Admittedly, your stipend does not stretch to anything particularly plush: Your wee niche in the former Microsoft HQ is a three-metre-by-four room in a shared office suite. It’s half-filled by a scratched-up pine desk and a pre-owned Aeron chair the management threw in as a sweetener. The rest of the suite is overrun by programmers from a local gaming corporation who rent two entire floors above you. They’re working on some kind of Artificial Reality project—you made the fatal mistake of asking one of them, and your eyes glazed over before he reached the fourth paragraph of nerdspeak without stopping to draw breath. But at least you’re not hot-desking, or hanging out your shingle above Rafi’s phone-unlocking and discount-print shop on Easter Road. No, indeed. You’ve come up in the world, you have an office of your own, you wear a suit and tie to work, and people
(Well, we’ll soon see about that.)
Mr. Webber was certainly taken aback at your last interview. “Representing a consortium of central Asian commercial interests in the Midlothian region?” He doodled a note on his tablet. “Well, Anwar, you never cease to surprise me. A family connection, I assume?” You grinned and refrained from blabbing, but produced the documentation when he asked to see it. The smug bastard
Actually, there’s fuck-all work in it. You’ve set up your office and your desk just so, and you’ve skimmed the helpful handbook they’ve prepared for honorary consuls. The first IBAN draft hits your bank account with a thud, and now you’re sitting pretty. Cousin Shani’s handling your tax—she’s an accountant—and you’re in credit and in employment. But after the first few days of scurrying around filling out online forms, it’s a bit boring. As the Gnome surmised, few natives of Issyk-Kulistan pass through Scotland. In fact, it’s a
Alas, you’ve got to be behind the desk during core hours, all twenty of them a week. After a bit, you ask Tariq if you can borrow a pad so you can work on his dating website while you’re holding the fort: Nobody who walks in will know it from what you’re supposed to be doing, and you can do with the cash.
So you’re there one midafternoon, grinding your teeth over a broken style sheet, when the doorbell chimes. At first you mistake it for your IDE complaining about a syntax error, but then it rings again, and you see the desk set blinking its light at you. You’ve got company.
“Hello? Uh, consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan?”
The desk set clears its throat. “Hello, the consulate? Please to be letting us in?”
You stare for a couple of seconds, then figure out which button to push on the antique console. You hear the front door open and hide Tariq’s pad before you stand up and go to see who it is.
Two men are peering twitchily around the lobby area of the shared offices. One’s in his late twenties, and the other is considerably older. They’ve both got close-cropped hair, bushy moustaches, and an indefinable air of perplexity that screams
“Er, hello, this is consulate of . . . Przewalsk?” The younger guy’s English is clearly a second language—or third. “Hussein Anwar?”
“That’s me,” you say, nodding. “Can I ask what your business is, sir?” You really want to get back to fixing Tariq’s botched style sheet, and you haven’t snapped into the right head space, but it comes out sounding patronizing and officious.
The old guy turns to his young companion and rattles something off. The young guy replies, then turns to you. “He says we need to speak in your office. We are visiting trade delegation. Felix Datka sends us to you.”
Your office is equipped with two plastic visitors chairs and a regrettably non-plastic rubber plant, which has hideous yellow-rimmed holes in its leaves but refuses to die despite your daily libation of coffee grounds. You usher the trade delegation past the plant and wave them into the seats. “What brings you to Edinburgh?” you ask.
“Emails are you has read, the?” begins the old guy before his young companion takes over: “My friend here, he is being lead trade mission to sell produce of our factories to foreign markets. There should an email be. We bring here for you a consignment of trade samples, to be distributed to visitors.”
The old guy nods emphatically. “You give we.” He waves at the huge and villainous suitcase, which is already settling into the carpet. “Samples.”
“Uh, yes. I see. What kind of samples?”
You watch, fascinated, as the young guy fiddles with the substantial locks on the case. He opens the lid with a flourish, not unlike a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Look!” he announces.
The suitcase is full of white paper bags. He pulls one out and hands it to you. The label reads: INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE. “For Western home bread-maker machine,” says the young guy, as the old guy grins broadly and nods. “Is produced by People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk- Kulistan! Taste very good, no grit, batteries included, just add water.”
“Batteries?” You shake your head.
“Yeast,” he says hastily. “You give. Visitors.”
You eye up the enormous suitcase. “You want me to give visitors bags of bread mix?” you ask him. “But I don’t have room here—”
The old guy nods again. “Give he you visitors bread.” He looks at you, and suddenly you recognize his expression and you just about shit yourself. “Is visitors, yes? Email, is.”
“The instructions are for you in the email,” the young guy adds helpfully. He stands up. “We go, now. Other consuls, more trade!” He grins alarmingly widely and reaches out to shake your hand. His skin is dry and hot, his grip tight as a handcuff. “Am thanking you. You are good man, says Colonel Datka.”
After the “trade delegation” leaves, you sit behind your desk breathing heavily for a couple of minutes. The suitcase crouches behind the dying rubber plant, like a snooping secret policeman intent on exposing your guilt.
You’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And you’ve
Curiosity gets the better of you, and you reach for the white paper bag on the edge of your desk. It weighs about a kilogram. You close your eyes, hefting it. The suitcase has got to hold at least fifty more of them, from the way it’s digging in the carpet. If this is heroin, it’s got to be worth half a million on the street.
Your hands are sweating, and you feel yourself shaking as you tear open the flap on the bag of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan, and jam your thumb inside, crush the coarse flour against the paper, raise it to your mouth, and suck.
It’s just flour.
