The Corporal's Wife (2013) (38 page)

Sidney liked to talk about the castles on either side of the gorge, especially the Burg Aggstein – they’d seen it when they’d been coming down the road alongside the Danube from the safe house and Spitz, and before they’d reached St Polten. It was a high, stone-walled keep built on a rock crag, extraordinary. It had been the seat of the Kunringer family, a Capone-style gang of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had robbed merchants trading up the river and taken the more affluent ones hostage, demanding ransoms. The Kunringers’ speciality, Sidney said, was the rose garden set above a vertical cliff. The victims were lowered onto the ledge by rope, then left. If a ransom came quickly, they might not starve to death or topple off with exhaustion and fall to the rocks below. It was a good place for the little bastard. Nobby had nearly come off the road when he’d looked up at the place and imagined the corporal perched on the ledge, his tongue loosening. It had been a good castle to see, but he was sorry he hadn’t identified the rose garden. He drove, and was alone with his thoughts.

Nobby hadn’t known Father William before now. He sensed that the man was the least likely of them to wash his hands of the problem the little bastard posed. There were lives on the line. Time was not on their side, and the man had to be drained of information over the next few hours. If he was given too much time he would realise he had made as bad a move as it was possible to make.

The sign announced Judenburg. There was a modern bridge across a wide river, and the valley sides yawed upwards. The town was on the far bank. It was Father William’s cue.

A pleasant voice, a friend’s: ‘Mehrak, pretty countryside, isn’t it? Don’t answer – don’t interrupt me. You don’t trust us and think we’re deceiving you. We’ve come here so that I can explain why you should believe us when we give our word. Remember Gaddafi? Remember “Mad Dog”? Remember he was a pariah and loathed? We made him a promise. He came in from the cold, ditched his nuclear programme and we delivered on the promise. He was vile, but we’d given our word. There was a man called Abdul Hakim Belhadj – now a fat cat in the new Libya – an enemy of Gaddafi. We helped the Americans to ship him back to Tripoli where he was tortured and abused by that despot regime. Why did we do that? Because we had given our word. We stuck by it. That’s what we do. We give our word to the devil for the sake of policy. Now, and then.’

They were over the bridge. Father William reached across Nobby and pointed to a narrow slip road running off to the left. They followed it past a couple of small hotels and some bars, then holiday cottages. The view was of the river, the Mur, a hundred metres wide. The sun had come out. The water was flanked by willows, looked deep and flowed fast.

Father William told Nobby he could park. He asked Mehrak to step out. Auntie followed and stayed close. Nobby slipped the short-arm baton into his pocket and locked the vehicle. Father William was conversational, relaxed.

‘My grandfather was here. He died a few years ago, and never told me the story, but when he was old he told it to my nan. He woke up in the middle of one night, and told her what he’d done sixty years before, as a young soldier in the British Army, what he’d done and been ordered to do here. He never spoke of it again. She said he was a Jack the Lad, a wild boy, when he went off in 1944, and they’d been married three weeks. He came back a year later and was moody, morose, miserable for the rest of his days, because of what he was ordered to do here. You following me, Mehrak? Just keep looking at the water.

‘The way he told it to my nan, there was an iron bridge across the river then. It was June 1945, the Germans and Austrians had surrendered and Hitler was dead. The Russian Army was across the river, and there was unfinished business.’

The river ran fast. Nobby thought it would have been higher in the early summer than it was now, autumn; the winter snows would have thawed and it would have been in spate, dangerous. He could imagine a rusted bridge, the arcs of the supports rising above a narrow carriageway, but didn’t know the story.

‘There were Cossacks who had fought with the Germans against the Red Army, and had fallen back in defeat. There were eighteen thousand of them here, with their wives and children. The Soviets hated them as traitors, and our leader had done a deal with theirs. London with Moscow, Churchill with Stalin. Did we love the Russians? Did we fuck. Didn’t trust them an inch, but there’d been a deal.’

Nobby watched a branch float under the arches towards a weir. He saw the power of the water, and its threat.

‘We kept our word. Our soldiers put eighteen thousand Cossacks, men, women and children, across the bridge. They were pushed with bayonets. They were singing hymns, and were beaten with pickaxe handles and rifle butts. The Soviets took them on the other side, marched them round a corner and the machine-guns started up. Everyone knew what was happening. Plenty jumped into the water rather than be taken by the Soviets.’

Nobby stared ahead, dry-eyed, and Auntie seemed to watch a kingfisher flash across the far bank, no emotion. The water was mud-coloured and he couldn’t see down into it. It surged either side of the new bridge supports and speeded as it approached the weir.

‘It was reckoned that some sixty of the eighteen thousand went into the water and reached the British bank. They avoided the soldiers sent to shoot them or bring them up again to the bridge and get them over. Sixty survived. The water, my grandfather said, was filled with the bodies of the drowned, and the noise of the machine-guns behind the trees went on into the night, a long summer evening. We did it because we had given our word, and that was worth the shame of what we had to do. We were true to our word. Understand me?’

Nobby saw the corporal nod. He realised why they had driven so far, and felt the force of Father William’s message. The man’s lips moved, but Nobby had no Farsi and couldn’t decipher the murmur. He stood back.

Auntie was beside him. ‘You think it worked?’

‘I . . . don’t know. Sort of shock treatment. So peaceful and serene here, but the atrocity makes it like a crime scene. I think it worked.’

He heard the snap of Father William’s fingers, and saw the gesture towards the vehicle. Going home. No pissing about, no late lunch. Strike while the poker was glowing. He phoned PK, said what had happened, that they were coming back.

What Mehrak had said to himself was, ‘You kept your word to the Russians. You
lied
to the people who trusted you and whom you betrayed by giving them to an enemy. It was
lies
you told them.’

He sat in his seat and was given a bar of chocolate. He believed in nothing beyond an old loyalty to his brigadier, and thought it shared.

He went from his office.

The traffic had snarled and he had been caught in a jam. His driver had been unable to reverse out of it or swing into a side road. The car had been on time, and he couldn’t fault that, but he could fault the mood in his office. Both of his regular aides had called in sick. His telephone hadn’t rung. Most days it rang incessantly.

He was late. Brigadier Reza Joyberi had changed in the office into his fatigues. The uniform was a camouflage design favoured by combat volunteers in Afghanistan, Iraq and south Lebanon. He wore the badges of his rank on his shoulders, had clipped the medal strips on the left side of his chest and wore a side-arm in a holster. He thought he looked what he was: a senior and influential figure in the regime.

His pistol was taken. He was given a docket. He could have argued, stood his ground.

He was escorted to a waiting room. It was a section of the Kazemi Garrison camp that he had not been into before. He heard voices down a corridor, aggressive, then a woman crying. Once a prisoner was brought past the open doorway of the waiting room, the stamp of despair on his face. He checked his phone. No messages. He waited. He was late for the appointment. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since a functionary had kept him waiting without a message of apology, or asking for him to be given tea, with biscuits or cake. He hadn’t used the phone to call those whom he expected would offer him support. Expected.

There was a handful of other brigadiers, the hierarchy of the Revolutionary Guard Corps – of which al-Qods was an élite entity – and political figures close to the Supreme Leader, generals in the army and admirals in the navy. He was a figure of importance. At gatherings, men who knew him only by reputation were invited to shake his hand and he would see, every time, their nervousness. In that hand he had held matters of life and death. He had not rung them to enlist their support because he had a vague fear, already, that they might decline to take his call, stall, or promise and do nothing. How many would regret his fall? Some? Perhaps. A few? Possible. None? Probable.

A door opened down the corridor. A man was led out. He wore a suit and wasn’t handcuffed but had an escort at either side of him. He was taken from the corridor. Then a clerk came from that room, stood in the entrance to the waiting area and beckoned for him to follow. He did.

The door was opened for him.

Two men sat behind a table, turbaned, robed and bearded. They had hangman’s eyes that lit as he entered. The clerk showed him to a hard chair in front of the table. There were men against the wall to his left, who wore dull blue uniforms that Reza Joyberi did not recognise. The door rattled shut.

No smile, nothing of humanity. Why should there have been?

‘Joyberi, we have questions to put to you.’ The older one spoke, and the other took notes.

He sat erect. ‘My name is Reza Joyberi, and my rank in the al-Qods unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps is that of brigadier. I should be treated with respect and addressed by my full name and rank.’

‘Joyberi, we have questions to put to you.’

‘Under what authority?’

‘Joyberi, the Ministry of Justice is charged with the responsibility of protecting the state from malfeasance wherever it appears. The trappings of rank do not protect those guilty of crimes against the state.’

‘It is ridiculous that . . .’

He knew the futility of argument and that, here, bluster would gain him no territory. He regretted already that he had not beaten a track to the senior men who worked around him, who kissed his cheeks when greeting him each morning, who took tea with him, who wished him and his wife well, who laboured alongside him to preserve the security of Iran. Perhaps he also regretted – already – that his wife was at home and his child at school, not at the airport. He stared at the man and won no response. The other’s pencil was poised.

‘Joyberi, it is important that you answer truthfully and co-operate fully or there is the potential of grave consequences for you, because these are matters that involve treason, war against God. What has happened to your driver?’

‘He is missing.’

‘He is missing and is believed to be in the custody of a foreign intelligence agency. And, Joyberi, what has happened to the wife of your driver?’

‘She also is missing.’

‘And is thought to have been taken out of the capital by agents of the United Kingdom – the Old Fox or the Little Satan. My first question of importance. You sent your driver to Dubai, Joyberi. Why? What business could so lowly a figure, the driver of your car, perform for you in Dubai at the expense of the Iranian people? I advise you to consider your answer carefully.’

‘It was a matter of state security. I refuse to share it with you.’

‘Does the security of the state involve the maintenance of private bank accounts that are beyond the reach of the tax authorities in Iran? I require an answer.’

The brigadier looked up. He saw blue, a small cloud in the midst, through the window and over the rooftops. He thought power was a skin that a snake might shed and that, deprived of it, he could feel the cold settling on him. How should he reply?

Zach sat on a fallen log.

‘Fuck where I’d rather be,’ Wally muttered. ‘What I’d like to be doing. We did a march through Warminster, up Station Road and the high street, to the Minster. All the town was out to see us. I felt, sort of, recognised.’

The guys talked of long-ago army days.

‘We did one in Colchester.’ Mikey’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Pouring with rain, us in best dress, five deep on the pavements. Best I ever felt.’

The water she used for washing the plates spilled out under the wagon. Zach and the guys should have helped her. They had eaten well from what had been left in the cupboards, tins of sausages and tomatoes, and a bag of small potatoes. There had been lemonade to drink. They were near to a viewing point in a parking area that was deserted but for themselves. The darkness had settled round them. The logs were for use in place of tables and benches. He could justify stealing the couple’s food, and transport, and abandoning them on the salt flats with the flamingos. He didn’t feel bad about it and knew he had changed. There was a small light above the sink, which she had used while she was doing the dishes. Now she switched it off.

‘When I had the boot I missed by a week the march-past through Winchester. I was shot of Basra a week before the parade at the Presidential Palace. I missed the Basra one because I was sent on a repatriation job, escort for a box. Don’t think I’ll be doing a march-past now.’ A chuckle from Ralph.

She sat beside him, not close.