The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,40
kill him, of course, if they knew he was alive and traveling about, and so would the Americans. Some of the Syrian intelligence barons might want to kill him, along with the Fatah Palestinians and the Nejdi Saudis and the Dubai Emiratis. He had killed their people, or so it was said, and so they would want to kill him in revenge. His protection was that he was a non-person. The world officially thought that he was dead, killed twenty-five years ago by the Israelis, and the Israelis were never wrong. Rumors persisted, but that was always the case in this conspiratorial world. So the man survived, year by year, and the longer he lived the more the myth of invulnerability grew up around him, among the handful of people who knew the truth.
Power was not what you did, but what people believed you did. That was the essence of Al-Majnoun’s authority. People who worked with him in Tehran truly believed he was the Crazy One. They thought that if he looked at them cross-eyed, they might end up dead. When he walked into a room in one of the security ministries, people pulled back and opened a path to give him a wide berth. When he took off his sunglasses, they didn’t look at his eyes. They were afraid.
And so they did what he wanted, or what they thought he wanted. They called him “General,” or “Emir,” and tried please him because they were frightened of him. A few Iranian intelligence officers who had seen the movie Pulp Fiction called him “Mr. Wolfe” because they imagined that he was in some way like the mysterious character played by Harvey Keitel who cleans up after other people have made a mess. But outside the circle closest to the Leader, people knew little about him, except that it was prudent to do what he asked. And inside that circle, more like a black box really, it was impossible to know what anyone actually did or thought. And so Al-Majnoun was carried forward, and powerfully, by the motion of his own reputation.
He spent only a long weekend in Damascus. He had run out of opium, for one thing. And he’d had his booster shot of Arabism. Someone sent a woman up to him at the Four Seasons, a beautiful blond girl from Minsk who couldn’t have been more than twenty. She looked like a model. He made her take off all her clothes and then gave her a deck of cards and told her to play solitaire on the bed, while he watched. She thought she was supposed to do something erotic, so she touched herself and moaned. But he just wanted to watch her play cards. The next morning he flew back to Tehran on his private jet.
Al-Majnoun visited Mehdi Esfahani when he returned to Iran. He didn’t want to see him at his office again. Indeed, he rarely visited the same building twice, even in the secure environs of Tehran. It was a mistake to be predictable, in what you said or where you went. He was thinking about another round of plastic surgery for that reason—not that he needed it, or even could tolerate another reassembly of his tissue. There was so little original skin left to work with. But still, it would upset people like this ridiculous Mehdi with his goatee if he couldn’t be sure if he was looking at the same man, or someone pretending to be him, or someone altogether different.
The Crazy One summoned Mehdi to the Revolutionary Guard compound in the northeast sector of the city. He had an office there, which he had used years ago and then left empty, padlocked against intruders. He had hideaways like that across the city, his own network of safe houses.
Mehdi knocked on the door. A muffled voice inside commanded him to enter. The room was so dark it was impossible at first to see Al-Majnoun, hunched over his desk at the far end. The interrogator stepped forward, walking toward the play of shadows he thought must be the form of the man who had summoned him. As he got closer, Al-Majnoun lit a match, illuminating his head in a flickering half-light. His sunglasses were off, and the low light seemed to catch every scar on the Lebanese man’s face. Al-Majnoun touched the glowing match to the top of his pipe and sucked down on it hard. The smoke disappeared into his lungs.