Hussain, whose aesthetic sense had been honed for life during his childhood, added a collection of eighteenth-century French watercolours which he accepted as a payment from a family who had supported the Pétain government during the Occupation and been rewarded in kind. The delicate, misty paintings, in their plain gold frames, assembled to please one individual eye, added to the impression that L’Equipe was nothing so vulgar as a nightclub, but a luxurious private home.
They compiled a guest list from a mixture of Hussain’s mother’s old friends, Ayeshah’s most glamorous clients from Le Bambou and a selection made from Givenchy’s address book. Ayeshah had plunged fearlessly into the new sphere of influence which a gilt chair at the Givenchy shows had opened up for her. The bitterness and frustration of her years with Philippe lifted from her, and she once more became capable of warm but expedient charm. She exclaimed, she flattered, she alternated vibrant sympathy with effortless poise, she spent money lavishly and she made friends.
As she watched her secretary address the invitations to L’Equipe’s opening by hand in her even, cultured script, with every title and decoration meticulously correct, Ayeshah was simultaneously thrilled and appalled by her own audacity. Her life seemed to have been a dizzying roller-coaster of fortune which was now gathering speed for its final impact. She had begun as a barefoot peasant girl dressed in a single strip of mud-spattered cloth, fit for nothing but the eternal chore of planting, harvesting and cooking rice; she had been betrayed, victimized and brutalized, she had endured a life of degradation; now she was a Princess, dressed in couture clothes and planning confidently to impress the most elegant, the most snobbish and the most powerful people in the world. She, who was barely literate, was watching her secretary write invitations to members of half the royal houses of Europe.
She counted the years, and at once felt sad. Ten years had passed in her progress from nothing to everything, and it was too long. She had wasted time, and soon it would be too late for her to achieve her only remaining aim, the most important ambition of all. Ayeshah left the girl to finish the pile of thick cream cards and did what she always did now whenever she felt the shadow of unhappiness; she went shopping. Hussain adored her to spend money, and if a week went by in which no uniformed messenger boy delivered a stack of couturier’s boxes to their apartment he would seriously suggest that she had been neglecting her health.
Rumours – skilfully created by Hussain who was adept at conjuring intriguing ideas in his listener’s minds with barely spoken hints – filled the city before the new club opened, and in consequence not one member of that self-appointed governing body of style, le tout Paris, felt it advisable to refuse an invitation. Two leopards, restrained by jewelled black leather collars and gold chains, patrolled outside at L’Equipe’s opening, keeping order as well as any squad of security guards among the glittering crowd which clamoured for entry.
From that spectacular beginning, there were never less than three photographers lurking with their Rolleiflexes under the spindly young plane trees outside the club, waiting patiently for famous faces. They never had to wait long. Sometimes the shy young Yves St Laurent, Marc Bohan’s assistant at Dior, would call in with a posy of models. Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, inseparable young lovers, came often. Princess Margaret, a tiny, erect young woman with eyes which flashed like fire opals, found she could sit down and play the piano for her friends in the backgammon room as easily as she could at Balmoral.
One evening the manager called Ayeshah at the apartment in aflurry of excitement. ‘Guess who we have a booking for tonight?’
‘Margaret again?’
‘No, better.’
‘Rainier and Grace?’
‘Next week, maybe, the way we’re going.’
‘Well who, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Edward Hardacre.’
‘Who the hell is Edward Hardacre?’
‘Jackie Kennedy’s detective, that’s who.’
‘Jackie’s coming to my nightclub?’ She knew that the President and his young wife were paying their first official visit. For days the newspapers had talked of nothing else except Jackie’s elegance, Jackie’s pillbox hats and Jackie’s political dilemma in patronizing the Paris fashion houses when she had worked so hard to demonstrate to the world that Washington also could lay a claim to elegance. The Kennedys seemed so much like demi-gods from a distant Olympus that Ayeshah had hardly dared dream that one of them would descend to the door of L’Equipe. She almost shrieked with delight at the news.
Hussain overheard her. As soon as she rang off, he made some telephone calls. In consequence, no paparazzi loitered outside L’Equipe that night, and the President’s wife was very grateful for this thoughtfulness.
‘This is nearly as good as being seventeen again,’ she said wistfully as she left.
The day after that, France-Soir had a large picture of Jackie at L’Equipe, taken from across the street with a telephoto lens, but by that time the victim was in Rome, innocently recommending the club to all her friends.
No one ever connected the exquisite Princess Ayeshah with Madame Bernard, whose name swiftly came to stand for the most beautiful women that money could buy. Those men who kept the Reaumur telephone number in their address books under the letter B, most of whom had the discretion to choose not to write any name against that number, were never entirely sure that they were calling Madame Bernard, or that such a person really existed. Ayeshah herself never intended to be known by that name. It simply attached itself to the operation, a consensus nomination from her clientele.
The men who called Madame Bernard’s number were answered by a woman’s voice which said ‘Locations Landon’in a pleasant, neutral tone. The entire transaction was disguised as an enquiry about an apartment to rent. One room meant one girl, two rooms meant a pair, seven a small party; a north aspect meant a blonde, east a brunette, south a negress. The price structure was encoded in the floor on which the fictitious apartment was to be located, with the first floor denoting the most expensive services. The clients’ special requirements were ingeniously expressed in requests for particular features such as security locks, leather furniture or a view of a church. The code was passed on by word of mouth, along with the telephone number.
Agnès, the woman who answered the telephone lived in a small room with a sloping ceiling on the top floor of an undistinguished apartment building. She had worked as a bookkeeper at Le Bambou, and Ayeshah valued her for her meticulous accounts and her complete avarice. Agnès had worn the same grey flannel skirt, winter and summer, for three years. Her long brown hair was coiled around her head in braids and once a month Agnès allowed herself the luxury of shampoo. Agnès rode to work on a moped and complained incessantly about its consumption of petrol. She was ever alert to an opportunity to eat, drink or travel at someone else’s expense. The only topic which she discussed with any sign of pleasure was the bank account in which her savings accumulated. She regarded every extra half per cent of interest as a personal victory over the Crédit Lyonnais.
Ayeshah explained to Agnès how she was to run the call girl agency and then allowed the prim, sexless creature to name her salary, knowing that Agnès would not have the vision, let alone the courage, to ask for an unreasonable sum. She instructed her to keep two sets of books, one recording the fictitious business of Locations Landon, on which taxes were to be duly paid, and the other containing the true names of the clients and the women they hired, although the exact nature of the transactions was still to be disguised. The records, detailed as they were, would mean nothing to anyone except Agnès and Ayeshah.
The only remaining connection with her old life was Bastien the pimp, to whom Ayeshah directed that a generous monthly payment be made.
‘That’s not necessary,’ he protested when she outlined her plans to him, sitting at the scarred metal table in the depths of a street-corner tabac where he normally conducted his business during the daytime. Bastien had an expression of puzzled d
iscomfort in his hard, black eyes. ‘You don’t want to forget your old friends, of course, but this is too much. I’ve no doubt we will be able to do business from time to time, naturally we will have interests in common, but we can always come to some arrangement. You know I’ve always been a reasonable man, Princess,’ he used her new title with ironic emphasis.
‘I want to pay for more than your blessing and your support – I want silence, absolute silence,’ she told him. ‘There must never, ever be the smallest breath of suspicion about me, do you understand? I’ve made it look as if this agency is entirely Agnès’s business, and I want you to make sure that is exactly what the girls take it to be. As far as the people who knew Ayeshah when she ran Le Bambou are concerned, she struck lucky with Hussain Shahzdeh, broke into the big time and now the arrogant bitch doesn’t recognize her old associates on the street. Do you understand?’
He gave her a nod and a smile which revealed his uneven, yellow teeth, noticing that for this meeting she was wearing a cheap blue suit and a wholly uncharacteristic, blue velveteen hat, an outfit so unstylish that she would scarcely be recognized by anyone who had encountered her at Givenchy. ‘And besides,’ she continued in an earnest tone, ‘there is something else I will need you to arrange for me – but not yet.’
Before long, Agnès began to begrudge the hundreds of francs of excessive graft which she paid out each month. She was the kind of employee who was as mean with her employer’s money as she was with her own, and the waste implied in every envelope stuffed with hundred-franc bills which she handed to Bastien began to gnaw at her soul.
Only one girl connected with Le Bambou was accepted by Agnès – Pan-Pan, who had become a stripper at the Crazy Horse and who nightly wrapped her magnificent limbs in the rope meshes of a hammock for that establishment’s most famous routine. Ayeshah decided to take a risk with Pan-Pan because she would undoubtedly attract other girls of the same calibre to the work. No one else who had known Ayeshah at Le Bambou was employed, but there was no lack of enquiries. When a woman’s voice sounded on the telephone line it might come from a haughty, high-class whore, a student who could not pay her book bill, a debutante looking for a thrill or a housewife who merely coveted a washing machine.
Within six months, Agnès complained that there was so much work she could not cope with it by herself any longer, and Ayeshah readily agreed to hire an assistant, choosing one of the poverty-stricken students, a round-eyed Canadian girl with a permanently startled expression. Shortly afterwards, Agnès told Bastien, with inept insolence, that she intended to pay him less. Bastien informed Ayeshah, who made up the shortfall. Four weeks later, on her way home after making another payment to Bastien, Agnès was knocked off her moped on the Boulevard Sébastopol and killed outright by a lorry loaded with concrete slabs whose steering was apparently defective.
The former student knew her employer only as a voice on the telephone, a woman’s voice with a curious, unplaceable accent and a distinct, metallic quality. She was joined in the office by Véronique, a former house mannequin at Givenchy who had been dismissed because she could not control her weight. The timid young Canadian had only just shown Véronique how the dual bookkeeping system worked when the voice on the telephone offered her several thousand francs plus her air-ticket to go home. She agreed. Thereafter, none of Ayeshah’s employees was ever to meet her. The little attic room was used only as an office. Money was paid into a bank account in the name of Locations Landon. Every week several ruled sheets of paper on which the agency’s transactions were recorded with the clients’real names were posted to an address in the suburbs, from which they were posted again to addresses which were changed every few weeks. An elderly Iranian woman, who had once been a maid in Hussain’s parents’household, was paid a small pension for the duty of collecting the large manilla envelope each week and placing it personally in the Princess’s hands.
His wife’s secret empire of vice troubled Hussain’s conscience. He considered that the men – many of them eminent, powerful and in positions of considerable public trust – whose names she recorded were incomprehensibly foolish, but when he noticed the unnatural pleasure which Ayeshah took in her potential dominion over them he was disturbed.
‘Don’t you think this business could prove a danger to us, after all?’ he suggested quietly one afternoon, as he watched her at the tiny Empire writing-desk that had been his mother’s, scanning the week’s delivery of names.
‘Of course not. Whatever makes you say that?’ She turned swiftly towards him, the colour rushing into her face, her black eyes glittering with alarm. The triple necklace of graduated pearls around her throat rose and fell as she took a sharp breath. Hussain’s cooperation was important and the idea that he might change his mind disturbed her.
‘You’re forced to deal with bad types like Bastien, you’re making yourself vulnerable to scandal…’ he continued in tones of reasonable practicality.
‘Nonsense. I know what I’m doing. No one will ever find out, I’ve made sure of that. And it’s far better to have Bastien on our side than to try to cut him out. I’ve seen how those Marseillais operate, so have you. We’ve no choice but to involve him. Once you’re operating outside the law, the only people you can trust are those who have as much to lose as you do.’ Nervously she patted her hair, making sure that the pins which held her immaculate chignon were secure. ‘Besides, Hussain, think of the money – the girls make more than the club.’
‘But you don’t need money. L’Equipe is an enormous success, you’re planning to open another club in St Tropez next year and that will be an enormous success too. Speaking as your major backer, I’m delighted. Money isn’t what you need now as much as prestige. If anyone ever connected you with Madame Bernard you would be ruined. You can achieve everything you want with clean hands, I’m sure of it. Why take such a risk?’
‘But Hussain, I thought you agreed!’ She jumped up and crossed the room, moving sinuously in her clinging, cream wool dress, to where her husband stood, leaning against the blue-white marble fireplace with one hand on the mantelpiece. She clung to his arm, pleading for understanding. ‘What about the things you want to do? Don’t you see that the information we have will give you power? With what we know we will hold every institution in France in the palms of our hands. We could almost bring down the government if we wanted to. And not only France – we’ve had calls from all over Europe already. How can you tell me to back out when you will need the agency more than I do?’
He broke away from her with an irritated gesture, angry with himself as much as with her. He had never looked for the emotion which other people called love from Ayeshah. Hussain considered love to be nothing more than self-deception, a waste of energy, a weakness. She fascinated him in a way that was beyond sentiment, and she saw the world from the same perspective. Now, however, he was beginning to suspect that her life was directed to a point beyond their relationship. Could it be that she was attempting to use him in the way she had undoubtedly used Philippe?
‘Don’t try to make me responsible for what you’re doing.’ He turned to face her, his face grave, the normal brightness of his glance extinguished. ‘I’ve told you my opinion, if you don’t accept it there’s nothing I can do about that. The fact remains I think you’re being foolish, I think the agency is a weapon which can be used against you much too easily, and I think you should reconsider. That’s all.’
‘Very well. I think you’re wrong and think time will prove me right.’ She followed him and caught hold of both his large, square hands in hers, the firm grip of her slim fingers almost pinching him. ‘Don’t you realize that there are only two ways to do business, Hussain? Fine, if you can keep everything straight and above board, if you can trade on your spotless reputation and never touch one dirty centime; but if you start on the wrong side of the tracks, if you have to flirt with criminals and accommodate corruption, then you have to go on that way. I might be able to forget Bastien, but he will never forget me,
don’t you see? We can’t break out. I’m trapped, and so are you. The only thing to do is be the biggest gangsters of them all. That’s the only freedom we have, don’t you understand?’
He smoothed her hair affectionately, hoping she was wrong; his mother’s injunction to live a good life never left him, although, like Ayeshah, Hussain’s personal morality had been warped by the way in which he had been forced to survive. But Hussain had to admit that his own ambitions were maturing only slowly. He could always find a market for doubtful commodities, there were always desperate men who sought him out for his contacts in the arms trade, but the big business, the business which was legitimate, never came his way no matter what efforts he made to attract it.
The following year his persistent search for the deal that would open the door was at last successful. He was approached by the defence attaché of the embassy of the Central Sahara Republic, who wanted aircraft for Air-Sahara, the new national airline. It was a natural development, the reward of years of discreet, successful trading. Sahara’s defence minister had dealt with Hussain a few years earlier, when, as a guerrilla leader, he had bought guns and tanks for the revolution which finally ousted the French.
Hussain had talks with one French and one German aircraft manufacturer, and the French finally offered to pay him the larger fee for introducing the Sahara business. It took months of hard bargaining to get an agreement on a spare-parts contract, a period in which Hussain dropped eight kilos in weight and slept badly.
‘Why not just take the Germans? They were prepared to play ball,’ Ayeshah asked him.
‘There’s more in it for us with the French, and I want to set a benchmark,’ he replied, ‘but if I can’t get a good spare-parts agreement, I’ll go back to the Germans, certainly. But if I sell Air-Sahara short now, the phone won’t ring again on this kind of deal. The time to be truly greedy is when I can afford it.’
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