Taiwan and Korea, but high quality from Finland and West Germany and Italy. He didn't do badly. He liked to say that the oil rich buggers down in the Emirates were putty to him.
Charlie could put up with the cant and boasting of the Shabro husband and wife, and he could put up with the caviare and the canapes, and the champagne. A thousand top of the range Zanussi washing machines were going down to Dubai, and some cretin who was happier on a camel was paying the earth for the privilege of doing business with Mahmood Shabro. Good enough reason for a party. He stood by the window. He watched, he was amused. He was not a part of the cheerful talk that was fake, the tinkling laughter that was fraud. He knew them all, except for the new secretary. One man had been a minister in the penultimate government appointed by Shah Reza Pahlavi as the roof was caving in over the Peacock Throne. One was once a para troop major who now drove a mini-cab, nights, and he was on orange juice which meant he couldn't afford one evening off to get pissed.
One was a former judge from Esfahan who now collected Social Security payments and who went to the Oxfam shop for shoes. One had been a policeman and now went every two weeks to the offices of the Anti- Terrorist branch at New Scotland Yard to complain that he was not given adequate protection for someone so obviously at risk.
They had all run away. They weren't the ones who had ripped off the system and come out with their dollars folded in their wife's underwear, if they weren't far sighted enough to collect them from banks in Switzerland. They were all pleased to be asked to Mahmood Shabro's parties, and they would eat everything within reach, they would drain every bottle.
Charlie always had a good laugh out of Mahmood Shabro.
Mahmood Shabro was a rogue and proud of it. Charlie liked that. The rest of them were pretence, talking of home as if they were off to Heathrow next week for the flight back, talking about the regime as if it were a brief aberration, talking about their new world as if they had conquered it. They had conquered nothing, the regime was in place, and they weren't going home next week, next year. Mahmood Shabro had put the old world behind him, and that was what Charlie Eshraq liked. He liked people who faced facts.
Charlie was good on facts. Good enough on facts last month to have killed two men and made it clear away.
The talk flowed around him. It was all talk of home.
They had exhausted their congratulation of Mahmood Shabro.
Home talk, all of it. The economy in chaos, unemployment rising, the Mullahs and Ayatollahs at each other's throats, the war weariness growing. They would have gagged if they had known that Charlie Eshraq had been home last month, and killed two men. Their contact with home was long range, a drink in a hotel bar with the captain of an Iran Air Jumbo who was overnighting in London and who was prepared to gossip out of earshot of his minders. A talk on the direct dial phone with a relative who had stayed inside, petty talk because if politics were debated then the line would be cut. A meeting with a businessman who had travelled out with foreign currency bankers' orders to purchase items of importance to the war effort. Charlie thought they knew nothing.
He reckoned Mahmood Shabro's new secretary looked good. Charlie and the girl were younger by 25 years than anyone else at the party. He thought she looked bored out of her mind.
'I rang you a few weeks back – good party, isn't it? I rang you twice but you weren't there.' Mahmood Shabro at his shoulder.
He had been watching the girl's backside, when her skirt was tight as she had bent down to pick up a vol- au-vent that had been dropped on the carpet and that was steadily being stamped in. The carpet, he supposed, was worth fifteen thousand.
'I was away.'
'You travelling much, Charlie?'
'Yes, I'm travelling.'
'Still the…?'
'Travel courier,' Charlie said easily. He looked across at the secretary. 'That's a pretty girl. Can she type?'
'Who knows what talent is concealed?'
Charlie saw the watchful eyes of Mrs Shabro across the room.
'You alright, Charlie?'
'Never better.'
'Anything you want?'
'If there's anything I can't get by myself, I'll come to you.'
Mahmood Shabro let go of Charlie's arm. 'Save me the taxi fare, take her home.'
He liked Mahmood Shabro. Since cutting loose from his mother and pitching up in London without a family, Mahmood Shabro had been a friend, a sort of uncle. He knew why he was Mahmood Shabro's friend. He never asked the man for anything.
The secretary had come to his corner of the room, taking her boss's place. She had a bottle of champagne in her hand.
He thought it must have been the last bottle, and she had come to him first to fill his glass almost to the lip before moving on and pouring out a few drops for everyone else. She came back, bearing the empty bottle. She said that Mahmood Shabro had told her to put a bottle aside for herself. She said with those eyes that had been worked with such care that she would not object to sharing the bottle. She told him that she would have to clear up. He told her his address and gave her a key and a note to cover the cab, and he said that he had to meet a man on his way home, that she was please to wait for him.
He went out into the early summer night. It was already dark. The headlights of the traffic flow scratched across his features. He walked briskly. He preferred to walk. He could check for a tail. He just did the usual things, nothing flash.
Round the corner and waiting. Stopping on a pavement, spinning, walking back, checking the faces. Just being sensible.
He went to his meeting. He had put out of his mind the gathering of no-hopers, losers, dreamers, in Mahmood Shabro's office.
She was nineteen.
She was a mainliner.
The middle of the evening, and the darkness spreading.
She stood in shadow at the side of the toilets in the small park area off the main shopping street. She was a mainliner because dragon chasing and mouth organ playing were no longer sufficient to her.
Lucy Barnes was a tiny elf girl. She felt the cold. She had been waiting for two hours, and when she had left the squat the sun was still hovering amongst the chimneys of the small terraced homes. The sleeves of her blouse were fastened at her wrists. The light above the toilet block had been smashed and she was in a black hidden space, but she wore a pair of wide dark glasses.
Two weeks ago she had sold the remote control colour 16-channel portable television set that had been her parents' birthday present to her. She had spent the money, she had used up the grammes of scag the sale had bought. There was more money in her pocket, more notes crumpled into the hip pocket of her trousers. That afternoon she had sold a teapot from home. Georgian silver, good price. She needed a good price.
The bastard was bloody late, and her legs ached in cramp, and she was cold and she was sweating. Her eyes were watering, as if she was crying for him to come.
Mattie Furniss would not have shared the conviction with even his closest colleagues, but the last fourteen weeks had convinced him that the Director General was just not up to the mark. And here they were again. The meeting of Heads of Desks, Middle East/West Asia, had kicked off an hour behind schedule, it had dragged on for close to three hours, and they were bogged down a third of the way down the agenda. Nothing personal, of course, simply the gut feeling that the Director General should have been left to vegetate in main stream diplomacy at Foreign and Commonwealth, and not been inflicted on the Service in the first place. Mattie Furniss was a professional, and the new Director General was most certainly not. And it was equally certain that the Secret Intelligence Service of Century House could not be run as if it were merely an offshoot of FCO.
Worst of all was the inescapable conclusion that the Director General, wet behind the ears in intelligence tradition, was gunning for Iran Desk. Israel Desk, Mid East Desk, Gulf Desk and Sub-Continent (Pakistan) Desk, were all in his sights, but Iran Desk was taking the bulk of the flak.
