'… Fine, we know that they are steadily turning to home produced weaponry, but for the moment it is not sophisticated enough for modern warfare, and must be backed up by essential spares for items such as strike aircraft – that's what we have to know about. Don't shake your head, you can walk on water when you set your mind to it. Any arms shipment is going to be met with security, with military vehicles, it's going straight through the Customs checks, no formalities.
Those are the ones that we have to know about… '
Those who knew Mattie Furniss down in the Cotswolds, the other weekenders in Bibury, the cocktail set of Saturday evenings, would have described him as a very straight sort of cove, a pretty gentle sort of fellow. Those who talked to him about footpaths, and milk yields, and the Stock Market, would have been upended to have known that he would drive a volunteer, a very brave spy, to suicidal risks, and seem to think nothing of it. He was a hard man. He was a Desk head in Century.
The following morning, while the official from the Harbour- master's office was returning to Bandar Abbas, once more secreted in a dhow, Mattie was watched as he boarded the flight to Ankara, the capital city of Turkey.
He was missing four front teeth, and the rest were yellowed stumps. The old man's hair was tangled, uncared for. His lined face was the colour of a walnut. It was a tough life that he lived on the lower slopes of the mountain. He ran some hardy goats and some thick coated sheep on the side of the Iri Dagh mountain and in the shadow of the summit, always snow capped, that rose to 8,800 feet above the level of the distant sea. On a clear day, and in the early morning when the sun was rising behind the mountain, it was possible for the old man to look down on to the metropolis of Tabriz. His glance would be cursory. He had no interest in that city.
He was steeled by the roughness of the ground on which his livestock grazed, on which he grew vegetables close to his stone-walled, tin-roofed home, and he was tempered by the sadness of his old age.
Majid Nazeri closed the wooden plank door and walked towards the building where the animals wintered and where he stored their fodder. He walked like an old soldier. He had no part of the present world which was why he was happy to live in this isolation, alone with his dogs on the slopes of Iri Dagh, away from Tabriz which the regime had made their own.
He inserted into the padlock the key that hung from a leather thong around his neck. There was a cut of pain on his face, because the new shoes that he had been bought would take weeks to mould their soles around the misshapen outlines of his feet. He was not ungrateful for having been bought the shoes, but it would be the next winter before they were comfortable for him. The nearest habitation was the village of Elehred, away over the mountain to the north, towards the Soviet border. He had chosen to spend his last days in a wilderness that housed the free soaring eagles, and the ravaging wolf packs, and the leopard if he was lucky enough to see it and his body smell were not carried on the stiff winds that never forsook the slopes of Iri Dagh.
He had not always been a recluse. He had once known how to polish boots. He had known how to pour and serve a pink gin with the right measure of bitters, and he had been familiar with the formation of a platoon sized unit in attack, and he had once stood at attention an arm's length from the Shah of Shahs. Majid Nazeri had risen to sergeant in Charlie Eshraq's grandfather's regiment, and he had been batman to Charlie's father. The day that Charlie's father had been arrested, he had started the journey from Tehran to Tabriz, and then travelled on, northwards, in search of a place where he could shut out the abomination of what happened on the lower ground beneath him.
It was two years since the young Eshraq, the quiet man replacing his memory of a noisy boy, had reached his home on Iri Dagh, found him.
Always, when Charlie came to him and then left him, he wondered whether he would see the young man again. Always when Charlie left him, after they had exchanged their gruff farewells, there was a wet rheum in his old eyes. It was of small concern to him that his once keen sight was sliding from him. His dogs were his sight, and as his eyes faded so also disappeared the hazed outline of the city of Tabriz. Charlie had told him that it was in the city of Tabriz, in front of the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards, that Miss Juliette had been hanged. He had no more wish to see the grey outline of the minaret towers of Tabriz.
To Majid Nazeri, his life winnowing away, Charlie was an angel of revenge. To the old soldier, loyal servant and batman, Charlie was the last of a line he had worshipped.
He pulled open the door of the shed. He had old rags in his hand, the remnant of an army shirt that had rotted on his back.
He spent all of that afternoon polishing the petrol tank, and the wheel spokes, and the engine work of the Japanese motorcycle that was Charlie's. The motorcycle did not need i leaning, and by the time that Charlie had next taken it down the stone track to the road running from Ahar into Tabriz then it would be filthy. And after he had cleaned the motorcycle he checked that the blocks on which it was raised to protect the tyres were firmly in position. He never knew, never asked, when Charlie would next be hammering at his door, shouting lor admission, squeezing the breath out of his old body.
He picked up the discarded two parts of a blue tracksuit, and he took them to the stream beside his house for washing.
The dusk was closing in. He did not have to go to his bed of rugs and furs as soon as the darkness came. Charlie had brought him kerosene for the lamp hanging off the central beam of his main room. He could sit on his wooden chair, and long after the night had come to the slopes of Iri Dagh, and the dogs outside had started their chorus to keep away the wolves from the animals' stockade, he would gaze at his most prized possession. He would stare at the gilt framed photograph of the army officer and his foreign wife and their two children.
The joy of Majid Nazeri's life was Charlie Eshraq's corning, his despair was Charlie Eshraq's going.
He had reverted to the clothes of a pasdar.
He was sleeping towards the back of the Mercedes bus.
Several times he was jolted awake by the man sitting next to him, because the Guards had stopped the bus at a block and were checking papers. His own papers were in order. Like every Iranian he carried with him at all times his Shenass-Nameh, his Recognition Papers. The Recognition Papers listed a false name, a false date of birth, a false record of military service in the Guards. The papers aroused no suspicion. He was unarmed, he had nothing to fear from a search of his one small bag. He had been wounded in the service of his country, he had been home on convalescent leave to the home of his parents in the fine city of Tabriz, he was returning to Tehran where his unit was to be re-formed.
He was greeted with friendship by the Guards who searched the bus.
The bus stopped at a cafe. Charlie dozed on. He had no wish to queue for food. He had eaten well at the home of Majid Nazeri early in the morning. To be hungry was to be alert, and it was sensible of him to sleep because in the morning the bus would arrive in Tehran.
He had the signature of the Mullah on his proposals for action.
The investigator only proposed. The Mullah, whose signature and office stamp were on the document, had been chosen with care by the investigator. He knew his man, he knew which cleric could be trusted to rise, a trout in a waterway in the Elborz hills.
It was late in the night. The room in which the investigator worked was without decoration, save for the portrait of the Imam. So different from the office he had occupied when he had been the trusted servant of a plucked Peacock. No carpet now, no drinks cabinet, no easy chairs, no colour television.
In the struggles waged amongst the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs in the twilight months of the Imam's life the investigator did not believe the dice would fall for those who were described as the Pragmatists, the Realists, the Moderates. He believed that the victors would be men such as the Mullah, whose signature he had on the two proposals.
The city was quiet below him. He telephoned to the Manzarieh camp on the northern outskirts of the capital. He waited for the telephone to be answered in the building that was once the hostel of the Empress Farah University of Girls and was now the Revolutionary Centre of the Volunteers for Martyrdom.
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