The Hidden Target Read online

  “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 th
eir 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.”

  “What’s wrong with them? They are harmless, make you feel wonderful.”

  “They may not be harmless. They may lead—”

  “It will soon be dark,” Madge said curtly. The long road ahead, tree-lined, was unlit and already slipping into the night shadows. To her relief, the camper slowed down before a flat-roofed building of virulent pink, one-storied, with a small gas station at one side. At the other side, where the camper was now following a rough driveway into the rear courtyard, was a café with its name in bold lettering of dashes, dots, and curlicues sprawled above a bleakly illuminated door.

  They drew up in the courtyard, a large square of packed earth surrounded by trees on three sides. Other cars were following them, but there was room—and space to spare—for everyone. Shawfield still sat at the wheel as his crowd followed Selim out of the camper; he was ready to angle it into another corner of the yard if some cars were parked too near him. But they settled for the garage side of the inn. He noted them carefully: the Fiat with the Turks; the station wagon with the Swedes; even the red Ferrari and the Australians. Only the Germans in the Mercedes had preferred to go on their way with a more expensive lodging in mind. As his crowd straggled slowly across the yard to the entrance of the building, Kiley joined him. “We’ll get them asleep by midnight,” Kiley said. “Does that give you time?”

  “That should do it. You’d better give O’Connell a pill tonight, make sure she’s as stretched out as the rest of them.”

  “She’s tired enough.”

  “Don’t chance it,” Shawfield warned him. “Hey, what is she doing now?”

  Kiley looked across the yard to the small group halted outside the inn’s central doorway. He swore, jumped out of the camper, then checked his pace to a saunter. Nina was talking with one of the Turks. The other was listening in rapt attention. So was Madge. And the Swedish couple. “Hello, hello,” Kiley said genially as he reached them. “Quite a traffic block we’ve got here.”

  “I’m getting some names,” Nina told him, excitement and success bringing her face to life. “Names of places where the best carpets are made.” She turned back to the Turk, a handsome man with large dark eyes and a sweeping black moustache. “Would you repeat them again, please?” And to Kiley, “Jim, can you note them down for me?”

  “We may not be anywhere near these places,” he warned her.

  The Swedish newspaperman had his note-book out, ready for dictation.

  “There are a few places in Tabriz,” Nina was saying, “And some on the outskirts of Tehran.”

  “Ab ’Ali,” prompted the Turkish carpet dealer. “Good at Isfahan. Ver’ good at Shiraz. Also Kerman ver’ good.”

  “I’ve got them,” said the Swede, scribbling hard. “I’ll give you a copy,” he told Nina. “Tomorrow morning? I will draw you a little map, too.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Very educational,” he remarked to his wife as they left in search of the children.

  “Thank you,” Nina said to the carpet experts. They bowed gravely, spoke a phrase in Turkish as polite goodbye, and entered the inn.

  “Their Turkish sounds better than their English,” Kiley said, letting the Swedes pass inside. “Must be Eastern mind readers, too. How did they know you wanted to see carpets?”

  “I asked them,” Nina said, “It was simple.”

  Madge was laughing. “You know Nina. She just goes up to a stranger with her best smile and asks him if he speaks English. He looked a little astounded, I must say. Then he answered, “Ver’ good English.” But it did take him a few moments to understand her questions.”

  “Ver’ simple,” Nina said.

  Kiley took her arm, led her indoors. “We’ll have some music tonight. Marie-Louise tells me she has mastered two of the gipsy tunes that she heard in Istanbul. That was a good night, wasn’t it?”

  On the outskirts of Istanbul, Nina thought. But that had been a good night. In spite of her anger and almost-revolt on leaving the Hilton, she had enjoyed herself. N
egative emotions had ebbed away, leaving only a touch of guilt: Jim was thoughtful, Jim was kind, and what was she? “Marie-Louise says one of these songs was brought from India by the gypsies. It’s one of the ragas that are played there. She’s hoping to trace it—”

  “Ragas? We’re getting fancy, aren’t we?”

  “Well, that’s their name.”

  “How do you pick up all these little pieces of information?” He half turned to the entrance, where Shawfield and Madge had appeared. “I know—you go up to a stranger, stun him with a smile, and ask if he speaks English. That’s how she does it, Tony. Got the names of carpet towns from our Turkish traders. Everything okay outside?”

  “Locked up and secure.” Shawfield looked around the small hall suffocated with large posters above its side counter, where Selim was superintending their registration. Ahead of him, through a wide doorway, he could see a dining-room. Sparse lighting, but plenty of space. It looked clean even if it was overdressed with garlands of bright-coloured paper flowers decorating cracks in newly plastered walls. Posters there, too: religious leaders in black turbans, the cult of personality, brooding over several large tables. At least, he thought, we won’t be packed together with a mish-mash of strangers. “Could be worse,” he said and relaxed.