Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (15 page)

By the year’s end, the excitement of the opening days had waned. The tedium of the day-to-day proceedings brought boredom and the benches emptied. Inside the courtroom, everyone settled into a routine. Of all the attorneys representing the victims, Ehrig was the only one in court every day. In their own separate cage, Rhayel and Darabi had grown accustomed to their own silence, as had others in the courtroom. They sat through the long hours keeping themselves from dozing off by doodling, or carving letters and shapes with their pens into their wooden benches.

Bruno Jost, however, was listening. No matter how stellar the quality of his investigation or the evidence on his side, he knew the case would be lost if the argument in the courtroom was lost. He watched the proceedings intently.
He had mastered all the documents contained in the 187 binders on the shelves behind him. By 1994 he knew every detail and pronounced all the Persian and Arab names with a native’s ease.

Listen fiercely was, for the most part, all he could do once the trial started. Bruno Jost, the federal prosecutor, the impartial investigator, had done his work. His indictment was in. The rest was for the judges to decide. In the courtroom, it was for the judges to ask the questions, for the judges to measure the strength of his argument, the soundness of his logic. He could, and did, rise from time to time to question a witness or make a statement. But they were detours along the road the judges were paving on their own, albeit using the map of his indictment. Jost, the leading man, had yielded the spotlight to the chief judge.

Judge Kubsch’s authority was absolute but somehow also gentle. His subtlety had cast him in a paternal light. Everyone sought his approval. Even at the peak of their exasperation with his scrutiny, witnesses never doubted his fairness. When his wife, fearing retribution, suggested that they unlist their address from the phone book he, knowing his own reputation, dismissed the idea.

“If the terrorists are truly looking for me, they won’t need the phone book to find me. All we’d get by unlisting ourselves is to lose the friends who are hoping to find us.”

The bench brought out the best in the quiet man who was always lost in thought at home behind his desk or tending to the flower beds, speaking only when addressed. His own son, a law student clerking in the same court, often snuck
into the audience section at lunch breaks to watch his reclusive father come to life. Kubsch’s bottomless patience drove casual viewers and reporters away. His serenity suffused the courtroom, which, for all the hostility inside, might have otherwise been mayhem. He never raised his voice and was sparing with his words. The expressions of his eyes, enlarged by his spectacles, instructed the witnesses more often than his orders. One day, when a witness kept rambling, he waited till the witness had paused to catch his breath, then he simply pressed his hands down into the air and closed his fists, like a conductor ending a symphony, and the witness plopped to his seat. Even the defiant Rhayel and Darabi showed their regard in their own muted fashion by keeping a lamblike demeanor in his presence.

Yet no one revealed Judge Kubsch’s mastery better than Yousef, who sought chaos as his only salvation. Using his full repertoire of physical and verbal stunts, Yousef disrupted the proceedings, hoping to win the forgiveness of his former allies. Sometimes he lay his head on the bench, appearing to nap. At other times, he showed up to court in his underwear only to be sent back to dress himself. He broke into song or complained—of prison food or the clamor in his ward. On a few occasions, he feigned insanity and spoke of stray spirits swinging from the courtroom chandeliers, or whispered to the specks of dandruff on his collar. The room burst into laughter at Yousef’s antics, but the chief judge, with a nod or the wave of a hand, pacified him each time.

But even under the reign of Judge Kubsch’s civility, the old enmities were hard to contain. Darabi lost a grip on himself
from time to time. One morning, when the judges were in their chamber, he finally returned the gaze of an old foe in the audience, someone he had faced off against at numerous rallies over the years. From the first day of the trial, the sight of the spectator had rattled him. Once the crowds began to thin, Darabi had expected to be rid of him. But even when endless legal arguments chased the reporters away, and frost brushed the panes of the stained-glass wall in white, that spectator always showed. Coming in from the cold, he and his two friends huddled against the heater, their gaze fixed on Darabi, who was helpless in his glass cage. Being a prisoner on trial had to be punishing. Being a prisoner on trial under the glare of a longtime enemy accented that punishment with torment.

“You’re a dead man, Hamid Nowzari,” Darabi hissed from his perch.

“Shut up!” was all the shy, amiable community organizer would say in return.

After leading the demonstration outside the courtroom on the opening day of the trial, Hamid had expected to resume his daily routine. Yet the pleasure of watching Darabi in captivity had drawn him in. The novelty soon wore off, and still he found himself returning day after day. There was something irresistible about Hall 700, though even he did not know what it was. He ran through the heady explanations at first. The trial was historic and he was there to affirm the work of the court through his presence. Or the trial was proving him in the right, so he came to revel in his
own good judgment. Hamid and his small band of friends thought President Rafsanjani’s promise of reform was nothing but a sham. They had been dismissed by other exiles as idealists who were unable to see a political opportunity—a handful of dinosaurs charging headlong toward extinction. Then the murders had occurred. The champions of reform and reconciliation vanished and the dinosaurs, albeit too desolate to gloat, lived on. But, at thirty-six and after ten years in exile, gloating was not as sweet as it had once been.

For a while he thought he was there for friendship’s sake. Together with Shohreh, he had founded the refugee organization that, over the years, had become their home away from home. He figured he was there so Shohreh would not be alone. Yet he knew himself well enough to know that loyalty could have carried him only as far as November, with luck through the early days of December. When 1994 began to loom and he was still returning to the benches, he realized there was no point asking why he was there. He quit his day job and took on a night shift so he would never have to miss a day of court. Going to court was what he had to do; the reason would reveal itself to him some day.

Thus began the monastic life of Hamid Nowzari, who never set foot in a temple except in foreign lands and not without a camera dangling from his shoulder. He was vigorous. Organizing protests, leading demonstrations, stamping his restless feet to the beat of slogans at rallies suited him. But being useful in a courtroom was something he had to learn. It would be years before he would realize that the trial, indeed justice, was what he had been demanding at all the
marches throughout his life. A trial never lasted longer than an hour, as so many who had been political prisoners in Iran had described to him. And a judge was a turbaned cleric in the image of Minister Fallahian to whom their guilt was usually a foregone conclusion. In Hall 700, he watched Judge Kubsch and his team, looked at Bruno Jost, listened to Ehrig’s every statement, thinking all the while,
This is the shape of a court, the look of a judge, the sound of a real hearing.

For the time being, he would be the trial’s self-appointed ombudsman, there to monitor the proceedings. No one in the room knew Darabi or Iran as well as he did. An expatriate publication gave him permission to be their representative. The court granted him a press pass with which one of his two other companions entered the reporters’ booth and took notes. He and a third listened. Sometimes the band of three drafted an ad hoc press release. Hamid’s name always appeared at the bottom after the words, “For more information, please contact.” In the evening, they brought the scrawled pages home, typed them up, wrote a summary of the day’s events, suggested the next day’s highlights, and distributed the report to diaspora publications before heading to work. None of them complained of their drudgeries. The ritual was a labor of love, strangely healing.

As the judges were returning to the bench, Darabi glared and shouted at Hamid once again.

“Your wife’s a whore.”

This expletive particularly amused Hamid, the bachelor. But the fuming Darabi sounded off again.

“Motherfucker! Your mother’s a whore, too.”

At those words, Hamid shrank. His lifelong orphanhood, beginning at age five with the loss of his mother and father to cancer within months of each other, made him vulnerable against any allusion to his lineage. He said nothing more, only pushed his hand into the air, as if pushing him away. Darabi sneered, undulating his shoulders, dabbing his forehead with the back of his wrist, striking his best homosexual pose then repeating in a high-pitched voice, “Oh, shut up!”

As the lone woman in the courtroom, Shohreh often wondered what it would be like to be left alone in that room without a single compatriot: Who would ever know her experience—not in its docile German translation, but in its feral Persian original? Who would help her if there was no one present but Germans, especially now that Salomeh’s condition was keeping Parviz away?

But this never happened because Hamid was always present. In the early days of the trial, Hamid had gone unnoticed. With his slim frame and deep olive complexion, he was easily overlooked amid the many faces. Then one morning, the attorneys for the accused surprised the court by introducing two new witnesses they wished to present the next day. The move upset Ehrig, who asked to postpone the new testimonies so he could study the witnesses. His request was denied. That evening, the spectator became a volunteer researcher. The names of the witnesses had sounded vaguely familiar to him. He spent the night reading through old magazines, and calling other exiles in Berlin to unearth information about them. In the morning, Ehrig’s aides had come up empty. Hamid,
however, handed a file to Shohreh with the detailed profiles of the new witnesses. The file elated Ehrig, who waved it in the air beaming at the benches.

From that day forward, Hamid’s presence seemed as natural, even as essential, as anyone else’s in the room. The translators began to greet him. The courtroom guards looked to him as the master of the audience section. If there was a row, they did not move from their posts. They left it to Hamid to restore order to his own domain.

One afternoon Ehrig finally broke the silence between Hamid and himself. In the courthouse’s basement canteen, where the attorneys, witnesses, and reporters ate, he spotted Hamid at his usual table. The silent courtroom visitor was perfectly animated in the canteen. The waiters, overjoyed whenever he entered, ushered him to the “Mykonos corner.” The canteen staff who had secretly sworn allegiance to him made the witnesses for the accused suffer for service. They huddled around him to hear the latest installment of the trial’s drama, which he had learned to tell with enough suspense to last through dessert—always a bowl of Jell-O.

Ehrig picked up his tray, walked to the Mykonos table, and asked if he could join him. Hamid lifted his head from his newspaper, rested his glasses on his forehead, beamed his winsome smile, and said, “With pleasure!”

He had long wished to reach out to Ehrig but feared he might think him another anti-Tehran proselytizer.

Ehrig quickly got to the point. “Who are you?”

Hamid offered a bite-size autobiography. To Ehrig, who had been in college in the late 1960s when German
universities were abuzz with Iranian student activists, Hamid’s history rang familiar.

“Tell me, how much longer will you keep at this? How long will you keep coming?” Ehrig asked, gently provoking his new acquaintance.

“Not long. Because it won’t go on much longer.”

Ehrig, surprised by the response, asked why.

“Iran will buy someone powerful enough and that will be the end,” Hamid answered confidently.

Ehrig had little patience for cynicism. There were many corrupt officials for sale, he consented—his tone suddenly declarative—but not everyone in Germany was for sale, certainly he, himself, was not for sale.

“You!” Hamid paused and patted the attorney tenderly on the back. Perhaps ingratiating himself was an art he had been born with, or had mastered years ago as a small orphan at the mercy of adults. Whatever its origins, Hamid disarmed everyone with geniality.

“It’s not you, Mr. Ehrig. You’re as noble as they come,” he reassured the attorney. But Hamid felt certain there were greater political motives, trade interests, that would put an end to the trial. Iran would present an offer Germany could not refuse, something that would make sacrificing justice small in exchange.

“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.