HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  They had to drag him.

  The use was gone from his legs. Thinking of Harriet who was his wife. Thinking of the cottage that was his home.

  Wanting to plead, and wanting to cry, and the voices strangled In his throat. Against the wall the guards loosed his arms. He collapsed. The dirt was on his knees, and on his arms and on his chest. Death was grovelling in the dirt yard of a villa on the outskirts of Tabriz. Death was choking in the night air, beyond the reach of help. Death was feeling the slackening of the gut muscles. . . . Death was the metallic crack as a Soviet rifle was cocked. There was a hand in his hair and his head was wrenched upwards and his body weight was taken so that he was left in a kneeling position and the cold damp dirt of the yard cloyed on his privates. Too frightened to pray, like that Lutheran pastor would have prayed. Thinking of all those who were too far from him to help him, but closer than the God he hadn't troubled to know. Thinking of the men at Century and Flossie Duggan. Thinking of Harriet alone in the cottage at Bibury where the spring was over and the summer was coming, and of Will, who would be coming soon to cut the grass around the apple trees. Thinking of the agents in Tehran and Tabriz and the Harbourmaster's office in Bandar Abbas. Thinking of Char he who should have been his son. They would all see the morning, they would all know the freshness of another day. The morning, and another day, they were beyond his reach.

  Against the back of his neck, where his hair thinned out, was the pressure of the barrel of the rifle. There was a pain prick from the fore-sight.

  No questions.

  No demand for names.

  He opened his eyes. He saw the face of the investigator and the face of the cleric, expressionless.

  He was shaking, and as his neck rolled so the muzzle of the weapon followed.

  There was the firing click.

  His ears exploded. His stomach failed.

  He rolled, fell, collapsed.

  He was on the dirt in the yard, and his mouth gaped and bit at the filth.

  Mattie heard the low chuckle of the investigator. His eyes opened. He gazed into the cleric's face. He saw a silently mirthless smile.

  He was pulled to his feet. His urine had run down the length of his thighs and had stained the dirt.He couldn't speak, couldn't help himself up. He made no attempt to cover himself as they took him back into the kitchen and past the cooker where a meal was in preparation, and up the stairs, and back to his prison room.

  He was their toy.

  On his bed he wept. The names were in his mind. In his mind were the names of the agents and the name of Charlie Eshraq.

  Mattie could recognise it all, the shredding of his will to light.

  From his room he could see the west face of the clock. Big lien showing a couple of minutes past midnight. He had slept on the decision, and he had killed a whole day on the decision.

  He had taken advice, but the decision was his. He could keep his options open no longer.

  He went down to the thirteenth floor.

  He didn't knock, he went straight into the room. A very strange noise in the room stopped him in his tracks. Past midnight in Central London and the sounds were of the countryside at dawn. They'd put old Henry Carter on night duty. Finding a job for Henry in the twilight of his service at Century was putting him on night duty in the room used by the Crisis Management Committee. There was a camp bed over by the window. The man wore long combination underpants and a woollen vest with short sleeves and buttons at the throat. Typical of Whitehall, typical of government service, that a Crisis Management Committee should wind up once it was past midnight as a solitary individual, past retirement if he wasn't mistaken, sitting in ancient underclothes, and listening to God knew what. . . . The man was quick off the bed, and was straight into his suit trousers, and was hooking on the braces over his vest. Didn't bother with his shirt. There was an expensive radio on the floor and a cassette was playing through it. A sharp note on the track amongst what, to the Director General, was a clatter of noise, and he saw the attention of Henry Carter waver, then disappear. A moment of bliss on his face. He switched off the machine.

  "Sorry, sir, bless you for your patience . . . phylloscopus inornatus, that's the Yellow-Browed Warbler, a little beauty.

  I did the tape in Norfolk last weekend. I thought I had her, never can be sure. Very intense, very penetrating call. Did you hear it, sir? Just off to Siberia for the summer, remarkable little lady. . . . Apologies, you didn't come in here to listen to a Yellow-Browed Warbler."

  The Director General handed over a single sheet of paper, in his own hand, his own signature. Carter read it. He hadn't his close work glasses on and he had to hold his spectacles away from his face to get a clear focus.

  "You'll not mind me saying it, sir, but it's a wee bit late."

  "You don't have a drink in here, do you?"

  Henry took a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard, and two glasses, and he poured two liberal scoops.

  The Director General drank deep.

  "I know we've warned them, sir, but we've taken an awful time to tell them to run."

  "Big step, Carter, dismantling a network. A bigger step when that network is down to three agents and will take years to rebuild."

  "I just pray to God they've got time."

  "Furniss, he's trained to withstand pressure."

  "Interesting usage, pressure . . . sir."

  "For Christ's sake, we are talking about the dismantling of a network."

  "No, sir, if you'll excuse me, we are talking about pressure."

  "He's been trained. . . . Please, I'll have the other half."

  The glass was taken, filled, handed back.

  "Oh yes, sir, he's been trained. He was very good at the Fort. One of the best lecturers they've had there. But my experience is that training and the real thing are wholly different."

  The Director General shuddered. His hands were tight on the glass.

  "How long can he hold out, that's what I need to be sure of."

  "He's a man I've been proud to know for more than twenty years, but if he's in Iran it's asking rather a lot of him that he hold out this long."

  The Director General headed for the lift and his car home.

  He left Henry Carter to the business of sending the messages that would instruct the three agents to take flight.

  13

  "I am Matthew . . . Furniss. I am . . . the Iran Desk . . .

  Head at Century House."

  It was said. . . . It was as if they were all exhausted, as if a birth had taken place and Mattie was the mother and the investigator was the midwife and the confession was the child.

  He could see into the investigator's face, and there was running sweat on the man's face and red blotches from his exertion, and the breath came hard to the investigator. Mattie lay strapped on the bed. He could see into the face of the investigator as the man reeled away, as if he'd run more distance than he could cope with, and the heavy duty flex sagged from the man's hand. He could not take any more of the heavy duty flex on the soles of his feet. The pain ran up from his feet and into his knees and into his thighs and up into his stomach, in his stomach the pain spread out and burst into every particle of him. The pain was in his mind, and his mind could take nothing more.

  It was done.

  "Matthew Furniss."

  It was as if they had all been on a great journey together.

  There was Mattie who had endured, he no longer knew how many days, there were the guards who had started the day playing football with him, blindfolded, punching and kicking him from one to the other and heaving him against the damp scrape of the cellar walls, there was the investigator who sweated because of the force he had used to beat the soles of Mattie's feet. All on a great journey together, and the guards and the investigator had broken Mattie, and Mattie was strapped to the bed and needing to talk to save himself from the pain.

  The investigator gripped the side of his table for support, then steadied himself and breathed in a gulp of the
cellar's foul, hot air. All the body smells were trapped in the cellar.

  He levered himself along the side of the table and threw the switch on the tape recorder.

  That morning had been different, as if everything else that had gone before had been child's play. No breakfast brought down to the cellar while it was still dark outside, a long age hanging from the wall hook until the pain in his shoulders had given way to agony, then the football, then the beating with the heavy duty flex. As if they were now bored with him, as if they had other business to be about and could spare Mattie no more time.

  So simple to speak the words. The hammering of new pain had ceased, and the tape-recorder was turning, and the investigator was sitting at the table, and the guards had pulled back to the wall and there was the rank sweet smoke of their cigarettes.

  At that moment there was no thought in the mind of Mattie Furniss other than the killing of the rising pain. The pain stayed where it was. The guards came from behind and they unstrapped the thongs that held down his legs and his wrists.

  They let him he free on the bed.

  He must be a pitiful sight. Not Mattie Furniss at all. He had not washed, not after having been brought back from the yard the previous evening. His hair was unkempt and filthy, his lips were parched grey and cracked, his eyes were big and starring and racing. They had broken him. He curled his knees to his chest and tried to control the pain that was all over his body. Broken, but free from the beating.

  "Well done, Mr Furniss. That was the hardest, Mr Furniss, mid the worst is now past."

  Mattie talked about Century.

  He could see from the eyes of the man that little that he said was not previously known. He spoke in a slow wheezing monotone. There was no character, no wit, he was a tour guide at the end of a long season. The investigator had pulled up his chair close to Mattie, and he was hunched forward so that his face dominated Mattie. Sometimes the investigator repeated what Mattie had said as if that way he ensured that the microphone picked up the words with greater clarity. The investigator took no notes, to have written on a notepad would have deflected the concentration that now settled over Mattie.

  He talked about the budget that was given to Iran Desk, and he talked about the resources that could be made available to Iran Desk from the Station Officers in Ankara and Baghdad and Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.

  All the old loyalties, all he stood for, beaten from him.

  He heard the drone of his own voice . . . he'd done them well. He'd stayed silent longer than they could have counted on. There was nothing that he should be ashamed of. He'd given them time to save the field men.

  He was given a glass of water. He held it in his two hands, and the water slopped down his shirt front when he tried to drink, and his lips were rigid like plastic sheeting . . . he'd won them time. They should be thankful for what that precious time had cost him.

  Mattie gave the name. " . . . His business is on Bazar e Abbas Abad."

  He could see him clearly. He was hugely fat, sat on a reinforced chair in the back office behind a cave of merchan-dise and held court over cigars and coffee. He was a con-noisseur of carpets and a collector of gossip, and he was a field agent of Century from far back. Mattie had known the merchant for twenty years, and it was Mattie's joke each time they met that he couldn't get his arms round his old friend when they hugged a greeting. There was gossip to be had from the merchant about the rivalries of the army colonels, about the inter-factional fighting amongst the Mullahs, about the industrialists squabbling for foreign exchange with which to buy overseas plant. Every time they met then Mattie laughed, and sometimes the choicest of the gossip, if it were of matters sexual, could even bring a smile to those witheringly dull fellows from the Agency across the ocean. He had known the merchant since he had been a liaison officer in Tehran, and there was a rug in front of the fire in the cottage at Bibury that had cost him an arm and a leg, and the last time he had been seriously angry with Harriet had been when she had put a wet pine log on that fire that had spat a knot on to the rug. Mattie named the merchant, and they brought a damp towel to put across the soles of his feet to quieten the anger of the pain.

  Another name. ". . . he works in the Harbourmaster's office at Bandar Abbas."

  When he was Station Officer in Tehran he had once made the long road journey south, and he had been sure that he had thrown off the tail of the S A V A K agents that was supposed to be with him, and he had gone to the home of the official from the Harbourmaster's office. The man had been recruited by a previous Station Officer, and until the Revolution had been of minimal importance, and maintained only because he did not want money. He was pure gold now, a field agent in the office which observed the comings and goings of merchant shipping in and out of the country's chief port. He had gone to the man's small brick house, he had sweated and sat on a floor rug and wondered why the ventilation chimney seemed so inadequate in the blasting Gulf heat. On that occasion, after the wife had scurried in with a tray and glasses holding diluted lime juice and scurried out, the official had told Mattie that he was a democrat, and therefore opposed to the regime of the Shah of Shahs. The Revolution had come, the official had found no democracy from the clerics, he had stayed on the list of active agents and he had begun to grow in importance.

  A small, frightened man, who believed that the work he carried out for Mattie was a short step in the long road to bring parliamentary rule to his country. A sandwich with sweet cheese was brought for the prisoner.

  Another name given. ". . . he runs a repair workshop in Tabriz for lorries, and he also has contracts to keep the Revolutionary Guards' vehicles on the road."

  A basic and human individual, a man who might have been in Mattie's eyes almost a European. The engineer was the sort of fellow who was always popular, perpetually in demand, and he worked all the hours that his God gave him. The engineer had been recruited in Turkey. A good and active Station Officer, long before this academic boy in the job now, had sought him out in a cafe and talked to him when he was over for the collection of a broken-down lorry that would need a new gear box. That Station Officer had been lucky. The son of the engineer's close friend had been shot in the old gaol in Tabriz after a cursory trial by the Komiteh. The engineer had been ready for recruitment. The engineer's pay went into an account at the Etibank in Van, and it was Mattie's business to know that the credit mounted and was never reduced.

  Perhaps there was a day on some far horizon in his mind when the engineer would drive out his truck, with his family hidden amongst a cargo. It was useful, the information provided by the engineer. In any time that approached normality it would have been second grade, but they were not normal times, and Iran Desk were pretty damn thankful to have anything coming out of Iran. Mattie had been given a glass of water and a damp towel again soothed the soles of his feet.

  It was a good hotel. Charlie could sleep on the pavements with the dossers when he had to, not for the sake of it. The room was £66.50 a night and the best that Leeds could provide. He locked the door behind him. He went along the landing, he was carrying his rucksack by the straps, the two straps twisted around his wrist. He wore his cleanest slacks, a clean shirt and a navy blazer.

  There was a man at the end of the corridor, in jeans and a sweatshirt, polishing hard at the muzzle of a fire hose. He didn't look at Charlie and went on with his polishing. Pretty damn obvious . . . Charlie understood. . . . What could be so compelling about getting a shine on to a fire hose nozzle?

  A lift was waiting for him.

  He came out into the hotel lobby. Too crowded for him to spot the watchers, and he wasn't hanging around to search them out. He knew what he was at. He strode across the lobby, not looking right and not looking left, went as though he belonged and hadn't a care in the world. He pushed his way through the revolving doors, then hesitated. It was colder up in the north than in London. There were taxis waiting in line, engines off. He paused on the pavement.

  He moved sharpl
y. He ducked back through the swing doors and across the lobby to the staircase.

  He went up the stairs three at a time. Six flights to climb.

  He went up the stairs like there was no tomorrow, and took the last flight that was to the roof, and he put his shoulder against the stiffness of the fire escape door.

  He stepped out on to the flat roof. He skirted the air conditioning machinery. He had no interest in a fine view over factories or the brick terraces or the munificence of the Victorian civic buildings and churches.

  He went to the edge of the roof. He looked down on to the street below. He could see the line of parked taxis. His eyes roved. He saw a green saloon that was behind the taxis.

  He could see that there were two people in the front seats, and there was the exhaust showing that the engine was idling. He saw that the man who had been polishing the nozzle of the fire hose was now across the street, and his lips were moving and there was no one close enough to hear him.

  In his bath, Charlie had remembered that he was a friend of Mr Furniss.

  He was going to piss on them.

  • * *

  "Where the hell is he?"

  "Went back up the fire stairs."

  "I know he went up the bloody stairs - where did he go?"

  "He was coming out and he just turned round."

  "I've got eyes myself - where is he now?"

  Harlech was across the road from the front of the hotel.

  Corinthian was stranded in the hotel lobby.

  Token was round the back. "Not a whistle of him here."

  There was the local joker in the Sierra, to drive. Keeper thought he was going to be a disaster because he was V A T , and V A T investigators were the pits. When the Head Office came up from the big city they had to put up with whatever they could get, and they needed a local man for the driving.