Tomy and the Planet of Lies (24 page)

Toward the end of the party, I suddenly felt a gentle wave roll through my consciousness, almost as if a radio station had gotten mixed up with my thoughts. And then came a telepathic giggle.

“Yes, that's about right!”

Despite all my experiences with Tomy, I began laughing loudly from relief. Especially as he had arrived just as the carol “From heaven on high, I come to you” was playing.

“Indeed, Tomy! Your arrival is just like a visit from an angel coming down from heaven!”

“Happy Christmas!” he replied. “Can you spare me a moment or two?”

I quickly told everyone about Tomy's arrival. The adults already knew about him, and only the children asked curiously who Tomy was. I explained that he was my best friend, and I certainly didn't feel that that was a lie. I strolled upstairs in a leisurely fashion, grinning constantly, and lay down on my bed. The answers that Tomy gave me now didn't come via my thoughts. In some wonderful way I saw, felt, and heard everything he had to tell me.

The first series of images Tomy showed me featured the commandant of the Taftan barracks. As Tomy softly slipped into his consciousness, he was reading a newspaper. He was sitting at a desk in a large room in his parent's house. In civilian clothing. He was not surprised by Tomy's visit—he had been expecting him.

“I knew you would come,” he murmured out loud. “I've been expecting you since I got home. I'm no longer in the army, you know. I'm a civilian now. You'll be wanting to know why I shot Chantal. Well, it was because she killed my beloved son. In a cruel and agonizing manner.” A surge of bitterness flowed through his consciousness.

That made everything more complicated. Up till now I hadn't known anything about a son. He hadn't appeared over the last few months. And Chantal was supposed to have killed this lad in an agonizing way?

Gently, as if he didn't want to overload my brain, Tomy played back the events before my mind's eye.

The commandant had only had one son, Chalid, and two daughters. I could see the lad as if he was standing before me. He was tall and slim with soft hands and fingers that could have belonged to a pianist. Raven-black hair and the beginning of a beard framed his tanned face. His carefree laughter revealed ivory-white teeth. And then Chantal entered the picture. She didn't look much different than the way she had when we had known her, and she used her striking looks and her irresistible feminine charms to worm her way into Chalid's affections. He didn't stand a chance. The commandant—I'll stick with this appellation now—did not approve of the liaison between his son and Chantal. True, he did not begrudge his son this amorous adventure, such a thing is a matter of course in the Arab world, but the age difference between the two worried him.

He would have preferred to see Chalid matched with a girl from a good Iranian family. The commandant had always imagined that his son would start a career in the civil service and enter politics, but instead the lad decided to study medicine. He had already completed one and half semesters at the university in Teheran. Chantal somehow managed to convince the commandant's family that Chalid would be better off in Paris, where the possibilities for specialist training were much better than in Iran. Chalid transferred to Paris and moved into an apartment with Chantal. This was the summer of 1986.

In the following months Chalid visited Iran several times; every time looking more worn down and unhealthy. The doctors in Iran diagnosed leukemia, but the less aggressive form that could be kept in check with medication. Chalid set his hopes on scientific research someday finding a drug that would cure him completely. During one short visit to Teheran Chalid confessed to his sister that Chantal was cheating on him. She was rarely in their shared apartment; he had even hired a private eye to follow her. She had turned into a regular whore who had nothing but sex in mind, and she was abusing him terribly. They had had fierce rows, but nothing had changed.

Only two weeks before Marc, Tomy, and I had turned up in the barracks where the commandant was stationed, Chalid had died in a Teheran hospital. The family was suffering terribly; their grief was unbearable. That was the reason he had been wearing the black armband.

The commandant, who had been talking out loud the whole time even though Tomy would have understood him anyway, laid his arms on the desk. Images of the meal we had taken together in the Sahedan Inn hotel in Zahedan appeared—I remembered the smoked salmon and “Omar Sharif.” After this meal Chantal had handed over a letter that contained financial demands. She bemoaned her fate since Chalid's death, both in terms of her heartbreak and how he had left her without a penny. A few days later his eldest daughter had told him the truth about Chantal's infidelity, her sexual appetite, her whoring around and how she had humiliated Chalid. These revelations and Chantal's demands for money had raised his suspicions. He had contacted an old friend in the secret service and had arranged to have Chalid's body exhumed.

“Do you know why my beloved son Chalid got leukemia?” he asked in a loud and furious voice and then said to Tomy in his thoughts, “Yes, my friend Tomy, you know. This disgusting woman poisoned my son with some kind of radioactive material. She must have been doing it for months while Chalid was wasting away in agony. He suffered so terribly, and all the time she was treating him like dirt. She deserved a slow and painful death, but I shot her!”

The commandant laid his head in his hands and wept. A brigadier general, who had probably killed many people in his early career, and now a broken man.

Tomy followed the traces of his memory, wanting to know why the commandant was there at the
Villa Serdang
at precisely the moment that Chantal had carried out her murderous deed. The commandant stood up and paced around the room.

He spoke loudly, as if he were talking to someone in the room with him.

“It is good indeed, my friend—for I see you as a friend, because you are not of this terrible world—to be able to talk to you,” he said. “You know that I myself was an active agent in SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. It was not a happy time. We did much that I am not proud of, and I have regretted my deeds ever since. If there is forgiveness in another world, then I ask Allah to forgive me. May he have mercy on my soul. My family helped many of the victims from back then. They didn't even know where the help came from.

I was a high-ranking officer in SAVAK; my family was one of the wealthiest in the land; my grandfather had an oil well on his own land. After the regime changed I ran a training camp here in Teheran; later they packed me off to Taftan. But I kept some of my old contacts intact. Without these contacts I would never have been able to exhume Chalid—Allah have mercy on him. It was comrades from back then who identified the radiation damage in his bones.”

Still lying on my bed, I slowly began to see connections, the existence of which I had never even suspected before.

Everything that the commandant spoke out loud, I experienced through Tomy's consciousness in sound, picture, and all the senses. I felt the touch of a breeze, smelled—without a nose and without being there—the stale aroma of old cigars. I saw, if you could call it seeing, the commandant as a secret service man, as a colonel in the training camp, felt his pain as much as his need for reparation and redemption. I experienced his bitterness, about himself and the world. Whenever the commandant opened a window, walked around the room, sat down or anything else, Tomy was with him. And so was I, so I felt. He talked to Tomy's consciousness as though he were talking to someone in the room, sitting opposite him.

“You want to know the details? I will tell you everything! Tomy, I would be so grateful if you could take me with you when you return to your world. Yes, I understand that it's not possible. But could you put in a good word for me? Is forgiveness possible?”

I could feel Tomy's answers. He soothed the commandant, showed him glimpses of his home world, and explained the divinity of creation, the “great spirit of creation.”

“So, there will be forgiveness, if I want it and make good my errors. That helps me a lot, thank you.”

He paused a moment, and then continued:

“I found out from my friends, one of whom—you can see him in my mind—is the head of the secret police, about the plans to eliminate you. You, my dear friend, were ranked as the single most dangerous being alive. You were to be removed from this world, radically and for good. And your friends, too, although they weren't considered quite so dangerous, of course. They tried to arrange to have you all killed in an accident on Mount Nemrut in Turkey. There was a great deal of anxiety when you all emerged unscathed. Somebody suggested using a fast-working poison gas to do the job, but the attendant circumstances for innocent bystanders were too unpredictable.

The physicist—a top man in the service—pointed out to the committee that it was impossible to just kill you because your consciousness would simply spring to another body. They had seen that demonstrated clearly enough in Teheran. Tomy, you know that I am telling the truth—no, think!—I was against it. But as a nonmember of the service, my influence was limited. The conversations I had with my ex- colleagues didn't take place on government property, but in a coffee house. That was where I found out about their perfidious plans to put you out of action. The physicist recommended a massive electric current that would have to be applied—so he believed—to your body at lightning speed and with the element of surprise. Your consciousness would be shocked, taken by surprise and you would not have time to leave your body. Allah be praised that you survived the attack!” He was silent for a moment and then: “Did you suffer?”

“No,” Tomy's consciousness answered kindly. “I was surprised for a second by Chantal's grim expression. She stood there on the doorstep baring her teeth like a dog. I wanted to speak to her, but I never had a chance. She must have hit me with around 50,000 volts. I didn't feel any pain, and my first priority was to try and stabilize the heartbeat in my body. I caught a glance of your Cadillac, commander, but didn't hear the shot that you fired. I saw how Chantal's mouth fell open in shock; how she didn't understand what was happening to her; how her eyes rolled up and she fell to one side. The last thing I saw with Tomy's eyes was a second man who was helping you to drag Chantal's body to the open trunk of the car. Then I sprang into Erich.”

“Ah yes, the writer.” The commandant conjured up a tired smile: “How is he? Say hello to him from me and tell him it'll soon all be over.”

Again Tomy had to calm the commandant's troubled thoughts. He regained a measure of control and managed to light up a fresh cigar.

“How did you know exactly when Chantal was planning to attack?” asked Tomy.

The commandant seemed relieved. The strange exchange of thoughts between his consciousness and Tomy's “intelligent energy,” but also the understanding that Tomy signalized and the generosity, with which he accepted the commandant's confession, soothed his nerves greatly.

“During my time with SAVAK, I never heard anything about electroshock weapons. They weren't around then. My friend, the head of the secret police, told me all about them one afternoon in the coffee house, and all about the planned assassination on that Sunday evening in Switzerland. Chantal was given the shocker in Paris. Please, no—you know it, my alien friend—not this tramp, of all people. Not the whore who killed my beloved son in such an insidious manner.
She
was to kill you. I was
against
your murder, Tomy!”

The commandant managed a liberating laugh: “It was only a few days after I had found out for sure about the true causes of Chalid's death. And now, the order for your elimination, Tomy. It was simply too much. My plan was to get to your friend Erich's villa
before
Chantal arrived. I even called on the phone, to warn you. But nobody answered the phone. As I saw the whore standing in the doorway in front of your body, I was hoping against hope that she hadn't discharged the weapon yet. I cried out, as loud as I could ‘Desist immediately!' but even from behind I could see her right arm crooked and I shot her immediately in the back. Allah knows that is not my way. But I had to react with lightning speed, Tomy. I wanted to save you. If Chantal hadn't had the electro-shocker in her hand and aimed at your body, we could have overpowered her and taken her back to Iran to face the courts.”

He wiped his sweating brow with an oversized handkerchief, puffed on his cigar and asked, prepared deep down to reveal even his most intimate of secrets, if there was anything else Tomy still wanted to know.

“What happened to Chantal's body?” Tomy asked.

We drove her in the Cadillac to a farm in the Jura Mountains. The Swiss friend of mine has a farm there. We hacked the body into tiny pieces and threw the whole lot—clothes and all—into a large vat of hydrochloric acid. There wasn't a trace left.”

Still lying on my bed in the Villa Serdang, I let out a large sigh. Tomy's revelations filled me with increasing astonishment. There wasn't the slightest doubt that the commandant was telling the truth: Tomy had experienced everything via his consciousness—and I had the privilege of being present in Tomy's incredible vibrations. As I looked up, I saw Elisabeth gazing down at me from the foot end of the bed. I could hear the laughing of children from down below. Just like the first time in Ankara, this “journey” had only taken a few seconds. Elisabeth must have followed me up here the moment I left the table.

“What's the news?” she asked.

“I know the basics,” I answered, still a little bewildered. “It's an unbelievable story! There are still a few things I'd like to find out though …”

“…Greetings Elisabeth …” Tomy broke in using my voice. “ Allow me just a few more minutes with your wonderful husband; he'll be back down at the party in a short while.”