The persian, p.31
The Persian, page 31
“Understood. Well, seeing as you already have a profile with us, we can arrange everything. Our guide will have a red sticker on the door of his Land Cruiser.”
“I am looking forward to it,” I said, and hung up.
—
I REMOVED ROYA’S FLEX CUFFS and dragged a chair over to sit by the bed until she stirred. I could give her another half hour to wake, then I would have to wake her. We had maybe six hours to reach the exfil site, maybe less; it’s not wise to test the patience and goodwill of Azeri smugglers. Roya woke groggily after another fifteen minutes, blinking and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her mouth would have been dry and her head would have felt like someone had swung it into a wall. When she saw me sitting there, a look of pure loathing crossed her face. I would have seen that hate gleaming in her eyes, but they shot away from me to focus on the wall.
“Can you sit up?” I asked. “There is a glass of water on the table.”
She did not reply, but after a few moments she did manage. The motion must have required some energy, because she stopped there, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, making a low pitiful groan while she rubbed her temples. “Where is Alya?” she asked.
“She is fine,” I said. “She is still with Afsaneh. They think you are still at Niavaran. You have”—I checked my watch—“two hours until you said you would pick her up.”
She took a sip of water. Then, with a frightful intensity, she flung the glass at me. It narrowly missed, popping against the wall like a firework. She seemed to be contemplating more violence, but, exhausted, she said: “I trusted you. I’m a fool. I trusted you.”
“I know,” I said.
“I am going to die,” she said, her voice quavering. “They are going to find out what I’ve done—what you tricked me into doing—and they are going to kill me. I have no future. Alya has no future. We are done. We—” Her voice was cracking; she put a hand over her mouth as if this might steady her.
I picked a few shards of glass off my shoulder. “There is a way out.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I am leaving. I need to get Alya. I—” Standing had not worked. She collapsed in a heap on the floor. I crunched across the glass, knelt down, and offered my hand. She smacked it away.
Leaving her there, I fished a few things from my backpack. The Makarov. A magazine. And then the stacks of money. I arranged it on the bed. She had heaved her arms onto the mattress to pull herself up. When she did, I put the gun in her lap.
“Take it,” I said. “Take it and shoot me.”
By the way she looked at me, I could see that she wanted to. But she set it on the comforter and managed to stand. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She drank it all and then she filled another and drank that, too.
“Who are you, really?” she demanded, filling a third.
“I work for the Mossad.”
“Your name?”
“It actually is Kamran Esfahani.”
She didn’t buy it, but she also didn’t fight it. Or maybe she no longer cared. “What happened?” she asked. “What were they after?”
“They kidnapped Colonel Ghorbani. He will be taken to Israel.”
She hurled the glass into the sink, then snatched another from a shelf and did the same. She put her head on the refrigerator door. For a moment I watched her hand slap the stainless steel, then she curled it into a fist and hammered, and hammered, and soon her hand fell limp and shook while she softly cried. I stood there. It was one of those long tense moments when all you can really do is stand there.
“How can I believe anything you say?” she murmured. “I don’t believe you. I can’t.”
“You can’t,” I agreed. “But you were in that room. You saw what happened.”
“I also saw you shoot two people in Istanbul,” she said. “And that was fake.”
“This time Colonel Ghorbani was there,” I said. “Unless you think he was involved—”
“Enough!” she shouted. “I am leaving.”
She started toward the door.
I put up my hand, shifted my body to block her path. “Hold on, I—”
CHAPTER 70
Tehran
SHE SLAPPED ME across the face. She stamped her heel into the top of my foot. She spat and it flocked me right above the eyes. She kicked my shins. I put my hand on her shoulders and she threw it off and landed another slap and I decided I wouldn’t touch her again. She slapped me again. Again, and again and again, getting the hang of it, each one sharper than the last until my face was raw. I was reeling in pain, but I stood my ground, and my resistance enraged her. She shoved me, and my back slammed into the door. She did it again.
“Move!” she screamed. “Let me go.”
I did not move. Instead I put my palms out, then my hands up. “Wait,” I said. “Just wait. Just listen. Please. Please.”
She balled up a fist and smashed it into my nose and there was more warm blood rushing into my mouth. I raised my hands higher, not even trying to block her. She drove another punch into my jaw and yelped as if she’d hurt her hand, and her next punch was soft and tentative, and on the delivery she screamed in pain.
Drawing closer to me, with her left hand she put jab after jab into my ribs until, exhausted, she grabbed my shoulders and tried to throw me away from the door. I braced myself and did not budge. When I looked down, I saw drops of blood splattered onto my carpet.
Roya took a step back and said, “You are a coward. You are a liar. You are an impostor. You are a traitor. You are the devil.”
I dipped my head and stretched my hands higher, and this sign of defeat seemed to brighten her rage. She swung a glancing blow off my nose. Screamed and screamed until her screams became tears.
I knelt down in front of her. When I bowed my head, more blood plip-plopped onto the floor from my nose, and I saw that some was also dripping from her wrecked right hand. “We are going to die, aren’t we?” Roya said.
“There is a way out,” I said.
“Liar,” she sneered. “You are a fucking liar.”
“Not this time,” I said. “Not anymore.”
She lifted her hand to slap my face again, but, quivering in midair, instead she brought it to cover her mouth, and I thought she might be sick, but then her hands fell to her sides. She slumped her back into the wall and slid to the floor and brought her knees into her chest.
“What’s your plan, Roya?”—still on the floor, on my knees, I was whispering, careful not to shout. I inched toward her. “Here is how I see it. The people back in the house are waking up around now. Mina heard you say you knew the Israeli woman, Rivka. There’s no way around that now. No going back. Ghorbani has been kidnapped. Shirazi and his lieutenants shot. The house was looted. And you’ve admitted to recognizing one of the kidnappers.”
“I can take Alya and go to the airport. Get out.”
“Sure, you could. But the first thing Qods does when they find out what’s happened is put your name on a list. They are going to put you on every watch list in the Islamic Republic. You think you fly out of Imam Khomeini on a commercial flight to Istanbul? No. They detain you at the airport. That window has closed.”
“I could turn you in,” she said.
“You could,” I said. “And I would let you if it would help. But it won’t. It’ll make things worse. Because, as happy as they’ll be to have me, it will raise tough questions for you. How did we meet? What did you think I was? Oh, you thought he was an Etela’at officer, did you? What did you do for him? They won’t treat your treason differently just because you didn’t think you were committing it.”
“I could kill you,” she said. “I should kill you.”
“Gun is in the bedroom,” I said. “But you’ll be in the same spot, or worse.”
“I hate you,” she said. And then, standing, she hit me again.
CHAPTER 71
Tehran
MY FATHER WAS FOND OF saying that hate and love, being opposites of apathy, were in the end not so different. In that moment I must say that none of it rang true.
When Roya had tired of hitting me, and I had still not stood aside, she took a few steps back and said, “You are a liar. A liar! If you care at all for me and Alya, you would have left me there.”
Some of my blood was on her hijab, her cheeks. “No,” I said. “You would have died. Mina would have told the investigators what you said. And even if she’d been killed . . . well, what would they have thought? You were the only one who survived? What happened? They’d have hanged you in the end.”
“You.” She curled an accusing finger my way, and it was shaking horribly. “You could have told me earlier. You could have warned me. You could have stopped this.”
What could I say to that? I could have stayed a dentist. Could have said no to Glitzman.
Could have, could have, could have.
“I’m sorry, Roya,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She sat down in a chair, curled her arms across her chest, and, turning to the side, vomited across the floor. We were so deep down into the shit that neither of us even acknowledged it. Wiping her mouth, she put the heels of her hands to her forehead and sat, rocking slightly. I went to the sink to clean off my face. The rag was soaked red after one swipe across my nose and mouth. I fetched another and brought it into the living room, standing there, wondering if she was going to run, and deciding that this time I would not stop her. This time I would take it as her decision, now that she had the facts.
“Why are you doing this?” Roya whispered. “Why did you bring me out?”
Even if I’d been able to explain it then, there was simply no more time. We had to go get Alya. “I don’t know,” I said, dabbing the cloth over my clawed cheeks.
The look she returned was the most complicated emotion I have ever seen on someone’s face, and even now, years later, I am unsure how to describe it other than to say it was a jumble of hope and hate. Whatever you might call it, I believe it revealed a grim reliance on me, the man who had betrayed her and now, for reasons she could not comprehend, was neck-deep in an attempt to bail her out.
CHAPTER 72
Tehran
THE EXFIL PLAN gave us six hours to reach Chalus, up north on the Caspian. Standing in our way was the big fucking problem that, since Roya was up, the drugs worn off, that meant Askari and Mina were probably also awake and making a racket, if they hadn’t already managed to break free. It would not be long before we had company. We had to leave.
I abandoned the Toyota van in my apartment parking garage and we took the Peugeot. On the way to her sister’s she rode in the backseat and we did not speak because there was nothing to say—her presence was her decision, as was mine. I was thinking about what might be waiting for us at her apartment. Officers dispatched to find her would not be geared up for a massive shoot-out, but there would be at least a few of them, and they would doubtless be armed, even if lightly. I pulled to the side of the street beside a tree-lined median a few blocks south of her sister’s apartment and put my head to the wheel for a moment. The afternoon had brought the smog, and I sucked in a huge breath of Tehran’s toxic air: all exhaust, no relief. Ahead, on the busy corner, was the café I’d picked.
“Text her now,” I said.
I was not checking to see what Roya was texting, and I didn’t watch over her shoulder. She could have been sending an SOS, but this whole thing would not work if I were her captor. At some point she had to believe me; she had to feel that even though a man has lied to you constantly, it does not mean that his next words are a lie. I felt that back in my apartment we’d reached an unspoken compact in which her trust had been extended, on credit, until she’d reached safety, at which point not only would it have run out, but I’d still be deep in her debt.
After a minute Roya said: “She’s coming down.”
“Remember,” I said, “if anyone tries to take you, you point back toward the café and scream and say I’ve kidnapped you.” Quite honestly, I believed she would do this anyway, regardless of whether anyone appeared.
Roya went first. I followed, searching for any telltale signs of surveillance—black Peugeots, white vans, militias on patrol. There were black sedans with government plates parked up on a curb but they were empty. Could be Etela’at officers out for lunch. Could be something far worse . . .
I went into the café, milling around, trying to keep tabs on her out near the street. I checked windows in the building opposite, I listened for the screech of brakes, though in Tehran that was far more likely to indicate a car wreck than a surveillance van peeling out from the curb. Roya’s arms were folded across her chest while she paced back and forth. She was not on the phone. She was not running. Even at a distance she appeared frantic. At the sight of Alya, she waved, and I thought she might cry, or run through the crowded traffic for the girl. But Roya, who had now lived through more than a few traumas, was cool enough under the pressure to stand still and wave back with an admirably nonchalant smile. Using the window’s reflection, I slicked down the yet again churned-up waves of my hair. I did not want to frighten the girl, though I barely recognized myself.
Roya and Afsaneh spoke for a moment, in one of those conversations that means nothing to one person, and everything to the other. Alya tugged at her mother’s manteau, the stuffed pink lamb swinging in her grip. Whatever Afsaneh’s concerns about her sister’s strange request to meet on this corner, whatever fear she may have seen playing across Roya’s face, in a moment they hugged, and I saw that Roya’s embrace was pulling at her sister’s manteau, and they hung there until Afsaneh, smiling worriedly, pulled back and squeezed her sister’s arms in assurance of something that I do not think either of them could name. Afsaneh kissed Alya and headed back across the street. As happens with so many moments that are actually goodbyes, I do not think Roya ever got to say one.
Roya stooped down and hugged her daughter tightly and her body convulsed, though when she stood her face was dry, and Alya was still smiling. They began to walk my way, and in a moment had passed the café, headed back toward the car. Alya was bouncing on her heels; it looked like she was singing.
I followed them to the car; I did not think we had surveillance on us yet. I also knew that, depending on the size of the team, I’d only know when it was far too late. Within sight of the car, where they were waiting, I spotted Alya and waved.
“The magician!” she squealed, raising the lamb, which I now recognized as the one that had eaten dinner with us at their apartment. The one she’d been carrying on the evening of her father’s murder, the one Glitzman had viewed through a scope.
We hopped into the car. I drove, Alya and Roya sat in the back; there would be no distance from her daughter on the journey ahead.
“You are hurt?” Alya asked, pointing into the rearview mirror with a worried frown. I had a look. My nose was bleeding again.
CHAPTER 73
Tehran
WE DROVE NORTH from their neighborhood through the grinding crush of Vali Asr Square. The shops were open and bustling, the air drowning with the buzz and growl of engines, thick with choking exhaust. The sky above us was leaden now. Roya and I did not speak, but Alya chattered at a nonstop clip, demanding I finish the story about Joseph. “Soon,” I said, “soon. The traffic. The traffic is terrible.”
But the usual tangle on the roads that day unwound for a few brief and beautiful moments: I weaved and danced through the lanes, gaps opening across Vali Asr as if by providence. Around Fatemi Square, after we had turned westward, we ground back into a clot of traffic and honks on the Jalal Ale Ahmad. We crept along the highway, my heart thumping at a beat precisely inverse to the speed of my car. Through the rearview I saw the hairs that sprang from Roya’s hijab were damp and spongy, as if she’d just emerged from a shower and neglected to dry off. The anxiety had us both moving constantly: shifting in our seats, grabbing handles, toying with our hands.
In the backseat Roya began to recite, in a low hum, this Rūmī, which Maman had read to me, and which had been passed down just so across the sweep of Persia for a thousand years:
Our desert has no bound, and our hearts and souls no rest World within world has taken Form’s image; which of these images is ours?
When you see a severed head in the path rolling toward our field—
I completed the verse while turning left: “Ask of it, ask of it, the secrets of the heart: for you will learn from it our hidden mystery.”
“I am the severed head,” she said.
“No,” I said, though I didn’t get any further than that because whatever I’d added would have surely been a lie.
“I am the severed head,” she muttered again with a glare. “But I don’t know anything, much less the secrets of the heart.”
“I’m hungry, Maman,” Alya said.
“In a bit, my sweet. In a bit”—this to her daughter, then she leaned forward and said to me, “I’m going to be sick.”
“Hungry!” Alya yelled.
My nerves were also cracked. I was swirled in smog, jammed in Tehrani traffic, on the lam from the police and Qods and probably a few more security organizations I didn’t even know about. And now we had a toddler howling about a snack. Like that head, we’d rolled to a dead stop. I’m hungry! I’m hungry! Hungry! Roya rolled down her window and vomited.
The sight of her mother retching yanked Alya from her tantrum. “Maman? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, dear. Mama is fine.”
“Little ick?”
“Little ick, yes, sweetheart.”
I am a natural pessimist—I have yet to meet a Persian who is not— and I had to assume the airports would soon be shut, the major roads in and out of Tehran clotted by checkpoints. The border guards would have her picture, and instructions, both of which would reduce the likelihood of skating through with a bribe. Not that our route was official. But a crew of Azeri smugglers running shisheh through the Caspian under cover of a crabbing operation were not, and are not, my idea of trusted associates.
