The Corporal's Wife (2013) (12 page)

‘How do I live, when you have finished with me?’

‘We’ll discuss that later, when I’m ready. When are the lorries checked?’

He subsided. He was alone. He took another cigarette. Any man who had seen Farideh spoke of her beauty. She had been his. He had brought her home. He had failed to interest or control her. He had failed to satisfy any part of her.

‘The lorries go into a sealed area at the top of the descent and are searched there. They are not searched again at the tunnel. The cargo then goes by forklift to where it is wanted.’

He had been told, in conversation with a secretary when he had waited in an outer office, that the main enrichment area was eighty-five metres below ground, protected by rock. It would be their tomb.

‘Mehrak, I understand, believe me, that this is difficult for you. You should understand what we’re offering you – financial security, a new life and identity, not just as a driver and corporal but as a man who is respected and trusted by his new friends. Do you believe there are other tunnels for entry and exit, and do you know of the ventilation holes?’

He thought of his wife and silence hung around him. The smoke had thickened, and the sun was low. It glowered over the frosted grass and spilled onto the table. He thought of what he had done to her, and took the blame for it. He couldn’t blame her.

Farideh had been told to sit. She was in the kitchen and the chair was hard. She should have been at work an hour ago. Kourosh was with them.

They had brought no woman to question her. Kourosh – who had once said he wanted nothing more than to sleep with her – didn’t speak. He had not been first through the door but had hung back when she had opened it and they’d barged in, flattening her against the wall. She was shown a card of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. She had been in her blouse and jeans. A man had told her to go to the bedroom and put on appropriate clothing. Her anger had been genuine.

What was their business? What right had they to come into her home? Did they not know her husband was an official of the al-Qods?

When they had started to search the apartment, to open drawers and tip out the contents, go through pockets in the wardrobe and and sift papers, what were they searching for?

No one answered her. It would have been the same when the men from MOIS had gone to Johnny’s mother’s home and rifled though his possessions, finding sufficient evidence to pass a sentence of death. She could see, through the open door, that Kourosh was in her bedroom, the bed unmade, and would have seen the indent at the side, where she had lain, naked except for the fine cotton nightdress that had been a present from Mehrak’s mother. He was on the far side of the bed from hers, going through her husband’s pockets, shelves and drawers, sifting among his clothing. She didn’t know if he had betrayed her. A false move, and she could kill him; a mistake from him would kill her. Neither showed recognition of the other.

Later, the questions.

‘Where is your husband?’ She didn’t know.

‘Don’t lie. You know where he is.’ She snarled back that she hadn’t lied, she didn’t know: they should ask the brigadier where her husband was.

‘Has he run away?’ That was ridiculous, she said, but the idea shook her.

‘When was your last call from him?’ She said he hadn’t called her since he had left their home four days ago.

‘He didn’t ring you from the airport, or Dubai?’ She hadn’t known he’d gone abroad. What was he doing in Dubai? They didn’t tell her.

‘When were you expecting him back?’ She snapped that she didn’t question her husband on work matters.

‘Where’s your phone?’ She pointed to it on the low table by the door and tried to assume an air of innocence. The man in front of her slapped her face. She had been – until the first of the
basij
had beaten her – a loyal, unquestioning supporter of the regime. She had assumed – until Johnny was taken to the gallows – that only the guilty and enemies of the Islamic Republic were targets of MOIS agents. Her face stung. Beyond the man, Kourosh looked at the ceiling. Would he give his life, as Johnny had, to protect her? Would she give her life to— Her handbag was emptied over the table. Her purse, cosmetics, hairbrush, ID, smart card to get into the office and the notebook in which she wrote her shopping lists cascaded out.

They opened her phone, removed the SIM card, dropped it back on the table.

‘Where’s my husband?’

It was four years and a few weeks since the
basij
had beaten her, and since she had let him made love to her. She pictured him – sallow, a little overweight, jowls, pockmarks and uneven teeth. There was a scar on his forehead that she knew was from the shrapnel of an Israeli bomb, and blisters on his ears from the desert heat of eastern Iraq.

‘We think he has fled Iran and gone to a foreign power. We think he’s betrayed us. We have an arm that will reach to wherever he is. If you had knowledge of this and failed to denounce him, if you thought that soon you would leave Iran to join him, then you were deluded. There is no mercy for those who wage war against God, for traitors.’

Another asked, ‘Do you have a passport? We haven’t found one.’

The laugh was brittle and laced with contempt. ‘I’m the wife of a corporal, I work on a reception desk. Why would I need passport? Where would I go? Paris, Rome?’

She was hit again. The other cheek. This blow was harder: her lip split and she was flung to the floor.

Kourosh was the last to leave. He hadn’t looked at her.

‘I want my wife.’

The man, PK, seemed not to hear. The question was put again: ‘What time would the principals arrive at the tunnel entrance?’

‘I want to be with my wife.’

‘What time in the morning do the buses drop the principals, and what time in the evening are they picked up?’

‘If I cannot have my wife, I will go back.’

‘Are you tired? You’re talking shit. We’re all tired – “I will go back,” ’ he mimicked Mehrak’s slow English. He seemed to freeze, cold face and cold eyes. Mehrak, for fuck’s sake, you were in a whorehouse. Can we move on?’

‘I want to be with my wife.’

‘You’ve said that. What time?’ The man, PK, had in front of him a large pad and his questions were scrawled across the pages, then ticked when Mehrak answered them.

‘They arrive at seven in the morning and leave at six in the evening. I want my wife. If I am with my wife I will tell you where on the road they are best ambushed, where mines could be put, what is the car that is used by the director and by the director’s deputy. I will tell you the list of the targets that al-Qods has drawn up if the Zionists attack our facilities, where, abroad, we will strike. I will tell you what I know of the responses if an attack is made, air or ground troops, as I have heard them in the car . . . There has been talk in the car of reports from agents who are in Berlin and Washington, and in Tel Aviv, and where they have access and what they learn . . . I want my wife.’

A pen was thrown down, and the notepad pushed away. He thought the man, PK, tried for self-control, then abandoned it.

‘Mehrak. Listen. Not many men who love their wife go to whorehouses. The two, on a set of scales, don’t balance.’

‘The oil installations at Dhahran, in the Kingdom, will be bombed. The Israeli embassy in Mexico City, the British military installations in Gibraltar, the Sixth Fleet that is in southern Italy and where the reprisal would come by submarine and frogmen . . . You want more, PK? I want my wife.’

Were they listening to him? Yes. The session broke.

‘I don’t know what he’s done, the fool.’

What Farideh, the corporal’s wife, knew of surveillance she had learned from Johnny. She had learned more from the Captain. She took two bus rides, each time boarding and stepping off late, then walked through a defile in the bazaar, near her father’s linen stall, and went where a vehicle couldn’t follow. She had been on a wide street, doing windows and reflections. In central Tehran, the cold hung in the air with the risk of sleet in the evening. She had been to work.

There she had faced clients of the insurance company. Her colleagues and superiors, the motorists coming for cover, would have seen the marks on her face, where the skin had reddened, and the small cut on her lower lip that was oozing. She had made no attempt to hide the marks or to explain them. They might have thought her husband had hit her again. No one would have believed that the wife of a junior official in the al-Qods unit had been hit by men from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security – and no one would have believed that the young woman, an example of loyalty, duty and humility, had been accused of complicity in the flight of her husband to the agencies of a hostile power. It had been suggested she might go home. Was she tired? They were curious, she could see, and nervous, but none wished involvement. She had said she would go home, had left by the back entrance and started the anti-surveillance procedures that two lovers had shown her.

‘He’s a creature of the regime but they say he has run to an enemy. It’s impossible.’ She was in the garage. She told Excellency and Highness what little she knew and what had been done to her. ‘He drives a car, is stupid, a thug. What could he know that an enemy would want to hear?’

They kept at their work, never looked at her. A carburettor had been stripped and spread across a bench, and a Vespa scooter had been cannibalised so that another could survive. They neither stopped nor interrupted her. They had never said that it would have been better if she had never come, if Johnny had never seen her. It was four years since Johnny, whom they had known since he was a child, had brought her here for the first time. She had been bleeding, bruised, in shock, and he had taken her up the narrow stairs into the room over the workshop. The bruises had barely gone before it was over, and she had waited each day – as they had – for the agents of the MOIS to come for them. Johnny was dead.

Two years had passed when she had drunk tea with them and gone back to the marriage that shackled her. Then she had brought the Captain here: handsome, carefree, fearing nothing. The old men had never criticised her for bringing him to the yard and exposing them. Johnny had lasted four weeks and the Captain had been with her for five, then had gone. He had died in faraway Afghanistan, working as an expert in ordnance. He had been mentoring on the laying of bombs. An officer who had been with him, working in uneasy alliance with Taliban fighters, had said he had not been himself on that mission. He had been ‘distracted and his mind was elsewhere’. A Canadian sniper had killed him at 1100 metres: he had allowed himself to be fully visible and hadn’t first scanned the ridge on the far side of the riverbed.

His mother had told Excellency what had happened when he had gone to her with the story of having a scooter for her son to buy. She had confided to him that a photograph had been returned with her son’s personal possessions – a woman’s head, all but her eyes hidden. Farideh believed the Captain’s infatuation with her had killed him: they had made love in the room above the workshop – it had been noisier, faster and more brutal than it had been with Johnny.

They started to reassemble the carburettor.

‘He’s a fool – it can’t be true.’

Highness said, ‘But he has ears and is close to the seat of power, as we both were. He’d be a great catch for the Americans, the Jews or the British – to any of the revolution’s enemies. Don’t dismiss him.’

Excellency said, ‘We must be vigilant. Take great care.’

She left them, didn’t know where to turn – and headed for her home.

‘ “Everything you want, or nothing.” Is that a direct quote?’

‘That was exactly what he said. I asked how he would show his gratitude.’

‘What did you get?’

‘He talked about the accounts and scams of two other brigadiers, one from al-Qods and one from the general IRGC. Our boy was driving and Joyberi had an investigator, corruption business, in the back with him. It’s drugs. The conversation was four months ago and our boy may not be the sharpest knife in the box but has a good memory. He spilled values, bulk of shipments and the dates they went through. He’s revelling in it, thinks we’re on the back foot.’

‘Are we?’

‘We are – because it’s a hell of an ask. But if we turn him down, what’ll he do? Go back? It’d be a gamble. He’d have to rely on friends in high places. He’s a fighting man.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘He’s been in Afghanistan, south Lebanon and Iraq. Two fire fights. We caught him at a moment of maximum personal crisis, but he’s starting to manage the difficulty. Stubborn enough? Probably. Oh, and he says . . .’

‘Yes, Petroc?’

‘Yesterday afternoon he should have been at Tehran Central railway station to pick up his man. The brigadier would have been left high and dry, not best pleased. Very soon, if not already, the security apparatus will come up with the right answer and put a ball and chain on her ankle, know what I mean?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Tadeuz, I’m passing you the parcel. You have to make fast decisions and—’

‘Don’t state the obvious, Petroc. I’ll be back.’

In the secure room at the embassy, Petroc Kenning cut the link. He had used the facility to transmit in ‘burst’ form the principal sections of the audio. The analysts needed it, evaluation would follow, something for them to worry at in terrier mode. The Vienna station chief had sat outside the room, with its lead-lined walls and no window: his world was to do with meetings at the International Atomic Energy Authority and shadowing Tehran’s people, looking for weakness, sexual, financial or ideological, and interpret the language of Iran’s prime negotiator. Petroc didn’t know him but had begged use of the facility. He was sweating when he came out, and didn’t dare to hope. He thanked the station chief and was led out and up the stairs. Sidney was parked behind the closed gates in the backyard of the embassy compound.