“I can’t convince you of the outcome I don’t myself know. But our judiciary is one of the best in the world.”
“For your own, yes. But not for foreigners like us. Fallahian has already struck a deal. It’s just a matter of time before they call this whole thing off.”
“Still, if you bother to come every day, there must be a tiny flicker of hope somewhere inside you . . .” Ehrig said playfully.
“Hope has nothing to do with it. It’s about duty. Someone has to bear witness,” Hamid said.
“Ah . . . but hope has got everything to do with it, or else you’d be in a museum looking at relics. When you bother to watch the living as ardently as you do, it’s hope driving you to it.”
Hamid shook his head and smiled. Ehrig, realizing the argument could not be settled, moved on.
“No matter! This is something only time can tell. For now, there’s a lot I don’t know about this case, and that gets in the way of my job. Will you help fill me in?”
From that day on, Hamid’s bowl of Jell-O was always served with an extra spoon—the second for his newfound lunch companion.
15
From: Minister of Islamic Guidance
To: Employees
Since autographing is an ungodly act from the deposed Shah’s era, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice hereby orders revolutionary sisters and brothers to refrain from signing and, instead, use the Islamic method of fingerprinting. Note: Respected sisters must wrap their index finger in the corner of their veils, so that the direct imprint of their fingertip should not arouse the God-fearing brothers. (fingerprinted: Minister of Islamic Guidance)
—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist
“The court calls Mr. Aziz Ghaffari to the witness stand,” announced Judge Kubsch on the morning of January 16, 1994.
Aziz entered the courtroom dressed in a knee-length sheepskin coat. The news of his upcoming testimony had been circulating for days, and the expatriates had flocked to the court to hear him. The benches were filled to capacity again and many more had been turned away. Hamid had arrived earlier than usual to shepherd first-time visitors through surveillance at the entrance and ensure that they made a good impression. In court, he told them, the exiles represented the dead: the more civilly they behaved, the more sympathy the dead inspired.
Whatever the case’s legal title, on that day it was the case of “Exiles versus the Restaurant Owner.” They were mostly old friends of Aziz who had come hoping to see him redeem himself so they could be at peace with the memories of the company they had once kept at Mykonos. Perhaps the rumors of his betrayal were unfounded. That was what they told themselves as they shuffled to their seats. Aziz had been one of their own and they wished to believe in their own collective innocence.
A great gasp came from the audience as Aziz passed them. He had not come alone. There was an attorney at his side—yet another sign of his guilt. Shohreh, pen and paper in hand, glared at him. Aziz kept his eyes on the judges, avoiding everyone else. His gait had been restored and he walked his old carefree walk. The room was unusually quiet, except for the muffled sound of the men’s steps on the padded floor. Silence was always Yousef’s cue. Spotting Parviz among the audience after many weeks he crowed at the feisty survivor who had come through the shootings unscathed.
“Oh, look! Rambo’s here!”
On the stand, when Aziz was asked whether he wished to testify in German or in Persian, he cast a quick glance at the audience and chose Persian. He knew who his real judges were.
The questioning began. No, he had not been able to identify the attackers in the police lineup. No, he could not recall how the attackers were dressed that night. His chef missing? He paused, squinting, as if straining to remember, but alas, no, he could not. Had he asked anyone to help him cook? No one at all. But a fellow exile claimed he had asked long in advance to help him serve the party on Thursday evening. (That fellow exile and his wife, who had visited Aziz in the hospital, were in the audience, fuming.) He, and everyone else for that matter, could say what they liked. He knew what he knew. Noori had told him Friday night from the start.
“You realize you’re a suspect here?” Judge Kubsch asked Aziz.
Aziz nodded and said, without flinching, “Yes, I know.”
The judge pressed.
“Can you tell us why you might be a suspect?”
“Well, you should ask this from folks who think me a suspect why,” was Aziz’s cool rejoinder.
The arrogant response drew another gasp from the audience.
“Well, what reasons did the police offer you for their suspicion? You must have been curious to know,” Judge Kubsch said with his usual paternal equanimity. “For instance, you had a sizable stash of cash in a plastic bag in your basement, some five thousand marks—”
“Six thousand,” Aziz corrected his inquisitor.
“So I must ask this question, though if you’re afraid you might somehow be incriminating yourself, you can refuse to answer it. Where did this money come from?”
“I already gave this information to the police when I was in the hospital and they promised to keep it to themselves,” he said what seemed to have been rehearsed.
“Did the police tell you they suspected the cash might be your payment for the intelligence you provided the killers?”
“Yes,” he said sharply.
“What did you say?”
“It upset me. They could tell that it did.”
“One of the defendants here in this courtroom told the police that he heard one of his teammates say a few days before the assassination, ‘When it’s all over and done with, he’ll sell the place.’ The assumption is that the ‘he’ in that sentence was a reference to you. What do you know about this statement?”
“I’ve heard that Yousef Amin has said this to the police, but it beats me. I’d wanted to sell the place for a long time.”
Hearing his own name, Yousef placed his hand on his chest, bowed, and hollered, “You must give the court the facts. Facts, I tell you!”
There were only a few laughs for everyone was too focused on Aziz to pay Yousef much attention. Other questions poured in.
“Have you heard the name Nejati?”
“Yes.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Nothing at all,” Aziz answered.
“Okay. Let’s leave the subject. Take a look at the defendants, please. Does anyone look familiar to you?”
A few sarcastic sounds rose from the audience:
“Get up!” “Take a good look!” “See a friend?”
“Yes, I know the man to the right, Kazem Darabi,” Aziz said, after looking to his left and right to examine the two cages a few times.
“Where did you meet him?”
“At his booth during the Green Week. I and a few others took him on, argued with him.”
“Do you know what line of work he’s in?”
“No. I never knew him, not even his name.”
A few in the audience laughed.
“Well, there’s someone here who says Mr. Darabi delivered vegetables and groceries to your store.”
“People say what they say. I say what I say,” Aziz said nonchalantly.
Shohreh wrote and wrote without lifting her head from her notepad. Parviz’s face was flushed, and Hamid kept his eyes on his lap all the while Aziz spoke.
“You bought the restaurant in the early weeks of 1991, but then put an ad in the paper that very summer to sell it. Why?”
“Personal problems.”
“You had problems in June that disappeared by August, at which point you decided not to sell the place?”
“I’d come into some money that made it possible to keep going.”
“How did you come into this money?”
“I can’t say. But,” Aziz turned to the audience, “you all know very well how I came to this money. It wasn’t clean money but it was not blood money, either.”
Aziz’s attorney asked to confer with his client, and the two left the room for several minutes. The audience felt divided. Most were appalled by Aziz’s calculated performance. A few, still doubtful, thought he might have got the cash through the illegal currency exchange that was rampant in the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The hubbub had yet to die down when Aziz and his attorney returned and asked to talk privately with Judge Kubsch, who disappeared into his chambers with them. When they returned, the judge announced that he had heard a satisfactory explanation about the source of the cash. The subject was closed.
The questions began again.
“After you placed the ad to sell the restaurant, did any buyers come to see it?”
“A group of Lebanese buyers looked at the restaurant very closely. I said that to the police already.”
“Lebanese you said, right? Do you have any reason to suspect that these groups had ulterior motives for looking at the property?”
“They kept coming and going, inspecting the place high and low. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but, looking back, well, it may not have been so innocent. Who knows, maybe they were checking the place out.”
The audience, aghast at the discovery, stirred again.
“You said that throughout the night of September 17th, you went out of the restaurant every once in a while for air.”
“If that’s what I said to the police, then that’s what I did.”
“You said the last time you went out for air was about half an hour before the shooting.”
“Then that’s what I must have done. I don’t remember anything now.”
“Did you go out for air ten minutes before the shooting?”
“Doesn’t seem logical. No, I didn’t.”
“After the guests arrived, did you ever leave the restaurant?”
“How could I? It was where I lived and worked. Where would I go?”
Tension rose with every exchange now. Parviz, seated in the front row, leaned over the parapet, listening even more intently.
“In other words, you did not stand in front of the restaurant, either?”
“I’d get out for air. That’s all.”
“You came out to get air half an hour before the shooting, you said before.”
“If I went out at all, which I doubt I did.”
“There’s a witness who saw you outside, looking distressed, minutes before the shooting.”
“Distressed? I can’t remember having run into a psychiatrist that night.”
“She says that from the time she spotted you outside till the time she heard the gunfire, it took only minutes.”
Judge Kubsch reminded the witness once again, “You don’t have to answer the question. But if you do, you must tell the truth.”
Aziz threw his shoulders up and continued in his cool manner. “Whoever this witness is, I’d like to meet her. Anyway, there are people here who were there that night. They know where I was. Why don’t you ask them?”
“Are you denying that you went out of the restaurant minutes before the shooting?”
“Yes.”
Judge Kubsch stopped the testimony.
“You may step down, Mr. Ghaffari, but your testimony is not over. I’d like you to hear the next witness before we continue.”
The judge had never before interrupted one witness to hear from another. He puzzled everyone when he announced, “The court calls Ms. Renata Kakir to the stand.”
Through Hall 700’s alternate entrance, a young woman entered. She was dressed in a white medical pantsuit, her work uniform, her auburn hair in a tight bun. A chiropractor, the witness had ridden her bicycle from the subway station to the courthouse that morning. On the night of September 17 she had also ridden from the subway station to her home. She lived on Prager Street, in a fourth-floor apartment that overlooked Aziz’s restaurant. Though she had never dined at Mykonos, she bought her cigarettes there and made the kind of small talk neighbors make. That night, like most weeknights, she had taken the ten o’clock train, reached her stop at ten-thirty, and some fifteen minutes had passed by the time she, lugging her bicycle, had emerged from the underground and peddled to her block. Aziz was nervously pacing up and down the sidewalk when she reached her door. The two greeted each other. Then she unlocked the door, pressed the call button, rode the elevator to her flat, and parked her bicycle on the balcony, beneath which she had seen shadows scurrying around. When she stepped into her living room, a deafening sound had boomed under her feet. It had been loud enough to make her wonder if the china shelf in the restaurant had buckled and all the dishes had crashed to the floor at once. She rushed to the balcony and peered at the sidewalk but saw nothing. Then the sirens had blared.
The next day, the police had taken her testimony. Together, they had walked the route, bicycle in tow, several times until they set the time of the killing at 10:48.
Judge Kubsch asked, “Your neighbor here denies having seen you that night.”
“I don’t know why he would. But I’m certain about the truth of what I’m telling you.”
“Thank you, Ms. Kakir. You may go.”
Aziz returned to the stand but remained resolute. He denied having seen her that night. It took three days of testimony until he was finally dismissed—the court deadlocked over his guilt or innocence.
In the weeks that followed, the witnesses for the accused took the stand like the troupe of a traveling circus. Some stunned the court with their freakish performance, others with the signs of genuine fear in their voices, upon their faces. The former listened to the questions, but answered as if they had heard nothing at all, making their own rehearsed statements instead.
“How do you know Mr. Darabi?”
“Mr. Darabi was always an avid student,” one defense witness answered.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know for sure, but he’s always studying.”
“Studying and running several businesses at the same time?”
“Human beings must always learn from birth to death, says the holy Koran.”
“Let’s focus on one human being here if you could, on Mr. Darabi. He let you live in his house, correct?”
“Never charged me a single coin. He’s a nice, nice man. A real Muslim. And he knows German. He helped me because my refugee salary is so small. This man here gives and gives.”
“He paid you?”
“Not for any work. He paid me out of the goodness of his heart.”
“Did you pay him back?”
The witness shook his head.
“Since you lived with him, did you ever see the other defendants who are here today?”
“I don’t know. But I tell you all the Lebanese people of Berlin know and like Mr. Darabi. He’s a good man.”
“I’m not asking you to judge Mr. Darabi. It’s obvious from your answers that you’re trying to hide something. Are you under pressure? Do you fear anything?”
“I fear only God.”
“Did Mr. Darabi ever speak about Salman Rushdie in the mosque?”
The witness shook his head once more.
“There was a demonstration against Salman Rushdie at the mosque. Was Mr. Darabi not there?”
By this time, the witness spoke less and less and gestured more. He threw his shoulders up.
“Yesterday you said that Mr. Darabi spoke at an anti–Salman Rushdie rally and today you can’t remember?”
Darabi interjected from his cage, “We’re all against Rushdie. That’s no secret.”
The court welcomed the comment from Darabi, who had kept silent on the stand.
“Did the defendant talk about the fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie at the mosque? That’s the question. But perhaps Mr. Darabi, whose memory is obviously vivid, can answer himself.”
In return, Darabi only said, “Later. I’ll speak later. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re gonna be here for a while. Another two more years at least.”
Like a pa
ndemic, amnesia seemed to afflict all the witnesses for the accused. When failing memory could not be blamed, the translators were. One week, a witness testified that he had been born and raised in the same Lebanese town as Yousef, had known Yousef all his life, and even traveled with him to Iran to receive combat training. A week later, he squinted at him from the stand as if straining to see, and said that his vision had failed him the week before and Yousef was not the man he thought he knew. When the judges pressed, the hysterical witness begged to be dismissed. “Please, please, don’t make me go there again.”
“Why? Are you afraid?” Judge Kubsch asked.
The witness only sobbed.
“Have you been threatened?”
He sobbed more intensely and pleaded once more, “If you don’t let me go, I may never see my family. I’ve been instructed to forget everything I know or else I might have a car accident. Believe me, the person who told me about the accident wasn’t reading tea leaves either.”
The start of the testimonies by the defense witnesses coincided with the appearance of a new face in the reporters’ section. The lanky newcomer looked German but sported the quintessential untrimmed beard of a devout Muslim. From the very first day, he took diligent notes. He looked familiar to Hamid, though he could not remember why. Leaving the court one afternoon, he spotted a witness whose testimony was to continue the next day, entering the reporter’s car. The view of the two men triggered in Hamid’s mind the memory of Darabi alongside the reporter. This was Oscar Brestrich, a convert to Islam, who had appeared on a televised debate defending the fatwa against Rushdie. He had quoted from the New Testament to prove that Christianity, like Islam, condoned the killing of apostates.
At lunch, instead of going to the canteen, Hamid slid into a phone booth to call the station that had broadcast the debate. He asked the operator to connect him to the producer Norbert Siegmund. From their seats in the courtroom, Hamid and Norbert had greeted each other often enough to have formed a friendship. Hamid asked for the transcripts of the debate which, by evening, Ehrig was reviewing.
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace Page 16