Chapter Thirteen · Adam's Robe Book 1

Tehran, Iran — 22 January 1979

Ronen Katz was twenty-four years old, had been in-country eleven months, and had learned, in that time, exactly one skill that felt like it might actually matter tonight: how to make a frightened family believe, entirely on the strength of his own voice staying level, that the next ten minutes were survivable.

He did not, in fact, believe it himself. The curfew had stopped meaning anything as a legal fact three weeks ago and had become, instead, a kind of weather — something everyone still discussed, still planned around, while understanding perfectly well that it no longer described anything real about which streets were safe after dark. Tehran at night, this particular January, was a city patrolled by at least four different kinds of armed men, only two of whom answered to anyone Katz could have named with confidence, and the church his contact had chosen for the meeting point sat exactly on the seam between a neighborhood the army still nominally controlled and one that had, in practice, already changed hands to a revolutionary committee nobody in the government had officially recognized yet.

He had cultivated Malko Yonan for the better part of two years, the way his service cultivated a hundred relationships like it across the region — quietly, patiently, more out of genuine respect for the man than any specific operational payoff Katz had ever expected to collect on. Malko ran an import business, sat on the council of his church, and had a way of listening to a much younger foreign officer's questions about his community's history that made Katz feel, more than once, like the one being handled rather than the one doing the handling. Katz had never asked him directly what the family's oldest stories actually claimed. Malko had never quite told him. It was, Katz had come to understand over two years of careful, unhurried tea, the exact shape of the relationship both of them had silently agreed to keep.

Tonight was not a night for that shape to hold. Tonight, Malko had sent word through a nephew, in a single line that had reached Katz two hours before curfew: We need the help you once offered. Tonight, if it can be tonight.

They came to the church gate in twos and threes, the way frightened people move when they've been told, correctly, that a crowd draws exactly the attention a crowd is trying to avoid. Miriam first, Malko's wife, moving with the careful deliberateness of a woman twice Katz's age pretending her hip didn't hurt her. Then Shushan, the daughter, with three-year-old Anahid asleep against her shoulder in the specific boneless way of a child who has been carried so far, so late, that even fear has stopped being able to keep her awake. David, Shushan's husband, came last before Malko himself, carrying nothing but a single canvas bag and the particular watchfulness of a man counting exits.

Malko came through the gate last of all, and locked it behind him with his own key, and Katz understood, watching him do it, that some part of the old man still believed a locked gate meant something in a city where locks had stopped meaning anything weeks ago.

"The truck is two streets north," Katz said, low, in the Farsi he'd worked hard to make unaccented enough not to draw a second look. "We move in pairs, thirty seconds apart. Miriam and Shushan with the child first. David, you're with me at the rear."

"And me," Malko said.

"You're with David and me. Rear position, same as we discussed."

Malko's hand found Katz's sleeve, briefly, in the dark. "If something happens tonight that separates us before that truck — you understand what I am asking you to do with my family, and you understand, I think, that there is a second thing I am not asking you to do, and never will."

"I understand both."

"Say the second one back to me. I want to hear a young man say it to an old one's face, on a night like this, and mean it."

"I will get your family out," Katz said, "and I will never ask you, tonight or any night after it, where the rest of what your family protects has gone."

Something in Malko's face, in the thin light leaking from a shuttered window two doors down, eased by a degree Katz would spend decades trying to accurately remember, and never quite managing to.

The checkpoint that should not have been there materialized at the second street corner, four men with rifles slung loose and a folding table dragged out from some shop's back room, checking papers by flashlight with the particular unhurried menace of men who had only recently discovered that they were now the ones with the authority to be unhurried about it. Katz saw it half a block out and had exactly enough time to redirect Miriam and Shushan down a side alley before the beam of a flashlight found David's face instead, and one of the four men said something too quiet for Katz to catch and too sharp in tone to be anything but trouble.

"Go," Malko said, already moving toward the checkpoint rather than away from it, his voice pitched to carry exactly as far as the four armed men and not a step further. "Take my daughter's family through the alley. I'll bring David."

"That's not the plan."

"It is now." Malko did not stop walking, and did not look back, and Katz understood, with the specific sick clarity of a man watching a plan come apart in real time, that arguing would cost seconds neither of them could spend. "An old man asking after his son-in-law's papers is a delay these men will find tedious. An old man and a young foreigner both asking will find it interesting. Go, Ronen. I am not finished with this family yet, and neither are you."

Katz went. He would spend forty-seven years deciding whether that had been obedience or cowardice, and would never fully settle the question either way.

The alley opened onto the street where the truck waited, and Miriam and Shushan were already inside it, and Katz had his hand on the tailgate, already turning to look back the way they'd come, when the first shots went off — not aimed, as far as he could ever reconstruct it afterward, not a targeted execution in a doorway the way the rumors that reached him over the following days sometimes claimed and sometimes didn't, but the particular chaotic scatter of gunfire in a crowd that has just decided, all at once, that it is now a crowd running rather than a crowd waiting.

He went back three steps before David's hand closed on his arm harder than he would have believed the quieter man capable of.

"He told you what to do," David said, low, urgent, his own voice cracking on the words in a way that told Katz he was fighting the same three steps himself. "He told both of us. Don't you dare make his choice cost us Miriam too."

The street between them and the checkpoint was already a wall of moving bodies, people who had been trying to reach their own homes before curfew now simply trying to reach anywhere that wasn't here, and Katz, straining for one more look through the crush, caught exactly one more image of Malko Yonan before the crowd closed over the space where he'd been standing — the old man's hand, raised, not in surrender and not quite in farewell, closing around something Katz did not understand until hours later, alone at the embassy, finding a folded scrap of paper in his own coat pocket that he did not remember being given.

He never saw Malko's face again. He would spend decades constructing and discarding a dozen different versions of what that raised hand had meant, and would never once, in all that time, let himself settle on the version that let him stop wondering.

The truck pulled away with four people in it instead of six, and Katz climbed in after it on foot two streets later, breathing too hard to speak, and Shushan — twenty-six years old, her daughter finally, mercifully, still asleep against her shoulder through all of it — looked at him across the truck bed with an expression that held no accusation in it yet, because the accusation, he understood even then, would take longer than tonight to arrive, and would never, not once in the following forty-seven years, entirely leave.