‘Rushdie also faces death, but at least he has the protection of the British government. At least he has the SAS or the MI5 to watch over him, to move him safely from house to house. We, on the other hand, can do nothing to escape the executioners sent to kill us. We can be abducted and tortured by agents of the Iranian government and not a soul will notice. The last person to be killed here on French soil, whose death merited a column in the newspapers of New York and London, was Gholam Oveissi, the commander of the shah’s army, shot dead on the streets of Paris beside his brother, five long years ago. People noticed this because the general was the last hope for the opposition groups who planned to overthrow the ayatollah, may he rot in hell. Oveissi was assassinated two days before he was due to fly to Turkey’s border with Iran and to lead our counter-revolution. Who tipped off the assassins? The Americans! MI6! Will they do so again, so that Shahpour Bakhtiar is also taken from us? You tell me, Mr Adam. You tell me.’
In a moment of distilled paranoia, Kite wondered if Bijan suspected that he was working for British intelligence. He was not familiar with the name Shahpour Bakhtiar, nor did he understand why Bijan assumed that he might be. The idea that MI6 were secretly siding with the government in Tehran against the exile community struck him as illogical, but he supposed anything was possible in the looking-glass world into which Peele and Strawson had thrust him.
‘I don’t know anything about any of this,’ he said.
‘Of course you don’t,’ Bijan replied, swallowing his espresso with a concise, practised flick of the wrist. ‘How could you know? But be assured, this is also happening in London. You are an intelligent person who lives his life with people who can eat at the best restaurants, who can afford to take their holidays in the South of France.’
‘With respect, you don’t know anything about me.’
‘Perhaps,’ Bijan replied. ‘And perhaps you do not care, Adam. But maybe you also want to help me.’
Kite realised that an offer of this kind had been brewing for some time, yet the question still caught him off guard.
‘Help you?’ he said. He experienced the disorientating sensation of falling into a trap. If Eskandarian or Abbas had grown suspicious of him and sent Bijan as a test of his loyalty, he must on no account agree to do anything for this man. He must leave the café as soon as possible and return to the beach.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just came here to read my book and have a coffee. I have to be getting back. My friends will be worried.’
To his surprise, Bijan raised no objection and pulled back his chair, allowing Kite the space in which to stand.
‘Of course, Adam,’ he said. ‘I understand. I will pay for your coffee.’
Kite readily accepted the offer, pleased to be released from the conversation, and watched as Bijan secured a ten-franc note under the ashtray.
‘You really don’t need to do that.’
‘It is my pleasure. I just wanted you to know the reality of what is going on in Iran, the reality of the man you play Frisbee with in the sunshine. Thank you for listening to me.’
‘You’ve certainly taught me a lot.’
Kite was almost at the door.
‘Please …’
He turned. Bijan was holding out a piece of paper.
‘Take this.’ The Iranian tried to stuff the piece of paper into Kite’s hand. ‘It is my telephone number. You can call me if you ever want to discuss these matters. I would like the opportunity to speak with Mr Eskandarian. You can make this possible, yes?’
Kite knew that he should keep the telephone number so that Peele could have it checked, but also that he should reject outright any possibility of a meeting or conversation ever taking place. There was still a chance that the whole thing was a charade orchestrated by Abbas to analyse his character, a test cooked up by BOX 88 to make sure that their golden boy was still on the right track.
‘I think it’s very unlikely,’ he said, pocketing the number. ‘I hardly know Mr Eskandarian. He’s friends with my hosts.’
‘Ask him,’ Bijan urged.
‘It was good to meet you,’ Kite replied, backing out of the door. ‘Thank you for the coffee. There’s really nothing I can do for you. I wish you good luck.’
41
Luc had given Jacqui money for a taxi. All the way back to the villa, Kite kept turning around to see if the same cars, the same number plates, kept repeating. If Bijan was following him, he was in trouble.
‘What’s the matter?’ Jacqui asked. It was cramped in the back seat. Xavier was in the front chatting to the driver about Mitterrand. ‘Why do you keep moving around?’
‘Sorry,’ Kite told her. ‘Got a pain in my back. Helps when I twist it out.’
Martha was beside him. She was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt and smelled of sun cream. There were tiny flakes of dried sea salt on her tanned thighs.
‘How did you hurt it?’ she asked.
‘Frisbee.’
He realised with frustration that the lie would prevent him from going for a run when he got back to the villa. Kite stared out of the window, working out his next move. Abbas already knew that he only ever went for a jog in the morning, not after several hours of swimming and playing Frisbee on a beach. Instead he would write a note to BOX, insert it in a packet of cigarettes, go for a smoke when he got back to the house and dead drop the packet on the wall.
As the driver indicated off the autoroute, Kite again turned in the back seat. Jacqui clicked her tongue. No car had followed them up the ramp. Two miles later, on the access road to the villa, Kite looked again. For theatrical effect, he winced slightly as he twisted. Martha said: ‘Poor you.’ Again there was no sign of a following car. If Bijan, or one of his associates, had attempted to follow the cab, they had surely failed.
‘Have a swim when you get back,’ she suggested. ‘Stretch it out. You’ll feel better.’
‘There’s no time,’ Jacqui replied. ‘We’re all going out. Dinner in some fancy nightclub Dad knows in Antibes. Mum said on the phone we have to get changed before seven. Apparently it’s a famous place, Kirk Douglas goes there.’
Back at the house Kite took a shower and had time to think more clearly. Perhaps reporting the details of his conversation with Bijan was not as pressing as he first thought. It could surely wait until morning. If he walked all the way to the bottom of the garden to have a smoke, it would look suspicious. Best just to hide Bijan’s phone number among his belongings and show it to Peele in the morning.
‘What are you wearing?’ Xavier shouted.
‘Fuck knows,’ Kite replied, coming out of the bathroom.
‘Language, Lockie, please.’
Rosamund had emerged from her room wearing a brown pencil skirt, two-inch white heels and a bright pink blouse bolstered by shoulder pads. He had never encountered a woman of his mother’s generation with so much money and such good looks who dressed so disastrously. Behind her, enjoying his reflection in a floor-length mirror, was Luc, his Gekko hair oiled back, a pale blue shirt opened to the solar plexus. Kite turned around. Xavier was making the final touches to his Mud Club uniform of ripped blue jeans, white T-shirt and black leather jacket.
‘I see George Michael will be joining us again tonight,’ he said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Xavier replied. ‘Very funny.’
‘You gotta have faith,’ Kite sang, and went into his room singing the chorus of the song, Xavier’s protests a faint murmur behind the closing door.
Kite dressed quickly, conscious of the meagreness of his own wardrobe, tonight comprised of a pair of Levi 501s, a navy blue sports jacket and a paisley shirt which had the potential to put Martha off him for the rest of her life. Flinging it back into his suitcase, he played it safe, recycling a button-down shirt from Gap which he refreshed with a spray of Right Guard after a quick sniff of the armpits.
‘Leaving in five minutes, everyone!’ Rosamund called out from the hall. ‘Wheels turning.’
Kite heard the
same clatter of ice cubes which had heralded the arrival of Eskandarian two nights earlier. He quickly dried his hair on a towel, reaching for a tub of radioactively green Boots hair gel which he applied in a dollop to the fringe. By the time he had left his room, his hairstyle could be plausibly compared to a photograph Kite had seen of River Phoenix in Arena magazine. This was suddenly all that mattered. He wanted to look good for Martha.
She was already outside, waiting to get into the Mercedes wearing an off-the-shoulder blue dress that caused Kite almost to lose his footing when he saw her. She must have been aware of the effect she was having because even Luc and Eskandarian were staring at her in barely suppressed awe. Rosamund knew it too and offered Martha a pale pink pashmina ‘to cover your shoulders, darling’. Xavier emerged from the house smoking a cigarette and holding the black leather jacket over his shoulder like a male model prowling on a catwalk.
‘Will you be my father figure, Xav?’ Martha asked. Hana came out seconds later in a vanishingly tight black miniskirt, received the gasps she had doubtless been hoping for – including a gobsmacked ‘Jesus’ from Xavier – and climbed into Eskandarian’s Audi. Within a few minutes they had all left the house, Alain waving them off with a rake in one hand and a Gitane in the other.
‘What’s the deal with Hana?’ Xavier asked his father from the back seat of the Mercedes.
Kite was in the front trying to find a decent song on French radio.
‘Which one of your hits do you want to hear tonight, George?’ he asked. ‘“Careless Whisper”? “Club Tropicana”?’
‘She’s not allowed into Iran,’ Luc replied in French, talking across Kite’s joke. ‘Not dressed like that, anyway!’ He laughed as he indicated onto the autoroute. ‘They meet up when Ali is travelling. She’s nice, no?’
‘Bit young for him?’
Kite knew that Xavier was interested in her. At the beach his friend had said that Hana kept flirting with him whenever Eskandarian’s back was turned.
‘Seriously, man. By the pool, over dinner. Always catching my eye. She’s trouble. Not getting enough attention from the ayatollah. What am I supposed to do? Ignore that?’
‘Yes!’ Kite had told him firmly, and not solely because Xavier getting off with Eskandarian’s girlfriend had the potential to jeopardise his mission. He didn’t want his friend landing on the wrong side of Ali or, come to that, for Hana to be found at the bottom of the Mediterranean wearing a pair of cement boots fitted for her by Abbas. ‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Ignore that. She’s taken. You mess with her, you’re messing with the Iranians. Look what they did to Rushdie and that was just for writing a book.’
The Antibes nightclub was another place to which the Bonnard family had taken Kite – like the Farm Club in Verbier, the Royal Opera House for a performance of Swan Lake, the dining room at Claridge’s for Xavier’s eighteenth birthday – which he would never otherwise have experienced without their generosity. Luc had reserved a table in a lavish upstairs restaurant where, for the second time that day, his guests were treated to superb wines and exquisite French cuisine. It was Kite’s habit to compare the dishes on the menu – Poitrine de Veau Confite et Farcie aux Légumes du Soleil, Poupetons de Fleurs de Courge au Saumon Nappés, L’Abricot des Vergers de Provence – with their feeble equivalents on the menu at Killantringan: Soup of the Day, ‘Skipper’s Choice’ Seafood Pancake, Apple Crumble. Spending time in the South of France, shuttling between his bedroom and the swimming pool, drinking wine at outdoor cafés and flirting with Martha in five-star restaurants – he had begun to worry that he was being offered a final glimpse of a life which would soon be torn away from him. Xavier was going on a gap year and they would likely lose touch for a while, particularly if Kite went to Edinburgh or continued to work for BOX 88. Neither of them were enthusiastic letter-writers and it had never been Kite’s style to telephone his friends when he was at home in Scotland. As for Martha, she had another year at school in London: whatever happened between them in the next few days, if anything, would likely only be a summer fling before she returned to her older men with their credit cards and Alfa Romeo Spiders, old Alfordians with trust funds who could afford to whisk her away to cosy country house hotels or to New York for a dirty weekend. He had to make some money; not just to impress Martha, but so that he could continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which the Bonnards had introduced him.
The nightclub beneath the restaurant was an even starker demonstration of a world Kite had only dreamed about or seen in Hollywood movies. Extraordinarily beautiful women were seated at tables with impeccably turned out French and Italian plutocrats treating them to flutes of champagne and bottles of Bandol rosé. Although nobody in the Bonnard group looked out of place in such an environment, Kite accepted that his button-down Gap shirt and scruffy denim jeans were the clothes of an impoverished interloper. It was Eskandarian, of all people, who seemed to sense his discomfort, approaching Kite at the bar and offering to buy him a drink while Abbas looked on.
‘I feel as amazed as you look, Lockie!’ he said. ‘Can you believe this club? In Tehran we do not have such places.’
Kite thought of Bijan’s words – If you were a young man living in Iran today, you would be forbidden to attend such parties – and tried to hide his disquiet. He could not square what Bijan had told him with the ebullient, liberal, westernised man now buying him a vodka and tonic in an exclusive Antibes nightclub. Surely if he was seen in this place – if Abbas, for example, reported him to whoever it was that policed the moral behaviour of Iran’s citizens back home – he would be denounced by Rafsanjani and the new regime? Or was it simply a case of rank hypocrisy, that Eskandarian was part of an elite who behaved as they pleased, creaming off the top of a corrupt society while millions of others existed in miserable poverty?
‘Are you enjoying your holiday, Lockie?’
It was hard to hear Eskandarian’s question over Grace Jones singing ‘La Vie En Rose’, but Kite nodded enthusiastically and said: ‘Yeah, oui, yeah’, telling himself that this was his first proper opportunity to make an impression on Eskandarian. ‘It’s my first time in Antibes. Yours? Luc said you’ve travelled quite a lot …’
‘You are right, Lockie. This is correct. I have travelled widely. I was living in France twelve years ago. I still get to go to a lot of places because of my work.’
Kite wanted to say, or if necessary shout: ‘What work exactly?’ but it was too direct. Instead he allowed Eskandarian to question him about his own background, describing life at the hotel and his mother’s career as a model in the 1960s.
‘And your father? What does he do?’
Eskandarian was standing with his back to the dance floor holding a glass of champagne. Kite was leaning against the bar with his vodka and tonic. He had no hesitation in using his father’s death to win Eskandarian’s sympathy and told him that he had died several years earlier. His words had an immediate impact on the Iranian, who placed a hand on Kite’s shoulder and offered his sincerest condolences.
‘I also lost my father some time ago,’ he said. ‘To the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police. But we will not talk of this now, not on this happier occasion. All that I will say is that you seem to be a very polite, very intelligent young man and that your father would be proud of you.’
Kite was buoyed by the compliment and felt his fondness for Eskandarian growing ever stronger, even as he made a mental note to tell Peele that the SAVAK had killed his father. I am not who you think I am, he thought. You shouldn’t trust me or compliment me. He was surprised to feel exhilarated, rather than ashamed of his own duplicity, and thanked Eskandarian for his kind words.
‘So you don’t go dancing in Tehran?’ he asked.
The Iranian cast his eyes out onto the packed dance floor. Jacqui and Hana were standing opposite one another, drunkenly miming the playing of trumpets at the start of ‘Sledgehammer’.
‘It is a religious society,’ he replied, turning back to face Kite. ‘O
r rather, I should say it has become a religious society. The government does not tolerate western music like this, however much some of us may enjoy it.’
Eskandarian conveyed with an expression of wry amusement that he counted himself among this group of people. Out of the corner of his eye, Kite saw Xavier sidling onto the dance floor.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, shouting over the song.
‘Let’s discuss it another time,’ Eskandarian replied, placing the same hand on the same part of Kite’s shoulder. Kite was worried that he was being brushed off. ‘These things are too complicated for nightclubs. Isn’t this the Peter Gabriel song with the famous video? On MTV?’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he replied, intrigued that Eskandarian should know such a thing. ‘Brilliant video. So are you going to dance?’
Eskandarian shook his head, stepped across Kite and tried to attract the barman’s attention. As he did so, Kite saw to his horror that Xavier had put his arm around Hana’s waist and was pulling her close. They looked sensational together: the handsome young man in jeans and a crisp white T-shirt, the beautiful Vietnamese woman moving sinuously beside him. Kite could lip-read both of them singing ‘I wanna be your sledgehammer’ and noted the delight in Hana’s face as Xavier spun her around. If Eskandarian turned from the bar, he would see them. Doubtless Abbas, sitting alone in a booth by the entrance, was clocking the whole thing. With Eskandarian ordering another bottle of champagne, Kite somehow managed to catch Xavier’s attention and warned him with a glance. His friend instantly moved towards his sister, leaving Hana dancing alone. She waved towards Eskandarian, shouting ‘Join me, baby!’ as the Iranian at last turned to face her. The disc jockey eased into ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ and Kite tapped Eskandarian on the shoulder.
‘Scottish band!’ he shouted.
‘What’s that, Lockie?’
‘Simple Minds. The band playing this song. They’re Scottish. You should dance.’
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 31