The Corporal's Wife (2013) (44 page)

‘He recognises what we’re doing for him, for his wife. He’s grateful and sings.’

‘Right, forget it.’

‘Nothing to forget. Come with us. Amazing place, where Richard the Lionheart was a prisoner. A bit of a climb. You up for that?’

He heard the chuckle but turned his back and went inside again. They had broken and were smoking.

Mehrak dragged on the cigarette. The talk that morning had been about the diary of the brigadier: whom he met, whom he considered most talented, who had the ear of the Supreme Leader. Who would the fighters follow if an attack came? Now it was conversation, not truths.

He could have said, ‘She hates me. We go for days without speaking except about housekeeping money and the utility bills, whether I am at home for dinner and what time she should serve my meal. We don’t talk – we have nothing to talk about. We have not had even the pretence of love for years.’ He didn’t.

He could also have said, ‘We had no sex. It is my right to have sex with my wife. She would not so I hit her. I lost my temper. One blow, to the face. She was bruised. She could have said to my mother and her own mother when she saw them that the bruise was from an accident. But she gave no explanation – so they knew the truth. She took her bruise to work. I was made to look like a violent fool. Since then nothing. To have sex with her would have been to rape her. I think she would have fought with her life.’ He said nothing.

He might have leaned forward, demanded confidentiality, and said, ‘The brigadier arranged our marriage with my father. Everyone I work with knows that Farideh, my wife, is a beautiful woman. Many, I know, are jealous of me . . . I could divorce her. In legal terms, in Iran, it is easy. In reality, I’m the poor fool who has not found love with a beautiful woman. ‘‘Perhaps he cannot satisfy her’’, they would say, ‘‘is incapable, inadequate. Maybe he wants to fuck a boy.’’ I would be humiliated.’ He didn’t.

He might have confessed, ‘It is four years and some months since she allowed me. I go across the Gulf. Do I want a woman? I am on my knees for a woman. I burn for it. They took me to that place. She was an old whore with a slack stomach and I could see the veins in her legs. I couldn’t do it – I love my wife.’

He could have let the tears flow, taken a handkerchief offered him and said, ‘I thought that if she was brought out of Iran she would be far from everything she knew and would come back to me, that I would be her rock. It was to win her that I asked you to bring her. The hope that she would learn here to love me.’ He held back the tears.

Last, he could have told Petroc Kenning, the enemy, of two evenings spent crouched with an ear to the pipes and of what he had heard. ‘You had neither the skills nor the resources to bring her out so now she is hunted, and the men with her. She will be caught. She will be arrested, tried and sentenced. She will be . . . I love her.’ He did not, and reached for another cigarette.

‘I want to help. I want you to be pleased with what I can offer you. I want to be trusted. We have fine castles in Iran, and I have seen some in Syria and Lebanon. I look forward to seeing the one where your king, Richard of the Lion’s Heart, was kept a prisoner. It will be a privilege for me – and you know, Mr PK, that I am sincerely grateful for what you do for me – and for my wife.’

He came across the field. Exhaustion slowed him. On the way out, towards the petrol station, Zach had taken a fast but meandering line from the camper van across the open ground. He had hopped from one tussock to another when there was bog. Now he had ten litres in the plastic fuel container. It grew steadily heavier. His tiredness and increasing desperation about the time led him to blunder erratically forward.

There were places where he went in up to his knees, then had to drag out his feet as the mud clung to them. Once, a shoe had come off and he had gone down on all fours, had reached into the water and groped until he found it.

His sight of the wagon was blurred. There was mud on his face.

Two of them carried weapons. One, Ralph, was by the bonnet and Wally was at the tail. She stood by the open side door. He wondered where she had hidden the pistol that had been offered to him and she had taken. Only when he was close did Wally start to unscrew the cap for the fuel tank. None of them could have done it. None of them could have helped him. He wouldn’t be thanked. Zach thought she was now a part of their team because she had taken the gun. Getting the fuel would not have given him entry to their club. He was swaying as he took the last few steps. Ralph reached down from the track, grasped his hand and pulled him up, then took the container from him.

Mikey called, through the open door, ‘We heard the gunfire.’

‘Difficult not to.’

‘Thought you might have started a war.’

He listened as the stuff gurgled down the pipe and leaned against the door. He was wrecked. She was close to him but didn’t touch him. He wasn’t thanked, might have been, should have been, but wasn’t. They couldn’t have achieved what he had. Zach wondered if each of them, in their own way, was jealous of his skill with the language. He might have expected, on those last exhausted strides, that the praise would be fulsome, his back slapped, and that he would be permitted to enter their tight circle. Her eyes held him, challenged him. He glanced at his watch. They no longer had hours: the time remaining to them was measured in minutes. Wally threw the can into the field. They were running late. He flopped on to the bench seat, making it filthy with mud. The girl from South Island would have laughed. Quite late.

Chapter 15

They parked.

Mikey had the map. He had made Ralph drive round a block twice, then decided where they would stop. To the front there was an arcade of shops, and at the back there were loading bays. Zach reckoned it the same architectural non-event he’d seen in a hundred English towns or cities; the concrete was stained, the paint was flaking and there were puddles. Mikey said that was where they would wait, except Zach.

Zach thought they were already late. He’d assumed they would drive into the square where they were to do the transfer, pile out of the camper, dump it, get on board the new wheels. Mikey would have seen his confusion because he said, ‘We’re the customer, they’ll wait for us. They’re likely in a side street, watching for us, and they’ll come running when we pitch up. But there’s a hunt on and I’m not having the five of us stuck on a pavement with the gear. You meet them and bring the transport to us.’ That was what he had been told.

The bloody rain had started again, heavy now. His legs ached from crossing the fields. He had no headgear, no umbrella, would be drenched by the time he’d done the walk and met the wheels.

Only Mikey spoke. Not Ralph or Wally. The hands slid on his watch. Late . . .

Zach hated that he was one of life’s punctual people. Ralph had driven into the town cautiously, hadn’t overtaken or used his horn, had given room to jay-walkers. Big dilemma: to keep, as near as possible, to the schedule or stay unnoticed and unremarkable, except that the colour of the wagon and its unique lines were a give-away if the description had been broadcast.

‘Good if she came with me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Farideh would have heard Zach’s words, but might not have caught Mikey’s answer. She was already slipping off the bench seat towards the wide-open side door.

‘She’d have a feel for the place. I’d never heard of it, know nothing about it, and she’ll read it better than—’

‘She stays.’

‘I was trying to say—’

A hand was on his arm. He was shoved away. No ceremony. ‘Get moving.’

She watched him, gave the slightest shrug and a small grimace, then eased back onto the bench seat. With her fingers she adjusted the scarf round her hair and dropped the veil over her face.

He was gone. Another look at his watch. On the schedule, they should have been aboard the people-carrier three minutes ago, and he thought – from Mikey’s map – it was a ten-minute walk to where it would be waiting, six minutes’ jogging or four running. But he couldn’t: his legs were leaden from the bogs. He looked like a tramp. There were derelicts who lived in the woods off the A445, outside Leamington and beyond Cubbington. They did gardening in the summer and lived like animals in the winter. Some said they should be ignored, others that they should be moved on . . . He could hardly have had Wally or Ralph do close escort for him, with their goatee beards, their shades, the waistcoats with every pocket filled, grenades, spare magazines, radios, phones and a machine pistol held at the ready. He would have liked to have her beside him. Wrong. He was in Iran, the Islamic Republic: she would have been a half-pace behind.

He had rounded the side of the arcade and was heading past the shops. A tailor, a fast-food outlet, a barber, second-hand furniture. He went to the lights. The traffic came, filled two lanes going to his left and was solid in two lanes going to his right. He couldn’t stampede across. The derelicts in those woods . . . He couldn’t clean himself up.

There was no trust. There were two groups and no melding: himself and her; Mikey, Wally and Ralph. They would have thought, because she had once bugged out on them, that he and she might get aboard the wheels and drive away. Maybe easier for two than for five. That possibility wouldn’t have crossed Zach’s mind. He reversed it: he seemed to see the three of them inside the camper, slamming the door, giving the driver a thwack on the shoulder, then leaving him and her. But tension and trust were rarely in the same bed together. They wouldn’t have let her go for fear of being abandoned. He needed to slap his own face. There was a good guy, a site manager, back home – he’d been a long time on his father’s payroll – who would have done it for him, or clipped his shin with the steel cap of a safety boot.

The traffic halted. He hurried to cross the road. A police car was stopped at the lights. He felt so vulnerable. There was a truck behind it with uniforms and guns. He imagined eyes stripping him. To run or walk . . . the compromise. The hands were slipping on the face of the watch. More time lost. He didn’t dare, then, to run, but he walked briskly. There was an avenue of trees, a small park and at the end of it the square that led into the pedestrian approach to the Shams Tabrizi Tower – and he’d studied the poet’s work composed nine hundred years before, and . . . He missed the kerb.

Zach fell forward and groped with his hands to break the impact. His shoulder caught a woman’s knees. She staggered. He rolled as he fell and the woman was pushed aside, her two plastic bags scattering. His hip hit the thigh of a man carrying a craftsman’s toolbox. The pavement was slippery with a sheen of rain: Zach saw a wild face staring at him, the fear in it. Some people stopped to help the woman and retrieve her shopping, others were concerned for the man with the toolbox. Someone helped Zach to his feet. The lights changed. The police car went on but all the eyes behind the windows watched him, and all the heads in the military truck were turned to the pavement.

He said he was all right. He said it, God be blessed, in Farsi. Instinctive. He shrugged off the hands. The kindness of people almost suffocated him. Etiquette would have demanded he praised them and showed gratitude, but he did not. He was gone. Two faces, many times life-size, glowered at his back, but he barely noticed them. It was late. He was a stranger in a town he didn’t know and had only the directions dinned into him by Mikey to guide him.

The town of Khvoy, in west Azerbaijan province, was known as the sunflower centre of Iran.

It was a little more than eight hundred kilometres from the country’s capital, Tehran, but there were police barracks, an army camp and the necessary communication towers to guarantee that the exhortations from responsible officials for the apprehension of criminals and terrorists had reached it. The sunflower trade produced cooking oils that were sold and processed through middle men across Europe. With efficient labelling, many who lived in countries boycotting Iranian goods were in ignorance of its source.

Trading had always been good for the community. It was astride the Silk Road, and reeked of history and old conflicts. Tamar of Georgia had been there as a conqueror in the thirteenth century, then Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and the forces of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. The town had more than its fair share of tourists, who spent a few hours photographing and drinking coffee, then wandered away to the bus station for the crossing to Van or
Dogubeyazit
. Few would have looked like a wretch who slept rough. They would all have possessed the necessary paperwork to leave Iran without difficulty. Many would have nurtured the image of a Turkish café that evening, a beer or several, and women would dump their shrouds. As it had always been for a community on the Silk Road, the trade through Khvoy was in commodities of value – not merely sunflower oil.

That afternoon the Azerbaijani who traded in packages – not his cousin who ferried passengers – used his phone to make many calls. All were coded, brief and from an upstairs room at the kebab shop on Shahid Samazzade Street.

He spoke to a colleague; as a Kurd from
Dogubeyazit
, a man he trusted. They were business partners and enjoyed mutual respect. The seventy-nine packages were on the way. There were, however, matters beyond his control on the road going west from Khvoy: road blocks, reinforcements of Revolutionary Guard Corps units and patrols in armoured vehicles. The only mercy God had shown them that day was the low cloud ceiling that had grounded the helicopters.