Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (6 page)

Then came a shout in Kurdish. The crowd stirred. Each protester placed one foot forward. The police gripped their batons. But what followed was not a charge of angry men. Arms around each other’s neck, they simply threw their shoulders up, then thrust them forward. There was a momentary hush. Then another shout came, and they undid the movement, stepping back on the other foot, shoulders releasing, lowering. Heeding the rhythm of an inner beat, they had begun the steps of an old familiar dance. One foot back, another forward, undulating the shoulders over and over, till at last they burst into song, their ancient anthem.

They chanted though they had no hope of finding justice for their dead. They had no reason to expect from Germany what the rest of Europe had not given them, no reason to place any faith in German prosecutors, judges, or the justice system. They were certain they would be overruled by the opportunism of politicians. Countries with far less at stake in Iran than Germany had been lenient toward Tehran. Bonn had reason to be even more lenient.

By 1992 trade figures between the two nations had reached 5 billion dollars, making Germany Iran’s dominant Western economic partner. Iran’s shares in German stocks exceeded 200 million dollars. The two countries had exchanged more than three hundred political, economic, cultural, and legal delegations, half of which included parliamentary members from both sides. In every international summit, Germany rejected, or at least tempered, the tone of American proposals against Iran. Since the end of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States in 1979, Europe had vied to fill the gap America had left behind. At last, Germany was about to step into the coveted space.

Its close ties with Iran had raised Germany’s standing as a global broker between Iran, Israel, and the United States. German officials championing the cause of Iran had initiated a continental effort to recast the image of Iran as an authentic, albeit imperfect, regional democracy. The campaign had been launched that July, only a few weeks before the murders. It was widely trumpeted as the “Critical Dialogue,” a diplomatic roundtable with senior Iranian and European officials, with future meetings scheduled for the following December.

With resolute expressions upon their faces, the protesters chanted their slogans. But resoluteness was only a mask. They believed Germany’s stakes in Tehran were too high to afford justice for their dead. They were chanting to affirm to each other that they were alive, knew the truth, and were not afraid to be seen or sing their song of perseverance. They knew who was behind the murders but it was immaterial—they were adrift and powerless. They made their demands
though they were consumed by a despondence that would prey on their peace, even as they made promising gains.

Two of the leading stars of the Social Democratic Party had agreed to represent the victims’ families. The law firms of Otto Schily, who would become interior minister, and Wolfgang Wieland, who would become a member of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, took on the case pro bono. These names raised the profile of the dead, but that was not all. The second firm also added its most seasoned criminal attorney, Hans Joachim Ehrig, to the team.

Ehrig was the lesser known of the attorneys but an equal in wisdom and passion. He was one of those rare members of the 1960s generation who had adapted admirably to the 1990s. His gaze was still fierce behind the perfectly round lenses of his rimless glasses, his old unruly beard trimmed down to a neat mustache. In him, all the formative bohemian ideals of his youth remained intact without dulling his taste for luxuries like silk ties or sailing. (His sail boat was docked in a lake near his villa in north Germany.) But between ideals or luxuries, the choice came effortlessly to him. He was on his way to spend a long weekend in the countryside at an arts festival when his assistant dropped the Mykonos file on his desk. After scanning it, Ehrig rolled his suitcase into the office closet and was off to a meeting with the victims.

7

A few days after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for my death, a delivery man brought a package to my door. Not recognizing the sender’s address, I didn’t dare open it. Finally I thought, “Hadi, you can’t keep being afraid. You’ve got to live your life.” So I opened it. And do you know what I found inside? Not a bomb, oh no! A pack of opium, and what superb opium it was.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

Yousef Amin was grieving for a loss of his own. By the end of September, his friend Rhayel had come to visit him in Rhine, asking him to leave his family in Germany. The Sportino bag they hoped had been expertly hidden was found under a white Audi at a dealership on Cicero Street. The office of the federal prosecutor had issued a statement announcing the discovery of the murder weapons, the first major breakthrough in the case. It was only a matter of time till they came for Rhayel. In the frantic moments inside the restaurant that night he had forgotten to put on his gloves, leaving his handprint on the gun.

Everyone else on the team had already left the country. The chief shooter had reached Tehran within forty-eight hours after the operation. Their patron, a Berlin grocer named Kazem Darabi who ostensibly employed them but had in fact coordinated and financed the operation, had also flown to Tehran. The driver, on his way to the airport the day before, had delivered some cash to Rhayel and advised him to leave immediately.

Lebanon was beckoning. But for Rhayel, the road back to Beirut passed through Rhine. There was no escape for him without Yousef. Self-restraint was not among Yousef’s virtues. The very qualities that made him endearing—his boyish banter and innocent enthusiasm—also made him dangerous in the hands of interrogators. It was for Rhayel to shepherd Yousef out of Germany, as he had shepherded him into it. Convincing Yousef to leave was not easy but Rhayel invoked the fate of his namesake. The biblical Joseph had left the comforts of Egypt to return home, and so must Yousef. Downcast and dejected, Yousef posed at a photographer’s studio for the black and white portrait that would be used in a forged passport he was expecting to receive shortly, as was Rhayel. Then they would flee Germany.

Shortly, it turned out, meant several days. By October 4, only one passport had arrived and the second was to be delivered the next day. The two friends spent a melancholy last day together. In the evening, at 17 Heriburg Street, the Amins and their guest turned in early. It was a moonless night in Rhine.

Long before the shades had been drawn on the windows and the lights were turned off in the apartment, the forces of BKA, Germany’s federal police, had surrounded the building. Two tips had led them there. The first was a document from the intelligence division at the BfV, the federal office for the protection of the constitution, which had been sent to Bruno Jost. Though only partially disclosed, it detailed the events at the restaurant according to an anonymous but highly reliable source.

The second tip, from British intelligence, revealed the identities and whereabouts of the two suspects who still remained in Germany and their patron, Darabi. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British and Americans had yet to fully surrender the city to their German counterparts and their watch posts were still operating. The British had monitored Darabi for years and knew of his ties to Hezbollah, his frequent visits to Lebanon, and the dubious nature of his various businesses.

Just after midnight, the BKA raided Yousef’s residence. Though the federal police were on location hours earlier, they waited for the stroke of midnight to make their arrest, giving themselves the longest possible stretch of the “one day” granted under the law before they had to file formal charges against their detainees.

Rhayel ran to the balcony to escape, but found himself surrounded from every direction. Everyone in the apartment was taken into custody: Rhayel, Yousef, Yousef’s brother, and Yousef’s pregnant wife. In Tehran Darabi, confident that all his
underlings had escaped, celebrated by buying a women’s Rolex watch at a jewelry store on his way to the airport. It would be his last stop before returning to his wife and their handicapped daughter, who depended on the generosity of German health care. By the time his plane landed in Hamburg, his men were already in prison. Hours later Darabi, too, was arrested.

Ordinary Berliners took comfort in the news of the arrests but the exiles felt no safer. There were guilty others still on the loose, some of whom had begun to torment Shohreh. Her telephone rang often, and a strange voice would pour into the receiver, “Can I speak to Noori?”

She usually hung up, but if she did not the caller would say mockingly, “Oops! He isn’t there, is he? In that case, can I speak to his pal, the Doctor?”

“Who are you?”

Instead of answering, the voice would break into fiendish laughter just before hanging up. Sometimes she answered the phone and heard a tape recorder playing a passage from the Koran.

Sometimes her daughter would cause a scare. During one episode, Sara ran into her mother’s bedroom, screaming, “It’s a bomb!”

The bomb was their own egg timer, which had been slipped into a boot on the shoe rack at the entrance to the apartment.

“Talk to her! Ask why she did it. You can’t be afraid to talk to your own child,” Shohreh’s brother had counseled.

But all she had the heart to do was seat Sara at the dining table and ask what she could fix her to eat, reminding her, “We must eat. We must eat so we can be strong. We have to be strong.”

Shohreh worried that she was failing Sara. No matter what her daughter did, Shohreh wallowed in guilt. If Sara sulked, Shohreh worried that her child was grieving. If Sara smiled, Shohreh thought it was fake, a smile only for her sake. Her sadness rarely dimmed, and when it did, anxiety flared. The menaces who kept calling had her believe that they were capable of coming after her and Sara too.

Solace was a rarity, but she found it in bed. She refused to wash the sheets because Noori’s scent still lingered in the fabric. She pulled them over her head, breathed the stuffy air, and ran her fingers lightly over his side searching the pillow and mattress for his imprint. She shut her eyes and tried to picture him at his liveliest, trying to wipe away the memory of the corpse that the police had asked her to identify. As her fingertips slid upon the sheets, her mind slipped into reverie. Noori came to life.

“Let your hair fall on my face, little lady. It’s better than silk.”

He dared to say what most men would not. “Why wear a bra? You mustn’t deny others the view of your glorious breasts.”

Once he had taken his fill of her glories, he lit a cigarette and dreamed about their future. “Let’s get out of here, little naked lady. Let’s go to a sunny place, somewhere in Latin America, bask on the beach and never look back.”

• • •

Unlike Shohreh, Parviz avoided his bed. He dreaded sleep. If he dozed off, nightmares ravaged his rest and he would awaken drenched in sweat. Every dream ended with him on the brink of death: trapped in a speeding car with failing brakes, standing blindfolded and handcuffed on a chair as a noose was tightened around his neck.

Mornings brought no relief. When he left his apartment, he crossed the threshold certain a sniper was waiting for him to emerge. He turned the corner hesitantly, awaiting a dagger at the bend. If walking became a test of his nerves, he would drive instead. But in his hands, the key felt like a matchstick and his car a heap of kindling ready to ignite. On the road, at each traffic light, the sight of every cyclist who pulled up beside him quickened his blood.

He, like Shohreh, was being shadowed. Fearing his assassins friends rarely visited him. Few had the courage to invite him over. He accepted only one dinner invitation in those early days after the killings. When he had arrived at his host’s house and they had sat down to eat, the telephone rang. The caller asked for Parviz, telling the host that it was about an urgent meeting that had to be arranged between Parviz and Mr. Changiz Dastmalchi—Parviz’s father who had died years ago. The call was only a reminder that the killers were not finished with him. When the host relayed the message, Parviz rose from the table and said good-bye. He never accepted another invitation, not wishing to expose his friends to the perils of his own life.

Besides, he was no longer sure who was a friend. He no longer trusted his friends and his friends no longer trusted
him. No one knew who had spied on them at the restaurant that September evening. So they treated each other like suspects. Parviz took it upon himself to solve the mystery. He questioned old acquaintances, thinking himself perfectly discreet, but they felt interrogated by him. His inquiries only added to the bitterness of an already bitter community. Some pitied him, others condemned him. He realized it one evening when, walking into a gathering of expatriates, he heard someone murmur, “Oh, look, Lieutenant Columbo is here.”

He left immediately. Leaving, retreating further into solitude, came easily to him in those days.

The events of September had robbed Parviz of many friendships, but October brought him a few new ones. Norbert Siegmund, the journalist, was now pursuing the case with an intensity matched only by his own. Norbert’s office at the ZDF station was within minutes of Parviz’s office at the Red Cross, so they met regularly.

The case was a shared obsession. Parviz recounted the minutiae of that evening often, the clues to the riddle that consumed them. He needed Norbert. Being on the air, having millions listening to his argument, broke the silence he so disdained, giving him a small revenge. Norbert also needed Parviz—the protagonist at the heart of his reporting. Thrust into the midst of the Iranian exile community for the first time, Norbert was finding it a forbidding labyrinth, where Parviz seemed more credible than the rest.

Norbert also needed the focus he drew from the investigation. For years, he had been seeking something elusive—his
life’s purpose—without luck. At sixteen, he became a social worker to help the jobless. At eighteen, he quit his job, picked up his guitar, and went to India looking for inspiration. When he returned after weeks of wandering, he reconciled his passion for music with the mandates of adulthood by choosing music history as his major in college. But a bad piece of Ukrainian folk music, assigned to him for his thesis by a glum professor, dashed his hope of becoming a music historian. Ukrainian folk was no rock and roll, and the scholarly pursuit of music did not stir him the way playing music had. He switched to journalism so he could become a radio host and spend his days airing his favorite tunes.

His first days on the job coincided with an unusually heavy news cycle. There was the weakening currency, the central bank’s fear of inflation—two of the many fallouts of Germany’s reunification—and a burgeoning immigration crisis marked by 400,000 new asylum seekers in 1992. The station’s experienced reporters were chasing these stories when the assassinations occurred. Therefore, the station manager was forced to send the new disc jockey into the field. There, at the site of Noori’s grave on his first assignment, the unexpected requiem he heard had moved Norbert as he had once thought only rock and roll could.

He and Parviz drove through the neighborhoods the assassins had frequented. They downed many shish kebab sandwiches and drank countless cups of tea in the hopes of disguising their anomalous presence in the Shiite haunts of Berlin. There was nothing to be unearthed on an innocuous block, yet just walking the streets the killers had walked
prompted conversations they never had inside their offices. They roamed about, looking for proof to back Parviz’s claim that the business owner, Darabi, was an intelligence operative working for Tehran.

“He’s their thug. Every expatriate in this city knows it. Anyone who’s ever demonstrated against the mullahs has felt the blows of his bat.”

Parviz talked feverishly, as if convincing Norbert might convince all Germans. The shuttered windows of Darabi’s grocery and dry-cleaning stores with
TEMPORARILY CLOSED
signs hanging from the doorknobs, inflamed him every time.

“Laundry services? Bah! All he laundered was the regime’s money. He doesn’t make his living selling turnips, I assure you.”

During one of these outings an old memory rushed back to him. He recalled that Darabi had manned Iran’s booth at the annual Green Week exhibit. Since the late 1920s, Green Week had been Berlin’s most festive international affair, a behemoth farmers’ market. Nearly half a million visitors came every year to taste the products of fifty countries, Iran among them. Norbert jotted the name down, ideas already brewing in his head, as Parviz strained to recollect. Which year, he could not be sure, but he had no doubt Darabi had been the official representative.

“Some bureaucrat somewhere must have the record of it on file, if you’d look into it. Tie Darabi to Iran’s regime and you’ll have your proof!”

If Parviz was not with Norbert, he was often off to do what increasingly seemed like an act of penance: visiting Aziz, who
was still in the hospital. Aziz was estranged from his wife and had no one to look after him. With Noori gone, Parviz felt a tenderness for Aziz he had never felt before. When Noori had first befriended Aziz, Parviz called them “brothers in alcohol,” since the two often drank together. But with time, he saw Aziz’s affection for Noori. Each night Noori stepped inside the restaurant, Aziz would open his arms and cheer, “My
mola
has arrived!”

He would link arms with Noori and drag him from table to table, saying, “Meet my
mola
, please! This man, here, is my
mola
.”

Mola
, the beloved in the love poems of the poet Rumi.

Instead of shying away from flaws in others, Noori was inspired to correct them. It was a virtue Parviz found at once exasperating and endearing. When Aziz and his wife arrived in Germany a few years earlier, Aziz had told her he did not wish either of them to study German.

“We don’t need to learn
their
language. Their Western ways will corrupt and tear us apart,” was his answer to her proposal that they take turns watching the baby and attending language classes.