They walked into the village. Kite and Martha had their first proper conversation, discussing Dangerous Liaisons, which she had seen at a cinema in St John’s Wood. He had the sense that she was assessing him, biding her time and working out if Lachlan Kite was worthy of her attention or just another drooling old Alfordian who couldn’t keep his eyes off her. At a café in the main square, Xavier bought a round of drinks and began to flirt with her, making jokes which Martha found funny and mentioning the various clubs and parties he had been to in London where they might have crossed paths. Kite remained mostly silent. Xavier finished his first vodka and tonic within five minutes and ordered a second while the others nursed glasses of beer and wine in the fading sun. Kite was half-expecting to catch sight of Rita or Strawson in the village, but there was no sign of them. He assumed that they were settling into the safe house, finding out if Eskandarian had landed safely in Paris, checking the sound feed from the lamp. He was worried about the stereo. He had to find a way of moving it up to the house so that it would relay conversations from the terrace, but it seemed likely that Xavier and the girls would insist on keeping it down by the pool so that there was music to listen to during the days. Kite could hardly move it back to the terrace every night after dark. That would look suspicious.
By the time Rosamund found them at the café and said it was time to go home, Xavier had knocked back three vodka and tonics and taken a surreptitious swig of the absinthe from Martha’s bag. Kite looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. If Eskandarian’s flights were on time, he would be landing in Cannes at any moment. Climbing into the front seat of the Mercedes and exchanging pleasantries with Rosamund, he felt as though he was going back to work at the hotel: there was the same sense of impending pressure and responsibility. Yet he was surprised to discover that he relished this feeling. He was looking forward to meeting Eskandarian, just as he was keen to see Peele and Strawson in the morning and to receive his next set of instructions.
‘Someone’s breath absolutely stinks of alcohol,’ said Rosamund, driving down the hill from Mougins.
‘Sorry, might be mine,’ said Kite, covering his mouth. He wanted to look good in front of Martha by taking the hit for Xavier. ‘I should stick to Coke.’
A snigger in the back seat, a stagey sigh from Jacqui. The rest of the journey passed in silence and they were back at the villa within five minutes. Turning through the gates of the house, Kite looked to the west and tried to work out which of the several houses along the road was ‘Cassava’, the property rented by BOX 88. In the morning he would set off on his run and find out. He needed to prioritise what Peele and Strawson would want to hear so soon after Eskandarian’s arrival. He had to identify something that these men of age and experience did not already know.
Back in the house, everybody went to their respective rooms to wash and change for dinner. Somebody, presumably Hélène, had opened the window and closed the shutters in Kite’s room. Peele had not anticipated this. If Kite at any point left a red T-shirt on the windowsill as a signal, only for Hélène to move it and close the window, the signal would not be seen. He had brought two T-shirts which were now effectively useless for the purpose of communicating with BOX 88. He trusted that Peele would come up with an alternative system in the morning.
Kite showered and returned to his room. He could tell by the atmosphere in the house – the smells emanating from the kitchen, the sense of people hurrying back and forth, the sound of ice cubes being dropped into a bucket in the hall – that Eskandarian was expected at any moment; it was only a short journey from the airport to Mougins.
‘Smoke?’ Xavier asked, sticking his head round Kite’s door.
He was wearing a pale blue button-down shirt and smelled of shower gel. They went outside and walked down to the pool. Mosquitoes were swimming in the lights, but Xavier had brought a spray repellent which he told Kite to apply to his arms and neck.
‘They get the munchies,’ he said. ‘Vicious bastards.’
He took out a lump of hash and proceeded to crumble it into a joint.
‘You smuggle that over on the plane?’ Kite asked.
Xavier shook his head. ‘Paris.’
When they had been sitting in the Marais, a young African man had approached their table with a whispered offer of cannabis. Xavier had disappeared to the bathroom moments later; that was when they had done the deal.
‘Might be shit shit,’ he said, pronouncing the second ‘shit’ like ‘sheet’. ‘Only one way to find out.’
It was perfectly good, though not particularly strong. They shared the joint, then Xavier rolled another. With Eskandarian’s arrival imminent, Kite was wary of getting too stoned and left Xavier to smoke the bulk of it. Soon his friend was looking out at the silhouetted hills from a deckchair by the pool, quietly singing chunks of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in a mood of disconnected sadness which unnerved Kite.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
He suspected that Xavier was troubled by something but unable or unwilling to articulate what it might be.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said, mumbling the words of Bob Dylan as he drew on a cigarette. ‘Do you ever hear from Billy Peele?’
Kite’s senses had been slightly slowed by the joint. The question jolted him back to full sobriety.
‘Not since we left,’ he replied, wondering why Xavier had chosen this, of all moments, to confront him. He tried to sound relaxed as he said: ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I was just thinking about him. He was one of the good ones. You’ll still be friends, no?’
‘As much as you can be friends with a beak.’ He needed to ascertain where was this coming from. Why was Xavier suddenly so interested in Peele? Had he seen them together in Hampstead? Kite said: ‘I doubt we’ll stay in touch.’
‘Shame.’
Kite studied his friend’s face in the darkness but found no trace of irony or hidden meaning. It was perfectly possible that Peele’s name had surfaced in Xavier’s consciousness for innocent reasons. They stood up and walked towards the pool. Hélène’s elderly husband, Alain, had switched on the underwater lights. The surface looked eerily white and cloudy.
‘We should try and have a pint with Billy when we get back,’ Kite offered, remembering Peele’s entreaty never to embellish a lie. He should have let the subject drop. Xavier gave a long sigh, seemingly having already lost all interest in the subject and said ‘Nah, fuck it’ before losing his footing and stumbling on a paving stone near the water’s edge.
‘Easy.’
‘I’m fine. No problem.’
He began to sing again – ‘My senses are stripped, hands can’t feel or grip …’ – chopping up the words and misquoting lines from the song with the same detached air of melancholy as before. Kite wondered if he had had an argument with his mother or father, both of whom kept a sharp eye on Xavier’s drinking. He was about to ask him when a set of headlights appeared in the distance. Kite followed their progress along the road. After three hundred metres the vehicle turned into the Bonnards’ drive. This was surely Eskandarian.
‘Looks like the ayatollah’s here,’ Xavier confirmed. A car door slammed. Kite couldn’t see what was going on at the house – it was almost dark and there were trees and hedgerows blocking the view – but Luc’s voice was audible on the drive. Kite heard the booming, joyous laughter of the Iranian as he greeted his friend, then Rosamund saying ‘Ali! Welcome!’
‘What’s he like?’ Kite asked.
‘Can’t remember.’ Xavier looked back at the pool as if he had forgotten something. ‘Haven’t seen him for years.’ There was a moment’s hesitation, then: ‘Actually, that’s not true. I saw him in London about two years ago. My father does business with him.’
‘What kind of business?’
Kite was working, mining his friend for answers. Strawson and Peele hadn’t mentioned a business relationship between Luc and Eskandarian. Xavier’s response was oddly aggressive, as if he disapproved of whatever was goi
ng on between them.
‘I dunno. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Ask him about sanctions. Ask him: “Aren’t there supposed to be sanctions with Iran?”’
‘What are you talking about?’
Kite had stumbled on something potentially of interest to BOX. Xavier put his arm across his back and let his weight fall on him.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘It’s all good. All kosher. Luc Bonnard is a fine man, not a bad man.’ He switched to French and said: ‘Daddy never puts a foot wrong.’
Eskandarian was not quite what Kite had expected. Courtesy of Strawson and Peele, he had seen several photographs of his quarry: corporate mugshots, as well as a video of a speech Eskandarian had given at a conference in Munich. In all these, he was modest in appearance and conservatively dressed. Kite was half-expecting to come face to face with a kind of Persian Obi-Wan Kenobi, a pious holy man dressed in long robes similar to the Muslim elders he had seen emerging from mosques in Ealing and Uxbridge Road. Instead he was confronted by a tanned, jovial Middle Eastern man wearing designer jeans and brown suede loafers. An enormous Rolex glinted on his wrist and there was a Ralph Lauren logo on the chest of Eskandarian’s spotlessly pressed Polo shirt.
‘Ali, this is Xavier’s friend, Lockie.’
Eskandarian scrunched his face up at the name, as thousands of others had done throughout the course of Kite’s life.
‘Lockie? OK. What is that short for?’
There was a slight American intonation to Eskandarian’s accent. They were shaking hands, the grip firm, the eye contact warm. Was this a man capable of coordinating mass murder?
‘It’s from Lachlan,’ he said. ‘Spelled with an “a”. I’m Scottish. North of the border it’s Lack, everywhere else people call me Locklan or Lockie.’
Eskandarian mimed a baffled confusion.
‘Then I think I will stick to Lockie!’ he said. ‘Very good to meet you, young man. And where is Master Xavier?’
Right on cue, Xavier stumbled into the hall behind Kite, his eyes slightly bloodshot, his grin at once wary and provocative, as if he knew that it was impolite to be drunk and stoned in front of his father’s distinguished guest, but that he didn’t much care. Eskandarian was evidently a man of the world and instantly understood that Luc’s son had enjoyed one too many. He made short shrift of the introduction, avoiding commonplace adult remarks about how much Xavier had grown, embraced him briefly, said that he was grateful to have been invited to spend time with the Bonnard family, and invited Rosamund to show him to his room.
It worried Kite that he warmed to Eskandarian on first impression. Without a father of his own, he knew that he had a tendency to lionise older men; he was supposed to be maintaining focus, reporting back to BOX everything he saw and heard about Eskandarian, not what he felt or wanted to believe about him. Kite could feel the after-effects of the hashish, a slow, mellow cloud pillowing his senses as he walked outside to clear his head.
A man in a black suit was pulling suitcases out of an Audi Quattro. Kite assumed that he was a taxi driver, but as the man turned around, he spotted a handgun holstered inside his jacket. Eskandarian had brought a bodyguard. Kite raised a hand in greeting but was ignored. A second vehicle with a taxi light on its roof was coming down the drive. The Bonnards hadn’t mentioned any other guests coming for dinner, but Luc instantly appeared from inside the house to greet the new arrival. Kite was conscious that he was standing around to no real purpose. He lit a cigarette to give himself something to do, keeping his eyes on the taxi. The driver opened the back door. An astonishingly beautiful Asian woman in her late twenties stepped out in high heels and a figure-clinging black dress.
‘You must be Hana,’ said Luc, addressing her warmly in French. ‘Welcome. Ali is upstairs.’
Strawson and Peele had said nothing about a girlfriend turning up, but she was too provocatively dressed to be a secretary. The woman, who appeared to be of Thai or Vietnamese origin, handed the taxi driver a clutch of francs as he unloaded her suitcase from the boot. When Luc introduced her to Kite, Hana offered him a soft, warm hand and a slightly patronising smile before going inside. She was obviously keen to be reunited with Eskandarian.
‘Who’s that?’ Kite asked.
Luc gave him a seedy man-to-man wink. ‘Special friend of Ali’s from Nice. She’ll be staying with us for a few days.’
Kite was not naive. He assumed Hana had been paid for. He had seen adverts for prostitutes at the back of the International Herald Tribune but couldn’t conceive that Lady Rosamund Penley would countenance having a high-class hooker in the house. Luc mistook his silence for young lust and commented on her beauty.
‘Incredible-looking woman.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kite, preferring Martha in every way. ‘She’s … exotic.’
Luc went back inside, leaving Kite alone with the bodyguard. They did not acknowledge one another. It was as though Kite were standing on one side of a wall and the man in the black suit on the other. To his surprise, the bodyguard opened Hana’s suitcase and quickly searched it, like a security guard at an airport. Kite caught sight of a black lace bra and felt a pang of lust. He turned and looked up towards the first-floor windows. Martha was billeted in the furthest of the two bedrooms with a view over the swimming pool. The light in her window was visible as a narrow glow seeping through closed shutters. He extinguished the cigarette in an old oil jar by the door and introduced himself to the bodyguard.
‘I’m Lockie,’ he said, indicating Hana’s suitcase. ‘Can I help you with that?’
He might as well have been addressing the brick wall which moments earlier had been separating them in Kite’s imagination. The bodyguard said nothing. He did not offer a name, a hand to shake nor any sense of gratitude for Kite’s offer. For reasons which he couldn’t properly explain to himself, Kite had expected somebody friendly and easy-going, a retired policeman from Isfahan with a pot belly and a few funny stories. He hadn’t anticipated that the guard would be at least a decade younger than Eskandarian, fit and strong and pitiless. He was unshaven and looked so tired that the bags under his eyes were slightly yellow in appearance. The underlying menace in his face was unsettling. He grunted as he picked up the case and carried it into the house. Out of some dark recess in his memory, Kite thought of the cassette recorder smuggled onto Pan Am 103.
‘How’s it going down there?’
Martha was leaning out of the window. She had put her hair up and was wearing a necklace of pale stones that showed off her tanned neck.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘You two ready for dinner?’
‘Looks like you are,’ she said, and Kite didn’t know how to take the remark. It was almost as if she knew how important the meal was going to be in terms of his first engagement with Eskandarian.
‘Ali just got here,’ he said. ‘And his special friend.’
‘Special friend?’ Martha asked, lowering her voice to a stage whisper.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come down and have a drink. I’ll explain everything.’
39
Kite did not get to sleep until four o’clock the following morning. The dinner finished by midnight, but Xavier kept him up by the pool, smoking the rest of the hash, working his way through half the duty-free Jim Beam, smoking cigarettes whenever he wasn’t drawing on a joint and singing Leonard Cohen songs to the quiet, shuttered neighbourhood. Martha and Jacqui had followed Eskandarian and Hana to bed, pleading tiredness after the long drive from Paris. The bodyguard – whose name turned out to be Abbas – had taken the room across the hall from Kite. Luc attended to what he called ‘some business’ in his office, then joined Rosamund upstairs. Kite had craved sleep, not solely so that he could avoid waking up with a hangover, but because he was genuinely tired. Yet he felt that he could not abandon Xavier, both out of a sense of friendship but also to avoid arousing his suspicion.
He had set an alarm for seven-thirty, having agreed
with Strawson and Peele that he would appear at the house at eight o’clock on the first morning. He woke with an ice-pick headache and stumbled downstairs in search of food and water. He found Hélène in the kitchen with a basket of fresh pastries and several baguettes. She gave him a pain au chocolat and a bottle of Badoit. The pastry was still warm. Kite took them back to his room and changed into his running gear. Heading back downstairs, he passed Rosamund coming in the opposite direction.
‘You’re up early,’ she said.
Kite was aware that he looked bleary-eyed and probably stank of booze and cigarettes.
‘Yeah. Couldn’t get back to sleep,’ he said.
‘Really? But you were both so late to bed.’ She allowed Kite to absorb the fact that she had heard them coming in from the pool in the dead of night. ‘I thought I heard an alarm clock.’
Kite was hyped up and keen to reach the safe house but needed to find an adequate excuse to explain the alarm.
‘I stupidly forgot to switch it off,’ he said. ‘Woke me up ten minutes ago. I’m off for a run.’
‘Very American of you to go jogging, Lockie. But I suppose if it helps clear your head …’
Kite had never been able to work out whether or not Rosamund liked him. She had the habit he had noticed in posh English women of treating everyone she met with the same bland courtesy and studied warmth, as though people were best held at arm’s length and inspected carefully for traps and flaws.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 28