The Silent Oligarch: A Novel

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Slowly he climbed toward Hampstead through ever older, ever greener streets, the world around him still vivid in the coming dusk, the colors richer in the half dark. In the absence of facts, ideas and images churned inside him. Inessa pulled from her hotel room by uniformed men, Gerstman dragged from his by dark, shapeless forms. They fit together, these stories; they were of a piece.

  HAMMER’S HOUSE SEEMED to glow beside its neighbors. It was a brick building of four stories, not counting the attic floor where his housekeeper lived; three centuries old, narrow, its bright mortar and clean red bricks gave it an almost colonial look. Most of its windows were Georgian sashes but a large wooden oriel, painted white with three pointed ogee windows, hung over the street from the second floor. The place was much too big for Hammer, thought Webster, who coveted its position and its splendidly entitled views across London to the City. Down in the lowlands of Kensal Green this would be seen as grandeur indeed. He had often wondered whether the whole house was used; he suspected that room after room simply stored old newspapers and books of military campaigns. Did Hammer entertain? Did he have house guests? Surely not.

  Webster gave a brisk rap on the knocker. Hammer answered the door. This was strange because Mary, his housekeeper, usually had Mondays off. Webster, noticing this, wondered irritably what it would take for his habit of trivial observation to switch off.

  “Ben. Come in.” Hammer betrayed the faintest surprise, the merest crease of a frown. Webster was grateful for the plain greeting. He didn’t need to be told that he looked terrible or asked what was the matter. Hammer was wearing a thick cardigan of muddy beige with a shawl collar, his glasses propped on his forehead. He led Webster into his study. Either side of the fireplace was an armchair, and by the farthest one, on a low table by a cheap spotlight, lay a thick hardback, open and facedown. Books lined the walls on old oak shelves and occupied much of the floor in ambitious columns. In between them sat lower piles of newspapers, journals and magazines. There was a fire laid in the hearth but it hadn’t yet been lit and the room was cold. Hammer sat down in his chair and Webster sat opposite, keeping his coat on.

  “Where would you like to start?” asked Hammer, as ever asking the pertinent question. Webster told Hammer about the call, and Gerstman; about the content of their meeting in Berlin, again, as near verbatim as he could, and Prock’s accusation; about Prock’s fury and his own attempts to understand whether there could be anything in it; about the calls he had made to Berlin and Budapest. The ordering of his thoughts made him calmer.

  When he was done Hammer sat for a moment. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth.

  “Mary’s gone to the store,” he said, putting them back on. “We’re out of milk. When she’s back she can make us tea.” He looked at Webster for a while, then said, “Let’s talk about you first. Then the case.” He took his glasses off and put them on the table by his chair. “We’ll find out soon how he died. It may not be murder. But if it is, the method should suggest the motive. If he was shot by a woman, that’s one thing; if he was poisoned with an umbrella, that’s another. Assuming it’s the latter, where does that leave you? Prock’s theory seems to be that Gerstman knew something dangerous, and that he was killed by someone who feared that he was about to reveal it. To you. Or would in time. Let’s say that’s the case. You hardly spoke to the guy, so the people who had him killed were already nervous. The safety was already off. So your role is minimal, almost accidental. It could have been a journalist, it could have been some other investigator—or some chance meeting that got interpreted the wrong way. As yours might have been, incidentally.” He was leaning back in his chair, his legs crossed, playing with a pencil. “They could have been going to kill him anyway, regardless. So you’re the catalyst, at worst, but you’re not the cause, and the whole thing was so delicate you couldn’t possibly know what you were setting off. Like a landmine with a faulty mechanism—you just happened to get too close. Assuming, of course, that you set anything off.”

  He paused, looking at Webster with his plainest expression. “So you didn’t kill him. That’s really important, Ben. I’m not just saying that someone else stabbed him or shot him. What killed him was in his life for years before today.”

  “I got overexcited and blundered around. For my own benefit. I set it off.”

  “Listen, I told you to go. Right? Sooner rather than later. And I won’t feel guilty if Prock turns out to be right. Which, by the way, we’ll probably never know for sure, the way these things go. And you know why? I didn’t introduce Dmitry Gerstman to Konstantin Malin. I didn’t bully him into taking a job that compromised him the moment he took it. I didn’t encourage him to think he could leave that behind. That’s what killed him.” Hammer smiled. “If, of course, that’s what killed him.”

  Webster heard keys turning in the front door lock and at the same time his phone rang. Number unknown. He looked at Hammer and answered it.

  “Hello,” said the voice on the other end. “This is Istvan.”

  Webster put his hand over the phone, told Hammer who was calling, and left the room. He managed to smile at Mary as he passed her in the hall, and took himself into the dining room. Ten minutes later he returned to Hammer’s study and reported.

  At 2:37 a.m. Dmitry Gerstman had fallen from the roof of the Hotel Gellért in Budapest and died instantly. Cause of death had not been formally established but superficial examination suggested he had been killed by the fall. He had not been staying at the Gellért but at the Four Seasons. He had checked in there on Friday morning, and was due to check out on Tuesday—he had a flight booked back to Berlin at 6:55 p.m. on that day. He appeared to have fallen from the roof itself rather than from one of the rooms, although tests to determine how far he had fallen would confirm that. Police had found no sign of any struggle at any of the points from which he could have fallen. None of the hotel staff on duty remembered seeing him enter the hotel; in fact, no one remembered seeing him in the hotel at all. Guests had not been systematically interviewed. He had left no note, but had e-mailed his wife from his BlackBerry half an hour before he died. The message had simply read, “Good-bye. I’m sorry. Dmitry.” When the German police had informed Mrs. Gerstman of her husband’s death at around 8:30 a.m. Berlin time, she had already received the message and had been trying to call him on his phone and at the Four Seasons. She had notified the German police. The BlackBerry itself had been found smashed in his inside jacket pocket. He had been wearing a suit but no coat, even though it had been a cold night.

  “Why was he there?” said Hammer.

  “In Budapest? That’s a little garbled. The Germans have been speaking to his wife and to Prock but I think something’s being lost in translation. He had two clients in Hungary, one in Budapest, the other in Miskolc. He had dinner with one of them on Friday but it’s not clear which one. He had meetings in his diary for Monday and Tuesday but that’s all I know.”

  “And what was he doing that night?”

  “They don’t know yet. They’re trying to put his movements together now. I’ve asked Istvan to keep an eye on it.”

  They sat for a few moments in silence. Webster realized that, ridiculous though it was, Hammer’s conclusion was important to him. It held the promise of absolution.

  “Does that sound like suicide to you?” asked Hammer.

  Webster sighed. “No. No, it doesn’t. Might you e-mail your suicide note? I suppose so. The coat seems strange but if you’re going out to kill yourself maybe you don’t think about coats. I don’t know. A hotel just seems an odd place to choose. Particularly when you’re staying in another hotel. Why not just throw yourself out of your own window?”

  “Maybe he’d had a bad experience at the Gellért.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry. What about him? Was he the type?”

  “He wasn’t exactly cheerful but . . . I don’t
know. He was fit. Obviously fit. Like a serious runner or a rower or something. But more than that he seemed driven. Purposeful.”

  “Depressed?”

  “Not at all. He was scared about something, clearly, looking back, but not depressed. No, I’m fairly sure.”

  Hammer chewed on his pencil. Then he got up, rooted around on the mantelpiece, found some matches and crouched to light the fire. It took a single match to get the rolls of newspaper burning. He stood up and watched the kindling begin to crackle and take.

  “Should have done that when you arrived. Sorry. Do you want to take your coat off? No?” Sitting back in his chair he looked at the ceiling for a moment and closed his eyes. He sat like that for perhaps a minute, then looked at Webster.

  “Why was it for your benefit?”

  “What?”

  “You said you got overexcited. What about?”

  Webster looked away and watched the fire for a moment, taking off his watch and rubbing his wrist. This wasn’t something he had wanted to discuss with Ike, but he hadn’t stopped to consider why. Now he knew: it was foolish, and he felt faintly ashamed.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Is it that article?”

  Webster nodded. “It’s been hard to leave it alone.”

  Hammer waited for Webster to look up. “You’re not thinking straight. You’ll never know who killed her, unless someone tells you. Was it Malin? He’s a candidate, sure. But it’s gone. It’s too long ago. You’ll never know. But on this case—you’d have seen Gerstman anyway. The job is to finish Malin, whatever he might have done ten years ago. That’s the best justice you’re ever likely to get.”

  Webster held his watch in his hands and studied the second hand ticking around before putting it back on his wrist, squeezing the clasp shut and sitting back in the chair. Hammer went on.

  “For what it’s worth, I’d be amazed if he killed himself. Either way you shouldn’t blame yourself, but you will, for a bit. But that’s not important. What’s important is what happens to Lock. If you put Gerstman at risk then presumably Lock is in danger too. And he’ll know that. He’ll be scared. That may be why Gerstman died. So we have a choice. Do we keep pushing Lock? Or do we leave him, even though we may be the best hope he has of a future?”

  Until that moment, Webster hadn’t realized that this, of course, was where the conversation would end: with him agreeing to go on with the case or walking away from it for good. He had come here wanting to hear that Gerstman’s death was not his fault. He hadn’t even thought about his responsibility to Lock.

  Hammer waited patiently for his response. I know what he wants me to say, thought Webster. Never back away. Finish what you start.

  “I think we should stop work,” he said at last. Hammer, his face lit by the fire, said nothing. “I don’t want to set off any more mines. No more meddling. I think we should have known how big this was. I’m sorry.”

  Webster stood up, apologized again, and left the room and Hammer’s house. Outside it was dark. He set off on the walk home, down the hill and west for two or three miles. No more meddling. This reckless campaign was over, its casualties already too great.

  THAT NIGHT WEBSTER DREAMED SHORT, stark dreams that never resolved. In one, he sat with Lock in a row boat on a narrow river heavily shaded by trees. He had the oars and was rowing with a slow, regular stroke while Lock, opposite him, in a black suit and a floppy red bow tie, talked happily about his life in the South Seas, as if he were Stevenson or Gauguin. Then Lock’s face tensed and he gripped the sides of the boat; Webster felt himself tipping backward as the river fell sharply downward behind him. When he woke the back of his head was wet with sweat.

  Seven

  AFTER GERSTMAN’S DEATH Lock’s imagination began to work again. It had never been energetic but at some point, in Russia, without his noticing, it had simply switched off. He had never really needed it, nor missed it, but when he found out what had happened to Dmitry Gerstman it came irresistibly back to life, resist though he might.

  The scene always played backward, in stages. He heard screams from a guest. He saw the doormen stop with bags in their hands. He saw the broken body flat on the flagstones outside the hotel, the dark suit covering it still strangely pristine. He heard the short heavy slam as it hit. But most vivid was Gerstman in the air, falling, not far, about fifty feet, perhaps for only a second or two. The image sat squarely in his mind, and he wondered whether his friend knew as he fell, as any sane man had to suspect, that his death was no accident.

  As he set off to his regular meeting with Malin the day after the news this was all that was in his head, vivid and continuous. He had very little to report: from reading newspapers online he had discovered only that Dmitry had fallen to his death, and that alcohol was suspected to have played a part. The police were treating his death as suicide. Lock was not.

  Lock’s office was on Kozhevnichesky pereulok, two miles down the Moscow River from the Kremlin and the Ministry of Industry and Energy. Every Tuesday he would go downstairs at 7:15 p.m. and his driver would take him to the ministry. There at eight he would brief Malin on the events of the week, always following the same agenda: Events, Opportunities, Threats. The meeting would last half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes. There had been a time, before Malin had become the man he had become, when they would have dinner afterward, but for many years now Lock had simply had his driver take him home.

  This evening, though, he felt like walking. This was unusual. He was no walker, and Moscow didn’t encourage a casual stroll. But after a day of sitting and worrying his back ached and his head ached and he longed for air and movement. And he had a call to make.

  He set off for the river, joining it at Novospassky Bridge, and walked north along its west bank. A frost was beginning to set in, and in his thin raincoat he felt underdressed; he quickened his step to compensate. Beside him queues of cars breathed gray fumes into the air and across the water the low, white, martial walls of the Novospassky Monastery, sparsely floodlit, shone amber in the dark through bare, scrubby trees. But the cold was exhilarating and Lock was reminded that on nights like these, when real cold first steeped the city after its airless summer, even he could find it beautiful.

  He took one of his phones from his coat pocket and found the number for his father. It was his birthday today. Lock should have called him that morning but hadn’t. Somehow speaking to his father from the office was too jarring, like calling home from the bed of your mistress.

  He pressed the key and after a long pause the line began to ring.

  “Hallo, met Everhart.”

  “Happy birthday, Father. It’s Richard.” Lock spoke English to his father; his Dutch hadn’t been strong since he was young.

  “Dank u, Richard. It’s good of you to call.”

  “Not at all. How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you.” Everhart tended to terseness on the phone. He saw it as a device to exchange information, no more.

  “Did you get my card?”

  “I did. Thank you.”

  There had been a time when Lock, newly rich, would buy his father expensive presents: a watch, a fountain pen. After the third year his father had told him that he didn’t need anything and had asked him to stop.

  “Have you had a good day?” Lock’s hand, exposed to the northerly wind that whipped down the river, was already stiff with cold.

  “Yes. I walked to Zandvoort.”

  “Not there and back?” Zandvoort was at least a dozen miles from Noordwijk.

  “I took the bus back. It was a beautiful day.”

  “Good, I’m glad. What about this evening? Are you doing anything?”

  “Maartje is coming to cook for me.” Maartje lived in Noordwijk. Lock got the impression that she and his father saw a lot of each other.

 
“Good. Well, happy birthday.”

  “Thank you for calling, Richard. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  For a moment Lock felt that faint, residual sadness he felt whenever they spoke. He had no idea whether the call he had just made would please his father or sadden him too. It was this unknowability that was so wearing.

  It wasn’t enough to distract him, though, from what had occupied him all day: Gerstman and Malin. Questions pressed against him, but one kept returning. Why would he want Gerstman dead? Why would Malin, so powerful, so safe in Russia, want his former underling dead? Dmitry had left years before, and had never done anything to suggest he was a threat. He was too clever for that.

  After twenty minutes, as he crossed the river, his face now stinging with cold, the immense, impassable red wall of the Kremlin came into view. So much of Moscow felt fortified. The whole city could seem like a castle, the Kremlin the keep, the rest a vast bailey of peasants paying homage. Perhaps, he thought, despite that precise sense of dread in my stomach, Malin had nothing to do with this. After all, no one really knew what Dmitry had been doing in Berlin; he had had time enough to make enemies there. By the time Lock arrived at the ministry, an entirely nondescript building behind the gaping space that had once been the Rossiya Hotel, he had convinced himself that it made no sense for Malin to have killed Gerstman. It wasn’t logical, and Malin was always logical.

  In the lobby he stated his business to a security guard behind a glass screen and surrendered his passport. He walked through a metal detector and was accompanied by another guard to Malin’s office, up two flights of stairs and along a broad, bare corridor. He knew the guard, and all the guards knew him.

  He was a little early. He sat in his usual seat in the anteroom to the office and waited, making halting small talk with Malin’s secretary. At twenty-five past eight Malin’s door opened and a slight, canny-looking man came out carrying a briefcase. He had a mild stoop and his neck looked unnaturally taut from the effort of looking up.