After the speech I’d approached him where he was sitting in the coffee shop of the conference centre with a laptop. My leather, finely crafted bag was a statement, and so I placed it firmly on the table to make one. He slowly raised his gaze to mine.
‘Fine. I’m going to let you buy me a coffee.’
His brows hitched. ‘That sounds like a command.’
I smiled. ‘Only sounds like it? Let me try that again . . .’
Shahryār leant back in his seat and ran his eyes across me, taking me in. I was in my formal gear: pencil skirt, blouse, court shoes, dark hair up in an intricately tied ochre scarf. And I wore a deep autumn-brown lipstick, despite it being summer. But that was not why he was looking at me.
‘Scheherazade Shirvani.’
I held still. He knew who I was. My job was hinged on the fact that near nobody knew my job unless they needed to know who I was. I was in the business of discretion. I was a storyteller and a world shaper. I was behind the scenes of the great cultural and political performances. I cleaned up messes, I anticipated messes, and, if needed, I manufactured messes. At thirty-two, I was one of the greatest strategists in the city, going toe to toe with the biggest predators. My story was rather pathetic: motherless, would-have-rather-been fatherless, unloved, unwanted, and so I wrote my own and conjured myself up from nothing. I stayed in libraries till closing time and put myself through school. I spun gold from dirt. Soon I discovered that the dirtiest places were the gleaming glass towers of the city, and so I made them my business. Those in the glass towers needed their narrator to be invisible for their new stories to work.
I pulled up a chair. ‘Who are you and what do you do?’
‘Shahryār Javid. Professor at The City University. Politics and history.’
I nodded. ‘Right. And let me guess, as well as this you are the leader of the pressure group? Holding the powers-that-be to account? Well, you call yourself a pressure group, but what you actually do is spy and sabotage.’
Shahryār smiled breezily. ‘Not at all. I’m just here to learn and do my civic duty. Get locked into the thrilling world of municipal politics.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m on the side of peace.’
Well that was bullshit. This man was a quiet warrior and, now that I was close enough, I could smell it on him. I found I quite liked the scent.
I crossed my legs and slid my head to the side. ‘That’s what everyone says. You didn’t believe a word my client said in there, did you?’
‘Do you?’
I was caught off guard, and caught off guard that I was caught off guard. ‘That’s not the point . . .’
He took a sip of his coffee and his warm honey eyes sparkled. ‘You don’t. Doesn’t surprise me. You’re smarter than everyone else who was in that room. Including me. You should have been stood on that podium. I hear you tell the best stories. In fact, don’t they call you The Storyteller?’
Ah. I nodded slowly, smiling. He wasn’t just a sweet college professor, he was me . . . He was me on a different tier – not higher, but different. His organisation was in direct opposition to mine, equally as dangerous and covert, but his role demanded a little more discretion. It was why he also had the professor job. It was also why he knew who I was, and I had no idea who he was. A thrill ran through me. It had been a while since I’d faced a challenge.
‘Are you going to be a problem for me, Shahryār?’
Shahryār grinned at me. ‘Let me buy you that coffee.’
It started off casual. It had to be. Though we represented two people who were technically on the same side ideologically, they were opponents locked in a civil war, arguing over semantics and delivery. Escalation could have been ugly and often it threatened to be, but that’s why they had us. We kept them in line. We were their generals, and so we had no time for anything as plebeian and ordinary as dating. What, were we going to do ‘dinner and a movie’ after a day of strategising how our clients would destroy each other? Impossible.
Shahryār couldn’t hold a girlfriend down and I didn’t want a boyfriend to hold me down, and so it was agreed that we’d only hook up if we bumped into each other at events. We bumped into each other at events a lot. Soon we started booking hotel rooms in which to bump into each other more, and then one day he bumped into me at my house, cooked for me, and we bumped into each other on the floor of my kitchen.
One day, after we’d bumped into each other in his house a few times and we were curled up on the sofa together – me watching TV, him reading a book – he stroked my hair and murmured into it, ‘This is good. Isn’t it?’