Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (3 page)

Noori’s voice could be heard in the main hall as he fumed in the back room of the restaurant. “Tell me this! Tell me only this! How could you say to people
Friday
night when I’d clearly told you
Thursday
?”

Of his original list of sixteen guests none had shown up. Aziz’s voice echoed, stammering an answer, “Listen, Noori
mola.
”

Mola
, as in “mentor,” had long been Aziz’s term for Noori. “You said Friday night. I swear on my two children’s lives, you said Friday night. ‘Aziz,’ you said, ‘call ’em up,’ you said,
‘tell ’em we’re meeting the Doctor at Mykonos on Friday night,’ is what you said.”

The answer flabbergasted Noori, who threw his hands up and refused to say more than, “Impossible!” But Aziz would not give in. “I don’t hold a candle to you,
mola jaan
, but my memory is rock solid. Friday night is what you said.”

They were seated around a long, wobbly table Aziz had arranged by joining three small tables together. At the head, the Doctor and Noori sat side by side, their backs against the wall, facing the open room and the Doctor’s two deputies. Had there been no confusion about the timing, the meeting would have been a rare chance to hear from the Doctor, the beloved regional leader who had national potential. But by eight-thirty, Parviz was the only one to arrive.

They all rose to welcome Parviz. “I was in my pajamas when Noori called, thinking the meeting was for tomo—”

With a gentle pat on the back, the Doctor interrupted Parviz to stop the exhausted argument from starting once again. Aziz resumed his duties as host. He ran a scraper over the tablecloth to clear crumbs, lit the candles, and emptied the ashtrays into his palms before walking away. Noori cast a last look of dismay in Aziz’s direction, then turned his attention to Parviz. He offered Parviz the other empty seat beside the Doctor, but seeing beer on the table Parviz chose to sit across from them, where he had an uncluttered path to the men’s room. No sooner had they settled in their chairs than they rose to welcome two other unexpected arrivals. Two Iranian cabdrivers had stopped to pick up dinner but Aziz had urged them to stay, hoping to make up for the missing audience.

Within minutes, a last guest arrived.

“
Huzzah
! Look who’s here!” Aziz rushed to the door. “Our own Mr. Mehdi, who’d otherwise never set foot in my joint.”

Mehdi, who was a former wrestling champion, pressed a sinewy forearm to his chest, giving a gentle bow, and greeted everyone. Aziz, trying to lighten the mood, exclaimed, “This way, please! Let the champ get through! Mr. Mehdi! Mr. Mehdi! You’re just as rare a sight around here as the absent Prophet Mahdi you were named after.”

Mehdi was there for Noori’s sake who had called earlier that evening urging him to come. A star athlete and an engineering graduate of Sharif, Iran’s most prestigious university, Mehdi could have remained in Iran relishing his status as a celebrity. But the glories of fame fell short of life’s daily indignations once he left the ring and crossed the threshold from wrestler to citizen. At least living as a cabdriver in Berlin afforded him consistency—he was the same invisible immigrant wherever he went.

“You’re a gem to come,” Noori, brimming with gratitude, whispered in Mehdi’s ear, then offered him the empty chair on his right.

“With all due respect, Doctor, you ought to take better care of yourself. You need security. You need guards,” one of the guests began, once everyone had settled around the table.

But the Doctor waved away the advice. Bodyguards were an expensive indulgence to the Doctor, who represented an impoverished people. Or perhaps it was the metaphysical
streak in him, in every Iranian, that made him dismissive of death, as if his cause was too great to yield to mortal concerns. The Doctor’s security had long preoccupied the thoughts of his supporters—something he always tried to ease by telling a favorite anecdote.

“‘Life and death are the two sides of the same coin.’ A Peshmerga fighter in the mountains of Kurdistan taught me this. With his walking stick, he drew a line in the dirt, stood to one side of it, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘
Kaak
Doctor, this is life.’ Then leapt to the other side of the line, looked into my eyes again, and said, ‘This is death,
Kaak
Doctor.’ He taught me to see how closely death shadows us all. There’s no point in fearing what’s always with us. There’s no telling when, but a few seconds is all that separates us from the next world.”

How fatalistic
, Parviz thought. What he believed the Kurds and all disenchanted Iranians needed was not a mystic but a pragmatic leader who refused to surrender, most of all to death. But before he had sounded his objection, the Doctor had moved on and was answering a question about Kurdistan and the state of its people. The Doctor was an attentive listener. He compensated for his lacking charisma with avuncular gentleness. His civility was endearing. He spooned condiments into everyone’s dish and cordially got up when anyone rose from his seat. Even in his fiercest official pose—decked in combat uniform with a gun strapped to his back—the balding, full-cheeked Doctor looked no more menacing than a crossing guard at an intersection. Had he not been born among a persecuted people, he would have
been a professor or a researcher in a laboratory. But all that was left of his years of learning was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and the title
Doctor
.

Despite the Doctor’s warmth, the exchange quickly lost its vigor. Of his two deputies, one was silent and the other, too eager to speak, incessantly interrupted everyone. Parviz was growing restless. He wanted to go home but knew he could not. Noori would not let him, at least not until dinner had been served.

At nine o’clock the telephone at 7 Senftenberger Ring in north Berlin rang once. Within seconds, it rang again. Then, no more. The four men inside the apartment did not pick up the receiver. For six days they had prepared for this moment—for the two rings that let them know their targets had arrived.

For six days, they had remained in a cramped dormitory studio, leaving only on essential errands. That morning, they had been busy wiping off doorknobs, kitchen counters, cabinet handles, and refrigerator shelves, all the surfaces where their fingertips might have left a trace. That afternoon, two of the men had gone to the local Woolworth’s store to buy a sports bag. They had returned within the hour with a black and green bag marked Sportino, purchased for 24.95 DM in cash—a final investment in the stock of malice.

The day before, the pair had driven to a deserted spot, a
blind location
in their own vernacular, where they received a delivery without seeing the deliverer. A cache of weapons had been left in a fruit carton, which they retrieved and
locked up in the trunk of their BMW. In the early morning hours of the next day, the sixth and last day, the team’s leader left before anyone was awake and returned that afternoon with an envelope of photographs. He ordered one of the men to fetch the fruit carton from the BMW’s trunk. Then behind locked doors and drawn shades he circulated the photos—mainly portraits—among his underlings. There were images of a bald, middle-aged man with round features, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. In others, the same face appeared next to two younger men, mustached and clean-shaven, their dark hair parted to one side, their expressions subdued.

The contents of the carton also passed hands—a machine gun, a handgun, several dozen bullets, and two silencers. They disassembled and reassembled the pieces, loading and unloading each, cocking them, taking aim, shooting blanks, until everyone felt at ease with them. Then they placed the pieces back in the carton and locked it in the car’s trunk once again. The BMW was perfectly indistinct beside the other cars on the block, though not for long. Soon, its every detail—the softness of its shade of blue, its plate number, B-AR 5503, its purchase price of 3120 DM—would be repeated like a new popular tune on the lips of reporters and investigators.

At sunset, the men spread their mats, stood in the direction of Ka’aba, and began a final prayer before leaving on their mission, code named the “Great Alavi Shout.
”
Alavi as in Shiite, the faith they claimed as their own.

After the two single rings, their leader announced, “It’s time!”

Two of his underlings left the apartment and drove away in the BMW. He and the remaining man also headed out. They hailed a taxi, which they rode to a midway point. When they exited the taxi, they descended the stairs into a subway station, walked through an underground tunnel, and ascended the stairs at the other end. When they surfaced, they hailed another taxi.

By nine-thirty, all four men had reunited near the Mykonos. An hour later, a black Mercedes pulled to the curb at the intersection opposite the cul-de-sac. The team leader approached the car and exchanged a few words with its passengers. Returning, he walked along the small alley separating the playground of the nursery from the back lot of the restaurant. Through the window overlooking the small room, he peered inside, then walked over to the BMW and unlocked its trunk.

4

Scotland Yard called to warn me that they’d received a tip about a terrorist plot against me. Their best advice was to never be on time for an appointment. “A half-hour delay is one Iranian tradition I always observe, I said.” The Yard man shook his head. “Then God help you, because your killers are Iranian, too.”

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

It was after ten when dinner was finally served. Aziz laid several trays of assorted kebabs and saffron rice on the table, along with perfunctory bowls of tomato wedges and iceberg lettuce. He kept shuttling to the table, being both chef and host, lingering only to fill empty glasses or replenish the trays. In the main hall, the German regular was still nursing his nightcap when two dark-haired men charged in and scurried past him.

As they were making their way through the restaurant, Aziz approached the guests once more. He pointed to the guest of honor, and asked, “Would the Doctor like any more beer?”

The Doctor did not turn toward the host, or answer him. His cheeks went bloodless, his eyes suddenly vacant. His gaze was fixed upon the archway where he had spotted the two strangers. A sense of foreboding filled the room, the feeling that something was dreadfully awry. Someone, seeing the change on the Doctor’s face, suspecting a heart attack, shouted, “Noori, see what’s wrong with the Doctor!”

And that was how death announced itself that night, unceremoniously, only as a blush vanishing, pink turning sallow. The swiftness, the simpleness of it had paralyzed them before a single bullet had been shot.

Parviz felt a presence beside him. From the corner of his eye, he quickly traced a set of steely legs beneath an impressive outline upward along a thick torso to a pair of dark eyes, connected eyebrows, and a widow’s peak . . .
but the face?
It was only partly visible. The obscurity of the face alarmed him. His nerves mutinous, he threw himself back to take cover under the table behind him.

The predators, standing tall, had yet to fire. The prey were hunched in chairs or lay prostrate on the floor. The ones to survive would strain to remember what had passed in the hours before the shooting began or after it had ended, but these in-between moments, this purgatory, would vividly, indelibly, brand their memories. A menacing voice boomed, cursing in Persian. The shout was followed by steady explosions that flashed through the dim air like the embers of a dying fire. The shell casings rang on the floor—the men collapsing, their chairs falling, the wall behind them cracking
with each bullet. Blood sprayed on what remained of a dinner of meat and rice, speckling the empty china like remnants of some crimson garnish, dotting the uneaten bread in the straw baskets, beading upon the petals of the plastic flowers in their stubby vases. One of the wounded men clutched the tablecloth as he fell, dragging it with him, spilling bottles. Beer and water streaked the cloth and dampened the neon-blue layer beneath. The print of his bleeding hand stained one end of the white fabric.

Danger summoned the wrestler in Mehdi. He shouted a warning, then dragged the elbows of his tablemates as he dove under the table. The person to his left followed the trajectory of his tug. The one to his right did not. Noori collapsed onto the table.

When the barrage ceased, a hush fell over the room, more petrifying than the disquiet it succeeded. Parviz stole a glance at his surroundings. Another shooter walked up and fired three more shots at the Doctor. His gun, like the machine gun, sounded muffled.
Silencers!
Parviz could see the shooter’s elbow jerk backward with every blow, then turn to aim at the Doctor’s deputy who lay next to him. A single muffled echo reverberated in the air. Expecting the elbow, clad in black leather, to pause over him next, Parviz shut his eyes and waited. But the next sounds were of rustling feet, heavy steps rushing past then fading away.

Fear had muted everything but the unconscious groans of the wounded. Nothing moved. Nothing gave a sound. Until at last, Mehdi called out.

“Noori?”

There was no answer. He called again, “Doctor?”

Only silence. “Mr. Abdoli?”

Still, no one gave a sound. “Mr. Ardalan? Aziz?”

At the other end of the room, someone stirred. Finally, a voice.

“Mehdi?”

“Yes! Aziz? Is that you?”

“No. It’s Parviz.”

The sound of Mehdi’s voice restored Parviz. He got to his feet and walked to the main hall. He was going to dial the police from the phone at the bar, but the German diner had already done so. Instead, Parviz called a friend and relayed the news. “They came to Mykonos and shot us all. I don’t know who’s alive and who’s dead. Tell everyone!”

The two cabdrivers among the guests, also unhurt, were standing in the main hall, dazed and too frightened to leave. Parviz retraced his steps to the back room. Under the archway, he froze, standing where the shooters had stood moments ago, gazing at what they had left behind. Arms to one side, neck drooped over a shoulder, the Doctor remained seated, as if to deny his enemies the pleasure of witnessing his fall. Under the table where Parviz had taken cover, one of the Doctor’s two deputies lay on his side, blood streaming from the corner of his mouth. The other, facedown, had fallen within a few feet of his spot at the table, as if the force of the bullets had ejected him from his chair. Aziz was on his back, motionless.

Parviz scanned the table. The glass and china were intact. A few vases had tipped when someone had grabbed onto the tablecloth to break his fall. Suddenly he caught sight of Noori, whose face was propped up by his mug of beer, over-flowing with blood. His glasses had slipped—a lens pressing against his forehead. A wet murky stain was widening across his sapphire shirt. With seven bullets lodged in his chest, he was unconscious, breathing strained breaths.

The image of the wounded Noori would seal two decades of Parviz’s memories, spanning Berlin and Tehran—Sunday afternoons on the volleyball court, evenings in the kitchen serving as Noori’s sidekick, late nights of drinking at the Bierkeller, the endless hours of debating, drafting statements, rewording the phrases of a flyer while inhaling the nicotine-riddled air that always hovered about Noori, weekends in the outdoors, watching Noori teach the malcontented children of newly arrived immigrants the secrets of survival in the woods—how to build a fire, climb a rock, weave a net, knot a rope. This bloody creature was that Noori, the chef, the writer, the debater, the debonair socialite, the friend Parviz had come to tonight to make look good.

He walked over to him. He wanted to lift Noori, hold him, soothe him. But he fought the urge, lest moving him worsened his condition. He stepped gingerly away, till he felt the wall against his back. Then his knees gave. He slithered to the floor and squatted shoulder to shoulder beside Mehdi. The two did not speak. They stared at the floor with damp eyes neither moved a hand to wipe.

Suddenly, Aziz stood up. He tried to walk but instead he let out a moan and collapsed, and kept on moaning. In the distance, the faint shrieking of sirens was growing louder. A man entered the restaurant. Parviz, startled by the sight, shouted, “Get away! Who the hell are you?”

Flashing a badge, the plainclothes officer shouted the same question at Parviz. Minutes later, Noori and Aziz were strapped onto stretchers and driven away in two ambulances. The bodies of the Doctor and his two deputies were left untouched. Only three square cardboard signs were placed next to each: 1, 2, and 3.

Yousef Amin wanted to be anywhere but in the backseat of that BMW. By his own calculation, he was not all that guilty. He had only been a watchman at the door of the restaurant. He had refused to kill, and did not want to be sitting in the same car with killers. The BMW jerked forward, speeding and braking without heeding road signs, barely keeping from crashing. To Yousef’s relief, the driver finally headed for the highway, but soon took the first exit and steered the car back onto the city streets again, resuming the madness.

The team leader barked at Yousef from the front seat. “Put the gun in the bag! Now!”

In the frantic rush to escape, the second shooter had thrown his piece into the car, and it lay in plain sight on the passenger floor. Yousef picked it up with a ski mask and dropped it into the sports bag. The car neared a crowded square. At a traffic light, the two shooters slipped out. Yousef followed next. With everyone gone, the driver was
alone behind the wheel of the incriminating vehicle, in possession of the incriminating bag. The operation had been flawlessly planned and executed until the moment of shooting, but not beyond. He drove aimlessly, looking for a desolate block to leave the car. Then he found himself on Cicero Street. He pulled over, shut the engine, grabbed the sports bag, and fled the car, unaware that he had blocked a driveway. The bag was all that was left to be rid of. He found a lot full of cars. He flung the bag under one of them. Unburdened at last, he ran into the night.

In a small room at Berlin’s police headquarters, Parviz stared out the window, waiting for the interrogating officer who had left to take a phone call. When he returned, he told Parviz that Noori, the restaurant owner, had died in the hospital.

Parviz rushed to correct him.

“Sir, please! Watch what you say! The restaurant owner’s name is Aziz. You’re trying to say Aziz died. Aziz, not Noori. Two different men.”

The officer checked his notes, then asked who Noori Dehkordi was, to which Parviz responded with confidence, “Not a restaurant owner. No! Anything but that.”

“Well, he’s the one who just died.”

Parviz looked at the officer, his gaze blank as a blind man’s. Tears streaked his face. He was not the crying kind, least of all in public. But at 3 a.m. on September 18, 1992, he was not the kind of man he used to be.

The officer brought him a glass of water and two pills, then softly urged Parviz to take them. He followed the order
mindlessly. In the spartan room, there was no more than a desk, a file cabinet, a set of chairs, and the glare of fluorescent lights above. Parviz tried to think but fear and fury kept getting in his way. To Parviz Dastmalchi, the fatherless boy from Tehran’s poor Sarsabil neighborhood, there was no problem that could not be solved, no adversity he could not overcome through thinking. He had always been pragmatic, able to reduce the most intangible matters to their elements. When his childhood allowance had been too small, he earned more by tutoring classmates in math. By fourteen he had worked at a tea factory wrapping tea boxes in cellophane, skinned and chopped onions for the corner grocer, getting paid by the kilo, and earned the reputation of a fledgling entrepreneur by supplying local peddlers with bags he made from the pages of his old notebooks—each pack of ten for one rial.

The fear he felt was not of death. Death had haunted him from the womb. (His mother, who had nicknamed him “the invincible” at birth, had tried to abort him, but Parviz, the fetus, had survived the intervention.) The fear he had was of another’s control over the circumstances of his death and, by extension, of another’s control over the circumstances of his life. He feared indignity. He had sacrificed much to live as a free man but the destiny he had tried to avoid had come looking for him. That night he had, but only narrowly, escaped becoming yet another number, sixty-five to be exact.

Five hundred Iranians had been on a list to be murdered; at least sixty of them (possibly more) had already been shot,
stabbed, or beheaded in Paris, Maryland, Manila, Bombay, Karachi, Istanbul, Vienna, Wembley, Larnaca, Geneva, Stockholm, Sulaymaniyah, Tokyo, New Jersey, and, five weeks earlier, in the suburbs of Bonn. On this night a malicious hand had crossed out four more names: sixty-one, Noori Dehkordi; sixty-two, Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi; sixty-three, Homayoun Ardalan; sixty-four, Fattah Abdoli.

The list had been drawn up by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980, one year after his rise to power. The names belonged to those he had branded “enemies of Islam.” Three years after his death, the orders were reinstated by his successor. These were the first death sentences the Ayatollah issued, before the word
fatwa
entered the Western lexicon or Salman Rushdie became a household name. The Ayatollah’s footmen were on a worldwide hunt for everyone on the list—writers, artists, poets, intellectuals, and even satirists. Scores of dissidents living inside Iran had long been silenced, imprisoned, or executed. Those abroad were learning that even if they could flee the Ayatollah, they could not flee the fate he had dictated for them.

The list also included many in the political opposition, several Kurds among them. The Ayatollah’s hatred for the Kurds was an old one. It ran so deep that he could not withhold it even before he was securely in power. After the 1979 revolution, when a new constitution was being drafted, he barred representatives of the mostly Sunni Kurds from the process. The constitution that was ultimately ratified favored the Shiite majority. After the fall of the Shah, a spirit of unity had swept over the nation and the Ayatollah, seizing upon
the public euphoria, invited all minorities to forgo ethnic demands and instead become a single Muslim nation. But the Kurds refused. They held fast to their own dream of autonomy. Years before a second word,
jihad
, entered the Western lexicon, the Ayatollah invoked it to declare war against the Kurds.

Iran was already at war with Iraq on its western frontier. So this other war against five hundred infidels had to be waged covertly. “We will export our revolution,” he promised. His shipments of aid were reaching far and wide, from the shores of Lebanon to the poor neighborhoods of Algiers. But for expatriates, his only export was terror. His scheme was run by henchmen who were recruited from around the globe. In Berlin, his funds poured into the city’s main Shiite mosque where his agents identified promising congregants and gave them jobs in innocuous grocery stores or other small businesses, which served as fronts for their sinister operations. It would be several years until terror networks began to strike against Western targets. But the Ayatollah’s fledgling cells, growing under Europe’s oblivious skin, were already at work destroying the lives of expatriates, creating a blueprint for the next, more ambitious generation of killers.