Zendegi

‘Okay, so it’s his mistress. Or a prostitute.’ Even so, Martin was a little surprised that Omar and his friends would treat such a revelation with anything more than cynicism. Dozens of young Iranians had told Martin that their rulers were two-faced hypocrites, moralising endlessly in public while they embezzled oil money and lived like kings. One student had shown him a famous cartoon: in the first panel, the despised former Shah cupped his hands beneath a torrent of gold falling from the sky, with just a few stray coins spilling out from between his fingers to reach his subjects below. In the second, a glowering, bearded mullah stood in the Shah’s place – and this time every last coin was caught, with nothing slipping through.

Omar wiped tears from his eyes. ‘Bebin!’

Martin looked at the picture again, wondering what he was missing. The woman was statuesque, with striking bone structure – was she a famous actress, or a singer? Perhaps it was just the poor quality of the image, but there was something theatrical, almost mask-like, in the excess of make-up she was wearing-

‘Mibinam,’ he said. ‘Mifahmam.’ He understood, now, why Omar had woken him.

Hassan Jabari, former government prosecutor and current member of the Guardian Council – the body that had declared more than two thousand aspiring candidates for last month’s election to be insufficiently loyal to the principles of Islam – had just been caught in his chauffeured Mercedes Benz in the middle of the night in the company of a glamorous, begowned transsexual.

‘Berim be-’ Martin struggled.

‘Hospital?’ Omar suggested.

‘Dorost,’ Martin agreed.

Behrouz, Martin’s translator, had taken a fortnight’s leave to visit his parents. With the non-event of the election over and half the country shut down for Noruz, the Persian New Year, Martin was officially on leave himself, but he’d decided to stay in Tehran and catch up on paperwork.

As they drove into the city, Martin contemplated the task ahead of him with unease. He recoiled from the prospect of treating anyone’s sex life as news – least of all when there was a potential death penalty hanging over the participants – but the email was already circulating, the revelation a fait accompli. The real story now was not Jabari’s behaviour, but the way the regime and the public would respond to the exposure of his hypocrisy.

‘We should call him “Hugh Grant” Jabari,’ Omar suggested – rather proudly, as if the time was long overdue for an Iranian celebrity to grab the attention of the international tabloid media.

‘I’m pretty sure Hugh Grant was caught with a woman,’ Martin said.

Omar racked his brain. “‘Forty-Eight Seconds” Jabari.’

‘Keep this up and you’ll be hosting the Oscars.’

Omar owned a shop that sold consumer electronics – and the odd bootleg DVD under the counter. His English had come back to him completely now, but Martin wished he wasn’t so reliant here on Omar’s help. Omar was a partisan player in all this, an unashamed pro-reformist; Martin was grateful for his tip-off, but it would be both naïve and unfair to expect him to act as an impartial colleague, like Behrouz.

They drove down Taleghani Avenue, past the ‘Den of Espionage’ formerly known as the US Embassy. The walls of the compound were emblazoned with bombastic slogans – helpfully translated into English for the edification of tourists – and a series of murals that included a skull-faced Statue of Liberty that would not have looked out of place on a Metallica album. Even at this hour Tehran’s traffic made Martin nervous, with the ubiquitous Samands and old fume-belching Paykans weaving between lanes without warning, and motorbikes zigzagging into every tiny space that opened up before them.

As he turned his company Peugeot Pars into the cramped hospital car park he hoped they hadn’t arrived too late. In a perfect Orwellian police state, Jabari’s companion – and every witness to the crash – would already have vanished without a trace, but Tehran was a very long way from Cold War East Berlin. He doubted that Jabari’s double life had been an open secret among the rigidly pious regime’s upper echelon, and while elements of VEVAK, the intelligence service, might have known about it – keeping it on file for a time when a political favour was needed – it would not surprise him in the least if they had not yet even heard about the accident; the email had been distributed in encrypted form to a relatively small number of people. In the first instance Jabari’s driver would be charged with keeping everything under wraps, but if he were out of action, who would call in the fixers?

Martin turned to Omar. ‘So what does a paramedic do when he comes across a man dressed as a woman?’ He was assuming Jabari’s companion was pre-operative, though that wasn’t necessarily the case; Ayatollah Khomeini, no less, had issued a startlingly enlightened fatwa in the eighties, declaring that gender reassignment surgery was a perfectly acceptable practice.