But upon his return on Sunday evening luck, too, returned to him. There were a dozen messages on his answering machine, several of them from the federal police, urging him to get in touch immediately. With every new arrest or discovery, the police called the surviving witnesses to weigh in on their findings. Parviz dialed Mehdi. Whatever the news, Mehdi had to have heard about it.
“They’ve got a few albums,” Mehdi said, “with some hundred or so pictures in them.”
Parviz asked if Mehdi had seen anyone familiar.
“Few of Darabi in there, for sure. There’s one with him in the middle. The others next to him, I think, are them.”
Parviz did not call the federal police that evening. He already knew what they wanted of him. They would ask that he go to them, sit in a room, and look through the very images he had tried to find, and which, like so many other pieces of information, they were unlikely to release. He was through being the obedient witness.
Before he closed his eyes that night, he asked himself once more: What would Noori do?
Monday dawned with a bright new scheme in Parviz’s mind. He dialed the number the caller had left on his machine. When he introduced himself, relief rang in the agent’s voice who greeted him.
“What can I do for you?” Parviz asked, trying to sound unaware.
As he had expected, the agent asked that he go to their offices for a Mykonos-related matter.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” he said without hesitation. “You see, since this whole thing first happened, I’ve missed too many days of work. If I ask my boss for even another hour off, I risk losing my job.”
Then he proposed that they meet at his office instead, so he would not have to be out again.
• • •
The morning was all the time he had to set his plan in motion. He told his secretary not to leave her desk after lunch, because a few “high profile visitors” with little time to spare would be visiting. He instructed her to quickly photocopy a few items—an album or two on his desk open to the exact pages to be duplicated while he and his guests were out of the room.
At two o’clock two agents arrived, bearing an oversized briefcase. Settling in the love seat beside Parviz’s desk, they placed the first album in front of him. He began leafing through the pages with great care. In that first volume, he recognized no one. The second album followed. Halfway through, he spotted a familiar face, that of a man with a balding head, hooked nose, and deep-set eyes. Darabi was smiling at him, standing between two other bearded figures who towered over him. The one on the right resembled the man he had picked from the lineup. On the facing page, there were several other images of the same men in various poses.
“That’s them,” he exclaimed, then pressed a hand against his forehead and shut his eyes.
“It’s all difficult, very difficult, to have to look at these pictures and relive that night whenever something like this comes up,” Parviz told the visitors.
Seeing the sympathetic expressions on their faces, he asked if they might take a short break. The agents consented. The afternoon being young, the guests welcomed the idea of freshly brewed coffee.
They walked to the common personnel room across the hall. Parviz took his time rinsing the pitcher and setting the coffeemaker. Over the sounds of the dripping and snorting of the machine, the agents talked about the heavy toll investigations always took on victims, casting compassionate glances at Parviz.
As he poured coffee, he asked who they thought was the culprit behind the murders. The agents turned silent, shaking their heads. After a few perfunctory sips Parviz announced that the caffeine had done its magic, rose from his seat, and led the way back to his office for a last round at the albums.
“I’ve got something you really want, Norbert. Something that will make you quit whatever you’re doing to walk over to my office right away,” the exuberant Parviz whispered into the receiver, moments after the agents left.
“You found a photo of Darabi?” Norbert asked.
Parviz said that he had done better than that.
“You found a photo of Yousef?”
Pride rang in Parviz’s voice as he repeated that he had done even better.
“You found a photo of Rhayel?” Norbert asked, gleeful and impatient.
“I’ve got a photo of all three!” Parviz burst out.
“This makes me very nervous!” Norbert said, though it was joy, not nervousness, echoing in his voice.
“Let’s just pray for the well-being of the unknown secretary in whose key ring hangs a master key, and whose hands run the Xerox at the speed of light.”
“Don’t move! I’ll be right over.”
• • •
That night, the first exclusive photo of the men involved in the Mykonos murders aired on the local broadcast Berliner Abend schau. The riveting segment was narrated by Norbert over a collage of pictures, beginning with the scene of the crime.
Tonight, we focus on the investigation, which, despite all the evidence, has yielded few certainties on the part of the authorities. The federal prosecutor maintains that rival Kurdish groups are likely to have ordered the murders on September 17 at the Mykonos restaurant. But slowly, Iran’s regime is emerging as the true culprit. Many feel that the German and international communities are not interested in shedding light on this crime.
The montage of photos faded into the sight of Parviz and Mehdi seated side-by-side on a leather sofa. Norbert addressed them, and they answered sheepishly, each ending the other’s sentence.
“Yes. I went to the federal police headquarters in Meckenheim and looked at the lineup.”
“And so did I.”
“And I identified the killer who had shot at us that night with a machine gun.” Each nodded as the other spoke.
Mehdi added, “I think, though I can’t be certain, I recognized the same man in the lineup. I picked him out and was told by an agent afterward that it was a big, important step in the investigation. But no one has since come forward to acknowledge it at all.”
Norbert’s voice boomed again as highlighted sentences from the consul’s letter scrolled across the screen.
But we know Iran is involved because Kazem Darabi represented Iran during the Green Week exhibit.
Then the bespectacled face of another exile appeared.
“I wrote a letter to the German foreign ministry requesting information about the Mykonos investigation. In response, they sent me a letter. Here’s what it says: ‘We have no conclusive evidence yet. No real signs confirming who is behind this crime one way or another.’”
Anger swept across the interviewee’s face as he stared into the camera. After a long pause, he went on to read another passage from the same letter. “‘Despite your . . .’” he poked his chest feverishly, “‘. . . your claims and accusations of the involvement of the Iranian regime.’”
He lifted his head, stared silently into the camera once more, and added a final ultimatum. “We, the Iranians of Berlin, demand that all documents regarding this case be made public immediately.”
The segment caused a sensation, even without the revelations about the ballistic results from the weapons. Ordinary Berliners who, until then, had only seen phantom photos of the accused, were shaken by their real faces. The images renewed the public’s fury, but this time the suggestion of a political cover-up spurred an unprecedented outcry.
At dawn, Norbert rang Parviz to warn that the federal police had just contacted the station and their agents were en route to the studio.
“I’m sure they’ll want to see you next. Lay low! They’re mad as hell!”
That afternoon the director of the criminal division summoned Parviz to his office. Parviz went reluctantly. Without moving from his desk, the director cast a livid look at the visitor and told him to take a seat, pointing to a chair across his desk.
“But put your briefcase by the door first!”
The request sounded odd to Parviz, who asked the reason.
&
nbsp; “You know why! You can steal a piece of gum out of someone’s mouth and he wouldn’t know it,” the director grunted. “Just tell me how you stole the photos.”
“Photos?” Parviz, startled by the man’s fury, tried to stall as he gathered his thoughts. “The ones on the TV program last night?”
The director glared at him in silence, then turned to his secretary and asked, “Won’t you return to your desk, please? We need a few moments alone.”
As the door shut behind her, the director glared at the visitor once again. Parviz threw his shoulders up, seeming unaffected.
“You have nothing to say?” the director thundered.
Parviz only rose and walked to the door. The director changed his tone and said in a softer voice, “Let me see you to the elevator.”
In the hallway, he pressed again. “No one’s here, see? I just need to know, for my own sake, how you did it.”
“I’ve done nothing, sir,” Parviz said, watching the arrows above the elevator door, avoiding his inquisitor’s gaze.
When the doors opened, the director made a last plea. “Why don’t we go down on foot?”
They descended the stairs together. At the bottom, the director pointed out that they were on the street, beyond the agency’s walls or its surveillance cameras. Sounding defeated, he asked yet again, “Man to man, tell me: how did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“You stole those photos and I must know how.”
“I’m not a thief, sir, but since you insist, I’ll tell you who did it,” Parviz retorted.
“Who?”
“You did!”
“I? Why would you say such an absurd thing?” the director, furious again, blurted.
“Because I can. Because I’m the victim, and you are the BKA. People will believe what I say over the word of a bureaucrat any day. They themselves will think up why you may have done it—rivalry, corruption, whistle-blowing. There’s no limit to the public’s imagination.”
The director was mum. Parviz wished him a pleasant day, turned on his heel, and walked away. He fought hard to suppress the urge to look back.
10
Despite what many think, there is freedom of speech in Iran. Only, there’s no freedom after speech.
—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist
When it came to mastering a case, Bruno Jost had no patience for leisurely introductions. He devoured his subject, now Iran, and not only its politics, but also its art and culture. His guide and Persian-German interpreter, Zamankhan, had drawn up a list of books for him to read, and among other lessons he had taken Jost to a Persian restaurant. The interpreter recommended the kebabs: the grilled meat that readily appealed to the Western palate. But since the urgency of the investigation weighed so heavily on him, Jost ordered what the menu listed as “the most truly Iranian dish of all”—a bowl of Ghormeh Sabzi, an herb stew.
“It goes over the saffron rice,” the interpreter instructed. He showed how the dried lime had to be squeezed to let the flavor seep into the mix of leek, parsley, chive, scallion, cilantro, and fenugreek. Then he scooped a spoonful of stew and daintily placed it over a spoonful of rice. He was a highly measured man whose precision extended far beyond syntax (he always introduced himself by pausing over the syllables of his own name, Za-man-khan). Jost watched him, then simply emptied the bowl over the mound of rice and dug in; he was a passionate man who readily immersed himself in the unfamiliar.
If the grubby look of the stew made the prosecutor squeamish, his face did not show it. After the first mouthful, he pondered. It was strangely delectable; tart to be sure, but also lush and fragrant—a profusion of flavors that hinted at the distinct origins of each ingredient yet delivered a single exotic taste. Jost did not leave the restaurant till he had a copy of the recipe. His enthusiasm for the dish had as much to do with palate as intellect. He cherished the surprise of seeing herbs he had known only as garnish become a meal and, even more, that it was, per its description, truly Iranian, not known among Arabs. The dish—unexpected, and rare—mirrored the surprise of his recent encounter with Iran.
Like most educated Westerners, Bruno Jost held two irreconcilable views of Iran: a rich ancient civilization and a savage theocracy. He discovered the rift in his own perspective, only after beginning to probe into the Mykonos case. One view was of the exotic Persia—its bygone glories and empires, its historic ruins, its poets, and its miniatures and rugs. The other was of the shiite hub of hostility—the fist-throwing mobs on the evening news, their hateful chants against the West, the fanatical rulers inciting violence. His reverence for Persia had sufficed in the past, but now that he had a murder to solve, it was no longer enough.
To consider Tehran as the mastermind of the Mykonos murders made Jost uneasy because it went against Germany’s diplomatic ethos. In 1988, four months after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made history by becoming the first Western European senior official to visit Tehran in many years. He had gone a skeptic and returned an optimist: under the leadership of its new president, Rafsanjani, Iran was ready to embrace Europe once more, or so Genscher believed. The era of radicalism had ended, giving Europe the chance to back the forces of moderation by helping Iran recover from war. German businesses cheered the notion, and so did most Germans.
Mykonos was not the first terrorism case Jost had handled. He had seen his share of corpses in pools of blood. Nor was it his first case dealing with troubled territories beyond his own country: he had investigated several high profile cases involving Turks, Yugoslavs, and Lebanese in the past. But the more he learned about this case, about Iran, the greater grew its allure to the prosecutor. Its intrigue was boundless. To discover, for instance, that the members of the terror team were from Iran and Lebanon and did not all speak the same language had surprised him. They communicated in Arabic, but for the Persian-speaking Iranians on the team, it had been a second language. He no longer dismissed details.
“Why are some turbans black and others white?” he asked Zamankhan, the interpreter. The black turban, he was told, is worn exclusively by those who claimed to be the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.
A mosque ceased to be simply a place of worship. That, too, he learned when Zamankhan explained that the Imam Jafar Mosque in Berlin, where Darabi was a major benefactor, did not welcome all Muslims. It was a hub for radical Shiites, funded mostly by Tehran.
Though the evidence against Tehran quickly began to outweigh that against the PKK, the prosecutor would not rule the Turkish group out—not publicly. He could not. Bonn was carefully monitoring the case. On September 18, the office of the chief federal prosecutor released Jost’s memo naming Tehran a possible suspect. Immediately after its release, the chief federal prosecutor, Alexander von Stahl, was severely reprimanded by the justice ministry. His office was never to release another statement without the justice ministry’s approval.
Calls from “concerned colleagues” had come in, advising Jost to let law yield to diplomacy. They counseled that in cases as important as Mykonos, lawyers were best to leave politicians in charge and limit the scope of their investigation, a move that would “surely benefit one’s future career.”
He courteously listened, then did the only thing he could do—investigate.
Exiled Iranians, too, had besieged his office with messages of their own, demanding that he expand the scope of the investigation beyond the men in custody to implicate their masters. But since he fiercely protected the case from others who wished to influence it, he kept his distance from the exiles. He was wary of political oppositions and of falling prey to a plot by former leaders who might use him to revive their own failed enterprise.
What consumed him was neither the prospects of his future career nor the pressures from invested parties. It was the question of motive. To imagine that Tehran, a government ruling over sixty million citizens, was threatened by a minority of four million seemed implausible to him. Besides, the his
torians he had consulted unanimously agreed that, compared to the Kurds elsewhere, Iran’s Kurds had always led far better lives. Given the ancient history of camaraderie among the Iranians and the Kurds why would Tehran wage war against them?
VIENNA. He thought again of the word he had written in block letters during his first night on the case. From the beginning, the ghost of another Kurdish leader, the Doctor’s predecessor, Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, had hovered over the investigation. Ghassemlou and two associates had been shot at an apartment in Vienna in July 1989. The similarities between the two murders—three Kurdish leaders killed in two neighboring countries within three years—were great enough to warrant a collegial visit. So Jost flew to Vienna to consult his counterparts across the border.
In meeting and reviewing the findings of the Austrian investigators, Jost quickly learned some key facts. Ghassemlou was widely popular. There had never been any doubt that his assassins were non-Kurds because in the ’80s even his staunchest rivals could not have survived the ravages of the regime and war without his stewardship. Unlike the assassins in Berlin, the ones in Vienna had left a clear trail that had led to Iran’s embassy. One assassin had even been caught, but once the ties between him and the embassy were discovered, the Austrian administration had intervened. Within two weeks, the prisoner was escorted onto a plane headed for Tehran. A few outraged parliamentarians launched their own investigations and found that the release had come on the heels of a major weapons deal with Iran.
To the Austrians, the motive was hardly a mystery: Tehran feared Ghassemlou. He had first emerged on the political scene in the early 1970s, and become a national figure by the late 1980s. He was beloved by Kurds and non-Kurds alike. Unlike the Doctor, the globe-trotting Ghassemlou was charismatic—as equally at ease in mountains of Kurdistan as on the sidewalks of Europe, sipping espresso beside his Czech wife. Educated in France, he moved between Paris and Prague as effortlessly as he did between French and the Czech language. After the Ayatollah came to power in 1979, Ghassemlou became the patron saint of all persecuted Iranians who took shelter in Kurdistan. His popularity transcended his own territory. Neither defeated nor driven into exile, he stayed in Iran and became a symbol of both resistance and hope. In 1989, more frail than ever from the bruises of a war whose only conquest had been swaths of ruins and millions dead or maimed, Tehran feared its own demise, and the electrifying Ghassemlou who could bring it about.
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace Page 9
