Few knew the history of Hoseyn’s Samsonite, bought for five euros in the crap souk of Dubai. It had traversed millions of kilometers, becoming the color of a donkey asleep in the shade. He had made it a visitor of each inch of his motherland and any country unafraid of Iranian passports. “Tell me what I didn’t understand and didn’t notice,” he implored his bag in private. Bungee-corded to the roof of his Peugeot, sealed against rain, impervious to heat, the Samsonite waited. It would speak one day. Everything eventually speaks.

But this sweltering day, Hoseyn drove to work with the Samsonite in the trunk, pills in the folds of his ears. They were flesh-colored, the two tablets. He’d already swallowed the first part of the chemical cocktail. He had a half-hour to take the second part, those pills, or his death would fail. When he reached the gate, the guard who waved him through each morning stopped him.

“Sobh beh’khayr,” Hoseyn said, rolling down his window. He frowned.

The problem was a routine one, the guard explained. The computer system was down. The electronic eye on the gate could not read the bar code on his windshield. “We must have your badge,” he said politely.

Hoseyn produced it and watched the man disappear into his air-conditioned booth. The heat was so scorching Hoseyn rolled the window back up. He turned the fan to high. The chill blast from the vents found his moist face. The relief of it made him think how much easier it would be to do it here, to die in front of this guard. But his cohorts in the Ahva Pesarah said one witness to his death was not enough. He must die in a crowded place.

A tap on the window broke his reverie. The guard was gone. In his place were three men, his Pesarah helpmates. Two of them were dragging the guard by his feet from the booth into a waiting sedan. The window tapper nodded, and Hoseyn rolled down the window enough to take back his badge. He glided through the now open gate. The asphalt drive, straight across baked ground, shimmered. The common illusion of glassy water on the surface beckoned, then disappeared as he neared. It reminded him of the salt basins left from the drained lakes of his country’s interior. When you saw them from the hills, they looked like hardened sugar.

Concrete walls surrounding the corporate campus appeared in the distance. Razor wire glinted. He saw the Iranian flag on its pole, drooped to full vertical. The wind had died weeks ago. The only movement in Tehran air was the upswell of smog. Here in the suburbs, it should have been cooler. The usual breezes should have helped. But there were none.