The Leveling (27 page)

“I can hot-wire a Paykan,” said Daria, referring to a popular Iranian-made car that had gone out of production a few years back.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they’re like lawn mowers.”

They passed a public park where Iranian families were picnicking on the grass, finishing up late dinners. Mark reflected for a moment on the huge chasm between the grotesque underworld he’d slipped back into and the placid normal world most people lived in, even in Iran. He also figured that stealing decent
licenses from those normal, gullible people wouldn’t be a problem. Getting the proper tools to alter them might be, though. “When do the stores close around here?”

“Probably eleven.”

“Will they have what we need for the licenses?”

“Quchan isn’t big, but it’s big enough. There’ll be a mall somewhere.”

On the bed of a three-dollar-a-night hotel room, under a
qiblah
arrow that pointed praying Muslims toward Mecca, Daria arranged a pack of razor blades, rubber cement glue, a digital camera, a Lenovo laptop, a photo printer, photo paper, a couple of sheets of clear laminating paper, a scanner, hair dye, tweezers, two pairs of weak reading glasses, a travel iron, and new clothes for herself and Mark.

Next to all that, Mark placed two standard-class Iranian driver’s licenses. Printed on the faces of the licenses were photos of the licensees—a married couple from Tabriz. The wife was thirty-six years old and the husband was thirty-eight. Mark had stolen their wallets while the couple tended to their crying infant. To soften the blow, he’d left two hundred dollars in Iranian rials in their coat pockets.

In preparation for their head-shot photos, they retreated to the bathroom. Daria cut Mark’s hair short on the sides, so that his face looked thinner, and he lopped three inches off Daria’s hair, leaving her with a bob cut.

“God, you stink,” she said, as he cut her hair.

After she finished with his hair, he wiped away all the cigarette ash beneath his eyes, showered, shaved off his three-day beard, and put on new clothes. Then he cut up pieces of cardboard packaging and wedged them into the heels of his shoes,
adding an inch to his height so that he stood nearly as tall as the six feet listed on his new driver’s license.

Overall it wasn’t much of a disguise, he thought, as he slipped on the weak reading glasses and looked in the small mirror above the toilet, standing a foot behind Daria as she worked on her own appearance. But he looked different enough that your average cop with a photo of him crossing the border earlier in the day would at least have to do a double take. He tried pushing the glasses lower, to mask the distinctive bump he had as a result of his nose being broken by KGB goons nearly two decades ago.

Daria plucked her eyebrows so that they were thinner and had more of an arch. She wiped away the makeup that had been covering the scars on her face. When she saw him looking at her, she got self-conscious and put her hands up to cover her face.

“I look like hell, I know.”

Mark stood a foot behind her.

He’d actually been thinking that she was still beautiful, despite all she’d been through. She’d probably never see it that way, though.

He could see someone else’s garbage—old fava beans and a bunch of used tissues—in the waste bin under the sink. The fava beans smelled sour, and a stink of sewage gas seeped up from the base of the toilet.

Daria didn’t belong in this dump, he thought. No one did.

“You look fine.”

China, Above Xinjiang

T
HE
B
EIJING-BOUND ARMY
transport plane was pretty utilitarian inside, but Li Zemin was seated up front, where a few comfortable captain’s chairs had been bolted to the steel floor—a first-class section of sorts, reserved for military and intelligence bigwigs. A young lieutenant general sat beside him.

Not long into the trip, an air force steward asked Zemin and the lieutenant general if they wanted tea and crackers.

Zemin said he’d brought his own tea. Just hot water would be fine. He sneezed and rummaged through his shoulder bag for the mix of oolong tea and medicinal herbs that his trusted herbalist in Beijing had prepared for him.

“Try it with some
baijiu
,” said the lieutenant general. He produced a green porcelain bottle and offered it to Zemin. “A little bit will help clear your nose.”

Zemin was about to refuse the offer—
baijiu
was a notoriously strong liquor that his wife had frowned upon when she’d been alive. And Zemin had never been much of a drinker anyway. But he found himself thinking that
baijiu
might be just the thing he needed to help him deal with his uncle. So he accepted the bottle, and after steeping his tea in hot water for a few minutes, he poured a few ounces of the alcohol on top.

The
baijiu
had been infused with the fragrance of honey, so despite its potency, it slipped down Zemin’s throat with ease. It did nothing to clear his nose, but he announced the success of the treatment to the lieutenant general anyway.

“Then the bottle is yours,” replied the lieutenant general, as Zemin had known he would.

“But I couldn’t possibly accept.”

“I insist.” He explained that the brand was common in his home city of Shanghai, but hard to find in Beijing.

Zemin offered his thanks for the gift and, an hour later, when he ordered more hot water for tea, he topped off his cup with another healthy pour of the liquor.

Mashhad, Iran

M
ASHHAD AT DAWN
was frantic with honking cars, tour buses and construction trucks, and crowds of people streaming along with great purpose. The pollution was so thick in the streets that Mark’s eyes began to water as he walked. It was a city that had grown too fast, he thought, with no central planning.

In the city center, towering high above the maze of clogged streets and surrounding buildings, loomed an enormous dome tiled in solid gold and topped by a green flag. It was the shrine of Imam Reza, Daria said, one of Shiite Islam’s most revered figures. Tall golden minarets rose on either side of it, and strings of lights suspended from the top of the minarets flared outward like bell-bottoms. A massive Vatican-like city-within-a-city had grown up around the shrine.

When Mark got to the high tiled walls that separated the shrine complex from the rest of Mashhad, he presented his Iranian driver’s license to one of the guards standing at the men’s entrance. Having already used it at two police checkpoints, when he and Daria had breezed into Mashhad early that morning, he was confident by now that it would be accepted.

The guard glanced at the license, as though to be polite, swept a hand-held metal detector across Mark’s body, and asked a question in Farsi.

Mark didn’t understand the question, but guessed the guard was asking him what his intentions were.

“Pilgrimage, pay my respects to Imam Reza.” Mark spoke in Azeri. More Azeris lived in Iran than in Azerbaijan, and it was a common language of commerce in Iran. He figured in a place so heavily trafficked as this that the guards would understand him.

“Camera?” asked the guard, this time in Azeri. He patted Mark’s body down, but stayed away from Mark’s genitals, where Mark had hidden a roll of tape and a sheaf of paper fliers. Mark had figured it would be like a football game, where you were allowed to smuggle in as much booze as you could fit next to your balls.

“No.”

The guard motioned for him to pass through the gates, and Mark entered the first of a series of interlocking courtyards that surrounded the shrine. In front of him, a woman in a black chador was praying, her eyes cast toward the sky, her hands held up in front of her as though holding an imaginary box. A nearby signpost pointed the way to ancient mosques, museums, religious schools, libraries, tourist centers, guest houses…

Most of the complex was technically off-limits to non-Muslims, but tests for religious purity were impossible to administer to the millions of visitors who passed through every year.

He followed the arrow pointing to the shrine itself and soon reached an inner courtyard that was ringed by a two-story arcade clad in millions of hand-painted tiles. Clusters of men in robes knelt on rugs, praying, and a gray cat walked on a roof high above the courtyard. A little girl, too young to need to cover her hair, brushed by him as she chased a little boy. As Mark traversed the courtyard, a flock of green pigeons flew up and settled on top of the gilded water station where pilgrims were washing themselves before entering the shrine to pray.

The entrance to the shrine stood under a gold-tiled vaulted Persian arch; a giant chandelier hung from its apex. To either side of the entrance were areas where pilgrims could remove their
shoes before going inside. Mark approached the men’s section and pulled out his sheaf of fliers.

On each flier was a photo of the man in the black turban.

Underneath the photo, it read, in Farsi,
Are you learned enough to know the name of this esteemed sayyid, next Friday’s Prayer leader? The first fifty worshippers to call will be rewarded with a private sermon by this learned man, to be held at the Balasar Mosque. There he will enlighten all of the glory of Imam Reza, peace be upon him
. At the bottom of the flier was a telephone number and the name Center for Islamic Studies.

Mark taped three fliers to a wall where people preparing to enter the shrine were sure to see them.

Next he went to a school, where women in black chadors were seated on a carpeted floor in a central room studying the Qur’an while their children played with humidifiers, putting their hands near the steam and laughing when it touched their hands.

He taped five fliers to the green bulletin board near the entrance.

Next came a library, then a huge courtyard where he taped fliers to half the lampposts.

Outside a mosque, over a thousand people stood in bare feet or socks on prayer carpets, bowing as one. Mark walked among them as though looking for a family member, trying to avoid the men in blue suits wielding rainbow-colored feather dusters who were directing late-arriving worshippers to their proper places. He spotted fourteen black-turbaned sayyids among the crowd. None was the man he was looking for. He taped more fliers to the walls near the mosque entrance on his way out.

As he did so an old man, dressed in a torn sport coat and wool ski hat, with a face like leather, demanded to know what he was doing.

Mark flashed him a nasty look. “Contest,” he said in Azeri, and taped up another flier.