Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (16 page)

“Did the defendant talk about the fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie at the mosque? That’s the question. But perhaps Mr. Darabi, whose memory is obviously vivid, can answer himself.”

In return, Darabi only said, “Later. I’ll speak later. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re gonna be here for a while. Another two more years at least.”

Like a pandemic, amnesia seemed to afflict all the witnesses for the accused. When failing memory could not be blamed, the translators were. One week, a witness testified that he had been born and raised in the same Lebanese town as Yousef, had known Yousef all his life, and even traveled with him to Iran to receive combat training. A week later, he squinted at him from the stand as if straining to see, and said that his vision had failed him the week before and Yousef was not the man he thought he knew. When the judges pressed, the
hysterical witness begged to be dismissed. “Please, please, don’t make me go there again.”

“Why? Are you afraid?” Judge Kubsch asked.

The witness only sobbed.

“Have you been threatened?”

He sobbed more intensely and pleaded once more, “If you don’t let me go, I may never see my family. I’ve been instructed to forget everything I know or else I might have a car accident. Believe me, the person who told me about the accident wasn’t reading tea leaves either.”

The start of the testimonies by the defense witnesses coincided with the appearance of a new face in the reporters’ section. The lanky newcomer looked German but sported the quintessential untrimmed beard of a devout Muslim. From the very first day, he took diligent notes. He looked familiar to Hamid, though he could not remember why. Leaving the court one afternoon, he spotted a witness whose testimony was to continue the next day, entering the reporter’s car. The view of the two men triggered in Hamid’s mind the memory of Darabi alongside the reporter. This was Oscar Brestrich, a convert to Islam, who had appeared on a televised debate defending the fatwa against Rushdie. He had quoted from the New Testament to prove that Christianity, like Islam, condoned the killing of apostates.

At lunch, instead of going to the canteen, Hamid slid into a phone booth to call the station that had broadcast the debate. He asked the operator to connect him to the producer Norbert Siegmund. From their seats in the courtroom, Hamid
and Norbert had greeted each other often enough to have formed a friendship. Hamid asked for the transcripts of the debate which, by evening, Ehrig was reviewing.

The next day, another witness took the stand and behaved as cagey as the rest. It was all the provocation Shohreh needed. She had heard about Brestrich’s ties to Iran’s regime and promised to let Ehrig address the matter in court. Still, seeing Brestrich in his usual spot, busily taking notes, she walked over to the parapet alongside the reporters’ section. She pointed to him, her brow knitted, her dark, straight hair slicing the air as she turned furiously back and forth between the judges and the grinning reporter. Her voice, outsizing the dainty expectation her figure inspired, boomed.

“It’s him! This man! There can’t be a real trial with him here.”

Hamid, alarmed, caught her glance and motioned her to
calm down!

“Mrs. Dehkordi, you’re disturbing the court,” Judge Kubsch thundered.

But Shohreh pointed and continued, “He’s one of theirs. He’s their reporter. Ask him! He’s the reason why none of them speak. Judge, how can you watch them say nothing at all one after the next? How do you let so many hours be wasted listening to their hogwash?”

“The reporters in this courtroom have proper credentials and the right to be here,” Judge Kubsch responded.

But it hardly pacifi ed Shohreh.

“It’s been weeks. They keep coming on and saying nothing.
He
’s the reason why. I don’t feel safe with him in this courtroom.”

“Mrs. Dehkordi, I ask you to take a break to collect yourself.”

A guard escorted Shohreh out of the room to a bench in the corridor before getting her a drink of water. Another guard stood watching over her as she wept. A few moments passed and the courtroom doors opened. The chief Arab translator walked out and approached Shohreh. For months, he had watched her despair. This time, he could no longer go on watching. He had to talk to her.

“Hush! You waste your pearls of tears over nothing. What a shame! You worry for no reason, missus. Hush, now!” He handed her the cup of water the guard had fetched.

Shohreh wiped her face and took a sip. The translator, encouraged, went on.

“I’ve worked in this court for so long. This judge is like no other. You can’t see the heart in his chest, but as God is my witness, it beats better than any I know. You’ll get what you want.”

What she wanted, she remembered, was dead, and no one, not even Judge Kubsch, could give him back to her. Tears overcame her once again. She moaned, “He hates me. He treats me like I’m a lunatic. They’ve paid him off.”

“This judge? Ay, missus! This judge . . .” The translator, searching for a metaphor, knocked on the marble wall behind them and whispered in her ear, “He’s a rock. Nothing
gets through him but the truth. Come now! You’re shedding the light out of your eyes, and won’t have them to see the glory of the day that’s coming to you. Come, listen to this old Arab! Trust me!”

He put his arms around her, hugged her, and then returned to the courtroom.

By the next day, when Ehrig presented the transcripts to the judges, the police had also spotted witnesses boarding Brestrich’s car. Judge Kubsch asked the witness how he had got home after his last court appearance.

“Someone drove me,” the witness said.

When the judge asked who, the witness pointed to Oscar Brestrich.

“What did he say to you in his car?” he pressed the witness, who was growing uneasy.

“He turned up the music and told me how to behave on the stand. ‘Don’t let them provoke you,’ he said. I asked him why the music was so loud and he said the police might have bugged his car.”

“What else?”

The witness turned silent, refusing to say more.

Brestrich was called to the stand and introduced himself as a reporter for Iran’s official news agency, IRNA.

“In what newspaper do your articles run, Mr. Brestrich? Who’s your editor?” the judge asked.

“I don’t have an editor. I report to Iran’s embassy in Bonn.”

“Why would a reporter report to an embassy?”

“Why not?” Brestrich answered breezily.

“And you get paid for this job?”

“Handsomely!”

“And the embassy circulates your reports to Iran’s intelligence communities?”

“Yes, naturally! They’d be fools not to. It’s every government’s job to collect intelligence. Why not Iran?”

“You have also been in touch with the witnesses. Why?”

“I help prepare them for your questions.”

Judge Kubsch told Brestrich that reporters never reported to embassies, nor did they coach courtroom witnesses. Brestrich dismissed the opinion as puritanical. The witnesses, he argued, were foreigners who did not know the ways of a European court and needed advice from an insider like him: a German who knew the system, but also knew Iran—he had traveled there, met with Ayatollah Khomeini, and taken lessons in Shiism from Kazem Darabi. Without someone like him, the novice witnesses would other wise be lost in the courtroom.

The judge listened to Brestrich’s monologue to the end, then said, “In light of what the court has learned about you, Mr. Brestrich, I revoke your reporting credentials as of today. You can continue to attend the trial, but only as a spectator, not a reporter.”

The Arab translator turned to Shohreh, who was seated behind him, and flashed a triumphant smile. With a sigh and a smile, she acknowledged her newfound ally. Then she looked to Hamid and moved her lips to form the words, “Thank you!” Together, they had scored a small victory.

• • •

Other victories followed. Oscar Brestrich never returned to the court. The Austrian chief investigator flew to Berlin to testify about his findings in the 1989 assassination of Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, a case that still remained open. His appearance in court was brief but damning. A four-year probe into the case had led to Tehran. The investigator’s final remarks shook the court.

“Iran’s leadership has been pursuing a covert policy to annihilate the Kurdish leadership. That much is clear to me. We did our job, investigated the case fully and thoroughly. We traced the killers and found those responsible. The problem wasn’t with us, the police, or the investigators. It was with our politicians, who set the guilty free.”

The federal intelligence chief Bernd Schmidbauer was once again forced to testify. At first, he tried defending his October 1993 meeting with Minister Fallahian as merely humanitarian. But when a confidential document—the record of the minutes of the meeting—was released to the court, the word “humanitarian” became the punch line to his critics’ jokes. The chief spy, dubbed Agent 008, was widely mocked for his ineptitude to even tell a proper lie. The testimony further cast him as a deceitful politician, and launched a series of congressional inquiries that marked the nadir of his career.

Schmidbauer’s testimony disillusioned the nation. But Judge Kubsch’s handling of him restored both hope and pride to them. Against Schmidbauer’s blunders, the judge’s subtle virtues glimmered. Reporters took note:

If there has been anything astonishing, anything admirable about the Mykonos trial in Berlin, it is Frithjof Kubsch. He is almost intolerably detailed and knows how to gently leave no room for appeal. It is with these qualities that he is moving the trial forward. This is how he is and how he will prove the motives behind this criminal act that took place on our soil. Until now, this judge, firm yet humble, constructing his quintessentially long sentences, has asked the questions and done the work of the prosecutor and the attorneys at the same time. He has masterfully resisted all the efforts that aimed at disrupting the trial. In the last round of testimonies by Schmidbauer, Kubsch asked Schmidbauer to explain what he meant when he said, “Those who know the details will draw a different conclusion.” Kubsch kept at 008 for so long that eventually Schmidbauer was left with no choice but to admit that he had lied.

16

We don’t like going to Iranian restaurants that aren’t busy—we prefer the ones where we can ignore a large number of people.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

There it was, inches beneath Salomeh’s left collarbone, an unsightly lump, on the brink of bursting. Salomeh had proved far too slender for the pacemaker. The device had so stretched her skin that her doctors, fearing a rupture, thought it best to replant it in the muscle instead. No matter how Parviz pleaded with her, she would not agree to a second operation. She was afraid, and the father who lived in the shadow of death was hardly qualified to advise her about life.

He reasoned that her skin might break at a time when neither he nor her mother were there to help. He could allude to death but could not utter the word itself, not
about her. In return, she shocked him by her depth and her forwardness.

“But
babayee,
you give interviews, go on TV, write articles. You could drop dead, too. Shouldn’t you have a surgery to sew your mouth up for a while?”

She showed the kind of feistiness he would have admired in anyone but his own thirteen-year-old sick daughter. He tried hard to hide his amusement, his pleasure.

“I swear on the Koran, something bad is gonna happen if you keep this up.”

“I thought you were agnostic,
babayee
.”

Her father’s vocabulary was not all the precocious child had mastered. His perseverance was another.

“You want me to have surgery so that I live. And I want you to stop being Ambassador Mykonos. There are other survivors who could do the talking for a change.”

In the end, he was the one abandoning reason and resorting to bargains.

“If you have the surgery, I’ll be by your side every step of the way and do anything, absolutely anything, you say. I’ll even shut up, if that’s what it takes.” Parviz clapped a hand over his mouth, pretending to be mum.

They bickered for days. Salomeh, seeing her father’s surrender, began contemplating her wishes. On the day she finally consented to have the surgery, she had won an impressive wish list from her parents. Only the intangibles were left to negotiate.

“Promise to perform for me every day?”

He clicked his heels and saluted her. To show good faith, he staged a coming attraction. Putting his cupped palms together, he raised them to his lips. His cheeks ballooned as he blew hard into the tiny opening between his thumbs. A loud hoot, like a locomotive whistle, filled the air. Once, twice, then a third time.

“All aboard!” Salomeh bellowed jubilantly.

With his fingers at his mouth, he puffed his cheeks out once again. A convincing hissing sound filled the air. A long puff followed a shorter one, the invisible train accelerating, then puff, puff, puff, until the sound tapered. Salomeh waved and blew kisses. Her father’s flair for cheap pastimes thrilled her. He made her laugh with nothing more than a twisted nose, a crossed eye, or a lazy tongue. Each time he crossed the threshold between activist and entertainer, Salomeh became hopeful that with enough persistence she could keep him with her at the opposite side of the perilous ground he insisted on treading.

After the surgery, Parviz got on a plane. Since the start of the trial, he had compiled all the documents—articles, photographs, reports—edited them, written his own introductions, and paid to publish them as a two-volume set called
The Mykonos Case
. He referred to them as his
books,
though given their rushed and unfinished presentation—page numbers missing in places, handwritten notes added in the margins of others—they more resembled the private journals of a genius on the verge of madness. He was compelled
to produce them in the same way Shohreh was compelled to keep notes and Hamid was to bear witness. The raw look of his white-bound volumes conveyed an urgency other Iranians in the diaspora grasped, and they set Parviz on a tour through their enclaves in Europe and the United States.

It was on the road that he realized his spirit, like the skin on his daughter’s chest, was about to break. Fear and mistrust had so swelled in him that he could hardly enjoy the company of those who came to listen to him. He walked away from his readings always on the edge of falling apart. In New York City, a comely woman bearing an armful of his books to be autographed shyly asked if he wished her to take him on a tour of the city. Moved by her beauty, he instantly rejected her offer, certain she was a Mata Hari. In Los Angeles, his hosts, worried for his safety, placed a German shepherd outside his hotel room. But the dog, glowering and bearing his teeth each time Parviz neared the door, terrorized him. In Miami, another host took him to the beach. Soon after they had waded in the water, the clouds covered the sun. The host, fearing a storm, swam closer to watch over him, but Parviz, suspicious of him moving in amid the rising tides, kept on swimming away. At last, the anxious host swam back to shore, borrowed the lifeguard’s bullhorn, and begged Parviz to get out of the water.

He realized, too, how much he missed Noori’s conversation. His good-hearted audiences, with their dull questions
and even duller commentary, only reminded him of the erudition of his lost friend. One day, after he had returned to Berlin, he went to the cemetery. Noori’s plot was in disarray—dried-up bouquets strewn on the ground, weeds everywhere. Atop his friend’s grave, he knelt and wept. In the past, when he suffered a setback, the thought of all the years ahead to make things right uplifted him. But now his loneliness was deeper than ever, and his setback greater than any he had known, and he was nearing fifty. He wept and wept, and when he had no more tears to shed, he stared quietly at the dry soil until nightfall.

“You know what happened in court today?” Shohreh would often ask her reticent daughter as they ate dinner together.

Sara hardly spoke. If she were still grieving, she did so in her mother’s absence. To make conversation, Shohreh gave her reports of the trial. They were always smashingly positive: Bruno Jost was brilliant, Hans Joachim Ehrig was an orator of Grecian proportions, and Judge Kubsch, a highly reliable source had leaked to her, was secretly on their side, which explained why he had to treat her harshly in court. Every one of their witnesses performed magnificently, whereas every one of the defendants’ witnesses was clownish.

In return, all that could be heard from Sara was the clanking of her utensils against the china plate. If Shohreh pressed, Sara simply asked, “When, then, will it be over?”

The question always dumbfounded the mother for its aptness. There had been several victories throughout the trial,
but they had all come at the cost of weeks and months. The trial had entered its third year, as Darabi had promised, and the end was nowhere in sight.

What Sara could not say was that watching her mother go to court terrified her. She feared losing her to the same men who robbed her of a father. More than any verdict or victory, she wanted the ordeal to end. She wanted a quiet, ordinary life without the constant ringing of the telephone, the incessant beeping of their jammed fax machine, the preoccupied face of her mother as she strained to write yet another letter to another congressman, or compose yet another sound bite for another reporter. She wanted peace so that she could sleep with abandon once again. As it was, she was frightened into wakefulness every dawn, sensing a strange presence lurking in her room, though it always vanished when she opened her eyes.

Her mother answered, “Ah! You’re missing the point,
moosh mooshak
. We’re winning.”

But black, in which she was still dressed, was not the shade of victory, not to the twelve-year-old girl. Each time Sara asked when she would shed her mourning clothes, Shohreh denied she was in mourning.

“This is just what I’m doing to remind the others what we’ve suffered, you see. It’s just for a short time.”

“It’s been two years,
maman
. This is going nowhere.”

There was cruelty in Sara’s voice but all Shohreh would have the heart to say was that justice, real justice, worked slowly. Yet cruelty was not the worst of what the mother would find in her child.

“What really works is a good gun to shoot those men with. That’s the fastest of all!”

Shohreh’s blood quickened every time Sara’s fury surfaced, but she managed to show a patience that failed her in the courtroom. Shooting was what the savages on trial had done, Shohreh would say. “Savagery was their way. Civility is our way.”

Something about the dignity, the certainty with which her mother uttered the words, the way she wove the tangled yarn of the ordeal into
us
and
them, civil
and
savage
was comforting to Sara. It restored to her mind a bit of the order their lives had lost ever since that September night.

Shohreh spoke of civility but it was sanity that preoccupied her the most. On days she was in court, she felt sane. Around Sara, preparing her meals, she felt sane. When reporters came over and their tapes were rolling, she felt sane. But as soon as she found herself alone, sanity began slipping from her. Stillness terrified her. A dark cloud, a ghoul, haunted her day and night. In solitude, it spread over her and whispered into her ear the very same words that Sara had spoken,
Face it! This is going nowhere.

Only Noori’s mother was able to console her. When they talked on the phone, she detected an anguish in her voice that matched her own. Then, in one conversation, she detected the foreboding traces of a familiar insanity, and dared not talk to her again. In her last telephone call, the old woman, feverish with flu, told Shohreh that she owed her an apology.

“None of this would have happened if I’d not eaten that fish. I let you down, my poor bride, I let you down.”

Living in Tehran, Noori’s lonesome mother, helpless with age and distance, hardly dared talk about her loss. Her forbidden sorrow, trapped within her, had turned in on itself.

“It was that fish. The minute I swallowed it, something went haywire in my belly. Oh, that fish! It’s why he’s dead,” the old woman said weeping.

“
Maadar jaan,
nothing you ate, nothing you did or didn’t do could have prevented what happened,” Shohreh said, censoring the word assassination from her lines, certain that their phones were under surveillance.

“People told me to swallow a whole fish alive. They told me if I did it when pregnant, the baby would become smart. I was nineteen and already loved him so. His father was away with the army. I was alone. I reached into the courtyard pool and caught a goldfish by the tail. I dropped it into my mouth. It slid down, flailing all the way into my stomach. There was such twirling and spinning in my belly. When it all stopped, I knew something had changed. I did this to him. If I’d not had that fish, he’d have been a regular boy. He’d have been alive . . .”

Ghouls of a different kind were hounding Bruno Jost. His mere name invoked anger in many. In court, even some judges were growing restless with him. In their chambers one afternoon, one judge lost his patience with the prosecutor’s refusal to limit the scope of his accusations. They had
gathered to discuss Jost’s refusal to drop the charges against Iran’s minister of intelligence. The assistant judge thundered at the uncompromising prosecutor:

“What is it you want, Mr. Jost? Will anything ever be enough for you? You’ve got five men in custody. Lock them up and be done with it! Why can’t you?”

His name was on the lips of furious imams at Friday prayers but except for guards, Jost hardly had any protectors. In the holy city of Qom, a wave of angry protestors had left the prayers chanting violent slogans against him. Yet, instead of issuing a statement in support of the prosecutor, Chancellor Kohl sent a conciliatory letter to Tehran expressing his regret for the religious sentiments that the investigation had injured.

Guards never left Jost’s side, not even when he was home. So close they kept to him that on Christmas the Josts left gifts for them under the tree, and ate their holiday feast together with the giants who kept feeling for their guns whenever the room fell unusually silent.

Too many forces beyond Jost’s reach tugged at the case. The deaths of four men in a Berlin restaurant one September night had spiraled into something far greater than each of their losses. It had become the pawn in many other games. In Germany, it had turned into the centerpiece of partisan politics. Parties used every misstep throughout the case to smear their rivals who, at the time, had been or were still in office. In Berlin, the hearings and investigations into the conduct of responsible local agencies were dragging on, dogging Berlin’s secretary of internal
affairs, among several figures. Other federal probes into the handling of the case by various agencies and their officials, including Bernd Schmidbauer, had become just as endless as the trial itself.

For all the troubles—scandals, inquiries, humiliations—for the loss of all the diplomatic gains—with Iran and with the rest of Europe and the United States—irate politicians directed their wrath at Jost and exacted their revenge by inventing rumors to smear the prosecutor’s reputation.

“That fucking Bruno Jost,” a senior foreign ministry official said to the reporter Hufelschulte one night while nursing a glass of whiskey. “He’s set up a shadow government in Karlsruhe and is shitting on everything we, in Bonn, worked years for. Goddamn legal debutant picked Mykonos for his goddamn debut and doesn’t know when to call it quits and leave it to us. Do you know, by the way, that he’s depressed out of his wits? He’s on a cocktail of anti psychotic meds. Won’t be long before the judges get wind of it.”

The rumors reached Jost’s boss, who called him to his office.

“Are you in trouble? Is there anything bizarre going on, Mr. Jost, that you wish to tell me about?”

Jost, even-tempered as ever, simply shrugged—nothing at all.

But he did feel exhausted. The trial seemed as endless as the day it had started. Each time Jost thought the last testimony had ended, the team representing the accused produced a new witness. Each time he prepared to deliver his final argument,
they presented a new document. There was little he could do against their ploys to prolong the trial. Besides, Judge Kubsch hardly ever rejected the chance to hear from a new witness or consider new discovery. Giving readily in to the unreasonable demands of the accused, Kubsch had been a riddle to many in the courtroom and was becoming one to Jost, too.