Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [41]
They pulled up outside the yellow brick fac¸ade of the post office, and Bond told the driver to wait. In his hotel room he had already composed a hundredgroup cable addressed to the Chairman, Universal
Export, London. He used a simple transposition code based on the fact that it was the third day of the week and that the date was the fourth of the seventh month. He knew little about cryptography and, for security’s sake, in case he was ever captured, had preferred to keep it that way.
He lit one of his remaining Morland’s cigarettes with the three gold rings and stood beneath the idly turning ceiling fan while he waited for the cable boy to tell him he had transmitted successfully. As he did so, he noticed that he was being watched by a thin man with reddish-brown hair and white skin. He was sitting at a table where other Tehranis were filling in forms and stamping letters. He held a paper cup of water to his mouth, but didn’t seem to drink from it. Although his head was steady, his eyes were swivelling constantly round the room, while the unmoving cup seemed only to be a cover for his mouth.
The cable boy called out the all-clear and Bond collected his papers from the counter.
As he went down the steps of the post office, he heard a voice behind him.
‘Mr Bond?’
He turned, without speaking.
It was the man from inside. He held out his hand.
‘My name is Silver. J. D. Silver. I work for General Motors.’
‘But of course you do,’ said Bond. The handshake was wet, and Bond discreetly wiped his fingers on the back of his trousers.
‘I wondered if I could buy you a cup of tea. Or a soda.’
Silver had a reedy voice. Up close, his long nose and fair eyelashes gave his face the look, Bond thought, of a watchful fox terrier.
Bond glanced at his watch. ‘I have a few minutes,’
he said.
‘ There’s a cafe´ on Elizabeth Boulevard,’ said Silver.
‘It’s quiet. This your cab?’
Bond nodded and Silver gave the driver instructions. Sitting alongside him, Bond had time to note the Brooks Brothers suit, the button-down striped shirt and college tie. The accent was educated East Coast – Boston, perhaps – and his manner was relaxed.
‘Where you staying?’
‘Uptown,’ said Bond, noncommittally. ‘How’s business? I see a lot of American cars, but not many new ones.’
‘We get along,’ said Silver, unembarrassed. ‘We’ll maybe talk more when we get there.’ He looked meaningfully at the driver.
Bond was happy to keep silent. The phrase of Darius’s – ‘a citizen of eternity’ – went through his mind.
‘ Tell you what,’ said Silver, ‘maybe we’ll just stay on the sidewalk. Elizabeth Boulevard. It’s named for your queen of England. It has trees, benches, ice-creams . . . I like it there.’
‘I notice there’s a Roosevelt Avenue, too,’ said Bond. ‘Would that be Franklin D. or Kermit?’
Silver smiled. ‘Well, I guess it wasn’t Eleanor at any rate,’ he said.
Bond paid the fare and followed Silver to a bench beneath a tree. Further up the street, he could see the entrance to a park, and on the other side the campus of Tehran University. It was, Bond thought, typical spy country: brush contacts, dead drops, all the rudiments of ‘tradecraft’ could be unobtrusively carried out in this busy, recreational area. In the middle of the road a channel, with swiftly running water, was flanked by plane trees. At intervals there were long sticks with metal drinking cups wired to the end, which thirsty passers-by dipped into the water.
‘Cute, isn’t it?’ said Silver. ‘ The water starts in the Elburz. It’s pretty clean up in Shemiran, but by the time it gets south of the bazaar . . . Oh, boy. But
they’re proud of it. These little channels are called jubs. They come from underground waterways – quanats –their big irrigation scheme. They’ve