Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (11 page)

To help Sara and her mother cope with Noori’s absence, Shohreh’s parents briefly moved in with their daughter. Their presence strengthened Shohreh, though she could not tell them that it did. Words failed her. What she had in abundance was tears. Her parents stared at her over breakfast and waited in vain for her to form a sentence as simple as, “How did you sleep?”

Her senses failed her. She rarely felt hunger. She barely tasted the perfunctory bites she took in front of them to reassure them of her appetite. Her parents, a government clerk and a housewife, had led serene and predictable lives. It was the security of their life that had given Shohreh the courage to rebel against them—she could go off to Europe, knowing that no matter what happened, she could always go home, she would always have them. But she wondered: Would Sara not have been better off with a pair of ordinary parents that would have been around for her whole life, rather than a pair of extraordinary ones who would be there only for a short time? All day, she turned these thoughts over in her mind’s kiln, blazing with anger.

“To hell with his extraordinariness and every bit of his brilliance,” she would mumble.

Noori enraged her now.

Stick with me and you’ll be famous like you deserve to be
, she remembered him promising the night they first met.

Was his death to be her path to fame?
she shouted in her head. Once again, he had abandoned them. All through her pregnancy and delivery she had been alone, while he had been in Kurdistan hiding. Remembering their time apart, she grew even more furious wondering if it had been a warning to her to prepare to raise their child alone. Reason had abandoned her. She no longer thought of Noori’s absence as involuntary. He had left them, yet again. The thought came to her when she played their old family movies. She spent one night watching reams of film but found Noori only once, and only for a few seconds: walking with her along the racetrack where Sara had run her first competition. It was as if her husband had sketched their future. Everyone moved, posed, and smiled following Noori’s instructions, but he, their director, was invisible. His vision filled the screen, yet he would not be seen. Just like now. His multipocketed sports vest hung on the coat hanger. His Swiss Army knife lay on the mantelpiece. His bonsais withered on the windowsill. The wooden backgammon set he had carved, with the marble pieces he had chiseled, lay on the coffee table he had built. The stack of television guides in the magazine rack bore the highlights of his marker, which determined Sara’s weekly viewing allotment. When they finally turned in for the night, the beds they slept in had been built by him. In the morning, the jam they spread on their toast was labeled in his handwriting. He was everywhere, yet nowhere.

• • •

For Shohreh and Parviz, an occasional tea or dinner together was just as painful as it was vital. As they sat down to chat, Sara and Salomeh, old playmates, ran off to play. The girls talked of spells, potions, flying brooms, and their beloved storybook witch Bibi Blocksberg. They would dress up in green, and gather their dark hair in buns and tie it with a red ribbon in the witch’s style. They would put on an audio cassette of a Bibi Blocksberg adventure and act out the tale the best they could in the confines of the bedroom. Only Sara went further. If her mother was not watching, she dashed into the street shoeless with a broom in her hand. She dared to live the life she conjured, but Salomeh hesitated. Once, their lives had been similar enough to be interchangeable. But now loss had cast one child starkly distinguishable from the other.

Meanwhile, the parents talked about what consumed them. Who had spied on them that night was still a mystery. They had briefly suspected Mehdi, until the coroner had confirmed Mehdi’s devotion. The pattern and location of Noori’s wounds showed that at the moment of the shooting, he had been dragged away from the line of fire. Mehdi had done that. He was why Noori was still breathing when the ambulance had arrived. They considered the two others who had joined the dinner unexpectedly that night. But that, too, seemed baseless because they had only come to the table at the urging of Aziz. They even wondered about the dead Kurds, especially the quieter of the Doctor’s two deputies. Was the mole among the dead? They would argue
and empty one glass of tea after the next, but the mystery remained a mystery.

May was approaching without a word from the ministries. The chief federal prosecutor’s patience had reached its limit. When he inquired about the delay, he was told the drafts he had sent were lost.
Lost
flabbergasted him. He sent new copies of the indictment to the ministries and again waited. A few more days passed without a word. It was clear the delay was meant to stall the case long enough for it to fade from the public’s attention.

Since the release of the
Bild
article, accusations against the office of the chief federal prosecutor had mounted. The segment that Norbert and his colleague had been preparing aired on the national broadcast
Kontraste
. Its septuagenarian correspondent with his glowing bald head rimmed with a ring of white hair had begun the hour by promising to “break the silence” about the Mykonos case. The target of
Kontraste
’s criticism was the chief federal prosecutor.

The reports enraged von Stahl, whose conduct and integrity had come under attack. Together with Jost, they pondered their predicament. Given how long the perpetrators had been in custody, Jost thought of an ingenious justification for releasing the indictment to Berlin’s high criminal court and requesting a trial date: any further delay on the part of the chief federal prosecutor would be a breach of the prisoners’ rights. By law, they had to either announce a trial date or set the accused free.

Once more, von Stahl contacted the ministries, this time
with an ultimatum disguised as a legal mandate. Word still did not come. So on May 17, he signed the indictment and submitted it to the Kammergericht, Berlin’s highest court. Never had a stroke of his pen spawned so many enemies.

One month later, the court granted the chief federal prosecutor’s request for a trial. A date was to be announced shortly after Judge Frithjof Kubsch, the chief of division one overseeing national security cases, was appointed to lead the team of four other judges in the upcoming trial. The court had clearly acknowledged the significance of the case by assigning the highest number of judges to preside over it.

Bruno Jost flew to Berlin to meet with the judges and determine the schedule and protocol for the trial. They agreed the court would convene every Thursday and Friday of every week. There would be two other judges on reserve to cover the absence of any of the main judges and two teams of interpreters to assist the Arab- and Persian-speaking witnesses. The meeting was mostly spent reviewing the indictment, without a mention of its historic significance. It was the first time since World War II that a German court would consider the crimes of a foreign government. Jost came away confident of the judges’ regard for the quality of his work. None of them had questioned the validity of his premise. There and then, they established the cordial distance that would define the relationship between the prosecutor and the court, especially Judge Kubsch.

In Karlsruhe, at the headquarters of the chief federal prosecutor, a happy uproar swept through the staff at the prospect of the imminent trial. The triumph owed much to
the backbone of Alexander von Stahl. But by releasing the indictment, he had violated too many allegiances. Pressure from every corner was heaped on him. A minor shooting incident in a remote part of Germany was turned into a national scandal that dogged him until July, when the minister of justice asked for his resignation. Only two months after he had signed the indictment, Alexander von Stahl was forced to leave his post, ending his promising career in government.

Years later, in a calmer and more forgiving state, Norbert reflected on the events of spring 1993. From the distance of years, Parviz’s betrayal revealed a wisdom he had been too furious to recognize at the time, and the chief federal prosecutor, whom he and others had accused of standing in the way of the truth, proved to have been a captive of even greater powers. He wrote:

With the arrest of the two Lebanese accomplices in September 1992, and that of the Iranian coordinator of the assassinations, Kazem Darabi, in early October, the investigators should have put to rest all other suspicions about the PKK or rival opposition groups. Still, the federal prosecutor never issued any statements about Tehran having turned into the lead suspect and refused to release any information that so much as alluded to it. In fact, eight months later, when a wealth of other evidence clearly pointed to Iran, the spokesperson for the office of the chief federal prosecutor said in a radio interview, “I can only discuss facts and our findings, not fantasize.
We still believe the PKK or the opposition could have been behind this.” Until May 1993, the federal prosecutor had not officially taken a different position. But on May 11, 1993, as a result of a piece of misinformation planted in the journal
Bild
by a member of the Iranian opposition, the chief federal prosecutor finally came forward. That bit of misinformation, purposely designed to force the investigators’ hands, worked brilliantly. In a statement released that same day, after many months, the federal prosecutor finally spoke of the true origins of the weapons. A week later, he released the indictment. As it turned out, the federal prosecutor, too, had to break free of others who had been pressuring him all along. But at last, the long reign of silence ended.

12

When Ayatollah Khomeini was told that Salman Rushdie might undergo plastic surgery to change his appearance, he ordered, “Kill anyone who doesn’t look like Rushdie!”

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

The federal prosecutor brought his charge against Iran in May 1993. But the magazine
Die Focus
had made the same accusations in its inaugural issue the previous January. The chief federal prosecutor could not be sued, but the magazine was vulnerable. Iran’s embassy in Bonn sued
Die Focus
and its reporter Josef Hufelschulte, on charges of slander, for an estimated 500,000 DM. Though the lower court dismissed the case, the embassy appealed the decision. For a second time, the reporter appeared before the judge to defend his piece. Like all good reporters, he refused to reveal his source and agreed to present his evidence to the judge only in a closed session.

The evidence was the final summary of the work of the federal commission on Mykonos. Shortly after the federal prosecutor took over the case, the commission—a body made up of Parliamentarians and representatives from all the agencies involved in the investigation—was appointed to monitor Jost’s work and review his findings. It was a watch-dog group that was established early on to minimize the damaging fallout from a politically charged investigation. After several weeks, the Mykonos Commission concluded its work by issuing a summary, which was captured in a single line, “powerful figures within Iran’s regime ordered the assassinations at the Mykonos restaurant.”

Since the commission’s findings, like the indictment, had been kept from the public, one frustrated member had leaked a copy of it to Hufelschulte. That was what the reporter presented to the judge who, after reviewing it, told him to go home. Case dismissed!

The embassy did not relent. It insisted upon its innocence by extending an exclusive invitation to the reporter to spend a few hours with the ambassador and his staff in Bonn. The embassy also offered him a visa to visit Iran for himself, but Hufelschulte traveled only as far as Bonn. He had tea at the embassy, which was rumored to be the hub of Iran’s intelligence activities in Western Europe. The reception left him with an even greater distaste for the officials he had so scathingly accused. Prior to the lawsuits and the encounter in Bonn, Hufelschulte was only intrigued by the Mykonos case. Afterward, his interest became a devotion, one that would inevitably lead to Parviz.

Hufelschulte paid Parviz a visit, hoping he might have photos or other material suited for print.

“How much for a photo, assuming it’s an exclusive?” the reporter asked after settling onto the love seat in Parviz’s office—which seemed shrunken beneath his tall, broad frame.

“I’m not a businessman, you know. It’s not money I’m after. I want information,” Parviz said in an unusually forward manner.

The reporter paused for a few moments to review all he had to offer, then said, “There was a mole in the restaurant that night. You know that, don’t you?”

Parviz nodded, his heart racing at the mention of the word.

“I’ve got something on that. Is it worth an unpublished photo to you?” the reporter asked casually.

Trying to match the other’s coolness, Parviz said that the information, if reliable, was worth a lot more than a photo. Hufelschulte said that his source had served on the federal commission on Mykonos, which impressed Parviz. One of the commission’s key findings, he explained, a time line drawn from the confessions of one of the prisoners, pointed to the presence of a spy inside the restaurant.

9 p.m.—the telephone at the team’s apartment rings once, followed by another single ring seconds later, signaling the operation’s launch.

9:30—the killers arrive but do not strike, certain that their man inside would keep the victims in place for as long as it took—until 10:45.

Hearing Hufelschulte review those events quickened Parviz’s blood. His eyes fixed on the reporter’s broad face with thick, sharply arched eyebrows—as the moments preceding the killers’ entrance passed through his mind. The smell of greasy meat wafting from the table to mix with the cigarette smoke in the air; the smoothness of the glass in one hand, the starched lining of his pants pocket enveloping the other hand; the flickering candles dotting the twilight about them; the sounds of fading conversation; then, seconds later, awakening to another sensory landscape, the sounds of groans and dripping liquid, the coarse carpet pressing against his cheek, the smell of a different smoke rising. These moments that bracketed the deaths—always ready to be summoned—were deathless in his imagination.

The reporter went on.

“. . . and when the time finally came, the mole signals the killers to enter.”

“No! No one signaled anybody. We were sitting there, talking the whole time. No one moved from the table. You’re wrong,” Parviz protested.

“One person must have been moving about that night.”

“No one! Whatever you’ve been told, I’m telling you, is wrong. I see it now. I’m sitting there. We’re all at the table, the whole time.”

“All of you?” the reporter probed. “What about your server, the restaurant owner?”

“What?
Him
?” Parviz exclaimed, pushing his hand into the air in dismissal. “Please! Don’t you know he was shot? The wretch has suffered more than all the rest of us.”

“But he’s the one the police suspects.”

Parviz tipped back in his chair, suddenly silent. Hufelschulte, reading the shock on Parviz’s face, asked if he needed fresh air. But Parviz did not hear him. He was elsewhere—at the dinner table on that September night. The question echoing in his head, over and over, was the last question he had heard that evening. An image he had since suppressed flooded his mind—of Aziz, not sitting beside them but leaning against the edge of the adjacent table, half standing, pointing to the Doctor, as if to point him out, saying, as if not to ask but to announce him,
Would the Doctor like any more beer?

Aziz had hardly finished his question when the shooting had begun.

Once Parviz regained his composure, the reporter gave a few more details, including the discrepancies in Aziz’s testimony to the police. Aziz claimed to have been inside the restaurant all along, but a witness had seen him pacing the sidewalk minutes before the killers walked in.

“Ah! But who’s that witness? An enemy of Aziz’s could be making the accusation. You know, we Iranians can be terribly cruel to each other,” Parviz said in Aziz’s defense as if in defense of his own unraveling confidence. “No, it’s a German, a neighbor, with nothing at stake in this.”

That night, Parviz crawled into bed but knew he would not sleep. He would spend another night in the embrace of his most steadfast companion—insomnia. There could be no rest for a man in whom so much had been stirred. Everything he had dismissed as negligible gaffes of a simpleton
now needed pondering. Aziz had not looked Shohreh in the eye when she had gone to visit him. He was agitated when his visitors recounted their version of events that afternoon in the hospital. He thought back to his own confusion about the date of the gathering. First had come Aziz’s message on the answering machine inviting him to the restaurant on Friday night, then the call from Noori on Thursday evening. If Aziz were the mole, had he tried to change the date of the dinner to keep the scene small and manageable for the killers? Mykonos had never been a bustling restaurant, but it had been quieter than usual that evening. The chef had been ill, and he remembered Aziz shaking his head in regret as he turned customers away. Had the chef really been ill?

Aziz as the mole! The idea withered him through the night. What gnawed at him was not his own betrayal by Aziz, but Noori’s. Did Aziz blame his divorce on the liberating influence of Noori?
This is my
mola, Aziz’s voice echoed in his ear. The image of him wrapping his arms around Noori kept playing in his mind. Aziz pressed Noori in his embrace with such ardor it was as if Noori was venerable, a totem he prayed to. He seemed so dedicated to Noori that Parviz—who found much intolerable in Aziz (especially the stench of alcohol on his breath)—did not confront Noori about his friendship with the restaurant owner whom they had dubbed “the buffoon.”

And why had none of them ever wondered how a penniless refugee could purchase a property as lucrative as a restaurant exactly one year before the murders? Parviz thought and seethed. Had the mole betrayed his
mola
? All through
the night the tides of revelation lapped against his memory.
Who was the buffoon now?

There were fewer bouquets and fewer mourners in Berlin’s central cemetery. A year had passed. Shohreh, still in black, made her way to Noori’s grave, flanked by Parviz and Mehdi. Sara had been sent to school. It was a quieter occasion, but no less somber. Raw grief had lifted. The solemnity that settled in its place was no less affecting in the eyes of the reporters who congregated in a corner and rolled their tapes.

Standing at the plot, Shohreh suddenly spotted an unsettling presence in the distance. Her heart sank in her chest. She turned to Parviz and whispered, “He’s coming this way.”

“Who?” Parviz asked, and looked in the direction where Shohreh’s eyes had been fixed. Aziz was approaching.

“The traitor! The bastard! Let him come. I’ll shred him to pieces with tooth and nail,” the inflamed widow hissed.

“You can do no such thing. Keep it together. Let me handle it,” Parviz counseled her.

Aziz circled the crowd to take his place next to Shohreh. The murmurs died down. The crowd was as silent as the grass under their feet, as still as the trees around them. No one wanted to miss the sound of the man who had barely spoken in a year.

“Hello,” Aziz greeted Shohreh sheepishly.

“Hello,” Shohreh replied bitterly and turned away.

“You look well, Aziz,” Parviz said, stepping between the two.

“Eh! I’ll never be a hundred percent, but what’s there to do? I go on breathing,” Aziz replied and nodded to a few others.

He was about to move when Parviz grabbed his arm and whispered in his ear, “Aziz, stop by and let’s talk before you leave.”

“What about?”

“You know what.”

“Okay. I’ll stay,” Aziz assented before disappearing into the crowd.

Shohreh asked what Parviz planned to do next.

“I’ll just ask him if he did it. That’s all. We should give him a chance to tell his side,” Parviz answered.

But when the speeches had been delivered, the poems had been recited, and the melancholic ballads had been sung, Parviz and Shohreh looked up to find Aziz gone.

Two weeks later, in the early hours of dawn, the telephone in Parviz’s apartment rang. In a drunken stupor, Aziz had dialed Parviz’s number. It took a few moments for Parviz to feel awake enough to say, “In the cemetery, I asked you to stay, but you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t,” Aziz shot back through sobs or drunken hiccups, Parviz could not tell which.

“So, what is this talk you want with me?” Aziz demanded.

“You don’t know?”

Only hiccups could be heard at the other end.

“Four people are dead, Aziz, and people say you,
you
, are the reason. They say you work for the regime,” Parviz fumed.

“History will prove me innocent,” Aziz replied.

“
History
? What history?
This
is history, this conversation between you and me. Have you no shame?”

“I did nothing wrong,” Aziz hissed.

“Explain that!”

“I don’t need to explain anything.” “Don’t you ever call here unless you’re ready to answer me, until you can prove you’re innocent.”

“Suit yourself!” Aziz hiccupped and hung up.