The Corporal's Wife (2013) (31 page)

A triumph.

The van seemed to accelerate and his hold on her loosened.

One hand off the wheel, Ralph did high fives with Mikey, then Wally.

‘Fucking good, Ralph. Quality.’

‘It was kids there – couldn’t cope.’

‘Just amateurs. Great driving, Ralph.’

‘Let’s burn it.’

Lights on, the way ahead shown up. Wally was giggling and Ralph chuckled. There was even a small smile on Mikey’s face.

The shout – the change.

‘For fuck’s sake, what’s the idiot—?’

Zach saw it. It would be played out in front of him – six or seven seconds of it, a life span. He had a good view through the gap between the seats now that Wally had eased to his left, and the headlights were on full beam.

He was a policeman or a
basij
. Difficult to tell because he wore a black anorak over his shoulders and chest. The giveaway would have been the trousers – blue for police, khaki for the paramilitary – but they were round his ankles. There was another behind him, but in shadow. The kid staggered onto the road but his trousers impeded him. He had a rifle. Zach didn’t know much about weapons but recognised the shape. It was the Russian one, what the Palestinians had. It featured on all the ‘resistance’ posters against the imperialism of America and Britain. People called it an ‘iconic’ image. He had whitish legs in the headlights, spindly, fragile.

The headlights centred on his privates, and Zach heard Ralph gulp. A ditch to the right, and another to the left.

The kid couldn’t see through the headlights. He was struggling to pull back the cocking lever – and had it. He lifted the thing – a Kalashnikov, so recognisable. He would shoot, Zach thought, into the heart of the light that was fifty metres from him, forty, thirty. A kid who wanted to be a hero, who had sloped off from the others to drop his trousers, hadn’t kept his head down. He’d come out on the road and confronted them. Ralph couldn’t spin the wheel, pass him.

The van hit him. It picked him up, threw him high, and the rifle spiralled out of his hand. It landed on the bonnet, fracturing the windscreen. The body hit the roof, bounced and made an echo inside, as if a rock had fallen on the metal. He didn’t shout, scream or cry out – his eyes had been glazed from the moment of impact. There was a thud below – like a sandbag on a site had been dropped from scaffolding and hit concrete. Zach saw what was in front.

The kid had screwed them. He had probably never fired his weapon except on a range but he had wrecked them.

That was why the kid was there – he’d gone a hundred paces from the block to watch the Stinger. It was like a big-link chain with sharpened nails sticking up. They’d catch a tyre’s treads every time. There was no escape from it. It was silvery chrome, shiny and bright in the lights, and was across the road. The kid would have been there to retrieve it when the two armoured cars came up: the cavalry on the rescue mission.

A chance, Zach reckoned, that Ralph might have been able to manoeuvre round it if he’d been able to go slowly and nudge the edge of the ditch, or stop for Mikey to get out and move it. But the kid hadn’t been alone.

Maybe the sergeant had thought him too nervous to be isolated from the main group down the road. Beyond the strip the shadow was rising to its full height, and the shape of the rifle was thrown far back, with the body, by the headlights. Cocked, firing. Ralph drove through.

It would have been on automatic, not single shots, and they came in a spray behind the cab and across the back of the van.

Zach covered her.

Wally had to shoot behind Ralph’s shoulder.

He couldn’t have taken aim faster, and was pressed into Ralph’s shoulder. Mikey couldn’t intervene.

Wally’s shooting – the clatter of the weapon and the cases spilling out of the mechanism. Useful shooting because the second kid – in love with Paradise – had no chance to aim at the cab, couldn’t get a bead on Ralph, himself or Mikey, and they went through. But there was the shaking.

A tyre had gone.

They went on through the darkness. No lights, no high fives.

Mikey said what was needed. Maybe he was right, and maybe he wasn’t . . . but neither Wally nor Ralph could come up with a better idea. They limped on. There was a cluster of buildings ahead, with a lamp or security light over a barn entrance. No celebrations.

They had pulled up. When they stopped, she wriggled clear of him.

‘What do we do?’

Zach said they’d stopped because they’d had to get off the road, beyond the angle of the headlights approaching them, and the armoured cars that were on their way.

‘The shooting, and the explosions?’

Mikey was out of the van, and Wally had crawled after him. They were circling it.

‘The guys used grenades at the block. They did the necessary. We were through and thought it had been successful. There were two more of them down the road and one came into the headlights and was going to fire. He was run down – I think he was killed from the impact. There was a second man – maybe
basij
– and he fired at us. His shots hit the van. The guys put him down. I think he was killed too.’

His voice was flat. They had crouched, were out of sight, checking the tyres that had clipped the edge of the stinger.

‘If they had taken us, if we were to be hanged, those bastards would have been allowed to watch. They’d have been singing and dancing. That they were kids . . . is that important? Do you think I’m an idiot, Zach? If it’s them or me, who would I choose?’

There was a rumble on the road, faint at first, but growing louder. Their own engine idled. Wally and Mikey were still by the tyres. Zach thought it was his fate to be like a crab caught under a stone as the tide pulled away. There was the stink of paint, resin and oil, and he could see the punctures on the right and left sides of the van, entry and exit.

The armoured vehicles had blazing lights. He heard Ralph call that they were Rakhash, a locally made personnel carrier. Zach saw them through the back, and the one that followed lit the one ahead. He thought their speed close to fifty miles an hour, at maximum, and their radios would have screamed that there was an emergency. Zach understood more. The guys had rifles, automatic pistols and grenades. They didn’t have the kit to take on an armour protected beast. They were back in and the engine was gunned. A lamp had been lit in an upper room of the farmhouse beyond the barn.

The headlights disappeared, went round the bend. They’d gone south, would find chaos and casualties when they got there. It had been a snapshot of defining moments – as if they were on a slate and couldn’t be erased – and there was no ‘going back’. He had seen the kid without trousers run down, the kid with the rifle shot and killed. The world had changed. Zach might have screamed. The howl stayed in his throat. If he had screamed, he would not have been heard.

They bumped towards the north. How long would the tyres last? He had the right to ask, and the right to be told. And
she
, Farideh, had the right to be answered.
Should I have stayed?

‘Who was Johnny?’

‘Why?’

‘You called his name at the block.’

The van sagged and listed but Ralph kept the speed up. The headlights were off. The stars were up but the moon kissed clouds.

‘They killed him.’

‘He changed you?’

‘I believed what I was told – everything. I believed in my place at work, in the apartment, in my husband’s bed and in my duty. I had done nothing that gave offence, nor would have wanted to. I was beaten on the street. I was left with my clothing torn, modesty lost. He found me and saved me. He was their enemy. He fought them and I loved him. They would have tortured him before they killed him, but he didn’t tell them my name. He died and I lived. I called out his name for protection when they shot at us. Do you understand?’

He remembered the photograph. The young man, the smile, the floppy hair, Zach wondered if, ever, he could earn that love – and the frame the picture was held in; there had been no fear in the face.

It was not in its place. The picture of the man who had been hanged was gone, as was the photograph, head and shoulders, of the officer who had died in Afghanistan. The rugs on the floor were removed, the soft chairs, and the bed on which he should have lain with her, but hadn’t.

There were footsteps on the stairs behind him.

Nothing remained. Everything had been replaced. On one wall there was a life-size portrait of Imam Khomeini, on another a magnified photograph, in a plain frame, of the Supreme Leader.

The two old men were in the doorway. A light was switched on and his torch dulled. Engine parts littered a long bench that straddled the room, and the floor around it showed the stains of engine oil and lubricants. One of the old men carried a wrench, the other a lump hammer. They had dead eyes and showed him no recognition.

A question was put to him: ‘Are you a thief?’

A second question: ‘What have you come to steal?’

Kourosh was a junior official in a unit that worked on the surveillance of state enemies, a married man, father of a child with bronchial difficulties. He was not an adulterer because she had refused to allow him the final moments of the sin. What had he come to steal? A motor-scooter wheel, a spark plug, a wing-mirror, a chain? He had brought her a necklace that she never wore, chocolates that he had never seen her eat, and a silver pen. He had given her a photograph of himself but it had never been displayed alongside those of the dead men. He had come to search for the necklace, the unopened box of chocolates and the pen, which was likely still in its padded case. He was an investigator: he understood searches and the work of the scientists who did forensic examinations of crime scenes, the gathering of DNA samples and the weight they carried in the eyes of the regime’s judges.

She would break before the will of the interrogators.

He had been to the barracks, had driven there in his old car, and attended a briefing: a team was to be put on stand-by and would be flown wherever it was required. A helicopter had been fired on. Reinforcements were on the move, with an armoured gunship helicopter. Road blocks hemmed in the fugitives. He had come to remove the items that might carry on them the traces of his sweat, skin and saliva. All gone. The room had been cleaned.

He thought they were laughing at him. They would deny knowledge of her and him.

He had left the barracks without permission. He was condemned, but in his own time and without the poison falling on his wife and son.

He knew of nothing to say. They stepped aside. He went out through the door and started down the steps. The light was switched off behind him and they followed. He had climbed the gate to enter the yard. Now it was pulled open for him. He thought the pen and the chocolates would have gone into a street rubbish bin, the necklace too – gold and turquoise, made by a merchant from Mashhad. It had cost him, second-hand – probably once round the throat of a young bitch from the Peacock’s ranks – more than he earned in two weeks. It would lie in a bin and be there until the refuse collectors came in the morning. He had lied to his wife to explain the loss of money, had said he’d been robbed. Perhaps she’d believed him.

He went out through the gate into the alleyway. The night closed around him. He knew when it would be light, and where he had to be before dawn.

He put down the phone. It was a call that Brigadier Reza Joyberi, a man of influence and authority, who was regarded as exemplary in his piety, made on average every two months. That it was past midnight did not matter as the dealer he had spoken to, in the code familiar to them both, dealt with prime customers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The delivery would come within an hour. He would walk down to the main street from the side road in which his home was, go to the fuel station and be at the back, in shadow, as there he would be given the package. He would pay in American dollars.

He dealt with an Armenian, and the man’s customer base ensured that he operated without interference but never with impunity.

The wealth he had accumulated, which was banked abroad, he would have regarded as a fringe benefit of his position. There might come a day – if the bazaar mounted a co-ordinated campaign, if the Revolutionary Guard Corps was led in rebellion by the lower ranks, who did not enjoy similar advantages – when he wanted to provide new passports for his wife and children, with new names, then send them out from a provincial airport, probably Isfahan, to Dubai or Istanbul. He would follow.

There might come a day when his allies backed away and he was unprotected. It might happen. While he was protected, and his connections were strong, it was accepted that he didn’t pay prohibitive taxes and Customs duties. But his wealth was across the Gulf, and his driver was in the hands of an enemy. He would have spilled the account details. He could not, now, lift his telephone, get the international code, quote the number of his account, speak to the Lebanese who managed it, and demand that it was kept safe from being sanctioned or wiped. There was sweat on his forehead.

His wife slept, and so did his children.