The persian, p.9
The Persian, page 9
“What?” I said dumbly. He was looking at me with a familiarity that I found remarkably disconcerting.
Glitzman had begun fussing with a scaler. Stillness, I would learn, was not one of his strengths. “My dentist also tells me I should wear a mouth guard. Same as your hygienist. Says if I don’t, I’ll grind my teeth down to nubs. I have been procrastinating.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“She.” He carefully returned the scaler to its spot on the tray and faced me again, his hands flat on his knees. “I am a keen observer of your recent extracurricular work in Iran, your attempts to import medical equipment and the like, to compensate for how poorly this place”—he motioned around the office—“is doing. But it’s a little risky, isn’t it? Sanctions and all. Plus it all seems to have fizzled out. I don’t normally think of dentists as gamblers. Certainly not Swedish dentists . . .” He trailed off, but his eyes had not. “But you’re not really Swedish, are you?”
I’d gotten this line, or a version of it, plenty of times from blond-haired, blue-eyed Svensson Swedes, most of whom thought I was an Arab, one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrian or Iraqi refugees who’d fled their civil wars for Stockholm. Maybe this Pluta was a pissed-off right-wing Pole who didn’t care for brown people in Europe? I considered telling him off, or issuing another denial, but my heart was running at a gallop. There was something all-seeing and frightening and comforting about Arik Glitzman, all at once. I dipped my head to absentmindedly nip at a fingernail. “Who are you?”
“A friend,” Glitzman said.
“A friend?”
“A friend.” Here Glitzman, straightening his back, scooted closer to me. “A comrade who understands the spot you are in.”
“And who might this comrade be, exactly?”
He sighed. “Peter Pluta, but you already know that, seeing as you have the name on your chart, do you not? But if you must know, I work for a furniture manufacturer out of Kraków. I’m here in Stockholm on business.” He sighed again, as if the identity, though false, were still a great burden on him. “And perhaps I will explain who you are, eh, for my bona fides? You are a dentist, yes, as you say. Your paternal grandfather started the line. Glory days of the Jews in Iran, the sixties and seventies. Your father was a dentist, too. It’s the family business, after all. There was a practice in Tehran, in Yusef Abad, not far from the synagogue. There were side businesses in Europe, my analysts tell me. Family did well. There is a house a short ways off Vali Asr, with a large garden. Of course, in those years Vali Asr was known as Pahlavi Street and your family’s home wasn’t occupied by the Sheep Butchers’ Union. You’ve no memories of the place back then, I imagine?”
I was not actually sure if it was a question, and I was growing conscientious of the sweat blooming in my armpits.
“I have another appointment,” I said feebly.
Glitzman, hawklike, was waiting on his answer.
“Really,” I said.
His nose twitched. “Kamran, your next appointment is at two p. m. with Mrs. Liza Backstrom.”
I blinked a few times and waited for my heart to stop.
“Do you remember the old place?” Glitzman inquired.
“I wasn’t a year old when we left Iran.”
“But you went back with your father often, didn’t you? On his quixotic quests to recover the home. Once your brother had a choice in the matter he stopped taking the trips. But you’ve got one foot in Tehran, Kamran, haven’t you?”
I wanted to send him away; I wanted to run; I wanted to hear him out. Astrid knocked softly on the door, said the paperwork for Mr. Pluta’s mouth guard was ready.
“I’ll grab it in a few minutes,” I called back. I heard Astrid’s footsteps padding away, then, loudly, for her benefit, I said: “You won’t have any enamel left if you don’t start wearing a mouth guard soon.”
Glitzman smiled. Because his head was still back in the chair and the smile was gleeful, I noticed, with growing interest, yet more wear on the cuspids. That happy glint was back in his eyes.
“Most Iranians would kill to come to Sweden,” Glitzman said. “And yet you seem keen to travel the other direction.” He picked up a plaque scaler. “Why?”
There was a very long answer to this question, but it was already blazingly obvious that Glitzman preferred short ones. “I want out,” I said. I folded my hands into my armpits to see if the warmth might stop my fingers from shaking.
“There is a California dream here, is there not?” Glitzman said. “Maybe I can help you find it. Plenty of lovely Persian girls in Los Angeles.” Confirming my fears, Glitzman then slipped me, from his pocket, a piece of paper bearing the address of a bungalow off the Pacific Coast Highway, near Corona Del Mar. A bit of a fixer-upper, it must be said, decidedly not on the ocean side, and also entirely out of reach, given my finances. It had been one of my more frequent web searches in recent months. I’d mentioned this to no one. I’d never sent a message about it. I’d searched for it. On my phone. Only my phone. I’d read news stories about Israeli malware with punch lines like this. At that moment, I would have been more comfortable in the throes of a vigorous colonoscopy.
“You could call this a threat,” Glitzman said, with a glance at the paper, “but you’d be wiser to see it as an opportunity. I think you will find the work complementary to your talents. In addition to being lucrative.”
“Complementary to the dentistry?” I asked.
Glitzman belly-laughed. He held up the scaler. “Is this clean?”
Astrid, in truth, could be uneven in the sanitization department, but I said: “Absolutely.”
Where Glitzman had been running his tongue, he now brought the scaler along his front teeth.
“How do you know about California?” I asked.
“Let me help you dig yourself out of this mess.”
“If I say no?”
He shrugged.
“Are you threatening me?” I asked.
He heaved that great sigh once more. “Don’t be foolish. I want to help,” Glitzman said. And I could see that he meant it.
CHAPTER 14
Stockholm
THAT SAME EVENING I arrived at the appointed restaurant, a cozy place in Gamla Stan, at precisely eight o’clock. At Glitzman’s insistence I’d powered through my singular remaining appointment with Mrs. Backstrom, though Astrid quite obviously knew that something was wrong, because when I waved goodbye at the end of the day her studied gaze held far more pity than condescension. At home, in the intervening hours, I’d sat in the darkness of my living room, wondering if there were cameras in there. After thinking about that for a while, I realized if they had wired up my apartment the cameras were surely infrared, and the darkness would do me no good. I flipped on the lights to search. I found nothing, and at the time that was encouraging, but now I know that if there were cameras, I’d have never found them. My phone now felt radioactive in my hands. I powered it down and set it inside my safe. Though they obviously still had access to the phone, I felt better with it in the safe, which I figured would dampen the impact of any explosives they’d hidden inside.
I briefly considered ignoring Glitzman’s instructions, but he doubtless knew where I lived, and it felt less violating to walk along with his leash than to have him show up here to toss me in his pound. Having been marinating in my own sweat for hours, I grew conscious of my smell. After my shower, I went out, and by the time I reached the restaurant— Glitzman was waiting—I could smell myself again.
In front of him were plates of pickled herring and smoked salmon. “Better than the lox in New York,” Glitzman said as I sat down, his mouth full. “Though to find a good bagel here”—he made a smug noise—“well, I’d have to be the Jew to make it.”
Though he was perhaps chummier in the casual setting of the restaurant, he was still full of that same brew of mirth and menace that had filled the examination room that afternoon.
I ordered the plain roast chicken, fearing I might not keep down anything more complicated.
“You need to explain yourself,” I said, rehearsing the speech I’d worked on facing my bathroom mirror an hour earlier. “You’re spying on me. You know things . . . You show up at my office. You say you can help. I need to know what’s going on.” I considered a threat about involving the Swedish authorities, but held back for the insane—yet very real— reason that I did not wish to anger him.
“My name’s not Pluta, of course,” he said, through a mouthful of herring, “but it’s no help to either of us to give you the real one. I work for the State of Israel, for an organization that worries day and night about Iran. And we weren’t spying on you. At least not to start. We were keeping an eye on a few of the people you’ve met in Tehran. We—”
Glitzman hushed as the waiter brought my chicken and mineral water. I pushed it aside as soon as he’d left us. Glitzman and I studied each other for a moment. In a gigantic bite he finished off the salmon.
“You were spying on me,” I muttered.
“Not on purpose,” he said. “Just listen. I have a proposal for you.”
I picked up my fork, looked at the chicken, and set it back down. I tried a sip of water and the bubbles crackled and popped in my mouth as I struggled to swallow.
Glitzman went on, “Work for me—for a good cause, I should add— and I’ll put you on a monthly retainer. For your services, not to Israel, let’s say, but to international Jewry.”
“A monthly retainer?” I asked.
“Indeed,” Glitzman said. “In exchange for shuttering your practice here and opening one in Tehran. Taking the plunge. Reconnecting with your homeland. All that.”
“Move to Tehran,” I repeated.
My eyes must have said it was a question, because he sighed and stared at me as if this should have been obvious by now, even to a humble dentist. “You go in and out of Tehran, you have valid Iranian documents, you have never been to Israel, though you are a Jew. Not a Zionist, let’s say, but a Jew. You are a Persian first, are you not? Of course you are. You are a Persian and a Jew, and where is the contradiction in that? Nowhere. Jews had been in Persia for over a thousand years when the Arabs showed up with their Islam.”
My grandfather had been a prominent Tehrani Jew at a time when Israel had a de facto embassy in Tehran, when Israeli engineers and agronomists and businessmen and intelligence officers were all over the country, pitching in on the Shah’s doomed effort to modernize. I had heard one story—and only slivers, at that—of an approach Mossad made to my grandfather at some point in the early seventies. He was a wealthy Persian who had never been to Israel, who, unlike my father, spoke barely a word of Hebrew. He had everything to lose. As I remember the story, my grandfather had politely told them to fuck off. But here his grandson was, listening.
Glitzman leaned back in his chair, folded his legs, and fussed with a stray thread on the cuff of his pants. “They wrote me a speech to give you. Would you like to hear it?”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
He ignored this. “When our agents or officers are Jews, particularly those without much history in Israel, there is a general belief in my organization, including a few of our more senior, dimwitted mandarins, that these people would benefit from a reminder of the importance of their work to the long-term security of the State of Israel.”
“Do you think I need that speech?” I asked. I had my own problems that needed working out before I could tackle those of the Jewish State or the Islamic Republic. Two entities, which, as the names alone suggest, are drowning in problems, and will be forevermore.
“No,” Glitzman said. “But I need to give it. You think I sit at the top of the food chain? Sometimes someone else tells me how it is, or how it’s going to be.” The loose thread on his pant leg had him enraptured for a moment. “In a generation’s time,” he said, with some theater in his voice, “the Iranian regime has stoked the ring of fire that burns around Israel now.” He nudged his head toward the window. “You think we’d all feel good here in this little Nordic paradise if the Norwegians had one hundred and fifty thousand rockets and missiles pointed at Stockholm? You think you could enjoy a night like this, fearless and bright, if the Finns were a month away from having a nuke and run by a death cult keen to turn your fjords into bathtubs of blood? How about if the Danes were arming and funding a bunch of the Arabs in Stockholm to blow themselves up inside your goddamn IKEAs? What if attacks like what happened on Drottninggatan a few years back were happening every few weeks? A madman hijacks a truck and rams it into pedestrians and department stores? No? Damn straight. And . . . end scene. There you have it, albeit with some of my own flair. What do you think?”
“Norway’s got the fjords,” I said, “not Sweden.”
“Ah, they have it all, don’t they?” Glitzman said. “I’ll pass that along. Otherwise?”
“It’s fine.”
Glitzman made a strange noise; it had come from his mouth but was more flatulence than sigh. Leaning into the table, he pointed a finger my way. “It’s shit. They wrote that for a Swede.”
“I am a Swede.”
“Are you?” Glitzman sized me up as a tailor might a client who has rapidly accumulated a great deal of weight. No judgment, but there was work to be done. “Not denying the passport, but you’re too brown to be a Swede, even if you’re a dentist. You’re too foreign to be an Iranian—and what’s more grotesque than a foreign-born Iranian? You hate the mullahs and the regime, but then again, so does everyone else. And you’re a Jew but you’re not an Israeli, and I have my doubts about your commitment to Zionism. Which, by the way, I’ve kept to myself inside the organization. You’ve got no family in Israel. You’ve never even visited. Everyone who fled Tehran came here or went to Los Angeles or New York. You don’t speak Hebrew; your father never taught you. Your bar mitzvah was . . . shall we say, a subdued affair. I hear there is a saying among Persian Jews: Iran is my homeland, Jerusalem is the direction of my prayers. But you don’t even pray.”
“It has been a while,” I confessed.
“I think,” Glitzman concluded, “that you believe Israel is a fine idea for other Jews. That you’re mostly bored. That you want a new life.”
I might have applauded, but I couldn’t congratulate him for spying on me. So I said, “That’s not so far off the mark.”
Glitzman went on, “What could be more exciting than opening a dental practice in Tehran, particularly one with very different—some might say, more exciting—objectives from your failing operation here? A practice that sends and receive goods inside Iran. A place I might park cars for a while, or run money through. A little outpost in the heart of enemy territory, one that might have interesting patients, people whose trust you might win? I’m not describing a dentist, am I?”
“You’re describing a spy,” I said.
“You say that scornfully, like it’s a dirty word,” Glitzman scolded. “I rather like how it sounds, especially on you. Better than dentist, am I right? Spies retire to California to play in the sun. But do you know what happens to Swedish dentists?”
For a brief moment, I felt a strange desire to defend the Swedish system, and shot back: “They probably have a comfortable retirement and a summerhouse in Gotland.”
“The successful ones, sure,” Glitzman said, jabbing his fork into another piece of herring, “But the rest, the ones like you? Well, my analysts say that those dentists drink themselves to death in the darkness of winter.”
—
THAT NIGHT, and the next one, Glitzman and I got frighteningly drunk as his pitch shifted from cold logic to the realms of emotion. He wanted me to feel that this wasn’t just business. He wanted me to trust him, and he’d clearly done his homework: I like drinking, and after two sessions of drinking with pretty much anybody I’m going to like them, too.
Those nights are a fog except for one encounter. While leaving a bar right around close, a tall, blond, and very drunk Swedish guy shouted at me, called me a Syrian like he was describing a fungus, and then, approaching us, said something that must have been quite nasty, though I honestly did not hear what it was. I’d only just turned to face him when, with one fearsome blow to the face, Glitzman put him on the floor. We hurried out of the bar, laughing, Glitzman’s arm around my shoulder, and mine around his.
CHAPTER 15
Tehran / Tirana, Albania
ONE YEAR AFTER Glitzman’s visit, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm and a disgraced Tehrani doctor were headed to Albania for two weeks’ training in small arms, surveillance and countersurveillance, agent handling and recruitment, covert communications technology, breaking-and-entering, and the construction of explosive devices, on the dime of the spy agency of the State of Israel.
Try and tell me the world makes any sense.
—
AMIR- ALI, that disgraced Tehrani doctor, had become one of my new dental practice’s first patients when I’d settled back in Iran to work for Glitzman. Amir-Ali found me because his previous dentist had retired and he had severe tooth pain (cavities on 3:5 and 3:6), which, as it turned out, were the least of his problems.
When I met him he was also under fire from the medical board because a patient had died of a heart attack during a routine hip replacement surgery. The board investigator, a real true believer, perhaps sniffing atheism on Amir-Ali and also hints of actual moonshine, had turned the hearing into an ideological exam. Amir-Ali could only name seven of the twelve imams and he couldn’t put them in anything close to the right order. He could not recite the Quranic verses that did not begin with in the name of God. He atrociously misquoted Khomeini. These days the ideological tests are mostly box-checking exercises, but Amir-Ali found an examiner looking to make an example of his inability to check any of the boxes. So by the time Amir-Ali had decided to do something about the cavities, the poor guy had been dumped from his orthopedic practice, his funds for wine and women were running dangerously low, and he was spending his spare time, when sober, trying to convince his more successful siblings to coinvest in various financial schemes. We became fast friends. We had much in common.
