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“I’ll keep you posted about him, Mr. Bahari. We know that he’s part of your vast network. He seems to have a lot to say about you.” He tapped my chair with his fingers. “So tell us about the dinner at Nazila Fathi’s house on the twenty-eighth of April.”

The pen shook in my hand. For the first time, he was asking me about something that had actually happened. He was referring to a dinner I’d attended with eight other journalists and photographers at my friend Nazila’s house in Tehran several weeks before the election.

It had just been a friendly get-together, and it surprised me that Rosewater knew about it. Nazila had been the Tehran correspondent for The New York Times for years. She and her husband, Babak, had told me that they thought that their house was under surveillance but that they didn’t know which branch of the government was staking them out.

“It was just a dinner. It wasn’t anything special,” I said as dismissively as I could.

“Who were the other guests?” he asked.

I told him the names of each of the guests except for two. One was a Spanish journalist whose presence there I had genuinely forgotten. The other was my Newsweek colleague Babak Dehghanpisheh. I didn’t mention Babak’s name in order to test Rosewater—I wanted to see if he knew as much as he claimed to. I was also worried about Babak and wanted to know whether they had arrested him.

“And?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I answered.

“This is a very dangerous game you’re playing, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater murmured into my ear. “Very dangerous.” He paused and then put a piece of paper in front of me. “You forgot your dear friend Babak Dehghanpisheh and a mysterious foreign woman.”

So he knew everything. “Yes, I forgot to mention Babak. Of course he was there. And I totally forgot the Spanish journalist. I can’t remember her name.”

“Is that so?” he said. “You are part of a very American network, Mr. Bahari. Let me correct myself: you are in charge of a secret American network, a group that includes those who came to that dinner party.”

“It was just a dinner.”

“It was not a dinner! It was a mahfel!” This word, which means “cabal,” suggested that I was part of a group of seditious reformists and journalists conspiring against the Islamic Republic. “A very American dinner,” he went on. “A very American mahfel. It could have happened in … New Jersey.”

The strangeness of the accusation was unsettling. New Jersey?

“You’ve been to New Jersey, haven’t you, Mr. Bahari?” The thought seemed to infuriate him.

The worst thing that can happen in any encounter with Islamic Republic officials is for them to think that you’re looking down on them, so I was careful to control my tone. “Well, yes, sir. New Jersey’s not a particularly nice place,” I said, trying to sound conversational.

“I don’t care if it’s nice. All I know is that it is a godless place, like the one you were trying to create in this country. With naked women and Michael Jackson music!” He paused. “Your own New Jersey in Tehran.”

His questions were having a weakening effect. I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I tried to muster the strength to answer him. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“You were planning to eradicate the pure religion of Mohammad in this country and replace it with ‘American’ Islam. A New Jersey Islam. Tell me,” he said, “did any of the women at the dinner party have their veils on?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me that you didn’t have a secret American network. A New Jersey network.”

The absurdity of his fascination with the Garden State almost made me laugh. But the fact that my life was in his hands horrified me. Where is Paola? I thought. She is the master of divining theories about people’s behavior. How would she define this Islamic Republic torturer’s fascination with the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and Bon Jovi?

“I have news for you, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater went on, his voice calmer now. “We will never let people like you change our country, to make it like New Jersey. I wish your American masters could hear me