Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  Hufelschulte paid Parviz a visit, hoping he might have photos or other material suited for print.

  “How much for a photo, assuming it’s an exclusive?” the reporter asked after settling onto the love seat in Parviz’s office—which seemed shrunken beneath his tall, broad frame.

  “I’m not a businessman, you know. It’s not money I’m after. I want information,” Parviz said in an unusually forward manner.

  The reporter paused for a few moments to review all he had to offer, then said, “There was a mole in the restaurant that night. You know that, don’t you?”

  Parviz nodded, his heart racing at the mention of the word.

  “I’ve got something on that. Is it worth an unpublished photo to you?” the reporter asked casually.

  Trying to match the other’s coolness, Parviz said that the information, if reliable, was worth a lot more than a photo. Hufelschulte said that his source had served on the federal commission on Mykonos, which impressed Parviz. One of the commission’s key findings, he explained, a time line drawn from the confessions of one of the prisoners, pointed to the presence of a spy inside the restaurant.

  9 p.m.—the telephone at the team’s apartment rings once, followed by another single ring seconds later, signaling the operation’s launch.

  9:30—the killers arrive but do not strike, certain that their man inside would keep the victims in place for as long as it took—until 10:45.

  Hearing Hufelschulte review those events quickened Parviz’s blood. His eyes fixed on the reporter’s broad face with thick, sharply arched eyebrows—as the moments preceding the killers’ entrance passed through his mind. The smell of greasy meat wafting from the table to mix with the cigarette smoke in the air; the smoothness of the glass in one hand, the starched lining of his pants pocket enveloping the other hand; the flickering candles dotting the twilight about them; the sounds of fading conversation; then, seconds later, awakening to another sensory landscape, the sounds of groans and dripping liquid, the coarse carpet pressing against his cheek, the smell of a different smoke rising. These moments that bracketed the deaths—always ready to be summoned—were deathless in his imagination.

  The reporter went on.

  “. . . and when the time finally came, the mole signals the killers to enter.”

  “No! No one signaled anybody. We were sitting there, talking the whole time. No one moved from the table. You’re wrong,” Parviz protested.

  “One person must have been moving about that night.”

  “No one! Whatever you’ve been told, I’m telling you, is wrong. I see it now. I’m sitting there. We’re all at the table, the whole time.”

  “All of you?” the reporter probed. “What about your server, the restaurant owner?”

  “What? Him?” Parviz exclaimed, pushing his hand into the air in dismissal. “Please! Don’t you know he was shot? The wretch has suffered more than all the rest of us.”

  “But he’s the one the police suspects.”

  Parviz tipped back in his chair, suddenly silent. Hufelschulte, reading the shock on Parviz’s face, asked if he needed fresh air. But Parviz did not hear him. He was elsewhere—at the dinner table on that September night. The question echoing in his head, over and over, was the last question he had heard that evening. An image he had since suppressed flooded his mind—of Aziz, not sitting beside them but leaning against the edge of the adjacent table, half standing, pointing to the Doctor, as if to point him out, saying, as if not to ask but to announce him, Would the Doctor like any more beer?

  Aziz had hardly finished his question when the shooting had begun.

  Once Parviz regained his composure, the reporter gave a few more details, including the discrepancies in Aziz’s testimony to the police. Aziz claimed to have been inside the restaurant all along, but a witness had seen him pacing the sidewalk minutes before the killers walked in.

  “Ah! But who’s that witness? An enemy of Aziz’s could be making the accusation. You know, we Iranians can be terribly cruel to each other,” Parviz said in Aziz’s defense as if in defense of his own unraveling confidence. “No, it’s a German, a neighbor, with nothing at stake in this.”

  That night, Parviz crawled into bed but knew he would not sleep. He would spend another night in the embrace of his most steadfast companion—insomnia. There could be no rest for a man in whom so much had been stirred. Everything he had dismissed as negligible gaffes of a simpleton now needed pondering. Aziz had not looked Shohreh in the eye when she had gone to visit him. He was agitated when his visitors recounted their version of events that afternoon in the hospital. He thought back to his own confusion about the date of the gathering. First had come Aziz’s message on the answering machine inviting him to the restaurant on Friday night, then the call from Noori on Thursday evening. If Aziz were the mole, had he tried to change the date of the dinner to keep the scene small and manageable for the killers? Mykonos had never been a bustling restaurant, but it had been quieter than usual that evening. The chef had been ill, and he remembered Aziz shaking his head in regret as he turned customers away. Had the chef really been ill?

  Aziz as the mole! The idea withered him through the night. What gnawed at him was not his own betrayal by Aziz, but Noori’s. Did Aziz blame his divorce on the liberating influence of Noori? This is my mola, Aziz’s voice echoed in his ear. The image of him wrapping his arms around Noori kept playing in his mind. Aziz pressed Noori in his embrace with such ardor it was as if Noori was venerable, a totem he prayed to. He seemed so dedicated to Noori that Parviz—who found much intolerable in Aziz (especially the stench of alcohol on his breath)—did not confront Noori about his friendship with the restaurant owner whom they had dubbed “the buffoon.”

  And why had none of them ever wondered how a penniless refugee could purchase a property as lucrative as a restaurant exactly one year before the murders? Parviz thought and seethed. Had the mole betrayed his mola? All through the night the tides of revelation lapped against his memory. Who was the buffoon now?

  There were fewer bouquets and fewer mourners in Berlin’s central cemetery. A year had passed. Shohreh, still in black, made her way to Noori’s grave, flanked by Parviz and Mehdi. Sara had been sent to school. It was a quieter occasion, but no less somber. Raw grief had lifted. The solemnity that settled in its place was no less affecting in the eyes of the reporters who congregated in a corner and rolled their tapes.

  Standing at the plot, Shohreh suddenly spotted an unsettling presence in the distance. Her heart sank in her chest. She turned to Parviz and whispered, “He’s coming this way.”

  “Who?” Parviz asked, and looked in the direction where Shohreh’s eyes had been fixed. Aziz was approaching.

  “The traitor! The bastard! Let him come. I’ll shred him to pieces with tooth and nail,” the inflamed widow hissed.

  “You can do no such thing. Keep it together. Let me handle it,” Parviz counseled her.

  Aziz circled the crowd to take his place next to Shohreh. The murmurs died down. The crowd was as silent as the grass under their feet, as still as the trees around them. No one wanted to miss the sound of the man who had barely spoken in a year.

  “Hello,” Aziz greeted Shohreh sheepishly.

  “Hello,” Shohreh replied bitterly and turned away.

  “You look well, Aziz,” Parviz said, stepping between the two.

  “Eh! I’ll never be a hundred percent, but what’s there to do? I go on breathing,” Aziz replied and nodded to a few others.

  He was about to move when Parviz grabbed his arm and whispered in his ear, “Aziz, stop by and let’s talk before you leave.”

  “What about?”

  “You know what.”

  “Okay. I’ll stay,” Aziz assented before disappearing into the crowd.

  Shohreh asked what Parviz planned to do next.

  “I’ll just ask him if he did it. That’s all. We should give him a chance to tell his side,” Parviz answered.

  But when t
he speeches had been delivered, the poems had been recited, and the melancholic ballads had been sung, Parviz and Shohreh looked up to find Aziz gone.

  Two weeks later, in the early hours of dawn, the telephone in Parviz’s apartment rang. In a drunken stupor, Aziz had dialed Parviz’s number. It took a few moments for Parviz to feel awake enough to say, “In the cemetery, I asked you to stay, but you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Aziz shot back through sobs or drunken hiccups, Parviz could not tell which.

  “So, what is this talk you want with me?” Aziz demanded.

  “You don’t know?”

  Only hiccups could be heard at the other end.

  “Four people are dead, Aziz, and people say you, you, are the reason. They say you work for the regime,” Parviz fumed.

  “History will prove me innocent,” Aziz replied.

  “History? What history? This is history, this conversation between you and me. Have you no shame?”

  “I did nothing wrong,” Aziz hissed.

  “Explain that!”

  “I don’t need to explain anything.” “Don’t you ever call here unless you’re ready to answer me, until you can prove you’re innocent.”

  “Suit yourself!” Aziz hiccupped and hung up.

  13

  Ballot boxes are very good for the human being, provided that the human being is a carpenter and has a large order for making them.

  —Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

  On the morning of October 7, 1993, Bruno Jost received a call from Commissioner von Trek. The most major figure in the case, “the main asset,” in the investigative vernacular, whom they had long wanted to question, was in Germany. He had quietly flown to Bonn for a confidential two-day visit. Since the visitor was unlikely to cooperate with them, the commissioner had sought permission from his chief to briefly detain him. The permission for the arrest was too politically costly to be granted, Jost and von Trek knew. But the old colleagues, despite their graying hair, had held on to certain relics of youth, especially the love of mischief and adventurism. Even if the “asset” was beyond their reach, the least they could do was to unsettle him, if only momentarily, by the chase.

  Jost cleared his schedule for the day and camped at his desk. The two men, who had vowed to remain friends in retirement, would wait till noon for the unlikely approval. Had there been the slightest mistrust between them, daring to make so bold a move would have never occurred to them. But ambition, vernal in nature, thrives on warmth, which they had in abundance between them.

  That morning, the reporter Josef Hufelschulte received a fax, whose contents, in journalistic venacular, amounted to a scoop. He reviewed the document, then immediately did what a savvy reporter would—called his sources to weigh in on his find.

  “Hey, Parviz! It’s Hufelschulte,” the reporter greeted, then, quickly dispensing with pleasantries, asked, “What am I to make of Fallahian’s visit?”

  “Fallahian? As in the intelligence minister?” Parviz asked, clearly startled by the news.

  Hufelschulte elaborated: Ali Fallahian, whose ministry had been named in the federal prosecutor’s indictment, was in Germany. The visit would have been a secret, if a copy of the minister’s itinerary had not been leaked to Hufelschulte. The itinerary, telexed to several agencies—the interior ministry and the border police among others—had been intercepted by an ally of the reporter at one of the agencies.

  “He flew into Frankfurt on Iran Air flight seven-twenty-one at eleven-thirty yesterday morning,” Hufelschulte recited the highlights, “went downtown, and then later in the day was off to Bonn to the chancellor’s mansion for a seven o’clock dinner. This morning, he’s visiting his German counterpart, Bernd Schmidbauer, at eleven.”

  Exile cultivates the archivist in its most wistful subjects. Since the murders, the penchant had become a passion in Parviz. His first concern was to obtain a copy of the itinerary, which Hufelschulte promised to send him.

  “But why’s he here? Is he meeting with the exiles?” the reporter asked.

  “He’d meet us for sure, but only if we rendezvous at the morgue, and only with our corpses. Bah! If he’s really here, three weeks before the trial begins, he’s here for one reason and one reason alone, and that’s to stop the trial.”

  To have his suspicions confirmed strengthened the reporter’s resolve. The next call he made was to the chancellery’s office of the intelligence chief, Bernd Schmidbauer. He introduced himself to the aide who took the call and bluntly asked if she could arrange an interview with Minister Fallahian prior to his return to Iran. Caught off guard, the aide denied the minister’s presence at the chancellery, which prompted Hufelschulte to recite from the itinerary. The flustered aid placed him on hold, only to return and say that she could not comment on the matter, and hung up.

  At eleven in the morning, Bernd Schmidbauer welcomed Minister Fallahian to a small meeting with only a handful of attendees, having dispensed with reception ceremonies lest they compromise the confidentiality of the visit. Schmidbauer suspected why Fallahian was there. He had foreseen such a day and tried to avert it long ago. He was an advocate of improving relations with Iran, but he was also intelligence chief, and thus privy to the full extent of Tehran’s notorious acts. In July 1992, during a private meeting with senior Iranian officials, he had issued this warning.

  “You must make me one promise! Iran cannot commit an assassination on Germany’s soil. That would place an insurmountable hurdle in the way of our efforts on your country’s behalf, especially the Critical Dialogue initiative.”

  The members of the mission had given their word. But like all things that perish in transit, the promise, too, withered upon touchdown in Tehran.

  What passed between Bernd Schmidbauer and Ali Fallahian that morning would remain a mystery for months to come. Only after severe scrutiny, and the costliest scandal of Schmidbauer’s career, were the minutes of the meeting released. In it Fallahian, cryptically referred to only as “F,” had come to make a bargain with Bonn.

  . . . F said that Iran has helped Germany a great deal. For instance, Iran pressured the Hamadi clan to release the German hostages held in Lebanon. To return the favor, the consulting minister [Bernd Schmidbauer] should help with an upcoming criminal trial in Berlin in which Iran is wrongly accused. F asked: How do you plan to stop this trial from starting?

  The consulting minister rejected the idea of meddling in the legal proceedings. He said: Berlin’s courts are in the hands of the justice ministry and function independently of other government bodies. There is no room or possibility for deal making. We can help you by trying to minimize the political costs of the trial, and our best hope is for Tehran to never conduct such an operation in Germany or Europe.

  The Iranian side consistently tried to put the Berlin trial back on the table. Both the consulting minister and his adviser rejected the idea each time. F’s request to provide the defendants with diplomatic immunity was also rejected. After repeated references to Iran’s past aid to Germany, F presented a list of other offers if only the Mykonos trial could be on the table. The consulting minister once again rejected any deals or exchanges that would have to be based on the trial. He said that he had no such powers and could not represent Germany in the way the minister expected him to.

  The words “no such powers” had inflamed the minister, who expected that Germany’s highest-ranking intelligence official to be perfectly capable, if he so willed, of putting an end to any trial. Time and again, Ali Fallahian had crossed the boundaries of military life into civilian, from religious life into political—sometimes remaining in both capacities at once. He therefore believed his European equals to be capable of doing the same. Born and raised in Isfahan, a city renowned for cunning peddlers, Ali Fallahian had expected to haggle, but walk away with a deal. With the final rejection, the minister’s youthful features—his childlike gap-toothed grin and dark, bushy beard that reached the periphery of his eye sockets—could no long
er hide his fury. A man of medium height and a robust and hefty demeanor, the minister rose from his seat and strode out, clearly incensed, his clerical robe flaring in the wind of his rushing feet.

  Bruno Jost spent part of that morning reviewing his file on Minister Fallahian. As a judge, Fallahian had presided over summary trials and ordered the executions of hundreds of political prisoners who had fallen under his Sharia rule, earning him the title of “butcher.” What implicated him in the September 17 murders—the employment of numerous interlocutors, like Darabi, by his ministry notwithstanding—was the vow he had made in a television interview, nine days before the Berlin murders.

  We have a special unit to take down the opposition. We’ve identified their central committees, neutralized and arrested them. At the moment, we have no opposition inside the country. They’ve all been forced to flee. But overseas, we keep them under surveillance. We’ve infiltrated their ranks and watch them constantly. We’ve dealt and continue to deal decisive blows to them within our borders and beyond. For example, we have seriously paralyzed the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and are not yet done with them.

  Some of the most incriminating details had been proudly offered by the minister himself. Passages from Fallahian’s own autobiography glorified what others would have agonized to bury. In the effusive prose of an adolescent, he had mapped out his brutal origins. Born in 1949 and raised in a religious family, the minister, referring to himself in the third person, wrote of his first encounter with Islam.

  The heat of faith began to sizzle in his chest and consume him so early on that he had to seek a remedy, which he found in the heat of love he felt in the company of masters such as Navab Safavi.