‘It’s beautiful, Papa,’ said Xavier, his voice sounding humbled and raw. Kite picked out the kitchen window to the west, the pool hut to the east through an opening in the garden wall. The paint on the wooden shutters of the master bedroom had faded and was slightly chipped. Cicadas were thrumming in the hills. Kite had heard this colossal, tropical sound in movies and songs, read about it in books by Wilbur Smith and Graham Greene, but was experiencing it in the real world for the first time.
‘It really is,’ Luc replied, putting his arm around his son in a rare moment of physical affection between them. ‘I think we’ll have fun here. Lockie, what do you think of it?’
‘Amazing,’ said Kite, seeing the ancient wooden front door for the first time, the giant oil jars flanking the entrance, the ravishing bougainvillea wilting in the August sun. ‘You say this belonged to your uncle?’
‘Great-uncle. He had no children. I guess I am the lucky one.’
‘You’re definitely that,’ Xavier muttered, and the intimacy between them vanished as quickly as it had come.
Luc opened the boot, releasing a blast of stuffy heat. Kite set the bags on the drive, carefully taking out his Gameboy so that both Luc and Xavier would see it. When switched on – the screen had been broken to make it look permanently damaged – the device would send a signal to a receiver in the grounds of the property allowing BOX 88 to listen in on any conversations taking place within a fifteen-metre radius of the microphone. Kite showed Xavier the damaged screen.
‘When did that happen?’ he asked.
‘Dropped it last night,’ he replied.
It was the latest of what he knew would become a thousand lies. Kite suddenly resented the cynical ingenuity of the Falcons and cursed the men who had come to the villa the day before and failed properly to rig the house for sight and sound. A stereo in the poolhouse. A lamp in the wrong bedroom. That was all they had managed, after months of preparation. It was mystifying. Surely they could have delayed the housekeeper coming back to the villa and not left Kite to pick up the pieces? Or had Carl lied and the lamp was yet another way of testing him?
‘Swim?’ Xavier asked.
Kite thought of the cool prospect of the water, of Martha arriving soon and diving in to join them. Carl’s words of advice were in his head: Make sure everyone else in the villa is downstairs, maybe outside taking a swim after the long drive. He recalled the rancid smell of the bins and was grateful when Xavier offered him a cigarette, breathing in the rich smell of the tobacco.
‘Don’t swim yet,’ Luc ordered. ‘Come inside first, put your bags in your rooms. See the place. Why do you have to smoke all the time? Put it out.’
Kite dutifully extinguished his cigarette after only a couple of puffs though Xavier defied his father and kept smoking as they followed him into the house. There was a large wooden table in the centre of the hall on which somebody had placed a vase of fresh flowers. The floor was a mosaic of faded brown tiles. On top of a baby grand piano in the southern corner were various framed photographs, including a black-and-white shot of Luc as a handsome teenager standing next to a man whom Kite assumed to be his great-uncle. Both of them looked cold-eyed and rather pleased with themselves. The walls of the hall were two-tone: below eye level, they had been painted a now-fading blue; above this was a broad band of pale cream plaster. The walls were adorned with several paintings that Kite did not remember seeing in the photographs shown to him by Peele. One was of a beautiful woman in a silk dress, done in the style of Renoir, another a watercolour of an orchard being worked by a farmer and his wife, seemingly in the early part of the century.
‘I remember this smell so well,’ said Luc, sounding uncharacteristically sensitive. ‘It is the smell of my childhood.’
They left the bags by the entrance and walked in a slow clockwise loop around the ground floor, beginning in the kitchen, where baguettes and bowls of tapenade had already been left out for supper and covered with net frames to ward off flies and wasps. A smell of cooked onions reminded Kite of the kitchen at Killantringan. The dining-room table next door was laid for eight, which made him wonder who else, apart from Eskandarian, would be joining them for dinner. Luc then led them outside via the large sitting room onto the terrace where Kite was supposed to leave the ghetto blaster. He immediately identified a socket behind one of the sofas which could provide a power source. A large backgammon board had been left out in the shade of the veranda. Kite looked back into the living room. He knew from memory that the next room was Luc’s office, then a connecting corridor leading to a smaller room identified as the place where the family would most likely relax and watch television. He was beginning to plot how he might go about moving the lamp.
‘The garden is spectacular, no?’ Luc announced. Kite wasn’t green-fingered, and Xavier didn’t appear to be listening, but his father carried on regardless. ‘Plumbago, oleander, wisteria, agapanthus.’ Each plant was identified in his thick French accent. ‘There is very little flowering at this time of year, perhaps only the hibiscus.’ It sounded as though he had memorised the names in order to impress them. ‘But what do you care? I didn’t care about gardens either, when I was your age.’ In French, he added: ‘One day you will understand and appreciate all this, Xavier. I hope anyway. At the moment you don’t consider it important.’ He switched back to English. ‘All
