Early EY203. Sheema and Nikoo are 15.
Sheema's waiting for Nikoo in the back of the library, sitting on the floor next to the physics section. Her face lights up when she sees Nikoo.
"Hi," Nikoo whispers. "Sorry, it took longer than I thought to get away."
"It's okay. Glad you made it. How are you doing?" Sheema pats the spot next to herself on the floor.
Nikoo sits down. She leans against Sheema's shoulder. "Tired," she says. "My father threw a party last night. I was allowed to stay past midnight. Rashid was there." She feels Sheema stiffen. Sheema's never met Rashid, but that doesn't stop her from intensely disliking him. "I brought you some saffron spiced pecans," she adds quickly, as a peace offering. She pulls the small bag from her pocket. "I know they're your favourite."
Sheema eyes the bag. "We're not allowed food in the library," she reminds Nikoo.
"Take it," Nikoo says, pressing it into Sheema's hand. "Eat them later. I barely even talked to him, by the way."
"So why did you mention him?" Sheema asks.
"He was looking at me a lot. I think he wanted to get me alone, but Asjadi was basically glued to my elbow the whole time."
"I still think it's freaky that you have a bodyguard."
Nikoo shrugs. "If I didn't, somebody would probably kidnap me to try to get to my father."
"Your life scares me, Nikoo." Sheema leans her head against Nikoo's shoulder and takes Nikoo's hand. Nikoo likes it when she does this; it feels so comfortable. "I wish I could get you out of there."
"We'd have to run far, far away," Nikoo says. She doesn't really want to leave her life. It doesn't frighten her the way it does Sheema; she's used to it, and she never feels safer than in the presence of her father. But it's nice to imagine going somewhere where she and Sheema wouldn't have to hide their friendship -- where they wouldn't have to steal moments in the back of the library stacks, hoping that nobody in the school suddenly develops an interest in physics. "You'd miss your family."
"I'd tell them where I was going," Sheema says. "But I'd tell them to keep it secret from everybody else."
"We could go to one of those frontier planets," Nikoo says. "You know. One or two clusters out. Get jobs waiting tables until we could save up enough to buy a cabin in the middle of nowhere."
"We'd plant vegetables," Sheema continues. They've told themselves this story before. Neither of them has the faintest idea how to grow vegetables, but that's okay; it sounds romantic. "And we could raise goats."
"And we'd make half of the cabin into a studio, and I'd become a famous artist and you'd be a famous writer," Nikoo adds.
"And don't forget the orphan children!" Sheema says.
"Right." Nikoo can't really imagine raising a child, but she supposes that she and Sheema could figure it out together somehow. "We might have to build more rooms on the cabin."
Sheema laughs. "We'll keep building until it's bigger than my family's house!"
"Bigger than my father's house!" Nikoo gasps, giggling at the thought of this rickety, hand-made mansion full of goats and orphans.
When they get tired of describing their imaginary future together, Sheema goes and gets a history book and Nikoo gets out her sketchbook. They lean against each other, working quietly; Sheema takes notes as she reads, and Nikoo tries to draw the cabin. It comes out weird, like all her drawings, but Sheema claims to like it.
"We needed a couple of six-legged llamas anyway," Sheema says, tracing a part of the drawing with her finger. She's leaning close to Nikoo, taking a close look at the drawing; her cheek brushes Nikoo's. "The orphan children can ride them."
"Actually that was supposed to be a broccoli tree," Nikoo admits.
"Oh. I don't think it grows like that." Sheema's still very close to Nikoo; she's turned so her lips are almost touching Nikoo as she whispers, and Nikoo's heart flutters strangely.
They hear footsteps. They dart away from each other instinctively; Nikoo pulls a book from the shelf and opens it to a random page. The Effects of Gravity Wells on Space Drives -- Theory and Calculations. Looks complicated.
"The library will be closing in five minutes," says Mrs Hajjar, the librarian. "You'll need to check those books out if you want to keep them."
"Sure, I'll do that," says Nikoo, not looking back at Sheema. Her cheeks feel warm for some reason.
"See you tomorrow," Sheema whispers, ever so softly, as Nikoo leaves.
Late EY203. Sheema is 16; Nikoo will turn 16 soon.
When Sheema catches her first glimpse of Nikoo's house, she nearly keeps on walking right by it. She'd known it would be big, but then Sheema has been to parties in the governor's mansion, so she'd figured she'd just take Nikoo's place in stride. She hadn't expected the razor wire topping the elegant wrought-iron fence, though, or the three slavering pitbulls barking frantically at her from the other side of it.
Nevertheless, she stops at the gate and rings the bell.
It's a long wait before anyone comes, and Sheema's courage almost deserts her. She's on the verge of walking away when she sees a man emerge from a small outbuilding near the bottom of the drive. He calls the dogs to heel with a few rough words and then approaches her. He's a youngish guy, early twenties maybe, and his suit jacket is open so she can see a holster tucked under one shoulder. A thrill of fear runs down Sheema's neck.
"What do you want?" he asks, not opening the gate.
"I'm here to see Nikoo," Sheema squeaks. "Nikoo Zandi. I'm from her school."
The man eyes her suspiciously. "She's sick today."
"I know," Sheema says. "I've brought her study notes. From her classes."
The man looks unimpressed, but he asks her what her name is and then disappears back inside the outbuilding.
After another uncomfortably long wait, the man comes back out and opens the gate. "She'll see you," he says.
As the gate clangs shut behind her, Sheema seriously wonders if this was a huge mistake. Nikoo had no idea Sheema would be visiting her; after Nikoo's second day absent from school, Sheema just spontaneously decided to come here. She had to get the address from the school secretary; Nikoo has never even told her where she lives.
The man -- the guard, Sheema realizes -- has a tattoo on his neck. She gets a better look at it as she follows him up the long path to the house. It's a black rose.
Well, it isn't like I didn't know, she tells herself. But it had been less frightening in the abstract.
The house is huge, opulent. The guard from the gate brings her up the wide, marble staircase to the front door, where she's handed over to a woman, also dressed in a suit and conspicuously armed, who leads her through the house itself. Finally they reach a door in a hallway, guarded by a man Sheema recognises slightly -- Asjadi, Nikoo's main bodyguard. Most school days, he's the one who drops Nikoo off and picks her up, so Sheema has occasionally glimpsed him at a distance. Up close, she can see the scar running down one side of his face, which twists his mouth and barely misses his eye.
"Hi," Sheema squeaks. "I'm here to see Nikoo?"
Asjadi gives a curt nod, unsmiling. He opens the door and leads the way in.
Sheema had expected that this room would be Nikoo's bedroom, but it isn't; it's some sort of sitting room, with a couch and several brocade chairs arranged around a low table. Asjadi passes through the room to a closed door on the other side. He knocks lightly. "She's here," he says, pitching his voice to be heard through the door.
"Bring her in," Nikoo says from the inside.
Asjadi opens the door, and this time beckons Sheema to pass through first.
This room is Nikoo's bedroom. It smells of paint and glue; there are half-completed art projects scattered all over the place. Nikoo's sitting up in a large four-poster bed in the middle of the room. She doesn't smile when she sees Sheema. "Hi," she says. "Sheema, right?"
"Yes," Sheema says. "They, um, asked me to bring you the notes from the classes you missed." This is a lie; there is no they. But it sounds plausible, especially with final exams about to begin.
"Do you have time to stay and go over them with me?" Nikoo asks, sounding stiff and formal.
"Sure, no problem," Sheema says.
Nikoo turns to her bodyguard. "You may leave us now," she says.
As soon as the door shuts behind Asjadi, Nikoo breaks into a huge grin. "Oh my God, Sheema," she says. "I can't believe you're here!"
Sheema lets out a sigh of relief. Even though she'd understood that Nikoo was acting cold so that Asjadi wouldn't realize that they're actually friends, it had still made her tense. "Me neither," she says, clutching her satchel. "Look, I really did bring you the notes you missed."
Nikoo pats her bed. "Come here," she says. Then she coughs, and looks guilty. "Oh shit, I'm probably going to make you sick."
"Eh, not likely. I think I gave it to you last week."
"You weren’t very sick, though."
Sheema shrugs. "Yeah, no offense Nikoo, but you don’t exactly have an iron constitution." She picks her way carefully past a paint-splattered easel and a tangled pile of ribbon and clothes-hangers that's probably meant to be some kind of sculpture. Nikoo's art is always weird but it makes Sheema smile. She climbs up on the bed next to Nikoo and hugs her. "How are you doing?"
"Sick. Bored. Glad you came!"
Nikoo's hair is loose and rumpled-looking. Sheema has never seen it like this; like most of the girls at their school, Nikoo always keeps her hair in a tight braid. Sheema's really tempted to run her fingers through it now, but she resists. "So, would you like to actually go over the notes?"
Nikoo rolls her eyes. "No. But spread them out on the bed in case Asjadi comes in to check on us."
"Your house is really nice," Sheema says politely as she pulls the notebooks out of her satchel.
Nikoo shrugs. "Sure. Um, Sheema, I'm really glad to see you, but why are you here? Won't you be in huge trouble if your mom finds out?"
"She won't," Sheema says. "I told her I was going to the city library to study." Finished arranging the books around the two of them, she takes Nikoo's hand. "When you weren't in school again today I got worried I wouldn't see you before exams." Tomorrow is the last day of regular classes, and during exams the school library is too busy for Sheema and Nikoo to meet in secret. "I wanted to bring you your birthday present."
"Oh!" Nikoo's eyes light up. "You didn't need to get me anything."
"I know, but I wanted to." Sheema pulls the gift out of her satchel and hands it to Nikoo; it's a box of oil paints.
"Wow, thanks." Nikoo opens the box and examines the colours with a delighted look on her face.
"So, I've been accepted into Nabu college to read history and political science," Sheema says quickly.
Nikoo looks up from the paints, still smiling. "Hey, that's great! That's a really good school. Congratulations."
"It's not too late for you to apply. They do a second round after exams are over."
Nikoo closes the paintbox. "I'm not going to college, Sheema."
"Couldn't you just apply?" Sheema says, putting her hands over Nikoo's. "That way you wouldn't have to decide for sure for another couple of weeks."
Nikoo shakes her head, but she looks conflicted -- which is why Sheema keeps trying.
"I don’t see why you have to join the Black Rose the minute you turn sixteen," Sheema says. "At least go to college for a couple of years so you have options. You could get your father to understand, I'm sure of it."
"I don’t have to, I want to," Nikoo says. This is a painful conversation, and they've had it more than once in the past few months. "It's my family, Sheema. It's my father. I'm all he has. It means so much to him that I’m going to join him in the business. Can you imagine if I ran off to art school or something? It would kill him."
"It's not a business," Sheema says quietly, withdrawing her hands. "It's a criminal syndicate."
Nikoo glares at her. "And you think so-called legitimate businesses are any cleaner? You have to face the way the world works, Sheema."
"It doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to be that way." Sheema feels tears prickling her eyes. She tries to swipe them away with the back of her hand, but more follow quickly. Nikoo's birthday is in two weeks. This might be the last time Sheema sees her alone. "Your life can be so much better, so much more beautiful..." Totally unexpectedly, she starts to sob.
"Oh Sheema, don't cry!" Nikoo pleads, sounding slightly panicked. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean ... um ..." She wraps her arms around Sheema.
Sheema nuzzles her teary face against Nikoo's neck and takes deep breaths, trying to regain control.
"I'll apply for college," Nikoo promises softly as she rubs Sheema's back in slow circles. "Like you said. It gives me another few weeks to decide."
It isn't much. But Sheema will take what she can get. "Thank you," she says, sniffling.
Early EY204. Nikoo is 16. Rashid is 19.
Nikoo's tattoo itches. She fights down the impulse to scratch, picking up the cards she just dealt herself. A pair of twos, and nothing else. Not much of a hand. She discreetly looks around the table.
Rashid is scowling openly at his hand, which means he's got nothing. If he were trying to bluff, the right corner of his mouth would be twitching.
Azar looks content with her hand, which doesn't mean much -- she's so bad at this game she went all in last week with two pairs, losing an ungodly sum of money to Nikoo's three-of-a-kind.
Yousef is the only one who's a bit hard to read. His eyebrow twitches slightly; Nikoo suspects he has a pretty good hand.
Yousef starts off the betting with 50 blaughs. Azar raises it to 100 right away. Rashid folds, sneering at his cards. Nikoo hesitates for only a moment before folding as well.
"You're no fun," Azar pouts. "How am I ever going to get you back for last week?"
"Don't worry, your time will come," Nikoo says soothingly, leaning back and clasping her hands behind her head. Her newly-minted tattoo twinges at the movement. She's wearing a tank top, ostensibly because it's always stifling hot here in the back room of the Drunken Snake, but honestly she wants to show off the tattoo. I'm not a child anymore, it says.
Of course she is the youngest person in the room, and having her bodyguard along does give her a slight feeling of still being baby-sat. Hey, at least it's Yousef, not Asjadi. Yousef is only a little older than Rashid, and he doesn't loom over Nikoo protectively the way Asjadi does. He's even playing as-nas -- though he took the seat facing the door, and he's abstaining from alcohol.
The round ends, with Azar's four of a kind beating Yousef's full house for two hundred blaughs. Azar chortles happily as she rakes in her cash.
"So how did it go with Reza?" Rashid asks her. He takes a drag from the hookah sitting between him and Nikoo, and then offers the hose to Nikoo. She takes a careful, measured drag; Rashid's got hashish in there, and her head is already spinning a little.
Azar shrugs. "He says he needs more money to pay off the police. There's a new lieutenant in the district. Some of the dealers are getting hassled."
Rashid exhales slowly, blowing a couple of smoke rings. Nikoo grins and passes a finger through them, watching the little eddies swirl into nothingness.
"Those cops'll bleed Reza dry if they can," Rashid says. "He'd better grow a backbone and scare them a little."
"I'll tell him," Azar says, noncommittally.
"What do you think, Nikoo?" Rashid asks unexpectedly.
Nikoo sits up straighter. She's flattered that Rashid wants her opinion. "He should take Farrin," she says. "And get her to bring her machete."
Rashid laughs. "Yes! The cops'll piss their fucking pants."
Azar gives a tight smile. "Yeah, I'll tell him. So are we going to play another round or what?"
Yousef deals. This time Nikoo gets a pretty good hand -- a full house. Everyone else seems happy with their cards, too, and the bet quickly goes up to three hundred blaughs. At that point, Yousef sets his cards down on the table and sighs. "I gotta fold, I can't match the bet. I'm out of money."
Nikoo briefly considers offering to lend Yousef some money, but quickly thinks better of it. On a bodyguard's salary, it's a bit crazy for him to even try to keep up with Azar and Rashid and Nikoo. If Nikoo lends him money, he'll end up in way over his head.
On the other hand, it might be useful to have her bodyguard in her debt...
Before Nikoo can act on that thought, Rashid speaks up. "How about a forfeit? You can stay in for the round without putting down any more money, but if I win you give me a minute alone with Nikoo."
Nikoo gives Rashid a startled glance. He smoulders in her general direction.
"Uh, and what do I get out of this?" Azar asks.
"If you win, you get a minute alone with Yousef," Rashid suggests, and everybody laughs.
Yousef gives Nikoo a look, like, Are you okay with this? And Nikoo nods.
So they all show their hands, and Rashid wins with four of a kind.
Azar and Yousef head out into the main tavern. Yousef, looking like he already regrets the evening's events, pauses at the doorway to tell Rashid that he'll come back through the door in sixty seconds flat.
So Rashid doesn't waste any time shoving Nikoo up against the wall and smashing his lips against hers. Nikoo's heart races. She's imagined their first kiss many times, and here it is.
She becomes aware suddenly that Rashid has lifted her skirt, has slid a hand into her underwear and is fingering her labia. She freezes for a second -- she didn't expect this. But the constant nagging itch of her tattoo gives her a weird kind of courage. The wine and the hashish probably don't hurt either. She tilts her hips toward Rashid and kisses him harder.
A thought flashes through her mind: Sheema wouldn't like this. But it's a pointless thought, because she's never going to see Sheema again.
The door opens again with a bang. Rashid steps back from her, grinning like a cat that just ate a canary.
"Come on," Yousef says brusquely. Nikoo goes to him, almost stumbling. She's pretty sure her face is beet red.
"Don't tell my father about this," she whispers fiercely to Yousef.
"No fucking kidding," he replies.
EY207. Sheema is 20.
She's dreaming about a shipwreck. She's in the water; it's dark and cold and wild. Salt stings her eyes and burns in her nose. A few meters away, Nikoo is drowning.
"I'm coming!" Sheema shouts over the howling wind and crashing water. "Hold on, Nikoo, I'm coming!" But Sheema's clothes are wet and heavy, dragging her down. No matter how hard she kicks, she doesn't get any closer to her friend. Suddenly a wave crashes over Nikoo, and she's gone.
"Nikoo!" the scream tears itself from Sheema's throat. "Nikoo!"
"Sheema?"
The water is gone. Sheema's lying in bed, tangled in the blankets. Her lover has cupped a hand around Sheema's face, stroking her cheek with her thumb.
"Wake up, Sheema," Zahra says. "I think you were having a nightmare."
The sound of the wind and the waves is real, but muted; there's a winter storm howling outside, and Sheema's apartment overlooks a rocky beach. This is the northern coast, a thousand kilometres from her family home.
"This is the second time this week you've woken up calling out your ex-girlfriend's name," Zahra says. "Should I be concerned?"
"Not exactly an ex-girlfriend," Sheema insists, sitting up. She wraps the blanket around her shoulders; the apartment is chilly. "We were friends."
"Seems like there must've been more to it than that," Zahra says. Sheema can tell that Zahra is a little bit curious and a little bit jealous. It's been six months now since Zahra sort-of-kind-of moved in with her, claiming half the closet and one dresser drawer.
Of course Zahra still spends weekends at her parents' house, and it's imperative that they don't learn the nature of her relationship with Sheema. Zahra's parents are followers of Allah, the angry desert god. In public Zahra wears a niquab.
Sheema wonders sometimes whether this is a meaningful pattern in her life: falling for girls whose parents might literally kill her if they found out.
"Maybe there was more to it," Sheema concedes. "We used to daydream about running away and living together. But we never even kissed."
"Well, that's not unusual," Zahra says. "You were young. You haven't seen her since you were sixteen, right?" This is just about the only thing that Zahra knows about Nikoo.
"The day she turned sixteen," Sheema says. And then, "Oh. Fuck. It's December 22nd."
Zahra glances at the clock on the wall. "It's 4 a.m., so yes."
"Well, that explains the nightmare. It's her birthday. Four years today since I lost her."
"Lost her?" Zahra looks appalled. "You didn't tell me that she was dead."
"She's not," Sheema says. "As far as I know. That's not what I meant."
"I'm going to make coffee," Zahra says, "and then you're going to tell me the rest of this story."
"We have school tomorrow," Sheema protests. "Er, today. In five hours."
Sheema is studying journalism; Zahra is studying music. When Sheema talks politics, Zahra nods politely, but Sheema loves listening to Zahra play.
Right now Zahra is ignoring Sheema's protests, and already has the stove lit and a pot of water coming to a boil.
Sheema goes to the window, blanket still wrapped around herself. Four years since she last saw Nikoo, and she's having nightmares. Maybe it is time to talk to someone about her. Try to put that ghost to rest.
Zahra serves dates with the spiced coffee; apparently this is going to be breakfast.
"All right," Sheema sighs, taking her coffee cup in both hands. "I was in love with her."
Zahra rolls her eyes. "I figured out that much by myself."
"We met in school. She stood up to this nasty clique of girls that was bullying me in year eight. They were friends of hers, more or less, but it took courage for her to go against the crowd -- and they listened to her. Of course that also probably had to do with who her father was."
"Who was he?" Zahra prompts.
"Well, that was the whole problem, actually. He was a Black Rose."
Zahra's eyes widen. "Seriously?"
Sheema nods.
"But your mom--"
"I know. We had to keep our whole friendship totally secret from both of our families, and from basically everyone."
"Because your mom would have arrested her father?"
Sheema rolls her eyes. "Judges don't arrest people, Zahra."
Zahra scowls. "You know what I meant. Sent the police or whatever."
"It wouldn't have been that simple. Her dad wasn't some smalltime thug -- he was really high up. You can't just send the police in to arrest someone like that, not without a lot of background work."
"Why not?"
Sheema lets out a frustrated sigh. She's tried, before, to explain politics at this level to Zahra -- the hidden threads of corrupt power connecting the government and the Black Rose -- but Zahra always zones out or changes the subject to music. "You just can't," she says.
"So did it bother Nikoo that her father was a criminal?" Zahra asks.
"Good question." Sheema takes a sip of coffee, thinking. "It didn't, when we first met. You've got to realize, it was all she'd ever known. She was very cynical about people, really -- I think she realized that her father did bad things, but she believed that everyone else was just as bad, or else foolish. Which is bizarre, because she was such a generous, kind person. It took a long time for me to get her to see this, but in the end I thought I had."
"So what happened?"
"On her sixteenth birthday she joined the Black Rose. She left school -- I never saw her again. She sent me a postcard explaining her decision. She felt like she had to choose between me and her father, and finally she chose him."
"Well, fuck her then," Zahra says. She enjoys swearing when she's safe in Sheema's apartment.
Sheema shrugs, gazing sadly into the dregs of her coffee. "I thought I could save her," she says. "But I guess I couldn't."
***
Sheema graduates at 22 (having broken up with Zahra some time previously), and gets to work building her career as an investigative journalist. She writes about anything and everything, as one must while starting out, but from the beginning she has a special interest in exposing organized crime. This is, of course, a dangerous subject, and she proceeds cautiously.
She doesn't have any more serious relationships, though she has a number of not-serious ones (all with women). She throws herself into her work; she travels a lot, works long hours.
As the years pass she thinks about Nikoo less often, although she knows that in a way the whole trajectory of her life was determined by that intense secret friendship. Sometimes when Sheema thinks about the choice Nikoo made she feels angry at her, but more often she feels sad.
Despite professionally haunting the edges of Nikoo's world, Sheema never gets solid information about her former friend. She knows that Nikoo must have married Rashid (that was in the postcard), but what happened after that is a mystery. Sheema hears a rumour that Rashid keeps Nikoo hidden away in his father's house; another rumour that Nikoo disappeared into thin air one day and was never seen again; another that Nikoo is dead, killed in some internecine power struggle.
When Sheema is 26, her mother is gunned down on the sidewalk outside the court building the evening before she is to hand down a verdict in a case involving the Black Rose. Sheema is devastated. When she returns to work after the mourning period, her colleagues immediately notice a difference. Instead of being motivated by her passion for justice, civic responsibility and the truth, Sheema is now very clearly driven by a personal hatred of the Black Rose.
Nobody calls her on it; she was a really good journalist before, but now she's brilliant.
Lying awake one night with a loaded gun in her bedside table, Sheema might fleetingly wonder whether Nikoo could have had anything to do with her mother's assassination. But the thought is quickly quashed. If Sheema is to have any faith left in humanity, she has to believe that Nikoo could never, ever have had a hand in something like that.
And besides, Nikoo is probably long dead.
Mid EY2016. Sheema is 28. Azar is 31.
Sheema perches on a stool at the hotel bar and orders a soda water. She is very specifically wearing a red dress.
The bar is almost empty; it's 8pm on a Tuesday. Normally on a night like this she'd chat with the bartender, find out what he thinks of the upcoming elections, ask if anyone interesting has passed through the hotel lately. Tonight, though, she pulls out her pen and notebook and makes herself unapproachable. She's working on a piece contrasting the rules for political party funding on the eastern and western continents.
But that's not actually why she's here tonight.
After about half an hour, another woman sits down at the bar and orders a double scotch. She's left one empty stool between herself and Sheema. Sheema checks her out discreetly. The woman is wearing a battered leather jacket and tight jeans. Her short hair was bleached blond maybe a month ago; now the dark roots are showing. The woman has a hunched, wary look to her, and she clearly does not belong in this swanky hotel.
Sheema quickly writes her room number on a cocktail napkin. She crumples the napkin, leaves it on the bar, and heads up to her room.
It's twenty minutes before the knock comes at Sheema's door. In the meantime, Sheema reviews her mental notes. She's nervous; this could be a very important interview. It could also be dangerous. Sheema's gun is in the drawer of the bedside table. She imagines herself diving for it from across the room if the other woman threatens her. It's not a very convincing fantasy.
According to Sheema's contact -- a slightly corrupt parole officer -- this woman, Azar, used to be on the outer edges of the Black Rose inner circle. Then she did five years for assault. She emerged broken, alcoholic, and estranged from the gang. She's apparently willing to talk with Sheema in exchange for 2000 blaughs and an iron-clad promise of anonymity.
When the knock comes, Sheema checks the peephole. It's the woman from the bar, and as far as Sheema can tell, she's alone.
Heart pounding, Sheema opens the door.
Azar steps in quickly with a nervous glance around. "Hi," she says. "You're the writer?"
"Yes," Sheema says. She closes the door, locks it, slides the bolt into place. Then she takes her first good look at Azar.
Azar has the look of someone who's lived a hard life, though she can't be older than her mid-thirties. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin has a yellow tinge, and she looks underfed. She has an old scar running down one side of her face; it misses her eye but distorts the right edge of her upper lip.
Sheema indicates the two chairs she's set up at the room's round table. "Have a seat. Do you want a drink?"
Azar does, as Sheema had anticipated. Sheema pours each of them a glass of a rather nice white wine, and then takes out the envelope containing 2000 blaughs and pushes it across the table. Azar shoves it into an inside pocket of her jacket after a quick glance inside, and takes a big gulp of the wine. Her hand trembles noticeably. "So what do you want to know?" she asks.
"Do you mind if I record our conversation?" Sheema asks, nodding towards the wire spool recorder on the nearby bureau.
"Yes I mind." Azar glowers. She takes another drink. "But you can take notes."
Sheema nods, not particularly surprised. She already has her notebook at the ready. "So how about we start with some names. I'm interested in any of the Syndicate's contacts in government or industry."
Azar, keeping her focus on her wine glass, promptly reels off an impressive list of names. Sheema's scribbling as fast as she can to get it all down. Very quickly she realizes that she's struck gold with this interview; this ruined woman must have at one point been very much in the inner circles, even more so than the parole officer had realized. Some of the names Azar mentions are people already known to Sheema as being in bed with the Black Rose, but others are not. The name of the governor's chief of staff comes up, which is a chilling surprise. Sheema asks follow-up questions, which Azar answers with a sort of fierce, bitter pride. Sheema can tell exactly what's going on here, which is that Azar's determined to prove that she used to be important.
The better part of an hour later, the flow of information finally slows to a trickle. Sheema's hand is cramping. They're opened a second bottle of wine -- though Sheema's still working on her first glass.
"So, I hope you got something useful out of all that," Azar says. "Use it to hurt them. Cut them off at the knees." She grimaces and empties her glass again.
Azar's pretty much speaking right to Sheema's heart right now, not that Sheema lets on. She keeps her professional face up, and just says "I think I'll be able to make use of it, thanks. Why do you hate them?"
"They cut me off. Left me behind. Rashid, that fucker -- well, when I got out of jail he was long gone, him and all that group that hung around with him."
On the name 'Rashid', Sheema's heart skips a beat. "Rashid Zarin?" she asks. "You know him?"
"Know him?" Azar said. She points at the scar on her face. "He's the fucker that did this to me."
Sheema's throat is suddenly dry. She's never before met someone from the inside of that circle. Someone who might have known -- but she can't ask about Nikoo yet, it would strike the wrong note, it would look strange. "He left you behind, you said? What do you mean by that?"
Azar refreshes her own glass. Her hand is steadier now than it was before the bottle of wine, Sheema notices. "Ever heard of Aiscapo?" Azar asks.
"No," Sheema says, then catches herself. "Wait, yes. Isn't it one of the frontier clusters?"
Azar nods. "Out past Panyan. Rashid went there to plant the Black Rose in virgin soil. He took all his best soldiers with him. But he left me behind. I mean, fuck, what the fuck was up with that?"
"You're upset that he left you behind?" Sheema frowns. "But he cut you ..." she waves at her own face in the place where Azar's scar is.
"Yeah, well, everyone does crazy things when they're fucking high, right?" Azar gives another tight hard smile and sips her drink.
Something about Azar's smile makes Sheema guess the word 'fucking' back there was a verb, not an adjective. "You were lovers?" she asks.
Azar shrugs. "You could call it that."
Now Sheema wants to take a drink but she thinks her own hand might shake too much if she tried. "Didn't he have a wife?" she says, as though it were just something she'd heard at some point.
"Whoah, writer lady," Azar says with a startled laugh, "Somebody's feeding you old intel. He was married, yeah, but the chick disappeared like a decade ago. You ask me, I think he killed her."
"You think?" Sheema repeats, and her voice comes out more like a whisper.
Azar sits up straighter, narrows her eyes. Sheema curses herself, because she knows she just gave far too much away.
"What do you care?" Azar asks. The question is curious, not dismissive.
"I went to school with Nikoo," Sheema admits, still in a kind of a croak. She realizes it's probably idiotic to confess to this personal connection but her head is reeling and she doesn't know what else to say. "I knew her."
"Oh." Azar looks surprised, then slightly contrite. "Well, maybe he didn't kill her. I mean, probably she ran away. I think I would've run away, if I were married to Rashid."
"But you were his lover," Sheema points out.
"More like fuck buddy. And that's different. Anyway, Nikoo wasn't a good match for Rashid. She wasn't nearly as hard as she made herself out to be."
I know, Sheema barely manages to stop herself from saying. "So you actually knew her?"
"Fuck yeah, we practically grew up together," Azar says. "Well, I mean I'd see her at weddings, you know, and like at Rashid's dad's 'family parties'." She makes the quotes with her fingers, sort of rolling her eyes. "Then when we got older she was always tagging along after Rashid."
Sheema is hanging on to every word and trying not to be incredibly obvious about it. This is the first time, ever, she's met someone she could talk to about Nikoo who'd actually known her.
This woman is a criminal, and a source, and Nikoo's been gone for over ten years. What the hell am I doing? Sheema asks herself. And yet she can't stop herself from asking for more. "She joined the Black Rose when she was sixteen," Sheema says. "Were you around then?"
"Joined is kind of a funny way to put it," Azar observes. "I mean, she grew up in it, just like we all did. But yeah, her dad let her get the tattoo when she was sixteen. I remember she was really proud of it. Went around in a tank top in January like this total little dork to make sure everybody could see it." Azar smiles, like she's recalling the exploits of a goofy kid sister.
Sheema is barely able to hold back tears at this point. She's remembering Nikoo in her sickbed, promising to apply to college. Two weeks later, she was gone from Sheema's life.
But not from Azar's.
"Hey, writer lady, are you crying?" Azar asks. "Um, fuck, I'm sorry." She reaches across the table and clasps Sheema's hands.
Sheema is crying, and she can't seem to stop. After a couple of minutes Azar lets go of her hands, disappears into the on-suite bathroom, and comes back with a box of tissues. Sheema dabs at her eyes and then, giving up on dignity, blows her nose. "Thanks," she says thickly.
"So what was that about, writer lady?" Azar asks. She hasn't gone back to her own chair; she's crouching next to Sheema.
"Nikoo was my friend," Sheema says. "I miss her."
"Is that why you want to write about the Black Rose?"
"One of the reasons," Sheema admits.
"Well, you should probably give it up. They're dangerous. You're going to get yourself killed."
Sheema feels goose-bumps forming; a danger-sense. "You won't tell anyone about me, will you?"
Azar lets out a sharp laugh. "I tell anyone I talked to you, I'm the one getting killed. Don't worry, writer lady."
Sheema looks down at Azar, who's still crouched next to her and is looking up with a somewhat concerned expression. Sheema guesses that Azar's still trying to piece together what that breakdown was all about.
Spontaneously, Sheema ducks her head down and kisses her.
Azar couldn't have seen that one coming, but she doesn't flinch. She opens her lips, meets Sheema's kiss with the tip of her tongue. Then she's standing up, arms around Sheema's waist to draw her to her feet too.
"I don't usually do chicks," Azar comments as they peel each other's clothes off. "Except in prison, obviously."
Sheema refrains from saying that she never sleeps with her sources, because if she says it then she'd have to follow through and not sleep with this particular source. She knows that what she's doing here is wrong and insane. She keeps doing it, regardless.
Azar has several tattoos. On her right forearm, a blurred and poorly-drawn skull. A prison tattoo, Sheema guesses. On top of her right breast, a butterfly, who the hell knows what that's about. And on her left upper arm, a black rose. Sheema kisses it with a shiver. She feels disgust and arousal all tangled up together. The rose is marred by half a dozen criss-crossing scars, like someone -- Azar? -- had tried several times to X the thing out with a knife.
In bed, Azar is passive. She makes gratifying little noises, though, when Sheema sucks on her nipples and fingers her pussy.
Azar is skinny. When she's on her back, her hip bones jut out sharply. Sheema spots more scars as she kisses her way down Azar's chest; a big white blob of a scar that looks like a bullet wound low on her abdomen -- that must've hurt. A longer scar on her leg, probably from a knife.
Was this what Nikoo would look like today? Too thin, scarred, broken? Sheema's kissing Azar on the broken places and she knows that what she wants, really, is to kiss Nikoo and heal her and save her. Which is insane, totally utterly insane, because Nikoo disappeared over a decade ago and is probably dead. Or maybe not? Maybe she got away, maybe she started a new life, maybe she's fine and fat and happy somewhere raising orphan children and goats in an art studio. But there's no way to know, that's the point.
Since Azar doesn't seem interested in actually doing anything to Sheema in bed, finally Sheema climbs on top so that she can finger herself and Azar at the same time, rocking her hips. She squeezes her eyes into slits, but that doesn't make Azar look like Nikoo, so Sheema closes her eyes the rest of the way and thinks about kissing Nikoo. She feels guilty, because she knows exactly how fucked-up this thing is that she's doing, and Azar is a human being who, for all her sins, probably doesn't deserved to be fucked as though she's the ghost of somebody else. And yet it's not hard to bring herself to orgasm like this.
After they both come, they lie beside each other quietly for a minute or two.
"Well, you're a better lay than Rashid is," Azar says eventually. "Do you have a cigarette?"
Sheema does, even though she doesn't smoke herself; she keeps a pack around for interviews. She has a nice silver lighter, too, and she lights the cigarette between Azar's lips.
"Tell me about Rashid," Sheema begs, sitting up and pulling the sheet around her waist to make herself feel less vulnerable.
"Bah, that fucker." Azar scowls and puffs on the cigarette. "He's a real snake, you know? Very, very charming when he wants something from you. But if he doesn't need you--" She switches her cigarette to her right hand, snaps the fingers of her left a couple of times, quickly, behind her head. "He'll drop you like that."
"You're more bothered by the fact that he left without you than by the fact that he cut you?" Sheema asks. She can't help focusing on the scar whenever she looks at Azar's face.
"Oh, we were both high as all hell the night he did that," Azar says. "I didn't even feel it."
"Was that the only time he hurt you?" Sheema asks.
"Well, he'd knock me around. Nothing that left scars." Azar takes a long drag on the cigarette, narrows her eyes thoughtfully. "You're thinking about Nikoo again," she guesses. "You're wondering if he hurt her."
"You said earlier that you thought he'd killed her."
"I was talking out of my ass, I didn't know you knew her. I mean, he might've. He's sure as hell vicious enough. But I don't think that's the way it went between them. They seemed pretty happy together up until she vanished. Then he got really, really angry -- it was like, don't go near Rashid, he might cut you just for looking at him. Anyway, it was like that till Abid came along."
"Abid?" Sheema repeats, feeling a sudden chill.
"Yeah. Abid. It was weird, he wasn't born to the life like the rest of us; he came up from the streets, got recruited as muscle, but then next thing you know he and Rashid were like this." She held up crossed fingers. "I always said I thought they were fucking, but that was just me talking out of my ass again; I don't think they were actually fucking. They just really connected. They were both vicious sadistic fucks. But at least once he had Abid to play with, Rashid mostly stopped attacking his own fucking people."
Sheema had only been half listening since Azar mentioned Abid's name. "Abid Jalali?" she asks. She needs this to be clear. Her mouth is dry.
"Right, that's him. You know him?"
"He killed somebody in a bar fight. He went on trial for it."
"Right," Azar says. "I heard all about that. It happened while I was in the slammer. Rashid tried to buy off the judge and it didn't work, so he had her killed. The next judge took the bribe. Rashid fucked off to the frontier pretty much right after that, along with Abid and everybody else -- leaving me to fucking rot in prison. Thanks a lot, Rashid."
Sheema is thinking about the gun in the drawer of the bedside table. She's thinking about taking that gun out and shooting this woman who she just had sex with. She's thinking about the way the blood would soak into the white sheets of this bed she's sitting on, the way it would drip down onto the expensive carpet.
She's not going to do it -- of course she's not going to do it -- but the clarity of the image makes her head swim.
The fantasy doesn't even make sense. Don't kill the messenger. Azar didn't have Sheema's mother killed.
Rashid did.
"Azar," Sheema says, "How would you like to get back at Rashid?"
"Well sure, I'd love to pay that fucker back," Azar says, "but did you miss the part where he fucked off to Aiscapo?"
"That's what I'm talking about," Sheema says. Her head is whirling. This is crazy, crazy stuff she's saying. "We could go to Aiscapo. Find him, denounce him, get him taken in. You could testify against him. Get him put away for the rest of his life."
"Well that sounds like fun," Azar says sarcastically. "How long exactly do you think he'd let me live if I did that? And weren't you listening a minute ago when I explained about how he bribes and/or kills judges until he gets what he wants?"
"The Black Rose has had over a hundred years to build its power base here on Persepolis," Sheema says. "In Aiscapo they've had, what, three? Five? We can uproot them. We can bring Rashid to justice and stop him from digging his tendrils in all over that system." Her gardening metaphors are getting a little overwrought here, she realizes. But Azar is looking interested.
"You must hate him even more than I do," Azar observes.
"You have no idea," Sheema says with feeling.
"Well," Azar says, "it's not like I've got anything to keep me here." She gets out of bed, naked, walks over to the table, and refills both their wine glasses. "All right, writer lady," she says, holding up a glass. "Let's go get that bastard."