by Salar Abdoh
So I made the call. The old man on the other end of the line had the familiar accent of a Lur, not unlike my own grandfather. I told him I was a reporter and was calling him about the ad.
The poor old guy started to weep and it took some time before he could offer any words. “I live way out in Malayer nowadays. I came to Tehran several times. Talked to the police. Nothing. They tell me every day dozens go missing in that evil city and at least four are murdered. They say if they find out anything they’ll call me. When? I know they won’t call. I was ready to find a good wife for the kid. Now I don’t even know if he’s alive.” Then he started to beg me to do something for him and began weeping again.
Guilt had gotten the best of me. I’d done a hack’s job of calling for a heartbreak story and now the ache in the old guy’s voice wouldn’t let go. His son, Asghar, was the same age as me. And I could just imagine what my mother—what with her bad back and bad heart—would do if I suddenly went missing for three months. I was hooked on that call. Sometimes this happens. It happens even to a crime reporter who thinks he’s seen it all; the proverbial ants in my pants were on the move and I wouldn’t stop until I had something.
The next day I had to go to the criminal court to follow up on some reports. Before that I called Asghar’s father again and hit him for some information—Asghar’s job, where he lived, his friends, anything to set me in the right direction. Turned out he’d been living in Tehran for about eight years and apparently worked night-shift security at a pharmaceutical company’s offices in midtown. He had a best friend, Mohammad, whom he shared a room with around Sepah Circle.
I got Mohammad’s telephone number from Asghar’s father and set up a meeting with him for later that day. Mohammad turned out to be a small, dark-skinned guy who seemed a bit thrown off at first when I got there and couldn’t quite imagine what a reporter wanted with him. But I broke the ice between us with the only thing in that room that still bore a trace of Asghar, a photograph. It was a picture of Mohammad and Asghar by a waterfall.
“It’s from four, five years ago,” he volunteered. “We went on a trip to Luristan and Khuzestan. There were six, seven of us altogether. It was a nice trip. I won’t forget it.”
Mohammad seemed depressed, like he really missed his friend. They’d gone to college together, and while Mohammad had quickly found a job with an oil company, Asghar was still looking for more permanent work when he went missing.
“I’d been sent by my office on a job down south. I called Asghar a couple of times when I was away and he didn’t answer. I thought nothing of it. He keeps . . . kept things to himself, you know. Never talked much about his troubles. But then when I came back to Tehran and he still didn’t come home, I started to get worried. I called his father.”
I asked him if Asghar had left anything behind. Mohammad hesitated for a moment before he pulled a small bag from underneath a bed. In it were a few shirts, a bottle of cologne, an electric shaver, a pack of condoms, and a paystub with the name of the company he’d worked for: Pars Pharmaceuticals.
“Did the police ever ask to look at these things?”
“The police?” He gave a bitter laugh. “They never even stepped into this place. They couldn’t care less about a missing person unless he lives in a mansion.”
Another three days went by. In the midst of dealing with my girlfriend who was threatening to leave me if I didn’t spend more time with her, and reckoning with my mother’s doctors—not to mention putting in time at the news desk every day and chasing ambulances and police chatter—I found time to call the numbers on Asghar’s paystub. But there was never any answer. Finally I called information, got an address for the place, and was getting ready to go there when an earthquake hit the Eastern Azerbaijan Province. The paper wanted me there right away. So Asghar had to wait yet again. Then, by the time I returned to Tehran, my mother’s back had taken a turn for the worse. I spent more days trying to get her into a proper hospital and calming my sister, who was worried sick about her and our father who was already half bedridden. Meanwhile, my girlfriend had stopped returning my calls and my boss wanted to know why my reports never left a ray of hope for readers—didn’t I know people can’t live without hope?
Maybe he was right. Asghar’s father certainly needed to hope. Two weeks had gone by now since I got the address for Asghar’s workplace. I called his father and let him know I had the address and meant to visit it. He sighed and said he’d pray that I’d marry well.
So on a late September day I finally got around to paying a visit there. The address was off Kheradmand Street, but when I reached it, there was no trace of the building. They’d demolished it and were preparing the groundwork for a new structure. I asked around, yet no one there had any idea where Pars Pharmaceuticals had moved to, nor did they recognize the photo of Asghar that I showed them. Only the corner-store guy recognized him. As he was bagging groceries he grumbled, “Are you serious, man? In this jungle of a city we don’t even remember what we had for dinner last night. And you’re asking us where this nobody named Asghar might have disappeared to? You reporters sure have time on your hands. Time and plum, useless jobs.”
I was tired and feeling hopeless myself. Around the corner from where Asghar had been working was a park. I walked there and sat on one of the benches watching kids play badminton. My mind drifted and I recalled how only a few months ago I’d had to cover the public execution of a twenty-one-year-old street thug named Ali Big right here. Three days before the execution I’d interviewed Ali Big at the lockup in the Shapur District. I’d been to that place countless times, interviewing every kind of criminal you can name—murderers, kidnappers, muggers, burglars, drug dealers, guys who shoplifted, and guys who trafficked in humans. The list was endless. Now then, sometimes my job is nothing more than getting a nugget of a sound bite out of a man who’s about to walk the plank. I think that day I got that nugget out of Ali Big. He’d sat across from me, a truly big guy, his hands shaking with tension so that the sound of the metal handcuffs rattling on the table was unnerving both me and the officer standing watching over us.
“Why do you rob people?” I’d asked. He gave me the look of death and said nothing. I persisted, like I always did at these interviews: “Didn’t you think you might get caught and executed one day?”
“Where I come from, Mr. Newspaperman, we have a saying that goes like this: If you sell your ass enough times, you gotta pay up with the hemorrhoids eventually.” Of course, the newspaper wouldn’t let me publish that sentence, but it was a beauty and maybe I could rephrase it and get it past the censors. Ali went on, “All the fellas like me who do this stuff for a living, they already know they’ll get caught one day. But they got no choice. We all grow up with just one option: crime. I got unlucky this time. That’s all. In this city of fourteen million motherfuckers, there’s a thousand muggings every day. I got unlucky there happened to be cameras to catch me in action. Fuck their cameras. You know for how much they’re hanging me for? For less money than you and your bright friends spend on coffee in one of your fancy restaurants.”
Three days later I was at his hanging—a couple of dozen yards from where I was sitting now in the park. They’d hung him for taking something like five dollars. They were making a public example of him.
I hadn’t been able to step inside a café to get a cup of coffee ever since.
Back at the newspaper I didn’t have the heart to call Asghar’s father and tell him they’d demolished the building his son used to work at. Yet his story wouldn’t let me go. Sometimes a reporter just sniffs something unique. I don’t know how that really happens. Something just pulls at you. I kept asking myself, Why him? Granted, I only had general information on the guy. But what I had didn’t point to him just going missing like that. He had a job, albeit a lowly one for someone with a college education; he also wasn’t an addict, had a family that cared about him, and wasn’t in love. I wrote all these things down in my notepad, trying to make sense
of what I had before me. That afternoon, besides having to cover a robbery at a gold dealer’s near Resalat Circle, I did some detective work and figured out the new location of Pars Pharmaceuticals.
They’d moved to a corner of Mottahari and Mirza-e-Shirazi, not too far from where they’d been before. I showed up around noon the next day. The security guard drew a blank when I showed him Asghar’s picture.
“You haven’t worked here long, have you?”
“Three months.”
“Who was here before you?”
“No idea. You need to talk to the office manager for that. His name’s Mr. Suleimani.”
Suleimani’s first response was a short laugh. “Well, we’re looking for him too. The guy melted away. If you find him, tell him to come get his last paycheck. It’s still with me.”
I replied, “Like the ad says, he’s been missing over three months now. Did he have a friend in this place? Someone who knew him a little bit better?”
I didn’t expect Suleimani to be so forthcoming, but he seemed genuinely intrigued all of a sudden, if not concerned, and told me to look up a fellow named Mohsen who worked the third-floor security desk.
I found Mohsen sitting behind a row of television monitors playing with his cell phone. When I asked him about Asghar, he didn’t bother answering. I repeated my question. Now he put his phone down and looked up at me for the first time. “You are?”
I showed him my journalist’s ID and told him I was searching for Asghar on behalf of his family.
The initial suspicion left him. “I never had an address on Asghar. After he disappeared like that, I called him a bunch of times. But there was no answer. I thought maybe it was because of the thing that happened between him and the general manager that he didn’t want to come back to us.” Mohsen glanced away. “I mean, so he had an issue with the manager; it wasn’t right he just vanished like that. I thought we were friends.”
Something had happened between him and the manager? This was my first clue and I felt myself getting excited. “What happened exactly?”
He lowered his voice. “Asghar got in hot water with the general manager over a surveillance video of the company he sold to a reporter. The general manager wanted to fire him, but several people intervened.”
“He sold a video to a reporter?” I felt the stirrings of a narrative and could barely contain myself. “What was in the surveillance video that was so important?”
Mohsen’s reply floored me. Suddenly I was sure I was in the middle of something far bigger than a simple case of a missing person, and in a minute I’d realize that as a reporter I’d in fact been a part of this story from the beginning.
The security guard got up and took a careful look around to make sure no one was nearby. Then from a flask he started to pour tea for us and began: “It was last winter. I don’t know if you recall that mugging off Kheradmand Street. Two huge guys on a motorbike stopped a man at knifepoint right in front of our building. Our cameras recorded the whole thing. I was on night duty back then, same as Asghar, so we weren’t there when it happened. Usually after the place closed down we’d sit and watch the surveillance videos just to pass the time. There’s a college girls’ dorm annex across the street. We’d sit there and get our kicks watching those girls’ comings and goings. So one night we’re watching the video and there it is, the whole thing. The bike stopping, the guys pulling out a huge dagger and taking the guy’s briefcase, and the people in the neighborhood who were there pissing themselves from fear and doing nothing about it. All of it was recorded. Need I say more? Unless you were asleep half of last winter, you must have seen the video on nightly news, right?”
I was too agitated to do or say anything except nod my head.
“The victim, he ended up going to the police station to put in a report. But the cops did nothing. It was just a simple mugging and what those thugs got away with was barely a day laborer’s wages. I can tell you for sure the police sent no one to the neighborhood to investigate, or they would have come to our building. So what could Asghar and I do? If we told our bosses about the video, they’d ask what the hell we were doing at night watching old videos when we should be manning the building. So we stayed quiet. I mean, until two weeks later when one night I’m watching the eight thirty news on TV and I see our video being shown to the whole country. Asghar was on duty on the second floor. I called him upstairs right away. I was scared out of my wits. He made a face and asked me to promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. He’d sold the video to a journalist. That’s all I know. Next day there were pictures of the video in a bunch of the newspapers. It was like the thing had taken on a life of its own. It was crazy.”
He was right. That video of the mugging had gone viral last winter. People were saying that the government had lost control. There was robbery and murder in broad daylight, and it was recorded, yet the police still did nothing. It had become a national issue all of sudden. The tech people at Criminal Investigation managed to zoom in on the license plate of the bike and quickly figured out who the perpetrators were. One of them was Ali. The very same Ali Big I’d interviewed for the paper three days before his execution. I recalled asking him then if he was angry that his partner in crime hadn’t been caught, but he had. Ali Big had glared at me with an expression of utter loathing. “It’s only you uptown bastards who’d sell your own mother for a song.”
Mohsen checked his watch. Now he wanted to get all of his story out before anyone showed up. I could tell the whole thing had been weighing on his mind and Asghar’s disappearance had gotten him thinking. “A few days after they showed the video on TV, Asghar and I were called into the manager’s office. He introduced a guy in civilian clothes as a detective from the CID. Boy, was the manager angry! And he had every right. He told us he knew that besides us no one else really had access to the videos, and from the angle of the shot it was obvious it was a video from our building. I remember looking at Asghar and seeing him turn white as chalk. He confessed he’d sold the video to some reporter. Someone like you, I guess.”
After a long pause where we both stared into space for a while, deep in our own thoughts, I asked him, “Do you know what the upshot of all this was?”
“That detective never came around again. I read in the paper they caught one of the robbers. Ali Big. Later they hung him right down the street, at Honarmandan Park. That was, I guess, about nine months ago? Our manager was still mad though. Several times I heard him tell people he knew of cases where relatives or friends of the guy they executed came back for revenge. Maybe he had a point. I mean, they’re not going to take their revenge on the police, are they? The manager was scared they’d come after our company because it was our video that got them caught.”
Or they could simply come after Asghar. That’s if they found out it was him who sold the video to the newspeople.
The first thing I did back at my desk was go online and watch the whole video again, which was barely even a minute long. In the bottom right side of the screen I could plainly see the logo of the TV channel, Iran Afternoon. So the reporter was from that news station. I called my contact there and got the name and number of the city desk correspondent who had bought the video from Asghar.
Now I sat down and tried putting it all together. When Ali Big was caught he’d admitted that he and his partner first planned the mugging spree at a teahouse near the Imam Hossein Circle. But that was all he’d given the police about his partner, a guy people knew as Abi the Lisp. Back then I had tried to follow up on the man. But his vanishing act was complete. Then, after they hung Ali Big, no one really bothered about Abi the Lisp anymore and soon he was forgotten. I thought of calling the CID and seeing if the file on him was still open. But that would be grasping at straws. Those detectives had a thousand other things to worry about; besides, they’d already executed one of the two culprits, and as far as they were concerned they’d probably closed the case to their own satisfaction, if not the public’s.
I finally calle
d the reporter at Iran Afternoon. He was cautious at first. We both realized we were basically talking to competition here. But after a few minutes of chatting around the subject he opened up to a fellow journalist. What he gave me wasn’t much. Just that the TV station had given him the green light to buy the video off Asghar. But afterward he’d had no contact with him. I could tell he had no idea Asghar had gone missing. And, of course, I didn’t tell him anything about it.
My last option was to go to the teahouse Ali Big and Abi the Lisp had hung out at. This may sound easy enough, but it wasn’t. What if I went there and started asking around and Abi the Lisp happened to be back in town and was sitting in that very teahouse just then? I was playing with fire. And I made the mistake of calling my girlfriend to ask her what I should do. She was still not talking to me. But she picked up this time, and as soon as she heard what I was up to she hung up again, though not before telling me not to call back until I was sure I wanted a life beyond being a newspaper reporter.
For three days I didn’t do anything but weigh my options. I could call Asghar’s father and tell him all that I’d found out so far and let him and the cops take it from there. But then . . . I thought about my life and where it was heading. Half my friends had left the country to work for organizations that beamed news into Iran; they had good lives and good salaries—at least I imagined they did—in places like London and Prague. They got to travel, see the world, and they didn’t have to deal with this maddening everyday censorship. I’d stuck it out here because I knew if I went away I might have that good life, but I wouldn’t be much of a journalist anymore. I’d have all the gadgets and all the audience who hungrily watched Persian-language satellite news coming from abroad. But I’d only be deluding myself. I wouldn’t be a reporter anymore; I’d just be someone else’s mouthpiece. I needed to be in the belly of the beast, so to speak. I needed to be in Tehran—to smell it, taste it, feel it, know its aches and pains and the sadness of its people. My friends had left and pretty much turned into collectors of paychecks. I didn’t want that. I needed to walk through the Grand Bazaar of the city and sit in the teahouses where criminals sat and smell the stink of desperation and poverty. London wasn’t for me.
