The Eyes of Lira Kazan (21 page)

Charlotte was dumbstruck. How could they have known? All she had done was copy out a few of the main points and the general trend of the statements shown to her by Félix. She had not signed the piece so that there could be no link with Lira, and somebody else had rung the police for details about Eyvin's death. But that had been enough to unleash the diabolical machinery of power. There was no way of knowing where the first telephone call had come from, but you could be sure it was from the very top. In the land of the tabloid there is a means of preventing journalists from telling the truth about such things as money laundering, known as a super-injunction. It is usually applied at the very last moment. This one had come to the
Guardian
at six o'clock: publication forbidden. The procedure had been set in motion by Jonas Rassmussen. The name of his client was withheld, replaced by random initials. This was allowed by the law since it existed to preserve a person's good name.

For the editor this wasn't the first time – he had suffered injunctions before and he went into crisis mode. You had to obey an injunction, but he promised to fight it and launch an appeal. But of course it was too late, and soon the other side would force the paper to reveal its documents and its sources.

Those sources, once again, became the quarry, pursued by hounds.

When the telephone rang at Mark's flat, Félix was standing with his back to the room facing the window. He wasn't saying anything; Nwankwo too had become completely silent. Félix was watching the street. There was a car down below with two men inside. One had got out, goodness knows where he was now, perhaps in the lift on his way up, or in
the corridor listening… Who was he? One of Finley's heavies trying to finish Nwankwo off? Or a Russian going after Lira again? Nwankwo had a third candidate: the British secret service. He was already convinced that they had been the ones searching the Oxford house.

The phone went on ringing. Finally Félix picked up the receiver. He recognized Charlotte's voice, trembling: “Injunction,” she said.

“What's an injunction?”

Nwankwo froze. He knew perfectly well what it was. Then he exploded.

“That's our death sentence! This country is a tax haven and a judicial haven too. The Prime Minister can stop any investigation he feels like, he can block any story. There are billions of pounds hidden over here, think of all the people they could save, and it's been going on like this for years, decades, a century! And you think you can overturn all that by feeding one miserable little story to the papers. I told you, it's no longer enough, you've got to think bigger than that, time's running out. Thanks to your stupidity they'll be emptying out the accounts as we speak and giving assassins their orders to kill us!”

Lira was shaking. “I'm going to call the embassy. It's over, I'll go home. Dmitry was right. You carry on with all that stuff you've got, it's huge. I'm just slowing you down. I can't contribute anything. I've told you everything I know.”

“Don't talk rubbish, Lira,” Nwankwo said drily.

His rage suddenly evaporated as he looked over at her face. She had taken her glasses off and you could see her eyes, her wounds and her tears. Were they because she had given up the fight, or had she just accepted her fate? Her face was pale and drawn. She had never rested as the doctors had told her to. And she hadn't been to see the shrink who would have talked her through the moment her life had been overturned. And the two men supporting her, the men who had become her eyes – they were now equally lost.

The three of them had never imagined themselves being outside the law; they had always felt that they were on the side of righteousness, inside the machinery of legality, however rusty it might have become. Now here they were, spied on, eavesdropped on, pursued by government forces, their lives threatened by mafiosi. All their pursuers, for all their different methods and orders, had one common purpose: the destruction of the documents. The inner workings of political and financial dealings must remain buried out of sight.

A key suddenly turned in the door. They all jumped. The silhouette of a small man appeared in the doorway. He had a polite smile, tracksuit bottoms, slightly awkward gestures – nothing like the kind of killer they had been dreading night and day. The man was clearly unused to his arrival creating such a sensation. He explained that he had come to clean the flat, as he did every Tuesday. He looked at Lira, stared at her face for a long moment, as though he recognized something familiar in her – the fragility of a survivor. Then he went and opened a cupboard in the kitchen and got out the dusters and the vacuum cleaner, signalling that he would start with the other rooms so as not to disturb them too much. Silence soon fell again between them, so heavy that they could even hear the sound of his duster.

“I'm going out to find a hotel for tonight,” Félix suddenly said.

“It's too risky to use a telephone or credit card, even for you, Félix. If they're downstairs it means they've been following you as well, and for quite a while.”

“We need a gun,” Lira said.

Nwankwo cleared his throat noisily to cover their voices. The cleaner passed to and fro, tidying, hovering, cleaning, restoring the flat to its original state. Nwankwo, Lira and Félix sat perched on three cushions around the computer as though it contained explosives and they were suicide bombers waiting to go into action. The walls seemed to melt
away around them as they were returned to being merely those of an upwardly mobile architect's smart apartment. They had to leave. They needed to find a way out. Not for a moment did any of them envisage approaching the police. That would have meant that the documents would disappear for ever. The cleaner came back through the sitting room on his way to scrub the bathtub. Nwankwo watched him carefully.

“We'll give him some cash and send him out to get us hotel rooms,” he finally said.

“If he's dressed like that any hotel would get suspicious and ask him for papers, which he probably doesn't have,” Félix said. “I know – wait!” He got up.

He ran into the bedroom, like a child trying to get back in favour after being naughty, and then reappeared with one of Mark's beautifully cut jackets. Everything happened quickly after that. They asked the cleaner whether he would do them a great service – he would be paid of course – and he listened to their proposal, both surprised and amused. He had certainly guessed that these people were out of place in this flat, which would have made a perfect double-page spread in an interior-decoration magazine. He agreed to the plan, and pulled on the jacket, which fitted perfectly. Félix added one his own scarves.

“He looks very handsome,” Lira said, defying them to leave her out of the game.

Félix smiled. In order to make the cleaner feel more relaxed he asked him what he was called, where he came from and what he did before coming to England.

“My name is Adit. I was a professional letter-writer and poet in India.”

There was an embarrassed silence. They didn't know quite what to say and apologized. Then Félix handed him the money, reassuring him that there would be no problem with Mark. He gave him an address near St Pancras and asked him to reserve rooms for two nights, starting that
evening. The man set off. Félix watched from the window as he walked along the pavement a few minutes later. His bearing had completely changed. He was a good actor. Or else all it had taken was a designer jacket and their trust in him to restore his own confidence.

Then Félix had a sudden brainwave: they would disguise themselves, become unrecognizable. There was plenty to choose from in Mark's cupboard: velvet, leather, loud patterns, sober suits. There was even a long dress that laced up the back, left over from an unforgettable drag party. And there were plenty of wigs, too, in the bathroom drawer. Félix made the suggestion. Nwankwo groaned. But no one had a better idea, and so he let himself be led over to the wardrobe, looking more and more irritated.

“I'll always be a black man.”

“Yes, but with a moustache, Adit's old cap and jacket, you won't look like an Oxford don at least.”

First, they would disguise themselves. Then they would leave separately. Then they would leave the country. Félix's brain was boiling. He poured out his plans at high speed as he pulled hangers out of Mark's cupboards. He didn't realize that in opening up these wardrobes he was revealing the other side of his life; his days would now be more like his nights, clandestine and secretive. And by removing Nwankwo's suit, he too was revealing his other self, the African archetype that he had always tried to escape from. Lira, sitting on the edge of the bed, waited for something to be suggested for her, as though she no longer cared about appearances. She was no longer talking about calling the embassy. She wanted to go to France – that was where Louchsky's main operation was, and that was where her daughter was.

“And that's where he's having his birthday party! He's taken over Versailles for his fortieth!” Félix said delightedly, remembering what Steffy had told him. “When is his birthday?”

“October the ninth,” said Lira. She knew everything about Louchsky by heart.

Soon they had finished trying on clothes and had settled on their chosen looks. They were all agreed – they would go to France. They would find a place far from everything, out of reach of all the radars. Félix recited the address to them, it must not be written down anywhere. They agreed to meet there in eight days' time.

 

 

The tall fellow in the cap putting out the dustbins at the bottom of the building was Nwankwo, dressed in the cleaner's ill-fitting blouson. Eventually he set off down Westbourne Grove, walking fast, crossing the road frequently, making sure he wasn't being followed. There were too many smart boutiques and expensive health-food shops for the street to be truly bohemian; it was full of young people who looked like his students, but Nwankwo no longer had the costume or the job that connected him with them. He felt that the smell of rubbish was clinging to him. He noticed a fine church that had been partly converted into a boutique. The church had itself been converted, rather than converting others. Here people were beautiful, healthy, young and solvent – they were not praying about the future. He walked up to Notting Hill Gate station.

Half an hour later he saw them walking slowly towards him through the crowds. Lira had a brown wig beneath a hat, dark glasses and a man's suit. She was holding Adit's arm – he had returned from his mission, still in his Paul Smith jacket. “How do we look?” she had whispered before they set off. “Super-cool,” Félix had replied. He had stayed behind, gathering up his things, taking the computer and the CDs disguised as British pop music and was going back to Paris that evening. Lira clung onto Adit's arm; he put his hand on hers as if they were old friends. They looked as though they were exchanging confidences.