Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  Outside the barricade, dozens of microphones hovered in the air, above the heads of onlookers. Newspapermen shadowed the investigators and shouted questions at them. Stern-faced television anchors paraded before the cameras and spoke feverishly. Phantom drawings of three suspects, barely resembling the killers, were circulating among the crowd. The next day’s headlines were in the making.

  “The Berlin Massacre Ordered by Saddam Hussein:

  500,000 DM paid for every dead Kurd.”

  “Executed at Dinner: Four Men Die

  in a Power Struggle within the Kurdish Party.”

  When Parviz was a boy, his mother once asked him to take the wash to the rooftop to hang up on the clothesline. Being only six, he refused. She asked again. He did not budge. She promised him candy, but he was not enticed. She beat him, but all he did was cry. She beat him harder. He only cried harder but did not move. In the end, she threw her hands up and bitterly called her son a “spring” because the harder she pressed him, the more he recoiled, and the more he recoiled, the feistier he became, and the harder he fought back.

  Since the night before, Parviz had been pressed hard. Watching lies being fabricated before his eyes was a final blow. He pondered his choices. He could go home . . . Keep mum, and be afraid of every shadow?

  To walk away from the scene was, for him, to be just as dead as the others. What a disgrace then, to have survived. Or he could . . . Speak! Speak, now!

  He made his way through the crowd and stood against the police barricade, facing everyone. Fear and fury gripped him once more. The fatigue he had not paused to feel had dulled his senses. Every dark head in the crowd, reminding him of the shooter’s head, jolted his nerves. Still, he hushed everyone and started to speak, albeit with a newfound stutter.

  “Listen please, all of you! I was here in this restaurant, at the same table with the four people who died. I can tell you exactly what happened.”

  The chaos came to order. The wayward cameras and microphones lined up before Parviz, the human spring.

  By midnight on September 19, 1992, Bruno Jost had examined the scene, which was more gruesome than any he had ever seen. He had talked to colleagues and local and federal police, read witness statements, and looked over the autopsy reports as they came in. He valued these early insights not simply because they advanced his knowledge of the case. They also became a yardstick by which to measure the quality of future information.

  Among his most startling discoveries was something no one, not even the survivors or the relatives of the dead, had considered. A crime of that magnitude could not have happened so cleanly, swiftly, and flawlessly without the help of an insider. Someone at the restaurant had collaborated with the killers. Was he still at large, or among the dead? This would be the first of several questions to gnaw at him in the weeks to come.

  He had unearthed more than most investigators could, a credit to two qualities in him that were easily overlooked. Firstly, Jost thought himself a servant to a master named law. He did not shy away from the drudgeries of an investigation. He respected, but did not believe in, mediators, which was what he thought of everyone who reported to him. He hardly ever delegated even the lowliest of tasks to assistants. The brilliance of the truth he was to piece together, he believed, was in the luster of every detail that went into it. He feared what might be lost in the journey that a fact made from the lips of a witness to the pen of an overworked agent.

  Besides, he could not claim to be a superior to those who had seen what he had not, talked to those he had not, measured the distances he had not walked. To earn the respect of his coworkers, to prevent the possibility of ever being told he was wrong because he had not been present at the scene, he traced in the footsteps of all those who had first been dispatched and repeated every tedious procedure they had performed in his absence.

  Secondly, Jost was also a self-effacing man. His unassuming ways—the only item of luxury on him was the wisp of a gold band on his ring finger—deflected attention from him. He so often yielded to colleagues, so easily lent an ear to everyone, that witnesses, experts, or police officers spoke unreservedly in his presence, as if he were merely eavesdropping. A smile readily creased his lips to ease subordinates, as did his lilac gaze. Whatever flaws or shortcomings existed in Jost’s character, they did not get in the way of his equanimity. Indeed, nothing caused Jost to lose his stride—not the armed bodyguards shadowing him, the frozen expressions of the corpses he examined, the tantrums of traumatized witnesses, or the cunning of the detainees who spun tale after tale to evade his questions. Nothing upset his peace for long because nothing could surpass in strangeness what he had witnessed as a child.

  Until the year he left for college, Bruno Jost lived on the grounds of an insane asylum. His father was an attendant there and had an apartment on the premises. Growing up near the patients had inured Jost to strangeness. Sudden howls, frantic fits, gloomy countenances, bizarre rituals, and violent threats did not intimidate him. He had learned long ago how to stare into havoc and see past it.

  That night, the last call Jost received was from an Iraqi Kurdish leader who had also come to Berlin for the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party. Jalal Talebani wished to meet with Jost because he had spent most of the day before with the Doctor. Fear of the killers kept Talebani inside the apartment of a friend, and so he asked Jost to come to him instead.

  “I’d warned the Doctor months ago, in Paris, and again at the conference. I’d told him that a plot was in the works for his assassination,” Talebani began.

  Jost did little to prompt him. He settled into a chair and watched Talebani with eagerness. Talebani had to unburden himself. A few nods from time to time or a gesture was all he, on whom the foreknowledge of the crime now weighed heavily, needed to continue.

  “My men in northern Iraq got a tip from an Iranian agent they had arrested. During the interrogation, the agent leaked the news of a plot by Tehran to behead all Kurds by murdering their leadership. But when I told the Doctor, he wasn’t impressed. He said, ‘You’re not telling me anything new. Of course they want to kill me. Saddam wants to kill you, too. Tell me something I don’t know!’ I thought Vienna would smarten them, get them to up their security, but obviously, it hadn’t.”

  Vienna again. For the second time in thirty-six hours that city’s name had come up. Before the interview ended, Jost wrote VIENNA in block letters in his notepad and circled it—a reminder to study that case in the coming days.

  On the ride back to his hotel, Jost pondered what he had learned from Talebani. Politicians were a tough lot to trust, especially the aspiring kind who lived in exile. Jost was glad to have the unsolicited account, but it hardly offered him more than hearsay. His main suspect was still the armed Kurdish group, the PKK.

  When he arrived at his hotel it was three o’clock in the morning. The next day was scheduled to begin at eight. He slipped between the sheets and sleep spread over him fast like a spell.

  Yousef Amin was wide awake aboard a train bound for the town of Rhine in Nordrhein-Westfalen, some four hundred miles from Berlin. He sat alert, gazing at the view that rolled past, as if absolution was something to be granted him through sight. The graffiti-riddled walls of the city tunnels soon gave way to farms, barns, bridges, rivers, and windmills. The landscape changed but his thoughts did not. All he could think of was what had happened in Berlin. His life would have lacked nothing, he reflected, if only he could wipe away September 17, or a few hours, even five minutes, of it. Five minutes seemed like a reasonable wish—small enough to come true.

  Going home was a relief, not merely because he had escaped arrest, but because he had escaped the band of men he had once called friends. His troubles with them began four days earlier, when they had all been sitting together at a sidewalk table of a café and the team leader casually said to him, “If I ask you to kill, would you do it for me?”

  The team leader, a forbidding figure, was not someone Yousef wished to cros
s. He hemmed and hawed. “You see, umm, but, brother, ahh, I wish I could but, er, I’ve got responsibilities now. A family, you know.”

  “Forget I said anything,” the team leader waved his hand in the air. “I was only kidding.”

  Others in the group berated Yousef, calling him a coward. But he did not budge. Away from his family, Yousef had realized that he was through with living dangerously. He finally had a stake in life. He had youth (he was only twenty-five). He had his girl. And by November, his first wedding anniversary, he was also going to have a son.

  Refusing to kill came at an unexpectedly high price. The team no longer trusted Yousef. His giddy manner, which had seemed perfectly innocuous before, now struck them as a liability. They did not take their eyes off him. In the days leading up to September 17, he was allowed out of their sight only for a few minutes, and only to call home. His wife pleaded with him to return but he had said, “I can’t. They won’t let me.”

  That they had turned on him became clear when he found himself alone in the apartment on that last morning. After his teammates left on errands, he decided to run to the phone booth at the corner to call his wife. But the door would not open. The lock had been turned and the key missing from its hook.

  Being trapped was a familiar experience for Yousef. He was the fifteenth child of a poor family from Lebanon, and believed himself to be the reincarnation of his biblical namesake, Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph, too, had left home as a teenager looking to find in strangers what he had not in his kin. Yousef eventually met Abbas Rhayel. Though he was Yousef’s junior by three years, Rhayel adopted Yousef like a little brother. When Rhayel decided to move to Beirut, so did Yousef. When Rhayel joined the Hezbollah, Yousef followed. When Rhayel went to receive combat training at a secret camp in Iran, Yousef went along. When Rhayel moved to Europe in 1989, Yousef was beside him. Together they went to Hungary, where smugglers snuck them into Germany. Rhayel was Yousef’s guide. He was the one to find Yousef work, albeit of the sinister kind; he was his bridge to other societies, albeit to dangerous ones. He was also the one to enter the restaurant that night and fire the four final shots.

  As the train neared Rhine, Yousef’s mood brightened. He thought of his wife and her belly full of hope. He would never again allow anything to get in the way of his new life in a land so safe that the worst he ever had to fear was severe weather. The future, at last, held a promise, whose first glimpse, according to the obstetrician, was only six weeks away. He would not let a few minutes of standing guard at the door of a restaurant eclipse his fortune. After all, he had refused to kill.

  6

  For days, the ghost of Doctor Sharafkandi kept haunting me until I finally had the balls to ask what he wanted. “Hadi jaan,” said the ghost cheerily, “being the respectable man that I used to be, I can’t rest until I know: Was our dinner tab ever settled?”

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  Friday, September 25, breezy and bright, had all the beguiling signs of a late summer day. But its glory was lost on the hundreds of mourners at Berlin’s Socialist cemetery, whose eyes were clouded by tears.

  Security was tight. The day before, police had combed the grounds and the neighborhood. Several dozen armed officers monitored the comings and goings of the visitors. The cemetery’s memorial hall was filled to capacity. Another throng waited outside. Some paced about aimlessly, others huddled together in threes and fours. Conversation eluded them. Instead, they sucked hard on their cigarettes and exhaled in each other’s direction.

  When the doors of the memorial hall opened, a stately man, a colleague of Noori’s, led the way bearing a basket of red and yellow roses. The pallbearers, wearing sullen expressions, lifted the coffin and began to march. The crowd remained hushed, for as the coffin moved forward the faces they were looking for appeared. Shohreh, dressed in black, followed the coffin stoically. Sara was beside her, chewing gum. In a hot pink jacket, matching headband, and floral-print leggings, she gripped her stuffed rabbit in one hand and her favorite teacher’s hand in the other. She looked to suffer from nothing worse than boredom. She seemed ready for a field trip, not the gloomy affair of her father’s funeral. There were no tears on her cheeks, not a trembling in her gait as she passed across the vast lawn. Her pace had the irreverence of an ordinary preadolescent girl. Only her gaze flashed with a wrath that far outsized her small frame.

  Relatives and close friends walked with the mother and daughter. Parviz hid his inflamed eyes behind sunglasses and carried a large portrait of Noori, cupping one cheek, smiling warmly. Next to Parviz, Mehdi, squeezing his eyelids together to hold back tears, stumbled forward, drunk with grief. Around his neck hung a flimsy string that had been threaded through the edges of a photo of the four dead men.

  They came to a set of stone steps, to a display of flowers and photos cascading down the sides. On the landing, Noori’s brother positioned himself behind the microphone. An interpreter stood beside him to translate for the Germans in the crowd—reporters, friends, and colleagues of Shohreh and Noori, and a cadre of representatives from the Social Democratic Party.

  “On behalf of Noori’s family, I thank you all for coming. I’ve been asked to talk about Noori. Under different circumstances, I could talk about him for hours, for days even. But this shock. I can’t yet make a sensible sentence, you see. I can only think of a poem he recited to me when he came back to Iran in 1978. Today it seems that the poem was the story of his own life.”

  Those who knew Noori had expected his eulogy to include poetry, especially lines from the great modern poet, Ahmad Shamlou. His was the very verse that had ignited the flames of the 1979 revolution in the lives of the young urbanites—middle-aged mourners now—the verse that was ultimately etched on Noori’s tombstone:

  Not a tale to be told

  Not a song to be sung

  Not a sound to be heard

  Or a thing to be seen

  Or a thing to be known

  I am shared pain

  Shout me . . .

  Shohreh sat on the top of the stone stairs. At times, she seemed to be somber but aware; at others, removed, engulfed in a whirlwind of thoughts. One moment she would lean her head, wrapped in black chiffon, against a picture of Noori; her hand, still adorned with her wedding band, stroked the frame and she looked into the distance, as if she were drifting into a dream. The next moment she had returned, alert, straightening herself and the flowers, dragging her index finger along the glass as if housekeeping could not be postponed and she simply had to dust. Her lips were moving to the words of the poem:

  In the quiet, luminous space I have cried with you

  For the sake of the living,

  And in the dark cemetery I have sung with you

  The most beautiful songs

  Because this year’s dead

  Were the most loving of the living . . .

  Hundreds had come, mostly exiles who knew Noori personally, or of him through his television and radio interviews, or from his bylines. There were also many who did not know him at all. Nearly a million Iranians were living in exile by 1992, after the greatest exodus in the nation’s history. The majority were political refugees—some six thousand of whom had settled in Berlin. That morning, they had come to the cemetery because they shared the same tormented origin and traveled the same tormented trajectory. Noori’s history mirrored their own. In the aftermath of the coup in 1953 and the overthrow of the popular prime minister Mossadegh, many university students had headed west, where they founded the Iranian Student Confederation. With offices throughout Europe and the United States, the confederation was the model of the democratic dream the coup had dashed. Scores of young progressives—secular and religious—came together to run the self-fashioned miniature republic in which every season was election season. They elected university representatives, who elected city representatives, who elected country representatives, who elected members of the international executive committee. They raised revenues
from membership dues and printed annual budget reports, all according to the egalitarian bylaws they, themselves, had drafted. By the end of its existence in the late 1970s, the confederation had shaped a generation, from whose ranks the new political elite then emerged.

  Dozens of graying members of the old confederation, idealists who had rebelled against one bad regime only to pave the way for one still more vicious, were standing at the foot of the stairs, solemnly listening. What pained them the most was not simply that they had become victims, but that they had bred their own executioners. Noori’s death was their burden. With the man they had come to bury, they would also bury a piece of their own past, a piece of themselves.

  Noori was not all that they had lost. Trust was the other. In the week since the assassination they had pondered the details of that night, leading them to the certainty that their ranks had been infiltrated. One of their own had betrayed them. They were grieving Noori, the Kurds, and the irrevocable errors of their youth. They were also grieving their once undivided community, which was now broken. Fear had chased them out of Iran but had found them again in Berlin. Their safe haven was safe no more.

  The procession began to move. Row after row, mourners holding photos, banners, and placards flowed forward until they arrived at the empty plot and circled it. There was a hush. A tall, broad-shouldered woman accompanying Shohreh unfurled an Iranian flag she had carried in a bag. What she did, what everyone did that day, was to follow their intuition, not a script. Quickly, a few arranged themselves behind the green, white, and red flag. Each grabbed a corner and stretched it along the length of the plot. Everyone was overcome by melancholy, but also with pride. For Noori was to be buried in Berlin’s Socialist cemetery beside some of Europe’s most notable rebels. A horn began to sound from the nearby woods. That its player was not in sight enhanced the majesty of the music. The melody was familiar to most as the beloved melody of their youth. Their lips began to move to the lyrics of the “Internationale.”