Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Neither man said anything until they had reached the gate and were taking the stairs down to the tarmac.

“How did you do that?” said Webster.

Some color had returned to Qazai’s face but he still looked pained. “I told him he should take the money. And that if he didn’t I would tell the director of the airport police that he tried to solicit a bribe from us.”

Webster nodded, grateful and not a little embarrassed.

“I didn’t know you could speak Arabic.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know.”

Webster, still not entirely confident that they had outrun the police, took one last look around at the airport, buzzing with heat in the midday sun.

“That’s about to change,” he said, and let Qazai go first up the steps to the plane.

IT HAD ALL BEENthe doing of a man called Nezam; in a sense, he had ordained all this thirty years ago from his office in Tehran. Dead for twenty, he had no doubt imagined this day, or one like it, and would have been saddened to see his careful arrangements finally coming undone. That was what Webster had to understand. It would be no exaggeration to say that Qazai had had no choice then, just as he seemed to have so few now.

People imagine that revolutions are clean-cut affairs: the emperor loses his head, his followers flee or are put to the sword, the state is transfused with fresh blood. No one from the old guard is meant to remain; there were no aristocrats on the Committee of Public Safety, no Whites on the Council of Public Commissars. In Iran, though, where politics is ancient and complicated, despite the reach and the viciousness of the revolution, despite the departure or death of almost everyone who had held a post of importance in the old regime, there was one place where one man somehow managed to stay on, darkly welcomed by his new masters, and that place was the secret police.

The odd junior officer from the ranks made the same jump—experience, after all, was hard to come by—but Kamal Nezam was a senior man, the deputy head of the service, in charge of monitoring sedition for the Shah, and to the Ayatollah no one should have been more deserving of a swift and public death. But either because he was already a traitor, or because he knew too well how valuable he might be to a government desperate to control the people it had just freed, he stayed on, smoothly making the switch from the Shah’s service to the service of the revolution, from SAVAK to SAVAMA, from one sinister acronym to another.

Whatever path he had taken, Nezam was no idealist. He was a technician of the highest order who set about creating an efficient, brutal, nasty little agency that mirrored many of the qualities of the revolution itself, and one of his first, critical jobs was to help the new government find a place for its money. In those days Iran wasn’t rich but it wasn’t poor, either: oil dollars were still coming in but it was soon spending most of them on its war with Iraq. Nevertheless, it had enough to put some aside for its youthful but ambitious foreign intelligence service, or for operations outside its borders, or for lining its own pockets, perhaps. And it wanted its money to accumulate, of course, which it wasn’t going to do sitting around in a recently nationalized bank in Tehran. So Nezam had gone to Paris to meet an old friend of his, and the old friend had suggested that he consider Parviz Qazai, who had recently arrived in London and was setting up a little bank that might be to purpose.

Here Qazai paused. He drained his glass of water, swirled the ice for a moment, put it down and looked out of the window. It was clear below, barely a cloud in sight, and Webster, facing forward, could see the west coast of Morocco stretching in front of him and in the distance, just visible through the haze, southern Spain and the points of the Strait of Gibraltar pinching together. Qazai was looking a little better. He had showered and changed into some loose gray pajamas that made him look as if he was about to start meditating, and though he looked drawn—pale, somehow, beneath the tan—he was lucid enough, and had been telling his story with odd, pained attention, almost relish. Webster had expected to have to force out the truth, but all he had done was ask what was really going on, and after a pause and a deep, sorrowful breath Qazai had begun, tired but constructing his sentences with care, as if he were laying down a piece of history that deserved total clarity.

But something had brought him to a stop, and for perhaps half a minute he closed his eyes before going on.

“For years I’ve wondered… I have tried not to blame my father for all this. He wasn’t a bad man. He needed more brilliance, I think. If he’d been more brilliant there wouldn’t have been so much room for his fears. And when he got to London I have to believe he was really afraid. About my future, for one thing.” There was an ironic note in his clipped laugh. “But I think we can agree that he set me up very nicely.”

Webster, not knowing whether the double meaning was intended, tried to keep his expression clear of sympathy or judgment and let Qazai go on.

Father and son had drawn up the first plans for their London bank during the summer of 1979, when Qazai was twenty-eight and a little lost; not a loafer, exactly, but wanting direction. In Paris, five years earlier, he had studied philosophy and economics at the Sorbonne and had done well enough, but his heart—no, his soul—was in art. When he was twelve, and committed to boyish notions of romance and adventure, he had read a novel by Stevenson that had seemed to capture precisely what he wanted his life to be. In it, the son of a stony, conservative, rich American goes to Paris to become a sculptor, before being led by an impetuous friend to chase after treasure lying in the wreck of a ship in the middle of the Pacific. That was living, the young Qazai had thought, and in a way, not that he had ever seen it in that light before, his progress since had indeed followed a similar track.

His sculpture was no better, in truth, than Stevenson’s hero’s had been, and when the revolution came about—or rather, when all the rich Iranians started leaving the country some months before it happened—he had been back from Paris for three years, in Tehran, working at this job or that but spending most of his energy planning (and delaying) a business that would export Persian art to London and New York. Life, in short, was too easy then. Too comfortable.

Exile was not. After they were forced to leave Iran he watched his father become fearful, prone to irrational alarms about the future, anxious about his reputation and his influence in this new city, which, while not hostile, was hardly friendly. That, rather than exile itself, was what had shocked Qazai into changing: he was overcome by a powerful desire never to be cowed in the same way by life and its possible misfortunes. Money, he realized, was the key to fearlessness, and he had surprised his father with his enthusiasm for the idea that they set up in business together. Later he would surprise him with his talent for investing, which had turned out to be his real genius, but for a time the job they had before them was simple—to raise funds—and for a dreary six months their lives had been nothing but meetings, and the same meeting every time at that: they would explain their idea, answer questions, and be shown out, with varying degrees of politeness.

After a while Qazai began to wonder whether it was his father’s profession, and not his character, that had caused his collapse. Finance was not like art. It had no soft edges. Either you had money, or you didn’t; either you were making more, or you weren’t. And if you weren’t making anything, you were nothing. A bad sculptor keeps his sculptures and may think them good, but a banker who cannot raise money has nothing at all, and slowly Qazai came to understand the distinct atmosphere of exclusion that his father must have been forced to breathe since leaving Iran.