Kasigi’s ultimate card had then been delivered with all the elegance needed: “I have a feeling, Excellency, you will soon be personally invited to my country to meet the most important, most important leaders there - for you of course realize how vital your Islamic state is to Japan - and to inspect facilities that would be valuable to Iran.”
“We … we certainly need untainted friends,” Abadani said. Kasigi had watched him carefully and had seen no reaction, still the same pitiless eyes and inflexibility. “In these troubled times it’s essential to look after friends, isn’t it? You never know when disaster may strike you, whoever you are? Do you?”
“That’s in the Hands of God. Only His.” There had been a long pause, then Abadani had said, “As God wants. I will consider what you have said.” Now in the privacy of his hotel bedroom, Kasigi was very afraid. It’s only essential to look after yourself. However wise or careful you are, you never know when disaster will strike. If gods exist, they exist only to torment you.
JUST INSIDE TURKEY: 4:23 P.M. They had landed just outside the village this morning, barely a mile inside Turkey. Erikki would have preferred to have gone farther into safety but his tanks were dry. He had been intercepted and ambushed again, this time by two fighters and two Huey gunships and had had to endure them for more than a quarter of an hour before he could duck across the line. The two Hueys had not ventured after him but remained circling in station just their side of the border.
“Forget them, Azadeh,” he had said joyously. “We’re safe now.” But they were not. The villagers had surrounded them, and the police had arrived. Four men, a sergeant, and three others, all in uniform - crumpled and ill fitting - with bolstered revolvers. The sergeant wore dark glasses against the glare of the sun off the snow. None of them spoke English. Azadeh had greeted them according to the plan she and Erikki had concocted, explaining that Erikki, a Finnish citizen, had been employed by a British company under contract to Iran-Timber, that in the Azerbaijan riots and fighting near Tabriz his life had been threatened by leftists, that she, his wife, had been equally threatened, so they had fled.
“Ah, the Effendi is Finnish but you’re Iranian?”
“Finnish by marriage, Sergeant Effendi, Iranian by birth. Here are our papers.” She had given him her Finnish passport which did not include references to her late father, Abdollah Khan. “May we use the telephone, please? We can pay, of course. My husband would like to call our embassy, and also his employer in Al Shargaz.”
“Ah, Al Shargaz.” The sergeant nodded pleasantly. He was heavyset, close-shaven, even so the blue-black of his beard showed through his golden skin. “Where’s that?”
She told him, very conscious of the way she and Erikki looked, Erikki with the filthy, bloodstained bandage on his arm and the crude adhesive over his damaged ear, she with her hair matted and dirty clothes and face. Behind her the two Hueys circled. The sergeant watched them thoughtfully. “Why would they dare to send fighters into our airspace and helicopters after you?” “The Will of God, Sergeant Effendi. I’m afraid that on that side of the border many strange things are happening now.”
“How are things over the border?” He motioned the other policemen toward the 212 and began to listen attentively. The three policemen wandered over, peered into the cockpit. Bullet holes and dried blood and smashed instruments. One of them opened the cabin door. Many automatic weapons. More bullet holes. “Sergeant!”
The sergeant acknowledged but waited politely until Azadeh had finished. Villagers listened wide-eyed, not a chador or veil among them. Then he pointed to one of the crude village huts. “Please wait over there in the shade.” The day was cold, the land snowbound, the sun bright off the snow. Leisurely the sergeant examined the cabin and the cockpit. He picked up the kookri, half pulled it out of the scabbard, and shoved it home again. Then he beckoned Azadeh and Erikki with it. “How do you explain the guns, Effendi?”
Uneasily Azadeh translated the question for Erikki.
“Tell him they were left in my plane by tribesmen who were attempting to hijack her.”
“Ah, tribesmen,” the sergeant said. “I’m astonished tribesmen would leave such wealth for you to fly away with. Can you explain that?” “Tell him they were all killed by loyalists, and I escaped in the melee.”
“Loyalists, Effendi? What loyalists?”
“Police. Tabrizi police,” Erikki said, uncomfortably aware that each question would pull them deeper into the quicksand. “Ask him if I can use the telephone, Azadeh.”
“Telephone? Certainly. In due time.” The sergeant studied the circling Hueys for a moment. Then he turned his hard brown eyes back to Erikki. “I’m glad the police were loyal. Police have a duty to the state, to the people, and to uphold the law. Gunrunning is against the law. Fleeing from police upholding the law is a crime. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, but we’re not gunrunners, Sergeant Effendi, nor fleeing from police upholding the law,” Azadeh had said, even more afraid now. The border was so close, too close. For her the last part of their escape had been terrifying. Obviously Hakim had alerted the border area; no one but he had the power to arrange such an intercept so fast, both on the ground and in the air. “Are you armed?” the sergeant asked politely.
“Just a knife.”
“May I have it please?” The sergeant accepted it. “Please follow me.” They had gone to the police station, a small brick building with cells and a few offices and telephones near the mosque in the little village square. “Over the last months we’ve had many refugees of all sorts passing along our road, Iranians, British, Europeans, Americans, many Azerbaijanis, many - but no Soviets.” He laughed at his own joke. “Many refugees, rich, poor, good, bad, many criminals among them. Some were sent back, some went on. Insha’Allah, eh? Please wait there.”
“There” was not a cell but a room with a few chairs and a table and bars on the windows, many flies and no way out. But it was warm and relatively clean. “Could we have some food and drink and use the telephone, please?” Azadeh asked. “We can pay, Sergeant Effendi.”
“I will order some for you from the hotel here. The food is good and not expensive.”
“My husband asks, can he use the telephone, please?”
“Certainly - in due course.”
That had been this morning, and now it was late afternoon. In the intervening time the food had arrived, rice and mutton stew and peasant bread and Turkish coffee. She had paid with rials and was not overcharged. The sergeant had allowed them to use the foul-smelling hole in the ground squatter, and water from a tank and an old basin to wash in. There were no medical supplies, just iodine. Erikki had cleaned his wounds as best he could, gritting his teeth at the sudden pain, still weak and exhausted. Then, with Azadeh close beside him, he had propped himself on a chair, his feet on another, and had drifted off. From time to time the door would open and one or other of the policemen would come in, then go out again. “Matyeryebyets,” Erikki muttered. “Where can we run to?”
She had gentled him and stayed close and kept a steel gate on her own fear. I must carry him, she thought over and over. She was feeling better now with her hair combed and flowing, her face clean, her cashmere sweater tidy. Through the door she could hear muttered conversation, occasionally a telephone ringing, cars and trucks going past on the road from and to the border, flies droning. Her tiredness took her and she slept fitfully, her dreams bad: noise of engines and firing and Hakim mounted like a Cossack charging them, both she and Erikki buried up to their necks in the earth, hooves just missing them, then somehow free, rushing from the border that was acres of massed barbed wire, the false mullah Mahmud and the butcher suddenly between them and safety and th - The door opened. Both of them awoke, startled. A major in immaculate uniform stood there, glowering, flanked by the sergeant and another policeman. He was a tall, hard-faced man. “Your papers please,” he said to Azadeh. “I, I gave them to the sergeant, Major Effendi.” “You gave him a Finnish passport. Your Iranian papers.” The major held out his hand. She was too slow. At once the sergeant went forward and grabbed her shoulder purse and spilled the contents onto the table. Simultaneously, the other policeman stalked over to Erikki, his hand on the revolver in his open holster, waved him into a corner against the wall. The major flicked some dirt off a chair and sat down, accepted her Iranian ID from the sergeant, read it carefully, then looked at the contents on the table. He opened the jewel bag. His eyes widened. “Where did you get these?”