The Network - Jason Elliot [113]
Then there’s what Seethrough calls last orders, and we hand over the sealed copies of our wills. Nothing in his manner suggests to me he’s aware that the operation will be deliberately threatened. It’s obvious he doesn’t know of any means by which our plans might be compromised, but is conforming faithfully to a well-established chain of command, the tainted origins of which lie far beyond our mutual reach.
No other place I know smells like Peshawar. The city is wrapped in smells like an Oriental tramp in an old coat from which he can’t be parted. There are three main layers to these smells, and infinite lesser ones, the proportions of which depend on your luck, or lack of it.
The first is the smell of the land itself, an ancient alliance of fragrances that probably hasn’t altered since the Buddha, Alexander, Chengiz Khan, Mahmoud the Great and Marco Polo passed through the city in turn. It’s the one that reaches around you as you step from the featureless atmosphere of the plane. It’s a warm smell, humid, sensual and faintly exotic. It comes from the mixture of dust, eternally recycled by wind and rain, and tropical vegetation, the fragrance of which suggests deep green canopies of untamed foliage on an immense scale.
The second layer rises unstoppably from the narrow open channels that run alongside every city street, carrying the full spectrum of human waste like a peeled-open intestine of infinite length, which you spend a good portion of the day anxiously hopping over or crossing on imperfectly balanced paving stones. The opaque slime contained in these primitive sewers cooks slowly in the heat, generously giving up its perfume of decomposition to the surroundings in a constant reminder of earthly dissolution and decay. It is strangely muted and inoffensive, and after a few days ceases to register.
The third layer is the toxic twentieth-century addition of vehicle fumes, which billow into the air from what seems like every passing vehicle. The main culprits are overworked buses and trucks, all obscenely laden and straining under their loads like ageing weightlifters. Clouds of eye-watering black exhaust follow them. On lesser streets and side roads their junior partners in olfactory crime are everywhere: plagues of three-wheeled rickshaws, trailing spumes of unburned oil from their soot-caked two-stroke engines.
Then, depending on where you find yourself, this basic range of smells is refined by the presence of countless others: the bluish smoke of low-grade wood charcoal burning on a million improvised stoves, betel nut, turmeric, cardamom, mildew, wool, concrete dust, whitewash, freshly skinned animal hides, baking bread, dung and the acrid fumes of burning rubbish.
Mercifully, our accommodation lies in the least polluted part of the city called University Town where, since we’re officially working for them as consultants, we’ll be staying at the official guesthouse of the de-mining trust. It’s the western and most prosperous suburb, where the streets are overhung with dusty eucalyptus trees and sprawling vines, and where the UN and foreign NGOs have made their headquarters in spacious houses with gated compounds and gardens behind high walls. Beyond them, from the car that takes us to the trust’s Peshawar headquarters, we catch glimpses of the villas built for the city’s politicians, high-ranking military and all the dealers and players who’ve made their fortunes from the endless war in Afghanistan, and whose white marble towers and balconies gleam like poisonous wedding cakes.
Our first meeting in Peshawar is at the British consulate. It’s there we’ve arranged to collect a large quantity of cash, to be delivered on behalf of the Cousins. It arrived from Islamabad