The Corporal's Wife (2013) (23 page)

To choose . . .

Auntie pushed the plate of biscuits closer. ‘You all right, Mehrak? You’ve gone a bit pale. Anyway, that was a good session and PK’s well pleased. We’re going to have a break now, maybe half an hour.’

He remembered how it had been at their wedding, that she hadn’t cried out on the first night when he had lain on her. He tried to remember the nights before he had hit her.

‘You sure you’re all right, Mehrak?’

He chose his wife above the friendship of the brigadier.

Time was up.

Mikey let go of Zach’s arm.

They were still huddled in front of him, whispering. He sensed they were arguing with her and she was rejecting their advice. The rain ran in rivers on the window and a leaden cloud hung over the rooftops. Mikey had the look, didn’t need to say that he should hit and hard.

He asked sharply now, ‘Do you have a passport?’

She faced him. ‘I do not.’

‘Do you have an airline ticket?’

‘No.’

‘If you have a passport, which you don’t, and if you had an airline ticket, which, again, you don’t, do you imagine you could walk into the terminal and board an international flight?’

‘I would be stopped and arrested.’

‘And you have no way out over the mountains?’

‘How would I pay the criminals who take people?’

‘So you’ll stay.’

‘I live a separate life from my husband, a divorce but not legal. He will not go to the court because he fears ridicule. I haven’t defected. I’m innocent of any crime.’

‘These men are your friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘They have your love and trust?’

‘They do.’

Now he went for the throat. He gestured at the two photographs. ‘You slept with those men.’

She flushed. ‘I did.’

‘Committed with them the sin of adultery, punishable here by whipping, hanging or stoning. Don’t answer. Listen. They will take you and torture you. At the end of the first day you’ll have forgotten you’re innocent. You’ll confess to anything – and you’ll tell them about your lovers – alive or dead?’

‘One killed by them, the other dead in Afghanistan.’

‘And you’ll tell them of these two old men, who gave you the bed to have the sex that is a crime. They will follow you to the gaol. I’ve come to take you out.’

He sensed her resistance slacken. ‘And then?’

‘We’ll take you over the border, beyond their reach.’

‘Then?’

‘We’re paid to cross the border with you. Then we hand you over. Afterwards? Not our problem. You get a new life.’

Somewhere a clock ticked, and the rain fell harder.

Highness told her to go. Excellency wheezed in her ear that she should accept the offer.

What about her parents and sister?

Highness said that family was always put at risk by flight. Excellency coughed, then spluttered that her arrest would do her parents as much harm as her escape.

Would they remember her?

Always, to the end of their lives.

And Kourosh?

Highness sighed, as if the name pained him, then dismissed the difficulty; they’d face it when they had to. Excellency gave a little wave – a small matter that would be taken care of.

Could Kourosh not kill them?

Highness grimaced and Excellency blinked: it would be in God’s hands.

Kourosh blundered past the sentry. The man knew everyone who worked in surveillance but he did his job: he asked for Kourosh’s ID. If his sergeant had been watching, and had seen an officer allowed through without producing an ID card, the sentry would have been verbally whipped, then punished. Everyone knew it: even the most senior men paused, rummaged and showed their card. The request was ignored. Kourosh went past.

The sentry charged after him, was entitled at that moment to shoot, or swing the butt of his rifle against the back of Kourosh’s neck. He had seen the officer’s glazed eyes and didn’t know whether the wet on his cheeks was rain or tears. He grasped the collar of the anorak and Kourosh’s arm swung back fiercely. The sentry staggered. There was no shot and no blow.

Kourosh walked on. He went up the steps and into the building, turned left and passed another picture of the Imam, and one of the Supreme Leader. A colleague called a greeting to him. He pushed through a door. Three women,
chadors
and scarves, one veiled, talking about the price of tomatoes.

The corridor stretched ahead. At the far end, to the left, was his commander’s office. The man’s reputation was fearsome: he was built like a toad, was incapable of mercy, intolerant of weakness, and his mind was governed by the need to preserve the revolution. Also at the end of the corridor, but to the right, was the large open-plan area where Kourosh and his colleagues worked, the walls plastered with the surveillance photographs of those believed to be enemies of the state.

A man came out of another doorway carrying a tray of empty tea glasses. Kourosh cannoned into him and the tray flipped, but he didn’t stop.

There were photographs on the corridor walls that showed men who had been martyred in the service of the revolution, killed in clashes with Azeri traitors and Baluchi rebels, or in Iraq and south Lebanon at the hands of the Zionists, or in Syria. Kourosh knew that armed men had come to take her out of the country. He knew, too, the route they would take. He knew that her husband was in a safe house, with enemies, in Europe, and she was to be brought to him.

He reached the end of the corridor and his legs weakened. The commander’s door was open and he saw the man at his desk, using his keyboard, a cigarette burning in an ashtray. The door to his work area was also open and he saw colleagues at their computers. He stopped. He didn’t turn right or left, just faced the end wall, panting.

PK came in. Mehrak thought he looked drawn. PK put his file on the table, and sat down.

‘You ready to hack on, Mehrak?’

‘I am ready.’

‘Not tired?’

‘I am good.’

PK shuffled papers, chewed a pencil, and frowned. He was dressed that day in black football shorts, long socks, trainers, a T-shirt and a white sweater that had a badge on the chest and red-and-blue stripes round the V-neck. He was smoking a cigarette. Sometimes he offered his to Mehrak. At others Mehrak helped himself from the packet on the table. Mehrak had learned something about his interrogator. There was a wife and a child; the brothel had been his idea and Mehrak the first ‘fly in the honey’. He was the sworn enemy of Iran and lived for his work. He had been to Oxford University and had studied history. But PK knew everything about Mehrak, had torn open his life, stripped it down.

‘Where is my wife?’

PK looked up sharply, underlined a note, grimaced. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I have the right to be told where she is.’

‘My friend, when I know where your wife is I’ll tell you. For now, Mehrak, that will have to satisfy you.’

PK was back at his paper, scribbled again, flicked ash from his cigarette. Mehrak gazed out of the window. He saw a tractor, women well wrapped against the cold, with buckets for the grapes, and the church tower, and the great river that disappeared beyond a bend. He saw winter clouds, and his isolation bit at him. He had adequate English but no German, Arabic, French or Spanish. He didn’t know where he would live or how he would fill his days. He had not been told the detail of a cash settlement or how he would be supported. PK pushed aside the papers and would have flicked the switch built into the base of the table to start the recorder. He smiled, framing his first question no doubt.

Mehrak interrupted. ‘How much money? How do I live? What do I do?’

‘All in good time. We’ll put together a package. When I have something to tell you, you’ll be told.’

‘And you have nothing to tell me?’

He saw PK’s anger.

‘We’re going to talk more about al-Qods in the embassies, about the meeting in the garrison camp at Hamadan. When I hear from Tehran about your wife, I’ll tell you. I want to know who spoke the most at the meeting, which men from which embassies. Let’s begin.’

Mehrak snorted. ‘The man from Vienna, he was a leader. You should meet him. Down the road in an hour? Go and meet him. Ask
him
what he said.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mehrak. I’ll put it simply, so you understand. It’s fine, Nobby.’ The hand with the cigarette waved away the red-haired minder, whose fists were clenched. ‘Understand, Mehrak, you have no reason to feel sorry for yourself. You’re out of that fucking place and lucky to be. If it hadn’t been for my colleague, the girl in Dubai, a brothel-owner would have sold pictures of you to an Internet source, and you’d be plastered across a million screens with a limp dick. Maybe your pretty wife would be watching you. You should understand, and be grateful, that we’re busting our bollocks to get her clear of Iranian territory. So fucking co-operate. Who led at Hamadan?’

It was said, and not denied, that the dishes on the high ground at Dhekelia, the military camp on Cyprus, could absorb some two million calls from Middle Eastern sources in an hour. In addition, they could monitor radio traffic across the region. Technicians pored over screens, consoles and keyboards as the computers gobbled traffic. A select few had been given the number of a satphone that would be operated, it was hoped, in central Tehran. The same few were also tasked to report any spike in emergency communications involving the security units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, specifically the al-Qods division. The technicians, junior boffins from a Signals regiment or GCHQ, would have appreciated such a specific request – more interesting than the usual wallow in a sludge of messaging. They would understand that the priority was high.

For Zach it was almost the end of his usefulness.

Almost
, not quite.

He was still needed to translate Mikey’s instructions. She could make no calls, not to her parents or friends. She would go from the yard in the clothing she stood in and there was no question of a bag being collected from Rafah Street. She would not question what she was told to do. He translated, and she nodded.

It was a quick gesture. Ralph’s hand snaked out, then Wally’s. Their fingers gripped and Mikey’s palm was on top. They held it for three or four seconds, then broke. His hand was not required. It was their show now.

He had done the translation and they had her acceptance. All he had left to do was to drive them clear of the city. Then he would be yesterday’s fish-and-chips wrapper. None of them had squeezed his fist in congratulation, and he was still shaking from the aggression he had shown her. He had done his job.

She clung to the older men. She called one Excellency and the other Highness. He assumed they were throwbacks from the old regime, hidden away, providing a refuge. She had gone to a chest and pulled open the drawers but they had intervened.

Mikey was at the door. He said, ‘What you translated for her, it’s for you as well. You do as you’re told. Don’t try to contribute unless you’re asked to. You’re both passengers.’

The rain beat on the roof. There was an upper window on the small landing that looked down on the yard where the van was and the puddles around it.

Mikey opened the door – Wally behind him, then her and Zach, the old men and Ralph at the back – and froze.

There was thin vinyl flooring between the steps and the door. It bore wet footprints. There was more damp on the steps, staining the wood. At the bottom of the stairs they saw more marks: a man had come through the doors and paced around, then come up to the first-floor room. Zach understood: someone had entered the yard, heard the voices, come up, listened and slipped away. His stomach knotted.

He had told her the route, and anyone in the yard would have seen the van and its plates. Who was ‘anyone’? He put the question quietly, trying to mask his fear. Highness and Excellency wouldn’t meet his eye.

She answered: ‘It might have been Kourosh. He’s infatuated with me.’

‘If he heard what we said would he denounce you?’ He spoke first in Farsi, then translated each question and each reply.

‘He’s a surveillance agent in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.’

The old men shuffled. Wally swore and Ralph punched the door jamb.

She said, ‘He can’t say anything. He can’t explain how he knew. Would he tell them I have a mole on my right buttock? Or that his ambition is to sleep with the wife of a colleague? And he’s married, a father. What can he say?’

Zach grabbed her arm and pulled her forward. They followed Mikey, and he heard the clatter of weapons being armed. He took the driving seat and saw in the mirror that she was thrown into the back. The engine kicked into life, the old men opened the gates and rain splashed the windscreen. He had the wipers going at full speed and didn’t know whether the first shot would be aimed at him or the engine. He drove out fast, and in the narrow alley, water splashed from under the tyres drenching a passerby. He heard Mikey tap the keys on the phone. Zach glanced at the screen; ‘Foxtrot on the run.’ He powered towards the wider street ahead, hit the horn and swerved clear of the alley.