Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  Mornings brought no relief. When he left his apartment, he crossed the threshold certain a sniper was waiting for him to emerge. He turned the corner hesitantly, awaiting a dagger at the bend. If walking became a test of his nerves, he would drive instead. But in his hands, the key felt like a matchstick and his car a heap of kindling ready to ignite. On the road, at each traffic light, the sight of every cyclist who pulled up beside him quickened his blood.

  He, like Shohreh, was being shadowed. Fearing his assassins friends rarely visited him. Few had the courage to invite him over. He accepted only one dinner invitation in those early days after the killings. When he had arrived at his host’s house and they had sat down to eat, the telephone rang. The caller asked for Parviz, telling the host that it was about an urgent meeting that had to be arranged between Parviz and Mr. Changiz Dastmalchi—Parviz’s father who had died years ago. The call was only a reminder that the killers were not finished with him. When the host relayed the message, Parviz rose from the table and said good-bye. He never accepted another invitation, not wishing to expose his friends to the perils of his own life.

  Besides, he was no longer sure who was a friend. He no longer trusted his friends and his friends no longer trusted him. No one knew who had spied on them at the restaurant that September evening. So they treated each other like suspects. Parviz took it upon himself to solve the mystery. He questioned old acquaintances, thinking himself perfectly discreet, but they felt interrogated by him. His inquiries only added to the bitterness of an already bitter community. Some pitied him, others condemned him. He realized it one evening when, walking into a gathering of expatriates, he heard someone murmur, “Oh, look, Lieutenant Columbo is here.”

  He left immediately. Leaving, retreating further into solitude, came easily to him in those days.

  The events of September had robbed Parviz of many friendships, but October brought him a few new ones. Norbert Siegmund, the journalist, was now pursuing the case with an intensity matched only by his own. Norbert’s office at the ZDF station was within minutes of Parviz’s office at the Red Cross, so they met regularly.

  The case was a shared obsession. Parviz recounted the minutiae of that evening often, the clues to the riddle that consumed them. He needed Norbert. Being on the air, having millions listening to his argument, broke the silence he so disdained, giving him a small revenge. Norbert also needed Parviz—the protagonist at the heart of his reporting. Thrust into the midst of the Iranian exile community for the first time, Norbert was finding it a forbidding labyrinth, where Parviz seemed more credible than the rest.

  Norbert also needed the focus he drew from the investigation. For years, he had been seeking something elusive—his life’s purpose—without luck. At sixteen, he became a social worker to help the jobless. At eighteen, he quit his job, picked up his guitar, and went to India looking for inspiration. When he returned after weeks of wandering, he reconciled his passion for music with the mandates of adulthood by choosing music history as his major in college. But a bad piece of Ukrainian folk music, assigned to him for his thesis by a glum professor, dashed his hope of becoming a music historian. Ukrainian folk was no rock and roll, and the scholarly pursuit of music did not stir him the way playing music had. He switched to journalism so he could become a radio host and spend his days airing his favorite tunes.

  His first days on the job coincided with an unusually heavy news cycle. There was the weakening currency, the central bank’s fear of inflation—two of the many fallouts of Germany’s reunification—and a burgeoning immigration crisis marked by 400,000 new asylum seekers in 1992. The station’s experienced reporters were chasing these stories when the assassinations occurred. Therefore, the station manager was forced to send the new disc jockey into the field. There, at the site of Noori’s grave on his first assignment, the unexpected requiem he heard had moved Norbert as he had once thought only rock and roll could.

  He and Parviz drove through the neighborhoods the assassins had frequented. They downed many shish kebab sandwiches and drank countless cups of tea in the hopes of disguising their anomalous presence in the Shiite haunts of Berlin. There was nothing to be unearthed on an innocuous block, yet just walking the streets the killers had walked prompted conversations they never had inside their offices. They roamed about, looking for proof to back Parviz’s claim that the business owner, Darabi, was an intelligence operative working for Tehran.

  “He’s their thug. Every expatriate in this city knows it. Anyone who’s ever demonstrated against the mullahs has felt the blows of his bat.”

  Parviz talked feverishly, as if convincing Norbert might convince all Germans. The shuttered windows of Darabi’s grocery and dry-cleaning stores with TEMPORARILY CLOSED signs hanging from the doorknobs, inflamed him every time.

  “Laundry services? Bah! All he laundered was the regime’s money. He doesn’t make his living selling turnips, I assure you.”

  During one of these outings an old memory rushed back to him. He recalled that Darabi had manned Iran’s booth at the annual Green Week exhibit. Since the late 1920s, Green Week had been Berlin’s most festive international affair, a behemoth farmers’ market. Nearly half a million visitors came every year to taste the products of fifty countries, Iran among them. Norbert jotted the name down, ideas already brewing in his head, as Parviz strained to recollect. Which year, he could not be sure, but he had no doubt Darabi had been the official representative.

  “Some bureaucrat somewhere must have the record of it on file, if you’d look into it. Tie Darabi to Iran’s regime and you’ll have your proof!”

  If Parviz was not with Norbert, he was often off to do what increasingly seemed like an act of penance: visiting Aziz, who was still in the hospital. Aziz was estranged from his wife and had no one to look after him. With Noori gone, Parviz felt a tenderness for Aziz he had never felt before. When Noori had first befriended Aziz, Parviz called them “brothers in alcohol,” since the two often drank together. But with time, he saw Aziz’s affection for Noori. Each night Noori stepped inside the restaurant, Aziz would open his arms and cheer, “My mola has arrived!”

  He would link arms with Noori and drag him from table to table, saying, “Meet my mola, please! This man, here, is my mola.”

  Mola, the beloved in the love poems of the poet Rumi.

  Instead of shying away from flaws in others, Noori was inspired to correct them. It was a virtue Parviz found at once exasperating and endearing. When Aziz and his wife arrived in Germany a few years earlier, Aziz had told her he did not wish either of them to study German.

  “We don’t need to learn their language. Their Western ways will corrupt and tear us apart,” was his answer to her proposal that they take turns watching the baby and attending language classes.

  Noori spent hours, alone and alongside their respective families, trying to make a better husband of Aziz. His transformation had not come fast enough to keep his wife from leaving, which, in the end, made him doubt the wisdom of the transformation in the first place.

  Reflecting on his marriage of twelve years, he would throw his hands up and exclaim, “Ever since we came to this country, I don’t know what my wife wants anymore. Shoes? I buy her. Clothes? I get her the best. But these two . . .” pointing to Noori and Parviz, “kept coming here, hanging around with their crooked ideas, talking about emancipating this and emancipating that, until she got to be crooked herself, then upped and left one day.”

  Aziz sounded jolly but what he said always left Parviz feeling blamed for the couple’s breakup. He did not think Aziz’s divorce was anyone’s doing but his own, but he did blame Noori and himself for the two bullets Aziz had taken. After all, Aziz would never have been in the company of the likes of the Doctor if it were not for them. Their friendship had exposed Aziz to danger and caused his wounds. The least Parviz could do to lessen his own guilt was to visit Aziz at the hospital.

  The police, too, came to visit Aziz. Parviz would often arrive as a detect
ive was leaving. The ongoing interrogation evoked even more pity in the visitor, who thought the patient was too frail for questioning. Aziz seemed to have aged years in only a few weeks. Seeing him, Parviz choked back tears and tried his best to appear cheerful. Aziz only moaned.

  “What can I do, Aziz jaan?” Parviz would say in Persian.

  There was always a fresh glass of water to fetch, sheets to untangle, nurses to instruct, inconsiderate visitors to manage or send away. It seemed to Parviz that most visitors came to pry, to satisfy their own curiosity rather than to tend to the patient. One couple had especially exasperated Aziz—grocery store owners who had supplied goods to Mykonos. They came one afternoon. The husband talked without pause, shaking his head, reminiscing, retracing his conversation with Aziz before that terrible night.

  “How destiny steers us all, Aziz jaan. Your voice is still in my ear, ‘Come help me on Thursday night, I’ve got guests coming.’ How you begged me. But Thursdays are my busiest days. Shipments coming in, deliveries to do. There was no way I could help out. How awful I felt turning you down. Or else I’d have been right there with you.”

  Aziz grumbled that all he had ever spoken of was Friday.

  The visitor pressed on, saying, “Believe me, you did. As God is my witness, you did. The Tuesday before, you said, ‘Come and help me on Thursday night.’ Destiny! How a man can escape anything but destiny.”

  Aziz shook his head vehemently.

  The earnest husband turned to his wife. “Remember, hon? Didn’t he ask me to come in on Thursday?”

  The tearful wife nodded in assent.

  It fell to Parviz to protect his bedridden friend from the needling of visitors. He interrupted and steered the conversation in a different direction.

  “Did you know Noori’s parents have come from Iran?”

  “They are here, those two?” asked the visitor. “Ay! No parent should ever see the day. Oh, cruel destiny!”

  Aziz cast a grateful look at Parviz and collapsed into his pillow.

  8

  The man who translated the Satanic Verses into Arabic was kidnapped. His captors told him that the Ayatollah would spare him only if he’d undo his sin by translating the book back into English. Today, some scholars argue that the retranslated version is a major improvement on Rushdie’s original.

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  Day after day, Bruno Jost pored over the transcripts from the interrogation of the detainees. Two of the suspects, Rhayel and Darabi, had kept a stoic silence. But Yousef had spoken at length. Jost would lay the pages side by side to piece together the passages he had highlighted throughout, tracing the obvious lies, unconvincing denials, and repeated contradictions, hoping they might lead to the secret the prisoner was clearly keeping.

  Some lies were preposterously evident, based on preliminary intelligence he had received.

  –Do you belong to a political organization?

  –I was with the army for two years. Nothing else.

  –Do you have any relations with the Iranian government or its organizations?

  –No. I’m only a God-fearing Shiite. If I went to Iran, it was to visit holy sites.

  Some lies that were less evident became more so by the denials.

  –Mr. Amin, tell us about Abbas Rhayel?

  –I don’t know anyone by that name.

  Abbas Rhayel and Yousef Amin had been an inseparable pair since 1989, when they first entered Germany through the Hungarian border and applied for asylum and other benefits in both Switzerland and Germany.

  –You don’t know Abbas Rhayel?

  –No! Never heard the name.

  –The man who was sleeping in your apartment when you were arrested?

  –Oh, him! I call him Emad Amash.

  Emad Amash was the first in a string of pseudonyms Jost had to master while dealing with the prisoners, who assumed new identities as naturally as they changed wardrobe for a new season.

  –How long have you known him?

  –Not long at all. We met in Berlin just a little while back.

  –Could you please take a look at this passport and tell us why this picture of the man you call Amash is tucked into someone else’s passport?

  This was the false passport the police had found in the Amin apartment, the one in which Rhayel’s photo was to be pasted.

  Yousef denied having seen it.

  –In that case, can you tell us why your picture and birth certificate were in the folds of Mr. Amash’s passport?

  –Were they?

  –We have information that you took these photos to forge them in a passport.

  –Your information is no good. I took these photos for my driver’s license and took one extra for a friend in Canada who wants a picture of me for his album.

  Lies were nothing new to the seasoned prosecutor. But Yousef’s lies were a promising sign—a sign of his reluctance to be detached. If he bothered to lie, it meant that he, unlike his teammates, cared enough to engage them. Jost always preferred a speaking prisoner, even if lying, to a stoically silent one.

  –Mr. Amin, where were you on September 17?

  –I was in Rhine. I was in Berlin a week earlier for a bit, taking care of some immigration business. When I came to Rhine it was, I don’t remember, either the eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth.

  –Who can testify that you were in Rhine on September 17?

  –You can ask my wife, her sister, and my brother. They’ll tell you I was in Rhine. My brother was in the hospital that day, where I visited him. He was in a bicycle accident two or three days after I came home.

  –So you were in Rhine on September 17?

  –Then again, the accident could have happened on the seventeenth, and I heard the news of it in Berlin.

  –So you were in Berlin on the seventeenth?

  –Like I said, I had some immigration business in Berlin, went there, and came back right away. A woman cabdriver drove me home to Heriburg 17. She had a red Volkswagen Passat. I was definitely in Rhine that day.

  He was always exact with inconsequential details, hoping they might divert his interrogators’ attention.

  –But Mr. Amin, your brother told us that you visited him one day after he had been released from the hospital, on September 19, one day after you had arrived in Rhine.

  But Yousef’s lies ended if they seemed to contradict his wife, brother, and other family members.

  –Oh? Then whatever my brother says is correct.

  Finally when asked about the considerable cash in his wallet he realized he needed help.

  –My wife has been saving it for the family. But I’d really like to speak to a lawyer now.

  At the end of one such session, Yousef was shown the full text of his testimony to review. His translator pointed to the dotted line where Yousef was to sign. Talking, it seemed, came more easily to Yousef than did printing his own name beneath the statements. He paused, flipped through the document many times, then asked his translator to write on his behalf:

  I am told that it is obvious I am not telling the truth. I must think all this over. I have nothing to add for now.

  It was clear to Jost that Yousef was tormented. But it was his partner on the case, a senior federal criminal commissioner named Tony von Trek, who discovered why. Von Trek sat beside Jost during the interrogations and also escorted the prisoner to and from each session. At times, von Trek, playing the part of a tough cop whose main thrill was locking men up, would gather more in the trip between the prisoner’s cell and the interrogation room than they would in hours of questioning. (Others would have bragged about such tactful acts but von Trek was beyond boasting, especially with Jost, whom he considered a dear friend.) On the return trip to prison one day, without being prompted, Yousef had begun talking about his impending fatherhood and his wish to witness his son’s birth in November. Appearing unimpressed, the commissioner enumerated the obstacles standing in the way of that wish, unless some evidence to clear him were to
miraculously surface. Yousef had listened and said nothing. When they reached prison, the commissioner gave his card to Yousef and said that if he ever wanted to tell the truth all he had to do was call. He left Yousef with this parting thought, “The miracle is for you to make happen.”

  In his cell, Yousef Amin began scribbling on the back pages of the prison manual chained to the wall of his cell, #404 B.

  M . . . F?

  N?

  L?

  K F A N Y?

  M H?

  F A N Y?

  N F Y . . .

  The meaning of love . . .

  Yousef Darayi

  He scribbled, and he prayed. But prayer could hardly fill the hours in solitary confinement. The manual had become his journal. He wrote cryptically, in codes and anagrams—a few letters here, a name slightly twisted there, a phrase or sentence—each a glimpse into his foreboding about his slipping resolve. Rhagheb . . . Darayi . . . Oh, you, Rhagheb. I am Yousef Amin. Speak not! . . . Silence, silence.

  • • •

  Yousef was afraid to print the names of his accomplices. Rhayel was an old friend, and Darabi was the patron who had given him a job. Yousef was neither rich nor powerful, but his association with Darabi was his claim to fortune. He boasted of their association using the many photographs he staged alongside Darabi. In one, he directed Rhayel, dressed in a black leather jacket and denim trousers, to stand in profile against shelves full of fruit inside Darabi’s grocery. With the plump features of a child, Rhayel shyly fixed his gaze on the crate of onions he was emptying into a trash bag. The bag was held by Darabi, who peered into it with pride. In another photo, the three of them, all bearded, appeared side by side. The burly Yousef, bundled in a sweater and winter jacket, grinned mischievously, his head tilted to the right where the much shorter, balding, and smiling store owner stood, flanked by Rhayel, who towered over them both.