He had come to the United States when he was fourteen, part of a group of Jewish boys spirited out of Iran with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to save them from being used as minesweepers on the battlefront with Iraq. Some of the boys were sent to live with relatives in Israel or America; others, who didn’t have family or friends outside Iran, were placed in Ashkenazi homes. That’s when everyone began to notice the great cultural divide between the Mizrahi Jews of the East and their Western counterparts.
Leon’s host family found him polite and shy and grateful for their hospitality. His English was grammatically correct, but his pronunciation and accent made them laugh. He had a habit of standing up, as if at attention, every time an adult walked into or out of a room. He did this in school whenever the teacher came in. The first time his host family took him to see a movie, he asked when the national anthem would play and when the audience would stand up to salute the image of the president. At home, he didn’t laugh at any of the jokes on television, didn’t understand why Archie Bunker was so unhappy about having his daughter and son-in-law live with him and Edith. He said all his prayers in the wrong rhythm and often in incorrect Hebrew, turned beet-red and hung his head anytime an older person addressed him.
The host family set out to teach Leon how to properly “integrate” into American society, and they did a good job of it, so much so that by the time he went off to the University of Baltimore hardly anyone asked him where he was from anymore.
His choice of law enforcement as a career was unusual for an Iranian Jew. Because he was a man, his aspiration to be a crime writer was even more unusual: while writing seemed to be the weapon of choice for every bored Iranian housewife in New York and Los Angeles, it was not the kind of work self-respecting men willingly engaged in. The housewives could afford to write because they had husbands who paid the bills, and friends who could be co-opted into buying the book and even praising it. The men, on the other hand, risked being laughed out of town if they confused writing with work. Work, for a man, was something that produced a paycheck.
Leon needed a paycheck not just to support himself, but also to care for his parents and sister. They had moved to the United States in 1997, thirteen years after they sent Leon away. They went to live with him in his two-bedroom house on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys. Leon had bought the house as an “investment property” when he still believed he was going to sell a screenplay a year and reach a Hollywood-type pay scale. Now, he slept in the smaller bedroom and had his shirts made by his mother, who had been a seamstress in Iran.
His father was one of the many thousands of Iranian men who had had to choose between living in fear at home or running to safe obsolescence in the West, between being alone in Iran because all their family had moved away, or moving to America to be with his son and, without a job, having to depend on him entirely. He woke up every day and dressed in a suit and tie even though he had nowhere to go. In the afternoon, he took the bus to the Orthodox Iranian shul that was held in a room on the second floor of a strip mall. Then he strolled down to the Persian grocery store on the ground level and spent half an hour selecting the slimmest, crispiest Persian cucumbers.
On his way home every afternoon, Leon’s father sat in the rear of the bus and cried quietly for his wasted life and ravaged pride.
__________________
On his way out of Century City, Leon took stock of his growing list of possible suspects: There was the wife, Neda; the indentured servant, Eddy Arax; the greedy cousins, the Riffraff. There was the angry gardener, Gerardo; the union boss, Lorecchio; and the random angry creditor. This last category was large and varied. At one end was the example of Raphael’s Son’s father-in-law, Dr. Raiis, a seventy-nine-year-old Iranian pediatrician who had once tried to run over Raphael’s Son with his ancient Volvo and missed. At the opposite end was Mrs. Scheinbaum, an eighty-four-year-old Ashkenazi woman from the Pico-Robertson area who had handed over her entire life savings to Raphael’s Son because she had met him at an Orthodox shul and was impressed by his apparent piety. When she realized that he had “misplaced” her money and was not going to return her calls, and that she was not going to live long enough to see him punished, she opted for the fast track.
One Monday afternoon she put on her nice coat and comfortable shoes, and took the bus downtown. She got off at the Staples Center exit and stood on the sidewalk for a long time, waiting for someone who looked like a murderer-for-hire. When she did see such individuals, however, she was too frightened to approach them. Then, at last, she saw a black man in a dress shirt and jeans get out of a Lexus across the street. He was middle-aged and not very threatening-looking, but he had the other necessary qualifications, so she made her way over to him and asked if he needed “work.”
The black man with the Lexus was the third-highest-ranking administrator at USC. He put little old Mrs. Sheinbaum in his car and drove her home, then told her landlord to keep an eye on her in case she ventures out to look for another assassin. That—through the landlord—is how the entire Pico-Robertson district learned of Mrs. Sheinbaum’s downtown adventure, and why Raphael’s Son sent Eddy Arax to file a police report against her. Two months later, Mrs. Sheinbaum was shopping for spring onions at Benny Produce, the Persian kosher grocery store on Pico and Oakhurst, when she felt a sharp pain in her temples, and dropped dead of a stroke.
* * *
From a detective’s point of view, this was a case from hell: too many people with motive, no body, witness, or weapon, and many an interested party still convinced that the victim was not dead at all, just a fugitive. Leon knew he had been assigned the case because he was Iranian, and that was okay. He knew he could pick up and interpret bits of information that would have taken an outsider a lifetime to understand. You had to know the community, how every person’s story stretched back a few generations, how the past steered the course of events in the present, to figure out where to look or even what questions to ask. You couldn’t apply the same investigative methods to the average Californian—born elsewhere, here temporarily, sees the family once a year for one meal on Thanksgiving and spends six months dreading it; has cousins he doesn’t know about or has never seen; knows nothing about the personal lives of his neighbors or coworkers, and only what his friends choose to reveal about themselves—that you would to people whose lives had been entangled together, their fate dependent on each others’, for three thousand years. With the Iranians, significant facts might remain concealed simply because the person you were asking didn’t think it was news, or was afraid he would be accused by others in the community as having had ulterior motives for sharing them with the police. Or he’ll know something but keep it to himself because he thinks it’s bad karma—enough people have been hurt already, why extend the suffering just to exact punishment?
There was all this, Leon knew, and there was also the fact that, had he deemed the case important enough, O’Donnell would have assigned a higher-ranking detective to oversee Leon’s work. Instead, he had left Leon alone, with only Kevorkian to help muddle through.
As if summoned by his thoughts, Kevorkian rang Leon at that very moment. For once, she sounded upbeat and pleased with herself.
“You’re gonna like this,” she announced. “Methinks the wife has a lover.”
__________________
According to phone records Jackie Kevorkian had dug up, Neda owned two cell phones, with two different service providers. One of the phones had been purchased on June 2, 2013, and was used to call only one number—a 7-Eleven on Brand Avenue in Glendale. Neda had called the place nearly every day since that date. In all, Kevorkian had counted twenty-eight calls in a three-week period in June.
The calls Neda placed to the 7-Eleven were always under a minute long. But she had also received calls, three in total, all from the same number. Those had lasted twenty minutes or more. The final call, made by Neda at 3:21 on the afternoon of June 25, had gone unreturned.
* * *
; Eddy Arax lived on Brand Avenue in Glendale.
LOS ANGELES
1987
__________________
The first confirmed sighting of Raphael’s Son in Los Angeles occurred in October 1987, in Attari—the Persian grocery store/café on the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue. He came in at eleven a.m., sat at table in the courtyard, and summoned the middle-aged Iranian man behind the food counter inside.
“Come here, boy!” he yelled through the doorway. “Bring a couple of Cokes. Make sure they’re taggaree—ice cold.”
The few patrons who were sitting at nearby tables eyed him with disapproval. Even the owner, a petite woman with well-tended hands and a clearly taaghooti demeanor, emerged from her back office to see for herself the person who had called a man in his fifties “boy.”
Nearly eight years into life outside Iran, the social makeup of the community remained largely static. You could still tell a person’s religious and ethnic background, and certainly their former economic and social status, just by their speech and manners, the way they walked and moved and carried themselves. Upper-class Muslims were exceedingly polite, humble, and conscious of the rules of noblesse oblige. Upper-class Jews largely resembled the Muslims. Upper-class Baha’is, who had been either Muslim or Jewish in their preconversion life, still bore their original markings. Upper-class Armenians stayed in Glendale and made sure they couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else.
As for the rest—the other 90 percent of Iranian immigrants who, contrary to the prevailing perception among the natives, were well-educated but not rich—the Jews among them went to work alongside Korean and Latino immigrants in LA’s Ragtown, the Muslims drove cabs and became bank-tellers and minimum-wage employees at small businesses, and the Armenians stayed in Glendale and made sure they couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else.
If there were working-class Baha’is, no one knew where they could be found.
What all these groups of Iranian immigrants had in common was an awareness of the importance and necessity of maintaining the social graces that, for over two thousand years, had cemented a wildly diverse group of people into a single nation. In this context, a younger man addressing an elder as “boy” was not only offensive but an unmistakable act of aggression.
Attari’s owner pegged Raphael’s Son as an Islami—the exile community’s term for a regime operative sent abroad to assassinate potential threats or invest the funds the mullahs had stolen from the country’s oil revenues and hidden safely in American and Swiss banks. She had a good mind to tell him off, but then she remembered that a Persian restaurant a block away had burned to the ground the previous week. The cause was arson, but the perpetrator and his motive remained a subject of great speculation. The owner was ruled out as a suspect because his place wasn’t insured; he claimed his competitors up and down Westwood Boulevard were to blame. Many of his customers, who knew he refused to serve Islamis no matter the consequences, thought he had finally angered one too many of them.
Raphael’s Son downed two cans of Coke and two tongue sandwiches in ten minutes, smoked a cigarette, then ordered another Coke. When the older man brought it to him, Raphael’s Son asked, “Been here long?”
The man kept his eyes on the table he was wiping. “Few years,” he said. He had the worn-out look of someone who has fought for too long and finally given in, the three-day-old stubble and much too sunken eyes of so many Iranian men stripped of their jobs and titles by exile.
“Where from?”
“Shiraz.” He turned to leave, hesitated, then faced Raphael’s Son again. “I was a civil engineer.” His voice ached. “We built highways.”
Raphael’s Son measured the man head-to-toe with his eyes. “And look at you now,” he delivered the coup de grâce, “wiping tables in Aamreekah.”
__________________
For the first year and a half after he set up shop in Westwood, barely anyone knocked on Raphael’s Son’s door. He had gone to court and legally changed his name from Muhammad Jadid al-Islam to Raphael S. Soleyman. He had rented an office on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise on the corner of Wilshire and Westwood, in a building erected by some Iranian Jews on the old site of Ship’s coffee shop. He received a great many calls, but they were all spurred by the name. The first question people asked was whether this was Aaron Soleyman’s office, which was stupid given the fate he was known to have met, but it infuriated Raphael’s Son anyway.
“It’s Soleyman all right,” he responded coldly. “R.S. Soleyman.”
He could never figure out if the silence at the other end, followed by a quiet “Oh!” and more silence, was a sign of the caller’s confusion or an expression of disbelief. Some of the callers went on to inquire what R.S. stood for, and when he told them, there was more silence, followed by a halfhearted “good luck to you,” before they hung up.
* * *
In those days, every chambermaid and seventh cousin thrice removed from the royal family was going around claiming they were a prince or princess. They started by introducing themselves as such to the natives in Europe and America, who didn’t know better, and after a while they came to believe it themselves and would repeat it to other Iranians. Some of them wrote books about their presumed aristocratic families; the less brazen simply enumerated the many towns and villages, jeweled crowns and stolen scepters, they had to give up when they escaped Iran.
These new royals were not alone in taking advantage of Westerners’ fascination with the monarchy. An absurd number of former conscripts from the Iranian armed forces suddenly seemed to have been “personal pilot to the shah.” Every other homeowner seemed to grieve the loss of a seaside mansion. Every disappointed wife recalled an earlier suitor who would have given his life—and a very substantial fortune—to marry her.
How much of the fablemaking was intentionally deceptive and how much of it was simply a result of idealizing the past, no one could say. So while the natives in LA were quick to believe every tale of aristocratic lineage or heroic status, the Iranians became especially distrustful of strangers. In the case of Raphael’s Son there was the added disadvantage of an ignominious childhood followed by a criminal youth, so that a person could be forgiven for wondering just what the young man thought he would achieve by reaching out to the people least likely to trust him.
Then again, one had to reckon, he hadn’t made it as far as Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles by being a complete imbecile.
* * *
Early on he discovered that unlike in Iran, where being Jewish was a social and commercial disadvantage, in LA he was better off as a Jew than just about anything else he might be expected to pass for. So he shaved the three-day-old beard and shed the buttoned-up dress shirts with no tie, stopped boasting about his influential friends in the regime, put the jewels he had bought with the blood of innocents in a safe-deposit box, and denied his own earlier claims of having left the country with a staggering amount of cash. In Westwood Village near UCLA, he discovered young Jewish men from Chabad offering to tie a tefillin or give the blessing of the lulab to students. It was the first time he had come across Jews who did not know him and did not care who he was, didn’t ask his name or his origins, and seemed eager to welcome him into their midst. It occurred to him that taking up religion might help rehabilitate his image in the community, so he joined the Chabad shul in West LA and, within a few months, picked up two clients. He realized that the more observant he appeared, the more people seemed to like him, so he decided he would be Modern Orthodox. It worked well enough with the Ashkenazis, but with the Iranians . . .
The Iranians still cared about a man’s name and aabehroo. To them, a family’s history remained their best collateral, more important than any legal document, more effective than any ruling by a court. It didn’t matter how often the younger-generation Iranians tried to explain to the parents that here, in the land of second chances, every person has a right to more than one life, that in America a name is just a layer
of skin you can shed as many times as you need to, to keep moving forward.
Shed the skin all you want, the parents said. It’s what’s underneath that counts and that, my dear, doesn’t change no matter what packaging you choose.
To these Iranians, the person who introduced himself as R.S. Soleyman was an unknown young man with more money than he could have earned honestly. His earlier incarnation, Muhammad Jadid al-Islam, was an extortionist who had sent scores of innocents to be tortured and killed. His original person, Raphael’s Son, was a bastard boy picked off a street corner by the Black Bitch of Bushehr.
* * *
For a while, Raphael’s Son prayed for patience. Sooner or later, he had to believe, the voices of those he had maligned were bound to fade, the image of Jadid al-Islam with his beard and buttoned-up shirt would be blacked out by the spectacle of the observant Jew in kippah and tallith, and a day would come—it had to come—when Raphael’s Son’s wealth and power would overshadow the memory of his earlier disgrace.
So he told himself it didn’t matter what the family said, he was Izikiel the Red’s real heir and would therefore act like it. He started to drop Elizabeth’s and Aaron’s names into every conversation, to refer to the family as “we” and “our.” He pretended not to notice the skeptical looks and sarcastic smiles, willed his pulse to slow down and his skin to stop perspiring from anger every time someone asked, “So they finally accepted you?” innocently or otherwise.
With every dismissive smile and every quiet snub, every invitation extended to others that was denied him and every raised eyebrow when he was seen—awkward and alone, it is true, but wasn’t his money as good as everyone else’s?—in a fancy store or elegant restaurant, Raphael’s Son became more intent on “showing them all.”
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 22
