Box 88 : A Novel (2020)

by Cumming, Charles

  ‘We have become the wrong country,’ he said. ‘Iran today is not where I hoped she would be. It’s strange that we are having this conversation when it is something Luc and I have also been discussing continually since I arrived in France. We both feel – looking at Iran from the inside and from the perspective of a foreigner – that my country has not yet emerged with full maturity from the Revolution of ten years ago.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kite asked. He did not want to seem too interested in what Eskandarian was saying, for fear of arousing his suspicion, but nor could he afford to appear indifferent. It was a question of balance. He knew that Eskandarian thought of him as a bright, intelligent young man, that he was intrigued by his Alford education and doubtless imagined that both he and Xavier would go on to lead interesting, fruitful lives. It was this that Kite needed to amplify, acting older than he was, playing the curious student sitting at the knee of the great man, listening intently as he imparted his pearls of wisdom.

  ‘I mean that when I was living in France, when I first met Luc, Iran was a broken society. How much do you know of my country, its history, apart from what you hear about Mr Rushdie?’

  ‘Very little,’ Kite replied, remembering something Strawson had told him in London. Eskandarian won’t even notice you. You’re too young to be taken seriously.

  ‘So I will tell you.’ Eskandarian lit a cigarette of his own and briefly glanced out of the window. ‘I lived in Tehran as a young man, when I was not much older than you are now. My friends and I went to discotheques, to cinemas. We could watch American films starring Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway. She was my favourite. But I was one of the lucky ones. My family had money. They were what we call bazaaris, merchants. We lived well. My uncle drove an American car. He even owned a washing machine which had been made in West Germany!’ Kite saw that he was expected to be amazed by this, so he said: ‘Wow.’ Eskandarian carefully tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘However, a great many people in the Iranian population did not live like this. They existed in poverty. Children went around in rags. Some survived on not much more than bread and a little salt. They watched the shah and his advisers, his foreign friends and American backers, gorging themselves on the best food, the finest wines, the most beautiful women, and they could do nothing about it. It was said that the shah was so ignorant of his country’s many problems because he saw us only from the air, from an aeroplane or a helicopter. He never came down long enough to be with his own people. I came from this same world of privilege, Lockie, but in my youth I rejected it. I knew that Iran had to change. So I came to France, I followed the activities of the Imam in Paris, I was lucky enough to meet members of his circle. I trusted them, and they trusted me. You have heard of Gandhi?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Kite replied.

  ‘So it is no exaggeration to say that I thought of the Imam as a man with the potential to be the Gandhi of Iran. The Revolution, in which I played a willing part, a revolution in which I still believe, promised Iranians a total break with the chaos and injustice of the past. The shah had promised to make Iran the fifth largest economy in the world. He promised “Prosperity for All”. Instead, he enriched himself on bribes and kickbacks while his people starved and suffered. The rural poor were illiterate. They lived in clay huts without electricity or running water where the only warmth – in a country rich in oil and natural gas! – came from burning dried cow manure. Can you believe such a thing, when other countries at this time could put a man in space, a man on the moon? We believed in freedom of the press, freedom of speech. A government of the people, for the people. Revenues from oil would pay for free electricity, free water, free telephone calls. These were our dreams! I knew that there were problems, that we were Persians, not Arabs, that we should not allow Islam to become too closely entwined with the business of government, but I was young like you and surrounded by men who convinced me of these things. I was a dreamer! Am I boring you, Lachlan?’

  Kite almost jumped out of his seat, wondering how on earth Eskandarian could have reached such a conclusion.

  ‘Definitely not!’ he said, hoping to God, to Allah, to whatever deity Peele and Carl believed in, that the lamp was beaming every word of his conversation with Eskandarian to the listening post less than a mile from where they were seated.

  ‘Good,’ Eskandarian replied. ‘You don’t look bored! I just like to check. Sometimes the younger generation has no interest in politics, you know? Why would you want to listen to an Iranian businessman going on about the good and the bad things in his country? I have a habit of taking advantage of the young, trying out ideas on them that it would be – how can I express this – too risky to express to my friends and colleagues at home. I can only speak to the likes of you and Luc about it. Hana has no interest!’

  ‘What kind of ideas?’ Kite asked. He was aware that he was slouching. He pulled himself up on the sofa. ‘Does Luc have some ideas on Iran?’

  It was the first slip he had made, demonstrating what might have been interpreted – both by Eskandarian and by Peele across the road – as an unusual interest in Luc’s attitudes. Thankfully Eskandarian did not seem to interpret it as such. Indeed, in his response there was a faint suggestion of a disagreement between the two men which Eskandarian was keen to skirt over.

  ‘We discuss a great many things. Luc, as you know, is a businessman with a wealth of experience.’ Was he hinting at a darker, more complex relationship? ‘We are old friends. We talk candidly.’

  ‘What did you mean about Iran becoming the wrong sort of country?’ Kite was trying to sound concerned and touchingly naive in equal measure. ‘Is Bijan right? That the Revolution has ended up hurting people?’

  Eskandarian hesitated. On the one hand he appeared to be in the mood to hold a frank and honest conversation, but on the other he was a citizen of the Iranian state, an adviser to its president, a government-sponsored official trained to avoid saying or doing anything that might be interpreted as treasonous, even if his only audience was a harmless eighteen-year-old boy.

  ‘It is certainly the case that elements within the state wanted to sustain the Revolution, to give it a religious character, an Islamic character, and they have done this by limiting freedom of expression, to a certain extent.’

  Kite knew that this was baloney and tried to extract a fuller answer.

  ‘You mean women?’

  ‘Women, yes. But this is hardly new in Islam, Lockie! I for one do not believe that women should be allowed to walk around the streets looking like Madonna!’

  You hypocrite, he thought, wondering how Eskandarian squared this view with Hana’s micro miniskirts, her figure-hugging black dresses, her suitcase full of lingerie and French perfumes. Eskandarian must have sensed his surprise because he added: ‘Of course over here it is different. In the nightclubs of Antibes, on the streets of Paris. In Iran it is preferred that such expressions of fashion be made privately, in the home.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kite smirked encouragingly. He thought of the faces of the young women killed on Pan Am 103. ‘So what Bijan said is true? In fact you yourself even talked about this last night in the club. That you don’t have discos in Iran. You can’t listen to the sort of music we heard in Antibes or played on the terrace last night?’

  Eskandarian smiled uneasily. Kite stubbed out his cigarette and wondered if he was being too pushy. He wanted to extract as much useful information as possible, but he was also keen to put on a good show for the Falcons. He recalled Peele’s advice: Play the innocent schoolboy. See if he confirms or denies what Bijan told you or lands somewhere in the middle. How could he keep Eskandarian talking without seeming to be too critical of his political views? The idea was to get the Iranian to trust him, not to make him think that Lachlan Kite was a pious bore.

  ‘Music is available,’ Eskandarian replied. ‘We can listen to it in our homes. But what this man Bijan said about people being stoned or whipped for these offences is nonsense.’


  ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ Kite made a face and rolled his eyes. ‘He sounded a bit deranged. Said the ayatollah was assassinating exiles in Paris and London, that his life was in danger.’

  ‘Such rubbish!’ Eskandarian again looked out of the window, as if the distant hills would offer him respite from Kite’s misapprehensions. A wood pigeon echoed in the garden. ‘All revolutions take time to bear fruit,’ he continued quickly. ‘Look at France after 1789! In our case, the Iranian state has developed at the expense of the public. This is true. A battle of ideas is taking place between religious figures in Tehran and what you might call technocrats like myself, republicans who have a slightly different view of the country’s future. But to say that my countrymen are murderers, well this is nonsense.’

  Kite did not fully understand what Eskandarian had said about republicans and technocrats, partly because he was concentrating so hard on what he might ask next. Peele and Strawson would be able to extract a fuller, more contextualised meaning from what Eskandarian was saying. Kite’s job was just to keep him talking.

  ‘Are you in danger here?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?!’ Eskandarian inflated his chest, squared his shoulders and smiled broadly in a display of mock courage. ‘No, of course not. Don’t you worry, Lockie!’ He picked up a sheaf of papers from the desk and tapped them into a neat, square pile. ‘Of course there are allies of the shah, his followers and admirers, who wish to see Iran return to the bad old days. And why not? They were getting very rich while millions starved! Men like this Bijan hold men like Ali Eskandarian responsible for the collapse of their dreams. He saw me on the beach in Cannes – perhaps somebody in his network recognised me at the airport – and he decided to resort to desperate measures. I am sorry that he filled your head with lies and propaganda. I have also read Papillon and I can tell you it is a much better story than the one Bijan related to you!’

  Kite smiled a crocodile smile, beginning to feel that Eskandarian was trying to wriggle off the hook.

  ‘But you need Abbas,’ he said, pointing towards Abbas’s bedroom. ‘You need a bodyguard.’

  ‘This is just for show!’ Eskandarian gave another puffed-up, sweeping gesture of omniscience. ‘Who is to say that Abbas is not keeping an eye on me, eh? Protecting me from myself!’ The Iranian broke into uproarious laughter. Kite played along, still as far away from knowing what, if anything, Eskandarian was up to in France.

  ‘Well I definitely hope that no harm comes to you,’ he replied. ‘It’s been so interesting meeting you and spending time with you here at the house—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Eskandarian replied. ‘I have also very much enjoyed meeting you and Martha, seeing Jacqui and Xavier again after so long.’ A sudden seriousness came over him. He leaned forward. ‘He drinks too much, no?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Kite gave an equivocal shrug. He didn’t want anything on tape that would make him sound disloyal or lead to concerns about Xavier.

  ‘Tell me.’ Eskandarian offered Kite another cigarette, which he declined. ‘Did Bijan ask you to contact him? Did he give you a telephone number, an address?’

  ‘No.’ The lie sat as easily inside Kite as smoke from a cigarette. ‘No number, no address.’

  Eskandarian pondered this for a moment. ‘So he just left you alone, you walked out of the café?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  What was the exact nature of Eskandarian’s concern? Was he worried that Bijan had followed the taxi back to the villa? Kite was hardly in a position to be able to put the Iranian’s mind at rest.

  They were interrupted by a noise on the stairs. Abbas appeared on the landing and peered into the room. He seemed both surprised and annoyed that Kite had penetrated the inner sanctum. Eskandarian said something to him in Farsi. Abbas stared at Kite, mumbled something and went back downstairs.

  ‘He is in a mood today,’ said Eskandarian.

  ‘He seems to be in a mood every day.’

  The Iranian laughed. ‘Oh, do not mind Abbas!’ He rubbed his hands together expectantly in a manner that reminded Kite of Billy Peele at the start of a history lesson. ‘I must get back to work. Thank you for coming to me and telling me this. I appreciate that it must have been unsettling for you. I hope that I have at least put your mind at rest?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Kite replied.

  He stood up with the dismaying sensation that he had failed adequately to draw out enough information for BOX 88. What else could he have asked about? Lockerbie? Malta? The plane tickets to New York? It was all off limits. What else was left to say? Kite’s mind was blank as Eskandarian started tidying the papers on his desk. He appeared to place them in order of importance, sliding certain documents to the top and moving others to the bottom, like a card dealer shuffling in slow motion. Kite made a private vow to return to the room and to photograph as many of the documents as possible.

  ‘Hana is leaving tonight,’ he said, as Kite turned towards the door.

  Kite was stunned. He could only imagine that her departure was a direct consequence of what had happened with Xavier.

  ‘Really? Oh no. Why?’

  ‘It had always been her intention to stay only for a few days. She has a job to go back to in Nice. We may reconnect in Paris on my way home.’

  Was he lying? Eskandarian smiled to himself, possibly at the thought of more miniskirts, more lingerie, more French perfume in Paris; the expression on his face might equally have been pleasure at the prospect of taking his revenge against Xavier. It was impossible to tell. ‘Well, I’ll be sorry to see her go,’ he said. ‘She’s great company.’

  Eskandarian took a moment to respond. It was not clear whether he agreed with Kite’s assessment of his girlfriend’s character or was distracted by something on his desk.

  ‘You think?’ he replied. ‘How nice. Yes. I’ll be sorry to see her go as well.’

  45

  The reason for Hana’s sudden departure became clear the next day.

  Kite made it to his morning meeting just before nine o’clock. Over lukewarm coffee, Peele and Carl told him that Eskandarian’s former fiancée had been invited to lunch by Luc and Rosamund. When Hana had found out, she had reacted angrily and announced that she was leaving. Carl had heard the entire argument on the lamp microphone. Kite was relieved to have it confirmed that it had nothing to do with what had happened between Hana and Xavier, an incident which appeared to have escaped the attention of the otherwise eagle-eyed Falcons keeping watch on the house.

  Peele also revealed that Bijan was a bona fide member of a large Iranian exile group in Europe targeting regime figures in France. Kite was pleased that he had not been duped but shocked to discover that the seemingly benign Bijan was potentially a man of violence. He was instructed to go back to the villa and to proceed as normal.

  ‘You did brilliantly in the office yesterday, but we still need hard information,’ Peele told him. ‘Photographs. Documents. Anything and everything you can get your hands on. It might be impossible. You might get a window of opportunity. Improvise.’

  Kite made it back in time to sneak into Martha’s room. They had slept apart the previous night, but she had left a note on his bed telling him to join her when he got back from his run. They made love for the second time, silently and deliciously, Kite covering Martha’s mouth as they moved, mindful that Jacqui was still asleep next door.

  Just after midday he went downstairs to discover that Eskandarian’s former fiancée had already arrived. Her name was Bita. She was a Frenchwoman of Iranian descent in her late thirties accompanied by two small children: a boy of nine named José and a little girl of three called Ada who clung to her mother’s side at all times. Bita’s Catalan husband had not come with her. She arrived in a hire car from Nice airport, having flown from Barcelona that morning. The other guests, appearing at intervals over the next hour, were a rotund, smartly dressed Frenchman in his fifties named Jacques and a younger French couple – Paul and Annette – who had two children of similar ages to Jos
é. Jacques worked as a banker in Paris, Paul in the film industry. Annette was a housewife. Kite had been exposed to the looking-glass world of espionage for long enough to suspect that at least one of them could be an intelligence officer investigating Eskandarian’s alleged links to Lockerbie. On this basis, he had a responsibility to obtain as much information about the guests as possible. That meant finding out how they knew Eskandarian, what they wanted from him, why they had come to the villa, if they were friends of Luc’s, of Rosamund’s – or associates of Eskandarian’s from Paris in the late 1970s. Kite decided to use the Walkman to record whatever conversations took place in the living room during the afternoon. The batteries supplied by BOX 88 would last up to eight hours. It was just a case of going up to his room, inserting the blank cassette provided by the Falcons, bringing the Walkman downstairs concealed among various personal belongings – a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, a pair of swimming goggles, a bottle of suntan lotion – and leaving all of them amid the general detritus which piled up during the day on a table near the doors to the terrace. Rosamund and Hélène tended to clear up at the end of every day, but Kite reckoned the Walkman would be left undisturbed until at least six o’clock. The only danger lay in someone picking it up, either to use it or to search for a tape. Xavier often did this when he couldn’t find an album he was looking for or if he had left his own Walkman down by the pool.

  Strawson and Peele would also want pictures. Kite had been taking photographs with the Olympus Trip more or less constantly since he arrived in France and snapped half a dozen shots of the group as they gathered for lunch on the terrace. None of them seemed to mind having their picture taken. Martha was also busily taking photographs, so much so that Rosamund jokingly asked if they were both thinking about taking it up as a career. Kite finally understood why Peele had been so interested in this aspect of Martha’s behaviour: BOX were planning somehow to get a look at her photographs once they had been developed, either by asking Kite to obtain them or perhaps by intercepting the rolls of film at whatever chemist or laboratory Martha used to have them developed. Even if Martha never discovered that her pictures had been purloined and copied in such a way, the thought made him queasy. He made a note to tell Peele that her belongings were off limits, even though he knew that such a request would likely fall on indifferent ears.