can find my way around.”
    “On Martyr Rafizadeh Street there is a school that was bombed during the War of Cities, and never torn down. If you want to know about the girl, about both girls, be there at seven.”
    “I can’t give you any guarantees about your friend.”
    “If you won’t try— then it’s guaranteed what will happen to her.”
    Dharvazeh Ghor, at the retreating edge of the desert, was home to the poorest of Teheran’s poor, day laborers and sweepers in small factories, who lived in iron-roofed shanties for which a single squat toilet over an open sewage pit served dozens of families. The Martyr Rafizadeh Street School had been a pet social project of the new regime. It was less than a year old when an Iraqi missile crashed into the lunch room, killing and maiming nearly two hundred children. No funds were available to rebuild the structure, which stood now as a memorial to the slaughtered youngsters. Though the roof was gone, the walls remained intact but for empty windows and door frames. Dharvazeh Ghor in its entirety appeared to Darius as a monument to shattered hope. New construction had been limited to wedding bowers for the war dead, waist-high shrines decked with colored pennants, and tin amulets in the form of St. Abbas’s consoling hand.
    Darius had assumed that Farhad would be waiting outside. For fifteen minutes he paced the sidewalk before clambering through the wreckage into a classroom. The cinder block walls were papered over with revolutionary posters showing Muslim warriors being raised to heaven on the backs of white horses. Rows of splintered desks faced a blackboard that was a Rosetta stone of juvenile script. A rat half as long as its hairless tail paddled away from a yelping dog that followed it around the edge of a water-filled crater. The walls, the floors, the sliding door of the coat closet were black with ancient blood.
    Spasms of light glinted off rubble piled in a doorway like tailings from a vein of base metal. Darius stood on the broken brick eye to eye with a picture of the Imam that stared down on a mahogany desk set among file cabinets and empty bookcases. Farhad was slumped behind the desk in an oversize leather chair with his head against his shoulder. He was wearing a knit skullcap and a long-sleeve shirt