‘Wow,’ he said, registering the chaos. ‘You’ve been busy up here.’
‘Please forgive the mess.’ Eskandarian set about clearing a space on the sofa so that Kite could sit down. It was like visiting a beak in his rooms at Alford. ‘It is an exceptionally busy time for me. I am part of a team advising our new president, Mr Rafsanjani. There are a number of things I am doing for the new government over here in France. They never stop sending me faxes. Luc will soon start charging me for ink and paper! I wanted to use my holiday to catch up on correspondence. As you can see, I have not been able to make very much progress.’
It occurred to Kite that if Hana was an undercover DGSI officer, she was sleeping next to a goldmine of information. He thought about the Olympus Trip, wondering if he would get the chance to come back upstairs and photograph some of the more important-looking documents in the study. Time and again Peele had impressed on him the importance of not taking unnecessary risks, but to fail to take at least a roll of film in this Aladdin’s cave of intelligence would be a dereliction of duty.
‘So tell me.’ Eskandarian sat at the desk and looked benevolently at his slightly nervous young guest. ‘What is it you want to tell me, Lockie? What on earth happened in Cannes?’
Kite was sitting beside the lamp. Out of habit he committed Eskandarian’s remarks to memory – I am part of a team advising our new president, Mr Rafsanjani. There are a number of things I am doing for the new government over here in France – just in case there was a problem with the technology.
He asked if he could smoke. Eskandarian offered him a cigarette from a silver case on his desk and lit it with a gold lighter. It was a brand Kite did not recognise, far stronger than the red Marlboros he was used to. Settling back in the chair, Kite felt no need to embellish his story, to exaggerate what Bijan had said nor to imply that he was frightened or in any way feeling morally compromised by sharing a house with a man accused of such profound injustices. Instead he merely repeated, more or less verbatim, exactly what he had told Peele at their morning meeting. Throughout, Kite had the sense of talking to an exceptionally intelligent, emotionally sensitive man who was determined that Kite should know the truth about life in Iran. Kite quickly became convinced that Bijan was a genuine exile and that neither Eskandarian nor Abbas had used him to test Kite’s loyalty. Eskandarian encouraged him to speak freely and at no point expressed any degree of anger or frustration with the things Bijan had said. Indeed, to Kite’s astonishment, he admitted that many of them were true.
‘We have become the wrong country,’ he said. ‘Iran today is not where I hoped she would be. It’s strange that we are having this conversation when it is something Luc and I have also been discussing continually since I arrived in France. We both feel – looking at Iran from the inside and from the perspective of a foreigner – that my country has not yet emerged with full maturity from the Revolution of ten years ago.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kite asked. He did not want to seem too interested in what Eskandarian was saying, for fear of arousing his suspicion, but nor could he afford to appear indifferent. It was a question of balance. He knew that Eskandarian thought of him as a bright, intelligent young man, that he was intrigued by his Alford education and doubtless imagined that both he and Xavier would go on to lead interesting, fruitful lives. It was this that Kite needed to amplify, acting older than he was, playing the curious student sitting at the knee of the great man, listening intently as he imparted his pearls of wisdom.
‘I mean that when I was living in France, when I first met Luc, Iran was a broken society. How much do you know of my country, its history, apart from what you hear about Mr Rushdie?’
‘Very little,’ Kite replied, remembering something Strawson had told him in London. Eskandarian won’t even notice you. You’re too young to be taken seriously.
‘So I will tell you.’ Eskandarian lit a cigarette of his own and briefly glanced out of the window. ‘I lived in Tehran as a young man, when I was not much older than you are now. My friends and I went to discotheques, to cinemas. We could watch American films starring Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway. She was my favourite. But I was one of the lucky ones. My family had money. They were what we call bazaaris, merchants. We lived well. My uncle drove an American car. He even owned a washing machine which had been made in West Germany!’ Kite saw that he was expected to be amazed by this, so he said: ‘Wow.’ Eskandarian carefully tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘However, a great many people in the Iranian population did not live like this. They existed in poverty. Children went around in rags. Some survived on not much more than bread and a little salt. They watched the shah and his advisers, his foreign friends and American backers, gorging themselves on the best food, the finest wines, the most beautiful women, and they could do nothing about it. It was said that the shah was so ignorant of his country’s many problems because he saw us only from the air, from an aeroplane or a helicopter. He never came down long enough to be with his own people. I came from this same world of privilege, Lockie, but in my youth I rejected it. I
