Martin started walking towards her, trying to judge his pace so he’d reach her in time without drawing attention to either of them. The second group of Basijis were shouting slogans at the people they passed, but they were yet to start bashing anyone; Martin doused a shameful hope that they’d find some guy in a Rammstein T-shirt to keep them occupied.
Some of the people ahead of him were turning back, but Mahnoosh continued, undeterred. Why had she headed south at all, when she’d known what was coming? Maybe she’d wanted to see how things unfolded here – to bear witness to any violence, even if there was nothing more she could do to prevent it.
It could not have been more than thirty seconds before Martin was finally walking a pace behind her, but his heart was pounding as if he’d sprinted all the way. He spoke quietly in English without wasting time giving his name, trusting her to recognise his voice. ‘Please don’t turn around. You’re still wearing the sash.’
For a second he wondered if his voice had been too soft – he hadn’t wanted to attract curious stares from the shoppers around them – but then Mahnoosh reached to her left side and unclipped the sash, where it was fastened together near her waist. In a sequence of quick movements, she gathered up the swathe of material, sliding it lengthways across her shoulder until it was entirely in her hands.
When she’d stuffed the sash into a pocket of her manteau, Martin finally dared to look up to see if any of the Basijis were watching, but her deft manoeuvre seemed to have gone unnoticed. Then, just as he was contemplating turning around and heading north, one of the men met his gaze for a second, and he realised that he was too close now to flee without attracting attention. He was middle-aged, conservatively dressed, and even if his features marked him as a likely foreigner at least he wasn’t toting a video camera. Far better to brazen it out than to act suspiciously.
He walked on briskly past Mahnoosh and into the oncoming Basijis, trying to prove his clear conscience by giving them no wider berth than he would have offered any other pedestrians, trying to channel the persona of a distracted foreign businessman who’d simply wandered out of his hotel at a bad time. There were ten of them, all with identical green batons, three with pistols. He could smell their acrid sweat. They’d been outmanoeuvred and humiliated, and even if they had no hope now of reliably picking protesters out of the crowd, it would not take much to be judged worthy of helping them work off their frustration.
One of them brushed against his shoulder. Martin said, ‘Bebakhshid, ’ and kept walking. He continued to the next street corner, then looked back. Mahnoosh had passed them too, unmolested. For a moment he considered approaching her, but with the streets full of Basijis it was still too dangerous; she was no longer marked as a protester, but she had no right to be talking to an unrelated, foreign man.
As Martin began climbing the stairs to his apartment, Omar’s wife Rana appeared at her door. She greeted him politely, but it was clear that something was wrong.
‘Have you heard from Omar?’ she asked.
‘No. Why, was he at the march?’ Martin would not have expected to see him there; waving placards wasn’t his style.
Rana shook her head. ‘But he didn’t come home from the shop, and he’s not answering the phone there.’
‘Maybe his car broke down?’ The mobile phone service was still disabled; Martin was about to mention the mesh network he’d seen Mahnoosh using, but Rana would have tried that already if it had been an option. Perhaps the devices weren’t thick enough on the ground to provide a connection out here in the suburbs.
He said, ‘Would you like me to drive to the shop and take a look?’
‘Please, if you could. We’ll come with you, bizahmat.’
‘Of course.’
Martin waited in the open doorway while she fetched her father-in-law, Mohsen, to accompany them; the whole family treated Martin warmly, but there was no question of him going anywhere with Rana alone. He felt a tug on his trousers; Omar’s three-year-old son had grabbed hold of his knee.
Martin squatted down to greet him. ‘Salaam, Farshid jan.’
Farshid frowned. ‘Baba kojast?’
‘Namidunam,’ Martin confessed. ‘Zud be khane miayad.’ He’ll be home soon.
Mohsen and Rana appeared and the three of them headed for the car, leaving Farshid with his grandmother. Mohsen’s English was as patchy as Martin’s Farsi, but Martin worked out that he wasn’t too worried yet: Omar had probably just been called away on business, somewhere with no access to a phone.
As they drove towards the city Martin scanned the radio stations for news. The official news agency had already announced that twenty-seven people had been hospitalised after the march; the hospitals themselves refused to give out figures, and he could no longer guess whether casualties were being downplayed to exculpate the militias, or inflated in order to warn people off.
When they reached the shop it was locked and dark; Omar’s car was still parked in the rear. Rana went inside to look around; Mohsen waited outside with Martin, leaning against the car, smoking. He had lost both legs in the war with Iraq; he had prosthetics, but he needed crutches to get around. After a couple of minutes Rana emerged, distraught. She spoke to her father-in-law, showing him a scrap of paper, then she explained to Martin, ‘He left a note inside the cash register. Someone arrested him, took him away.’
‘Who arrested him?’
Rana shook her head. ‘He didn’t know who they were. Or he didn’t have time to write it.’
Martin didn’t want to dwell on what would happen if VEVAK had uncovered Omar’s role in getting Shokouh out of the country. ‘We could go to the police station, ask there,’ he suggested. He couldn’t think of anything else to try; they’d be hard-pressed to find a lawyer at this hour. Rana repeated this to Mohsen, and he agreed.
The central police station was more crowded than Martin had seen it before, with a queue of anxious relatives spilling out onto the street and halfway down the block. There’d been no mass arrests at the march itself, and the brawls with the Basijis had not been widespread – the only explanation Martin could think of was that there’d been some kind of crackdown in the hours after the march, with hundreds of minor dissidents rounded up. He tried to find a positive spin on that: if Omar had been arrested for nothing more than a few indiscreet comments overheard by informers, the chances were he’d be released within a day or two, uncharged.
When they joined the queue the first half-dozen people ahead of them offered to cede their place to Mohsen; he politely declined, but they kept insisting until he accepted. Martin couldn’t entirely fathom why he wasn’t simply admitted to the head of the queue; it wasn’t as if the dozens of people who were now content to remain in front of him were any less respectful of his status as a veteran. Perhaps it was a kind of trade-off, a gesture that showed respect without overstepping the mark into condescension.
Rana wouldn’t lift her gaze from the ground, and she resisted Martin’s attempts to distract her with small-talk and optimistic prognoses. He was trying to keep his own imagination in check; he knew what went on in Evin Prison, but nobody was going to round up and torture every last Iranian who’d ever stocked contraband action movies. Only if they’d traced Shokouh’s false passport back to Omar would he be in real danger.
Martin spotted a woman further along the queue speaking on a phone, though she was doing her best to hide it in her sleeve. As far as he knew the Slightly Smart phones weren’t illegal, though perhaps they soon would be.
When she hung up the call, she turned and spoke agitatedly with her neighbour. Whatever the subject, it was not a private matter; within minutes Martin could see the news being spread up and down the line. Maybe the authorities had decided to charge Jabari after all; if his resignation hadn’t been enough to win back conservative support, why not pull out all the stops and have a show trial, to prove that nobody was above the law?