‘Someone’s breath absolutely stinks of alcohol,’ said Rosamund, driving down the hill from Mougins.
‘Sorry, might be mine,’ said Kite, covering his mouth. He wanted to look good in front of Martha by taking the hit for Xavier. ‘I should stick to Coke.’
A snigger in the back seat, a stagey sigh from Jacqui. The rest of the journey passed in silence and they were back at the villa within five minutes. Turning through the gates of the house, Kite looked to the west and tried to work out which of the several houses along the road was ‘Cassava’, the property rented by BOX 88. In the morning he would set off on his run and find out. He needed to prioritise what Peele and Strawson would want to hear so soon after Eskandarian’s arrival. He had to identify something that these men of age and experience did not already know.
Back in the house, everybody went to their respective rooms to wash and change for dinner. Somebody, presumably Hélène, had opened the window and closed the shutters in Kite’s room. Peele had not anticipated this. If Kite at any point left a red T-shirt on the windowsill as a signal, only for Hélène to move it and close the window, the signal would not be seen. He had brought two T-shirts which were now effectively useless for the purpose of communicating with BOX 88. He trusted that Peele would come up with an alternative system in the morning.
Kite showered and returned to his room. He could tell by the atmosphere in the house – the smells emanating from the kitchen, the sense of people hurrying back and forth, the sound of ice cubes being dropped into a bucket in the hall – that Eskandarian was expected at any moment; it was only a short journey from the airport to Mougins.
‘Smoke?’ Xavier asked, sticking his head round Kite’s door.
He was wearing a pale blue button-down shirt and smelled of shower gel. They went outside and walked down to the pool. Mosquitoes were swimming in the lights, but Xavier had brought a spray repellent which he told Kite to apply to his arms and neck.
‘They get the munchies,’ he said. ‘Vicious bastards.’
He took out a lump of hash and proceeded to crumble it into a joint.
‘You smuggle that over on the plane?’ Kite asked.
Xavier shook his head. ‘Paris.’
When they had been sitting in the Marais, a young African man had approached their table with a whispered offer of cannabis. Xavier had disappeared to the bathroom moments later; that was when they had done the deal.
‘Might be shit shit,’ he said, pronouncing the second ‘shit’ like ‘sheet’. ‘Only one way to find out.’
It was perfectly good, though not particularly strong. They shared the joint, then Xavier rolled another. With Eskandarian’s arrival imminent, Kite was wary of getting too stoned and left Xavier to smoke the bulk of it. Soon his friend was looking out at the silhouetted hills from a deckchair by the pool, quietly singing chunks of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in a mood of disconnected sadness which unnerved Kite.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
He suspected that Xavier was troubled by something but unable or unwilling to articulate what it might be.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said, mumbling the words of Bob Dylan as he drew on a cigarette. ‘Do you ever hear from Billy Peele?’
Kite’s senses had been slightly slowed by the joint. The question jolted him back to full sobriety.
‘Not since we left,’ he replied, wondering why Xavier had chosen this, of all moments, to confront him. He tried to sound relaxed as he said: ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I was just thinking about him. He was one of the good ones. You’ll still be friends, no?’
‘As much as you can be friends with a beak.’ He needed to ascertain where was this coming from. Why was Xavier suddenly so interested in Peele? Had he seen them together in Hampstead? Kite said: ‘I doubt we’ll stay in touch.’
‘Shame.’
Kite studied his friend’s face in the darkness but found no trace of irony or hidden meaning. It was perfectly possible that Peele’s name had surfaced in Xavier’s consciousness for innocent reasons. They stood up and walked towards the pool. Hélène’s elderly husband, Alain, had switched on the underwater lights. The surface looked eerily white and cloudy.
‘We should try and have a pint with Billy when we get back,’ Kite offered, remembering Peele’s entreaty never to embellish a lie. He should have let the subject drop. Xavier gave a long sigh, seemingly having already lost all interest in the subject and said ‘Nah, fuck it’ before losing his footing and stumbling on a paving stone near the water’s edge.
‘Easy.’
‘I’m fine. No problem.’
He began to sing again – ‘My senses are stripped, hands can’t feel or grip …’ – chopping up the words and misquoting lines from the song with the same detached air of melancholy as before. Kite wondered if he had had an argument with his mother or father, both of whom kept a sharp eye on Xavier’s drinking. He was about to ask him when a set of headlights appeared in the distance. Kite followed their progress along the road. After three hundred metres the vehicle turned into the Bonnards’ drive. This was surely Eskandarian.
‘Looks like the ayatollah’s here,’ Xavier confirmed. A car door slammed. Kite couldn’t see what was going on at the house – it was almost dark and there were trees and hedgerows blocking the view – but Luc’s voice was audible on the drive. Kite heard the booming, joyous laughter of the Iranian as he greeted his friend, then Rosamund saying ‘Ali! Welcome!’
‘What’s he like?’ Kite asked.
‘Can’t remember.’ Xavier looked back at the pool as if he had forgotten something. ‘Haven’t seen him for years.’ There was a moment’s hesitation, then: ‘Actually, that’s not true. I saw him in London about two years ago. My father does business with him.’
‘What kind of business?’
Kite was working, mining his friend for answers. Strawson
