HOME RUN (10 page)

In Bahrain, Mattie had met the carpet merchant from Tehran.

The man brought in foreign exchange, and his family were left behind, and he had two sons conscripted, so he could usually get a visa to fly out and back. And in Bahrain he had talked with his Station Officer. And he had picked up a tail.

Mattie had flown from Bahrain to Dubai to see the junior in place there, and he had been watched on to the aircraft and watched off it. He had dealt with the junior in a bit over four hours, given him the pep talk, told him to chuck out his University essay style, and to get himself down to the docks more often, to ingratiate himself more with the shipping fraternity.

Had he taken the road from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, had he been driven the hundred miles from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, past the cars left to rust in the desert because the oil rich could not be bothered to fix another starter motor or whatever, then he might have noticed the tail. Travelling by air, watched through an airport, watched out of an airport, he did not see the tails.

And little opportunity here in the Gulf for him to lay a trail as an archaeologist. He found these communities with their air-conditioned Hiltons, their chilled ice rinks that were proofed against the 100 degree outside temperature, their communities of tax-avoiding British engineers, rather tedious.

Van would be different, the Urartian ruins would be blissful.

He lost the tail that he did not know he had picked up in Abu Dhabi. He employed his standard procedures. He had checked into the hotel, been given a room on the 20th floor of an architectural monstrosity, and then slipped down the fire escape service staircase and out through the work force entrance. He had entered the hotel wearing his dun-coloured linen suit, left it in jeans and a sweatshirt. And he sweated hugely as he walked the few hundred paces through the city to the small office that was nominally base for a firm of international marine surveyors. In a first floor room, the Venetian blinds down, he met the man who worked in the Harbourmaster's office in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

Mattie had to hug the man. That, also, was standard procedure. He was not fond of overt displays of affection, but it was the way of these things that a man who had come secretly by dhow across the waters of the Gulf must be hugged like a prodigal returned. The man kissed him on both cheeks, and Mattie could smell the man's last meal. It must not concern Mattie Furniss, Head of the Iran Desk, that the man had perspired his fear of discovery while lying amongst the nets and hawsers of a dhow that had ferried him from Bandar Abbas to the wharfs of Abu Dhabi. If the dhow had been hoarded, if the man had been discovered by the Guards, if the man had been taken before a Revolutionary Court, then the man would have been tortured, would have screamed for the release of execution. And yet Mattie must, as a pro-lessional, keep himself emotionally aloof.

They sat down. They sipped tea. The man listened, and Mat tie gave him the prepared lecture.

"It is detail that we want. Hard facts . . . I don't just want to know that a Portugese or Swedish or Cypriot registered ship is coming in to Bandar Abbas with containers on the deck, I can get all that from satellite photography. I want the contents of the containers. I want the markings on the containers . . ."

He watched the man, saw that his fingers were twitching at the string of beads that he held over his lap. If over the years he had become emotionally involved with the man then he would have found these demands well nigh impossible to make.

" . . . There is an international arms embargo on Iran. No weapons of war are supposed to be shipped into Bandar Abbas or any other port of entry, yet we understand that the Iranians are spending 250 million dollars a month on hardware. We want your country, your regime, strangled of arms supplies.

Without the arms supplies the war effort will fail, and if the war effort fails then the clerics are gone. That's the incentive for you."

Not, of course, for Mattie Furniss to share with an agent Century's exasperation at the government of the United States of America who had dispatched 2,086 tube-launched optically-tracked wire-guided missiles to the clerics along with a plane-load of spares for their old F - 4 Phantoms. He could have reeled off the roll of honour of countries shipping arms to Iran: USSR, China, UK (anything from anti-aircraft radar to military explosives), Italy, Spain, Greece, North and South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, the Czechs, the East Germans, the Japanese, Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, Portugal, Belgium, even the Saudis . . . Where a buck was to be made . . .

" . . . Fine, we know that they are steadily turning to home produced weaponry, but for the moment it is not sophisticated enough for modern warfare, and must be backed up by essential spares for items such as strike aircraft - that's what we have to know about. Don't shake your head, you can walk on water when you set your mind to it. Any arms shipment is going to be met with security, with military vehicles, it's going straight through the Customs checks, no formalities.

Those are the ones that we have to know about . . . "

Those who knew Mattie Furniss down in the Cotswolds, the other weekenders in Bibury, the cocktail set of Saturday evenings, would have described him as a very straight sort of cove, a pretty gentle sort of fellow. Those who talked to him about footpaths, and milk yields, and the Stock Market, would have been upended to have known that he would drive a volunteer, a very brave spy, to suicidal risks, and seem to think nothing of it. He was a hard man. He was a Desk head in Century.

The following morning, while the official from the Harbour-

master's office was returning to Bandar Abbas, once more secreted in a dhow, Mattie was watched as he boarded the flight to Ankara, the capital city of Turkey.

He was missing four front teeth, and the rest were yellowed stumps. The old man's hair was tangled, uncared for. His lined face was the colour of a walnut. It was a tough life that he lived on the lower slopes of the mountain. He ran some hardy goats and some thick coated sheep on the side of the Iri Dagh mountain and in the shadow of the summit, always snow capped, that rose to 8,800 feet above the level of the distant sea. On a clear day, and in the early morning when the sun was rising behind the mountain, it was possible for the old man to look down on to the metropolis of Tabriz. His glance would be cursory. He had no interest in that city.

He was steeled by the roughness of the ground on which his livestock grazed, on which he grew vegetables close to his stone-walled, tin-roofed home, and he was tempered by the sadness of his old age.

Majid Nazeri closed the wooden plank door and walked towards the building where the animals wintered and where he stored their fodder. He walked like an old soldier. He had no part of the present world which was why he was happy to live in this isolation, alone with his dogs on the slopes of Iri Dagh, away from Tabriz which the regime had made their own.

He inserted into the padlock the key that hung from a leather thong around his neck. There was a cut of pain on his face, because the new shoes that he had been bought would take weeks to mould their soles around the misshapen outlines of his feet. He was not ungrateful for having been bought the shoes, but it would be the next winter before they were comfortable for him. The nearest habitation was the village of Elehred, away over the mountain to the north, towards the Soviet border. He had chosen to spend his last days in a wilderness that housed the free soaring eagles, and the ravaging wolf packs, and the leopard if he was lucky enough to see it and his body smell were not carried on the stiff winds that never forsook the slopes of Iri Dagh.

He had not always been a recluse. He had once known how to polish boots. He had known how to pour and serve a pink gin with the right measure of bitters, and he had been familiar with the formation of a platoon sized unit in attack, and he had once stood at attention an arm's length from the Shah of Shahs. Majid Nazeri had risen to sergeant in Charlie Eshraq's grandfather's regiment, and he had been batman to Charlie's father. The day that Charlie's father had been arrested, he had started the journey from Tehran to Tabriz, and then travelled on, northwards, in search of a place where he could shut out the abomination of what happened on the lower ground beneath him.

It was two years since the young Eshraq, the quiet man replacing his memory of a noisy boy, had reached his home on Iri Dagh, found him.

Always, when Charlie came to him and then left him, he wondered whether he would see the young man again. Always when Charlie left him, after they had exchanged their gruff farewells, there was a wet rheum in his old eyes. It was of small concern to him that his once keen sight was sliding from him. His dogs were his sight, and as his eyes faded so also disappeared the hazed outline of the city of Tabriz. Charlie had told him that it was in the city of Tabriz, in front of the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards, that Miss Juliette had been hanged. He had no more wish to see the grey outline of the minaret towers of Tabriz.

To Majid Nazeri, his life winnowing away, Charlie was an angel of revenge. To the old soldier, loyal servant and batman, Charlie was the last of a line he had worshipped.

He pulled open the door of the shed. He had old rags in his hand, the remnant of an army shirt that had rotted on his back.

He spent all of that afternoon polishing the petrol tank, and the wheel spokes, and the engine work of the Japanese motorcycle that was Charlie's. The motorcycle did not need i leaning, and by the time that Charlie had next taken it down the stone track to the road running from Ahar into Tabriz then it would be filthy. And after he had cleaned the motorcycle he checked that the blocks on which it was raised to protect the tyres were firmly in position. He never knew, never asked, when Charlie would next be hammering at his door, shouting lor admission, squeezing the breath out of his old body.

He picked up the discarded two parts of a blue tracksuit, and he took them to the stream beside his house for washing.

The dusk was closing in. He did not have to go to his bed of rugs and furs as soon as the darkness came. Charlie had brought him kerosene for the lamp hanging off the central beam of his main room. He could sit on his wooden chair, and long after the night had come to the slopes of Iri Dagh, and the dogs outside had started their chorus to keep away the wolves from the animals' stockade, he would gaze at his most prized possession. He would stare at the gilt framed photograph of the army officer and his foreign wife and their two children.

The joy of Majid Nazeri's life was Charlie Eshraq's corning, his despair was Charlie Eshraq's going.

He had reverted to the clothes of a
pasdar.

He was sleeping towards the back of the Mercedes bus.

Several times he was jolted awake by the man sitting next to him, because the Guards had stopped the bus at a block and were checking papers. His own papers were in order. Like every Iranian he carried with him at all times his Shenass-Nameh, his Recognition Papers. The Recognition Papers listed a false name, a false date of birth, a false record of military service in the Guards. The papers aroused no suspicion. He was unarmed, he had nothing to fear from a search of his one small bag. He had been wounded in the service of his country, he had been home on convalescent leave to the home of his parents in the fine city of Tabriz, he was returning to Tehran where his unit was to be re-formed.

He was greeted with friendship by the Guards who searched the bus.

The bus stopped at a cafe. Charlie dozed on. He had no wish to queue for food. He had eaten well at the home of Majid Nazeri early in the morning. To be hungry was to be alert, and it was sensible of him to sleep because in the morning the bus would arrive in Tehran.

He had the signature of the Mullah on his proposals for action.

The investigator only proposed. The Mullah, whose signature and office stamp were on the document, had been chosen with care by the investigator. He knew his man, he knew which cleric could be trusted to rise, a trout in a waterway in the Elborz hills.

It was late in the night. The room in which the investigator worked was without decoration, save for the portrait of the Imam. So different from the office he had occupied when he had been the trusted servant of a plucked Peacock. No carpet now, no drinks cabinet, no easy chairs, no colour television.

In the struggles waged amongst the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs in the twilight months of the Imam's life the investigator did not believe the dice would fall for those who were described as the Pragmatists, the Realists, the Moderates. He believed that the victors would be men such as the Mullah, whose signature he had on the two proposals.

The city was quiet below him. He telephoned to the Manzarieh camp on the northern outskirts of the capital. He waited for the telephone to be answered in the building that was once the hostel of the Empress Farah University of Girls and was now the Revolutionary Centre of the Volunteers for Martyrdom.

5

She was different, but she was the only girl amongst them.

He had been given short shrift by the boys. She wore no make-up, and her dark hair was combed away from a centre parting, and she had discarded the headscarf that would have been obligatory out on the street, and she wore the jeans and the blouse that would have to be covered by a
chador.

"I might have been away, OK, I've been away, but that wasn't my decision. I was taken away. Now I am able to make my own choice, and that choice is to come back and live my life inside Iran."

They had all been his friends, the boys and the girl, at the American School. The name of the girl was La'ayya. Charlie sat on a straight-backed chair and the girl lounged on the wide sofa. This was the reception room of the villa of her parents, Before the Revolution there would have been framed photographs of La'ayya's father, about his official business, and with minor members of the First Family. The images of the other life were gone, along with the servants and gardeners.