Moosa's head jerked around at hearing his name, and his face slackened in shock when he saw his father approaching. Over Ezra's shoulder, he could see the dismayed faces of his mother and sister. Why are they still here? Their flight was to have left an hour ago! As his mind raced in frenzy, he saw the Swissair jet only now approaching their gate. A delayed flight! Why on this of all days ...

"Father!" he hissed, white-eyed with horror, "get away from here! You don't know-"

Marandi almost laughed aloud. So! This Jew is the son of that one! Who wouldn't a.s.sume that the father was a collaborator? He would kill two Jews today!

The first pa.s.sengers from the jet were approaching the entrance to the gate as Marandi unslung his semiautomatic from its hiding place beneath his caftan. Yanking back the bolt, he grinned as he aimed the muzzle at the two Jews.

Moosa heard the click of the weapon. From the corner of his eye he saw the dark hole of Marandi's gun pointed at him. He shoved his father violently in the chest, flinging him hard onto his back with the unexpected thrust. He charged Marandi, shouting, "No! He's my father-"

Marandi's burst caught him in the chest, just as the nearest pasdar-who had slipped unseen behind the informant-opened fire. A spray of blood spewed from Moosa's chest as he fell, wide-eyed with the tragic surprise of the betrayed. Lying on his back in the echoing, darkening world, he saw Marandi fall, the traitor himself a victim of treachery.

The crowds around them screamed and dropped to the floor as the first shots erupted. All around the perimeter of Gate 13, guerillas died in short, thrifty bursts of gunfire as the pasdars acted on the information supplied to them by the now-dead informant.

Esther clambered to her feet, her legs wobbling with terror. "Ezra!" she screamed, racing madly to where he lay, spattered with the blood of his son. His eyes were open wide, his mouth moving. "Moosa ..." his lips framed in silent urgency. "Moosa ..."

She looked up, her eyes drawn in horror to the splintered chest of her son. She crawled to him, vaguely aware of the distant ululating wail-her own voice. Cradling his head in her lap, she moaned the timeless, wordless dirge of the bereaved mother, a sound that rose up from the darkness of forgotten time like a death-groan from a well.

Moosa's eyes flickered open to her face. His lips moved. She bent near.

"Go."

Dumb with grief and confusion, she looked into his eyes. Feebly his fingertips brushed her chador, as if to push her away. "Go!" he whispered, his voice quiet with the urgency of the dying.

Feebly he turned his face to peer toward Gate 12, even as his soul shuddered from his body. With tears flooding from her eyes like rain, she turned her gaze in the direction it seemed to her, that Moosa's spirit had yearned in its final flight. Toward Gate 12. Toward freedom.

As she stood, she felt hands on her shoulders. She turned, thinking to see Ezra beside her; but it was Nader Hafizi who gripped her arms and peered into her face in urgency. "Esther khanom, hurry! It is now more important than ever for you to leave Iran at once! Come!"

The mullah had raised Ezra to his feet, stiff-limbed and dumb with shock. Through the wailing maelstrom of confusion that had descended, he herded the two of them toward Gate 12, where Sepi stood trembling, unable to remove her face from her hands.

"Esther khanom," the mullah murmured tersely, "quickly, turn your chador inside out. The blood stains will attract attention."

An insane cry-half laugh, half sob-sprang from her throat, before she clapped a hand over her mouth. No, indeed! she thought, We surely don't want to attract attention! Unnoticed in the general hysteria, she adjusted her garment.

The mullah guided the three blinded, staggering wretches toward the door of Gate 12, even as pasdars poured into the area, swiftly imposing order on the frenzied, shrieking crowds. The bodies and blood stains of the guerrillas were removed, the area efficiently secured, and the patrons calmed. Within thirty minutes, the only evidences of the foiled ambush were the muted murmurs of the bystanders, the edgy glances and wan faces of those who had lived through the one-sided melee.

Looking somewhat befuddled at the unexplained delay, the Iraqi mullah came through the door of Gate 13 and was welcomed-in a slightly wilted fashion, by his greeting committee. At almost the same instant, the door to Gate 12 was blocked by three pasdars and an officious weasel of a man who announced in a reedy voice, "Unfortunately, we must reinspect the pa.s.sports of all those wishing to leave the country. Please form a line."

TWENTY-SIX.

Hafizi stepped up to the official, pulling the Ayatollah's letter from his pocket. "These three people," he said, gesturing toward the Solaimans, "are, by order of the Imam himself, not to be detained on their way out of Iran. I am charged with expediting their journey." He thrust the letter in the man's face as he concluded, "I a.s.sume you will honor the wishes of the Ayatollah Khomeini?" He glared at the sweating inspector, whose Adam's apple bobbed repeatedly as he scanned the doc.u.ment.

In half a minute, the official handed the letter back to Hafizi, a nervous twitching across his face. "Allow these people into the boarding area," he snapped. One of the pasdars opened the door.

"You," snapped the mullah at one of the pasdars, "fetch their luggage." He jerked a thumb imperiously at the valises and handbags beside the door. Grumbling, the soldier stopped to comply.

Hafizi shepherded his three blank-eyed charges through. The official stared after them, his expression was awe mingled with traces of suspicion. The pasdar tossed their luggage in a heap just outside the doorway.

The door closed behind them, and they stood on the tarmac of the airport runway. Although the steps had been wheeled to the door of the Swissair craft, because of the disturbance inside the terminal, no one had yet been permitted to deplane. As they waited for the hatch to open, Hafizi gripped Ezra by the shoulders and shook him like an errant child.

"Aga Solaiman! Aga Solaiman! Wake up! You must come back! Someone must take charge!"

Ezra's eyes twitched toward the mullah, then away, back into the trackless abyss of sorrow where he wandered.

"Ezra!" By now Hafizi was shouting. "Moosa is gone! Neither your death, nor that of your wife and daughter, will bring him back! Do you wish all this to have been for nothing?"

In a blinding, rending rush, the world snapped back into place within Ezra Solaiman. In sudden recognition, with instant, horrified memory, his eyes leapt out toward the mullah. "My son!" he gasped, clenching Hafizi's upper arms with a desperate grip, "my son is dead! G.o.d in heaven, how can this be?" He sobbed aloud, his face raised blind to the sky, his fingers digging into the mullah's flesh, seeking some mooring, some point of anchorage against the storm of madness that dragged him.

Hafizi pulled him against his breast, hugging him fiercely as if attempting to hold down a wild winged thing that strained to spring into the air. "Yes, baradar!" he said, teeth clenched, into Ezra's ear. "He is dead! But you are alive, and your wife and daughter. You deserve a future, a chance to live past all this hatred, this mindless violence! Be strong now! You must have strength enough for the three of you." Hafizi stepped back, took Khomeini's letter out of his pocket, and carefully placed it in Ezra's hand. Looking at Ezra, he said, "I have come as far as I can."

As Ezra's eyes locked with his, an understanding beyond words pa.s.sed between them. Just then, the door to the aircraft opened. Arriving pa.s.sengers, complaining loudly about being delayed inside a cramped, stuffy cabin, began descending the stairs.

When the aircraft was cleared, the Solaimans were permitted to board. They shouldered their handbags and valises. After clasping Nader Hafizi in a final, firm embrace, Ezra guided Esther and Sepi up the steps, toward the small dark doorway to freedom. They were greeted atop the stairs by a smiling, efficient flight attendant who glanced at their boarding pa.s.ses and gestured toward their seats. Sidling down the narrow central aisle of the 707, they arrived at their places. Numbly, Esther began to heave her shoulder bag into the luggage rack above, but Ezra stayed her.

"We'll put the valises in the racks," he told them, "but not the handbags. They should stay beneath the seats ... where they'll be easy to reach."

Their eyes stared blankly at him; then they turned to comply.

For ten or fifteen minutes, they were the only ones on the plane. Then the other pa.s.sengers, who had been unable to avoid the tedious pa.s.sport checkpoint, began trickling into the cabin. Esther and Sepi were seated next to each other, Ezra just across the aisle. Presently, the occupant of the window seat arrived, glancing from his boarding pa.s.s to the vacant place beside Ezra.

Ezra glanced up, wincing inwardly. Inevitably, the man was corpulent, laden with baggage, and perspiring heavily. Quietly Ezra got out of his seat, managing a polite smile as his seatmate began unloading and arranging his paraphernalia. After he had stowed his baggage in the rack, grunting heavily as he shoved and pushed the things into place, he managed to wedge himself between the armrests of the window seat.

The cabin was nearly full. Ezra edged into his seat, trying to avoid contact with the sweaty bulk of a man next to him. As he was buckling himself into place, he glanced up and dropped the ends of his seat belt from suddenly nerveless fingers.

Ahmed Dabirian had just entered the cabin, after showing some sort of badge to the flight attendant. The cabinetmaker was making his way down the center aisle, swiveling his eyes this way and that, carefully inspecting the face of each person he pa.s.sed.

There was only one reason that Ahmed Dabirian could be on this aircraft. With a dull pounding in his ears, Ezra watched the approach of the carpenter. Unaccountably, he found himself slightly amused by the sawdust in Dabirian's beard. He imagined the ludicrous picture: himself handcuffed and led off the plane by a ragtag Islamic official who looked as though he had only just left his workbench.

Dabirian saw him, elbowed his way past the squirming pa.s.sengers, and came to stand over Ezra, his face grim with purpose.

Esther felt the presence of someone standing beside her in the aisle longer than should have been the case. She stirred from her dark trance to peer upward and recognized the figure of Ahmed Dabirian looming above her husband. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. This is surely the end. Without consciously willing it, she began silently cursing Ezra's stubborn insistence on his own cleverness.

"Aga Solaiman," Dabirian was saying in a quiet, serious voice, "you have done a bad thing."

Ezra felt his heart twisting inside him, as if someone had reached through his ribs and clamped it in a steel-fisted grip.

"You thought, perhaps," continued Dabirian, "that an uneducated man, such as myself, would not be clever enough to discover the purpose for the empty s.p.a.ce at the bottom of your so-called shipping crate." The carpenter stared down at Ezra in silence, slowly shaking his head from side to side.

Any minute now, thought Ezra with the fatalistic clarity of the doomed, the pasdars will come up the aisle and take me away. Can they be persuaded to allow Esther and Sepi to go on their way? He began composing a plea in his mind-some entreaty that would influence Dabirian to allow his wife and daughter to go to safety. He realized the cabinetmaker was speaking again.

"This hurts me deeply, Aga Solaiman. I have had many dealings with you, and always we have treated each other with complete fairness. That you would presume to take advantage of our friendship wounds me deeply."

The area of the cabin immediately around them had grown very still; Ezra was acutely aware of the eyes, the silent faces of the other pa.s.sengers. The man sitting beside him had not moved since Dabirian had arrived. From the corner of his eye, Ezra sensed the fellow staring, open-mouthed, as Dabirian reached into an inside pocket of his coat and drew out two bundles of American dollars.

There was an audible intake of breath as the currency came into view. It was not difficult to see the numbers printed on the topmost bills in the stacks. The man standing in the aisle was holding some $20,000!

"Because of my personal regard for you, Aga Solaiman," Dabirian was saying, "I am not going to arrest you." He paused, as if in debate with himself. "I have prayed much about this matter," he muttered, "and I have decided that to show mercy in such a case is not an altogether bad thing.... But my duty will not permit me to allow this money to be taken out of Iran. It will be given to the poor-so perhaps my act of mercy will not, after all, be fruitless. No one will know the source of the money. I will see to that."

Ezra realized that Dabirian was not going to send him back to Evin Prison. He felt a slight breeze of hope wafting through his mind, then remembered Moosa's bloodied body, lying on the floor of the terminal.

"I wish you well, Aga Solaiman," finished Dabirian. "I mean this with all sincerity." Gravely he bowed toward Ezra, turned and nodded toward Esther. Then he strode down the aisle to the front of the cabin and was gone.

This is a tragic exodus, thought Ezra, as he surrendered to the dark gauzy curtains of exhaustion falling across his vision. This time, the blood of the firstborn is on us-and we must hide it at all costs. Then he was unconscious.

He was awakened by the landing gear, the grinding rumble of the jet's wheels as they slammed into a tarmac. He clawed his way out of the darkness of sleep and looked across the aisle at his wife.

"We're in Geneva," she announced in a voice devoid of all inflection.

Later the taxi dropped them in front of the nearest hotel. Wearily the three refugees leaned against the walls of the elevator cubicle. Wearily they slogged down the dark hallway to the door where the number matched that of the room key the desk clerk had issued.

They went inside. "Place the shoulder bags on the bed," said Ezra. Esther and Sepi shrugged their satchels onto the bed beside Ezra's. He unzipped the nearest one-Esther's-and unceremoniously turned it upside down, dumping the contents in a tangled heap atop the bedclothes.

Tumbling from the bottom of the bag came just over $300,000, done up in the same neat bundles as those confiscated by Ahmed Dabirian. Ezra repeated the process with the other two bags, with the same result.

The three of them gazed silently at the money-the sum total, Ezra reflected, of his life of careful planning and toil. He had managed, despite everything, to bring this out of Iran.

It was not enough.

Epilogue.

TEHRAN.

Nader Hafizi smiled as the small child dipped his hand in the pond beside the front walk. The toddler was fascinated by the goldfish and had inched closer and closer to the water, his chubby hands twitching, as if they longed to touch the shining ornamental fish that swam gracefully in the blue-tiled pond.

He managed to brush one of the fish with his fingertips, and it wriggled away with a sudden burst of speed. The child gave a little yip of alarm and yanked his hand back, losing his balance and sitting down hard on the herringboned walkway. Hafizi laughed aloud.

"Aga Hafizi, the midday meal is prepared. Will you come and offer the blessing?"

The mullah looked over at the shy young woman who had spoken. "Yes, Maryam khanom, I will come." He gestured toward her son, who still sat dazed on the sidewalk. "If young Akbar has his way, we will eat fish for supper." Hafizi winked at the child as he rose from his seat on the front steps.

The young mother shook her head as she hurried to gather her son. Together they went into the dining room.

The boarders were already gathered about the large table, Akram standing in her habitual place beside the kitchen door. Hafizi beamed at her as he sat down.

Their guests were the dispossessed, the downtrodden, those with no place to go. He found them in the streets and alleys of Tehran, and brought them here to Solaiman House-the refuge he had created on this s.p.a.cious, beautiful site. It was a place of peace, a place of healing. A place of hope reborn.

There had been suspicions, at first. From time to time, officials and mullahs came poking about the premises, looking for any sign of double dealing or suspicious goings-on. Hafizi endured these visits good-naturedly, knowing he had nothing to hide. It was, as he told Akram, as if a thief returned from a long journey, to find that one of his cronies had become a holy man. He would be bound to search diligently for some evidence of an ulterior motive for his former colleague's inexplicable behavior. To the hypocrite, Hafizi well knew, nothing is so baffling as sincerity.

He raised a morsel of bread in his hand. "In the name of Allah the Merciful," he intoned, "may He bless this house and its occupants. "And may He also," the mullah continued, as was his habit, "bless the house of Ezra Solaiman, the generous and gracious man whose goodwill made this place and its mission possible."

Epilogue.

PLAINSBORO, NEW JERSEY.

As Ezra turned the key in the lock, the door to his apartment swung open. He went inside, tossing the package from the drugstore on the table of the kitchenette and tugging open the drapes. He sat down on the couch and looked out the front window.

The view led across the blacktop road into a cornfield, framed in the distance by stands of hickory and ash. The idyllic setting pleased Ezra; it was the main thing that had drawn him to this semirural community south of the loud tangle of New York City. Sometimes the quiet, the sibilant rustle of the wind through the corn leaves, could almost make him forget....

He looked over at the package on the table-Demerol, described by his doctor for the raging headaches that had tormented him of late. Sometimes the pain was so fierce he woke in the middle of the night, writhing and squeezing his temples in a futile effort at relief. But the headaches paled beside the nightmares.

He rose, walking over to the kitchenette. Almost offhandedly, he picked up the cylindrical brown plastic bottle of Demerol. How well he knew what too many Demerol could do.

Esther and Sepi lived nearby, in an apartment much like his own. Esther called him sometimes, and they made small talk around the shouting silences between their words. He was lonely, and he often thought she was too. But he couldn't blame her.

Shaking the pills in the bottle like a child shakes a rattle, he drifted again toward the couch. He looked down, his eye lighting on a book he had recently purchased.

An Iranian community was growing in these parts as many others followed Ezra's path out of turmoil. Businesses were springing up to cater to the refugees' needs. One of these, half a mile from Ezra's apartment, was an Iranian bookstore.

As he had browsed through the meager offerings, he had noticed the book that now claimed his view. A New Testament translated into Farsi.

Telling himself he was motivated by mere curiosity, he had bought the book. When he came in that day, he had flung it on the coffee table, where it had lain undisturbed. Until now.

He picked up the thin volume, thumbing through the pages. "Nothing remarkable here," he told himself aloud. "Just a book. A waste of money."

And then he was back in Evin Prison, among the emaciated, stinking bodies of the breathing dead. Reuben Ibrahim was beside him, weeping and praying. "Yeshua ... protect them."

The book fell open and his eyes lit halfway down the page: "Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.... Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it."

A harsh grace, that of this Jesus. And yet ...

To find a life ... wasn't that his goal? Hadn't it been for that very purpose he had fled Iran? And had he succeeded? Was he now living-what was the American phrase-the good life? He had left Iran a millionaire. Had it made any difference?

In one hand he held the Demerol, in the other the book. His eyes flickered between them.

"Whoever loses his life for My sake ..."