The persian, p.1
The Persian, page 1
THE
PERSIAN
ALSO BY DAVID Mc CLOSKEY
The Seventh Floor
Moscow X
Damascus Station
As always for Abby, my love
And for the people of Israel and Iran, for hope, and a new way
Love comes with a knife.
— R Ū M Ī
PROLOGUE
Tehran, Iran
Four years ago
IT DID NOT ESCAPE the Israeli watching through the hijacked phone camera that this very scene had unrolled that morning at his own breakfast table in Tel Aviv. His daughter was about the same age—even the nail polish had been pink.
—
ROYA SHABANI BLEW ACROSS her daughter’s freshly painted fingernails. Alya, ever a mimic, took a deep breath and huffed as hard as she could across the bright pink polish.
“Who’s coming to my party?” Alya asked, watching her mother screw the cap onto the polish.
“Everyone you wanted. The list we made, sweetie.”
She began to stand, but Alya held her wrist tight. “How many?”
“Six,” Roya said.
“Will there be cake?”
“You and I made the cake,” Roya said. “We are bringing that.”
“Can I bring my lamby?”
“Of course,” Roya said. “Your lamb can come.”
Roya stood and glanced at the clock. “Why don’t we draw while we wait for Papa to finish working? Go get your paper and crayons.” As Alya hustled off, Roya strode over to Abbas’s office and raised her fist to knock on the door before she thought better of it. They were going to be late, even if traffic was light, which in central Tehran it never was. But why bother Abbas, and add his agitation to the mix? So she turned around, and headed for the bathroom to check the rings of kohl around her eyes and reapply the bright red lipstick that Abbas had once complimented.
Back in the living room, Alya slid her mother a few crayons and a sheet of paper, and Roya aimlessly began drawing. Something had been wrong for a few months now—late nights in the office, overnights, last-minute travel, always to places he would not name, and always with Colonel Ghorbani, his uncle. When he was home, he was joyless and distracted. At dinner he would stare off into the distance, as he’d done in the thick of his dissertation, which meant he was trying to work out a problem. Then, it had been amusing, endearing. Now it was worrisome. Abbas was not the cheating type, but Roya could not help but wonder if he was having an affair, or had taken a temporary wife.
Halfway through Roya’s second distracted attempt at drawing a fountain, with Alya’s ire rising that Maman could not do it right, the door to the office swung open and Abbas walked out while sliding on his jacket and trying his best to smile.
Alya darted to him, hands outstretched, and said, “Papa! See my nails?”
“Absolutely beautiful,” he said, making a show of admiring them while gathering her into his arms. “Are you ten today?”
“I’m five, Papa!” He kissed her head. Roya heard his phone buzz, and when he set Alya down he was back on it. An hour earlier, while getting ready, Roya had entertained a brief fantasy that the night would offer some connection with Abbas, a chance to talk at dinner, to admire their daughter, and, if lovemaking wasn’t in the cards, at least to go to bed at the same time. But she could see his mind was elsewhere, and that made hers itch for cigarettes, which Abbas hated. He wasn’t a prayer-and-fasting type—though both Shabanis occasionally had to put on a show for his job. No, his objection was rather the smell, which he said made him queasy. Though maybe after dinner, and once Alya was asleep, he would return to the office? She hated that, which was where the cigarettes came in . . .
—
TRAFFIC WAS A GRIND as they inched northbound from Yusef Abad up to the restaurant off Jordan Avenue; not a drive any Tehrani wanted to make in rush hour, but this was where the Shabanis went to celebrate birthdays. Not the sort of ritual a newly minted five-year-old girl was likely to let you break. Alya was singing to the stuffed lamb in the backseat, occasionally interjecting, “Ugggh, why so slow, Papa?”
“Traffic, love,” Roya said. “Papa is going as fast as he can.” As they were passing a sycamore-lined median, Alya began singing again. This time it wasn’t nonsense, it was a nursery rhyme, the one about the little chicken and the pool, a bathtime favorite. For a moment, with all of them together in the car, the singing made Roya feel warm and cozy. Tonight they might actually have fun.
Abbas’s phone began to light up and buzz with incoming messages.
“I’m picking up the shoes tomorrow,” Roya said, while Abbas typed out a message on his phone.
No response, except a few angry honks from the car behind them.
“Abbas?”
“Oh, what?” Face still fastened to the phone.
“I said I’m picking up your shoes tomorrow. The ones I had made for your birthday.”
“That’s great. That’s great.”
No sooner had he put his phone down than it would blink and buzz again. The traffic, the toddler singsong—which was growing quite loud—the honks . . . Roya rifled through her purse and tossed it back at her feet in a huff. A mistake, she thought, not to bring the cigarettes.
“Does your uncle know it’s her birthday?”
“What? I don’t know.”
The traffic was loosening; the car in front puttered ahead. Roya looked at Abbas, who was looking at his phone.
“Abbas, go.”
“Oh.” The phone clattered into the cupholder, Abbas jerked the car forward. They drove in silence for a few moments. Alya had stopped singing. All Roya could hear was the beep and buzz of his phone.
“Colonel Ghorbani,” Roya said, emphasizing his uncle’s rank, which Abbas hated, “told me at your birthday dinner that you might be his nephew, but you’re like a son to him. So how does he not know it’s her birthday?”
“I told you, Roya, I don’t know what he knows.”
“Maybe you could tell him, then? When the car stops again and you pick up the phone? So we can enjoy dinner.”
“Only some of it is my uncle,” Abbas said. He looked down at his phone and then seemed to catch Roya glaring at him. He drifted his eyes back to the road, chastened.
There had been plenty of times in the past month when Roya had wanted to take her husband by the shoulders and shout: You’re a scientist! You’re supposed to be sitting alone in a lab! She regretted his decision to reject the postdoc opportunity in Paris in favor of Colonel Jaffar Ghorbani and whatever his group was doing. “I design materials that radars can’t see,” Abbas had said once. That was all she knew. That was all she was going to get.
When they exited the highway they made a right and then, after a few blocks, turned down a road that would send them right back the way they’d come, but this time on the same side of the street as the restaurant. Roya looked out the window at a van up on the curb. One front tire was missing and it was up on a jack. Abandoned. Another Tehrani driver throwing in the towel.
“Auntie will be there?” Alya said.
“Yes, sweetheart, she’s already there. Auntie’s waiting for us.”
“I can have cake now?” Roya turned and saw Alya eyeing the cake, sitting beside her in the backseat.
“Not now, sweetheart,” Roya said. “We’re almost there.”
Abbas slowed the car for a speed bump, the restaurant just ahead. Alya began singing again. “Lili lili hozak . . .”
Roya spotted a little market she knew carried packs of cigarettes smuggled in from Dubai. Maybe she could send her sister, Afsaneh, to snag one for her, assuming Roya couldn’t slip away while pretending to use the bathroom.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud crack as the windshield spiderwebbed, and Roya thought someone had thrown a stone into the glass. Abbas let out a strange yelp. The car had been rolling so slowly that it bounced to a stop against the speed bump. There were pieces of glass on her lap. Air was rushing in.
“Abbas!” she screamed.
“I can’t see,” he yelled, “I can’t see.” Abbas yanked off his seat belt and smacked wildly at the door handle. Then Roya saw it, a shard of glass protruding from his eye, glimmering under the streetlights. Blood was trickling down his face.
“Abbas!”
When he got the door open Abbas fell out into the street. Alya was screaming in terror. Roya was, too, but their screams were drowned out by the roar of more gunfire. Abbas was flailing and jerking around, and then she saw a ruddy brown spray jet loose from his body, she didn’t know what it was, but the shooting stopped and the car was momentarily quiet except for Alya’s screaming. “Abbas!” she yelled, but he didn’t move, didn’t speak, and then she’d opened her own door and was crawling, reaching up to grasp around for the handle of the back door. The gun thundered again, a short burst, and then stopped. Roya was splayed across the cake, wrenching Alya free from her car seat, pulling her out. “Abbas!” she called. “Abbas!” The only response was another round of gunfire.
Papa, Papa, Papa, the girl was screaming. Roya was turning and twisting, trying to figure which way to run—she didn’t know where the shooter was—when her eyes fell on a blue Zamyad pickup. She felt the explosion in her teeth, in her bones. She was staring at its white-orange center, and it felt like the light was searing her eyes. A hulk of metal lifted from the bed of the truck, shooting skyward like the takeoff of a rocket.
With Alya slung over her shoulder, Roya turned and ran.
—
IN AN UNMARK
ED limestone building outside Tel Aviv, the Israeli squeezed the shoulder of a woman sitting at a computer terminal, and said she’d done well. A small group was clustered in the operations room, and no one was talking. The only noise had been the sound of gunfire in Tehran, nearly two thousand kilometers away. The woman lifted her hand from the joystick that was tethered, by satellite uplink, to a Belgian-made FN MAG machine gun. The kill order had been clear, as they always were: No collateral damage. And that included the young scientist’s family.
The Israeli watched the survivors run. In the grainy feed he made out a stuffed pink lamb flopping against the new widow’s back, clutched tight in the little girl’s pink-painted grip.
The Interrogation Room
Location:
Present day
“WHERE AMI, General?”
Kamran Esfahani loads his questions with a tone of slavish deference because, though the man resembles a kindly Persian grandfather, he is, in the main, a psychopath.
The General is looking hard at Kam. He plucks a sugar cube from the bowl on the table, tucks it between his teeth, and sips his tea. Kam typically would not ask such questions, but, during the three years spent in his care, hustled constantly between makeshift prisons, he has never once sat across from the General, clothed properly, with a steaming cup of tea at his fingertips, a spoon on the table, and a window at his back.
Something flashes through the General’s eyes and it tells Kam that he will deeply regret asking the question again. It has been over a year since the General last beat him or strung him up in what his captors call the Chicken Kebab, but the memories are fresh each morning. Kam can still see the glint of the pipe brought down on his leg, can still remember how the pain bent time into an arc that stretched into eternity, and how that glimpse into the void filled him with a despair so powerful that it surely has no name, at least not in Persian, Swedish, or English, the three languages he speaks. And he’s got more than the memories, of course. He’s got blurry vision in his left eye and a permanent hitch in his stride.
What is the spoon doing here? A spoon!
Two thousand seven hundred and twenty-one consecutive meals have been served, without utensils, on rubber discs, so Kam can’t help but blink suspiciously at the spoon. A mirage? An eyeball scooper? A test? Perhaps the General plans to skin the fingers that pick it up? The General calms his fears with a nod, a genuine one, which Kam knows looks quite different from the version he uses for trickery, for lulling him into thinking there will be no physical harm. Kam puts a lump of sugar into his tea and slowly picks up the spoon. He stirs, savoring the cold metal on his fingertips. He sets it down on the table and waits, listening to the soft metallic wobble as the bowl of the spoon comes to rest.
“You will write it down again,” the General says. He is rubbing the gray bristle on his neck, and Kam follows his eye contact as it settles on the portraits of the two Ayatollahs looking down from the wall above. When Kam was a child the sight of the Ayatollahs frightened him—it still does. He looks away.
How many times has he written it all down? Dozens, certainly. A hundred is probably closer. As if reading Kam’s thoughts, the General lowers his eyes from Khomeini and says, “One more time.”
Only once more? Are they finally going to kill him?
“May I use notes from my past testimonies?” Kam asks.
The General clicks his tongue. Translation: Hell, no.
“General,” Kam says, with a slight bow of his head, “I have already confessed to my crimes. I’ve hidden nothing.”
“Those,” the General says, wagging his finger, “are not the same thing.” And he gives a great laugh. Kam does not feel the cup slip from his fingers. He only feels the warm tea seeping into his pants and for a moment believes he’s wet himself. Kam has never heard the General laugh. He had assumed the man lacked even the lunatic’s sense of humor. Together they watch more tea run off the side of the table. Kam knows better than to stand without permission, so he just looks at the mess, and the General looks at him, more from curiosity than anger. The General could motion to the camera for a rag, but he does not. Nor does he motion for a new cup.
He instead pops a sugar cube in his mouth and chews on it as if it were a cracker. The General is the only person Kam has ever seen do this. A few times he has seen the man eat entire bowls of sugar cubes and once Kam even dared to suggest, from his long experience as a dentist, that the General give it up. But, for a man who asks so many questions, the General is also a terrible listener. He eats one more, licks a few grains from the corner of his mouth, and says, “You have confessed, yes. And what a list, eh? Sowing corruption on earth. Serving as a witting agent for the Zionist Entity. Breaking-and-entering. Robbery. Impersonating an official of the Islamic Republic. Wire fraud. Assault. Accomplice to murder. Fornication.” He begins to chew on another sugar cube and stares down Kam with the look of a man who despises fornicators because he desperately wants to be one. “You will write it again. And you will leave nothing out. It will be comprehensive, and final.”
Final? Kam considers another question. The General’s silent gaze screams: Do not.
“You will be clear on the chronology,” the General says. “You will be more careful than last time.” Kam knows that one of the surest roads to punishment is to throw fog around what happened when. The man is a real stickler for dates.
Kam nods, and makes it a nice, meek one.
Then the General motions to the camera hung in the corner.
It has been at least a year since the General’s last request for testimony; since then, Kam has worked diligently to forget the more painful parts, the ones that lock him in the past, in fantasies of endings he will never write.
Colonel Salar Askari, one of the General’s underlings, enters the room. He wears a patch over his left eye. Bizarrely it very nearly matches the color of his own skin, but that is only one of the reasons Kam does not like to look at him, and it’s not even close to the top. Around Askari floats the smell of rosewater and a predilection for forms of violence that in most places would be seen as sadism but here are treated more like paintings, with great potential for innovation and beauty. The muscles in Kam’s arms and legs and back clench tight, but then he sees that Askari’s hands are mercifully free of pipe, razors, cords, mystery creams, knives, leashes, terrariums, belts, vials, bags, rodent traps, sandpaper, or—the darkest possibility—lugging a bucket of water.
Unless it is contained in a small rubber cup, Kam no longer likes water. There’s been unpleasantness with water. In here, certainly, thanks to Askari’s buckets, big enough to submerge your head but not so big that there’s room to move it around. But more than anything, water reminds Kam of how he got here. And most days he’d take the General’s pipe over thoughts about that.
Instead of a bucket, Askari is carrying a thick stack of A4 paper and a shoebox filled with crayons, all the same shade of dark blue. Crayons are used for the writing drills because it is tricky to kill yourself with one. Kam suspects it is not impossible, though, and in his first grim months he nearly summoned the courage to give it a try. He might attempt it now, but for the knowledge that however they choose to kill him, it will be swifter, gentler, and far more certain than jamming a sharpened blue crayon into his eye socket, face-planting into the table, and plunging it into his brain. Also, now he’s got the spoon.
To his relief, the General dismisses Askari. Then he says, “Remember: this is your masterpiece, your magnum opus, your Nobel Prize winner.”
The General has variously accused Kam of representing the intelligence services of Israel, America, Britain, and Sweden. Kam finds the Nobel mention, with its nod to Sweden, land of his childhood, a good sign. The General tends to be less violent when he pretends to be interrogating a Swede. Kam’s optimism soars when he remembers that the Nobel cannot be awarded posthumously, and then, not for the first time, he realizes he’s overthinking it. That happens a lot in here. He’s got way too much time.
The General stands and claims one more cube. Kam hears the crunching of teeth on sugar and then the click of the door and the man is gone. Kam sorts through the box for a good crayon. Three years of writing, and he’s got standards. It’s the one spot in his life where he’s got some control, so he’s developed strong opinions on the proper tools for a confession. The crayon must be long enough. No nubs! When your big toenail is the crayon sharpener you don’t want to look at the nubs any longer, much less be forced to write with one. So it cannot be dull from the start. But it also cannot be so sharp as to risk a premature fracture. After Kam finds the one, he slides a piece of paper off the stack.
