For a mistaken moment, I thought I'd found the missing girl. For a moment, I thought I'd found something even more important.
I looked around the apartment a bit, but my gaze kept coming back to the painting. It was signed in the corner: "Farid Sabouri."
I kept thinking, Why did they defile the painting?
After a while, the police deputy asked me in his imperfect English, "You know what happen? Who?"
Somewhere in this rat's warren of apartments there was probably a man whose wife or daughter the artist had been screwing. Or someone he owed a lot of money to. Or just a psychopath. You get used to the options after a while. They aren't complicated.
I breathed in the smoky air. They weren't ever going to find the guy who had done this. Not in this country. It was still reinventing itself.
