Graham tried to hide his sudden surge of interest. ‘Mark Winshaw of Vanguard?’
‘You are known to Mr Winshaw, I think. You have been doing business with him on some occasions.’
‘Once or twice, yes. Is he here at the moment, by any chance?’
‘Oh yes, he’s here, you can be sure of it. But he likes to keep a low profile, as you know. As a matter of fact I’m dining with him myself tonight. Shall I give him your regards?’
‘Please do,’ said Graham; then hesitated before asking boldly, ‘A business meeting, I take it?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Louis. ‘We both belong to a certain organization: a sort of rather exclusive club. It’s to do with technical matters, really. We meet regularly to discuss problems of safety in the manufacture and distribution of our weapons systems.’
Graham knew which organization he was talking about: AESOP, the Association of Europeans for Safety in Ordnance and Propellants. But he was surprised to hear that Mark was a member. He wouldn’t have thought he’d have time for such concerns.
‘Anyway,’ said Louis, ‘I don’t think there will be much business to discuss tonight. I expect it to be more of a social occasion. You should come along, Mr Packard. You would really be most welcome.’
Graham accepted.
A small private room had been booked towards the back of a very quiet and expensive restaurant in central Baghdad. There were only five guests: Mark, Louis, Graham, a severe Dutchman and a boisterous German. The food was French (they were all highly vocal in their condemnation of Middle Eastern cuisine); the champagne vintage (Roederer Cristal 77) and plentiful. Each guest enjoyed the attentions of his own pretty, petite Filipino waitress, who would giggle and affect to be pleased when a hand was thrust up her miniskirt or her breasts were roughly fondled as she attempted to serve the food. Graham’s waitress was called Lucila: so far as he could tell, none of the others were ever asked to say what their names were. He was seated between Louis and Mark, who seemed noticeably less self-contained and guarded than on previous occasions. He chatted freely about his work and the Baghdad Fair and what it revealed about Saddam’s military ambitions to anyone who had eyes to see. Graham was recording this conversation on to a slimline tape machine in the inside pocket of his jacket: it meant that he had to keep a careful track of the time, so that he could slip away to the toilet whenever the tape needed turning over (he’d brought two C90S with him) before the machine switched itself off with a giveaway click.
For personal reasons, in any case, he would erase these tapes after he got home.
Louis was the first to disappear upstairs with his waitress, between the first and second courses. They were away for nearly half an hour. As soon as they came back, it was the Dutchman’s turn. While this was going on the party had still managed to consume, by Graham’s reckoning, eight bottles of champagne. He could sense Lucila’s puzzlement that he was not behaving towards her as his companions would have done. She was not as conventionally attractive as the others: her skin was slightly blemished and pock-marked, and she wasn’t as good at hiding her sadness behind a façade of blank-eyed gaiety. She was nervous and sometimes spilled things while serving the food. Graham knew that if he could have relaxed more himself, it would have helped to put her at ease, but this was difficult because he was trying hard to remain sober.
Just as the main course — a shoulder of beef — was about to be served, Mark turned to him and said: ‘I hope you won’t think us rude, Mr Packard, but there are a few private business matters we have to attend to at this point. I think this might be a good moment for you to withdraw.’
‘Withdraw?’
Mark pointed towards Lucila and made a gesture with his eyes. Graham nodded and left the table.
They went upstairs to a small uncomfortable bedroom where the bed was unmade and dishevelled from recent use. The room was clean but dimly lit and inelegant. There were bloodstains on the carpet which seemed to have been there for some time. As soon as the door was closed Lucila began to undress. She looked bewildered when Graham asked her to stop. He explained that he did not want to make love to her because he was married and did not think it was right that women should be expected to go to bed with men they hardly knew. She nodded and sat down on the bed. Graham sat beside her and they smiled at each other. He could tell that she was both relieved and offended. He tried asking her a few questions about where she came from and what she was doing in Iraq, but her English wasn’t good and she seemed, besides, a little resentful of these inquiries. They both knew that a decent interval would have to pass before they went back downstairs. Then Lucila remembered something and, opening one of the drawers in the cupboard, she took out a pack of cards. Neither of them knew any proper card games, so they played a few hands of Snap. There was some more champagne in a bottle on the bedside table, and before long they both became hopelessly giggly. After all the subterfuge, the watchfulness, the perpetual tension of the last few days, Graham felt suddenly liberated: there was nothing on earth he would rather be doing than playing this mindless card game with a tipsy and lovely young woman in a strange room, and all at once he felt a wave of desire, which Lucila recognized as soon as she saw it in his eyes. She looked away. They finished the game on a quieter note and then it was time to go back to the restaurant.
He found Mark and his friends arguing with each other noisily but in a teasing vein while drawing a number of pencilled circles on their napkins and on the tablecloth. Each of these circles was divided up into four unequal segments, with the letters GB, D, NL and B written inside. With a bit of effort, Graham was able to coax a drunken explanation out of Louis: later on, the details would be confirmed by his own researches. AESOP, it turned out, had nothing at all to do with research into safety measures. It was an informal cartel of European arms dealers set up to tackle one of the biggest problems posed by Iraq’s military requirements: how — given that the demand was so enormous — could the munitions companies meet it without raising their production quotas to the point where government suspicions were aroused? AESOP was the answer: a forum in which leading dealers from each of the member countries could get together and share the work out equitably among their own manufacturers.
‘We have decided that these are the figures,’ said Louis, handing him a napkin and pointing at the segmented circle, ‘which will represent our commissions. Our commissions for the next year.’
‘But they don’t add up to a hundred,’ said Graham.
Louis laughed wildly.
‘These are not percentages,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘These are millions of dollars!’ He laughed even louder when he saw Graham’s undisguised astonishment, and his whole body shook as he extended his arm in an expansive gesture which took in the room, the waitresses, his three friends and the gutted carcass of beef on its silver platter. ‘What a carve up, eh, Mr Packard? What a carve up!’
Over the next half hour, the atmosphere around the table grew more and more hilarious, and Graham knew that he had begun to seem increasingly out of place.
‘Your lips have a look of pursed disapproval,’ Mark Winshaw remarked, at one point. ‘I don’t see why. I’ve just secured your company the lion’s share of the Iraqi market for the foreseeable future.’
‘I’m a little tired, that’s all,’ said Graham. ‘It’s all been a bit much.’
‘Or perhaps, like me, you find this orgy of celebration all rather loud and vulgar.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And yet I understand you were quite the young firebrand at college, Mr Packard.’
Graham paused in the act of sipping his coffee.