The Corporal's Wife (2013) (25 page)

Was the defector worth the effort? He couldn’t say.

‘We’re very worried. Other than in the depths of winter, when they’re in a hole or a cave, in a state of semi-hibernation, we have sight of all our principals. It’s the longest Stephie and I have gone without spotting him. He’s such a fine beast, a symbol of all the hard work put in by so many people at the park, but he has enemies – livestock farmers, honey producers . . . Sorry, Petroc – I’m a bit tired, been up since first light. I’m sure your anxieties aren’t focused on the absence of a brown bear.’

The voice was quiet and Petroc Kenning needed to press the phone to his ear to distinguish Rollo Hawkins’s words. He sensed that he had intruded upon the one-time intelligence officer’s private world. Petroc had never seen a bear outside a zoo.

‘You tell me that the wife is on the move. We have to sit quietly, perhaps offer something akin to a prayer. You had little time to plan. Difficult . . . If you achieve the extraction –
if
– you stand a chance of the two settling as a couple. A small chance. Very few do. This man, from the background you provided, has a small chance. I would suggest that by now he’s suffering from doubt and self-recrimination. He’s a little flattered by your attention but it’s already diminishing. His self-respect will slide, and cannot be replaced. I’m getting there, Petroc . . . Work him hard. He’s not a high-ranking intelligence official from the old Soviet Union or the new Kremlin, a man who can offer insights on policy, give lectures at the Fort, address small, closed meetings.

‘Extract what you can from him, then wave him goodbye. He’ll be dumped in some European city with his wife on his arm, suitcases at their feet, and will ride in a taxi to a life where regret is piled on the mantelpiece. He won’t settle. Who’s he going to befriend? He’s a driver. Life as a driver is tolerable while he ferries a big man around. Does he want to run a kebab stall?

‘Am I rambling, Petroc? Not for me to teach you, dear boy, about egg-sucking, but as valuable as talk about sentry duties on missile silos, and the layout of al-Qods in some grubby town in the Bekaa valley, is the damage you can exploit in their ranks. For Heaven’s sake, a brigadier is using his handyman to run messages to a foreign bank where he has an illegal account. That’ll play on every radio station in the Gulf, is great propaganda in the psyops world. He’s just another zealot on the make when the prices of utilities, petrol, staple food and rents are knocking holes in the roof.

‘In Saudi and all down the Gulf the lappet-faced vulture strips a camel carcass to the bone. That’s what you’ll be able to do with your Brigadier Reza Joyberi. You can reduce him to a hate figure in the bazaar and a laughing-stock in north Tehran. He’ll be vilified inside his own circle for turning a spotlight on their activities.

‘Excellent. I’m going to have a lie-down now because Stephie and I, and some others, are going back to our viewing-points later for the dusk routine. Milk your man now. Keep him cheerful. Deflect his mind from contemplation of the fact that he’s a treacherous little weasel, and only in his predicament because he went into a whorehouse. Good to speak, Petroc, thank you for calling.’

He rang off.

Petroc went back into the sitting room, and sat down opposite Mehrak. The man gazed back at him. Petroc couldn’t read him, doubted he ever would.

Briskly: ‘Now we’re going to talk, Mehrak, about your brigadier’s corruption and that of all the other hoods stealing from their people.’

Short of Qazvin, Zach pulled off the road and took a side trail, which wound away from the highway towards the mountains, not that he could see them.

Fog had come down as the rain had lessened. He’d said, ‘Sorry and all that, guys, but I can’t go on any longer.’ The fog had been as hard to drive through as the rain and he’d had enough. ‘Apologies, but I’m half dead.’ Mikey had told him to pull off, and that they were ready for the switch-over. None of them had said he’d done well, had earned his corn and might want to pass on the driving. What had sustained him for the last thirty minutes had been the signs on Route 2 that warned of the approach to Qazvin. He had been there, taken a bus five years ago. Every tourist, student and back-packer, with an ounce of self-esteem, made the trip to the town, joined a tour that drove up the hills towards the fortress. He’d climbed the last stretches on foot, stood at the summit and gloried in the view and the clutch of history. The fortress had been built a millennium ago by Hassan Sabah, Grand Master, as a bolt-hole for his sect. Somewhere, in his parents’ home, there would be the album of the photographs he had taken that day. The sect of Hassan Sabah was the Assassins, the
hashishiyun
, because the old man had taken the young to beautiful gardens on the slopes below the walls, shown them women in provocative dress, then dosed them on hashish. He had told them the women would wait for them, then sent them out across the region. They killed and were sacrificed. They died believing the women would make a paradise for them.

Each time Zach had read of a suicide bomber – Haifa, Jerusalem, Kandahar, Kabul, Baghdad or Basra – or the anniversary of the London Underground bombing had come round he had been taken back to that fortress, ruined by the last earthquake. It had been captured in the thirteenth century by the Mongol king, Hulegu, and the defenders massacred. During the last part of the drive, the memory of the castle had sustained him.

He had seen nothing. The cloud’s ceiling was barely higher than the sides of the lorries that surged past, burying his windscreen under avalanches of water.

He climbed out. He heard coughing behind him, a reminder that others were waiting for him. He couldn’t see the high ground, but it took a four-wheel-drive vehicle more than three hours to get to the base of the scramble path that led to the fortress. It was said that the Grand Master had such control of his sect that, to impress a visitor, he had ordered a half-dozen of his men to walk one at a time towards the precipice on the south side of the fortress. They had not demurred and had fallen to their death.

He turned back to the van. Ralph was in the driving seat, Mikey beside him.

It was as if the decks had been cleared and he was of no more use.

The men of his sect were strangers. He didn’t know them. He had been told they were a team, that a team was as strong as its weakest link, and that link should not be him. Now he was told to hurry up. He thought he had no more status now than a piece of baggage. Exhaustion swept over him. Zach went to the back door and Wally opened it. He crawled in, found a place between Wally and Farideh, away from the paint pots and the collapsible ladder, and lay on his side. The weapons were armed, the engine purred, and they shook on the rough ground. In low voices Ralph and Mikey talked about the route, and how far they’d go that night.

In the cold Zach felt the warmth of the woman. They hit the road, and the light was dying.

The office stirred. The last coffee dregs were drained, the last of the salad wraps eaten, and men checked their gear around him. It was nearly time.

He had sat in the open area, at his desk, all afternoon and had not spoken to any colleagues. They could have talked work, or of Esteghlal’s chances in the next home game against Persepolis, or of a new TV channel for movies. Usually Kourosh made himself part of the groups that formed when the teams waited to get their kit, hear the last briefing and get ready to move out. He liked it best when the talk was of the Zionists’ agent they were to lift, when there was a whiff of excitement: nothing better than seeing the door of an apartment cave in under the sledgehammer and drag a man from his meal, his bed or his family, slap his face, fasten the handcuffs and take him, dazed, to the car. Good also when they argued football and tempers exploded. Half of the electrical appliances in the flat he shared with his wife and child had been bought, at shaven prices, from those who knew which warehouse and which back-street lock-up to visit. Some – not himself – bought alcohol that had come into the country from Turkey or Armenia. Often the room was filled with cigarette smoke and the men played card games –
hokm, ghahveh
or
pasur
. All afternoon the room had been alive with talk but Kourosh hadn’t contributed.

His desk faced the door into the corridor, which had stayed open.

Across the corridor, between portrait photographs of two more recent martyrs, was the door to the commander’s office. He had known when his commander was in a meeting, when the room was empty, when the man was bent over his papers or talking on the telephone.

He could have slipped away from his desk – with the chat around him, no one would have noticed. He could have gone to the door across the corridor and knocked quietly. There would have been a shout for him to enter. He could have gone in and closed the door behind him.

He could have said there was a matter he wished to report. He could have denounced the wife of the corporal in the al-Qods and those with her. He could have finished, ‘The British are taking her from Iran. They will go via Qazvin and Zanjan, Mianeh and Tabriz. They will meet a smuggling party near the border with Turkey, beyond Khvoy, and skirt the frontier town of Maku. I don’t know how many Britons are involved. Their mission is to reunite her with her husband, a defector and . . .’

The commander’s face would have contorted in confusion, suspicion and elation.

He hadn’t moved from his seat. He had stayed, smoked, read his screen and ignored the banter around him. He had refused to make a fourth with the cards. Kourosh couldn’t argue successfully against his dilemma.

If he denounced
her
, he denounced
himself
. How did he know of the repair yard? How did he know of the woman? How to answer? He didn’t know.

A section leader whistled through his teeth. The cards went into one drawer, the electronics brochures into another. Men took down raincoats, cursed the weather, checked firearms, handcuffs and their keys. The radios squawked static. Eight filed out. The commander had come to his door and slapped the leader’s arm. They were to take one woman. He opened his wallet. One of them had been in the apartment on Rafah Street that morning, had told the story of the dropped blanket, the brigadier’s reaction. The story was entertaining, but Kourosh hadn’t laughed.

He gazed at a picture hidden behind his laminated ID card, then pushed it out of sight again. Only the eyes were visible in the picture, which had been taken in a booth at a railway or metro station.

They filed out. He had to go. Kourosh worked as a servant to a society where suspicion killed. He must not arouse it.

A crowd had gathered. Those from other blocks in Rafah Street lined the far pavement. The cars blocked the street, and now a uniformed policeman had arrived at the top junction, diverting traffic. Arguments erupted. The pavement crowd could see inside the first floor because the curtains had not been drawn and there were high street-lights. Jamali, who repaired electrical goods and lived above his business, had perched his thirteen-year-old son on his shoulders. The child gave a commentary that his father relayed.

‘Every drawer is taken out. They’re angry because they haven’t found her. Everything’s thrown on the floor, I tell you,
everything
– even intimate clothing. They should have done it this morning. She was there then, and there was a senior man, but they didn’t. Now they can’t find her. They could have asked me – I’d have told them. They broke the door down. There are pictures, Shia, special, and they’re all off the walls and they’re stripping the backs off – and they’re cutting the cushions open. They don’t do this for someone who’s taken tomatoes from the bazaar and not paid. She’s in trouble. I never liked them – she’s a stuck-up bitch, and he’s arrogant because he drives a big man’s car. This number of men, and the anger, it’s for a hanging.’

No resident of Rafah Street raised a voice in support of the corporal and his wife.

Abruptly, the man who mended electrical appliances was outgunned. A couple lived in isolation on the third floor of the building, because of disability: she had tuberculosis and he had a war wound. Ali had made it his business to take them the bare essentials of food. He had been with them, two floors above, when the security men had swarmed up the stairs. Moments after they had broken down the door he had come down to that landing and hovered. He had not been moved on, so now he could report.

‘It must be a charge of treason, or
moharebeh
. So many of them, and they’re destroying the place. Everything’s broken, the furniture, plates, cooking things, pictures, and they have floorboards up. They keep sending the message back on their radios that they’ve found nothing, but they’re told to look again. She was there this morning, and a big man came. After that she went. It’s days since I last saw
him
with the big car. They say she’s taken nothing – left money and her outdoor clothes. They say she’s fled. I wouldn’t help anyone, man or woman, guilty of war against God or treason . . . There was a van this morning that went slowly on Rafah Street. I saw it. It went too slowly, as if a stranger drove it. It was a builders’ van, but I didn’t recognise the driver or the man beside him. It was the first time I’d seen it in our street.’

Jamali shouted, ‘I saw it too! Blue, rusty, string holding the back door shut.’

‘Do as I did, brother. Tell them what you saw.’