The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  “You need to understand something, Inspector—people don’t pay me to go round the law. Or Ben. They pay me to supplement it. If you spent a week in my company you’d know I take that very seriously.”

  Throughout the conversation Sander had been enjoying herself; now she turned stern.

  “This isn’t a conversation about your ethics, Mr. Hammer. You’re a big man, you have money, you have friends. Things have gone your way for a long time. Trouble’s new to you. But understand, this is trouble. You of all people ought to recognize it. We know that hacking happened here. That’s five years, straightaway. Your case. Your name on the engagement letter, your client, your company. Five for starters, let’s say. And that’s just the hacking. Then there’s the other work Saber was doing for you. That information about the FBI investigation into Mistral? There was nothing about that in the e-mails. It comes out Saber bribed someone for that, your trouble just got a whole lot worse, because your countrymen are going to want to be involved. They’re already interested. Bribing a public official, you can say good-bye to another decade. At least. I have it down here you’re fifty-eight. Is that correct, Mr. Hammer?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Seventy-three. There’s not much living to be done after that. Is that how you imagined your last good years playing out?”

  She’s trying to make you scared, he told himself. First she makes you uncomfortable, now she makes you scared. It’s all just technique.

  Fight them as he might, though, no logic was equal to the thoughts that started pressing into his head. For a moment, he saw himself in rooms like this for the rest of his life, without color, without humanity, where living was suspended. No more being in the world. No more Ikertu. No more variety, influence, control. Five years was unimaginable; fifteen a black pit with no bottom. The person sitting across the table from him, he realized—as she wanted him to—had the power to end his life.

  Sander had leaned forward again, her hands clasped on the table.

  “This is the thing. You’re a clever man and no doubt you understood this the moment I arrived in your office, but let’s spell it out. Unlike half the people I interview in here you have a lot to lose. If you built that up by sailing close to the wind, then you deserve a fall, a long one, and I’ll make it happen. But if you took your eye off the ball for a minute, trusted someone too much, made a mistake, then it makes no sense to throw everything away just to cover that up. In short, Mr. Hammer, you have options. I don’t like what you do but if you’re more or less blameless in this you should say so.”

  Hibbert was saying some words that Hammer heard but didn’t catch. His mind had settled on a single, determined point.

  It wasn’t his place to give anyone up. Ben would have to do that himself.

  SEVEN

  AGeorgian policeman in a peaked cap took Hammer from the interview room down to the cells, which were clean enough—white walls, bright under two rows of untiring bluish lights—but decidedly solid, and full of men whose evenings, like his, had been brought firmly to an end. There were perhaps thirty of them in a cell the size of the smallest meeting room in his office back in London. A few looked round when he was pushed through the door; three or four continued to stare at him as he looked about for some space to occupy between all the bodies. As a matter of policy, Hammer returned the stares, just enough, and tried to communicate that he wasn’t as small or as puny as he might look. At least his hands were free now, should he need them.

  The best places were on the four low bunks, the next best against the wall, and in every inch someone lay slumped. Most had their legs pulled up to allow others to sit cross-legged in the middle, but some stretched out in comfort, and Hammer approached the smallest of these and gestured for him to make room. He was a scrawny man, with sparse hair and one eye half closed and a wispy, uneven growth of beard, and he looked up at Hammer with idle contempt, holding all the power. As if to confirm it, he crossed his legs at the ankles, and then his arms. Others watched the impasse.

  Tired, and in no mood for games, Hammer thought. There was a certain purity to this. There was nowhere else to sit. He needed something, and this ratty character didn’t want him to have it. A neat conflict with no obvious solution, not least because he was missing his usual tools. He couldn’t talk to the man, to reason with him or threaten him or humiliate him, as you might a cocky schoolboy in front of his friends. He had no money to buy him off, and no leverage: he didn’t know him, what he wanted, what secrets he needed to keep. An expert opponent in his own world, Hammer found himself in a different arena. And if he didn’t find a way round, others would sense his weakness.

  Force seemed disproportionate. It was only somewhere to sit, after all. Then his memory jogged him with an idea, and from his shirt pocket he took the driver’s cigarette.

  “Here,” he said, offering it to the man with a friendly hint of a smile. “Something to save face.”

  The rat considered it, then reached out a hand. Hammer looked down, and when he finally drew up his legs, gave him the cigarette.

  “Obliged to you,” said Hammer, and sat carefully down in the space.

  The air was warm with the smell of old alcohol and tobacco smoke and sweat accumulated over days. Some men slept; some talked and smoked; some stared ahead. Over everyone there was a settled lethargy, as if no one expected anything to happen for a good while yet.

  In among them, Hammer’s thoughts raced. If the Georgians weren’t about to deport him they might leave him in here for a few days while they dealt with more pressing problems. How to get out? Feign illness? Surely that didn’t actually work? Bribe a guard. That was more like it. Except without actual cash he had no means of explaining his offer. There wasn’t a prison guard anywhere who’d free a prisoner at the sight of him grinning meaningfully and rubbing his fingers together. His watch might do it. But that would be a gross overpayment, and chances were would only see him out of this cell.

  Hammer looked around at all his new companions—impassive, contained, unknowably Georgian—and wondered how in the world he was ever going to make himself understood.

  • • •

  It was late now, air was in short supply, and despite the bright lights most slept, heads bobbing on their chests. No one took any notice of Hammer, except for a new arrival who perched on the end of a bunk next to him. He had a shaved head and a dry trickle of blood from a gash on his temple, and every so often he lazily switched his gaze to Hammer, kept it on him for a while, then turned his head again. He had forced someone further down the natural order from his precious spot. Hammer did his best to ignore him.

  It wasn’t the best environment in which to think. Apart from the heat, and the stale air, all the shifting and sighing, his neighbor was making him feel conspicuous. It didn’t take a detective to see that Hammer stood out. Ten years since he had last been in the field, fourteen since his last stay in a cell, and in that time he had become respectable. And rich, by anyone’s standards, least of all those of a Tbilisi police station. The fine leather shoes said it, and the linen jacket, bloodied though it was, and the neatly rounded nails that hadn’t ever seen manual work. He wasn’t so much from a foreign country as from a foreign world. Fourteen years ago he had felt, if not at home, then at least as if he and the jail occupied the same universe. Not now.

  Now he had money, and a reputation, and people he hadn’t met knew his name. A hundred and ninety-three people relied on him for work. Private bankers competed in vain to look after his fortune, invited him to days of golf in the countryside, persisted in the face of his increasingly impolite refusals. As he had once called important men, journalists now called him for comments and tips and leads, some of which he was happy to give. People listened to him. And though he never spoke of it, nor really thought of it, the money he gave away—to his faith, to protect journalists, to the boxing gym that he wouldn’t allow to bear his name—was enoug
h to accomplish good things. He was a big man. A “big macher,” his mother would have said, with pride, though she hadn’t lived to see him become it.

  That was at home. And there not for much longer, perhaps. Here, all she would have seen was a Jew without papers, in a police cell somewhere very close to Russia, doing his best not to catch the eye of a thug who looked like a neo-Nazi and seemed to want for entertainment. I predicted this, she would have said. You court this sort of thing, always have. This once, she would have been right.

  The staring had become continuous, he could feel it. Maybe this man had been put here to scare him, or worse. A thought that he should have had long before came and rattled him: if neither Ben nor I make it back, who will look after Elsa?

  So absurd, this situation. To be arrested for being beaten up, on a quest to avoid prison.

  A strong hand gripped his upper arm. Hammer looked down at it and then up into the eyes of the man with the shaved head. The whites were a filmy red in a face of deadened gray that looked as if it hadn’t seen the light in months; a waxen scar stretching back an inch from the corner of his mouth was the only relief. He seemed at once barely alive and animated by some terrible energy. Strengthening his grip, he reached for Hammer’s wrist with his free hand and roughly pulled at the cuff, revealing the gold watch underneath. In this place it seemed pointedly flawless. He said something slowly in Georgian, a question, looking into Hammer’s eyes.

  It was important not to show fear, no matter how much he might feel it. This just wasn’t in the normal realm of his experience. Other people fought with their fists; Hammer did his fighting from behind a desk, and until recently on others’ behalf. This guy could do him some damage, no question, and if he had a knife in his pocket it could be worse than that. But he didn’t want to give up his watch. It was a nice watch, fancy by the standards of a Georgian jail, pretty modest for a man of Hammer’s wealth, that he had bought for himself twenty years before at the conclusion of a favorite case, which had also been his first and only real murder investigation. And the thought of this punk pawning it for a few lari and spending the proceeds on junk just didn’t sit with him.

  With the hand of his free arm he took the man’s little finger and firmly bent it up and back, until he felt the tendons tighten and the resistance grow. Hammer was strong, under his jacket, and fit; every day he exercised hard to allow his body to take all the running he put it through. Small he might be, but he was not without power. Sinewy is the word a lazy journalist would use.

  He kept the finger just on the edge of pain and held his cell mate’s eye.

  “I’d like you to let go of my arm,” he said, glancing down at the hand on his sleeve.

  Confusion and then anger registered in the man’s face. He kept his hand where it was and with the other reached for Hammer’s neck, driving his thumb up into the soft flesh under the jaw. Hammer felt his throat tighten and his breath weaken, and in among the pain was aware that his opponent had the advantage not only of size but of position: he was a foot above him on the bunk, and his weight pressed down. Calmly and swiftly Hammer wrenched the little finger back as far as it would go; felt something give inside. The man roared and jerked backward, releasing Hammer and clutching his hand.

  “Shevetsi!” he shouted. “Shevetsi!”

  Hammer was up instantly, his feet set like a boxer in among the bodies and his hands in fists, prepared for a knife or a piece of broken glass.

  Wrong-footed, in pain and in shock, Hammer’s opponent looked up at him, his expression curiously empty, as if he had no idea what to do next. He scanned the room, saw the drowsy faces taking in his humiliation, brought his eyes back to Hammer, and arranged his brow into an exaggerated frown, continuing to cradle his bad hand. Hammer saw a broader fear in him, and wondered whether it had afflicted him his whole life. The man turned his shoulder to Hammer and brought his fists up, purpose returning to his eyes.

  A key clattered in the lock and two police officers, roused no doubt by the noise, stood in the doorway and took in the scene. Then one of them addressed Hammer.

  “You. American. Here.”

  Blood coursing, every sense alert, Hammer unclenched his fists, smoothed down his hair at the sides, and went, with a final look at his adversary that was not without a strange sympathy.

  EIGHT

  For Hammer, running was thinking. Once a day, sometimes twice: down the hill from Hampstead in the mornings, an easy freewheel to arrive at the office with some momentum, and then back home after work with a problem that wouldn’t crack, carrying it up to the top of the city until he had it broken down into pieces.

  Not today. However hard he went at the hills he couldn’t so much as chip it. He’d read a story once, he forgot where, about a group of Italian resistance fighters who needed to move a massive boulder to build a shelter. It was too big whole, and for hours they hammered at it, big strong men, but it just looked back at them. Then out of the woods came an old man, the last of their party and a mason, and all the others stepped back. He walked all round the rock, ran his hands over it, found his point, and with great precision gave it a distinct but not forceful tap with a sledgehammer. Obediently the boulder fell in two. Today Hammer felt like the first group, hopelessly beating away, his own name a dim ironic taunt.

  Sander had released him at seven, after four hours of dogged questioning. No charge, not yet, but he was to return to the station a week from Friday, by which time she would have gone through the haul she’d made that afternoon. No traveling abroad in the meantime. And no talking to anyone about their conversation, unless he wanted to add perverting the course of justice to her list. That included Webster.

  The day had been humid and now as he ran the rain started, big soft drops that he barely noticed. Barely noticed the road ahead, or the route that he knew so well, or the people and cars that he threaded in between. Ignored the hamstring that had been tight for days; ran through it, fast on the flat and faster up the hills. What the fuck had Ben done? The question repeated itself like a mantra. What had he done? How great was his talent for creating so much trouble to so little purpose?

  Isaac Hammer sent down; the great detective behind bars. A bunch of people would like the idea. The crooks who had come his way, a handful of other investigators, at least half a dozen lawyers whose noses he had put out of joint over the years. The newspapers would have a blast. Spies, corruption, a fall—it was a good story. He’d have been happy to write it in his day. The shame he could endure, but what he couldn’t contemplate, and yet knew was certain, was that there was no way Ikertu would survive. Who wants an investigator whose boss isn’t even at liberty? Clients would desert him, and his people would rightly follow. He couldn’t sell the company, because without him there was nothing to sell, and even if there had been, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to do it. It was his. He had brought it into the world.

  No. If this had been his doing, fine, he’d take the rap. But stand by and watch while someone else destroyed his world? Ben had to stand up. There was no other way. He’d made the decision, he’d done the work. And the least he could fucking do, after the risks he’d so blithely taken, would be to come clean for once, without that slippery evasion he wrapped up so neatly in superiority.

  What had he said, when he left? You sell hypocrisy, and value nothing but profit.

  For days after their final meeting, Hammer had raged over the words, but recently all he had felt was a great sadness—that their friendship had ended, and that Ben had contrived so skillfully to screw up his life.

  Now there came fresh fury at the man’s own cant. For what had he endangered everything Hammer had made? For a scrap of pride.

  • • •

  Beyond Hampstead the streets flattened out and the houses grew less moneyed and soon Hammer was on Hiley Road, wet through and steaming, walking the last few hundred yards to relax his legs and try to cool his thoughts.
>
  He rang the bell, conscious for the first time of just how wet he was. The rain fell cold on the back of his neck and he counseled himself to be calm. Don’t hit the fucker. An unexpected nervousness mingled with his fury, light in his throat, and with it a dull memory of relationships, and rows, and the anxious hope that came with trying to make up.

  Elsa opened the door, harassed, as if the last thing she wanted was a caller. Her dark hair fell across one eye, and she pushed it back distractedly.

  “Christ, Ike.” She seemed concerned more than surprised. “I thought you were a salesman.”

  So absorbed had he been that he hadn’t thought for a moment that he might see her. The question that only now struck him, and for which he had no answer, was what she would do if Ben was no longer around.

  “I’m sorry. I was passing, on my way home, and there’s something I need to talk to him about. I thought I’d stop by.”

  Her frown grew puzzled. Elsa was the last person in the world to be convinced by a bad lie.

  “He’s not here. He’s away.”

  Of course. He would be.

  “When’s he back?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow maybe. He went to Karlo’s funeral.”

  “Karlo?”

  “The journalist.”

  “Jesus. Karlo?”

  Karlo Toreli. He had more life in him than ten men.

  “I thought you might have known.”

  “I’m the last to know things these days. That’s kind of unimaginable. Karlo?”

  “I’m sorry.”