Exit wound

I started off trying to memorize the route, but soon knew I’d be in trouble if the shit hit the fan. After several more twists in the journey, I was completely lost. Traders at every corner tried to sell me a hundred and one things I didn’t want, from flip-flops to melons.

We ducked into another tiny alleyway and passed a cafe with a handful of tables spread under a patched awning. The lads were all linked up to a hubble-bubble. There was hardly room to pass by and my nostrils filled with applewood smoke.

An old man sweeping shit out from under the chairs caught Ali’s eye and waved. Ali waved back. They gave each other a burst of Farsi.

We walked on. I glanced back over my shoulder. ‘What’s he on about? Me?’

‘No, just chit-chat, but a little bit formal. We have to be formal – respectful – with people older than we are. He is my father’s friend. We used to come here to meet him for a breakfast of fried egg and meatballs in the days before my father became ill.’

Talk of food made me hungry all of a sudden. I hadn’t eaten since about six this morning.

‘When I could eat no more, my father would drive me to Mehrabad airport in the Paykan so we could watch the planes taking off and landing. This, for me, was the perfect day.’

Ali told me that his family had lived in the bazaar ever since his great-grandfather had crossed the border from Iraqi Kurdistan. He’d made a fortune trading sugar. The family had built a large house in the bazaar on the proceeds and Ali was old enough to remember what it had been like when his grandfather had still owned the entire building.

The Shah had tried to break the power of the bazaris by building roads through the district. He’d failed, because the bazaar was too big in every sense of the word. At the time of the Shah, almost half of the country’s retail economy had pumped through its streets and alleyways and over the years the bazaris had branched out into new disciplines, like money-lending and banking.

After the revolution the mullahs had decided the bazaris were getting above themselves so they encouraged the growth of shops, supermarkets and banks in the central and northern part of the city. That way they’d fucked up the bazaris’ power base and managed to achieve what the Shah had failed to do.

Under Ali’s grandfather, the family business had collapsed. To pay off his debts, the old boy had converted their home into apartments, selling off every floor except the top one, which was where Ali now lived with his father and his sister. Life, clearly, wasn’t easy.

We emerged into a courtyard and Ali pointed to the large, red-brick house opposite. It had an ornate double door for an entrance and big balconies with carved stone pillars rising to the fifth floor. It looked like a Venetian palace. ‘This is where we live, Jim. Come.’

He pushed open the door. Inside, dim electric light fizzed from a bare bulb hanging from the flaking painted ceiling. Rubbish littered the cracked marble floor. There was a rank, putrid smell – either the rotting rubbish in the bins I could see under the stairs, or perhaps something had died.

There was an ancient lift, too, but it had jammed fast between two floors and looked like it had been there since the time of the Shah. The lift well, as we passed, seemed to be the main source of the stench.

Ali climbed the stairs ahead of me, our footsteps echoing off the walls as we made our way to the fifth floor.

‘Jim, it would please me greatly to work on your magazine.’ He started taking the steps two at a time. ‘And my sister Aisha would be so happy!’

Halfway up, Ali’s mobile beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open. ‘The signal is so bad here that I only pick up messages when I am on the second floor.’ He stopped to read the message, swore under his breath, then broke into a run.

I called after him, but he was already half a floor ahead of me, taking the steps in threes. I didn’t catch up with him until we reached the apartment door. ‘Ali?’

He was breathing hard and fumbling in his pocket for his keys. ‘It’s my sister, I-’

The door was opened by a girl in her late twenties, with heavy kohl-laden eyes and long dark hair. She wore frayed jeans and a T-shirt with a photograph of Bono just about to swallow a mike.

She glanced at me and cut away just as quickly to focus on Ali. She spoke fast, pulling him into the apartment as she did so. There was a look on her face – one that I knew from years of soldiering and a whole lot more of shitty times.

Somebody was either dead or dying.

66

I followed them along a dark corridor into a room with tall French windows. Dirty full-length net curtains blew into the room. There was a double bed with a large carved headboard set against the far wall. A ceiling fan that wobbled on its axis above it pressed the sheets against the outline of a body. Despite the open window and the fan, the room remained sweltering. Voices drifted up from the street below. The melons and flip-flops were still on special offer.