The Corporal's Wife (2013) Read Free Page B

saw the misery in his face, the shame, and the gold ring on his finger. She spoke good Farsi, colloquial and vulgar.
    ‘Adultery. Cheating on your wife. How would the Qods view that? Here on duty, are you? Spending your time in a whorehouse!’
    She thought him barely worthy of her time or the expense of the honey trap so carefully fashioned by the station chief. But the Qods was top of the heap . . . His ID said he was a corporal, a driver . . . and he was in Dubai. ‘Who do you drive, Mehrak?’
    Those who knew Katie from home, university or the Buenos Aires station, her initial posting, or from the canteen at VBX wouldn’t have recognised her: she oozed authority. She had no boyfriend in either Dubai or London, and had minimal knowledge of brothels or the men who patronised them.
    She said, ‘Well, Mehrak, if you’re going to play dumb I’ll play rough. There’s a film, with soundtrack, and I promise it’ll be on the Internet by morning. We’ll make sure the site doesn’t go down with the number of hits it’ll take. You’ll be the biggest laugh from Cairo to Sana’a and Khartoum to Istanbul. Couldn’t get it up. Do you want to get on the plane and face the music at home? Your people will be thrilled with your behaviour, but I doubt your wife will be very forgiving. Now, did you hear my question?’
    He looked up.
    ‘Who do you drive, or are you in the pool?’
    She was told. Katie could have punched the air. She knew the name. There was a restricted file. She nodded.
    They pulled him to his feet, hustled him through the door, down a flight of stairs and into the car. He was on the back seat, squashed between the guys, and she drove along the coast road towards the embassy.
     
    She was a small, hunched figure. She came off the bus and walked fast along the pavement, the stalled traffic in the road belching fumes. Little of her was visible, certainly not her ankles or wrists; she would have been held up as an example to others by the modesty police. Men worshipped her beauty, they said. Farideh had hidden her face with a veil, which kept her warm and acted as a filter against the smog that hung over Tehran in the winter. She wore cotton gloves and the handles of her shopping bag, heavy with vegetables, cut into her fingers.
    She hadn’t met the boy that evening. Married for seven years, unfaithful to her husband for four, she was never reckless in her liaisons. She didn’t know when her husband would return from his journey. Now, she would walk to the four-storey building that was their home, climb the stairs, unlock the door and enter the loveless apartment.
    Love was outside Farideh’s front door. The boy would have walked on hot coals to be with her, but she had refused him that evening.
    She was twenty-five, had been married a week after her eighteenth birthday, and the boy wanted to be her third lover in the last four years.
    Her eyes, high cheekbones and full lips were hidden under the headscarf and veil. If she was careless, she might be arrested, taken with her lover to a gaol and hanged. When she thought of hanging, her hands trembled and she had to clasp them so tightly that her wedding ring gouged into her finger. She wanted to be loved, but not loved by him .
    She hated her husband, despised him. He was abroad. Farideh had not been told when he would return, whether it would be late that evening or the following day; neither did she know what he did for the brigadier, or the duties assigned to him by al-Qods. She knew nothing because he had told her nothing before he left for the commercial flight to Dubai out of Imam Khomeini International. She knew nothing because she had asked him nothing.
    On the stairs she met a neighbour from the floor above. He was a bus driver, but his son worked at the university and gave him money so he could afford an apartment in this block. The man ducked his head and didn’t look into her covered face. It was a nervous reaction, shared by the others on the