Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (14 page)

In the midst of writing one day, she heard the chief judge call her name. She lifted her head, bewildered. Ehrig leaned into her and said, “It’s your turn.”

Her moment to testify had come and, though she had long known that it would, the reality startled her just the same.

“Me? But . . . what will I say? I’m not ready,” she whispered, anxiety rising in her.

“Just answer the questions. That’s all you need to do,” he murmured, tugging gently at her arm to lift her along as he stood.

On the stand, she did her best to be a good witness. She kept to the facts, as the lawyers had advised. At times, she shut her eyes to concentrate on the details of the memories she was asked to revisit. She did not cry, even when the questions summoned gasps of sympathy from the audience.

“What did your husband say before leaving that night?”

She had paused to hold back tears and answered without breaking.

“Your honor, he said not to wash the dishes because he was going to do them when he returned.”

“Is that all?”

“Then he kissed me and said, ‘See you shortly, little lady.’”

She had done well until then but, shifting in her seat, she caught a glance of Darabi on whose lips she detected a smirk. In an instant, the smirk undid her composure. She turned deaf. Her fury was reignited and the room blurred. She saw no one but the man with the hooked nose, balding head, stubbly beard, and deep-set eyes, grinning triumphantly.

She faced Darabi and began addressing him as if they had been in conversation all their lives.

“I’ll get you, Mr. Darabi. You may think you’re a Muslim, but you’re nothing but a disgrace to our religion. I’ll show you I’m the better Muslim. I’ll fight you and your bosses for as long as I breathe. I—”

Judge Kubsch interrupted her.

“You can’t speak this way in this courtroom, Mrs. Dehkordi! No one’s guilt or innocence has yet been proven. You may step down!”

Shohreh was shaken, above all, by the judge’s austere tone. Who was this caped man who did not bow to her venerable grief, and commanded her so? She pursed her lips lest the thought slip through them. Her attorneys had told her to trust the judge. Kubsch was a veteran who had presided over some of the toughest cases of political crime in recent years. When the former heads of East Germany appeared before him on charges of treason, Judge Kubsch had, after weeks of deliberation, declared the trial altogether unconstitutional. The decision caused a sensation, prompting a nationwide debate. The case was referred to the Constitutional Court, and was upheld—setting a precedence. A victory so great would have inflated most egos. But he had celebrated the landmark event by returning to the bench the next day.

Other survivors took to the stand and felt similarly unsettled. For Mehdi, the feeling set in when Judge Kubsch’s deputy asked, “Here, in the transcripts of your statement to the
police on the night of September 17th, you say the killers were members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Do you have any evidence the court hasn’t seen?”

“I say this based on years of observation. I’ve no doubt the regime is behind this. The Guards or the intelligence ministry or both carried it out.”

Judge Kubsch interjected. “Let me remind you that this is a court of law. We’re not interested in your political analysis. Please state what facts or evidence you have to back your claim.”

Modesty kept Mehdi from saying that he was an accomplished engineer and a beloved athlete. He simply said, “You see, I’ve no other enemies. There’s no one else who wants to kill me.”

“And do you have any evidence to prove the Iranian regime wants to kill you? If you don’t, please don’t speculate.”

To ask Mehdi to document so obvious a presence as the inescapable menace that had forced him into exile and haunted him still was to ask that he show the air he breathed. He was offended, but silenced, too. That was the trouble all the exiles would face on the witness stand—how to carve out something tangible from the indurate, misshapen heap of their thirteen years of suffering for those who did not know their experiences.

The scrutiny felt equally harsh to Parviz when his turn came, as if only his errors were the subject of inquiry.

“A few months ago you went to the BKA headquarters in Meckenheim and identified Yousef Amin as the lead shooter at the restaurant that night. How could you say with confi dence that Mr. Amin was the man who had shot at your party?”

“Whatever Yousef Amin was doing and wherever he may have been, inside or outside, he was carrying out Tehran’s orders,” he responded stubbornly.

“This you also say with confidence. Could you tell the court why you are so confident?”

“We in the Iranian opposition have been hounded by the regime for so long that we sense things in a way that’s impossible to put into words.”

The judge, clearly not convinced, watched Parviz silently for a few moments.

Parviz tried again. “Because many Iranians in the diaspora have been murdered, and whenever a case was properly investigated, Tehran was implicated. Very simple! Take the 1989 murder in Vienna . . .”

The judge raised his hand and stopped him in midsentence to put an entirely different question to him. “In your opinion, how did the killers know about the meeting on Thursday?”

“I think they had a mole.”

“Do you
think
this, or know this?”

“I think this. I don’t have any evidence.”

“You said earlier that the killers were near the restaurant at nine-thirty. How do you know that?”

“From the police reports that have been in the papers.”

“Have you read all the police’s findings?”

“What’s been printed, yes. The rest, no, although heaven knows it’s not for lack of trying.”

Suddenly, Yousef stood up and shouted, “What I want to know is how my pictures have ended up in your hands. That’s what I want to know. The police are leaking my pictures. I’m sure of it.”

Parviz welcomed the break. He raised his arms, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “You ought to ask Allah how that might have happened.”

A long day of grueling testimony was about to end and the judge still had many questions for the witness. He told Parviz to return the next day.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Parviz said, surprising the court.

Judge Kubsch frowned and asked why. Parviz reluctantly explained, “Because my daughter needs me, your honor.”

The previous morning, he had heard a loud thud from Salomeh’s bedroom. She had fainted yet again. Her pulse had dropped. He had rushed her to the clinic, and the cardiologist had finally ordered a pacemaker to be implanted in her.

“She’s probably having heart surgery tomorrow. I must be at her side,” Parviz continued.

“Don’t you have anyone else who could accompany her in your place?” the chief judge pressed without a hint of emotion.

“Sure I do. I’ve got a dozen people who could be with her. But as her father, I
want
to be with her,” Parviz ended,
clearly discomfited by having to speak publicly about so private a matter.

The room fell silent. After a pause, Judge Kubsch said, “In that case, please call me tonight after you find out if the surgery is on or not for tomorrow. If it isn’t, I’d like you to be here tomorrow.”

Parviz called the judge at home that evening. The surgery had been postponed and he could return for another day of testimony. In the absence of microphones and the decorum of the courtroom, Judge Kubsch’s voice sounded soft through the receiver.

“How did the visit to the doctor go? Is your daughter better?”

For a few moments, the business of the trial pressed on neither of them, as they talked one man to the other, father to father. Parviz’s refusal had been unfathomable to the judge. For years Mrs. Kubsch had been asking her husband to take a few days off for a family vacation, but each time he told her there would be plenty of time for vacations in his retirement. His work was treated as sacred by the household. His son and daughter walked gingerly if they found him at his desk inside his study. Only when they had trouble with their studies of Latin or Greek would their father would attend to them. For all other subjects or troubles he entrusted matters to his wife, who had dedicated herself to the three
K
s: Kinder, Kirche, and Kuche—or children, church, and kitchen. He performed the duty that was also his passion. It was what he expected everyone to do, before Parviz refused him.

The conversation, warm and thoughtful, endeared the judge to Parviz, though he, sworn to skepticism, would not acknowledge his thawing apprehension toward Kubsch to anyone, not even to himself. He was still at war and could not chance dismantling the barricades within.

In the remaining weeks of 1993, Noori’s friends who had frequented the restaurant took the stand.

“Do you wish to take the religious or the secular oath?” Judge Kubsch asked the witnesses, who usually chose the secular oath, since their foes, the defendants, had sworn to God.

“I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.”

They came expecting to win the court’s sympathy, certain that their testimony would deliver a blow to the accused. Instead, they found themselves sternly examined. The judges no longer asked who they thought was behind the killings. They surprised the court by raising a subject the witnesses had hoped to have buried with the corpses of the dead. The two names the expatriates dreaded rang in the chief judge’s microphone. “Have you heard the names Nejati and Sedighi?”

Until 1991—twelve years after the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini —the Iranian opposition in Berlin had, despite all the rifts within it, spoken with one voice against the regime in Tehran. But that year, the sudden appearance of two men tore the community apart. Just as Germany’s foreign minister had returned from his visit to Tehran vowing to mend the relations between
Europe and Iran, Nejati and Sedighi, using the disarming pseudonyms of “the savior” and “the virtuous” in Persian, had been assigned as envoys of the Iranian president to mend the relations between the expatriates and their homeland. From the Center for Strategic Studies at the president’s office, the two senior officials were to deliver President Rafsanjani’s message of reconciliation to the diaspora.

Berlin had been their first stop. They had contacted several leading members of the opposition and invited them to a “dialogue.” What the subject of that dialogue would be, or how it would come about, was unclear. Yet the proposal had excited most exiles. Noori had called it the historic opening everyone had been waiting for, and gathered friends every Wednesday night at Mykonos to decide the terms of that dialogue. Some had already talked to the envoys on the telephone and believed meeting them privately was harmless, but others believed the meetings had to be held in public.

But a few thought this was the regime’s latest scheme to infiltrate the ranks of the opposition and destroy them from within. Whether that was the intention of the envoys or not, their appearance did, indeed, bitterly divide the opposition. Because both men had vanished after September 1992, rumors that they had merely been the first pieces in the premeditated assassination plot had spread. Few remembered feeling optimistic about them, and fewer still would admit to having met them.

Given this history, the testimony of the several exiles who took to the stand was a blur of incoherent statements.

Exile witness 1 said, “Yes, your honor. I’ve heard of them. I know many people received phone calls from them, and a few met them.”

“Who did they call?”

“I know one person they called, because he told me himself that they did.”

“Is this man a politician in the opposition against the regime?”

“He’s, er, an activist.”

They chafed at the word
politician
. They were not politicians in the same way the judges knew politicians to be. They were disenchanted citizens, paid by no one, seeking neither fame nor glory, hoping to rid themselves of their tyrants. Politics, as they knew, was nothing but penance.

“What was the subject of these meetings and phone calls?”

Exile witness 2 said, “They said they wanted to negotiate a solution to bring the educated back to Iran.”

“What was the subject of the conversations with the particular friend who you said told you that he had been contacted by them?”

“Well, I suppose Nejati wanted to show he meant well. He knew every last detail of all our backgrounds. He knew that this guy and his wife had fled Iran on foot years ago without their baby girl. He knew the child was still with her grandparents in Iran, and he offered to reunite them.”

“Did he reunite them?”

The witness, seeming ashamed, nodded.

“Where is the child now?”

“Nejati made arrangements and, in a few days, the kid flew to Berlin. She’s here now.”

“What did the father have to do to return the favor?”

“Nothing, your honor, as far as I know.”

“Nothing? Do you mean to say the highest officials of the regime you call evil were simply acting charitably?”

“I, I suppose . . . I don’t . . . can’t say, your honor.”

The next witness took the stand and was asked: “Did you meet with them alone or was this an open meeting with others?”

Exile witness 3 said, “Er . . . I met with them alone, in a hotel.”

“What did they want from you?”

“They wanted me to return to Iran to help rebuild the country after the war.”

“What is your profession?”

“I’m a veterinarian.”

“Was the health of your nation’s pets and livestock such a pressing priority to force you to meet with your sworn enemy in secret?”

“Er . . . I thought . . . Well, in my analysis . . .”

“Please, no analysis! Just state the facts.”

Only the rambunctious Yousef’s interruptions gave these witnesses a reprieve.

“Ah! What is this? They all say ‘I can’t say.’ Why don’t we just close it all up and be off to Lebanon already?”

The exiles appeared composed. They were dressed in suits, silk scarves tied around their necks, their temples aglow with silvery sideburns. But the trial exposed their inner
disarray. It brought them face to face with the errors they had hoped to keep from the court. They had to admit they were accusing the very regime they, themselves, had helped bring to power. At times, the scrutiny felt so harsh it was as if they were being tried for the parts they had played in a revolution some thirteen years earlier. Only on the witness stand, when they failed to convince the judges of the nobility of their reasons in meeting the envoys, did they begin to see their own gullibility in having met them at all. And when they did, they realized they could no longer expect the judges to believe in their wisdom, or hope to convince them of what they knew. Once they had portrayed their rulers in the dark light where those rulers belonged, they had inevitably painted the landscape of their own failings.