Misdemeanor Trials

by Milton Schacter

  Raintree said, “People here don't pay any attention to the number of people going to Evin prison, mainly because you hear about it almost every day. There are more bodies in the trunks of cars in Tehran heading to Evin prison than anyone wants to admit, and while I am driving I try to figure out which cars are carrying bodies. Anyway, I spoke with Avi this morning. Everyone got out safely and the operation went as planned. Newspapers here are just like at home. There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth. You can't believe a word they say.”

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  IN PARTS

  “Big girls don't cry”- The Four Seasons

  Raintree and John returned after evening prayers and found Farah sitting on the sofa reading a romantic novel printed in English. Raintree excused himself and left without saying where he was going or when he would be back. John had learned to expect that from Raintree and Mac. Mac was more of a shadow presence than Raintree, but they both had something else going on all the time. Raintree was mostly driving his cab. Raintree and Mac never said where they were going. John never asked. Farah looked up at John and said, “John, let's go get a drink. I have to get out of here once and a while. Mac goes with me sometimes, but he has been busy lately.” Farah had a voice like bourbon with a splash of lime and ginger ale, both intoxicating and sweet.”

  “Sure,” said John.

  “It's not a good idea for a lady to go out at night without a male escort. We'll take the tram, so don't speak English while we travel. Once we get there, you can speak any language you want. It's moderately wide open.” She left a note for the urchin who lived there and retrieved her knee-length coat. Farah paid the trolley fare. John noticed that there was a sign on the trolley that showed a price increase from the last time he took the trolley. It was getting dark when they arrived in a place Farah said was the Super Jordan Market where they could get a drink. The narrow street was blocked with traffic. He saw BMW's, Mercedes and other sports cars inching along. They walked a short distance to a garish building where bare chested men in leather vests were standing outside, obviously standing as filters for the proper clientele to enter. Inside the building was a relatively small bar with tables populated by well-dressed western looking people, none over forty. The music was beat music, high volume, but not loud. Farah took off her roo-poosh and let her hair fall on her shoulders. She asked what John wanted to drink.

  “What are you having?” he responded.

  “I'm having a Kettle One on the rocks.”

  “I'll have the same,” said John.

  After the waiter took their drink order, Farah looked around the room and said, “I hate this place.”

  “We could go to another place, if there is one,” said John.

  “No, I mean I hate Tehran and the whole country,” said Farah.

  “I thought you were from this country,” said John.

  “I was born here. It was a long time ago, and maybe I just don't remember much or maybe I came from a small town where things were different.”

  “How is it different now?” asked John.

  “It is so full of hate now. The people who live here are thieves, the men are boorish, women are treated like animals, and you have to come to an underground bar to get a decent drink. If you have a drink you are frowned upon, but in the hills they grow poppies for heroin. It is just crazy. When I was a child my family lived in a small godforsaken town in the east of Iran. It didn't seem to me to be as bad as it is now. I liked my home and my family. I liked to go to school and had lots of friends. It was a good life for me and my sister. I guess I didn't know about all the conflict and turmoil of Iran. My father taught in a small university, mainly because the larger university would not hire a Jew. We lived in a small house and the electricity worked some of the time. It was very dark at night when there was no moon. When I was a child I would go up on the roof and watch the stars. It was peaceful. I would see a shooting star, sometimes several, coming from different directions, like flaming bullets across the sky. They must have come from millions of miles away, and maybe they had been traveling for millions of years from all different parts of the universe until they came too close to this small planet, and then in a millisecond would burn up in a beautiful bright flash. I wondered on those quiet nights if there was anyone else in the whole world who saw that same shooting star as I did. I don't think so. I don't know and never would. Probably something that is not even knowable.”

  The drinks arrived. John looked at Farah, raised his glass a bit, and said, “To your health.”

  “I don't know why I am telling you all of this,” Farah said.

  He paused, reluctant to get out in front of Farah or appear to be prying. John said, “My mother would go to the supermarket and stand in line. People in the checkout line who were complete strangers would just start talking to her, telling her things about themselves that seemed oddly personal. They would just go on, and my mother would listen, and then we would leave after buying our groceries. I thought it was normal because it happened frequently. I grew up with it. But I learned later that she was just the kind of person people wanted to talk to. I have no idea why. When I figured it out that she was a living, breathing sounding board, I would answer the phone for her, and, if it were a friend or relative, I would yell to her and say something like, 'Mom, your sister wants to talk to you. Do you want to meet her in the supermarket line?' I thought it was funny, but maybe I have some of that in my DNA.”

  “Are your parents still well?” asked Farah.

  “No,” answered John. “My mother and father are both gone. My mother was special in my eyes, maybe even a little dopey. Both my parents seemed to really like each other and laughed together a lot. Both of them had a great sense of humor. One time at dinner when we were kids he told the story of a time my mother and father, before they were married, went to an Indian casino, parked in a free parking lot, gambled a bit, had dinner and returned. My dad said he would go get the car, and my mom said she would follow in a few minutes. My dad was sitting in the car, waiting, and he could see my mother come into the lot, walk towards some Indian fellow about 30 yards away with some dollars in her hands. The guy was backing away from my mom, like he was being attacked. She walked towards him as he backed away, with the money in her hand, trying to give it to him. He finally put his hands up, and walked away. When she got back to the car, she told my father that she was trying to tip the guy for watching the parking lot while they were in the casino, but the guy said, 'No thanks, ma'me, I am here just trying to look for my own car.' Mother and father both started to laugh in the car. That night at the dinner table they began to laugh again. We kids laughed too. I was drinking a glass of milk when my dad told the story. When everyone started to laugh, the milk never got swallowed. They told us that story several times during the next twenty years. They laughed every time.”

  “How did your dad die?” asked Sarah.

  “He had been a smoker most of his life. He got lung cancer, and after a short time in Hospice care, he died. My mother was sitting next to him as she always did at home as he was dying. Everyone knew the end was coming and my mom and dad would sit and talk. Mostly my mother would talk because my father didn't have the energy. She told him she remembered the time at the Indian casino where she tried to tip the guy. My dad started a smile and then a weak laugh, which was interrupted by a weak and persistent cough. A trickle of blood came out of the corner of his mouth, and then he just died.

  “At the funeral my mother delivered a short eulogy. She told our family and his friends how she was sitting with him when he died, and how he laughed a little before he died. Then she said, with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face, that she was very happy that he died laughing. I swear, the entire church was crying. He was a good guy. I miss him.”

  John asked, “How long have you been here?”

  “A couple of years, but I am leaving soon.” Farah replied. “I have been good at it. Hey, I'm alive and that is a certain indicator of
success. But one of my assignments before I came to Tehran ended up very badly. After that I wanted out, but I felt a responsibility to stay in the business, just like Mac and Raintree. I thought a simple presence in Tehran might be a little less intense. I'm an American, I love my country and I have to do what I can to protect it as well as what I can do to protect Israel. But this place is a dark spot in the world and I just want no more of it. Their religion is hate for everyone. It is a poison they drink, thinking it will kill their enemy. Their soul is primitive and inadequately developed. No civilization can continually condone barbarism and expect to remain civilized. And they haven't remained civilized. Maybe they never were.”

  “I get it,” said John. “I don't want to be here at all, but I was in the Military and they have control over me, probably until I die. Unfortunately, with their help, it may be sooner than later. I'm probably not as motivated to be in this business as you were, or are. I just want to go home and prosecute criminals. I don't do cloak and dagger.”

  Farah continued. “I am fortunate that I can go home, and that I have a place where I can go to escape the hate here. People wonder why the Jews were compliant with the oppression of Germany during World War II. Germany was their home. They had nowhere else to go. I do.”

  The conversation paused. John did not know how to react to the outpouring of a woman caught in the middle of a world and its many players and its many conflicts.

  “So you're a lawyer?” she asked.

  “Yeh. Haven't been at it too long. I just get started on a case or an assignment and some guy named Bob calls me from D.C. and wants me to report right away. If I don't, they threaten me with activation and a desk job in some military base in Nome, Alaska. Not really, but that kind explains their attitude. I thought I was the leading man in my own life, but it seems I'm just in a supporting role,” said John.

  “I understand that kind of pressure,” said Farah. “I graduated from college in International Relations. I planned to join the Foreign Service, become a diplomat, and save the world, but before I could even apply to the Foreign Service, I was approached by a guy who called himself Avraham. They had been tracking me for a long time. I was a Jew, I lived in Israel for a while, I was a woman, I spoke perfect Farsi, I spoke Arabic, I was American, and I had been educated in International Relations. More importantly, I was young, naive and full of energy. They recruited me. I spent a year in training outside of Tel Aviv. I love that country. After that, I spent a long time deep in the terrorist networks, and I mean networks. It is the one binding thing all of the Arabs, Persians, Sunnis, and Shias have in common, simple terrorism, and a hatred of Jews. But they thought I was one of them, a focused terrorist, and I suppose I was for a long time because I had to be. One night things ended badly. I went to a house where terror business and preparation and planning were done. When I got there three of my fellow terrorists had what they called a Jew spy. When I got to the room, he was tied in a chair, his head hung over and his face was cut and bleeding.” Farah paused for a moment looking in her mind for the memory of that moment.

  “He was alive, but barely. I knew who he was. We had trained together in Tel Aviv. He was a close, and very personal friend. I loved him. His name was Uri. They asked me what they should do with him and I said, 'Kill the Jew pig,' because I knew that would happen to him no matter what. One of the shitheads raised a gun and shot him in the head. I died a little that night, right then and there in that moment. Since then the sun has not been so bright.” She paused for a moment. “Just because a friend dies, does not mean they go away. He has not gone away. He may not have remembered the times at the door he let me go first, or the times in training that he dropped back to tell me it wasn't far to go. Or the time he waited at the crossroads for me to catch up. He might not remember, but I do, but this last time, even though it was my solemn pledge to him, we would not go home together. After that I begged off from the deep undercover. If I were caught I don't think I would mind dying, but I could not stand the torture. So I was loaned to the Americans, with the provision that there would be no violence. I accepted because I had to do something. I really despise these cowards.”

  “Anything happen to the guys that killed your friend,” asked John.

  “I arranged for them to die,” she replied. “I told my colleagues that I wanted them to perish in a way, that when they spent eternity in hell, the one thing they would never forget is how they died.”

  “How did they die?”

  “In parts.”

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  THE BETRAYED

  “When one calls death, he always answers.”

  --Zalesky

  Eris Bahar climbed the steps into the bus outside his home in suburban Tehran on Monday morning for another 30 mile trip to work at the Hemmatt Industrial Complex. He greeted his fellow workers and took his usual seat in the middle of the bus. He had read about the killing of Dr. Abassi-Davani, and he wondered how it would set back the program he was working on. The bus lumbered through the city and picked up a few more of his friends and fellow scientists before setting out on the highway. He would spend the next five days in the facility at Hemmatt, spending twelve hour days away from his family and his home. He had been allowed to live off site of the scientific and production complex. Thousands of other workers lived there in tall high rise apartments. He was privileged. He had made significant contributions to the project, and was the lead scientist in a group that had developed a simple Go-onto-Location-in-Space guidance system. His system was not as complex as the west had, but it was able to use Global Navigation Satellite Systems atop the North Korean Do Nong Missile. It was a guidance system that was a “launch and forget” system to a specific preloaded target. There was no sophisticated tracking ability for the missile after launch, and its success would be determined by reading what happened in the morning paper, or seeing the destruction of his country by retaliation from the target nation. He had been performing this same work routine for twelve years. He was necessary for the development of defense systems for the country he had been born to. His family ties went back centuries when Iran was Persia. He had been rewarded for his work and lived in a pleasant home. He had a car and his children went to private schools. His wife was a successful and active lawyer, constantly in court defending farmers in water distribution issues. She constantly fought in court, and her legal complaints centered around the fact that Tehran had hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of water, enough for all the needs of Tehran and a large part of the country. But the government was diverting from the farmers for other reasons. Without water, the farms would dry up, food would not be available, and the population would suffer further. Already food prices had increased forty per cent in the last year because of the food shortages. Transportation costs were exploding, and the decreasing number of farms in Iran contributed to the rampant inflation. Although Eris thought water distribution rights were important, and he would listen to his wife's stories every weekend about her struggles in court, he was quietly bored by the whole thing. But Eris had another gnawing crisis that caused him to be irritable. He was less patient with his wife and children, and he had lost weight over the last few months while he considered his dilemma.

  He always had some feelings of distrust in his country's leadership. His mistrust had developed to the point now that he had personal deep and growing hesitations in helping to build a missile that would kill thousands of people, and would certainly bring death and annihilation to his own country, especially since the inauguration day bombing. He thought his government was losing its grip on reality. The group of scientists he was working with was moving closer to a missile guidance protocol that would change the ballistic missile to an independently guided, long range missile. It was capable of carrying a nuclear bomb, which he had heard was ready for installation. He had been given specifics about the weight, dimensions and electrical properties of the warhead. He contemplated that the change would require some further development of the g
uidance system. The pressure to complete his team’s project had increased significantly over the last few months. His own team was near completion and he felt the final purpose of his work was in the near term future, and he was afraid.

  Eris knew it was important that he tell someone, or anyone who could change things before there was a holocaust in his country. He wanted to contact someone in the United States, or any country that could make things different. He had no relatives, friends or contacts outside of Iran. He considered many different ways that he could contact someone outside of Iran that might have influence or listen to him, but they presented risk to himself and his family if he were detected. If he used any method to contact someone outside of Iran, it was possible that several people might see, or read, or hear, and then talk about it too much. A leak would develop, and he would be found out. He would be killed. He was afraid. He thought deeply about how to make contact without dangerously exposing his family or himself.

  CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

  THE POTION