Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (5 page)

He paused to consider.
Had he?
He did not feel alive in the same way he had the day before. It was as if he had been cast into life’s twilight, into an in-between state, where he was at once both alert and disoriented. He spoke again, this time deliberately.

“Around eleven. We’d just finished dinner and were talking. Someone asked Dr. Sharafkandi if the Kurds of Iran wanted to separate and create a country of their own. He objected to that suggestion, saying that his people were not separatists, insisting that the Kurds were even more Iranian than the Persians. It was his way of saying they did not want independence, but autonomy. He said the real issue was how to unify the opposition against the current regime. I was sitting with my back to the entrance, facing the Doctor, and sometime in the middle of all this I felt someone standing beside me. I turned toward him. He looked to be thirty to thirty-five years old and had a mask on. The rest happened at lightning speed. The man had a machine gun but I could not see it. It was under something, maybe a blue handkerchief, or maybe inside something. I don’t know. He cursed us, but you must forgive me because I cannot bring myself to repeat his words. And then it happened. Forty bullets, maybe more. I survived by throwing myself under a table.”

The next question, the reporter’s last, was the one that Parviz had come to answer, the one that had driven him to make the call in the first place. “Who do you think is behind this?”

“Undoubtedly, the regime in Tehran.”

Killers often return to the scene of the crime. So do haunted victims. At noon, Parviz found himself on Prager Street. From a distance, he could see a throng at the end of the
block. Plainclothes agents and uniformed police officers were milling in front of the restaurant, inside the police barricade. Some spoke into walkie-talkies. Others, with gloved hands, held up and stared into small transparent bags, appearing deep in thought. A few were wielding tape measures, busily sizing things as scientists would. One appeared possessed, tracing and retracing the same steps from the boxes of evergreens to the main entrance, then to the intersection, over and over.

Outside the barricade, dozens of microphones hovered in the air, above the heads of onlookers. Newspapermen shadowed the investigators and shouted questions at them. Stern-faced television anchors paraded before the cameras and spoke feverishly. Phantom drawings of three suspects, barely resembling the killers, were circulating among the crowd. The next day’s headlines were in the making.

“
The Berlin Massacre Ordered by Saddam Hussein:
500,000 DM paid for every dead Kurd.
”

“
Executed at Dinner: Four Men Die
in a Power Struggle within the Kurdish Party.”

When Parviz was a boy, his mother once asked him to take the wash to the rooftop to hang up on the clothesline. Being only six, he refused. She asked again. He did not budge. She promised him candy, but he was not enticed. She beat him, but all he did was cry. She beat him harder. He only cried
harder but did not move. In the end, she threw her hands up and bitterly called her son a “spring” because the harder she pressed him, the more he recoiled, and the more he recoiled, the feistier he became, and the harder he fought back.

Since the night before, Parviz had been pressed hard. Watching lies being fabricated before his eyes was a final blow. He pondered his choices. He could go home . . .
Keep mum, and be afraid of every shadow?

To walk away from the scene was, for him, to be just as dead as the others. What a disgrace then, to have survived. Or he could . . .
Speak! Speak, now!

He made his way through the crowd and stood against the police barricade, facing everyone. Fear and fury gripped him once more. The fatigue he had not paused to feel had dulled his senses. Every dark head in the crowd, reminding him of the shooter’s head, jolted his nerves. Still, he hushed everyone and started to speak, albeit with a newfound stutter.

“Listen please, all of you! I was here in this restaurant, at the same table with the four people who died. I can tell you exactly what happened.”

The chaos came to order. The wayward cameras and microphones lined up before Parviz, the human spring.

By midnight on September 19, 1992, Bruno Jost had examined the scene, which was more gruesome than any he had ever seen. He had talked to colleagues and local and federal police, read witness statements, and looked over the autopsy reports as they came in. He valued these early insights not simply because they advanced his knowledge of the case.
They also became a yardstick by which to measure the quality of future information.

Among his most startling discoveries was something no one, not even the survivors or the relatives of the dead, had considered. A crime of that magnitude could not have happened so cleanly, swiftly, and flawlessly without the help of an insider. Someone at the restaurant had collaborated with the killers. Was he still at large, or among the dead? This would be the first of several questions to gnaw at him in the weeks to come.

He had unearthed more than most investigators could, a credit to two qualities in him that were easily overlooked. Firstly, Jost thought himself a servant to a master named
law
. He did not shy away from the drudgeries of an investigation. He respected, but did not believe in, mediators, which was what he thought of everyone who reported to him. He hardly ever delegated even the lowliest of tasks to assistants. The brilliance of the truth he was to piece together, he believed, was in the luster of every detail that went into it. He feared what might be lost in the journey that a fact made from the lips of a witness to the pen of an overworked agent.

Besides, he could not claim to be a superior to those who had seen what he had not, talked to those he had not, measured the distances he had not walked. To earn the respect of his coworkers, to prevent the possibility of ever being told he was wrong because he had not been present at the scene, he traced in the footsteps of all those who had first been dispatched and repeated every tedious procedure they had performed in his absence.

Secondly, Jost was also a self-effacing man. His unassuming ways—the only item of luxury on him was the wisp of a gold band on his ring finger—deflected attention from him. He so often yielded to colleagues, so easily lent an ear to everyone, that witnesses, experts, or police officers spoke unreservedly in his presence, as if he were merely eavesdropping. A smile readily creased his lips to ease subordinates, as did his lilac gaze. Whatever flaws or shortcomings existed in Jost’s character, they did not get in the way of his equanimity. Indeed, nothing caused Jost to lose his stride—not the armed bodyguards shadowing him, the frozen expressions of the corpses he examined, the tantrums of traumatized witnesses, or the cunning of the detainees who spun tale after tale to evade his questions. Nothing upset his peace for long because nothing could surpass in strangeness what he had witnessed as a child.

Until the year he left for college, Bruno Jost lived on the grounds of an insane asylum. His father was an attendant there and had an apartment on the premises. Growing up near the patients had inured Jost to strangeness. Sudden howls, frantic fits, gloomy countenances, bizarre rituals, and violent threats did not intimidate him. He had learned long ago how to stare into havoc and see past it.

That night, the last call Jost received was from an Iraqi Kurdish leader who had also come to Berlin for the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party. Jalal Talebani wished to meet with Jost because he had spent most of the day before with the Doctor. Fear of the killers kept Talebani
inside the apartment of a friend, and so he asked Jost to come to him instead.

“I’d warned the Doctor months ago, in Paris, and again at the conference. I’d told him that a plot was in the works for his assassination,” Talebani began.

Jost did little to prompt him. He settled into a chair and watched Talebani with eagerness. Talebani had to unburden himself. A few nods from time to time or a gesture was all he, on whom the foreknowledge of the crime now weighed heavily, needed to continue.

“My men in northern Iraq got a tip from an Iranian agent they had arrested. During the interrogation, the agent leaked the news of a plot by Tehran to behead all Kurds by murdering their leadership. But when I told the Doctor, he wasn’t impressed. He said, ‘You’re not telling me anything new. Of course they want to kill me. Saddam wants to kill you, too. Tell me something I don’t know!’ I thought Vienna would smarten them, get them to up their security, but obviously, it hadn’t.”

Vienna again. For the second time in thirty-six hours that city’s name had come up. Before the interview ended, Jost wrote
VIENNA
in block letters in his notepad and circled it—a reminder to study that case in the coming days.

On the ride back to his hotel, Jost pondered what he had learned from Talebani. Politicians were a tough lot to trust, especially the aspiring kind who lived in exile. Jost was glad to have the unsolicited account, but it hardly offered him more than hearsay. His main suspect was still the armed Kurdish group, the PKK.

When he arrived at his hotel it was three o’clock in the morning. The next day was scheduled to begin at eight. He slipped between the sheets and sleep spread over him fast like a spell.

Yousef Amin was wide awake aboard a train bound for the town of Rhine in Nordrhein-Westfalen, some four hundred miles from Berlin. He sat alert, gazing at the view that rolled past, as if absolution was something to be granted him through sight. The graffiti-riddled walls of the city tunnels soon gave way to farms, barns, bridges, rivers, and windmills. The landscape changed but his thoughts did not. All he could think of was what had happened in Berlin. His life would have lacked nothing, he reflected, if only he could wipe away September 17, or a few hours, even five minutes, of it. Five minutes seemed like a reasonable wish—small enough to come true.

Going home was a relief, not merely because he had escaped arrest, but because he had escaped the band of men he had once called friends. His troubles with them began four days earlier, when they had all been sitting together at a sidewalk table of a café and the team leader casually said to him, “If I ask you to kill, would you do it for me?”

The team leader, a forbidding figure, was not someone Yousef wished to cross. He hemmed and hawed. “You see, umm, but, brother, ahh, I wish I could but, er, I’ve got responsibilities now. A family, you know.”

“Forget I said anything,” the team leader waved his hand in the air. “I was only kidding.”

Others in the group berated Yousef, calling him a coward. But he did not budge. Away from his family, Yousef had realized that he was through with living dangerously. He finally had a stake in life. He had youth (he was only twenty-five). He had his girl. And by November, his first wedding anniversary, he was also going to have a son.

Refusing to kill came at an unexpectedly high price. The team no longer trusted Yousef. His giddy manner, which had seemed perfectly innocuous before, now struck them as a liability. They did not take their eyes off him. In the days leading up to September 17, he was allowed out of their sight only for a few minutes, and only to call home. His wife pleaded with him to return but he had said, “I can’t. They won’t let me.”

That they had turned on him became clear when he found himself alone in the apartment on that last morning. After his teammates left on errands, he decided to run to the phone booth at the corner to call his wife. But the door would not open. The lock had been turned and the key missing from its hook.

Being trapped was a familiar experience for Yousef. He was the fifteenth child of a poor family from Lebanon, and believed himself to be the reincarnation of his biblical namesake, Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph, too, had left home as a teenager looking to find in strangers what he had not in his kin. Yousef eventually met Abbas Rhayel. Though he was Yousef’s junior by three years, Rhayel adopted Yousef like a little brother. When Rhayel decided to move to Beirut, so did Yousef. When Rhayel
joined the Hezbollah, Yousef followed. When Rhayel went to receive combat training at a secret camp in Iran, Yousef went along. When Rhayel moved to Europe in 1989, Yousef was beside him. Together they went to Hungary, where smugglers snuck them into Germany. Rhayel was Yousef’s guide. He was the one to find Yousef work, albeit of the sinister kind; he was his bridge to other societies, albeit to dangerous ones. He was also the one to enter the restaurant that night and fire the four final shots.

As the train neared Rhine, Yousef’s mood brightened. He thought of his wife and her belly full of hope. He would never again allow anything to get in the way of his new life in a land so safe that the worst he ever had to fear was severe weather. The future, at last, held a promise, whose first glimpse, according to the obstetrician, was only six weeks away. He would not let a few minutes of standing guard at the door of a restaurant eclipse his fortune. After all, he had refused to kill.

6

For days, the ghost of Doctor Sharafkandi kept haunting me until I finally had the balls to ask what he wanted. “Hadi
jaan
,” said the ghost cheerily, “being the respectable man that I used to be, I can’t rest until I know: Was our dinner tab ever settled?”

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

Friday, September 25, breezy and bright, had all the beguiling signs of a late summer day. But its glory was lost on the hundreds of mourners at Berlin’s Socialist cemetery, whose eyes were clouded by tears.

Security was tight. The day before, police had combed the grounds and the neighborhood. Several dozen armed officers monitored the comings and goings of the visitors. The cemetery’s memorial hall was filled to capacity. Another throng waited outside. Some paced about aimlessly, others huddled together in threes and fours. Conversation eluded them. Instead, they sucked hard on their cigarettes and exhaled in each other’s direction.

When the doors of the memorial hall opened, a stately man, a colleague of Noori’s, led the way bearing a basket of red and yellow roses. The pallbearers, wearing sullen expressions, lifted the coffin and began to march. The crowd remained hushed, for as the coffin moved forward the faces they were looking for appeared. Shohreh, dressed in black, followed the coffin stoically. Sara was beside her, chewing gum. In a hot pink jacket, matching headband, and floral-print leggings, she gripped her stuffed rabbit in one hand and her favorite teacher’s hand in the other. She looked to suffer from nothing worse than boredom. She seemed ready for a field trip, not the gloomy affair of her father’s funeral. There were no tears on her cheeks, not a trembling in her gait as she passed across the vast lawn. Her pace had the irreverence of an ordinary preadolescent girl. Only her gaze flashed with a wrath that far outsized her small frame.

Relatives and close friends walked with the mother and daughter. Parviz hid his inflamed eyes behind sunglasses and carried a large portrait of Noori, cupping one cheek, smiling warmly. Next to Parviz, Mehdi, squeezing his eyelids together to hold back tears, stumbled forward, drunk with grief. Around his neck hung a flimsy string that had been threaded through the edges of a photo of the four dead men.

They came to a set of stone steps, to a display of flowers and photos cascading down the sides. On the landing, Noori’s brother positioned himself behind the microphone. An interpreter stood beside him to translate for the Germans in the crowd—reporters, friends, and colleagues of Shohreh
and Noori, and a cadre of representatives from the Social Democratic Party.

“On behalf of Noori’s family, I thank you all for coming. I’ve been asked to talk about Noori. Under different circumstances, I could talk about him for hours, for days even. But this shock. I can’t yet make a sensible sentence, you see. I can only think of a poem he recited to me when he came back to Iran in 1978. Today it seems that the poem was the story of his own life.”

Those who knew Noori had expected his eulogy to include poetry, especially lines from the great modern poet, Ahmad Shamlou. His was the very verse that had ignited the flames of the 1979 revolution in the lives of the young urbanites—middle-aged mourners now—the verse that was ultimately etched on Noori’s tombstone:

Not a tale to be told
Not a song to be sung
Not a sound to be heard
Or a thing to be seen
Or a thing to be known

I am shared pain
Shout me . . .

Shohreh sat on the top of the stone stairs. At times, she seemed to be somber but aware; at others, removed, engulfed in a whirlwind of thoughts. One moment she would lean her head, wrapped in black chiffon, against a picture of Noori;
her hand, still adorned with her wedding band, stroked the frame and she looked into the distance, as if she were drifting into a dream. The next moment she had returned, alert, straightening herself and the flowers, dragging her index finger along the glass as if housekeeping could not be postponed and she simply had to dust. Her lips were moving to the words of the poem:

In the quiet, luminous space I have cried with you

For the sake of the living,

And in the dark cemetery I have sung with you

The most beautiful songs

Because this year’s dead

Were the most loving of the living . . .

Hundreds had come, mostly exiles who knew Noori personally, or of him through his television and radio interviews, or from his bylines. There were also many who did not know him at all. Nearly a million Iranians were living in exile by 1992, after the greatest exodus in the nation’s history. The majority were political refugees—some six thousand of whom had settled in Berlin. That morning, they had come to the cemetery because they shared the same tormented origin and traveled the same tormented trajectory. Noori’s history mirrored their own. In the aftermath of the coup in 1953 and the overthrow of the popular prime minister Mossadegh, many university students had headed west, where they founded the Iranian Student Confederation. With offices throughout Europe and the United States, the confederation
was the model of the democratic dream the coup had dashed. Scores of young progressives—secular and religious—came together to run the self-fashioned miniature republic in which every season was election season. They elected university representatives, who elected city representatives, who elected country representatives, who elected members of the international executive committee. They raised revenues from membership dues and printed annual budget reports, all according to the egalitarian bylaws they, themselves, had drafted. By the end of its existence in the late 1970s, the confederation had shaped a generation, from whose ranks the new political elite then emerged.

Dozens of graying members of the old confederation, idealists who had rebelled against one bad regime only to pave the way for one still more vicious, were standing at the foot of the stairs, solemnly listening. What pained them the most was not simply that they had become victims, but that they had bred their own executioners. Noori’s death was their burden. With the man they had come to bury, they would also bury a piece of their own past, a piece of themselves.

Noori was not all that they had lost. Trust was the other. In the week since the assassination they had pondered the details of that night, leading them to the certainty that their ranks had been infiltrated. One of their own had betrayed them. They were grieving Noori, the Kurds, and the irrevocable errors of their youth. They were also grieving their once undivided community, which was now broken. Fear had chased them out of Iran but had found them again in Berlin. Their safe haven was safe no more.

The procession began to move. Row after row, mourners holding photos, banners, and placards flowed forward until they arrived at the empty plot and circled it. There was a hush. A tall, broad-shouldered woman accompanying Shohreh unfurled an Iranian flag she had carried in a bag. What she did, what everyone did that day, was to follow their intuition, not a script. Quickly, a few arranged themselves behind the green, white, and red flag. Each grabbed a corner and stretched it along the length of the plot. Everyone was overcome by melancholy, but also with pride. For Noori was to be buried in Berlin’s Socialist cemetery beside some of Europe’s most notable rebels. A horn began to sound from the nearby woods. That its player was not in sight enhanced the majesty of the music. The melody was familiar to most as the beloved melody of their youth. Their lips began to move to the lyrics of the “Internationale.”

Arise, ye wretched of the earth, arise, ye prisoners of starvation . . .

When the song ended, six large men in dark suits lowered the mahogany box into the pit. Stepping to the edge, Shohreh looked down. The freshly dug hole was the raw, unsightly truth the eulogies had left out. In it, she saw the shape of her days ahead. Her stoicism vanished. The gypsy within overcame her. She squatted at the edge. In her black skirt suit, her arms wrapped around her shins, she looked like a lone, helpless crow. She began to rock to and fro.

“Oh, Khomeini. Oh, Khomeini . . .” she mumbled, as
if the leader were still alive, as if she had known him well enough to dispense with titles.

“Oh, Khomeini . . . Oh, Khomeini . . .” she repeated, in a tone of concession to a longtime enemy. “Oh, Khomeini . . . Oh, Khomeini . . .” She rocked to and fro, to and fro. She unwrapped her arms and covered her face with her hands, then lifted them to the sky, then clawed the loose earth. The crowd gasped. Their tears burst forth. Several relatives rushed and whisked Sara away. Shohreh repeated her movements and lamented. Face, sky, earth. Face, sky, earth, over and over, in her own mad choreography.

Reporters squeezed to the front. A recent journalism graduate on his very first assignment—Norbert Siegmund—was mesmerized by the widow. All he had ever seen at a funeral were mourners who never lost control or surrendered decorum. But this dazed, slender woman, at war with the earth and sky, moved him immensely. Overcome, he stopped the tape and packed his microphone away to honor the moment.

Hands and knees in the dirt, Shohreh began again. After all, she was the hostess and had to serve her guests, even if all she had to serve was grief. Through a curtain of tears came her monologue. It was a medley of fragments, some mumbled to herself in Persian, others shouted in tortured German for the spectators’ sake.

“I know who did this . . . Oh, Khomeini. I know you did this. Oh, Khomeini . . . We’ll not always be your prey. We’ll avenge ourselves. Oh, Khomeini. I swear on your grave, Noori, we’ll take your revenge.”

Pointing to the pictures of the four dead, she howled, “Their blood will be a beginning. I know it will.”

Then, turning on the crowd, she growled, “Why are you all silent? We can’t be silent. You know we can’t.”

Mehdi’s eyes were shut, his face tilted skyward. Parviz had placed the picture frame at his foot and turned his back, his shoulders heaving.

She carried on. “In exile . . . In exile, I’m burying him. In exile, where he never wanted to be. I know who killed them. And they can never pay the price of his blood. His life wasn’t for sale. They can never appease their way out of what’s coming to them, out of what I,
we
, will do to get them justice. There won’t be a deal. I’ll be here to remember and to shout the truth until kingdom come: I know who killed them. Khomeini, that’s who! Khomeini killed them.”

Parviz could not bear to watch her any longer. He feared that strangers hearing her imperfect speech might think less of her or their tragedy. They were grief-stricken not mad, transplanted not rootless. He stepped behind her, slipped his hands under her arms, and lifted her. In his grip, she hung like a marionette, at last hushed.

The mourners walked up to the pit and each dusted the coffin with a fistful of soil. Parviz could not watch them. He turned to Mehdi, grabbed him, and began a loud, unabashed cry. Mehdi, wrapping his arms around Parviz, wept in return. While they embraced, each man wondered if the other was the insider who had betrayed them.

• • •

After the burial, the young journalist lingered. He could not leave. Norbert Siegmund did not know anyone in the crowd, nor did he understand any Persian. But what he had witnessed hardly needed translation. He approached Parviz, whom he recognized from his television interviews, and asked if they could talk. Shohreh’s lamentations echoing in his ears, Norbert wanted Parviz to guess at the possible suspects behind the crime.

“Suspects? You want to call them suspects? You can, if you like. But there’s nothing plural or mysterious about it. This is the work of Iran’s regime. No suspects there. They’re the culprits, beyond the shadow of doubt. I’m more sure of that than I am of myself standing here now.”

His certainty impressed Norbert. Wishing to prolong the conversation, he played devil’s advocate.

“But the federal prosecutor is leaning toward the Kurdish group, the PKK.”

“The federal prosecutor can lean whichever way he wants, but it doesn’t change the facts. These men who died weren’t mafia members or drug dealers. They were visionaries of the highest order, real patriots, after whom other governments name national holidays. What does the federal prosecutor know about what we’ve paid for in blood and tears for thirteen years?”

Like all exiles, he assumed that everyone’s calendars began with 1979.

“You sound adamant,” Norbert replied. “Aren’t you afraid you might be wrong?”

“I sound adamant because I know my history. This isn’t the first time an exile has been killed. There have been
many, many deaths like this. Am I afraid? Of course, I am. I’m afraid that those who don’t know the history may be fooled. I’m afraid of the truth never seeing the light of day, this charade going on until we’re all done away with.”

Norbert did not know what Parviz meant by history. But he was not about to detain him in that cemetery for an explanation. He offered his business card to Parviz and suggested that they meet again soon. Parviz tucked the card in his pocket and promised to call him.

After the funeral, the mourners stopped at the cargo section of Berlin’s Tegel Airport to send the coffins of the three Kurds off to Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery where they would have the worthy farewell they could not get at home. When the plane was airborne, the crowd converged, most of them Kurds, on Iran’s consulate, an indistinct three-story building on Stavanger Street. The staff inside had been warned of the oncoming protesters. The front gates had been chained and the shutters had been lowered over the windows. Now and then, the lens of a camera was wedged in the blinds. The unruliness outside was clearly on record.

Riot police had already garrisoned the building. Uniformed men brandishing batons, helmets, and shields locked their gaze with empty-handed protesters. As mourners, they had shed what tears they had. Now the fog of grief lifted to reveal their wrath. For them, there was nowhere else to go. This fortress was their destination. Faced with the chain of armed policemen, they stood side by side in a chain of their own and linked arms. Watching their line, the chief of
police signaled his men. Visors were lowered, shields were centered at chest level. A tunnel formed—the police on one side, protestors on the other. They stared one another down, waiting for the other to falter.