They Hanged Arash on a Tuesday

They hanged Arash on a Tuesday, at dawn, and state television showed it twice in case Leïla had missed it.

She had not missed it. She was standing in her kitchen in Vanak with a glass of tea going cold in her hand, and she watched the first broadcast at half past seven and the second at eight, and by the second time she had stopped looking at the crane and the rope and was looking only at his face in the confession they ran beforehand, because the face was the part that still had information in it.

They had shaved his beard. That was a small cruelty, and deliberate. Arash had been vain about his beard in the way of men who have nothing else to be vain about; he had trimmed it with nail scissors in the back of a Peugeot outside Isfahan while she kept watch, and he had asked her, quite seriously, whether it made him look like a poet. She had told him it made him look like a man who sold carpets to tourists. He had been delighted. Now his chin was raw and his eyes moved from left to right, left to right, reading from a card held somewhere above the camera.

‘I was deceived,’ said Arash, on the television, to eighty million people. ‘I was deceived by the Zionist enemy and by Western filth. I listened to their music. I let it into my heart. Even the music. Even Under Pressure.’

Leïla put the glass down on the counter, carefully, because her hand had decided to do something on its own and she did not want to find out what.

There was a rule. It had been Arash’s rule, actually, which was typical of him: he liked rules he could be clever inside. If they take you, he had said, and they put you in front of a camera, and you have to say what they tell you to say, then somewhere in it you name a song. If it is a Queen song, it means you held. You gave them nothing that matters. If it is anything else, anything at all, it means run. Run tonight. Don’t pack.

She had asked him why Queen. He had looked at her as though she were simple. Because Freddie was Persian, he had said. Because he got away.

Under Pressure. She ran it through again, standing very still, with the television showing the weather now, a smiling man explaining that the pollution in the capital would be moderate to severe. Under Pressure was Queen. Everyone knew that. It was also David Bowie, whose name was on it beside theirs, which Arash knew perfectly well, because Arash had been the kind of man who read the small print on record sleeves and corrected you at parties.

Queen meant stay. Bowie meant run.

He had chosen, out of every song in the world, the one song that meant both.

‘You bastard,’ she said aloud, in Hebrew, which she never did, and then she was frightened of having said it at all, and she switched the television off.

The clinic opened at nine. Dr Lilit Sarkissian opened it at five minutes to, as she had every working day for six years, because Armenian dentists in north Tehran were known to be punctual and she had built her life out of the things people expected.

The plate on the door said, in Persian and in English, Dr L. Sarkissian, General and Cosmetic Dentistry. The English was for the patients from the embassies, who had mostly gone, and for the aunties of Vanak, who liked to think their teeth were being seen to by someone international. Inside there was one chair, one X-ray unit that had been old when the Shah left, a reception desk with nobody behind it since the receptionist’s son had been called up in March, and a framed print of Mount Ararat that Leïla had bought in a shop on Hafez Street because she felt Lilit would have owned one.

She had invented Lilit with great care. Lilit’s parents were from Isfahan, from the old Armenian quarter of New Julfa. Lilit had trained in Yerevan, which explained the gaps. Lilit went to the Armenian church of Saint Sarkis on the big feast days and lit candles for parents who did not exist. Lilit was unmarried and slightly too old to be unmarried, which made the aunties sympathetic and the men cautious, and both of those were useful. Lilit did not drink, in public. Lilit listened to Persian pop and old Armenian songs. Lilit had never in her life heard of Massive Attack.

Leïla had a pair of earbuds in the second drawer of the desk, under the appointment book, which held three albums by Massive Attack and nothing else, and she had not listened to them in Iran once. They were for afterwards. She had decided that years ago. When it was over, she would put them in on the plane.

She checked the appointment book. Mrs Tehrani at half past nine, a crown. The Moradi twins at eleven, because their mother believed in check-ups. A cancellation at two. Nothing at four. Nothing at all after four, for the rest of the week, which was the war, and the price of everything, and people deciding that their teeth could wait.

Then the door opened and Mrs Tehrani came in, talking already, about her son-in-law and the price of rice and the explosions they had heard all night from the south, which her son-in-law said were the Americans and her husband said were the Guards blowing up their own ammunition so they could blame the Americans, and which did Dr Lilit think it was?

‘I think,’ said Leïla, ‘that you should open your mouth.’

She worked. It helped. A crown is a small, absolute world: the shade, the fit, the bite, the patient’s tongue trying to be helpful and getting in the way. She did Mrs Tehrani’s crown and listened to her son-in-law’s opinions. She did the Moradi twins, who were nine and had been told by their mother that the dentist would be able to tell if they had been lying, and who therefore confessed, unprompted and through their fingers, to a long list of crimes involving their grandmother’s sweets. Leïla gave each of them a sticker and told them their teeth were the most honest she had ever seen.

At lunchtime Mrs Afsaneh came down from the third floor with a pot of ash reshteh wrapped in a towel, because it was cold now in the mornings and Mrs Afsaneh did not believe that a woman living alone could be trusted to eat soup.

Mrs Afsaneh was seventy-one, a widow, and the most devout person Leïla had ever met. She prayed five times a day and wore her chador to the bakery and had made the pilgrimage to Mashhad eleven times, and she despised the government of the Islamic Republic with a pure and personal hatred that she never troubled to hide from God, only from the neighbours. Her husband had been a schoolteacher. In 1988 he had been taken for two weeks for reasons nobody ever explained, and he had come back without the use of his left hand, and he had never again been able to write on a blackboard. Mrs Afsaneh did not talk about it. She talked about it the way she put the soup down on the desk: with great force and without a word.

‘You look terrible,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

‘You watched it.’

Leïla did not ask what. In Tehran, that morning, there was only one it.

‘They hanged a boy who listened to music,’ said Mrs Afsaneh. ‘They hanged him in God’s name.’ She lowered her voice, not very much. ‘God was not there. I asked Him. He said He had been somewhere else.’

‘Khanom, the walls.’

‘The walls,’ said Mrs Afsaneh, ‘have heard worse from me.’ She lifted the lid of the pot and the smell of herbs and noodles and fried onion came up warm into the cold room. ‘Eat. You are too thin for a woman who wants a husband.’

‘I don’t want a husband.’

‘That,’ said Mrs Afsaneh, with satisfaction, ‘is what is wrong with you.’

She went back up the stairs, slowly, her hand on the rail, and Leïla ate the soup standing at the window. It was very good. It was always very good. She thought that if she ever had to leave this building in a hurry, which she might have to do tonight, it would be the soup she missed, and Mrs Afsaneh, and then she made herself stop thinking that, because it was not useful.

Kian was on the stairs when she locked up at half past six. He was twenty-two, studying mechanical engineering at the Sharif University of Technology, and he lived on the ground floor with his mother, who worked nights at a hospital. He was thin and loud and kind and had a scar along the line of his jaw from a rubber bullet in the autumn of 2022, which he told girls was from a motorcycle accident and told Leïla was from a motorcycle accident, and she let him.

He was carrying a bag of oranges and a router.

‘Your Wi-Fi,’ he said. ‘I fixed it. I mean, I’m going to fix it. I mean, I know what’s wrong with it.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘The internet,’ said Kian. ‘They’ve switched it off again. But when they switch it on, your router will be ready.’ He held it up like a trophy. ‘Faster than the Revolutionary Guard.’

‘Not difficult.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not difficult.’

He sat down on the step, which meant he wanted to talk, and she sat down beside him, which meant she would let him, and he peeled an orange with his thumbnail and gave her half.

‘You saw,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘He was a nobody. A courier. Some guy from Isfahan who drove a van.’ Kian’s thumb dug into the peel. ‘They said he was a Mossad spy. A Mossad spy who drove a van.’ He laughed, without any pleasure. ‘If the Mossad had spies who drove vans, we’d have been free years ago.’

Leïla ate an orange segment and said nothing at all, very carefully.

‘In two weeks it’s Aban,’ said Kian. ‘The anniversary. November. You remember?’

She remembered. November 2019: the petrol price trebled overnight, and the country came out, and for five days the internet went dark and the security forces shot people in the streets, in the head and the chest, in towns whose names most of the world could not have found on a map. Nobody ever agreed on how many. Hundreds, at the very least. Kian had been fifteen. His cousin had been twenty.

‘We’re going up on the roofs,’ he said. ‘Like before. Like 2022. The whole block. Shouting.’ He looked at her sideways. ‘You should come. Armenians can shout too.’

‘Kian.’

‘I know, I know. Be careful.’

‘Don’t shout from this roof.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I live under it.’

He grinned, and stood up, and handed her the router. ‘Plug it in when the internet comes back,’ he said. ‘Like a candle. Like a prayer.’ He went in to his mother’s flat, singing something under his breath in English, badly, and she sat on the step with the router in her lap and the smell of orange on her fingers and wished, with an intensity that alarmed her, that he were stupider, or braver, or anyone else’s.

The dead drop was a loose tile behind a radiator in the women’s washroom of a mosque on Vanak Square, which was a choice Arash had made and of which he had been very proud. Nobody, he said, would ever search the women’s side of a mosque. He was right. Nobody had. And there was nothing in it now, nothing in it for nine days, just the dust and a dead moth and the smooth cold back of the tile.

She could not pray there. Lilit was a Christian, and a Christian seen kneeling in a mosque would have been talked about in Vanak for a year. She ran the tap instead, as any woman caught short on the square might, and stood at the basin with her wrists under the cold water and her eyes closed, and nobody would think anything of a woman who wept at a basin.

She did not weep. She thought about the arithmetic. If Arash had held, then she was safe, and could stay, and finish the work. If Arash had broken, then they had her name, or the shape of her, and they would come tonight, or tomorrow, or in a week, when they had watched her long enough to find whoever else she knew. Queen and Bowie. Stay and run. She went round it until it was smooth and meaningless, like the back of the tile.

At home she drew the curtains and took the terminal out of the false bottom of the dental cabinet. It was small and flat and grey, a dish no bigger than a dinner plate, and it was the most illegal object in the building by a wide margin, more illegal than the earbuds, more illegal than the Hebrew she was not supposed to remember. She put it on the balcony behind the dead geranium, angled it at a sky that was brown and starless with pollution, and waited, cross-legged on the cold tiles in her coat, while it thought about whether there was a satellite anywhere in the heavens willing to speak to her.

At eleven minutes past one in the morning, there was.

One message. It came in a burst, compressed and encrypted and stripped of everything human, and the little screen unpacked it into eight words in English:

Hold. Someone is coming. Do not shoot him.

She read it four times. Then she deleted it, and packed the terminal away, and sat in the dark with her back against the cabinet.

Do not shoot him. Ezra had a sense of humour that came out at the worst moments, like a rash. But Ezra did not waste words on a satellite link that cost a fortune a second and could get her killed. If he had said it, he had meant it. Someone was coming whom she would want to shoot.

She did not sleep. At six she got up and dressed as Lilit, and drank her tea, and at five to nine she opened the clinic.

The phone rang the next morning, at ten past eleven. A man’s voice, on a Dubai number, in the soft Persian of an educated Tehrani: he would be in the capital next week on business, he had a molar that was killing him, and could Dr Sarkissian possibly see him on Monday? His aunt in Shiraz had recommended her very warmly.

Leïla held the receiver and looked at the print of Mount Ararat on the wall.

Nobody’s aunt in Shiraz had ever recommended her. Nobody’s aunt in Shiraz had ever heard of her. It was a phrase she had last heard in a windowless room north of Tel Aviv, six years ago, from Ezra, who had made her repeat it back to him until she was sick of it: if anyone ever tells you that his aunt in Shiraz recommends you, he is ours, and you will tell him that his aunt has terrible teeth.

‘Your aunt,’ she said, ‘has terrible teeth.’

There was a short silence on the line. Then the man said, gravely, that this was unfortunately well known in the family, and she wrote K. Nazari — molar, painful on Monday’s page at four o’clock, and put the phone down, and went on with her afternoon.

For four days she did exactly what Lilit did. She saw her patients. She ate Mrs Afsaneh’s soup. She washed her hands in the women’s room on Vanak Square and checked the empty tile. She did not run. On Monday, at four o’clock exactly, the bell over the door went, and a man came in holding his jaw.

He was in his early forties, tall, with grey coming into a short beard, a cheap good suit and the kind of very still face that has been taught to be still. He had the slight stoop of a man who has spent years in rooms with low ceilings. He said, in the voice from the telephone, that he was Mr Nazari, that he had an appointment, and that his molar was killing him.

Leïla said that she was sorry to hear it, and asked him to sit down.

She had seen his face before. Not in Tehran. In a windowless room in a building north of Tel Aviv, six years ago, on a screen, in the last briefing before she went in, about the officers of the Quds Force who were known to be hunting Israeli networks in Iran. He had been younger in the photograph, clean-shaven, in uniform. There had been a name under it, and a rank, and a line of text that said assessed: highly capable, devout, dangerous.

He settled into her chair and leaned his head back against the rest, and looked up at her with dark, tired, intelligent eyes, and waited, the way a man waits who knows exactly what she is thinking.

Leïla picked up the drill.

A Reassuring Face

It had been raining in Bayswater since roughly the Suez Crisis, and Jonah Ashdown had long since stopped taking it personally.

He took it, instead, as a kind of stock control. Ashdown & Daughter, Persian & Oriental Books, occupied the ground floor and basement of a narrow stucco house on a side street off Westbourne Grove, and the damp came up through the basement and down through the roof and met, companionably, somewhere around the poetry. Every November Jonah went through the lower shelves with a torch and a cloth and decided which volumes of Hafez could be saved. There were a great many volumes of Hafez. His father, who had founded the shop in 1952, had believed that the British public would one day develop an appetite for fourteenth-century Persian lyric verse in the original, and had bought accordingly. The British public had so far resisted.

At a quarter past nine on Wednesday morning, Jonah was on his knees in front of the Divan, in three editions, when the bell went over the door.

‘Mr Ashdown.’

‘Mrs Okonkwo.’

He did not get up immediately, partly out of dignity and partly because of his knees. Mrs Okonkwo stood in the doorway in a magnificent purple coat with a matching umbrella, and the rain ran off the umbrella onto his doormat, which said Welcome in Persian, a word she had once asked him to translate and had then regarded, for some time, with suspicion.

Mrs Okonkwo owned the building. She also owned two others on the street and a launderette in Kilburn, and on Sundays she was pastor of the Gate of Heaven Pentecostal Fellowship in Peckham, a congregation of some four hundred souls who had, as far as Jonah could tell, the most punctual rent-paying habits of anyone in London. She held him up to them, he suspected, as an example of what happened to people who did not.

‘It is November,’ she said.

‘It is,’ agreed Jonah, getting up in stages. ‘I’d noticed. It’s on the calendar, just after October.’

‘The rent is due on the first. The rent you have not paid was due on the first of October.’

‘I’m aware of the general principle.’

‘Mr Ashdown.’ She closed the umbrella, which she did slowly, like a woman sheathing a sword. ‘I have prayed for you.’

‘That’s very kind.’

‘I have prayed that the Lord would send you customers. I have prayed that the Lord would send you a wife. I have prayed, God forgive me, that the Lord would send you an inheritance from a distant relative. The Lord has not seen fit.’ She looked around the shop, at the shelves, at the green-shaded lamp, at the single armchair in which no customer had sat since the spring. ‘The Lord,’ she said, ‘is patient, Mr Ashdown. I am not the Lord.’

‘No,’ said Jonah. ‘I’d noticed that too.’

He made her a cup of tea. This was not a tactic, or not only a tactic; it was what one did. He had made tea for a Somali pirate on a satellite phone, metaphorically speaking, and for a Colombian guerrilla commander in a hut in the Cauca, actually, using a camping stove and a teabag he had carried in his breast pocket for six weeks. Tea was a way of saying that whatever was about to happen, there would be a moment beforehand when two people held something warm and waited for it to cool. People were more reasonable with a cup in their hands. It was very hard to shout at a man who had just asked you if you took sugar.

Mrs Okonkwo took two sugars and a promise of payment by the end of the month, and left him with a tract about the prodigal son, which he put on the counter beside the others.

The phone rang at ten.

It was the landline, which almost nobody had the number of, and it was Graham Pryce, a senior underwriter at a syndicate in the City that Jonah had worked with for twenty-two years and which had a long and profitable relationship with misfortune. Graham insured ships against things happening to them. When things happened to them anyway, he rang Jonah. He had been two years above Jonah at Winchester, and for twenty years he had come into the back room of the shop once a quarter to drink Jonah’s coffee, complain about his Kinks records and leave without buying anything.

‘Have you seen the news?’ said Graham.

‘I try not to.’

‘A tanker. Greek-owned, Liberian flag, the Kalliope Star. Taken off Qeshm on Saturday night by the Revolutionary Guard Navy. Twenty-three crew. Mostly Filipino, a Greek master, a couple of Ukrainians.’ Graham’s voice had the particular lightness he used for very large sums of money. ‘We’re the lead on the hull. Also on the kidnap and ransom, as it happens, through a sister syndicate, which is why I’m ringing you and not just drinking.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Officially? They say she was smuggling fuel. Unofficially, nobody has the faintest idea. The owners swear blind she’s clean. The Foreign Office are being Foreign Office about it. The Greeks are furious. The Filipinos are frightened, which is reasonable.’ A pause. ‘There’s a war on, Jonah.’

‘I’d heard.’

‘We need someone on the ground. Bandar Abbas, initially. Possibly Tehran. Someone who speaks the language, knows how they think, and isn’t government, so they can’t use him as a bargaining chip against the government.’ Another pause, slightly longer. ‘Someone with a reassuring face.’

‘Who told you I have a reassuring face?’

‘You did. In 2014. In Djibouti. You were quite drunk.’

Jonah looked out of the window at the rain. A man went past under an umbrella, then came back, then stood at the bus stop across the road, not waiting for a bus.

‘What’s the fee?’ he said.

Graham told him. Jonah thought of Mrs Okonkwo, and of the roof, and of the poetry in the basement slowly turning into papier-mâché, and said that he would think about it.

‘Think quickly,’ said Graham. ‘They’ve already started hanging people.’

‘Yes,’ said Jonah. ‘I saw.’

He had seen. He had not meant to, but the newspaper had been on the mat with the post, and he had read it over toast, as he always did, in the small back kitchen behind the shop where the light came in grey through the yard.

There had been three stories about Iran. One was about the war, and the Strait, and the American strikes near Qeshm, with a map that Jonah could have drawn from memory and a quote from a retired general saying that nobody knew what would happen next, which was the only thing anyone had said about Iran in forty-seven years that was reliably true. One was about the hanging in Tehran of an alleged Israeli spy, a courier named Arash, aged thirty-four, with a still from the confession: a frightened man with a raw chin, reading from a card.

The third story was smaller, on page eleven. Two Romanian men had been sent to prison for stabbing an Iranian journalist outside his home in Wimbledon. The journalist worked for a Persian-language television station that had been threatened so often in London that it had, for a time, moved its studios to America. The prosecutors said the attack had been ordered from Tehran. The Romanian men had not been spies. They had not been anything. They had been hired, through a chain of intermediaries, the way you might hire a man to clean your gutters.

Jonah had read that one twice. Then he had folded the paper and put it in the recycling, because there was nothing to be done about any of it before ten in the morning, and it did not do to start the day by being afraid of Romanians.

At a quarter to one the bell went again, and a man came in shaking a raincoat with the air of someone who had been personally betrayed by it.

‘This country,’ said Ezra.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘It’s not raining,’ said Ezra. ‘That’s the thing. In Tel Aviv when it rains, it rains. It’s an event. You can see it coming from the sea, it arrives, it does its business, and it leaves. Here,’ he held up the raincoat, which was dripping steadily onto the Persian Welcome, ‘it doesn’t rain. It just fails to stop being wet.’

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Do you have coffee?’

‘I have something that came in a jar marked coffee.’

Ezra looked at him with deep sadness. ‘Tea,’ he said.

He was somewhere in his late fifties, or possibly a youthful seventy; Jonah had known him for eleven years and had never established which. He was short and broad and bald, with heavy black eyebrows and a face like a well-meaning bulldog, and he wore, as always, a sports jacket that looked as though it had been bought for a wedding in 1987 and worn to every funeral since. He was, as far as Jonah had been able to work out, quite senior in the Mossad. He had never said so. He had never needed to. He had first come into the shop in 2015 asking for a book on Sufi poetry that did not exist, and had stayed for two hours, and had left having bought nothing and having asked Jonah eleven questions about the kidnapping of an Israeli businessman in Lagos, to which Jonah had given eleven very careful answers. Since then he had come perhaps twice a year, always with a question and never with a book.

They went into the back room. It was where Jonah’s father had kept the stock that was too valuable for the shop floor, or too obscure, and where Jonah now kept a gas fire, two armchairs, a desk covered in invoices, a record player, and about four hundred long-playing records in a set of shelves his wife had built and painted blue in 1994.

Ezra sat down in the better armchair, as he always did.

‘You’ve had a call from Graham Pryce,’ he said.

Jonah filled the kettle. ‘Have I?’

‘About a tanker.’

‘Are you listening to my telephone?’

‘No,’ said Ezra, sounding wounded. ‘Graham told me. I asked him to call you.’ He accepted his tea, and held it in both hands, and looked at it as though it might explain the English. ‘I want you to take the job.’

‘I was going to anyway. The roof leaks.’

‘I want you to take a man with you.’

Jonah sat down in the other armchair. The gas fire ticked.

‘And,’ said Ezra, ‘I want you to bring a woman back.’

There was a long silence. Somewhere above them, in the flat, a pipe knocked.

‘Ezra,’ said Jonah, at last, ‘I’m a hostage negotiator. I’m not a spy. I’ve never been a spy. I’ve taken considerable pains, over a long career, to make sure that everybody I have ever sat across a table from knew, beyond any doubt, that I was not a spy. It is the whole of my value. A spy who negotiates for hostages is a hostage who hasn’t been taken yet.’

‘Yes,’ said Ezra. ‘That’s why it has to be you.’

‘That doesn’t follow.’

‘It follows perfectly. You go in as what you are. A negotiator for the insurers. Everyone knows you. The Revolutionary Guard Navy knows you; you got three of their own sailors back from the Somalis in 2011. They trust you, as much as they trust anybody, which is not much. You go to Bandar Abbas. You talk about the ship. Maybe you go to Tehran, and talk about the ship some more. And while you’re there, the man who travels with you as your local agent does something else.’

‘And the woman?’

Ezra drank some tea. He made a face, but a small one, out of politeness.

‘The woman,’ he said, ‘has lived in Tehran for six years. She has done more for my country in those six years than an armoured division. She is the last of her network. The others are dead, or in Evin, or on television. On Tuesday they hanged her courier.’ He put the cup down. ‘I don’t know if he talked. She doesn’t know if he talked. If he talked, they’ll come for her, and they’ll do to her what they did to him, slowly, and then they’ll put her on television too. If he didn’t talk, they’ll come for her anyway, sooner or later, because they’re not stupid and they’re looking very hard.’

‘Why not take her out yourselves?’

‘We tried. Twice. Since February the borders have been impossible. The airports are watched. The mountains in the north are full of Revolutionary Guards looking for Kurds and anybody else. The usual ways out are closed, or known, or both.’ Ezra spread his hands. ‘An English negotiator, sailing through on a tanker deal, with an agent from a shipping company in Dubai: that is a way out nobody is watching. Yet.’

‘And if they catch her with me?’

‘Then they’ll hang her, and you’ll be in a very uncomfortable prison for a very long time, and I’ll do everything I can to get you out, which will not be enough.’ Ezra looked at him steadily. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Jonah. I don’t lie to you. It’s one of the few pleasures left to me.’

Jonah got up and went to the record shelves. He did not need to look; his hand knew where it was. He slid the sleeve out, and the disc out of the sleeve, and put it on the turntable, and lowered the needle. The crackle first, like a fire catching. Then the strings, very quietly, rising.

Ezra closed his eyes.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is the bad-news record.’

‘It’s Elgar.’

‘I know it’s Elgar. I’ve been coming here for eleven years. You play it every time someone tells you something you don’t want to hear.’ He listened for a moment. ‘It’s very beautiful. I hate it.’