‘Enjoy your breakfast,’ he told them. ‘I’m going for a shower.’
40
The next forty-eight hours passed without serious incident. On the first day, Eskandarian, Hana, Luc and Rosamund went to lunch in Menton with friends, leaving the others behind. Abbas went with them. When Alain and Hélène drove into Mougins to buy food, Kite was able to take advantage of their absence to look, without success, for Hana’s passport and to leave the Gameboy wedged behind a chest of drawers in Luc’s office. He contrived to make it appear as though it been left among a pile of books and magazines on top of the chest and had fallen down the back. Eskandarian had also left a pile of papers on a stool in the living room. With Xavier, Martha and Jacqui by the pool, Kite flicked through them, seeing documents in Farsi, Russian and English, but without his camera to hand he had no opportunity to photograph them. Instead he looked for the keywords he had memorised from his training – BIOPREPARAT, PRALIDOXIME, IDLEWILD – and made a mental note of the senders’ names, scribbling them down on a sheet of paper in his bedroom. He would have risked going up to the attic to search Eskandarian’s rooms had Luc not come back astride a brand-new bottle green Vespa which he told Xavier and Kite they could use to ‘buzz into Mougins’. Kite asked if Martha and Jacqui were insured to drive it. Luc shook his head.
‘Just you two,’ he replied. ‘I don’t want the girls riding it.’
That night they ate supper outside. Alain, who had a cigarette permanently clamped to his lips and was always busy about the house hanging pictures and making repairs, lit mosquito coils at the southern end of the terrace. A smell of cardamom and citronella drifted across the table as they ate chilled pea soup and poule au pot in the moonlight. Kite was again seated next to Hana and therefore prevented from speaking at any length to Eskandarian. By eleven he was tired and retired to bed, leaving Xavier, Jacqui and Martha watching Betty Blue on VHS.
The next day Kite woke up at eight, jogged over to the safe house, gave Peele the list of names from Eskandarian’s correspondence and returned to discover that Eskandarian, Luc and Hana had already gone into Vence to look at the Matisse chapel. He knew that BOX 88 would be covering their every move outside the villa, photographing anyone of interest with whom Eskandarian came into contact. Meanwhile Rosamund busily made changes to the house, twice driving into Antibes and returning with the Citroën full of crockery, glassware and ornaments to replace many of those bequeathed to Luc by his great-uncle. On the second trip, Martha and Jacqui went with her, leaving Kite and Xavier by the pool. They returned to the house only to grab a snack, take a shower or vegetate in what Luc still insisted on calling ‘the playroom’. Kite again looked for Hana’s passport without success, concluding that she was probably carrying it around in her handbag. Peele was keen to join the dots between Xavier’s father and Eskandarian and had instructed Kite to take a look at the documents on Luc’s desk and to leave his Walkman under a sofa in the living room. Yet there was never a moment when Alain wasn’t lurking around, changing a plug or hanging a picture and generally making Kite feel that it would be discovered almost as soon as he had planted it. The last thing he wanted was Alain catching him in the act of rifling through Luc’s personal effects or approaching him in front of Eskandarian and saying that he had found his Walkman in an unusual place.
Everything changed on the third day. After a late breakfast, the family and their guests drove in three cars to Cannes with the idea of spending the day at the beach. Kite brought a hacky sack which he promptly lost in the sea, having thrown it too far beyond Xavier, who allowed it to sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean rather than swim out to fetch it. They then bought a Frisbee, teaching Eskandarian how to throw and catch it on the flat sands, doubtless to the consternation of surveillance teams of any persuasion photographing the Iranian from stakeout positions overlooking the beach. It was Kite’s first proper interaction with the Iranian and as the disc skimmed low over the beach he again found it impossible to imagine that the easy-going, laughing man running this way and that was the brains behind the Lockerbie atrocity, the mastermind of a follow-up attack in New York of even greater malignancy. Hana and Jacqui lay on towels chatting in the sun, having forged a somewhat unlikely bond. Martha had gone into town with Rosamund to buy more film for her camera. At all times Abbas sat on a fold-up chair a few metres from Eskandarian, his manner composed, his expression utterly inscrutable. He continued to wear a black suit, even in the heat of the midday sun, and, with the exception of Luc, rarely made any effort to speak to other members of the party.
They went for lunch at an upmarket brasserie in the centre of Cannes, Abbas eating a bowl of spaghetti at a separate table. Afterwards Eskandarian, Luc and Hana returned to the villa with Abbas, Rosamund drove into Antibes to buy more furniture for the house and Martha and Jacqui went shopping for clothes. Xavier had drunk more than a bottle of rosé with his swordfish and promptly fell asleep as soon as he lay down on the beach. Kite was left alone with Papillon, the book he had been reading for the previous three days. He decided to walk up to the main road and finish it in a café.
The August crowds were scattered along the promenade in shorts and bikinis and flip-flops. Waiters criss-crossed the pavements carrying trays of
