In those rare moments when her guard did drop, she could console herself that honesty of a kind had played its part, despite the deceptions. Her mother’s welfare had always been paramount in her life. She just wished she had been asked to get close to someone else, rather than a man she was struggling not to fall in love with.
Earlier that day, after an introductory meeting with her new colleagues, she had slipped out of the embassy compound and walked through the 40-degree heat of the May morning to a taxi rank. She had seen a public phone booth there when her car from the airport had driven past at dawn. As she dialled the number in Tehran, she glanced across at the taxi drivers, lying on string charpoys in the shade of a large canvas canopy, limbs hung listlessly as they listened to All India Radio blaring out from a nearby car, its doors flung open.
‘Mama,’ she began. The line was faint. ‘It’s Leila. Things will be better soon.’
But it wasn’t her mother’s voice that replied. ‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ a man said in Farsi. Leila’s stomach tightened. For the past year her mother had been in and out of the Mehr, a private hospital in Tehran, her treatment paid for by the Americans. Each time the doctors had prepared her for the worst. Normally, though, her neighbour had sent a text to tell her that she had been admitted to hospital.
‘Who is this?’ she asked. His voice sounded familiar.
‘A friend of the family,’ the man said. She could hear other male voices in the background. ‘She’s fine and, inshallah, will have the best treatment dollars can buy.’ The mocking tone was thinly disguised, his words addressed to the others in the room with him.
‘I want her looked after, that was always the deal,’ Leila said, trying not to raise her voice. A man outside the telephone booth glanced up at her. She knew she should be at her mother’s bedside, but that was impossible.
‘I will tell her you called,’ the voice said, then paused. ‘And that her health rests in your hands.’
The sun was at its highest as she walked back towards the embassy. In the distance, an unseen nutseller was rattling his spoon rhythmically against a frying pan. Otherwise there was a stillness in the midday air. Even the traffic police at the junction near the embassy had retreated to the shade, where they snoozed on flimsy wooden chairs. She had never minded dry heat. It somehow made her feel closer to her mother, who she knew needed her now more than ever.
She had just turned nine when she first sensed that all was not well between her parents. They were living in the expat community in Dubai, where her father was working, and he had come home late, as he often did. But this time she was awake. There had been a problem with the electricity in their apartment block–there was not enough power to run the air conditioning, and the sudden warmth had woken her. One of the staff had placed an old fan in the room and she lay there mesmerised by the way it turned as far as it could one way, before sweeping back in the other direction. But above its hum she gradually became aware of shouting downstairs, and then screaming, followed by slammed doors and silence.
She had found her mother curled up in a corner of the kitchen, their Indian maid holding a bloodied cloth to her forehead. Her mother smiled weakly when she saw Leila, but the maid gestured crossly for her to go back upstairs.
‘It’s OK,’ her mother had said, beckoning Leila towards her. She walked tentatively across the kitchen and sat down beside her mother, watched anxiously by the maid. ‘It’s OK,’ her mother repeated, putting a shaking arm around Leila as the maid retreated.
They must have stayed like that for most of the night, hunched together on the marble floor in the heat of a Dubai night, the weak yellow lights flickering. Her mother explained how her father was under a lot of stress at work and sometimes drank too much whisky, hoping that it would make him feel better. But it just made him angry, and when he was angry he wasn’t himself, and did silly things.
In the years that followed, Leila and her mother learnt to be out of the way when he was not himself, but Leila knew that he continued to vent his whisky-fuelled fury on his wife. Not even a burqa could disguise the black eyes. Her father’s long hours and frequent trips abroad meant that she had always been closer to her mother than to him, but his violence bonded them further, uniting them in a mixture of shame and solidarity. She had never forgotten that night, the sight of her mother crying, and could never forgive her father, whose light in her life went out.
All she could do now, slumped on the floor of her bare embassy room, was to fulfil her side of the deal and hope that the voices at the end of the phone in Tehran would honour theirs. But before she could think what that deal might bring, the evening stillness was split by a sound that she knew at once was not thunder.
31
Marchant felt the weight of a body lying on top of him, but he didn’t realise it was Uncle K until he tried to move out from under his heavy frame. Other people were stirring on the bar floor all around him. For a moment, in the dark silence, Marchant was back at the marketplace in Mogadishu. But then the moaning started, guttural cries of primitive pain, and he remembered the quicksilver shards dicing the air, the compression, the chilling cacophony of disintegrating glass.
‘Uncle K, are you OK?’ Marchant asked, trying to shut out the sweet smell of cauterised flesh. It was a smell he hated more than any other, one that had never left him. Now, five years later, the same nagging thoughts were suddenly back once again: could he have done more about the man at the bar?
He was kneeling beside Uncle K now, checklisting his own body as he spoke. He put a hand briefly to his face, touching warm blood as he bent over the colonel. The old man’s features were still intact, the plump, putty-faced cheeks and pursed, rosebud mouth, but the angle of his lower body was too jack-knifed for a seventy-year-old.
Marchant looked at the debris all around him, the lights torn from the ceiling, the upturned tables, shredded curtains. He saw a plastic bottle of mineral water on the floor, a few feet away from him. Reaching over, he dribbled some onto the colonel’s dusty lips, spitting grit out of his own mouth. Slowly, the colonel’s lips began to move. Marchant leant closer, cupping one hand behind his head.
‘You must go,’ the colonel whispered. ‘They will try to blame you for this.’
‘Who will?’
But the colonel had lost consciousness again. Marchant put the bottle to his mouth, spilling water over his lips and chin. Blood was seeping now from the corner of his mouth. The colonel opened his eyes, coughing feebly.
‘You must go,’ he urged. ‘Om Beach, near Gokarna. Ask for…’ The next word was lost in the blood and saliva. ‘…brother Salim at the Namaste Café.’
‘Leila, I want you to get down to the club and slip inside the cordon, assuming the Delhi police have put one up. It’s usually a free-for-all at these things. They might do Golden Temples, but crime-scene golden hours? Give me a break.’
A ripple of polite laughter moved around the room as Monk Johnson, head of the Presidential Protective Detail, addressed a room of ten officers, a mix of Secret Service and CIA. Behind him, a large TV screen was showing library footage from NDTV of the Gymkhana Club before the blast. Cameras had yet to reach the scene. Leila had been tempted to head out into the Delhi evening as soon as she heard the explosion, but she had been summoned to the meeting within minutes. The station was already on a state of high alert: in seventy-two hours the new President of the United States would be