The Leveling

The factories soon gave way to a mix of well-maintained apartment buildings and shops. It was nine o’clock, and the streets were crowded with people out walking and doing their shopping. Some of the women wore chadors, but many just wore jeans and headscarves that barely covered their hair. They passed a pizza shop, a hardware store, clothing boutiques, and an electronics store packed with televisions and digital cameras and cell phones. After the bizarre white-marble sterility of downtown Ashgabat, Mark was struck by how normal it all looked.

He kept both hands on the steering wheel, still on full alert.

“Assess our current situation,” he said to Daria. He’d never been to eastern Iran before. But Daria had, many times.

Her chador had slipped from her head, and the black headscarf underneath had come loose. She tightened it with a few quick, practiced motions, tucking her hair underneath the fabric, then slipped the chador robe back over her head so that only her face was exposed. Mark glanced at her as she worked, examining for the first time how she really looked in a chador. It transformed her, accentuating her high cheekbones and large eyes. Beautiful, he thought.

“Watch the road,” she said.

“What’s the best way to get to Mashhad?”

“It’s only an hour or so away but there are always police checkpoints outside cities. Usually they’re just manned by regular cops who inspect your insurance and make sure you’ve got proper license plates, but if word gets out in time, there’ll be military looking for us.”

“Can we skirt the checkpoints?”

“Depends on where and how many there are. It’d be a crapshoot.”

Mark imagined the calls that were being placed right now, alerting police and army troops all over the region. It would take time for everyone to react, though. Some guys would be at home, putting their kids to sleep or drinking contraband liquor in front of the TV. Mobilizations took time.

He wondered whether they’d been photographed by security cameras at the border. Probably. Which meant that eventually the police at the checkpoints would have photos.

“What do we need to get through the checkpoints legally?”

“Valid driver’s licenses, and a car with its papers in order.” Daria opened the dash compartment and inspected the documents inside. “These papers are up to date, but—”

“—at a minimum we should change cars. The police will be looking for the one we’re driving.”

“I can hot-wire a Paykan,” said Daria, referring to a popular Iranian-made car that had gone out of production a few years back.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they’re like lawn mowers.”

They passed a public park where Iranian families were picnicking on the grass, finishing up late dinners. Mark reflected for a moment on the huge chasm between the grotesque underworld he’d slipped back into and the placid normal world most people lived in, even in Iran. He also figured that stealing decent licenses from those normal, gullible people wouldn’t be a problem. Getting the proper tools to alter them might be, though. “When do the stores close around here?”

“Probably eleven.”

“Will they have what we need for the licenses?”

“Quchan isn’t big, but it’s big enough. There’ll be a mall somewhere.”




On the bed of a three-dollar-a-night hotel room, under a qiblah arrow that pointed praying Muslims toward Mecca, Daria arranged a pack of razor blades, rubber cement glue, a digital camera, a Lenovo laptop, a photo printer, photo paper, a couple of sheets of clear laminating paper, a scanner, hair dye, tweezers, two pairs of weak reading glasses, a travel iron, and new clothes for herself and Mark.

Next to all that, Mark placed two standard-class Iranian driver’s licenses. Printed on the faces of the licenses were photos of the licensees—a married couple from Tabriz. The wife was thirty-six years old and the husband was thirty-eight. Mark had stolen their wallets while the couple tended to their crying infant. To soften the blow, he’d left two hundred dollars in Iranian rials in their coat pockets.

In preparation for their head-shot photos, they retreated to the bathroom. Daria cut Mark’s hair short on the sides, so that his face looked thinner, and he lopped three inches off Daria’s hair, leaving her with a bob cut.

“God, you stink,” she said, as he cut her hair.

After she finished with his hair, he wiped away all the cigarette ash beneath his eyes, showered, shaved off his three-day beard, and put on new clothes. Then he cut up pieces of cardboard packaging and wedged them into the heels of his shoes, adding an inch to his height so that he stood nearly as tall as the six feet listed on his new driver’s license.

Overall it wasn’t much of a disguise, he thought, as he slipped on the weak reading glasses and looked in the small mirror above the toilet, standing a foot behind Daria as she worked on her own appearance. But he looked different enough that your average cop with a photo of him crossing the border earlier in the day would at least have to do a double take. He tried pushing the glasses lower, to mask the distinctive bump he had as a result of his nose being broken by KGB goons nearly two decades ago.

Daria plucked her eyebrows so that they were thinner and had more of an arch. She wiped away the makeup that had been covering the scars on her face. When she saw him looking at her, she got self-conscious and put her hands up to cover her face.

“I look like hell, I know.”