Tehran Noir

by Salar Abdoh

  The sudden splash of water from all the sprinklers coming alive transformed the cemetery in an instant. And an instant was all I needed to pull the Chiappa Rhino out of my pocket. I saw him fall to his knees, his head tilting at the sky for a moment before his chin hit the ground and the dancing water rained on his face. But the bullet hadn’t been from my piece. I turned to Jamshid and saw him sticking his hidden Colt back in his pocket.

  He said, “Boss, it’s really time to hurry now.” He pushed the safe onto the dolly and started.

  I’ll never forget the scene—that twilight and the sprinklers and the cemetery and the dolly and Jamshid slowly passing by the corpse of a basiji who lay at the edge of William Mason’s grave in the Gholhak District.

  From the embassy garden we could hear a basij commander telling his men to finish up and start vacating the smashed-up embassy. This meant there was no time left to fill in poor old William Mason’s grave. There was no going through the police station either. But Dowlat Avenue was supposed to stay closed down. And I’d paid the inside man at the station to make sure no uniformed cop suddenly stopped us while we transported the safe from the crane into the Land Cruiser waiting down the street.

  Once Jamshid had the safe hitched to the crane hook, he opened the ladder against the wall. The sprinklers had turned off by now and before climbing up I took one last look at the guy we’d dropped. It was as if William Mason had returned from the next world and pushed aside a whole lot of dirt to start living one more time, but as soon as he’d touched ground a German soldier had deported him back to where he belonged.

  * * *

  I told Jamshid I’d meet him later on. Now I sat alone in the Land Cruiser, with the safebox in the back, thinking of what I could possibly say to Isaar about some dead basiji at the cemetery. The truth was that neither the British nor the basij forces could raise an issue about the dead man next to that grave. The Brits wouldn’t open their mouths because it wasn’t in their interest; and the basij would stay hush because, well, how were they to even explain the presence of one of their own at that cemetery and not in the embassy garden in the first place? But I was still in the shit with Isaar. And the whole way driving to his place in the Qeytarieh District I swore at myself for not having had the presence of mind to have a backup plan if something like this happened.

  I put my window down and drove slowly, listening to the sound of the running rivulets of the city next to the sidewalks. I took in the trees and the silhouettes of housewives in their kitchens readying dinner. The image was one of a city at peace. So much so that you’d hardly believe just a little ways down the road the people of this very place had just raped the hallowed grounds of the embassy of another country.

  I stopped in front of Isaar’s gated mansion. How many times had I done this? How many times had I shown up here after a job to give him my report? Tonight I’d come to tell him I was done. I’d given them what I owed them and then some. It was time to let me go. That’s right, I wanted to sell everything here and add it to what I’d stashed abroad. Then Hawaii, or Tahiti, or the Canary Islands. Anywhere there was sun and ocean and where they didn’t overrun other people’s embassies. I’d find a place like that and operate the biggest, best bar on the island. And so what if I could barely get it up nowadays, even on pills? I’d still keep a bevy of the sexiest women around. And once a year I’d run along to Jerusalem and cry my heart out and feel cleansed.

  The automatic gate finally opened but the lights in the garden were off. I drove slowly up to the house where only the lights to the first floor were illuminated. It was odd not see Isaar already standing there waiting for me with his dogs and a bodyguard or two by his side. But then I saw the top of his head through the window, sitting in his usual chair in the living room. I entered the old, familiar place with its excess furniture without knocking, not minding that I was rubbing those muddy shoes, compliments of the sprinkler system of the British cemetery, into the expensive silk carpet.

  “You know what, Isaar? Statues are like people: they too can get themselves into trouble.”

  “Not as much trouble as you’re in.”

  The voice came from my nine o’clock. Now I smelled cigar smoke. And of course I’d never known Isaar to have a cigar. As I turned, the first thing I saw was the corpse of one of his longtime bodyguards by the stairway. Then I saw the owner of the voice, directly to my left. His head was erect but his shoulders slumped awkwardly a little forward. He also had a pair of blue eyes set deep in skin so white that it made me almost gag to look at him. I’d never liked the look of Englishmen and I guess I didn’t like it now.

  I felt the muzzle of an automatic in my back. “Move,” the new voice behind me said. “I’d like to keep all my ammo intact today, if possible.”

  The Englishman was putting out his cigar in one of Isaar’s antique dishes. “Take his gun and his car keys.”

  He had said all this in Persian. Almost without an accent. In that blue suit, almost the color of his eyes, and the reddish hair with tinges of white, he looked like the devil itself to me. His man now came around and stuck his piece under my chin. A familiar face. One of Isaar’s men whom I’d seen alongside the dead one for years. A traitor. He took the car keys and the Rhino revolver out of my pockets. Then he put the muzzle to the back of my neck and pushed me toward the fireplace. It was only now that I had clarity. Isaar, dead! Just like that. His head hanging slightly to one side and not a word out of his mouth.

  “Keep moving.”

  I did. The thing I had wished for thirty-three years ago in that interrogation room had finally come true. Isaar with his mouth open and blood spread over his fancy white shirt. But a man has to be careful what he wishes for, because I had never felt more alone and more vulnerable than that moment. I kept moving until my foot caught on something and I went tumbling against the fireplace. I grabbed onto a bronze statue of a woman with wings and pulled myself up. Then, turning to the corpse again, I saw that his dog, a boxer with her guts hanging out, lay just as dead as its owner under Isaar’s splayed-out legs. It was the dead dog’s paw that my foot had caught. Men and dog were fresh kills. I bent down and noticed the blood and piece of gut stuck to my muddy shoes, and doubling over myself I threw up on the bronze woman with the wings. Me! Eshaq Lariyan, who had seen his share of death for ten lifetimes and more! I was sick so long that the Englishman finally got bored with me.

  “All right, Eshaq, enough acting for one day.”

  He didn’t have to say my name like that for me to understand he knew everything there was to know about me. I tried wiping my mouth with my shirt sleeve, but Isaar’s old bodyguard whacked me hard on my forearm with the automatic.

  I sighed and took another look at Isaar. “You realize,” I raised my head to face the Englishman again, “you’re messing with a military branch of the Iranian government here.”

  “Wipe your dirty mouth.”

  I didn’t. “They’re going to get hard on you when they find out. Very hard.”

  He laughed. “They? They’ll cut him up so bad you won’t be able to tell the dog from its owner.”

  I froze. I was sure he was bluffing at this point. Nevertheless, I tried holding my ground since it was all I had left. “I suppose they’re going to replace him with you?”

  “With me?” His smile made me cringe. He came forward with those sloping shoulders of his. “They forced your dear Isaar to retire a few months ago. I suppose you didn’t know. And why should you? Corruption, they called it.”

  The room smelled like lead and iron and staleness, and it was all I could do not to throw up on the Englishman and his sidekick right there. He didn’t have to explain any further. I saw exactly what had happened. They’d made Isaar retire. But he knew about the statue from way before. And for whatever reason that I’ll never understand, he wanted to swindle the Sepah he had so diligently and profitably worked for one last time. It couldn’t have been just the money, though. Isaar had plenty of that already. Maybe it was o
ut of spite for having to retire before he was ready. He wanted to swindle the special military arm of the Islamic Republic and the Englishman wanted to play games with the embassy of his own country. So they had found each other. More likely, they’d done these types of jobs plenty of times already. Isaar would take his cut for the statue and the Englishman would take the thing across the border—for whoever and whatever, probably some insane collector who got a kick out of possessing stolen statues from the public places of closed countries.

  The Englishman said, “As long as Isaar had you believing you were still working for the Sepah, it was good enough for us.”

  I let him talk. First I had to take care of the guy with the gun. I was slowly collecting myself and thinking of a way out of this mess. I pretended to feel weaker than I was after all the vomiting. I barely whispered, “Well, Isaar took care of me, and you took care of Isaar. Nice job. Congratulations!”

  The Englishman kept on talking, proud of himself and his treachery. I figured I could buy my freedom from the Sepah once and for all if I just did this right. I’d give them back the statue and tell them I’d been a part of Isaar’s plan all along and was simply biding my time. That’s what I’d do. It was a workable plan, if only I could manage to—

  A slow but insistent beeping, like that of a clock or a bomb, suddenly began. Maybe for a fraction of a second all three of us froze in the moment listening to it. But then, without bothering to locate the source, I quickly crouched low and elbowed the bodyguard in the nuts as hard as I could. After the second quick blow he let go of the automatic and fell to the floor. I took back my Rhino and pointed it at the Englishman. For good measure I gave a vicious kick to the prone man’s balls and saw the light go out of him.

  All this maybe took a total of two seconds and yet the Englishman hadn’t moved.

  The beeping continued. Isaar’s cell phone. Maybe a text message from someone. They hadn’t bothered to take it off of him when they’d killed him. It was a telephone that had saved me.

  I watched the Englishman, who returned my gaze with a look that was too cool to understand. Back then I still didn’t realize how many centuries of practice in the art of being of an imperial race stood behind that unflappability of his. He could have tried to reach for the bodyguard’s weapon, but he didn’t. And now, with a gesture from me, he put his hands up and waited calmly.

  I took the other gun off the floor too, and seeing the bodyguard start to moan and move a bit I gave him another smash with the heel of my bloody shoes right on the nose and kicked him over onto his stomach and took my car keys out of his side pocket.

  “Make a move and it will be the second time in my life I sent an English bastard to the next world.”

  There hadn’t been a first time, actually. And if I knew what was good for me, I had to leave that place today without another murder taking place. I couldn’t let the Sepah have any reason to hold me back in Iran or give me up to the British as a fall guy.

  The Englishman did not bat an eye. “I would like to make a suggestion.”

  I stepped over to Isaar and fished the phone out of his pocket. It had finally stopped beeping. “You are in no position to offer suggestions.”

  I saw that my number was the only one in the cell. Everything else had been deleted. They’d left the phone on Isaar on purpose and it had fucked them. Such symmetry! And what should those last persistent texts that had saved my life be? Several random messages from some local mosque about the upcoming Ashura ceremonies in the neighborhood.

  I had to search the Englishman. I stepped over the entrails of the dead dog and did just that. He had nothing on him but more cigars and a lighter inside a leather bag. I wiped my mouth with the back of the bag and threw it to the ground. The man’s cool was unnerving me. I felt I was only a step away from gifting him one of the bullets from my Rhino. But that would have been a deep mistake. First of all, this guy had done for me what I’d been aching to do for thirty-three years. Isaar was gone. Gone for good. And by killing this man, all I’d achieve would be to have the Sepah string me up as the mastermind behind everything that had gone wrong.

  The bodyguard began moaning again. But I knew it would be a long time before the poor bastard could get his bearings. I stepped backward toward the door. “You can stay for as long as you like in this accursed place. My only command is that until that outside gate is shut behind me, you concentrate long and hard on your boy’s balls. He’s in need of serious attention.”

  And I was out of there. The garden was still dark. I hurried to the car and had my hand on the door when it was as if half the lights in the world suddenly came on. For a second I was blinded and in shock. In that second the sound of a bullet echoed in my ear a thousand times and I was on the ground before I knew what was happening. The next few seconds, or maybe minutes, I felt like some underwater diver who was stuck in an ocean of seaweed. I saw the Englishman step right past me without another look. I saw the glint of what looked like a Magnum. And I felt the fire in my spine.

  Then there was the sound of a car door opening and closing. The start of an engine. And wheels missing my ears by inches. Everything was muffled and subdued and happening as if through a screen. Only as I felt myself passing out did I recall Isaar’s phone which, miraculously, was still in my hand. I dialed emergency and mumbled, “Qeytarieh, Kajvari Street, number 36,” before everything went black.

  * * *

  Maybe the Englishman thought even if I wasn’t dead, I would be soon enough. Maybe he didn’t want to risk the sound of a gun going off again in that house. Or maybe he’d thought that with Isaar’s cell in my hand and my number in there, the Sepah higher-ups would simply put this to an endgame between two onetime partners. Whatever it was, he didn’t kill me, and maybe he hadn’t intended to all along. Which meant I’d jumped the gun.

  I had a lot of time to think about all this over the next few months. Three surgeries in four months at Milad Hospital were just enough to turn a half-dead man into a live paraplegic. And a neutered one at that. I had been transformed into a half-thing, a bust, just like that statue that the Englishman took with him when he left.

  When I finally came out of the hospital, they sent a messenger to tell me a few things. For instance, the night in question the ambulance had managed to get me quickly to the hospital. But afterward the folks in the Sepah would not let the police come anywhere near the case again. They closed the file on it and sent word that I could leave the country. In fact, they said I had no choice but to leave, and I had a month to do it. After thirty-three years they were retiring me too. And killing me had no benefit for them, while having a live Jew abroad who still owed them was far more desirable. They only mentioned in passing that everything I owned in Tehran would have to stay here and one month was long enough to do the paperwork and sign over what I had to the gentlemen of the Sepah. That was all right with me. I had expected a day like this would come. I’d prepared for it, and what I had abroad remained intact. I signed over my life in Tehran and they stayed true to their word and let me go. For them, the presence of one dead bodyguard next to Isaar and one semi-live one could explain everything. Symmetry again. Besides, who would want to build a case that had a Jew with a gun in it? It wouldn’t do.

  So yes, I was let go. And now in this not-so-quiet little island in the Caribbean I run what many customers swear is the perfect bar/restaurant, with plenty of delectable island girls to serve and smile at me, their boss. I sit here in my wheelchair and think now and then of Jerusalem, which I’ve never actually visited and probably never will, and I smile back at my pretty girls and recall all the things I can never do again before reminding myself that I’m still lucky to be here instead of a corpse in Tehran.

  THE WHITEST SET OF TEETH IN TEHRAN

  BY SALAR ABDOH

  Karim-Khan, Kuche Aban

  The caretaker of the synagogue and his son carried the barrel to the garbage dump outside and emptied it. The thing seemed heavy and its contents looked like
mud. Man and son glanced up for a moment in that dawn light, looking right at Lotfi’s apartment window on the third floor, and Lotfi imagined their worried faces asked him to turn a blind eye on them.

  He figured they were making wine for the synagogue. It wasn’t illegal. Not for them. But they still dumped the leftover grape skin and mixed it with earth so no one could tell it was alcohol they’d made.

  Lotfi had a headache. It came from a bad batch of bootleg vodka he’d bought from an Assyrian Christian. He wouldn’t buy from that damn Christian again. I’m an alcoholic in a supposedly dry country, he thought. Yet if anything, Tehran was the wettest place on earth. People drank like fish here. All that homemade arrack and the overpriced booze that came across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan. Except you never knew what was legit liquor and what could kill you. The khakham’s wine wouldn’t kill him, that was for sure. And maybe he’d just go down there one of these days and ask to buy some of their wine from them. Of all the places in Tehran he could have gotten himself an apartment, he had to end up right across from a synagogue. Again! Just like all the years he’d lived just off Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York.

  He heard water running and came and stood by the bathroom. The door was open. She’d lit a fat blue candle and was washing him off of her. He considered her skin. Milky. Breasts, full and firm. She had short hair and the way her neckline sloped to her shoulders made him want to join her in that shower. They’d met two months ago at some rich folks’ weekend party a half hour drive away in Lavasan where mostly BMWs and Mercedes lined the driveway. He’d promised himself this was the very last time he was going to one of these gatherings. White pasta sauce dribbled from the mouths of potbellied merchants, and bleach-haired women who dressed like the Colombian soap opera whores they loved to watch on Iranian satellite television danced till the wee hours of the morning with their short chicken legs and gaudy, extra-high-heeled shoes. They were ugly, these rich people. They were ugly everywhere, not just here. Yet Lotfi had sat there wondering why he hadn’t chosen another part of the planet to move to instead of Tehran. What with the score he’d made on his one and only book, and the tidy sum from his brother’s life insurance policy back in America, for the first time in his adult life he had money in abundance. He was a millionaire suddenly. He could go anywhere he wanted to. If he had come to Tehran it was because he had unfinished business here. And maybe when he was done with this unfinished business he’d pack up and go again, go somewhere Mediterranean, a place with real liquor and with cops who were corrupt only half of the time.