A fictional series based on real events that happened in Iran known as the “Spider Killings“. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
PART 18
Azadeh woke up in a cold sweat. For a few seconds, she looked around disoriented at the unfamiliar room in which she had been sleeping. She was lying in a lower bunk bed and someone was snoring on the top. In front of her, another set of bunk beds was erected against the wall, where other women were lying asleep. Her first instinct was to look for Yassi and then, she remembered. The awful reality that her friend was dead smashed her with a hard thud on her forehead like a stone aimed at her with a vengeance from afar.
This was a safe house of sorts, which Majid had taken her to before he could get the paperwork ready for her and Babak to leave the country. Along with the rest of these girls, former prostitutes, drug addicts, abused wives and children, they were to get a second chance all thanks to him. Majid had secured jobs for them in Dubai in the employ of a wealthy Iranian who owned a conglomerate of luxury resort hotels and nightclubs there. Azadeh would be able to repay the money that Majid had expended on Yassi’s funeral, although he had begged her to forget about it. More importantly, Babak and her would have a chance for a new life away from all the horrible memories that remained in their native country.
The money promised was good and the job would be decent: Hotel maid, cook, or waitress. It would depend on the positions vacant and their skills. The pay was okay and Majid had promised them they could make double in tips. No more of this la-jan, this mud she had been waddling in ever since she ran away from Mohammad.
The rest of the girls also owed a huge debt of gratitude to Majid, in some way or another. Most of them had come to know him through their prior arrests and just like he had done with Azadeh, he had given them his contact information and an opportunity to get out of their hated lives.
— “Why do you do all this?” Azadeh had asked him. “What’s in it for you?”
— “Azadeh Khanoom, let’s just say I too have fallen on hard times and I know what it is like.” Majid had responded after a long silence. “I was an orphan you know and if it wasn’t for my uncle raising me as… as his own son…”
Majid swallowed hard and did not continue. Azadeh thought he was choked up with emotion. She would never have pegged him to be such an angelic man. She hated herself for it but even now, as he was offering a helping hand, she still couldn’t help it. The mere presence of him in her proximity rendered her uncomfortable. Just like that first day she had met him. She couldn’t fathom why. After all the filthy, disgusting men she had debased herself for, gone down on all fours for, bent over for, been pinched, pulled, pushed every which way for, this clean-cut and kind young man was the one who was making her skin crawl.
— “Azadeh you are really losing it.” She told herself “You are so confused between good and evil, you wear evil like a warm and comforting winter coat while you think goodness has all the appeal of a venomous snake slithering against you!”
Quietly, she got up and went down the hallway to check on Babak in his room. The little boy was fast asleep in a big bed, along with a couple of other kids that belonged to the other women. He still was unaware of anything that was going on and thought that the trip he was going to be taking with Azadeh was to visit Maman Yassi where she had gone abroad.
— “Better to let him think that, it will be smoother for the journey.” Azadeh thought to herself guiltily “Once we are there and he has gotten used to things a little bit, I will break the news for him, but slowly, slowly. And he will be fine. We will be fine. We will survive.”
She whispered the last sentence aloud to herself, as if to convince herself of its truth.
* * *
Ramin was driving back from his meeting with Roxanne, lost in deep thought. He always had suspected the things that Roxanne had revealed to him, the facts that Peyman had uncovered during his year-long investigation. Still, to hear it confirmed, and with damning evidence to back it up, now safely hidden by Roxanne in Tehran, wow… He still didn’t know what to do with all this. He had asked Roxanne and she had agreed to keep it to themselves for now until they figured out what was the best way to use it against their adversaries. For now, it was important to locate the young Azadeh who had mysteriously disappeared with Majid. Ramin wasn’t sure if it was by force or willingly. But he was certain of one thing. That vermin Majid could not be trusted.
When he got back to his headquarters, it was past midnight. There were a couple of urgent messages left for him by Asghar, his second in command. He called him in.
— “Asghar, I want you to page Majid. I need to see him.”
— “Of course, Sir, I will do that. But before, may I tell you of an urgent matter at hand?”
— “What is it?”
— “Someone has come forward regarding the Spid… ummm… I mean with some new information that may be connected to the Shrine murder.”
Ramin sighed. With the scandalous display of the dead girl in the holy center of the city, not even the almighty Ayatollah Kazemi could keep the news at bay any longer. The story was all everyone was talking about. It had spread like wildfire through Mashad. A prostitute strangled with her own hejab, her body tikkeh pareh, shredded to pieces and left to rot before the Mausoleum of the Great Imam. The populace was as thirsty for the killer ‘s blood as the killer had been for his victim’s. Now, everyone and their ammeh, their aunt, would probably come forward with tales how their neighbor, their brother-in-law, or their employee was the man responsible. It would be difficult to weed out all the people who were simply acting on the basis of a personal vendetta rather than bringing forth useful clues.
— “Well? Who is he? What does he say?”
— “It’s a she. She says, she was victimized by a man she believes could be the same…”
— “So, just take down her story and investigate.”
— “It’s just, I really think you should hear it Sir. I have kept her here for that purpose.”
Seeing Ramin’s look, Asghar added:
— “Sir, the way she described it. It leads me to think… Well, I just want you to hear her out.”
— Ramin jumped on his feet and followed Asghar to the interrogation room where a chubby woman clad in a fashionable, silk hejab and short, navy blue manteau was sitting at the table. When she turned around, Ramin was surprised to see that she was in her late fifties, given the youthful get-up and the fiery strands of red hair that were prominently displayed from underneath her loose headscarf.
The woman had been crying for a long time. Her eyes were two puffy globes, her cheeks still glistening with the remnant of her tears, some hair strands stuck to her moist temples. Ramin was about to ask Asghar why he had brought him here, why the particular interest in this would-be witness when suddenly, there it was again. That ice cold pressure against his nape. That uncomfortable tingling that had never failed to push Ramin in the right direction in all of his investigations. The Brigadier-General sat down and asked the woman to begin.
— No matter how hard she tried, Azadeh just could not get some restful sleep that night. She woke up again, almost crying out from her dream. She had envisioned Yassi in the grassy field that used to lie next to her native home, where she and her brother Massoud used to play when they were children. Yassi was running away from her, her black chador a dark inkblot that stained the shimmering meadow under the bright summer sky. Azadeh’s pleas to her friend to wait for her echoed those she had so often shouted at her brother during their childhood games.
As Azadeh was running, her feet began to slip and dig into the ground, which had become muddy and soft. She looked up and noticed the sky had become cloudy and dark. The wind had also picked up, chilling her to the bone. She was almost out of breath, and out of hope, when finally she was able to grab on to one of the folds in Yassi’s chador and hold her back. Except that it wasn’t Yassi.
Azadeh froze in terror as the figure she was holding onto turned around to reveal she was no woman at all. There was a human shell but it had been devoured by the creature that now stared at Azadeh from the abyss of its hollow eye sockets. As Azadeh began to back away, now the creature started advancing upon her.
— “Please…” Azadeh murmured in her dream, too choked up to raise her voice, “Please…”
But she could not continue. The woman had taken hold of Azadeh’s arm with a grip as tight as the handcuffs Azadeh had been bruised by so often during her prior arrests. Young girl was too terrified to move anyway. She watched helplessly as the deev, the monster before her, rose her free hand high in the sky and brought it down on Azadeh’s face with all the magnitude of a lightning strike. Azadeh bit her tongue and tasted blood. She closed her eyes, realizing helplessly that she was in fact dreaming, that this could not be real and waiting desperately to wake up, but she couldn’t.
She felt the demonic woman’s open palms burn her chest as she pushed her onto the ground, and kneeled atop of her. Azadeh still refused to open her eyes. She could smell and feel the deev’s hot breath on her face. They were so close to each other now they must have been almost touching. The infernal creature smelled both sweet and rotten, like blooming flowers left in a pile of decaying garbage. Azadeh began to gag, and she was afraid she would throw up in her mouth and choke on her own vomit. But before that could happen, the same fiery hands moved up from her chest to her throat.
Mercilessly grabbing her neck, the monstrous woman began to lift Azadeh’s head and to slam it hard onto the ground. With each thud, Azadeh felt life beginning to chip away from her. When she felt she was definitely on the brink of death, she decided to open her eyes. But instead of the monster’s face she expected to see staring back at her, she found herself looking at the bunk bed on top of her.
* * *
— “Like I was telling your officer, I am a respectable woman, the mother of a shahid. I don’t know why God decided to visit this terrible pain upon me.”
The woman was sniffling. Dabbing her eyes with a dirty handkerchief, she continued:
— “You have to understand, I am not… I am not like one of those women. I am a respectable lady. It just happened that I got into this taxicab to go home but when I reached my destination, I realized I had forgotten my wallet at home. So I told the driver to wait for me, that I would be right back with the money. He must have followed me home unbeknownst to me.”
The woman broke into tears again.
It went on like this until the woman had described, as best she could, the man who had tried to kill her. Ramin’s ears had perked up at the mention of taxicabs. Of course, how clever. If indeed this was the Spider Killer, he had the perfect pretext to roam around strange neighborhoods, stalking his prey, and then pick up a female passenger without being harassed by the morality police. And her description of the man was eerily familiar too. According to her, he was short, with graying hair but a curiously jet black beard as if he had dyed it. Ramin was sure he had heard or seen that description before and decided he must have a prior criminal record.
— “Asghar, get the photograph books to this woman and see if she can identify her assailant among those criminals. There is something about the description that makes me think I have seen him before, perhaps he was recently arrested? Also, get a few men to start calling on the taxi agencies in the city. Don’t just ask to see the documentation for the drivers on their payroll but also the men who lease their cars as independent contractors. They should all have a copy of their driver’s I.D. on file.”
Turning to the woman, he asked, not too kindly:
— “Why have you waited over a month to come forward? Don’t you know this could be considered interference with police work?”
The woman was sobbing so hard now, she was hiccupping.
— “I am … so… so… sorry. I couldn’t even… get out of my house since… this happened. Then when I heard… about that poor young girl… at the Shrine…I had to… had to…”
— “Very well” Ramin interrupted. “My officer is going to show you photographs of men who have a criminal record. Please look at each carefully and tell him if you recognize your assailant.”
Despite his stern exterior, Ramin was secretly excited. This could be the break he had so desperately been looking for. And once they found him, he was sure of it now, that they would find him, it would put an end to this bloodthirsty demon’s ravages, it would bring serenity back into Ramin’s life and then… Lost in his thoughts, the police chief forgot to follow up on Majid and Azadeh.
* * *
It took a few minutes for Azadeh to regain her breath, to calm her beating heart. She wept quietly in her bed, under the covers, so as not to wake up the others. Then, she reached into her purse, which she had kept under her covers with her and took out her scissors. She had been careful to wrap them up and take them with her when she had left her old home forever. Although she had promised herself she would try to not do it again, she felt that she could not go on, she could not survive the night without cutting herself. Perhaps by engaging in this ritual, the only ritual she had ever known that could make her escape her nightmarish reality, she could literally chase her demons away, at least for one night.
Quietly, Azadeh got out of bed, scissors in hand, and made her way downstairs to the first floor, to the one bathroom in the house, where she could have some privacy. Once she reached the door of the bathroom though, she heard some moaning noises coming from another direction. Curious, she tried to listen to see where it was coming from. It seemingly originated from the main floor bedroom. It had been vacant when Azadeh had arrived the previous evening. Maybe there was a new arrival. She put her ears to the door and heard some grunting, followed by a moan. There were definitely two different voices there. Before she could stop herself, she opened the door as quietly as she could, peering inside>>> Part 19
PARTS [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
