Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (18 page)

“How come they’re not checking us at all?” Messbahi wondered out loud.

“Because they’ve been taken care of,” the chief boasted.

All along the road, he and the chief talked about their families—children, the chief’s grandchildren, and loved ones—but never about the reason that had brought them together after so long, never about Messbahi’s fall. When they finally arrived at the border bazaar several hours later, the downpour had stopped. Messbahi looked into the horizon and saw a rainbow and, thinking it a sign from God, he got out to pray.

Another car, a Toyota SUV bearing Pakistani plates, was awaiting them. They boarded the Toyota. From that afternoon till the dawn of the next day, they rode over muddy, unpaved roads where they saw only clouds of dust and bright blue skies over dunes as expansive as eternity. For an unforgiving fourteen hours, the driver drove on. His passengers drifted into sleep until at last they were rocked awake by the bouncing tires on bumpy roads. The desert behind them, they were on poorly paved streets now. A new landscape,
a run-down town, stretched before Messbahi’s eyes. In the narrow alleyways, pedestrians shades darker than he milled about, the men among them dressed in the same costume as he.

The car pulled in front of a modest, two-story home lined with brick walls. The chief stepped out and rang the bell. The door swung open and several children rushed to throw themselves into his embrace. His arms circling their reedy frames, he turned to Messbahi and said, “Welcome to Quetta, son! Come meet my relatives!”

At last, they had arrived in Pakistan, in eternity itself. He prayed again, his lips moving to the words of the scripture, while his wet gaze remained fixed on the chief.

Inside, an elaborate feast had been spread for the guest of honor. Never had a fugitive received so grand a reception. They ate and, when their stomachs were full, they sang folk tunes, and when they had sung long enough they filled their bongs with their purest opium to toast the man of the hour, who, to their great surprise, refused to smoke. By the end, everyone was strewn on the floor in a stupor—everyone but Messbahi, who rose and bid the chief a tearful farewell.

March ended as Messbahi found his bearings in Islamabad and a handful of restaurants where the food did not set his insides on fire. April came and went as he moved from hotel to hotel, never staying in the same one for long. May passed as his asylum request to several European countries was rejected one after another. The record of his deportation from France in 1982 had doomed him. No European Union
member would shelter someone who had been turned away from another member country. June delivered yet another blow. All the diplomats he had once known found an excuse to refuse helping him. The shock staggered him into July, which began with a new worry: his stash of cash was fast diminishing.

Without anyone to turn to, Messbahi dialed the last and only number he had not yet dialed and left a message on the answering machine. After he hung up, he fought hard to keep the wave of despair at bay, afraid that the details of his whereabouts on the message would be leaked to Fallahian in return for a handsome reward. The thought of being in custody again drove him to ponder the quickest path to suicide if the minister’s men were ever to catch up with him again.

An hour passed. He stretched on the creaky twin bed of his Islamabad hotel room, gazing at the ceiling. The fan whirred. The innkeeper’s broom brushed against the floor of the corridor. The faucet in his room dripped from time to time. So many sounds except the one he expected. Anxiety mounted in him. He rose and began to pack to leave for another hotel. As he gathered his few things, the telephone at last rang. The voice he had not heard in years greeted him.

“Mr. Messbahi, this is Banisadr. I hear you’re in trouble,” former president Abulhassan Banisadr spoke, his calm tenor intact.

The telephone number of the former-president-turned-dissident living in Paris was a secret the Iranian military and government elite tucked in the folds of their passports next to wads of provisional cash reserved for an emergency
flight. He was every defector’s last resort. He was also their most natural ally, for his history was theirs. Banisadr had been a confidant of the Ayatollah, flown back with him to Iran in 1979, elected the nation’s first president in the next year, and soon became the Ayatollah’s harshest critic, finally fleeing in 1981. His life had since been dedicated to erasing the blight of his association with the former mentor. He was not a warm man but a genuine nationalist who helped fellow defectors on the condition that they would similarly dedicate themselves to repenting, undoing their past sin for the remainder of their days.

In a few minutes, Messbahi summarized his career and his falling out with Fallahian. When his story came to an end, Banisadr spoke in his usual terse and candid fashion.

“You see, Mr. Messbahi, I’m not yet convinced I ought to help you. I must first find out if you’re telling me the truth. But even if you are, I’m not sure what I can do for someone with your kind of past. You’re a hard man to pity, having worked for a gang of godless thugs for so long.”

Messbahi tried to interject but Banisadr stopped him. “Let me finish! I’ll only help you if you vow to do right by your people now. You must redeem yourself, Mr. Messbahi! Tell me everything you know about that devil Fallahian and the rest of them,” the former president demanded, like a priest demanding from a sinner.

“I’ll tell you as much as I can. What I don’t know, my wife, who’s still in Tehran, can help me get,” he said with deference.

“Don’t talk of your wife. She works for the devil, too. My sources tell me she’s been ratting you out to Fallahian for months.”

Messbahi gasped. The memory of the disappointment he had detected in her eyes, seeing him after months of detention, rushed back into his mind. He remembered his friend Emami on the day he told him to leave, refusing to say how he knew of the threat against him:
Can’t tell you how I know. That alone will kill you
. It had to be his wife’s betrayal his friend was sparing him

He held the receiver but said nothing, heard nothing. The former president went on.

“That’s what the bastards do. Turn father against son. Wife against husband. They’ve no morals. They talk of God and act like the devil.”

Then he added, “The devil would do well to take a few lessons from them.”

Messbahi’s attention was drifting farther into the past, reviewing the inexplicable events of the recent years—the way his children seemed to run from him when he went to embrace them; the way he constantly sensed someone had gone through his desk, looking at his files every time he sat down to work.

“You there, Mr. Messbahi?” Banisadr asked when the silence at the other end had lasted too long.

The call brought him back to the conversation. His desperation had strangely lifted to give way to vengeance—against a nemesis who had robbed him of everything, even his wife.

“I’m with you, honorable Mister Banisadr.”

Testing his devotion, the former president asked, “What’s the regime hiding?” Then, as if tuning an instrument, he asked a second question, striking the perfect pitch.

“Say, what do you know about the 1992 murders at Mykonos?”

That August Berlin was unusually hot. In Hamid’s small apartment, the only breeze blew from an old fan. Throughout much of the season, he had spent his days inside, driven to repose on the powder-blue settee of his living room, his eyes languidly scanning the pages of the journals that had piled for several weeks. This was how he filled his daytime hours while the court was in recess. In any ordinary year, he would have gone to a cooler place. But he could not abandon his post while Ehrig was away lest something important elude them in their absence. Yet a new assassination in the suburbs of Paris, had put him on alert. Another exile, a former deputy at the ministry of education, had been shot at his home only weeks earlier. Since the killers would not take a vacation, neither would he.

As always, the television was on to ward off the silence in the bachelor flat. As always, it went unwatched. The monastic Hamid, who hardly ate before sunset, bit into an occasional bar of dark chocolate, sipped cold tea, and flipped through the pages of magazines, looking at the lines rather than reading them. The heat had undone his focus. Adult responsibility kept him at the task but a childlike restlessness gnawed at him, clamoring for adventure. In this twilight, his
eyes caught a familiar name—Mykonos restaurant. He sat up to read and reread the sentences preceding and succeeding the name carefully.

According to a source (a person we’ll call C for the purposes of this article), the lead killer who wielded the machine gun at the Mykonos restaurant on the night of September 17, 1992, is a man named Bani-Hashemi . . .

The line appeared in a diaspora magazine published in France—its author former president Banisadr. Since the murders four years ago, Hamid had mastered every detail about the case and longed to solve its lingering mysteries, among them the identity of the lead killer—the nameless phantom who had tried to lure Yousef to kill; the one who, minutes before the strike of nine that night, had ordered them all,
It’s time!
The one who had retrieved the Sportino bag from the trunk of the getaway car and walked with it into the restaurant. The intruder who had announced his presence at the dinner table with an expletive. The machine-gun-wielding assassin who had fired three consecutive rounds. The nameless fugitive finally had a name.

Hamid’s drowsiness disappeared. The thrill of discovery set his nerves on fire. At last, at the bottom of a staid afternoon, he had found the adventure he was yearning for.

In thirty years of practice, Ehrig had never returned a business call while on vacation. But when his secretary said Hamid
was looking for him, he broke his old vow and dialed the secret co-counsel’s number. The news he received was riveting, more invigorating than the fine sand beneath his feet. His excitement showed in the many questions he asked:
Did Hamid know the former president? Was he a trustworthy source or a corrupt politician who would fabricate any lie to inflict damage upon his former allies? Could Hamid find him? Talk to him? Who was his source? Did the source know more about the murders than what was printed in the article? Would the former president be willing to testify in court?

He asked Hamid to translate the article into German and send a copy to his office. The details of the article itself mattered less to Ehrig. What intrigued him was the prospect of returning to court and surprising the other attorneys, who had delayed the trial with their endless supply of witnesses, with a witness of his own.

Hamid also broke a vow. An uncompromising secularist, he had always kept his distance from the religious opposition. Banisadr, a devout Muslim, had once been at the helm of a government that Hamid had opposed from inception. But on that day he softened. Like any good custodian who would readily place the welfare of his charge above all else, Hamid suspended his own rules. Leafing through the tattered pages of his address book, he found the telephone number of the former president’s representative in Germany and requested an audience with him.

Within a few hours, Banisadr had granted Hamid’s request with a call. At first, the conversation was dry, their sentences piling like cold logs on a hearth. When they dispensed with
introductions to talk about the trial, the case ignited the exchange and they warmed to each other. Since the publication of the article, the source Banisadr had quoted had revealed much more. Once a top operative in the ministry of intelligence, now a defector, he knew a great deal about the assassinations at Mykonos, though getting in touch with him was nearly impossible, given his precarious circumstances in a border country. Banisadr had faxed the defector some questions, and the few answers he had scrawled and faxed back made it clear that he knew too much to walk the streets for long. The former president was doing his all to bring the defector to Europe but the defector’s past associations and history made it legally impossible. So Banisadr was looking into alternatives. The former president would not speak of breaking the law, but he was confident that those who did so for the noble end of this case would be absolved by heaven. Most of Banisadr’s cryptic lines were lost on Hamid, but not his allusion to a scheme to get the defector out of harm’s way.

On the evening of August 21, 1996, the scent of dilled rice with fava beans wafted from the apartment. Hamid rarely cooked but on the few occasions he did, he cooked with the zest of a connoisseur. Throughout the day, pots and pans simmered and sizzled on the stove of his tiny kitchen. He talked to friends and reporters while tasting his concoctions or adding a dash of what needed adding. By sundown, he had prepared a feast for a once unthinkable guest.

At nearly eight o’clock, the police entered Hamid’s flat. They peeked into his closets, checked his drawers, searched
his cabinets, locked all his windows and entryways. Because he had no curtains, they nailed blankets to the window frames to block the view into the flat. The building was placed under security lockdown for the next several hours. Visitors were turned away as residents looked on warily. An officer stood guard at the main entrance, another on the roof, a third at the apartment’s threshold.

Banisadr arrived with two assistants in tow. He beamed his quintessential smile, two bumps forming in the upper cheeks. His dark droopy eyes also smiled behind the large square-framed glasses that had inspired so many cartoonists. Standing across from the former president, Hamid marveled at how similar the man looked compared to the campaign posters he remembered from years earlier: dark hair coiffed back, mustache trimmed, broad forehead smooth, face shaven clean, white shirt buttoned up to the last without a tie. With no trace of trepidation, he cupped two hands around the former president’s hand and welcomed him. True to Iranian etiquette, he seated the visitors at the table and rushed to serve dinner.