Brides of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

razor under his nose, scraping away at the underlying pallor to get at a few stubborn hairs. He used an Iranian blade, an aptly named Shark; when he glanced in the mirror again, his upper lip was awash in blood.
    “You’re the only man I know who keeps pictures of himself on his mirror,” Ghaffari said.
    “To remember me by.”
    Searching for a match Ghaffari went into Darius’s office, a waiting-room ambience of gray walls and gray carpeting. A threadbare sheet had been tossed over a couch upholstered in torn vinyl, and a bolster pillow was squashed against the armrest. In a large outer office burly men in various stages of uniform dress breakfasted on melon juice and coffee cake while civilian clerks beat on manual typewriters. He returned to the bathroom without the match. “Why don’t you sleep in your own bed for once?”
    Darius screwed the cap off a green bottle, and held it to his nose. “It’s not worth fighting the traffic, when I have to be at the morgue by ten.”
    “You never go home. There are corpses who spend less time at the morgue than you.”
    “They don’t know what they’re missing. Look, Mansur, it would be nice if you could stop poking your nose into every little thing I do.”
    “What other friends do you have to tell you that your behavior is cause for concern? You see so little of your wife, it’s a mystery why you bother to stay married. Considering all the time you spend here, it would be more practical to move into one of the cells downstairs, and Farib can come stay with you during visiting hours.”
    “Now, I think you may have something,” Darius said.
    Ghaffari hung his head in surrender until he saw the beginnings of a reluctant smile. Taking the bottle from Darius, he milked it of a drop, and transferred a whisper of scent to the underside of his jaw. With liquor outlawed, alcoholics had bid the price of aftershave and cologne to the equal of French perfume. “You should lay off this stuff.”
    “Why?” Darius snatched back the aftershave, sloshed it on his face and neck.
    “You waste it like water.”
    Darius poured more onto his tie. “A pretty girl is waiting.”
    The coroner’s office was housed in a building the color of mud brick several blocks from police headquarters. Darius went in through the viewing room where Teheran’s bereaved gathered each morning to claim the bodies that sprouted like malevolent toadstools on the streets. Corpses waiting to be identified were stored in the basement morgue, and brought up for inspection on a glassed carousel. The building resounded with an iron clangor like the housing of a huge engine. Descending into a chemical bouquet of formalin and urine, of cold sweat mixed with the foulness of death, Darius had the sensation that he had skipped the intermediate stations of dying and burial to arrive intact in the bowels of hell.
    A room the size of a downtown block was a benign necropolis under the rule of men in surgical gowns and masks, the nether side of the living city three stories above. A dozen slabs were inhabited by corpses in various stages of destruction. To each was assigned a young doctor as squeamish as a schoolboy investigating a frog. Flitting from table to table was the stooped figure of Baghai.
    A body without a face lay under fluorescent strips. In the most devout neighborhoods a splash of sulfuric acid was vigilante justice for women found wearing makeup. Blindness or disfigurement was the usual sentence, but too often it was administered with an excess of zeal. Baghai claimed from the chest cavity a gelatinous heart, and placed it in a shiny pan—Baghai, who hadn’t the decency to fill the air with cigar smoke, to pretend to be offended by premature death.
    He stood behind a pathologist tracing a Y-shaped cut on a cadaver whose lower torso had been crushed to the thickness of a book. Steadying the tremulous scalpel, Baghai forced it through the brittle flesh on both sides of the sternum, and slid it to the