The persian, p.8
The Persian, page 8
“Why are they keen on forest fires?” Cohen asked.
“Some holdover from their Zoroastrian fire worship, maybe, who knows?” Glitzman replied, and thought that Meir would have some quip, probably a relevant poem, or some obscure piece of cultural history, and it would agitate Amos to no end, and that made him smile, and he dearly missed his friend.
“The point is that Ghorbani would be the sort of man you bring in to break through this drought,” Glitzman said.
“Drought?”
“All of these spy rings have been rolled up,” Glitzman said. “They’ve not killed any of their marks, until now, at least. Perhaps Ghorbani has been brought in to change this. There are a few hints, nothing more, that he’s craftier than the Iranians out hiring mercenary Jews to burn down their own forests.”
“You mean that he’s a ghost now?” Cohen asked, tapping Glitzman’s memo sitting on the desk.
“It’s astounding,” Glitzman said. “Ghorbani and Hossein Moghaddam have vanished from our collection. We’ve even sent a few of our surveillance resources in Tehran to scope out the home address we had on Ghorbani. And—”
“Let me guess,” Cohen said. “Doesn’t live there anymore.”
Glitzman tapped his nose. “The selectors we had for him are no longer active. We’re not picking him up on internal Qods Force comms, either. You’re right to call him a ghost. You might mention this to the Director tomorrow.”
Cohen said, “Theories?”
“Ghorbani’s targeted killing operation is so sensitive, and he knows that we’ve penetrated them so fully, that he’s running it completely off the grid, so to speak. No old phones. No Qods Force email, faxes, cable traffic, any of that.”
“We found Qaani,” Cohen said.
“He made a mistake,” Glitzman said. “He ran his mouth on an old phone. Same as Abbas Shabani.”
Cohen was fiddling with his kippah. With his other hand he danced fingers across a line of Post-it notes as if they were piano keys. “The Prime Minister wanted to leak some of the tapes of your interrogation of our kidnapping victim, Arik. Of the questioning, I mean, before we had to eliminate him. Embarrass the Iranians. Make them feel nothing and no one is safe. I have so far prevented this from happening, the Director has cautioned against, and the Prime Minister has listened. But no one likes it, and—”
“Amos, if we leak any of this, we tip our hand. We put our people in Tehran at risk. No, we must give Ghorbani some doubt about what’s happened. Look, Qaani’s given us a start. We have a name: Hossein Moghaddam. We have a structure run by Ghorbani that we’re targeting. It’s not nothing. I don’t want Ghorbani changing up his staff now. I don’t want him to know what we know.”
“You need to find Ghorbani. Or Moghaddam. I need something to take to the Director.”
“We are working on it. People in Tehran are working on it. It’s the only priority, Amos.”
Cohen, nodding, opened a folder on his desk. “Speaking of your people in Tehran. The support asset we lost, this Amir-Ali Mirbaghri—”
“The Kurdish brothers have handled it,” Meir said.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Our priority, Amos,” Glitzman cut in, “was to avoid formal investigations. Amir-Ali was a recreational drug user. He drank. He’d just bought a fucking sports car owned previously by the Shah. We’ve connected dots.”
“How is his friend doing, our Swedish dentist? He recruited Amir-Ali. They were friends. Is he still in the game?”
“He still hates being a dentist and wants to retire in California,” Glitzman said.
“A dentist,” Cohen’s chuckle and slight shake of the head signaled acceptance of Glitzman’s assurance at face value. “I was skeptical of him, Arik—and that was a progressive view inside the Office at the time. Others thought you were insane. Recruit a dentist? To do what? Well, you showed us what.”
“You saw the report on how Kam celebrated Amir-Ali’s birthday, yes?” Glitzman asked. “The one we got from his phone? Most people would think his plan too risky, they wouldn’t be able to predict Amir-Ali’s reaction. But Kam knew he’d love the prank, the theater, the whole bit. Kam knew him better than he knew himself. Back when Kam was asking Amir-Ali to get involved with us, he had the guy recruited before he’d even made the pitch. My Kamran’s good with people. Knows how they work. He’s still in the game, Amos. He’ll find his way through.”
CHAPTER 12
Tel Aviv
IN THOSE DAYS the formidable structures that formed Arik Glitzman’s mind would fold in on themselves under the shock of the stress, creating a rigid warren of thought that impressed his colleagues, annoyed his few friends, and utterly dismayed his family. The secrecy made it all worse. Tzipi, despite her status as a long-suffering wife of a Mossad official—a member of Caesarea, at that—desired a certain degree of situational awareness. To Glitzman’s great irritation, she expected to be told the why of things. She wanted clear answers to questions he could scarcely acknowledge in the first place.
So when Glitzman drew a map depicting a spiderweb of potential driving routes between home and school, home and Oriana’s piano lessons, home and the dance studio, Tzipi fought to comprehend why, in god’s name, Arik, is this necessary? Is this to do with Meir and Yael? Glitzman’s answer was to open the fridge. By the time he’d shut the door, deciding against another egg, she was gone.
When, one Tuesday, a four-man, two-car security detail materialized outside their apartment, to Glitzman’s profound gratitude Tzipi, though bristling, submitted to the intrusion without questions or a fight. When Oriana asked who was in the car, Tzipi said that Papa’s bosses decided to help us out a bit, though when the inevitable toddler questions followed (“Why?” “With what?”), Tzipi commanded Oriana to pipe down, this is all part of having a father who protects people, not another word. It worked, at least for a day or two. Later, when Oriana wondered about the shiny black cars, Tzipi would tell her they might pretend they were carriages, and she a princess.
One Saturday morning, Glitzman happened to look out the window to see Tzipi shoveling Oriana, clutching her wand, clad in tights, a tutu, and a tiara—all pink—into a jet-black armored Land Cruiser, the befuddled security officer doubtless insisting his orders were to remain on the premises. Tzipi and Oriana wore him down, because by the time Glitzman made it down to the street, the car was speeding off. To Glitzman’s great satisfaction they took the third left, following one of his suggested alternative routes to the dance studio.
But everyone has their limits, and Tzipi’s were found the day a crew arrived to install windows of ballistic glass and to upgrade their security system with cameras covering the entrance to the apartment building and their interior front door. The security upgrades were, to be fair, less of a disruption than the security detail. The new windows looked identical to the old, and the cameras weren’t even visible from inside the apartment itself. But the security detail and their serpentine routes had felt temporary. Now, when Glitzman watched his wife glaring up at the camera outside their apartment door, uncertain who was watching her, she looked affronted. Like a woman who had permanently lost something. That her fate was no longer her own.
That night, after Oriana had gone to bed, Tzipi joined him for a smoke on the balcony and asked, quietly and directly, if she should be alarmed.
“And why not?” she asked, before he’d even had a chance to respond. “Because it seems that your office is alarmed.”
“Absolutely not,” he insisted. “There is no reason for any alarm whatsoever.”
A merciful oddity of the Glitzman domestic compact was that Tzipi always forgave her husband’s first lie. Such sins were absolved instantly and easily, features as they were of his chosen trade. The lies were treachery only if they went on, and they never really did, because Tzipi would stop asking the questions that generated the lies in the first place. But she was spooked, and Glitzman felt that she was on the verge of submitting Meir and Yael’s murder as the compelling evidence it was.
“Then, Arik, why”—there again, that damnable word—“why are Meir and Yael dead? Why are we suddenly putting ourselves under surveillance”—she jerked her cigarette up toward the glowing red dot of a new camera above them on the wall, pointing down at the street below—“and why can I not drive Oriana to Ms. Dagan’s studio as I always have, on a route that does not cast me into grinding traffic, or sling me on a ridiculous loop? Why do we have men outside in armored SUVs? Why are you telling me that I should sometimes leave ten minutes early, other times twenty, and still others not take Oriana at all? Maybe your office can send babysitters? They’ve sent everything else. What am I supposed to do with her on Tuesday afternoons?”
A rare failure of Tzipi’s tactics, he thought, to exchange the whys for the far more manageable whats. Glitzman pounced. “Take Oriana for ice cream,” he said. “I will draw you several routes.”
Tzipi sucked in a sharp breath through her nose, a noise that could only mean she was weighing the merits of slapping him. He duly lowered the cigarette from his lips in anticipation. And then, regaining her verve, she delivered one of the few what questions he could not answer: “Arik,” she said. “What is going on?”
The Interrogation Room
Location:
Present day
“ARIK GLITZMAN,” the General says, from nowhere, as he reads. “Chief of the Zionist Entity’s so-called ‘Caesarea Division.’ ”
He licks his pointer finger, turns over the page, and pops another sugar cube into his mouth.
Kam has been watching the General read through an earlier draft of his confession, and there’s some blood spatter on these pages, which means it might even be a first edition. While waiting, Kam has counted the white-painted bricks that form the wall by the door a dozen or more times. (There are 347.) He’s had a brief staring contest with Khomeini. (He lost.)
“What do you think of Glitzman?” the General asks. His eyes are still buried in the papers.
Kam thinks too many things of Glitzman to effectively summarize. In the past this question—or those like it—has tended to start the ball rolling toward beatings. Kam chooses the one answer that he has learned will direct it elsewhere.
“Arik Glitzman is a competent intelligence officer and formidable recruiter,” Kam says. “He is also a Zionist madman.”
Proof, right there, that honesty absolutely will not save you.
Glitzman’s not a madman, but it’s really important that the General hears the lie from Kam’s lips. As befitting someone in the position of running an interrogation center, the General is utterly devoid of empathy. In the written confessions nuance is tolerated. But here, face-to-face with the General, Glitzman cannot be painted as Kam sees him: a manipulative yet honest recruiter, loving yet absentee father, fearsome yet elegant operational planner. And above all as a ruthless killer—and yet one who saves lives.
Killing to save lives, Kam thinks.
Why not fuck for chastity while you’re at it?
But Kam’s not sure Glitzman is wrong. You can’t really promote chastity through fucking, but he wonders if you might be able to save a few people by killing the right ones. Take the General. Kam has fantasies about Glitzman killing him. And he knows damn well it would save lives, starting with his own.
“I want the stuff before the kidnapping and the death of Amir-Ali,” the General says. “Before the murders of your Zionist friends. Take us back to your recruitment story, Kamran,” the General says, baring his teeth. “Plus the training in Albania.” Mention of that Balkan shithole brings a flicker of amusement to the General’s eyes. “You should consider this your final word on how the madman Glitzman convinced a dentist to play spy games.”
The General motions to the camera, and soon an underling Kam does not recognize has dumped a stack of A4 and a fresh box of crayons on the table. The General stands to leave.
Albania. Hard pass, Kam thinks. The General likes to hear about Albania because it is embarrassing to Kam, and the General is a major fan of embarrassing his prisoners, staff, and probably his family. (Does the General have children? Kam has wondered. And if so, where are they institutionalized? He does believe there is a Mrs. General, and he worries about her. He feels they would have a lot to talk about.)
The General’s delight in shame carnivals is the reason why, years ago, once the spy story was written down, they backtracked to tackle embarrassing and operationally useless questions such as:
Why did Malin leave you, only to marry a Swedish orthopedic surgeon within the calendar year?
Why did the Stockholm dental practice you inherited from your father begin failing? (And do you believe your father had hints that you were a failure before he died?)
Why is your brother Sina’s annual income seven times your own? (And, given his financial situation, why did he not bail out your failing dental practice?)
Why did your father favor Sina, despite you following in his footsteps as a dentist?
With these for options, Kam must admit that his recruitment and Albania are relative softballs. Even so, one of the silver linings of this final testimony is that soon Kam will no longer be forced to answer such questions. Soon he’ll be dead.
CHAPTER 13
Stockholm, Sweden
Six years ago
THESE EVENTS, GENERAL, took place in the months before I returned to Iran, in service of the Zionist Entity, to commit espionage and sow corruption on earth.
—
MY SCHEDULE ON THAT fateful morning had an appointment blocked for one “Pluta, P.”
Peter Pluta, it turned out, was a Polish furniture salesman from Kraków.
The nationality was the only part that wasn’t really cover, or at least the bit nearest the truth. Some of Glitzman’s family indeed hailed from Lvov, back when it had belonged to independent Poland, before the war. His forebears had learned how to survive in this hostile territory, their potential enemies, depending on day and season, some mix of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. Arik Glitzman had swapped that European cocktail for Arabs and Persians. The dance for survival, though, was mostly unchanged.
Peter Pluta was my first appointment on that Monday morning six years ago, and I was terribly hungover. I’d arrived at my practice a half hour late, my hair still wet from the shower. Upon seeing my face, my lone remaining dental hygienist, Astrid, treated me to a look rich with that peculiarly Swedish mix of condescension, shame, and anxiety.
“Perhaps you go home and rest?” she said.
“I’m fine. Just tired. Long weekend.”
She nodded, unconvinced, and told me that my first appointment that summer morning was a routine cleaning for a Pole. He’d shown up at the office around eight forty-five, asking for a same-day cleaning. My nine a.m. block was open (as were nearly all the others), and Astrid had already done the cleaning. She said: “You might not even bother with the check.”
“What do you mean?”
“That Pole’s teeth look like they were cleaned last week. Though I can’t see any record of it in the system, so if they were, it wasn’t in Sweden.”
I lathered my hands in antibac. “And no X-rays?”
“He said he didn’t need them.” (That was too bad—we could have used the cash.)
“And he doesn’t speak Swedish?”
“Right. It’s English, unless you’ve got Polish.”
“Na zdrowie!”—and I laughed, as I mimicked taking a shot. Astrid was unamused. The records she shoved into my hands had his name as Peter Pluta.
Months would pass before I called him Glitzman.
I went in, introduced myself in English, and squeaked alongside him on my stool. I poked around and noticed some chipping and significant wear on 1:2 and 2:2. Bruxism, teeth-grinding on the lateral incisors. Later, when I was to learn of the stress borne daily by Arik Glitzman, I would come to believe it was a minor miracle that he hadn’t already splintered the teeth in his sleep.
“You are visiting Sweden?” I asked, making conversation as I found similar chipping and enamel wear on 1:6, 1:7, and 1:8. It was the same for their opposite numbers on the left side.
“Jaaaaas,” he grunted.
“You picked the right month. It’s miserable most of the year. How long will you stay?”
“Maaabeee a few muh . . . few muh months.”
“You are fastidious about your dental cleanings, then?”
“Vaaarry.”
Not that I was going to complain about unnecessary work. It was an easy appointment, which was about all I could handle in my slightly hungover state. I’d just repositioned the mirror for a better look when Glitzman gently grasped my wrist and pulled my hand back from his mouth. He wiped the corners of his mouth with the blue paper bib. “Water.”
I readied the syringe to give him a squirt, but he raised a hand. “A cup, thank you.”
I filled a paper cup and handed it to him. He swirled and spat into the cuspidor. And then he sat up, turning to face me.
“You are really a dentist?” Glitzman asked.
An odd question, to be sure, from a man sitting in a dental chair, speaking to the guy whose name was on the diploma hung on the wall, and who had been examining his teeth mere seconds earlier. I replied with an equally odd answer, though it happened to be true. “Mostly,” I said.
“I understand there’s a spot of trouble,” Glitzman said.
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t think there’s too much trouble with your teeth. Some abrasion and cracks from grinding, you need a night guard to—”
“No,” he cut in, “I mean that you are in a spot of trouble.” Your men are quite talented, General, but they usually need pipes and belts to make their points. Glitzman does not. “And I know that sounds threatening,” Glitzman went on, “but you must know this: I am here out of love and concern.”
