Night in Tehran

by Kaplan, Philip

  SAVAK, Weiseman thought. Klein’s friends?

  Along the side of the road, two women walked arm in arm, one in a long flowing skirt, the other in a chador. They could have been mother and daughter, but it was impossible to judge their ages. A man sat on a log nearby, smoking the stub of a cigarette, staring blankly at the mule. Other cars arrived. Drivers shouted at the delay, and leaned on their horns.

  The man with the mule patted his beast and grinned. The people from North Tehran would just have to wait.

  Finally, the mule was across the road. The taxi edged forward. The Peugeot waited, then slid back behind them, trailing at about thirty feet. Why so obvious? Weiseman wondered. Clumsy, or just letting him know that they were on to him, a warning not to get out of line?

  The cab arrived at a covered bazaar. Surely a place to see, and to lose his police escort—if they were indeed cops.

  The driver said, “You get out here, mister.”

  Weiseman got out and watched the Peugeot roll by. He paid the taxi driver and walked into the warren of alleys and stands. Merchants hawked their carpets, bracelets, religious icons, and street food. A young man held a silk scarf. “Lovely…lovely,” he crooned, his dark eyes sparkling. “Made in Paris,” he said, sure it was the deal clincher.

  “No, thank you,” Weiseman said.

  “Please, sir. It is woven in Tabriz, worth thousands of rials. For you, one hundred dollars!”

  He shook his head at the merchant. “I bought one at the other stand.”

  The man was wringing his hands; he knew there would be no other Westerner passing by his stand today. “Please, mister, you will take the scarf, free, for the honor of my house.”

  “No thanks,” he said, and moved on, before remembering. Taarof. The elaborate behavioral system, a culture comprised of cues and traps, courtesy and deceit, as their protective cloak. You’ll run into it everywhere, he’d been told, in the bazaar and in the palace, and in the mosque.

  If the scarf was really any good, he thought, the hawker wouldn’t offer to give it away. But that’s not quite it. What had Françoise said? He offers it to you free, but doesn’t mean it. He expects you to be sufficiently civilized to pay him his price. Taarof. That’s the way it works here.

  He wandered out of the bazaar, across the road and onto a dirt soccer field with shredded nets on either end. Young boys and men in mixed jerseys and short pants were racing back and forth, kicking the ball ferociously, intercepting each other, butting heads, battering shins. A shirtless kid made a neat tackle on a man wearing a Barcelona shirt, then grasped the ball with both hands as though doing so was essential to prove his manhood, even if it meant violating the rules of the game. The kid then kicked the ball sharply, peered toward the goal, then shrieked and laughed as it curved into the upper right corner of the net, over the outstretched arms of the tall older man who was the goalkeeper.

  A green Peugeot pulled up. Startled, Weiseman wondered if it was the same one that had been following him?

  Two cops in bottle-green uniforms strode onto the dirt field, grabbed the goalkeeper by his arms and began to beat him with their batons. The other men and boys all stood with their heads down, saying nothing. One of the boys, no more than eight, edged slowly toward Weiseman and meekly extended his hand. Weiseman stared at him. The boy wore a tattered, sleeveless yellow sweater, like the one Weiseman himself wore to school a lifetime ago in Berlin. He didn’t know why the cops were beating the goalkeeper but grasped the boy’s outstretched hand tightly, as if the boy were his son, knowing he had at least to give this frightened boy some protection.

  SAVAK, Weiseman thought, snapping out of his momentary reverie. He hated knowing he couldn’t interfere, could do nothing to help them. Why do they do it? he asked himself. But he knew: to show they can.

  And the others, why don’t they do anything? But he knew that, too: the first imperative is to survive to fight another day. The savage beating brought back memories of his childhood in Berlin, of other innocents he had seen beaten for no good reason, other than so Hitler’s hoodlums could show that they could.

  One day, he thought, those other boys will be foot soldiers of the revolution. They’ll join whatever SAVAK the mullahs establish. They won’t forget what happened here today.

  He walked slowly off the field, careful not to attract attention, grasping the boy’s hand. At the end of the street, he saw a cop watching them, then look off at the beating on the playing field. He gave the boy a push. “Go now,” he said. “Run!” Then watched, breathless, as the youngster raced away down a dirt road.

  * * *

  —

  THE ELEVATOR IN the British embassy was creaky. Weiseman rode down to the basement offices and rang a bell beside a metal door. A thin man in a faded blue shirt, tartan necktie, with a monk’s tonsure of gray hair and round eyeglasses stood before him.

  “Justin Trevor sends greetings,” Weiseman said, and Ronald Sims smiled as if it took some effort.

  “Right. Shall we?” Sims stepped back to slip on a Harris Tweed a Harris Tweed_jacket and a gray peaked cap hanging behind the door, then snatched a long black umbrella and led Weiseman up a flight of stairs and out the back way, into a car park. A moment later they were driving slowly up the road in an antique Jaguar that had already clocked 200,000 miles. “They don’t make them this way anymore,” Sims said.

  He gave off the air of a small-town English Midlands constable, accountant, or door-to-door insurance salesman, hardly the type you’d expect to be MI6. Back in Washington, Trevor had cautioned Weiseman not to underestimate Sims, which would have been easy to do. He had cultivated an air of inconsequence since entering MI6 but he had a first class mind, Trevor confided, and a bag of tricks he’d accumulated over a lifetime. There was a wife, Millicent, who, Trevor implied, added something extra to Ronald’s repertoire.

  “You’ve been monitored since you arrived,” Sims said. “By SAVAK, by the French, and of course by your own people. The American ambassador doesn’t much care for our types.”

  That didn’t surprise Weiseman; that’s the way it was going to be.

  The smog made for reduced visibility. Sims swerved the Jag across a lane of traffic, then pulled up to a white mansion. A white sign said BRITISH CLUB IN TEHRAN. The place was an oasis of Britain’s former empire and might have been transplanted from the British Raj in India. Doric columns supported the roof that overhung a wooden porch packed with white cane chairs and tartan cushions. The dining room décor was faded Victorian plush—red velour banquettes, chandeliers from the subcontinent, and portraits of Disraeli, Gladstone, and Chamberlain.

  “Here’s someone you need to know,” Sims said, the lines at his mouth crinkling again.

  “Foster,” said a six-foot-four man in a gray striped suit, standing by the banquette.

  “Your deputy chief of mission here,” Sims said.

  They all slipped into a booth. Sims filled out a luncheon chit, and a waiter came by and picked it up. “Well, that’s done then.”

  It was 1:00 p.m., and only three tables were occupied. Foster folded his hands in front of himself on the table. “Serge Klein told me you were a troublemaker,” he said. “He told me to keep an eye on you.” Foster stared hard at him, then said, “Klein is a rat. I take my orders from Justin Trevor.”

  “And the ambassador?” Weiseman asked.

  “Lyman Palmer? He’s a disaster.”

  Neither Foster nor Sims seemed to find it odd that the American was airing his embassy’s dirty linen in front of a British operative. Apparently the special relationship that fostered the Ajax operation in 1953 was still functioning in Iran.

  The waiter arrived with Dover sole—flown in fresh every day, Sims assured him.

  “Trevor’s going to dump the Shah, isn’t he,” Foster said.

  Weiseman dipped a slice of the sole in the dill, ate it, then sipped the Frascati Sims had ordered. “What would you do?” he asked.

  “Not much choice,” Foster said
. “The bazaari, the army—no guts, nothing there.”

  “And it won’t buy us much time,” Sims added, then suddenly stood to greet a tall woman in a floral dress who appeared at their table. “Millicent,” Sims said, “our friend David works for Justin Trevor.”

  She slid into the booth, and her husband squeezed in after her. “Yes, Farah told me.”

  So he’d already been announced to the Empress. And therefore the Shah.

  He studied Millicent more closely. The curly red hair and the sensuous mouth and the flowery Dior outfit all were offset by a protruding nose with rounded nostrils that evoked, in his mind, the image of a bloodhound.

  “You want to know what to do,” she said. “What have Ronald and Thomas told you?”

  “Nothing yet,” Weiseman said, and raised his glass to her.

  “Of course, nothing,” she said. “But you’re here to advise Justin. You need to know.” She picked up Foster’s glass proprietarily and sipped his wine.

  Ronald Sims never stopped cutting and eating his Dover sole in neat, tiny bites.

  “Here’s what I think,” Millicent said. “We can do it again.” Her whole aspect brightened and she seemed to grow larger. “Another Ajax would keep Mohammad Reza and our dear Farah on their thrones. Mrs. Thatcher would know what to do…” She shrugged stoically. “I suppose your people wouldn’t have the stomach for that.”

  “It won’t happen, my dear,” Sims said. He seemed to turn reflective, as if about to say something of significance, but he kept whatever it was to himself. Weiseman decided he’d need to devote more time to Ronald Sims.

  “Then you simply must wait for the Imam,” Millicent said. “Will Justin like that?”

  Foster nodded conspiratorially. “Millicent has it spot-on.”

  Ronald Sims looked up from his sole. Weiseman sensed that there were other options careening through his brain, but he kept them to himself. The little man was a pro.

  “That’s about it, Dave,” Foster said. “What are you going to tell Trevor?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” Millicent focused on him, as if taking his measure, then raised her glass. “Welcome to Iran,” the bloodhound said.

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE hotel, Weiseman slipped by the people sipping tea in an oak-paneled lounge that could have been taken from the club he’d just left. He rode the tiny elevator up to his room, unlocked the door, and there was the Shah’s face staring through the window into the room—from a huge billboard on the facing building: the high forehead; the outsized ears and prominent nose; the coal black eyes staring at him as if peeling away the layers of guilt he should, by rights, feel for coming to Iran to take away his Peacock Throne.

  He sat on the bed, emotionally exhausted from jet lag and his first day in Tehran, then eased his head back on the pillow. Françoise had sent him a message; she would arrive in the morning—there were Iranians she wanted him to meet.

  Only half-awake now, he tried to sort out signals flashing from a lighthouse in the center of an alien world. He was back at the soccer field, at that moment with the little boy he helped escape, repeating, “Hurry!” And then the nightmare reappeared: he saw a small child hidden behind the high hedge in Berlin’s Grünewald park, gestapo dogs sniffing ever closer…

  4

  PRIEST & PROFESSOR

  “COME, I’LL SHOW you Tehran,” Françoise said the next morning, waiting for him in the breakfast room, sipping an espresso. She stood and put on her black wool coat.

  A taxi took them to another upscale part of the vast city, where stone villas cloistered behind high walls and guard booths heedlessly called attention to the lucrative targets inside. They stopped at a two-story house with a tile roof and multiple TV antennas.

  “Ready?” she asked, and adjusted her green, silk headscarf. He nodded, and she led him into the house, to the living room where they were greeted by a mullah with well-tailored clerical robes, a leathery face, and carefully trimmed white beard under a circular turban. “Sobh bakheir, Mr. Weiseman,” the mullah said. “Madame d’Antou said you wished to visit us.”

  “Good morning.”

  At a side table, a framed photograph showed the mullah as a young man, with a young Ruhollah Khomeini.

  “David, this is Ayatollah Seyyed,” Françoise said. “His name means ‘Descendant of the Prophet.’ ” She took a seat and inclined her head. Seyyed’s bony hand emerged from beneath the sleeve of his black robe and gestured to a window. He was in his fifties—a serious, self-assured man with a taste for luxury, if the gold embroidery on his robe was any indicator. At the window, they looked south, toward the decay below, poverty not erased by the Shah’s reforms—the so-called White Revolution.

  “We will find our recruits to overthrow the Shah there,” Seyyed said, “Alam dollah. Thank God, it will be done without violence.”

  Weiseman, recalling the mayhem on the soccer field, asked how that might happen.

  “We have a secret weapon,” Seyyed replied. “Pahlavi himself. The people despise him. They will sweep him aside, and we will return this land to Allah.”

  So it wasn’t just the cancer, Weiseman thought; already there was plotting to oust the Shah. And the first contact arranged by Françoise was with a lieutenant of Khomeini. Perhaps Trevor was right—that the French thought Islamist rule was inevitable.

  Seyyed picked up a pack of Gauloises and put it in his pocket. On the table, Weiseman spotted a book, Anatomy of a Revolution. This ayatollah was no Gandhi, he thought.

  “You know, the Shah will resist,” Weiseman said.

  Seyyed held up a finger for silence. He pointed to a door. Weiseman and Françoise followed Seyyed down a flight of stairs, into a dark cellar with one bare light bulb. The strong scent of wine was incongruous in an orthodox Muslim house.

  The priest spoke in a low voice. “I agreed to see you,” he told Weiseman, “because we trust Madame Françoise. Soon we may be in charge of this country. We don’t want the CIA to try to install another strongman; it would tear this country apart.” He lit up a Gauloise, took a deep drag on it, and vented the smoke into the fetid air of the dark cellar. “We will not accept the son of a shah, as we had to do when the Shah’s father was deposed by the British in 1941. We will not receive an exiled shah dumped on us by the Americans, like 1953.”

  Seyyed referred, of course, to Operation Ajax, which had stashed the Shah in Rome just long enough to remove Mossadeq, the opposition prime minister, before returning Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. Did Seyyed take him down to this cellar, out of reach of the listening devices undoubtedly located upstairs, to pledge allegiance to the cause of the Islamic Revolution? That hardly seemed necessary. And why was he saying all this in front of Françoise?

  Trevor said that Paris had another agenda. Maybe Seyyed was keeping all options open.

  “The photograph upstairs of you with Ayatollah Khomeini,” Weiseman said. “When was it taken?”

  Seyyed took a final drag on the cigarette and dropped it to the concrete floor, lifting his robe to grind the butt with his black leather wing tip. He inched closer to Weiseman: they were almost forehead to forehead. “I have known the Imam for many years. There are those around him who hate America, who speak of gharbzadegi, of ‘Westoxication.’ ”

  “And this concerns you?” Weiseman spoke in a whisper. It seemed as if some secret was about to be imparted.

  “Sheikh Khalaji and Montana are dangerous,” Seyyed said. These were new names to Weiseman. He hadn’t seen them in the briefing material Trevor had given him.

  Seyyed kept talking. “Those two fanatics mean to use the Imam. He is old and frail.”

  “But there are others,” Weiseman said, “who would tread the true path of Islam.”

  Seyyed said nothing, but Weiseman could tell there was something he meant to say.

  The idea crystallized at once. An ayatollah, Weiseman thought. An old friend of the ailing Ayatollah, fearful of fundamentalists aroun
d Khomeini.

  Could he be thinking of opposing the radical ayatollahs? Would he?

  “Please go on,” Weiseman said quietly.

  The sound of a car pulling up startled them. Seyyed moved the shade at a small window near the low ceiling and peered warily outside. He seemed taken aback at whatever he saw.

  A sharp rap on the door. A head with a long white beard poked in and spoke in Farsi.

  “And now it seems I am summoned,” Seyyed said. “I’m told we are honored by a visit from General Hanif. Perhaps you two will be so good as to depart through the rear door.”

  * * *

  —

  “DANESHGAH,” FRANÇOISE TOLD the taxi driver—the university—as Weiseman turned over the possibility that Seyyed could be an avenue into Khomeini’s inner circle. Yet it seemed too easy, and Françoise seemed to read his thoughts. “In a revolution,” she said, “everyone keeps one eye open while sleeping.”

  A half mile before the gates of the university she told the driver to let them out. She led him across a rough terrain and into a grove of cedar trees. She pointed to a house through the trees and led him forward.

  Leaves rustled, a tree branch snapped. An Iranian man emerged from the woods, very close to them, with a lean foxhound bounding free. The man wore a trilby hat and had a rifle tucked under his arm. The dog barked and bared his teeth.

  Weiseman stepped in front of Françoise. The dog surged toward them, stopping only a few feet away. Spittle dribbled from his yellow teeth. The man in the trilby hat stood impassively.

  “Call him off,” Weiseman said quietly, not wanting to provoke the dog.

  The man did nothing. The dog moved closer, snarling at Weiseman.

  “Please,” Weiseman said. “The lady…”

  “Reza!” the man commanded. The dog backed off, following his master back across the glen and into the trees.

  Weiseman was shaken, wondering if the man with the dog was just off on a walk through the woods or was one of Hanif’s lieutenants. He took a deep breath and tried to decipher the sphinx-like calm of Françoise.