The Increment (11 page)

Mahmoud Azadi squirmed nervously
in the backseat of a Paykan taxi in Tehran, heading north in the afternoon traffic. The cars were moving along the Kordestan Expressway, big and breezy like Los Angeles, the city that Tehran secretly mimicked in its dreams. When the cab reached Vali Asr Avenue, the traffic slowed to a crawl. The driver asked his passenger what kind of music he wanted to hear, Persian or Turkish, but Azadi said he didn’t care. The taxi stopped for another passenger, a single woman. Azadi moved to the front seat, as the rules required, so that he wouldn’t have to sit next to her.

His mind was somewhere else. He hated meeting the British in Tehran. They weren’t supposed to do this. They were supposed to wait and talk in Qatar or Dubai. They were supposed to use the mysterious communications device they had left in the bushes in Lavizan Park many months ago. Something bad was happening, it could only be that. When Azadi received the message the day before summoning him to the apartment, he had been sick to his stomach. He had been afraid even of his own vomit, that it was a telltale sign of his secret work.

The September smog had settled over the city like a noxious cloud. Azadi couldn’t even see the Alborz ridge through the haze, and it was only a few miles away. He had grown up in this neighborhood, born in the last gaudy days of the shah. He was lucky that his father had been a religious man with the right friends in the bazaar. Otherwise the family would have been destroyed, and he might be driving a cab instead of riding in one.

The traffic edged up Vali Asr. At each corner, cars entering from the right pushed their way in, defying the oncoming traffic. People drove here by inches. They were ready to die for a car’s length of space. It hadn’t been that way in the Netherlands, when Azadi was a student at Utrecht. “Sun of justice, shine upon us.” That was the university motto. There were rules. People stood in lines. They stopped at traffic lights. A man’s dignity wasn’t at risk every time he entered an intersection.

Azadi got out on the corner of Vali Asr and Satari Boulevard. The driver said he didn’t want any money for such a short ride, but of course he didn’t mean it. Azadi gave him five tomans. Too much, but he was nervous. The apartment was two blocks north, on Foroozan Street. He walked slowly, looking in the store windows the way the Englishman had told him to do. There was someone behind him, a man in sunglasses, walking as slowly as Azadi. Why was that? He had that queasy feeling again, as last night, that he wanted to be sick. The man in the sunglasses continued past him, but then he stopped at the corner of Foroozan Street and began reading a newspaper. Nobody did that. Azadi was panicking now. He wanted to run, all the way back to Holland if he could. The foreigners were devils, and they had made him a devil, too.

He hailed an empty taxi coming up Vali Asr. From the driver’s open window came the buoyant sound of an American country singer. He recognized the voice: it was Sheryl Crow; Azadi had a bootleg copy of one of her CDs. The young taxi driver asked Azadi if he minded the music, and when he didn’t answer, he let it play. The driver was a brave man, or maybe just a careless one. Azadi was reassured, either way. Why should he be so afraid? Perhaps he had just imagined the surveillance.

He told the driver he wanted to go to the Nigerian embassy, on Naseri Street. They inched their way two blocks north, so close to the other cars that the metal skins seemed to be touching. They turned right off the main drag and moved slowly down the side street. Azadi looked up at the rooftops of the buildings. You could see satellite dishes on most of them, sucking down the sweet signals of pirate television from Los Angeles and Toronto and Dubai. They were illegal, officially, but that didn’t matter most of the time. When the authorities decided to crack down, there would be a little story in the paper, and people would move the dishes back from the edge of the roof so they couldn’t be seen from the street. A few dishes would be confiscated, and then sold on the black market by the police. And then after a few weeks everything would go back to normal. The authorities didn’t lose face; the people didn’t lose face; the rituals were preserved.

Azadi was feeling almost relaxed now. The taxi crossed Afriqa Boulevard, and a few moments later they were at the Nigerian embassy. Azadi knew it because he had worked there as a translator, before he went to Holland. He had been reporting for the Ministry of Intelligence, of course, not that the Nigerians had any real secrets to steal. But it was enough to get Azadi his permission to travel abroad. He gave the driver a few tomans and began walking south, back toward Foroozan Street, approaching the apartment from the other direction. He wasn’t so scared now. They weren’t here. They knew nothing about him. The British were powerful. They were devious and vile, as every Iranian knew, but they were the clever ones. How could someone be in danger if he was in the hands of the Little Satan?

Azadi entered a modern
apartment building, next to another new one that was still under construction. Everything was being rebuilt in this part of town. Iranians living abroad were sending money home to buy apartments for their parents or their cousins, or just to sit empty. The English must have played that game to get their safe house. They had found an Iranian businessman in Geneva or Frankfurt and had him fill out the paperwork, and wire money to the right bank accounts in Dubai. It was just another “hot” apartment, bought quasi-legally as an investment. The exiles were convinced the mullahs could not last much longer, so they speculated in real estate. They didn’t care about politics, these rich exiles. That was the problem. They would never pry power loose from the street urchins of South Tehran who filled the ranks of the Basij and the Pasdaran. The good people were always too soft.

Azadi rang the bell of an apartment on the third floor and waited.

The Englishman opened the door a crack. He called himself Simon Hughes, but Azadi knew that must be a false name. Why did they bother? He could call himself “John Bull,” and that would be fine. He had red hair and a big belly, and big glasses that shielded his eyes. It must be a disguise. That was what these spies did. They changed costumes like they were in a Hollywood movie. “Simon Hughes” didn’t say a word until they were in the salon and he had turned up the radio. He began by repeating the time of the next scheduled meeting, in Doha in three months. Why hadn’t they stuck to that plan? Something must be wrong.

“We are looking for someone,” said the Englishman. He sounded so serious, but he wasn’t very old. He was in his early thirties, probably no older than Azadi himself. He spoke good Persian. The British did that right. Were they all spies, all the people who graduated from the schools of Oriental studies at Oxford and London? Was that their secret?

“Who are you looking for?” asked Azadi. “Can you give me a name?”

“No,” said the Englishman. “But the person we want may be looking for you. That’s how you will know him. Or her, possibly.”

Azadi was confused, and also worried. “Why will he be looking for me? Please? Does he know who I am?” There was a tremor in his voice.

“No, he doesn’t know who you are. Not at all. But he will be expressing an interest in your scientific specialty. He will be asking about nuclear physics, X-ray physics. That is how you will know who he is. It is possible that he works at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, or she. It is likely that he is a scientist, like you. If you learn of such a request, I want you to make note of the name and send it to me as soon as possible. And then I want you to forget it.”

Azadi nodded. He was really frightened now. He was putting his head into the mouth of the lion if this person worked at the TNRC. That was the place of “no one knows.”

The Englishman had some other requests. Had there been visits from foreign scientists to the lab at Tehran University where Azadi worked? Any new shipments of materials from the West, or new requests for suppliers of scientific equipment? They were always asking about that. You would have thought these British were selling laboratory equipment, from all their commercial requests. The Iranians had a saying: “The British have a hand in everything.” That was why people feared them, and loved them secretly, too. They were the puppet masters. They had their hands on the strings. How could the puppet not love the puppet master?

The Englishman went over the communications protocol one last time. Then he said goodbye and Azadi walked out the door and down into the sheltering chaos of the streets.

A week passed.
The rains came, and they broke through the shell of smog covering Tehran. Azadi tried to concentrate in his lab, but he was nervous. He left work early the day the rain stopped, and went up to Darband, to walk in the hills north of the city. He took something with him, a copy of an official message he had received on the Internet. He didn’t want to look at it in the lab, where others might see him—or simply see his face after he had read it.

The drive to Darband was slow, up the steep streets near the shah’s old palace. The taxi dropped him near the top, where the trails began. It took an hour of hiking to escape the juice peddlers and knots of tourists and feel free of the city and its tightness. Up here, the women began to let their scarves fall loose, showing their hair. If they were young and daring, they found a hideaway off the main path and took their bras off, too, so that their boyfriends could touch their breasts under the cloak of their manteau. That was the orb of freedom, the soft whiteness of a woman’s bosom, to be touched and kissed. Azadi had brought his girlfriends up here, the adventurous ones. He had been a spy of love then, risking everything for a touch of flesh. Was it a version of that same excitement that he felt when he went to his meeting with Simon Hughes? Was that why he did it? There were easier ways to find a secret life.

Azadi climbed another steep trail until he was certain that he was alone. He turned back and looked down the hillside. Building after building, mile after mile; dreams and lies behind every door. How was he any different? Lies were the fuel on which this city ran; everyone had something to hide. He was in a crowd of liars, millions of them. That was his protection. Why would they look for him, when everyone had a secret?

Azadi took out the email message he had printed from his computer. He unfolded the piece of paper carefully. He read it twice. It was a research request, addressed to his department, seeking information about recent literature in the field of X-ray physics. It was sent by a scientist named Dr. Karim Molavi at the Tohid Electrical Company. Azadi thought he had heard of that company. It was owned by the Pasdaran. Did he remember that? Who was Dr. Karim Molavi? The sickness was beginning to rise in his stomach again.

He knew what to do. His anxiety made him smart. He had brought with him the communications device the Englishman had given him after their first meeting, and now he typed the details of the message. The name, the email address, the workplace at Tohid Electrical Company. He pushed a button and it was gone. It had never existed. He tore up the printed copy of the Internet message and was going to throw it away, but he thought, No, they will find the pieces. He would take it home and burn the paper with a lighter, and throw the ashes down the toilet. He wished he could escape in the same way, flush himself back to the Netherlands, or London, or maybe just to Doha.

Now he would quit. If Azadi was looking for somebody, that somebody was also looking for him. He would skip the next meeting with the British in Qatar, and refuse to answer any more of their communications. And never, ever meet them again inside Iran. He would disappear back into the anonymity of his laboratory at Tehran University. He would go to Friday prayers and bow so low he would make a callus on his forehead.

Azadi began walking back down the trail. His steps were heavy. It was one thing to be above the city of lies, here at Darband, but it was another to descend back toward its belly.

Azadi tried to calm
himself that night by reading one of his favorite books. It was an Iranian novel called
My Uncle Napoleon
that had been written in the mid-1970s, around the time he was born. It was about an irascible old man who was convinced that the British controlled every aspect of Iranian life. The lead character, “Dear Uncle Napoleon,” took that name because he identified so passionately with the French emperor’s hatred of the British. The only real British person Dear Uncle actually encountered in the novel was the bossy wife of an Indian businessman, but never mind. Like most Iranians of the time, Dear Uncle assumed that the British and their agents were everywhere. The Americans were not yet the Great Satan when the book was written. They were wicked, but in a phantasmagorical way. Dear Uncle’s friend Asadollah was always admonishing his chums about the importance of “going to San Francisco,” which was his euphemism for having sex. If you couldn’t make it to San Francisco, Asadollah would say, you should at least try for Los Angeles.

Dear Uncle Napoleon was crazy, or maybe not. He said the things people believed, but were too polite to say out loud. The British were wicked; they were the cause of every bad thing; their agents were omnipresent. Every Iranian believed that. The book became a wildly popular Iranian television series during the 1970s. The ayatollahs had tried to ban it—it satirized the mullahs of Iran, in addition to obsessing about the British—but they gave up. It was like trying to ban laughter.

Azadi liked to read
My Uncle Napoleon
because it covered his trail. It showed that he despised the British and their spies, like every other Iranian. He carried the book with him to the laboratory sometimes and read it during lunch, laughing aloud at the funny parts. But it wasn’t just that. Though it was a farcical comic novel, it reinforced his sense that there really was a foreign hand that steered Iran’s destiny—and that by assisting it in secret, he was making the only rational choice. He fell asleep that night with the book open on his bed.