City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

by Ramita Navai

  Jomhouri Street, Tehran, November 2013

  As Bahar disappeared through airport security, Amir wished he had told her about Ghassem. No one knew about the old man; with Bahar gone, Amir’s history went back to being a shameful secret.

  At first, Amir spoke to Bahar every few days, but as her life changed, they began to grow apart and the phone calls became more infrequent. A few months after her departure, he had saved enough money to travel to Turkey to apply for a US visa. His application was rejected. He promised himself that he would tell Bahar about the old man when he saw her next.

  Amir felt an isolation he had not experienced since his parents’ deaths. After the old man’s warning, the group stopped contacting each other. There were more arrests. Bita was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, on charges of membership of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters, acts against national security and disseminating misinformation about the system. The Filternet, as everyone now called it, was slowed right down. Presidential elections came around again; the Voters and the Boycotters argued the same arguments they had four years earlier.

  A new cycle of life began when, in June 2013, Rouhani was voted in. People were jubilant at the prospect of a President who was pushing for relations with the West. Amir and his friends emerged as emboldened and as hopeful as they had been under Khatami. The atmosphere felt freer than before, ordinary people on the streets seemed less depressed. Even those who had given up activism during Ahmadinejad’s years came back out. Now they were angling for small changes; none of them wanted an Arab Spring-style revolution, the very thought of it terrified them; they were afraid of Iran going the same way as Libya, Syria and Egypt – too fearful after the protests of 2009. They were also still too bruised and jaded by their parents’ experience to think that a revolution could work. Yavaash yavaas, slowly slowly, is what they said.

  The old man had turned up at the flat shortly after Bahar’s departure. Amir was too broken to argue and let him in without resistance. The old man sat on the sofa and began to cry; Amir did not know what to do, so offered him a glass of black tea. The old man tried to talk, but Amir shut him up.

  The old man’s visits became one of the constants in Amir’s life. They were always the same: sitting in silence, opposite each other, drinking tea. Amir and the old man who killed his parents. And every time, just before he got up to leave, the old man would ask the same question: ‘Will you forgive me?’

  And every time Amir would give the same reply: ‘No.’

  four

  BIJAN

  Around Makhsous Street and Gomrok, south Tehran

  The police chief had insisted on meeting in the park. It crossed Bijan’s mind that this might be a sting; it was, to say the least, an odd choice. The Chief knew well enough that without back-up he would not be safe. Bijan had told him that even he might not be able to protect him. And Bijan had a busy day ahead, no time for extra drama; but the Chief had been adamant.

  The park near where Bijan lived in the south of the city was where all the local small-time gangsters, pretenders, dealers, hooligans and thieves hung out. Even now that the air had begun to crackle with winter’s crisp, cold breeze, they still gathered here, to hustle for work, to rob, to get stoned and to socialize. Only when the first spidery crusts of ice covered the shrivelled grass would they retreat to the tea houses and hidden opium dens nearby. The park was the kind of place Bijan avoided. Not because he was scared; far from it. He knew all the reprobates in this neighbourhood, it was his patch after all. But he had moved on from them, from these careless, lazy, in-and-out-of-jail drunks and addicts who had about as much nous as a three-year-old child. The one thing they did all have was an indefatigable fondness for violence and a fierce glint in their eyes, the basic qualities needed to keep them in business. They were an uncomfortable reminder of where Bijan had come from and of who he used to be.

  The Chief was waiting for him on the corner of the road, under the white sky that had been streaked pale yellow by December’s low, watery sun. His smile was so broad his lips looked like they might crack. It was the smug smile of the powerful and on seeing it Bijan had an instinctive urge to smack it off his face. The Chief began to strut through the park, chest puffed out, legs swinging high, as though he was on parade. Bijan had to stifle a laugh. They’re going to eat him alive, he thought. But instead they started jumping to attention. The local heroin dealer clamped his hand to his forehead in a salute: ‘Hello sir!’ Even the addicts on the bench stood up and bowed their heads towards the Chief, deferentially touching their hearts. They shuffled out of the shadows of the trees, peeled themselves off the grass where they liked to gather in circles on their haunches, and they each came and paid their respects. The Chief looked at Bijan, his grin even bigger than before.

  ‘You looked surprised!’ The Chief was good at faux naif.

  ‘What the fuck have you done to these poor bastards?’

  The Chief giggled like a schoolboy. ‘I took care of them. Since they’ve stopped listening to you, I thought I’d teach them a lesson.’

  Muggings in the area had become uncontrollable. There were only so many official figures the Chief could successfully fudge without raising suspicions. Everyone knew the boys in the park were responsible, and that once upon a time those boys had been under Bijan’s control. But Bijan had insisted this was no longer his beat. He was involved in more sophisticated operations these days, which the Chief respected him for.

  ‘I suppose I’m going to have to pay you for this service.’ Bijan was almost laughing – he had never seen anything like it.

  ‘Work doesn’t come for free! Now, how about a quick toke in the tea house where we can sort out business, eh?’

  Bijan heard the story later; he got it out of a sixteen-year-old kid who had started selling sheesheh, crystal meth, in the park. The Chief had decided to teach these boys a lesson. He had gathered ten officers and local basijis, volunteer militiamen. Good boys he trusted. They had stormed the park, swooping on over a dozen of them. The guys had not been scared at first; when their lookouts had seen the cops coming they had simply hidden their drugs and weapons as they always did. They had even smirked at the approaching unit. ‘Hello ladies, what can we do for you today?’ one of the layabouts had said, imitating a camp rent boy. That is when the smirking stopped. The Chief’s men rounded them up and marched them to the edge of the park, lined them up under the shade of the willow trees and pointed guns to their heads. The Chief watched as one of his men produced a glass bottle; the gang were held down as the cold, dirty vessel was thrust up each of their anuses. Every single one of them was raped. Some were silent; some screamed in pain. All were left humiliated and bleeding.

  The tea house was a long, narrow, dingy room with bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling. A row of small tables was pushed up against the grey tiled walls and beside a silver samovar, blue and green glass hookah pipes were lined up on the floor. A patchwork of old banknotes from the Pahlavi reign was displayed under the glass top of a wooden desk by the entrance; here sat the owner, a big man with a comically large moustache and a tattooed hand that swung jade tasbih rosary beads between gigantic fingers. On the wall was a poster of Imam Ali with a lion at his feet; hanging inside the door, a sign: No entry for drug addicts and those under the age of 18.

  The regulars raised their arms and nodded as Bijan and the Chief took their usual spot at the back. The talk was of a stabbing that had happened in the tea house a few years earlier.

  ‘So your boys found Behrouz last night?’ a young mechanic shouted out to the Chief.

  ‘Nothing gets past you fishwives.’

  ‘The Kurd told me.’

  ‘I don’t know how the Kurd does it, I suppose you know too?’ the Chief was asking Bijan.

  ‘With a little help from your boys.’ They both laughed. Bijan began stirring the strong black tea that had been smacked in front of him. The news about Behrouz was the best Bijan had heard in a while.

  B
ehrouz, a local fraudster, had knifed Hooman to death in a fight over a heroin deal. Hooman was one of Bijan’s closest childhood friends and the manager of his car-washing company. The regulars had barricaded Behrouz in the tea house until the police had arrived. Behrouz was given the death penalty. Hooman’s brothers received diyeh, blood money, for the murder, which is worked out at the current market value of either 100 camels, 200 cows or 1,000 sheep: 114 million tomans (about 30,000 US dollars), although if Hooman had been killed during the holy months his life would have been worth thirty per cent more. When Behrouz asked for a pardon, as was his legal right, Hooman’s brothers agreed and told the court that they forgave Behrouz and that he should be spared execution and a lengthy prison sentence. But they had not forgiven him. They simply wanted the satisfaction of killing him themselves. They only had to wait a few years. Just three hours after Behrouz was released from prison, Hooman’s brothers nailed him to a wall, slashing his throat. They smoked a cigarette as they watched the blood leak out of him.

  ‘Chief, is it true they got Astollah?’ a toothless man near the door was asking. Astollah was a big-time booze merchant who lived nearby. They, as always, meant ettela’at, intelligence. Stories abounded of dealers and smugglers caught by the security services and forced to be turncoats, spying on their own and informing on their customers.

  ‘I got to tell my boys to keep their mouths shut, there’s more gossip in here than a beauty parlour.’

  Astollah had been shifting thousands of litres of alcohol a year. There is no corner of the city where booze is not bought and sold. Vodka and whisky are the bestsellers. Most of the alcohol comes from Erbil in Iraq where a bottle of Smirnoff costs six US dollars; Astollah could flog it in Tehran for thirty. He had been caught before, but had always paid his way out of lashes and a prison sentence.

  ‘What else you got for us Chief?’ asked a sixty-year-old strongman, who still travelled the country in black trousers and a vest, a leather band tied round his head, lifting improbable weights and dragging cars with his teeth. The Chief threw his hands in the air in mock exasperation, but really he loved the attention and enjoyed being the purveyor of the latest news and scandal.

  ‘We got a mullah the other day, you know, the one that’s got his face on posters all over Vali Asr.’

  ‘Let me guess, little boys?’ asked the mechanic.

  ‘Little girls. Made one of them pregnant,’ said the Chief. ‘I bet you a million tomans nothing will happen to him. This is the third time he’s been in. That bastard has got some friends in high places, I tell you.’

  The caretaker of a mosque had discovered that a visiting cleric had been raping his two daughters in the room where the family lived; his fourteen-year-old had become pregnant. The police had been sympathetic but had told him there was nothing they could do. The cleric was untouchable. The caretaker went to see editors of magazines and newspapers, begging them to take on his case. They were all too scared. Then the cleric was caught with another child. And another. The police had finally agreed to have him arrested; but still they had little hope he would be charged.

  ‘Who was responsible for the mosque incident?’ Now the Chief wanted information.

  ‘Why Chief, is he in trouble?’

  ‘The opposite – I want to pat him on the back.’

  The local mosque’s congregation had dwindled to only a handful of faithful in recent years. Bijan hated going to the mosque, and it pained him to go into its adjoining hosseinieh, the congregation hall used for gatherings and religious ceremonies, which he did at least a few times a week to buy the best (and cheapest) khoresht-e ghormeh sabzi in the whole of Tehran, a rich, deep-green stew of herbs, dried limes, kidney beans and lamb. In an effort to drum up interest, the mosque had started broadcasting its dawn azan from an amplifier cranked up to full volume, through a made-in-China loudspeaker bolted to the side of the minaret, cheap plastic parts rattling away. The noise had been deafening and there were dozens of complaints. It would have been half tolerable if the muezzin did not sound like a cat being skinned alive. For someone with such a bad voice, he delivered his off-key shrieks with more confidence than Pavarotti. Even the Chief had complained. The mosque refused to turn the sound down, so the locals, some of whom had never stepped inside a mosque, began to complain in person. The man responsible for the azan revamp was a vindictive mullah who took great pleasure in causing a stir and waking this lazy community out of its torpor. ‘You can’t turn down God’s message,’ was the stern reply. Nothing could change his mind, not even a ribbon-tied box of his favourite golden, sticky, deep-fried goosh-e-fil pastry, delivered to him by an exasperated housewife.

  Early the previous morning, a young man with four children and impeccable aim shot the speaker from his living-room window with an air rifle. ‘That coward of a mullah won’t be turning up that music again,’ he had said to his wife as he placed the rifle back in its hiding place in a hole behind the sink. So far, the mullah had not dared.

  Bijan and the Chief had an easy familiarity; they had both grown up in the area, an urban inner-city south Tehrani neighbourhood west of Vali Asr, not far from Monirieh Square. For decades the place had had a reputation for being a rough, crime-riddled hood, but slowly it cleaned up its act, on the surface at least. There were no obvious signs of poverty, as there were less than two miles away on Shoosh Street; the drug addicts stuck to the parks here and kept out of the way; the poorer families still had tight networks around them and so they were not yet lost to the city. Apartment blocks were built. New residents moved in, prices rose. But the same kind of people ruled these streets; they had simply retreated farther underground. Every now and then, the area’s real colour would reveal itself. The last time was a gang fight over territory; a rival group from across the motorway thundered into a small street, clubs in hands, smashing every car window on their way. The police were called but did not turn up until the rampage was over; they never got involved in turf wars.

  In the clutch of alleys where Bijan and the Chief lived, every other house was involved in crime, some way or other. Drugs, guns, black-market goods, knocked-off DVDs. It was just the way it was, the way it had always been. It was as though they were a tribe apart from everyone else. The community was neither religious nor particularly educated and most of them could not stand the regime. Pragmatism ran in their blood; they understood the power of money in this city, and the fact that it could buy them into the middle classes. Some who made money moved north, to stylish apartments in Shahrak-e Gharb and Sa’adat Abad. But not all of them wanted to hike up Vali Asr. There was a freedom they had on these streets that was missing in north Tehran. The people ruled here and stuck together. It was not the same as the high-rise living in the more salubrious parts, where everyone was hidden indoors or trapped in cars.

  After the war with Iraq, thousands of Iranians travelled to Japan, and it was there that Bijan and the Chief really got to know each other, in their early twenties. They had both returned from the front lines to a jobless country shattered by war. Visa restrictions for Iranians had been lifted by Japan in the early 1970s following the world oil crisis. Japan’s economy had been almost entirely dependent on imported oil and was hit hard; it needed to ingratiate itself with Middle Eastern nations and distance itself from American foreign policy. By the late 1980s, Japan’s economy had peaked and Iranians were eager and willing to provide cheap manual labour. They did the work the Japanese were not willing to do, known as the ‘3K’ jobs, because they were kitanai (dirty), kitsui (difficult) and kurushii (painful). When visas become compulsory for Iranian citizens, they simply stayed on and the police turned a blind eye. At one point, 500 Iranians were going to Japan every week and thousands were overstaying their visas. Most of them worked on construction sites, returning home with money, contacts and wild tales of womanizing. But before long, men like the Chief became involved in scams that were more lucrative, more fun and not so ‘3K’. The Chief made his money in counterfeit phone cards. When se
edier possibilities emerged, hundreds of boys from around the hood flew over; the Japanese underworld throbbed with Iranian crooks and pimps barging in on the action. Bijan was enlisted as a footsoldier in the yakuza, Japan’s own mafia. It was here that he met many of the men he would later hire, tough guys pumped up on steroids and hulking tree-trunk-necked wrestlers – men who were used to the rough, knife-wielding ways of south Tehran streets. The yakuza snapped up these south Tehrani thugs, deploying them as their heavies; Bijan and the boys liked to say the Japanese police were more scared of the Iranians than they were of the yakuza. Both Bijan and the Chief were deported from Japan in one of the crackdowns on illegal immigrants. The Chief’s uncle was in the police force and made sure his favourite nephew was given a job and that his records were cleared of all trace of his Japan jaunt; people knew what hard-nosed goons like the Chief got up to in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  Bijan slid a stack of greens across the table, the Chief’s monthly hush money. The cloudy water in the hookah pipe purred as it bubbled up. He drew in a mouthful of smoke.

  ‘They’re going to raid Chahar Dongeh soon. Don’t have any details yet,’ said the Chief.

  ‘Shit. How long d’you think I’ve got?’

  ‘At least a week.’

  Bijan took out another wad of notes from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Much obliged.’

  Bijan had moved on to drugs and he had set up a meth lab in a disused warehouse in Chahar Dongeh, a small, ragged industrial town just south of Tehran. As the country’s economy was flailing in the wake of stricter sanctions, the illegal drugs trade was booming. Sanctions were not new to Iran; they started when the US froze Iran’s assets during the hostage crisis over thirty years ago. The Europeans soon joined in, punishing Iran for its nuclear enrichment programme (which it has always maintained is for peaceful energy purposes). Oil exports were slashed to a third, and as sanctions triggered inflation, the poor and vulnerable were predictably affected. The price of some foods more than doubled in a year; staples like Tabrizi feta cheese, fruit and meat became unaffordable for so many. But the price of drugs had barely changed. Iran’s meth empire was expanding at an astonishing rate. It was easy and cheap; the chemical needed to make crystal meth was legal and, as the Islamic Republic was one of the highest importers of the chemical in the world, there was lots of the stuff around. The head of the anti-narcotics unit had just declared that Iran was the fifth-highest consumer of crystal meth in the world. Bijan’s operation was growing by the day.