Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  He was not the only one. Others like him had attacked exiles throughout Europe and escaped as law enforcement authorities looked on. A few were briefly detained but were quietly deported to Iran in the name of “national interest.” In Austria and France, after two such assassinations took place in the 1980s, both countries cited “national interests” and escorted the killers onto planes bound for Iran. Each time an assassin returned home safely, Tehran rewarded Europe by arranging for the release of a European hostage held captive somewhere in the lawless corners of the world. Europe accepted Tehran’s math: dozens of dead Iranian exiles equaled one free European citizen.

  These deaths were merely an inconvenience to the politicians who were boosting their careers by negotiating with Tehran and facilitating trade. They were granting asylum to Iranian dissidents at their borders, giving them the illusion of having reached a safe haven. But they were also turning a blind eye to assassins crossing the same borders.

  Parviz did not know the details of this dark history, but he intuited its essence, and it was what he told the interrogating officer when he asked who Parviz thought was behind the crime. The officer noted the statement in the file but appeared skeptical.

  Dawn had broken by the time the questioning ended and Parviz was allowed to leave. He stepped into the hallway, looking for Mehdi or the others. Instead, he found Shohreh. The two rushed to each other and embraced.

  He wailed, “They killed them, Shohreh. They killed them.”

  “How’s Noori?” she whimpered.

  Deaf to her words, he went on, “Our dear ones. . . . all gone. The Kurds. Dead as stone on the floor. Blood all over. Oh, Shohreh. Aziz, poor Aziz . . .”

  They shook with weeping and talked without listening to the other. She asked again through sobs, “Noori, Parviz, Noori! What happened to Noori?”

  But he only wept. She released herself from his embrace, looked into his eyes, and repeated her question. This time, he heard her. That Shohreh had not yet learnrd of her husband’s death stunned him. In a daze, he simply echoed her, “Noori?” then resumed wailing.

  Shohreh pressed. “Yes, Noori. Tell me, what happened to him? Will he be all right? What will I do if something happens to him?”

  Parviz averted his gaze from hers. Standing before Shohreh, faced with her yearning, valor failed him. He mumbled, “He was breathing the last time I saw him.”

  Then, without pause, he turned on his heel and hurried down the hallway, looking for the exit.

  5

  Ever since that night at the Mykonos restaurant, Parviz Dastmalchi won’t have dinner unless it’s served under the table.

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  Bruno Jost first heard of the murders at the Mykonos restaurant in the men’s room of his office, the chief federal prosecutor’s headquarters in Karlsruhe, some four hundred miles from Berlin. From behind the stall door, the prosecutor received a briefing from his superior.

  “Quadruple homicides of top Iranian Kurds at a Greek place in Berlin, sometime around twenty-three hundred hours last night. Quite a scene, Mr. Jost. Could be linked to the other Kurdish case you’ve got on your plate.” The superior relayed the crux of what he had learned in a phone call from the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency.

  The conversation continued against the backdrop of rushing water and the hissing of a hand dryer. They discussed the assassins’ probable identities as they walked the long corridor to Jost’s office. He was in the throes of a case involving the PKK, the armed separatist group of Turkish Kurds. He could not help suspecting there was a link between that case and the murders in Berlin. For a militant group, an assassination would be the swiftest solution to a dispute over leadership.

  “The victims being high-profile political types, the killers being most likely foreign agents,” Jost said, more in rumination than inquiry, “this ought to be our case, don’t you agree?”

  He was hoping to take on what seemed to be a new piece to the puzzle he was trying to solve.

  His superior, the head of the terrorism division, shared Jost’s intuition, and asked him to make a few preliminary inquiries.

  Bruno Jost made two calls—one to the Berlin police and one to the federal police—to assess the scope of the case, which, if it proved vast enough to be deemed a threat to the nation’s security, his office would claim as its own.

  At forty-two, Bruno Jost had reached his moment of professional reckoning. He wanted a case consequential enough to put his skills and mettle to the test. Such a case, he believed, seldom came a prosecutor’s way, and, if it did, only once. His professional lot thus far had included a notable medley of drug and terrorism cases. But even the most demanding of them, one brought against the former East German officials after reunification—grueling enough to keep him in Leipzig, far from home for six months—had not quenched or exhausted but only conditioned him for an Olympian run.

  A prosecutor’s ambition is usually the mark of his opportunism, his eagerness to stage a performance in the courtroom in the hopes that politicians might take notice and promotion might follow. But in Germany a prosecutor rises through the ranks only by merit—a series of rigorous tests and internal peer reviews. Courtroom drama hardly has a place in this universe, where the prosecutor is neither the adversary of the accused nor the victim’s defender, but an objective agent on a mission to find the truth. He is the nonpartisan trustee who must follow all leads against, or in favor of, all sides. His success or failure hardly reflects his oratory or panache. It comes long before the curtain rises on the courtroom stage, during the many days, weeks, or even months of grueling investigation, culminating in the indictment. The ensuing trial is not a battle between two adversarial parties. It is a thorough examination of the merits of that indictment that is, in essence, the prosecutor’s last word, his discovery, his verdict on the matter the judges set out to examine.

  The prospect of such a monastic quest had preoccupied Jost from boyhood, as he read favorites by Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, in particular), Karl May, Albert Schweitzer (for Jost, too, had a passion for distant lands), and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—the latter having left him ever daydreaming about scenarios of his own solitary encounters with great odds. Jost’s tanned face, small hands, salt and pepper hair (more pepper than salt in 1992), and disarming lilac eyes belied his fierceness. The decor of his office was equally misleading, seeming more like the tidy quarters of a lovelorn youth than the workplace of a middle-aged attorney. On his walls hung a poster of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and a picture of snow-covered prairie. There were two overgrown plants in need of repotting on a shelf and a few unframed cartoons tacked above his desk next to the file cabinet on which pictures of his family were propped. These tokens of serenity camouflaged his inner intensity. Law was the most consuming passion of his life. He had afforded the luxuries of marriage and children only because his wife, Angela, who often found herself alone in the face of domestic trials, was unusually resourceful. His father had been a hospital attendant, his mother, a homemaker. Law had been the antidote to his inner adolescent tumult—the mark of his mutiny against his lowly filial destiny. It took no more than skimming a few vocational brochures at a high school job fair for Jost to discover his future. In his teenage state, becoming a prosecutor seemed a noble profession. When he finally entered one of Germany’s most prestigious offices, Jost was an unfettered prodigy who owed no one for his ascent.

  After the phone calls, Jost pondered what he had learned. Two facts loomed larger than any others. The first was that the killers had insulted their victims not in Kurdish but in Persian, which probably meant they were not Kurds. The second was that the crime in Berlin had a precursor in Vienna. Three years earlier, another Iranian Kurdish leader, the predecessor of the main target at Mykonos, had also been assassinated. Though the assassins were still at large, the three-year investigation by the Austrian investigators pointed to Iran’s embassy in Vienna.

  The telephone rang. Chief
Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl had heard the news in his car, en route to work. He had immediately called to tell his office to begin working on the case.

  “We’ll take it now and worry about proving why it’s ours later,” were the words of von Stahl, whose elegant, baritone voice had a tinny echo on the mobile telephone.

  Von Stahl’s next call would be to his press secretary, he assured Jost, to arrange a noon press conference. In the meantime, he instructed Jost to take charge of the investigation in Berlin.

  On his way to the airport, Bruno Jost drafted the statement that would become the emblem of his career. It began with a description of the incident and then, in a paragraph, he summarized his earliest suspicions about the culprits.

  The pattern of the execution—particularly the profile of the victims who were all members of the opposition—speaks to the political motivation behind this crime. Based on the current evidence, the following are the possible culprits:

  1)PKK as the rival of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan. The possible reasons may be: In the past the PKK has widely and routinely attacked competing movements. In these instances, it has not shied away from murder. Another clue may be that one of the perpetrators shot Sadegh Sharafkandi with a handgun, even though he had already been shot by a machine gun.

  2)An Iranian governmental agency may also be a suspect since the gathering was of a group of Iranian opposition members. That one of the perpetrators shouted an expletive in Persian speaks of a punitive or vengeful act on behalf of a governmental organization.

  To this he added several legal citations to justify the federal prosecutor’s claim to the case. At the bottom, dispensing with titles and prefixes, he wrote only: Jost

  Berlin beckoned, and the prosecutor had one regret. He would be missing his wife on the night of their twenty-second wedding anniversary, something he hoped to rectify with a loving phone call. He expected to be home in a few days. Neither he nor Angela could have known that they would remain apart for six weeks, or that September 18 would some day be not simply the reminder of their union, but also of the ordeal that put that union through its toughest trial.

  Sara Dehkordi knew something was amiss when she woke up to find her parents gone and her aunt at her bedside. The morning grew stranger when she learned she would be skipping school. Instead, the two of them went out and wandered through the streets. And when her aunt bought all the frivolous things Sara pointed to in shop windows—the small indulgences her parents never permitted—her foreboding worsened. Never had getting her wish made her so miserable.

  Sara was not the only little girl to skip school that day. At his apartment, the first call Parviz made was to his former wife. Hearing the cheerful voice of his daughter at the other end, he grumbled, “You’re home, Salomeh. Warum?” He broke into German as they often did together, speaking a mix of tongues, one of the mixed blessings of their overlapping worlds.

  Salomeh said that her mother had allowed her a day off, then handed the receiver to her for proof. Parviz’s ex came on and he whispered, “Listen! I can’t say much now, but keep Salomeh away from television today.”

  Calls! All he wanted to do was make calls. He paced the apartment—from his living room couch, past the television set where the news was on, to the balcony for air, to the telephone on his bedroom desk, to the stove in the kitchen where he was boiling water for tea—over and over again. His morning routine had vanished. The thought of eating or going to bed did not enter his mind. Only, calls! He dialed his secretary at Berlin’s Red Cross where he was a supervising social worker managing the affairs of refugees. “I won’t be in today,” he told her and, when asked why, he broke into a sob.

  “Were you robbed? Is your mother dead? Is your daughter missing?” came the secretary’s frantic questions.

  All he could say to her was, “Turn on the news!”

  • • •

  He took a shower. Under the rushing water, he stood with eyes wide open. If he closed them, the image of the extended arm in a black leather sleeve would plague his mind. It was not until the streaming water struck his body that he felt the aching in his right cheek and temple and remembered the blow to his right side upon falling off his chair at the restaurant.

  The age of real-time news had not dawned, and reporters were not yet looking for him. On an ordinary morning, he would have reveled in the peace. But against the uproar within him, quiet was the antithesis of peace. More calls! He dialed another number. It was that of a friend, an editorial writer on the board of the progressive daily Berliner Zeitung.

  “Hello there. This is Parviz.”

  “Hey there, Parvis!” the voice came, softly modifying the last syllable of his name, per Parviz’s own earlier instructions. (“Think of Paris,” he told Germans who had trouble remembering his name, “then add a V after the R and voilà, you’ve got me.” A slight mispronunciation, he figured, was a small sacrifice for the sake of a good mnemonic.)

  He crafted a single sentence to distill the ordeal for the busy journalist. “I was there at the restaurant, at Mykonos, with the four men who died last night.”

  “I heard. Let’s have coffee one of these days to talk it over. Today is insane.”

  Parviz, stunned by the lukewarm reception, was forming his next sentence when the reporter excused himself and rushed off.

  The dismissal caused a wave of panic in Parviz. For years, he had carefully collected journalists the way a connoisseur collects wine. In their company, the raconteur in Parviz found a captive audience. Spinning tales was a skill he had been perfecting since childhood, when he and his friends, who could not afford to go to the movies, pooled their allowances together to buy a single ticket for an emissary to see, then recount the ninety-minute film over the span of hours—so elaborately that the film, if the others ever did see it, invariably fell short of its narration.

  Journalists had always been Parviz’s most formidable allies. Years ago, after his visa had expired, the same editorial writer he had just spoken to had saved him from deportation by writing a scathing piece on Germany’s repressive immigration policy. But now? To whom could he turn now?

  As he brooded, the telephone rang. The same voice filled the receiver once more. “I’m sorry, Parvis. It’s a crazed morning here. Did you say you, yourself, were at the Mykonos last night?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Then we must talk instantly.”

  Café Kranzler was teeming with customers at midmorning, as it had on many mornings in its two hundred years of operation. A waiter in the café’s trademark maroon uniform seated Parviz at a table for two. The other chair did not remain empty for long. To his great relief, the old friend who had nearly forsaken him appeared, looking almost as distraught as he felt. The Kurds who had died had been guests of the Social Democratic Party, whose politics the newspaper advocated. That the party had failed to protect its guests was devastating, especially to the editorial writer who was one of its most vocal supporters.

  Neither man spoke of what was undeniably on their minds—of fear. Parviz was certain the killers would soon return for him, but said nothing of it. The other sensed it so vividly that the words seemed superfluous. Never had the bold, outspoken Parviz asked not to be named in a piece, or hidden himself from view, as he did on that gray, cloudy morning, behind a pair of sunglasses worn indoors. For the second time, Parviz began recounting the details of the night before, the second of hundreds of times to come. Recollecting the tale did not ease his pain, for he had yet to feel pain, but it shattered the silence he was certain the killers wished to drive him into.

  The first few questions established the Doctor’s purpose in Berlin, at the conference, then at the dinner with the exiles. Parviz’s voice faltered when he talked about the confusion over the time of the meeting, and of Noori’s telephone call to him. The answers came easily to him as he walked the listener through the memories, hour by hour, until he was asked, “How did you survive?”

  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.