31
Kamran cut the wires behind Kite’s back. Kite had suffered a deep cut on top of the left wrist and had lost all feeling in his right hand. He made a fist with it, clenching and releasing the fingers while massaging the wrist. Torabi handed him a used tissue with which to mop up the blood.
‘I need to use the toilet,’ Kite told him as he was passed a bottle of water.
Torabi said something in Farsi and ordered Kite to stand up. Kite drained the water, put the bottle on the floor and was escorted from the room. Kamran put a gun in the small of his back. Hossein went ahead to open the bathroom door.
‘Leave it open,’ he ordered.
‘I want some privacy.’
The two guards looked at one another and laughed.
‘We’re not coming in unless we have to,’ Hossein replied.
‘What am I going to do? Dig a tunnel? There’s nothing in there except a bar of soap and a shower curtain. At least let me close the door.’
Kamran indicated that it would be acceptable for Kite to do that.
‘No lock,’ he said.
‘Fine,’ Kite replied.
As soon as he was inside the bathroom, he closed the door and lifted the seat on the toilet. He noisily unclipped his belt, pulled it free of his trousers, and sat down. The two guards were talking in the passage and did not appear to be taking much notice of what was going on. Quietly, Kite opened the cupboard under the sink, ducked down and started pulling at the loosened nail, shaking it from side to side, trying to turn it. It moved slightly. Reaching back, he flushed the toilet and used the covering noise to scratch away at the plaster with the belt buckle until an inch of the nail was visible. He could feel it very gradually moving away from the wall. Kite reached for the bottle of bleach and squirted some into the space around the head, hoping that it would loosen the plaster. For another thirty seconds or so he chipped away. The bleach was running down the paintwork, making no discernible difference, but Kite knew that the nail was coming. Pinching the metal head so it dug deep into the skin of his thumb and index finger, he at last yanked it free of the wall.
He stood up, almost striking the back of his head on the cupboard, and turned on the tap. The nail was about four inches long. If he could get one of the men alone, he could use it to disable them. More than one and he doubted that he would be fast enough to disarm them before they used their weapons. He slipped the nail into his hip pocket and looked up at the metal towel rail.
‘Hey!’
It was Hossein. There was a loud succession of knocks. He said: ‘Let’s go. Taking too long.’ The attachments at either end of the rail shifted when Kite moved it up and down. It was stuck to the wall only by adhesive. He could pull it free from the wall or, if that proved impossible, kick it down by standing on the rim of the bath. Kite looped the belt around his trousers and called back: ‘Yeah, just a minute. I’m washing.’
He urinated in the sink, switched off the tap and went outside, resuming the role of the hapless oil trader.
‘No luck,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ Hossein looked confused.
‘I can’t go to the bathroom properly. I’m too tense.’
‘You think I care? Don’t be fucking disgusting, man. Move!’
Kamran stuck the gun in Kite’s back and pushed him forward. Kite continued with the act, re-entering the room in a forlorn state.
‘Ready?’ Torabi demanded.
‘I don’t feel well,’ he told him.
‘I don’t have time for you not to feel well. Sit down. We made an arrangement. Eskandarian in exchange for the life of your wife and child. A simple trade.’
Kite slumped into the chair. As soon as Kamran and Hossein left them alone, he could use the nail, setting the head in the ball of his hand, pushing back Torabi’s neck and driving it up through the throat. To Kite’s despair, Kamran suddenly grabbed his arms, pulled them behind his back and tied his hands with a set of plasticuffs.
‘Hey! We agreed no wires, no handcuffs.’
‘I don’t trust you.’ Torabi was looking at him, pursing his lips. ‘I don’t care what we agreed.’
‘I can’t think straight if my hands are tied.’ He could feel the nail against his hip. ‘My wrist is already bleeding. I lose the feeling in my arms.’
‘Poor little Lockie,’ Torabi mocked him in a childish voice. ‘Just talk, you piece of shit. Just tell me what happened in France.’
32
And so Kite began.
He told Torabi nothing about what happened at the motorway service station en route to the villa, nothing about the lamp, nothing about the Mougins safe house or the plot to attack the New York subway. The story he told was a story of innocence to experience, the tale of a naive eighteen-year-old who went on holiday with the Bonnard family, found himself embroiled in a tragedy and came home a changed man.
There was no Carl or Strawson in Kite’s recollection of the summer, no dead drops or modified Olympus Trip. He told the truth about Bijan and Abbas, just as he told the truth about Luc and Rosamund. Kite did not conceal what had happened with Martha. He told Torabi what Xavier had likely told him in Paris before he died. One version of events, seen only from one point of view.
The rest was lies.
This is what happened.
On the morning of Wednesday, 2 August 1989, Lachlan Kite arrived at the Bonnards’ house in Onslow Square. His suitcases were packed, his training complete. The family were waiting for him on the ground floor: Xavier, sporting a patchy beard; his younger sister, Jacqueline, who looked permanently tired and moody; Rosamund, smelling of expensive perfume and wearing a bright yellow jacket with broad shoulder pads; and Maria, the Filipina maid, who greeted Kite with a delighted smile and a moist kiss. He remembered a similar encounter, two years earlier, when the Bonnards had invited him to Switzerland on a skiing trip. That time he had just been a normal teenager, innocent of the ways of men. Xavier’s parents had always been so kind to him, taking him under their wing and treating him like a surrogate son. Now he was set to betray them.
He looked down at his luggage. Zipped inside were the commonplace belongings of a typical young man – a Walkman, a Gameboy – but his own had been refitted into devices with the power to strip the Bonnard family of every inch of their privacy. In that moment, standing in the hall of the house, his mind full of tradecraft and protocols, he felt wretched for deceiving them.
The plan was to fly to Charles de Gaulle, to meet up with Luc in Paris, spend a night at the Bonnard apartment in St Germain and then to make the eight-hour journey by car to the villa in Mougins.
‘Everybody remembered their passports?’ Rosamund asked, zipping an Eximious washbag into her suitcase.
‘Passport, passage, pesetas,’ said Jacqueline.
‘You say that every time we go abroad,’ Xavier groaned.
The relationship between Xavier and his more conservative, less reckless younger sister had always been fraught. They bickered and griped, steering clear of one another’s friends, going to separate parties, favouring different parents. Xavier was close to his mother but fought constantly with his father. By the same token, Luc favoured Jacqueline, whom Rosamund treated no differently to Maria or the family dog; that is to say, politely and patiently, but without evident warmth. Kite put her indifference down to the steely, compassionless DNA of the English aristocracy. Rosamund was beautiful, well-educated and extremely rich. She wanted for nothing except two healthy children and a dutiful, faithful husband. On the latter count, Luc had most definitely let her down. Brought up to believe that emotions should be suppressed at all costs, Rosamund rarely complained but seldom seemed unequivocally happy. What was important to her was to present an ordered, graceful face to the world, to acknowledge her boundless natural gifts and privileges without feeling guilty about them and certainly without showing them off in a way that might be interpreted as vulgar.
‘Maria’s going to come with us to Paris then stay behind whil
e we’re at the house. You’re going to have a little bit of a holiday, aren’t you, Maria?’
‘Yes, Lady Rosamund.’
‘Shall we go then?’ Xavier’s mother glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Golly, our plane leaves in three hours.’
There were no problems at either airport. A chauffeur met the Bonnards at Charles de Gaulle and they were driven at speed into the heart of Paris, a city Kite knew only from books and films and which he found spellbinding at first glance. The distant Eiffel Tower, the grandeur of Notre-Dame, the café crowds gathered at outdoor tables seemingly on every street, were like glimpses of a dream world. It felt as though he was passing into a different realm, a new phase of his life comprised of great luxury, of secrets and glamour. He had grown accustomed to the privileges enjoyed by Xavier’s family, staying regularly at Rosamund’s country pile in Gloucestershire and twice at Luc’s chalet in Verbier. Even so, Kite was astonished by the splendour of the Bonnard apartment, a vast penthouse in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with views of the Seine, Invalides and the Jardins de Luxembourg. Rosamund explained that Luc’s family had bought the property shortly after the war. Most of the time it lay empty, though Luc travelled to Paris for work at least once every two months. Kite knew that Xavier suspected his father of running a French mistress – indeed he claimed to have found a bra jammed down the back of a Louis Quinze day bed in the drawing room. Luc had denied the accusation, insisting that the bra must have been left by a guest but urging Xavier not to say anything to his mother in case she got the wrong impression.
Luc himself was a man whom Kite respected but had always struggled to like. Tall and immensely good-looking, he had inherited a fortune and tripled it through various opaque business activities which Xavier feigned not to understand. Strawson and Peele had said that there were ‘question marks’ surrounding Luc, though they had not elaborated on this and Kite had been too busy concentrating on his training to pursue the point. Besides, the source of Luc’s wealth was of less consequence to him than the manner in which he treated his son. Xavier fought with his father not because he was a confrontational, moody teenager – quite the opposite, in fact – but because Luc always seemed to be in a permanent state of competitive disappointment with him. Self-confident to the point of arrogance, he would accuse Xavier of laziness, even of lacking strength of character, rarely showing him any genuine affection. To make matters worse, Luc had always been friendly towards Kite, generous as much with his time as he was with his money. On more than one occasion, Xavier had said: ‘Dad would much prefer you as his son’, a remark to which Kite had no reasonable answer other than to say that his friend was talking nonsense.
They arrived in Paris in time for a late lunch at Brasserie Lipp. Afterwards they walked across the Seine, passing the Pompidou Centre en route to the Louvre where I.M. Pei’s pyramid, built to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Republic, had finally been opened to the public. Rosamund declared it a ‘monstrosity’ but, to Kite, it was one of the most extraordinary buildings he had ever seen. He took photographs of the Louvre complex with his doctored Olympus Trip 35, not just to familiarise the Bonnard family with his new-found passion for photography, but for the more honest and prosaic reason that he wanted to preserve his memories of such a beautiful place.
While the others went to Café de Flore for tea, Xavier and Kite holed up in the Marais, self-consciously smoking Gitanes Blondes and staring moodily at passing girls.
‘You OK?’ Xavier asked.
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You seem a bit distracted.’
Kite’s heart skipped a beat. Was his excitement and anxiety about what lay ahead already so obvious? The entire day he had felt as though he was inhabiting two bodies: his old cheery self, the trusted family friend; and a new person, the cunning, artful spy playing a dangerous game.
‘It’s just all this’ – Kite gestured at the shops and the girls, the street life of the Marais – ‘my first time in Paris. Taking it all in.’
Peele had taught him never to embellish a lie. To make it short and sweet and get out fast. If a person rambled on without cease, giving answers to questions that had never been asked, it was a sure sign of guilt.
‘You were weird this morning, too.’
Kite shrugged and apologised, wondering what to say.
‘Maybe it’s Mum. Killantringan. She’s basically bankrupt after paying off her loans. I don’t have anywhere to live when I get home, not sure if I’ve done OK in my A levels. It’s just been a weird summer.’
‘Well, you can relax now.’ Xavier patted him on the back. ‘You can take it easy.’ A breathtakingly pretty girl with a Godard bob walked past their table and smiled. ‘Mon Dieu,’ he whispered. ‘Do you think that will ever stop?’
‘Girls?’ Kite replied.
Xavier nodded.
‘Probably not.’
‘We’ll go out in the south,’ Xavier said. ‘Antibes. Cannes. You’re bound to get lucky.’
‘You, not me,’ Kite replied. Xavier had the advantage of his father’s saturnine looks, expensive clothes and a certain enigmatic magnetism, at once feral and poetic, which too many girls – as far as Kite was concerned – found irresistible.
‘We should get back,’ Xavier announced, throwing a few francs on the table. ‘Mum wants to take Maria out to dinner at La Coupole. It’s her fortieth.’
Kite was embarrassed not to have had the opportunity to buy Maria a present. Xavier took him to Shakespeare & Co on the way home, finding the owner closing up but happy to let two young students browse quickly inside. Xavier knew the history of the bookshop and encouraged Kite to buy something by Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. The owner recommended The Beautiful and Damned (‘much better than Gatsby’) and Kite asked that it be wrapped up. Later, as the family were presenting Maria with presents at dinner, she cried when she saw that he had bought her a book, as if nobody had ever thought to credit her with greater intelligence than the ability to make scrambled eggs or to turn perfect hospital corners on a king-size bed.
‘Gracias, Master Lockie,’ she said, pulling him in for a kiss. She had put on a dress for the occasion and did not look out of place among the glamorous denizens of La Coupole. ‘I will treasure this. I will read it slowly.’
Kite had never experienced a restaurant quite like it. The ripple of Left Bank conversation, the music of cutlery and cut-glass, waiters in black tie gliding from table to table as though they had been on the same shift since the liberation of Paris. It was a world away from the chaos of the Killantringan dining room where prawn cocktails and defrosted lasagne had been the order of the day. Kite had been practising his French with Peele almost every day for three weeks but still didn’t recognise half the dishes on the menu. Luc announced that he had been coming to La Coupole with his family since childhood and always reserved the same table, nestled between pillars within touching distance of an extraordinary stained-glass dome in the centre of the room. Compelled by Luc to experiment, Kite willingly played the wide-eyed tourist and asked for snails as a starter. Xavier tried to make him order Andouillette as a main course until his mother interjected and told Kite that it was a ‘revolting’ sausage made primarily from offal which ‘tastes like a loo brush’. Xavier cursed her affectionately for spoiling the joke and went to the bathroom.
While he was gone, Luc turned to Kite.
‘Lockie, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’
His eyes had a way of going dead in moments of seriousness. Kite’s stomach caved in on itself.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘My friend Ali is arriving tomorrow. Xav’s told you that he’s an Iranian businessman. Is that correct?’
Kite leaned on his training. Don’t talk unless you have to. Keep your answers short. Nobody expects you to be anything but a dozy teenager.
‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Said he was some kind of godfather?’
Luc smiled. ‘A Muslim godfather, yes. Ali and I were go
od friends in Paris when Xavier was living here as a child. He has close links to the new president. We’ve been trying to have a holiday together for years and we’re finally making it happen – despite all the changes going on in Iran at the moment.’
‘What changes?’ Kite asked. He wondered why Luc was bothering to tell him so much about his relationship with Eskandarian. It was almost as if he was trying to conceal something.
‘Oh, you know.’ He gestured towards the street. ‘The death of the ayatollah. And there was an election last week. We thought maybe that would prevent Ali from coming, but thankfully he is flying out tomorrow.’
Again, Kite wondered why Luc felt obliged to explain the situation to him. It was more than just politeness. Was Xavier’s father trying to persuade him into thinking about Eskandarian in a particular way?
‘That’s great,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be happy to see him.’
‘I will.’ Luc took a sip of wine. ‘I don’t want you to worry, but there is a certain threat to Iranian public figures when they travel overseas. Ali will be coming with a bodyguard. The chances of anything happening are zero. It’s only for show.’
‘OK,’ Kite replied.
Strawson had suggested that Eskandarian would travel with protection; this merely confirmed it.
‘I just thought I would say something in case you were surprised when he turns up. Various people may come to the house this week to meet him, but more likely he will go off and do whatever he has to do during the days. My hope is that we can all have a nice holiday together.’
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 24