Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (10 page)

But reaching a wider audience was hardly what drove Parviz to call the tabloid reporter. It was desperation. The nationwide broadcast Norbert had promised was still days away. The waiting gnawed at him. He worried that it might have to yield to other breaking news. The fresh round of rumors about who had infiltrated the dinner at the Mykonos
were now directed at him and Noori, and it added to his restlessness. He had to retaliate, ruthlessly if need be. He believed that the waters of the tragedy he had experienced were deep enough to wash away all his past and the forthcoming sins he had begun contemplating.

From the visit the BKA agents had paid him, Parviz still had nine unpublished photos of the three leading suspects in the case. With nine exclusive photos he could strike a bargain with any reporter, especially a novice toiling at a tabloid with lesser standards of accuracy. He called the young reporter and offered him one of the photos.

It all happened swiftly. The photo ran beside an article and interview with him in the next issue of the
Bild
. The reporter was showered with more praise and congratulatory messages than he had ever received in his career. For him and the paper, the piece was a coup, and it brought some highbrow colleagues to the tabloid reporter’s doorstep, probing him about his sources.

“I’ve Parviz Dastmalchi to thank,” he told everyone, including Parviz.

The success of the piece was immediately followed by a second and then a third installment on the Mykonos case, with “never before seen” photos accompanying each. For the fourth article, Parviz offered more than just another exclusive photo.

“I have something else for you, something no one has yet reported,” Parviz said, then seductively asked if the reporter, whose confidence in Parviz was at a peak, could guarantee front-page coverage in exchange for the scoop.

The reporter put Parviz on hold, but returned moments later with blessings from his editor. Buoyed by the promise, Parviz unfolded the piece of paper he had been keeping in his shirt pocket, and said, “Here are the results of the ballistic tests on the murder weapons found at the car dealership last September, the ones the police won’t disclose.”

Parviz gave the full account of the weapons’ history and the reporter, at times speaking as if only to himself, fitted the pieces of information together, staggered by the enormity of what he was learning.

“These weapons had been sold to the Iranian Royal Army in 1972. But who supplied the weapons to the hit squad is as important as who sold the weapons to the Iranian Royal Army to begin with, you see,” Parviz said, raising the curiosity of his eager listener.

It was for this moment he had chosen the novice. What he subsequently did went against everything he had ever preached to his daughter. Yet he did not waver. “The weapons were sold to Iran by Germany,” he added.

To force the hands of the German officials, Parviz calculated, one had to incriminate them. Naming Germany, instead of Spain, as the real supplier would goad the authorities into denying the accusation by coming forth with the truth.

“Germany?” the reporter gasped at the other end. “Good God, Mr. Dastmalchi. What proof do you have for this?”

Parviz quoted a highly positioned but anonymous source at the BKA. Then he wrote down the serial numbers of the
weapons, their make and model, and the year they had been manufactured. At the bottom he wrote “sold to Iran by Germany” and faxed the hand-crafted document to the
Bild
.

At dawn the following day, a howl—deep, wrenching, and protracted—shook Norbert’s apartment.

“Nooo . . .”

The clock radio had gone off and the half-conscious Norbert heard the weather report interrupted by a breaking story about the murders at Mykonos. He burst out of bed and switched on the television. Every broadcast was running the news of the ballistic tests according to the
Bild
’s most recent issue. Except it was
Germany
not Spain that was being named the original supplier.

“Nooo!” Norbert wailed again as he dialed Parviz’s number. His howl was the sound of his broken trust.

Parviz spent the early morning hours of that day in his office, unable to do much. Norbert’s angry words kept echoing in his mind. Maybe all his ploys had been paltry and quixotic. Maybe he had achieved nothing. Maybe the sum of all his efforts was a drop in an ocean whose tides ebbed and flowed to the whims of politicians. Maybe, as Norbert insisted through his screams, he was damaging the case by his rash acts. Or maybe, as some fellow exiles had rumored, he was using the assassination to promote himself. Whatever it was that moved him was beyond his control. He could not stop what he had
begun. The need to wage war had become another physical urge like eating or keeping warm. He either warred or surrendered to fear, insomnia, and despair. It was how he warded off darkness. War was what he did to affirm, if only to himself, that he was innocent and alive.

11

Hollywood is making a film about Cyrus, so Westerners can learn how it took us 2,500 years to get from a great king to the mullahs of today.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

It was one of the great ironies in the history of diplomacy: Tehran was overtly boasting about what Europe was trying to hide or amend on its behalf. In November 1992, the supreme leader doubled the reward for the murder of Salman Rushdie. In December, another opposition member was kidnapped and killed in Istanbul. Not long after, at a press conference, the interior minister said that the murdered dissidents in exile were getting their due and had only themselves to blame. Yet these events did not keep the euphoric European businessmen from the 1992 Tehran Trade Fair, nor did they stop conceited officials from holding their scheduled two-day summit of Critical Dialogue with Iran in Edinburgh that December.

The next January, two more dissidents were murdered—one in a car bomb in Ankara, the other gunned down in Iraq. And in March, Bruno Jost circled in red three new spots on the world map—two in Pakistan and a third in Italy, each for a new assassination. In Washington, the secretary of state of the new Clinton administration called Tehran an “international outlaw,” yet Europe’s fervor would not be diminished. Against that backdrop, Jost was the lone investigator tracking the deadly epidemic his countrymen denied existed. At a time when Europe’s exports to Iran had reached a historic peak, the prosecutor’s gloomy news was unwelcome.

Denial, like a shadow, had also spread over Moabit’s prison cell #404. Yousef Amin, too, had a lot he wished to recant. Rumors about his collaboration with the police were circulating among the inmates, who had begun tormenting him. The few calls he received were either threats or reports of threats his family had received. Yousef had survived several jail terms in Lebanon and nimbly slipped by immigration officials throughout Europe. But for the first time in his life, he found himself under assault with no way out. After twenty interrogation sessions, his inquisitors had simply disappeared. By March 1993 it was Yousef who demanded a meeting with them, promising to make new revelations. These, like the preceding confessions, came in several installments.

“I’m here to tell you that everything I’ve said so far has been a lie. The truth is something I’m saving for the court and only the court,” Yousef said to his audience. They were
startled by the dramatic shift in his speech and manners. When Jost asked why he seemed so distressed, Yousef burst into a litany of complaints.

“I want to know why your police sent my family back to Lebanon.”

Jost and the commissioner, von Trek, took turns explaining that they had done everything in their power to protect his family. In the end, the family had chosen to return on its own. Yet neither man could get through to Yousef, whose distress grew with their attempts to calm him.

“I begged you to give my family an apartment. Six people cooped up in one room. Your police watching them like dogs. The Kurds and the Iranians weren’t enough? My family had to be afraid of your police, too!
You
are why they went back. If you so much as whistled, my family would have had a good life here. They told me they’d write me, and they haven’t. I’ve heard from nobody. Not you, not them. No one. I’d have had more visitors at my grave. I wrote a letter to the Lebanese embassy asking the ambassador to visit me here, and nothing! My lawyer hasn’t been around. He says he’s too busy reading what you’ve sent him.”

Yousef’s predicament was particularly tragic because of his previous credulity. Before the murders, he had believed his friends who reassured him that Iran would quickly negotiate their release if they were captured. After the arrest, he had hoped to strike a bargain with Jost by telling the truth, confident of his own winning wit. Six months in prison had taught him a hard lesson about the absoluteness
of Germany’s laws, the imperfect ubiquity of his patrons, and the limits of his own charm.

“This is what you’ve done to me.”

He made a gesture, which the stenographer recorded.

Note to file:
The prisoner placed his right fist in the joint of his left elbow and folded his forearm over it. According to the translator, the gesture is a vulgar one but, pertinent to this exchange, it means that the prisoner is in trouble.

“It’s all over. You’ve done your worst. But I tell you now, everything I said before is wrong. Are you writing this down? Lies! I’m keeping the truth for the judge and the court. Oh, how my head hurts!”

Note to file:
The commissioner accompanied the prisoner to the washroom for a drink of water. When they returned, the prisoner refused to go on, demanding another interpreter. He contends that the current interpreter speaks a different dialect of Arabic.

As Jost adjourned the meeting, Yousef pointed to the translator and shouted, “He’s working for the police. I know it. He’s a dirty pig!”

Note to file:
Other insults the prisoner used have been struck from the record.

After denying his past confessions, Yousef tried to revise what he had previously said about the friends he had betrayed.

“Here’s something else. Write it in your papers! Whatever happened, Darabi had nothing to do with it. He knew nothing. Darabi is a good man, nothing to do with anything bad. And also I’m not a member of the Hezbollah.”

Jost challenged him. “Mr. Amin, you said yourself that you had joined the Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

“I never said I’d anything to do with them.
You
keep squeezing me into Hezbollah.”

The commissioner read from the transcripts of several witnesses who had spoken of Yousef’s membership in the group and his travels to Iran with his friend Rhayel for combat training.

“So what?” Yousef shot back. “They say what they say. I say what I say. That’s all. I got nothing to do with Hezbollah. I’ve had no training. I’ve not even gone to school. What do you think I know? Nothing! I’m a nobody. You want me to sign something, okay, I will. You want me to say I’m Khomeini, fine! I’ll sign your papers and do what you say. I don’t need this. I need peace and quiet, not this. Not you. I’m sick. Can’t you see? Look at me! I’ve asked to go to the infirmary, but no one does anything . . . Iran! Keep saying Iran. I’m Lebanese. Got nothing to do with Iran.”

“Why is it then that in your address book you have the phone number of the Iranian consulate in Berlin?”

“Maybe someone gave me the number so someone there could help me. Is there such a number in my book? Is the
number any good? Did you try to see if it really is the consulate’s number? You should, you know.”

Jost paused and, instead of pressing the same point, he asked Yousef if he had been threatened.

“It’s the police that has threatened me. I’ll say what I want to the judge. I’m a Muslim. I’m not afraid of threats. I’m only afraid of God.”

“Mr. Amin, just to be sure, do you clearly understand what we mean here by the word
pressure
, or
threaten
? Perhaps your family in Lebanon has been threatened.”

Yousef interrupted angrily. “Don’t start talking this way!”

Note to file:
At the time of the dictation of the last two questions, the accused asked that the question about the threat against his family be struck from the transcript. When his request was denied, he jumped out of his chair and broke into tears. He said that it cannot and must not appear in the transcribed protocol. He pleaded with everyone in the visiting room.

“I’m a human being and you’re ruining everything for me. I’ll never see my son. I’ve not seen him since he was born. And I’ll not see him if you keep doing this to me.”

Yousef refused to speak to the investigators again. He ended his collaboration, just as the investigation ended. By March, Jost submitted the first draft of the indictment to the chief federal prosecutor. More than six months after Alexander von Stahl had
assigned Jost to the case, the prosecutor had returned with his findings. The appendices alone, spanning Jost’s library of 187 binders, were evidence of an impeccable inquiry conducted on two continents. It included some rare finds: police files dating as far back as 1980, letters from Iran’s embassy and consular sections in support of Darabi on several occasions, and statements from refugee affairs agencies throughout Europe, sixty-eight witnesses, and eighteen experts and scholars.

The chief federal prosecutor immediately alerted the ministry of justice. Just as quickly, the order came that he neither sign nor release the indictment until the justice ministry, its liaison at the chancellery, and the foreign ministry had approved it. To yield to the justice minister was reasonable, but to yield to the chancellery and the foreign ministry struck the chief federal prosecutor as a violation of the independence of his office.

If anyone had the power to limit the scope of Bruno Jost’s investigation, it was the chief federal prosecutor. Yet contrary to what many, reading through the tea leaves of party affiliation, had forecasted, Alexander von Stahl, a political conservative, proved to be surprisingly original. Though his party had historically been uncritical of Iran in favor of Germany’s businesses, von Stahl refused to put any interests above the law. He fiercely protected Jost and his staff. For von Stahl, the nation’s security always came first, no matter the political consequences. Under his watch, the streets of his country would not be turned into rogues’ gaming grounds, be the victims German or not.

Jost’s indictment, fearlessly articulating his findings, began with the words, “I accuse Yousef Amin, Kazem Darabi, and
Abbas Rhayel of collectively conducting, on September 17, 1992, with reprehensible motives, a most heinous act of murder against four human beings in the city of Berlin.”

The indictment alone was historic, if only for the single sentence no one on the continent had ever dared pen: “Kazem Darabi, the agent who organized the murders, acted upon the orders of the intelligence ministry of Iran.”

Iran
, that forbidden name, had at last been spoken.

As illogical, even unlawful, as the justice ministry’s instructions were, von Stahl obeyed them and sent copies of the document to all three offices. Naming Iran went against the wishes of some of the most powerful figures in his own party, among them the foreign minister and the deputy justice minister. To accuse Iran’s regime of murder was not simply a blow to Tehran, but also to Bonn, Iran’s champion in the West.

April arrived without a word from the ministries. The chief federal prosecutor reluctantly waited.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights in the exam room, Parviz stood by, sometimes kissing, sometimes stroking the hand of his daughter, Salomeh. She looked even more frail in the hospital gown. He felt restless on behalf of the aspiring twelve-year-old dancer who had been told to remain still till the doctor returned. Two fainting spells, confounding several internists and pediatricians, had forced the father and daughter to see a cardiologist. Two fainting spells on her part, and a heap of guilt on her father’s part.

Ever since the morning after the murders, Parviz had tried to keep her away from the fallout, to shield Salomeh from the news. Before picking her up on Tuesdays, their weekday together, he combed through the apartment to hide all signs of the case from view: photos, letters, phone messages, newspaper clippings. But the more he hid, the more she wanted to know.

“How did it happen, Baba
jaan
? How many were they? Did anyone hit you?”

“They came. They shot. They left. Nothing happened to me. Nothing at all,” he would say, wishing to move on.

But her questions continued.

“Did you have blood on you? Did you scream? Did you cry? Did you cry after? Were you scared? Are you scared now?”

The depth of her curiosity astounded him. Once he yelled, “Enough!” and she stopped asking, but he knew she had not stopped thinking the haunting thoughts.

The dream of becoming a dancer had turned her into a reluctant eater, and so he designed intricate plans for her meals. Instead of an elaborate dinner, he lined up an epicure’s array of tiny appetizers, which he paraded before his willowy ballerina at intervals. In the small, tidy apartment brimming with music, the father, surrendering to the daughter’s whims, had agreed to be a dance student in the tutelage of his diminutive coach. Though tone-deaf and hopelessly uncoordinated, his performances were memorable. What he lacked in talent he compensated for in wit. When he failed to remember his steps, he resorted to buffoonery. He limped
cross-eyed across the floor, greeting an imaginary audience not with “guten Tag,” German for “good day,” but with his own Persian-German concoction, “
gooz-be
Tag,” or “fart on your day.” Nothing like a bit of vulgarity to bond a parttime father with his preadolescent child.

What he could not fathom was that joy, however abundant, was no substitute for safety, which she no longer felt in his presence. Nor could he imagine her days in school, among the classmates who treated her like a sensation. Only some of the questions she asked him were her own. The rest were ones other children, mocking her father as the “superhero of the nightly news,” incessantly posed to her.

When the first fainting spell came over Salomeh, he thought she had starved herself. But when she fainted on a full stomach, he blamed himself and his complicated life for his daughter’s malady—the malady no one could, thus far, diagnose. He had tried hard to keep her out of his own gloomy world lest the killers, or the mere idea of them, rob her of a happy childhood. But now it seemed the vacuum he had surrounded her with was robbing her of breath.

Unlike Salomeh, Sara wanted to know nothing. In November, she had asked Shohreh where exactly her father was now and if he was in pain. In December, she had asked if she could buy him Christmas gifts and leave them under the tree until he returned. In February, she had asked if Shohreh intended to marry another man, and if so, was he going to move in with them. By March, she no longer asked. If she heard the name “Mykonos” on the radio, she rushed to turn it off. If
she recognized the face of family or friends on television, she walked out of the living room.