The Hidden Target (31 page)

“Fine. Can you drop off the house keys at the real-estate office? Make our excuses to Miss Gladstone—we won’t have time to ’phone her tonight. Come on, let’s move it.” At the door to Sal’s room, he halted to call back, “Did you hear what we’re planning? Any improvements to suggest?”

Renwick said, “Don’t forget the outside antenna.”

He has recovered, Mac thought with a surge of relief. As he followed Sal into his room, he began explaining about forest fires and lack of birds—something that wouldn’t hurt Gladstone’s feelings and would raise no wonder in Sawyer Springs.

Mac was right: keep busy. Renwick went upstairs, started emptying their rooms of small items and clothes, making sure that not even a matchbook was left behind. For a few last moments, he stood at the window, looked at the rise and fall of hills stretching far to the south. The sun had set; the light was fading. But another day would follow tonight, take him to London and reports from Claudel and his friend the rug buyer. Istanbul must have had some messages from them: by this time they’d be following the camper out of Turkey. If all went well, they’d be following.

He carried the two suitcases downstairs. “Ready when you are,” he told Mac.

One hour later, they were leaving. For their final minute together in the darkened driveway, all talk ended. In silence, they shook hands. In silence, they got into their cars. Mac and Sal were the first to go. Ten minutes later, Renwick followed. Sawyer Springs seemed already asleep, didn’t even notice their departure.

They crossed the Turkish-Iranian frontier in late afternoon, a small cavalcade of four cars and one brown camper, all heading for the nearest town before dusk set in. Tony Shawfield was in a thoroughly bad mood, partly due to the long delay at the border when Turkish officials were intent on how much money was being taken out of their country and Iranian officials were scrutinising passports with heavy frowns. One Englishman, three Americans, one Frenchwoman, one Dane, one Italian, one Dutchman, was a total that baffled them; or perhaps it was three young women travelling with five young men, and only one couple married. But at last, with no drugs found and the pills in Shawfield’s medical kit—all bottles clearly marked as aspirin or malaria or dysentery or digestive—briefly inspected, the campers were free to leave. Selim, their Turkish guide, who was accompanying them as far as Tabriz—this district spoke a Turkish dialect—hadn’t been much help. The Iranian border officials were not of this province, he was explaining now to Shawfield and Kiley; they came from Tehran. “Religious fascists,” he ended. “But we’ll—”

“Shut up,” Shawfield said. Kiley laughed and the rest of the group joined in. Except Nina. There was nothing funny about Selim’s perpetual excuses to cover his failures; nothing funny, either, about the way all the others would laugh so easily without even knowing why they were laughing. But, thought Nina, I’m beginning to guess why, and I hope I am wrong.

“Are you all right?” Kiley asked, coming to sit beside her.

“Just tired and hungry.”

“Well, it won’t take long now. Selim recommends a small hotel on the outskirts of Tabriz. I thought we could all use proper beds tonight.”

Nina stared out at the rolling plain and hills, at the backdrop of mountains. “That’s Russia over there—to our left?”

Kiley nodded. “And to our right, the Kurds. We’re giving them a wide berth—a lot of fighting, I hear.” He spoke conversationally; he always did when politics came up. None of his business, there were other things in life, let’s all be sane and sensible—and tolerant of people like Selim.

“What would Selim call them? Nationalist pigs?” That was a phrase he had used of the Armenians, of the government in Ankara, of both Turks and Greeks in Cyprus. “I wonder if he approves of anyone,” Nina added with a smile. “His idea of politics seems to be hatred for everything: tear it all down, destroy, destroy. He belongs to Genghis Khan and a pyramid of skulls.”

“He just likes to speak. Too much rhetoric. It’s endemic in this part of the world.” Kiley slipped an arm around her shoulder, drew her closer. The gesture, like his voice, was gentle, reassuring. Then he was talking about the field they were passing: a lot of cultivation around here, good grazing land, too; markets, plenty of markets in Tabriz—tomorrow she and Madge could go exploring them. “What are you going to buy?” he teased her. “Another skirt?”

“If I can get some money changed. Perhaps at this hotel—”

“I can get better rates for you tomorrow. I’ll be going into town.” He turned the conversation back to safer channels. “It was a good move to pack your jeans away. A pity, though. They suited you.”

“If Madge and I had been wearing tight pants, I wonder how much longer we’d have been delayed at the frontier.” She laughed. “We might even have been refused entry. Then Tony would really have had something to make him mad. Why does he get so uptight?”

“Selim gets on his nerves.” And will I have a bad report to make on that loose-mouthed idiot, thought Kiley grimly: a play-acting revolutionary who can’t resist driving home the obvious. Not that the Dutchman Tromp or his good and dear friend Lambrese paid much attention to anything outside of archaeological remains, photography, and themselves. The French girl and her stolid Dane were lost in their world of music. Madge—a small problem at first—had stopped concentrating on him and now found some consolation in Tony Shawfield and his magic pills. If the Iranian border guards had taken five blood samples or listened to the confident voices and fits of laughter, they would have examined Tony’s medicine chest with real interest. Nina was the holdout. (“I hate pills,” she had said; “won’t even take aspirin unless I have a hundred-and-three-degree fever.”) And Nina was the one who noticed everything. But he could manage her. At the moment, he felt her body relax against him. “Also,” he went on, “Tony hates driving with a pack of cars at his heel.”

“He could slow up and let them pass.”

“Tony?” That amused Kiley. “He wants to reach our sleeping place—I guess it’s an Iranian version of a motel—before it’s dark.” And the four cars following might have the same idea, thought Kiley. Still, they had seemed fairly innocent. During the delay at the frontier he had drifted back, chatted with the drivers, made a genial exchange of small talk. The Mercedes immediately behind the camper had three Germans in the oil business. Next was the grey Fiat with a couple of Turkish carpet buyers. Then came a station wagon with a Swedish newspaperman, wife, and three children on their way to India. The last car was a rakish red Ferrari with two Australians bound for northern Pakistan. A race against weather, they had said; the newly completed highway over the top of the world, from Pakistan to China, could be closed by heavy snows in another six weeks. “In any case, no one passes Tony on the road. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“Who are they—did you find out?”

Yes, Nina notices, Kiley thought. Not that it mattered in this instance. So he could give a humorous account of the people travelling behind them. “They’ll never make it,” he ended his description of the Australians. Brawn but no brain, he decided. Certainly not undercover men. No intelligence agent would travel in anything so noticeable as a red Ferrari.

But Nina’s interest was caught by something else. “Carpets— Persian carpets? Oh, Jim, can you persuade Tony to take us to one of the towns where they are made? Not to the factories— to the places where families still spend years on one carpet. The designs—”

Kiley laughed, shook his head. “Oh, yes—designs again.” Careful, he warned himself: don’t imitate Selim and give a lecture on impoverished families being exploited by a few rich people who wanted an expensive rag to throw over a floor. “Why don’t you ask Tony yourself? All right, all right—I’ll do it,” he agreed, watching the fleeting expression on her face. It seemed a good moment to probe. “What have you got against Tony anyway?” he joked.

Nina shrugged her shoulders.

“He isn’t a tyrant, you know. He’s easy to get along with.”

“For you, yes. For the rest of us?”

“Madge seems to think he’s okay. He talks a lot with her, doesn’t he?” Kiley had made sure of that, even if Shawfield had at first resisted the idea: stupid little blonde, Shawfield had said. Kiley had insisted: Madge was Nina’s confidante and a sure way at getting to Nina’s private thoughts. She had them, thought Kiley as he looked at Nina, yet I never feel she tells me anything that really matters. Was that reserve part of her nature and nothing to worry about?

Yes, Nina was thinking, Tony talks and laughs with Madge now. Now. Not before our little trip through Greece, though. Only since Istanbul. It isn’t the kind of thing I can even mention to Madge: she’s convinced she has made a conquest. Perhaps she has. I’m only certain of one thing: Madge and I don’t talk any more—not the way we did in London. What has happened to all of us? We’ve changed: Henryk and Guido, always sharing their own private jokes; Marie-Louise and her Sven, polite and amiable but remote somehow, impossible to talk with them except with pleasant little remarks that only skate over the surface. And everyone except me—and Jim and Tony— worrying about nothing, accepting everything, wild attacks of laughter and giggles followed by stranger fits of lethargy and vacant stares. They look but they don’t see. They aren’t on heroin—there are no punctures on their arms. What is it, then? This isn’t just my imagination, she told herself. Or is it?

Kiley said, “And were all these thoughts for Tony? I’m envious.”

She pointed to a background mountain. “What is it—a volcanic cone? We’ve seen so many of them all day.”

“Was this just a way of changing the subject away from Tony? But Nina did notice scenery. “You’re a puzzle, Nina. What’s in a view? Just another collection of hills.”

“But not like those we saw in Greece, or in Yugoslavia, or in Switzerland or Austria. All those were different from each other, too. Just like the people who live among them.”

“People are people. They’re all the same. It’s their economic environment that makes them seem different. And these are the differences that can be changed.” Changed with a revolution that would end the differences, the inequalities, the barbarities of privilege.

“Changed by force? By proclamations and edicts? Social engineering, my father would call it. He’d give you a good argument against that, Jim.”

“I’d probably agree with him,” he said lightly. “Who talked about force or edicts anyway?”

“Then how do you change people into all the same pattern? First, you’d have to destroy all their values, all their achievements, everything that didn’t agree with your ideas of how people should live. Then you’d have to get them to accept all your laws and regulations, change them into—”

“My ideas? My laws? Oh, come on, Nina.” He was laughing now.

“Not
yours,
Jim. You know what I mean. It’s a manner of speech.” Suddenly she smiled. “My father would agree with you there. He never uses ‘you,’ always ‘one.’ One does this, one doesn’t do that.”

“What is your father exactly?” Kiley knew quite well what Francis O’Connell’s function was: he headed the Bureau of Political-Economic Affairs in Washington and was about to be given that peculiarly American position of ambassador-at-large. He would be jetting around the world mending political fences, shoring up breaks in economic dams, Mr. Almighty in International Affairs, Pinhead Supreme.

“Economics and politics, that’s his thing,” Nina said.

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“But I am. I just don’t like impressing other people.”

“Did he talk with you at all? Or was he too busy?”

Nina was angry. “We talked. We travelled together. At one time.” Then she recovered, said, “He taught me a lot, actually. I’d put forward my ideas, and he’d argue them out. But patiently. I remember once—I was fifteen at the time—I wanted everything in the world to be equalised.” Nina shook her head, laughing at herself.

“But he didn’t believe in equality?”

“Before the law, yes. In civil rights, too. But how on earth, Jim, do you keep people equalised in what they do or what they want? I mean, you may force everyone—if you are ruthless enough—to be equal in earnings and in possessions, but how do you
keep
them equalised? I don’t see how you can make a programme of behaviour for the whole world and expect it to stay the way you want it to be.”

There was a brief silence. Thoroughly indoctrinated, Kiley thought, as he looked at the girl beside him. He raised a hand and pushed back a lock of her hair behind her ear. “There’s that ‘you’ problem again,” he said, and won a smile. “You’re so beautiful, darling. Why do you bother your pretty little head with all that political talk?”

Bother your pretty little head
... “I wasn’t talking politics. I was talking about people.”

“Of course,” he said soothingly. “I think I’d better spell Tony at the wheel. He’s just about had it with Selim chattering in his ear.”

Whispering would be better word for Selim, seated up front with Shawfield. “He looks like a conspirator out of a grade-B movie.”

For a second, Kiley stared at her blankly.

“Selim,” she explained. “Who else?”

Drawing his arm away from her shoulder, Kiley prepared to rise. “We’ll soon reach our stopping place. Selim says the food is good there—plentiful, at least.” With a brief touch of his hand on her cheek, he went forward. Seemingly, however, there was no need for him to take the wheel. He stayed beside Shawfield after elbowing Selim aside, cutting him out of their quiet conversation. Nina watched them for a few moments. Now we’ve got two conspirators, she joked with herself. Then her eyes turned to the grey landscape, a high plateau of dusty green surrounded by hills. As fields gave way to trees sheltering small cubes of houses built of earth-toned brick, she reached across the narrow aisle to shake Madge awake. “We are here.”

“Where?” Madge straightened up, looked out the window.

“At the oasis.”

“Oasis?” Madge’s wits were slow in gathering. “Oh, you mean the town?”

“The outskirts.” Always the outskirts, thought Nina. But tomorrow, somehow, I’ll get into the centre of this city, find the bazaar and a skirt to change with the one I’m wearing, find a bookstore and look for a map, newspapers, and magazines (will there be any in English?), and get malaria pills at a drugstore or chemist’s or whatever it’s called. “Madge,” she said softly, “don’t take any more pills from Tony. I think they’re some drug.”