City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

This is going to be fun, thought Bijan.
‘You have to burn your T-shirt right now, in front of us!’
‘Listen closely you pair of illiterate faggots.’ Bijan took a step towards the boys. ‘If you want to burn my T-shirt, first I suggest you go to the store at the end of this road and burn every single packet of USA-made Winston cigarettes in there. Then, when you’re done, I suggest you go to Karaj dam, which provides us all with electricity. And guess what? You’ll find Morrison of the USA made it, so you’ll have to burn that down too. Next, may I suggest a visit to the airport where you can burn the Boeings, the F-4s, the F-5s and the F-14s. Guess why? Oh yes, they’re from the US of A. Once you’ve burnt all of them, then you can come and pour gasoline right over my body and burn the T-shirt from off my FUCKING BACK!’ The boys were edging away. They knew a real thug when they saw one.
‘You’re crazy, he’s fucking crazy.’
‘Yeh, I’m fucking crazy. Next time I see you, I’ll rip your fucking testicles off,’ Bijan laughed as they turned on their heels.
He drove for another ten minutes through the wretched streets. He spotted his first lookout, who nodded. He could see the warehouse ahead, in the corner of a derelict plot of land the size of two football pitches. They had an excellent safety record and produced high-purity, good-quality meth. He only used a handful of people he knew and paid them well. He was proud of his operation. As he parked the car, another lookout walked towards him.
‘Sir, everything’s already been cleared. We got word this afternoon.’ The warehouse was spotless. The Kurd was always one step ahead. Bijan tipped the lookout and smiled as he got back into his car.
Tehran’s yellow lights were glimmering in the distance. He put in a CD of his favourite underground music, turned up the stereo and rapped along to a song by Hichkas:

This is Tehran

A city that tempts you till it saps your soul
And makes you see you were always meant to be Nothing more than dirt

As he entered the city, Kambiz rang and told him to drive to a road off Pirouzi Street, in the east of town. When Bijan arrived, Kambiz’s boys were waiting on a motorbike. One of them was an ex-soldier who also moonlighted doing night shifts as armed security for a crime syndicate that sold drugs under a motorway flyover in north Tehran. They would act as lookouts and protection as the dealers traded on a lay-by. It was a busy spot where two motorways converged, so there was a constant stream of customers; two o’clock in the morning was peak time.

When Kambiz’s boys saw Bijan, they walked up to a small, two-storey house and knocked on the front door. The dentist opened it. They dragged him onto the street and started beating him. They broke both the dentist’s arms and knocked out four of his teeth. Bijan watched from his car, all his nervous tension melting away. On his drive home, he called his wife and told her to stop cooking and leave the kids with his mother; tonight he was taking her for supper to Café Azeri on Vali Asr.
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