Xavier looked at Kite and rolled his eyes, withdrawing to the sitting room. Kite followed him.
‘What was that about?’ he asked. He had been surprised by the intensity of Eskandarian’s reaction.
‘Didn’t you realise?’ his friend replied, as if Kite was being stupid. ‘Bita was pregnant when Ali left for Iran. José is his son.’
46
Kite was alone with Torabi. He was seated in the chair, his hands tied behind his back. He repeated what Xavier had said to him in the sitting room. He told Torabi that Eskandarian had then accompanied Bita Zamora to the hospital in Cannes. The young José had received seven stitches in his forehead, just above the hairline.
‘Seven stitches,’ Torabi replied blankly. ‘Yes, I know.’
There was a moment between them, a span of time in which Kite’s understanding of what was taking place underwent a profound and sudden change. It was like one of those paintings he would occasionally see in galleries which looked from one angle like an abstract and from another, with just a minor adjustment of perspective, like a portrait or landscape. Torabi gazed at him, his eyes momentarily stripped of all malice, and the truth broke over Kite with a startling, euphoric clarity.
‘You’re José,’ he said. ‘You’re the boy.’
Torabi’s expression did not change. He pulled back a clump of hair, tipped his head forward and showed Kite a pale white scar running from the top of his forehead into the hairline.
‘Yes. Bita is my mother. Ali was my father.’
Everything became clear in that moment: the uneven interrogation; Torabi’s occasional moments of nervousness and uncertainty; his desperate desire to know anything and everything about Eskandarian. This wasn’t a state mission authorised by MOIS. Torabi wasn’t following orders. This was personal.
‘Why didn’t you say something?’ Kite asked.
‘Why should I? You would only have lied in a different way.’
It was necessary for Kite to say: ‘For the last time, I am not lying,’ but he knew that Torabi had set a trap for him. It was not at all clear to Kite how much the Iranian remembered of that distant summer afternoon. Was it possible that he had heard the eighteen-year-old Kite in the attic office taking pictures with the Olympus Trip, the click and roll of the camera audible across the landing? Did he know more than he was letting on about what had happened to Eskandarian? Not for the first time Kite wondered if Torabi had a line into BOX 88, access to an individual who was drip-feeding him secrets.
‘I wanted to listen to your memories of that day and see if they matched my own,’ he said.
Kite adopted an impassive manner. ‘And did they?’ He remembered what he had left out of the account – the questions he had asked José in the pool, the camera he had grabbed from his room with the little boy standing beside him – details which José might possibly have remembered.
Torabi reached for the gun. He moved his head from side to side, like an athlete warming up for a sprint, and rose from the sofa.
‘I remember that you were kind to me,’ he said, securing the gun in the waistband of his trousers. ‘I remember swimming in the pool with Martha and Jacqui. I remember the long outside table covered in food, my sister sleeping in a hammock in the garden.’
‘It was a beautiful house,’ Kite replied, feeling the nail slip against his hip. Throughout his long account of what had happened that summer, he had dared not look down and risk drawing Torabi’s eyes towards the pocket. ‘It was a beautiful afternoon. Do you remember going to the hospital with your mother and father?’
Torabi crossed the room and leaned against the door.
‘I didn’t know he was my father until many years later.’
‘When you joined the MOIS?’
To Kite’s surprise, Torabi did not deny that he had been recruited by Iranian intelligence.
‘My mother died when I was twenty years old,’ he said. ‘My stepfather had betrayed her long before that. She told me shortly before she died that Ali Eskandarian was my biological father. I didn’t want to stay in Spain. I wanted to live in Iran as an Iranian. It is true that I worked for the MOIS. I no longer work for them.’ Torabi paused, as if he expected Kite to applaud him for his candour. ‘I was recently able to obtain some intelligence files relating to my father, but they did not provide the answers I was seeking. I decided to find out what happened for myself. So: is it true my father insisted on accompanying my mother to the hospital?’
‘Everything I told you is true,’ Kite replied. He was still calculating what omissions he had made that Torabi might recognise as evidence of his duplicity. ‘When Abbas insisted on going to the hospital with your father, he shouted at him and ordered him to remain at the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he wanted to be alone with you? Because he didn’t want Abbas knowing that he had continued to visit your mother after 1979 and that she had borne him a secret child?’
Torabi bristled at this, as Kite should have anticipated. It had been a slip. The idea of his father concealing, even denying his existence, was clearly abhorrent to him.
‘What about your friend?’ Torabi asked. ‘Xavier?’
‘What about him?’
‘He was with Hana in the way you described? Did they continue to see each other after the summer?’
Of all the questions Torabi might have asked, this was the one that Kite had least anticipated. The incident at the poolhouse had helped to burnish Xavier’s legend as a ladies’ man when he went up to Oxford the following year, but as far as Kite knew, he had never seen nor heard from Hana again.
‘Didn’t you ask Xavier that in Paris? Before
