The man walked down a narrow passage towards the rear of the building. He appeared to have a plan. Kite waited for a count of three, checked that Xavier and Luc were not behind him, then followed him along the passage.
He came to a Fire Door and pushed it open. The man was waiting for him on a patch of concrete to the left of the door. He was wearing jeans and a Goats Head Soup T-shirt. He gestured Kite into a sectioned-off area where three industrial bins were giving off a stench of rotting food. The clouds had moved away. It was searingly hot.
‘We don’t have much time, so I’ll make this quick. The name’s Carl. You OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ Kite replied.
He was a lean, undernourished man of around thirty-five. He didn’t look like the sort of Englishman who would ordinarily be reading the Financial Times on holiday in France. Kite guessed that was the point.
‘Eskandarian is arriving late this afternoon. Landing in Paris at five, catching a flight to Cannes at seven.’ Kite made a mental note of the flight times. ‘The villa was swept by MOIS early this morning. They were thorough. They didn’t find anything. Looks like the French aren’t interested in our man. Team went in straight afterwards, tried to rig some tentacles. They didn’t succeed in the way they wanted to succeed. Were disturbed by the housekeeper coming back and had to get out. Understand?’
Kite nodded although he wasn’t sure precisely what Carl was telling him. Was the operation being called off?
‘Take a look at this.’
The man produced a colour photograph from his pocket which looked as though it had been torn out of a brochure or Sunday supplement. It was a picture of a table lamp with a broad wooden base and wide burgundy shade. Kite noticed three warts on the back of Carl’s right hand.
‘All they managed to do was get the stereo into the poolhouse and this lamp into the first bedroom you come to on the first floor of the villa. It’s a small room, unlikely to be where Rosamund puts Eskandarian. If you get the chance, before the target shows up, find out where he’s going to be sleeping and try to switch the lamps. Only do this if it’s a hundred per cent safe. Make sure everyone else in the villa is downstairs, maybe outside taking a swim after the long drive. You are under strict orders not to attempt the switch after Eskandarian arrives. Is that understood?’
‘I understand,’ Kite replied. He wanted to ask if Carl had been following him all the way from London, via Lipp and Coupole and the Marais.
‘They’re sorry they didn’t get the job done. Couldn’t be helped, time window was squeezed to less than four minutes. You’re the fallback. That’s why you’re there. Just plug the lamp in and get out. Somebody catches you, you say your own light fused and you went to switch it with another one from a different room. Capeesh?’
Kite nodded. ‘Capeesh.’ He had not anticipated that there would be this much pressure so early in the operation.
‘Here.’ Carl passed him a packet of cigarettes and some Hollywood chewing gum. ‘In case anyone asks what took you so long, you were buying these.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
‘Luc make any calls on his car phone?’
Kite shook his head. He knew that BOX could access the phone line when the car was stationary, not when it was moving.
‘OK. Remember what I told you. Good luck. Go.’
Kite did as he was told, walking away from the stench of the bins, back down the passage, committing the colours and design of the lamp to memory, his heart racing in a way that no amount of training in Hampstead had prepared him for. The entire conversation with Carl had taken less than two minutes. Why had he asked about Luc using the phone?
Kite went into the gents. Xavier was coming out of one of the cubicles. He looked up and was surprised to see Kite, but they did not say anything to one another, merely grunting as they passed. Moments later Kite was back at the car, Xavier already in the passenger seat, Luc sitting impatiently at the wheel.
‘Why did you take so long?’ he snapped. Luc Bonnard was not a man who liked to be left waiting around.
‘Sorry.’ Kite put the cigarettes on the seat. ‘Bought some gum. Want any?’
‘Ollywood?’ Xavier replied in a cod French accent.
‘Oui,’ Kite replied, relief flooding through him like the first blissful rush of Ecstasy. ‘Hollywood. Tuck in. There’s plenty. How far are we from the house?’
36
They reached the villa before the others. Kite had memorised the layout of the roads surrounding the house and was confident he would have been able to guide Luc to the property even without the aid of the Michelin map Xavier passed to him on the last stretch of motorway beyond Grasse. He had seen aerial photographs of the villa, pictures of the rooms, architectural drawings of every floor, surveillance shots of the swimming pool and gardens. As Luc turned through the iron gates and proceeded along the gravelled drive, Kite had the sense of a place he already knew intimately springing into vibrant, three-dimensional life. He stepped out of the car and looked up at the house for the first time. He was surprised by the size and complexity of the building; it was even larger than he had imagined. The vast lime tree at the entrance concealed much of the southern facade and there were little iron tables, ceramic pots and plants in the nooks and crannies of the forecourt.
‘It’s beautiful, Papa,’ said Xavier, his voice sounding humbled and raw. Kite picked out the kitchen window to the west, the pool hut to the east through an opening in the garden wall. The paint on the wooden shutters of the master bedroom had faded and was slightly chipped. Cicadas were thrumming in the hills. Kite had heard this colossal, tropical sound in movies and songs, read about it in books by Wilbur Smith and Graham Greene, but was experiencing it in the real world for the first time.
‘It really is,’ Luc replied, putting his arm around his son in a rare moment of physical affection between them. ‘I think we’ll have fun here. Lockie, what do you think of it?’
‘Amazing,’ said Kite, seeing the ancient wooden front door for the first time, the giant oil jars flanking the entrance, the ravishing bougainvillea wilting in the August sun. ‘You say this belonged to your uncle?’
‘Great-uncle. He had no children. I guess I am the lucky one.’
‘You’re definitely that,’ Xavier muttered, and the intimacy between them vanished as quickly as it had come.
Luc opened the boot, releasing a blast of stuffy heat. Kite set the bags on the drive, carefully taking out his Gameboy so that both Luc and Xavier would see it. When switched on – the screen had been broken to make it look permanently damaged – the device would send a signal to a receiver in the grounds of the property allowing BOX 88 to listen in on any conversations taking place within a fifteen-metre radius of the microphone. Kite showed Xavier the damaged screen.
‘When did that happen?’ he asked.
‘Dropped it last night,’ he replied.
It was the latest of what he knew would become a thousand lies. Kite suddenly resented the cynical ingenuity of the Falcons and cursed the men who had come to the villa the day before and failed properly to rig the house for sight and sound. A stereo in the poolhouse. A lamp in the wrong bedroom. That was all they had managed, after months of preparation. It was mystifying. Surely they could have delayed the housekeeper coming back to the villa and not left Kite to pick up the pieces? Or had Carl lied and the lamp was yet another way of testing him?
‘Swim?’ Xavier asked.
Kite thought of the cool prospect of the water, of Martha arriving soon and diving in to join them. Carl’s words of advice were in his head: Make sure everyone else in the villa is downstairs, maybe outside taking a swim after the long drive. He recalled the rancid smell of the bins and was grateful when Xavier offered him a cigarette, breathing in the rich smell of the tobacco.
‘Don’t swim yet,’ Luc ordered. ‘Come inside first, put your bags in your rooms. See the place. Why do you have to smoke all the time? Put it out.’
Kite dutifully extinguished his cigare
tte after only a couple of puffs though Xavier defied his father and kept smoking as they followed him into the house. There was a large wooden table in the centre of the hall on which somebody had placed a vase of fresh flowers. The floor was a mosaic of faded brown tiles. On top of a baby grand piano in the southern corner were various framed photographs, including a black-and-white shot of Luc as a handsome teenager standing next to a man whom Kite assumed to be his great-uncle. Both of them looked cold-eyed and rather pleased with themselves. The walls of the hall were two-tone: below eye level, they had been painted a now-fading blue; above this was a broad band of pale cream plaster. The walls were adorned with several paintings that Kite did not remember seeing in the photographs shown to him by Peele. One was of a beautiful woman in a silk dress, done in the style of Renoir, another a watercolour of an orchard being worked by a farmer and his wife, seemingly in the early part of the century.
‘I remember this smell so well,’ said Luc, sounding uncharacteristically sensitive. ‘It is the smell of my childhood.’
They left the bags by the entrance and walked in a slow clockwise loop around the ground floor, beginning in the kitchen, where baguettes and bowls of tapenade had already been left out for supper and covered with net frames to ward off flies and wasps. A smell of cooked onions reminded Kite of the kitchen at Killantringan. The dining-room table next door was laid for eight, which made him wonder who else, apart from Eskandarian, would be joining them for dinner. Luc then led them outside via the large sitting room onto the terrace where Kite was supposed to leave the ghetto blaster. He immediately identified a socket behind one of the sofas which could provide a power source. A large backgammon board had been left out in the shade of the veranda. Kite looked back into the living room. He knew from memory that the next room was Luc’s office, then a connecting corridor leading to a smaller room identified as the place where the family would most likely relax and watch television. He was beginning to plot how he might go about moving the lamp.
‘The garden is spectacular, no?’ Luc announced. Kite wasn’t green-fingered, and Xavier didn’t appear to be listening, but his father carried on regardless. ‘Plumbago, oleander, wisteria, agapanthus.’ Each plant was identified in his thick French accent. ‘There is very little flowering at this time of year, perhaps only the hibiscus.’ It sounded as though he had memorised the names in order to impress them. ‘But what do you care? I didn’t care about gardens either, when I was your age.’ In French, he added: ‘One day you will understand and appreciate all this, Xavier. I hope anyway. At the moment you don’t consider it important.’ He switched back to English. ‘All you boys think about is wine and girls and cigarettes.’
‘Sounds a bit like you,’ Xavier replied. ‘I must be a chip off the old block, Papa. We have a lot in common.’
Luc’s mood darkened; he did not like to lose face in front of his son. He stepped back inside without responding. Xavier remained in the garden smoking the last of his cigarette, making knowing eye contact with Kite. It occurred to him that Luc was in some way jealous of his son, resentful of his quick wit and essential good nature. How else to explain the thinness of his skin whenever Xavier dared to tease or defy him?
‘Lockie!’
Luc was summoning Kite back into the house. Xavier nodded at him, indicating that he should go inside.
‘I’ll be two minutes,’ he said. ‘Really need to fart.’
Kite was still smiling at this as he made his way into the office. Luc was seated behind a vast teak desk, looking every inch the cat who got the cream.
‘Not bad, huh?’
‘Not bad,’ Kite replied. ‘What a great place to work.’ He clocked a fax machine in the corner, a record player by the window. He knew from his conversations with Peele and Strawson that they had been keen to rig the study: the bookcases and light fixtures, the skirting boards and fax machine, would all have made ideal locations for hidden microphones.
‘Perhaps,’ Luc replied flatly. ‘I prefer not to work on vacation though it is not always possible. I want to enjoy myself, but there is always something to do. I haven’t seen Ali in a long time.’
Right on cue, Hélène, the housekeeper who had disturbed the Falcons, walked into the room. A sharp-eyed, diminutive woman of at least sixty-five, she embraced Luc like a long-lost son, remarked on his good health and asked if Kite was Xavier. Luc laughed and quickly cleared up the confusion, summoning Xavier into the study. Kite had the strange, disconcerting sense that Luc had been embarrassed by Hélène’s mistake, as though Kite were too low-born, too poorly turned-out ever to be considered the son of Luc Bonnard. Xavier duly shook Hélène’s hand, then left his father talking to her as he joined Kite in the last of the rooms on the ground floor, the sitting room in the south-east corner. He was bemoaning the ‘ancient’ TV and the ‘shitty’ video recorder when Kite heard the low rumble of an approaching car and the crunch of gravel under tyres. The shutters in the room were closed against the heat. Xavier opened them with a flourish just as Rosamund switched off the engine on the Citroën.
‘Friends, Romans, countrywomen!’ he shouted through the window. Kite was behind him, nonchalantly staring out at the Citroën and waiting for his first glimpse of Martha. She eventually emerged from the back seat wearing tight denim jeans and a crop top that showed off her stomach. She was as striking as he remembered. She gazed up in awe at the house, immediately taking out a camera and firing off several shots of the entrance, dappled light cutting through the branches of the lime tree and falling on her face. Kite was mesmerised by the way she moved, such confidence and grace it was as if she was deliberately taunting the world with her self-assurance.
‘You’re not watching television, are you, darling?’ said Rosamund peering through the open window.
‘Course not, Mum. We’re doing drugs.’
It wasn’t a taunt that Lady Rosamund found particularly funny. Kite and Xavier lingered in the room as she and Luc unloaded the luggage from the Citroën, carrying it into the house. Kite could hear Martha talking to them, her voice already having a hypnotic effect on him. There was a turntable beside the television. He flicked through a stack of vinyl records, mostly jazz and classical, covers showing Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Dizzy Gillespie with his cheeks blown out. Xavier went through the drawers of an old armoire, finding a pack of cards, a bottle of white spirit, a rusted tin full of old centimes.
‘This guy just died, right?’ he asked, holding up the Karajan. With this many people in the house, he was wondering when he would ever get a clear opportunity to move the lamp.
‘No idea. Want to see upstairs?’
‘Sure.’
They bumped into Luc in the hall, Jacqui’s voice audible on the terrace at the back of the house. Kite didn’t want to seem to be rushing to the first bedroom. He waited for Luc and Xavier to pass him, then followed them upstairs.
‘Where are we all sleeping?’ Xavier asked.
‘I’ll show you,’ Luc replied abruptly. He was clearly still smarting from Xavier’s remark on the terrace. ‘There’s a cabin at the bottom of the garden but it has no roof yet, so we will all have to be in the house. There’s plenty of room. Lockie, do you want to be in here?’
He indicated the closed door of the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. Xavier opened it and coughed at a small eruption of dust. Kite immediately spotted a lamp on a low wooden table beside the bed identical to the picture Carl had shown him. It wasn’t as big as he had imagined, and noticeably newer than some of the other furniture in the room. The Falcons had either bought it recently or reconstituted an existing lamp from the house.
‘This looks great,’ he replied, slinging his bag on the ground. He assumed that Luc and Rosamund would be in the master bedroom across the corridor on the southern side of the house.
‘Xavier, you will be in here.’ Luc indicated a large bedroom at the end of the passage overlooking the terrace. Kite knew that three empty bedrooms remaine
d on the first floor and that there were two more above them in the attic. Would the girls be upstairs or would Eskandarian take that suite of rooms? If the Iranian was just across the corridor it would make switching the lamps much easier. Kite could walk across the passage in two strides and be back in his room within moments.
‘Nice,’ said Xavier, stretching out his arms in appreciation of the width and scale of his room. There was a huge double bed, a sofa beneath a large bay window, a door connecting to a sizeable en-suite bathroom. ‘Where’s Jacqui going?’
‘There are two bedrooms on the other side, above the nursery,’ Luc replied. ‘What my uncle used to call the nursery, anyway. The girls can go in there and share a bathroom.’ Kite’s heart sank. ‘Ali will need his privacy. I have put him in the attic. In the future, Jacqui can sleep there. Or you two can argue over this room and switch.’
‘No way,’ said Xavier. ‘Shotgun.’
‘You haven’t even seen the other rooms,’ his father replied. ‘How can you be so certain?’
Even this simple question was loaded with unnecessary malice. Xavier again caught Kite’s eye and shrugged, as if to say: ‘What did I do?’ They climbed the stairs to the attic, which was just as Kite had visualised: a cramped landing, with bedrooms on either side divided by a bathroom. He noticed that the smaller of the two rooms had been converted into a makeshift office with a modern desk and swivel chair. There was a single bed in the corner, but the sheets had not been made up. Eskandarian would presumably be sleeping in the other room. Kite looked around for a lamp and found one on top of a chest of drawers behind the door. It was small enough to switch with the light from his bedroom but not as modern in design as the one created by the Falcons. Kite walked across the landing and immediately spotted a button telephone beside Eskandarian’s bed. It hadn’t been in any of the photographs. Luc had probably had it wired in on the Iranian’s instructions. BOX 88 had been monitoring his phones and fax messages for several months, but neither Peele nor Strawson had mentioned anything to Kite about a phone line in the bedroom. So where to put the lamp? Near the phone, so that the Falcons could eavesdrop on any calls, or across the landing in the makeshift office, where perhaps Eskandarian would hold private meetings with visitors to the house? Kite wished that he could seek out Peele’s advice, but it was too late to walk over to the safe house. Besides, the switch had to be made before Eskandarian’s arrival.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 26