“Get out? Get out of where? Why?”
“Leave the country! They want to truckicide you. Fallahian’s orders! Can’t tell you how I know. That alone will kill you. Just go! Find a way to cross the border. Save your questions for later. Don’t tell anyone, anyone, you’re leaving! Border guards have orders to arrest you. How you go, I don’t know. But go, or they’ll have you gone their way. That’s what I came to say.”
The deputy grabbed the man’s shoulders and their beards brushed against each other in a hurried embrace. Then he disappeared into the backseat of the Mercedes and took off.
Behind the door, he remained frozen at the foot of the stairs. Standing barefoot in a white shirt and a pair of black pants, his eyes fixed to the ground, he was the portrait of a man fallen from grace.
The heirs to the 1979 revolution had come to devour him, one of their brightest children: Abulghassem (Far-had) Messbahi, born on December 17, 1957, the son of a prosperous factory owner, the third of five children in a devout Muslim family. At four, he had learned to read while eavesdropping on his brother’s lessons through the open windows of the school yard. As a teenager, he gazed into the turquoise dome of the neighborhood mosque every night and prayed, spent summers at seminaries in Qom studying with the foremost clerics. He was among the youngest ever to enter Tehran University and mingle, a mere freshman, with the religious intelligentsia. In 1977 he signed up for the draft but deserted a year later, when the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini ordered all servicemen to abandon their posts. His next stop was inevitable, the only destination for a bright, religious twenty-one-year-old in 1978—the Rafah School, the Ayatollah’s Tehran headquarters, where he entered the inner circle.
On February 1, 1979, riding a motorbike, Messbahi shed tears of joy. The Ayatollah had returned from exile and he was one of the guards in his motorcade. By day’s end he was kneeling before the leader to kiss his hand, accepting his first official assignment. Messbahi’s rise had been swift: chief of Tehran’s largest military base, then senior diplomatic attaché to France before the year’s end. Under the guise of an attaché, he was to reinvent a new intelligence outpost in Europe. He recruited turncoats from among the opposition and deposited regular installments of cash for them in the hideouts of Hamburg, London, Lisbon, Rome, Geneva, or Brussels. His constant movement across the continent alarmed the French, who deported him and his wife in 1982.
Within days of returning to Tehran, he was promoted to chief of intelligence in Western Europe and flew to Brussels. Deportation brought him and his bride closer to each other. She, too, joined the ministry to help his cause. Together, they would raise their baby daughter and their brand-new revolution. Adaptable and quick on his feet, he also served as chief negotiator for the release of Western hostages in Iran and in Lebanon, delivering the Ayatollah’s message to world leaders.
But each time he returned to Tehran to brief colleagues such as Fallahian, he saw a rift growing between them. He and his friend, Emami, believed they had to defeat the enemy with superior intelligence. They wanted to win in the battle of ideologies. Fallahian and his band argued for bloodshed. They wanted the enemy dead.
In 1987, returning to Tehran to deliver a letter for the Ayatollah from the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter—requesting the release of an American pilot held hostage—Messbahi was quickly flanked by two men on the tarmac of the airport.
“You’re going with us,” one of them whispered in his ear, then shoved him into a car.
Once they had blindfolded him, the blows came, pounding his face and stomach. Arresting him was absurd, he said to himself, a mistake for which he would receive profuse apologies and perhaps even a promotion. When he was thrown into a solitary cell, he thought someone would soon be on the way to release him. But the person who came only took him to a room where three others sat at a table and they took turns interrogating him, demanding that he admit to being a spy.
“Messbahi! These aren’t the days of the Shah,” the good interrogator reasoned. “You can’t outsmart anyone now. Come clean!”
The bad interrogator, flicking his fingers like he was about to squash a fly, barked, “This is what we do to rebels who won’t get in line, who are out of control, whose ways we can’t trust, who are too smart for their own good.”
His interrogators were reading to him from the manuals he had helped pen, asking him questions he had designed. They whipped him, then ordered him to write a detailed account of his “treasonous activities.”
“I’m not a spy,” he repeated over and over.
But when their fresh lashes struck the blisters of the old, he began to discover things he did not know about himself. Indeed, he had been a spy, if only they could help him recall for whom, if only they would help him compose the statement of his guilt.
They threw him back into the cell with a pen and a notepad to write a first draft. He was not to make a sound, much less speak, even to ask to be taken to the bathroom. To communicate, he could only tuck a note into the small groove in the wall outside his cell. Each word that escaped his lips cost him twenty lashes, each cough, ten, every sneeze, five.
He turned mute. Because he was not allowed a mirror, he would delay drinking his morning cup of tea until night, just so he could have a surface upon which to trace the contours of his face, lest he forget his own image. After a while, unable to shave, he saw the darkness of his own face disappear into the darkness of the murky tea. He was no longer visible, not even to himself.
Then one morning after nearly four months, they told him to get ready for a visit to the barber. He was about to be granted a furlough. He dared not ask why.
The good interrogator drove him home, but home was not where he knew it to be.
“We thought it best to move your family. It was for your own good.”
He rang the bell of a strange door and prepared to behold his wife. But when the door opened, the look in her eyes was empty, loveless.
“Aren’t you happy to see me?” he could not help asking her.
“Of course!” she stammered. “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s just that I didn’t expect it.”
The good interrogator walked in with him, sat in his living room drinking tea like a guest. That day and every two weeks thereafter, he had to host him, his tormentor, in his own apartment—his harbor.
His friend Emami came to visit, bearing the gloomiest of news: his imprisonment was a declaration of victory by Fallahian and his gang. The ministry was now under their control and they had begun purging their old rivals, starting with him.
“Fine!” he said. “I’ll resign and get on.”
“Resign?” his friend exclaimed. “You can’t resign. School teachers resign. Intelligence operatives strike a bargain. You’re still the ministry’s employee. You need Fallahian’s consent to breathe the air you breathe.”
• • •
He went to see Fallahian, but Fallahian would not receive him. He appealed even to President Rafsanjani, and was assured that he would be safe and could go on to other things. Reinventing a life outside of politics intrigued him. It would be a chance to start anew, this time in business. No longer a spook, he fashioned himself into an entrepreneur. He built a factory to produce engine oil and named it Khazar. His old ties to Europe helped him grow fast. But the speed of his success only stirred Fallahian’s men. They came to extort shares so large that they exceeded his profits. He had no choice but to close the plant.
Standing frozen behind the door of his apartment building on that March day, he realized that even the president could not save him. He realized that his last and only friend, Emami, had risked everything by coming to him. He realized there was nothing left for him but to flee.
On the eve of the New Year, Messbahi packed his Samsonite briefcase with a comb, a toothbrush, a razor and some shaving cream, a pair of reading glasses, his old tattered volume of the Koran, and $25,000 in cash and headed for the south. His voyage was a gamble. He was betting everything on a seventeen-year-ol
d promise. In his first post before going to Europe he had ordered the release of the chief of one of the largest tribes of the south. On a visit to Tehran, the chief had been arrested for carrying an unregistered gun. Messbahi—then a young and influential official, arguing that the detention could spark a mutiny in the south—had personally walked the chief out of his holding cell. Stunned by the young and powerful savior, the chief, repeating Messbahi’s name under his lips, had vowed to return the favor if Messbahi ever happened upon his territory.
Messbahi was going to Zahedan hoping the chief was still alive, hoping he would still remember his vow from long ago, hoping he still commanded enough power to return the favor.
Night had fallen when he reached the chief’s compound. The gatekeeper took his name and went into the building. Moments later, a much older and grayer chief emerged and beamed at him. He grabbed him like a lost son who had finally returned.
“Huzzah! Come in, dear fellow! Welcome! A thousand welcomes!”
The chief’s reception was a boost of life to Messbahi, who was racing against death.
“Heaven knows I want to, but I must leave the country now,” Messbahi replied, certain that rejecting the chief’s offer would displease him.
“Are you in trouble?” The chief sounded puzzled. He knew Messbahi only as the impervious titan from the capital.
Messbahi nodded.
“You?” the chief slapped his thigh and exclaimed. “You in trouble with them? How could this be? You are them.”
Messbahi shook his head.
“It can’t be. You’re humoring an old man.”
“I must get out tonight. Will you help me or should I go on my own?”
The chief thundered, “Go on your own? Stop the nonsense, son! You’re not going anywhere in the middle of the night. Come in! Eat and rest! We’ll take this up tomorrow.”
Seeing Messbahi’s reluctance, the chief repeated, “Get in, son! You’re a guest at my home now, and no guest of mine has ever left without proper welcome. Get in!”
The chief ushered his guest into a room and ordered a servant to prepare a meal. Then, speaking in the local dialect, he addressed his young assistant and the two disappeared into another room, busily talking.
At six o’clock the next morning the chief awakened Messbahi.
“Rise and shine, son!” he said with affection.
They ate breakfast together and afterward the chief handed him a tribal Salwar costume to put on—loose-fitting white pants and a knee-length shirt and vest and said before heading to the street, “Get your things together. We’re leaving!”
A dark Buick bearing Iranian plates awaited him at the gates. The chief opened the car door and Messbahi was surprised to find several people already inside—the chief’s wife, daughter, son, and two grandchildren. He patted Messbahi on the back, whispering in his ear, “I won’t leave you until I put your hand in the hand of a trusted friend at the other side of the border.”
The sound of the revving engine faded into the rushing tires on the gravel road. If their destination had a name, no one spoke it. It hailed that morning, a ferocious downpour the likes of which the region had not seen in decades. When the hail let up, the rain came. Through hail and rain, the driver pressed on. At every checkpoint, Messbahi witnessed what he, being a believer, could only call a small miracle. Twice the guards, recognizing the plate numbers of their car, simply bowed and remained doubled over until it passed. At others, the driver stopped, rolled down the window, and exchanged a sentence or two before the bars parted to let them through.
“How come they’re not checking us at all?” Messbahi wondered out loud.
“Because they’ve been taken care of,” the chief boasted.
All along the road, he and the chief talked about their families—children, the chief’s grandchildren, and loved ones—but never about the reason that had brought them together after so long, never about Messbahi’s fall. When they finally arrived at the border bazaar several hours later, the downpour had stopped. Messbahi looked into the horizon and saw a rainbow and, thinking it a sign from God, he got out to pray.
Another car, a Toyota SUV bearing Pakistani plates, was awaiting them. They boarded the Toyota. From that afternoon till the dawn of the next day, they rode over muddy, unpaved roads where they saw only clouds of dust and bright blue skies over dunes as expansive as eternity. For an unforgiving fourteen hours, the driver drove on. His passengers drifted into sleep until at last they were rocked awake by the bouncing tires on bumpy roads. The desert behind them, they were on poorly paved streets now. A new landscape, a run-down town, stretched before Messbahi’s eyes. In the narrow alleyways, pedestrians shades darker than he milled about, the men among them dressed in the same costume as he.
The car pulled in front of a modest, two-story home lined with brick walls. The chief stepped out and rang the bell. The door swung open and several children rushed to throw themselves into his embrace. His arms circling their reedy frames, he turned to Messbahi and said, “Welcome to Quetta, son! Come meet my relatives!”
At last, they had arrived in Pakistan, in eternity itself. He prayed again, his lips moving to the words of the scripture, while his wet gaze remained fixed on the chief.
Inside, an elaborate feast had been spread for the guest of honor. Never had a fugitive received so grand a reception. They ate and, when their stomachs were full, they sang folk tunes, and when they had sung long enough they filled their bongs with their purest opium to toast the man of the hour, who, to their great surprise, refused to smoke. By the end, everyone was strewn on the floor in a stupor—everyone but Messbahi, who rose and bid the chief a tearful farewell.
March ended as Messbahi found his bearings in Islamabad and a handful of restaurants where the food did not set his insides on fire. April came and went as he moved from hotel to hotel, never staying in the same one for long. May passed as his asylum request to several European countries was rejected one after another. The record of his deportation from France in 1982 had doomed him. No European Union member would shelter someone who had been turned away from another member country. June delivered yet another blow. All the diplomats he had once known found an excuse to refuse helping him. The shock staggered him into July, which began with a new worry: his stash of cash was fast diminishing.
Without anyone to turn to, Messbahi dialed the last and only number he had not yet dialed and left a message on the answering machine. After he hung up, he fought hard to keep the wave of despair at bay, afraid that the details of his whereabouts on the message would be leaked to Fallahian in return for a handsome reward. The thought of being in custody again drove him to ponder the quickest path to suicide if the minister’s men were ever to catch up with him again.
An hour passed. He stretched on the creaky twin bed of his Islamabad hotel room, gazing at the ceiling. The fan whirred. The innkeeper’s broom brushed against the floor of the corridor. The faucet in his room dripped from time to time. So many sounds except the one he expected. Anxiety mounted in him. He rose and began to pack to leave for another hotel. As he gathered his few things, the telephone at last rang. The voice he had not heard in years greeted him.
“Mr. Messbahi, this is Banisadr. I hear you’re in trouble,” former president Abulhassan Banisadr spoke, his calm tenor intact.
The telephone number of the former-president-turned-dissident living in Paris was a secret the Iranian military and government elite tucked in the folds of their passports next to wads of provisional cash reserved for an emergency flight. He was every defector’s last resort. He was also their most natural ally, for his history was theirs. Banisadr had been a confidant of the Ayatollah, flown back with him to Iran in 1979, elected the nation’s first president in the next year, and soon became the Ayatollah’s harshest critic, finally fleeing in 1981. His life had since been dedicated to erasing the blight of his association with the former mentor. He was not a warm man but a genuine nationalist who helped fellow defectors on the co
ndition that they would similarly dedicate themselves to repenting, undoing their past sin for the remainder of their days.
In a few minutes, Messbahi summarized his career and his falling out with Fallahian. When his story came to an end, Banisadr spoke in his usual terse and candid fashion.
“You see, Mr. Messbahi, I’m not yet convinced I ought to help you. I must first find out if you’re telling me the truth. But even if you are, I’m not sure what I can do for someone with your kind of past. You’re a hard man to pity, having worked for a gang of godless thugs for so long.”
Messbahi tried to interject but Banisadr stopped him. “Let me finish! I’ll only help you if you vow to do right by your people now. You must redeem yourself, Mr. Messbahi! Tell me everything you know about that devil Fallahian and the rest of them,” the former president demanded, like a priest demanding from a sinner.
“I’ll tell you as much as I can. What I don’t know, my wife, who’s still in Tehran, can help me get,” he said with deference.
“Don’t talk of your wife. She works for the devil, too. My sources tell me she’s been ratting you out to Fallahian for months.”
Messbahi gasped. The memory of the disappointment he had detected in her eyes, seeing him after months of detention, rushed back into his mind. He remembered his friend Emami on the day he told him to leave, refusing to say how he knew of the threat against him: Can’t tell you how I know. That alone will kill you. It had to be his wife’s betrayal his friend was sparing him
He held the receiver but said nothing, heard nothing. The former president went on.
“That’s what the bastards do. Turn father against son. Wife against husband. They’ve no morals. They talk of God and act like the devil.”
Then he added, “The devil would do well to take a few lessons from them.”
Messbahi’s attention was drifting farther into the past, reviewing the inexplicable events of the recent years—the way his children seemed to run from him when he went to embrace them; the way he constantly sensed someone had gone through his desk, looking at his files every time he sat down to work.
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace Page 19
