The Jackal's Share

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Webster gathered his papers and stood up.

  “You’ll have my bill in the morning. If I were you I’d think seriously about quietly retiring Mr. Clifford. At the very least.”

  He made to leave, but the boxer blocked his way, standing at the end of the table by the door.

  “Two years,” he said. “Two years of my time, his time. Half this office has worked on this.”

  Webster studied him for a moment; there was sweat along his hairline and his neck was tight against his collar. He was giving another of his deliberate stares, and tilting his head forward slightly, presumably for menace.

  “Perhaps you should have come to me earlier,” Webster said.

  The boxer put his good hand on Webster’s chest. Webster left it there and looked him in the eye, wondering for a moment what would happen if he were to bring his head down hard on that stubby, flattened nose.

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “If this deal doesn’t go through, you don’t get paid.”

  “If I don’t get paid, you break our contract, and I tell everyone about the company you keep. Now take your hand off, and move.”

  “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “If it was up to me I’d have done it already.”

  The boxer finally stepped back a full pace and Webster passed him, nodding to his colleague and thanking him politely for his time.

  • • •

  A FINE, cold spring rain fell as Webster walked back to Ikertu through old streets toward the Inner Temple, where warm squares of light glowed in the dusk. This whole block of London, half a square mile to the west of the City, was given over to the service of clients. The lawyers had been here for hundreds of years, and after them had come accountants and advisers and consultants of every stripe. And a certain sort of detective, Webster thought.

  In the rooms all around him lawsuits were being compiled, audits made, presentations pored over, efficiencies mooted, debts rationalized, strategies dreamed up by a legion of associates and directors and partners, all recording their hours, some their minutes, all billing at a healthy rate. It was its own world with its own etiquette, rituals, dress, but Webster, in his tenth year of this, still struggled to feel like he belonged. When he sent out a bill to a client and saw that they were paying thousands of pounds a day for him, he wondered first how it could be so much, then how any client could possibly afford to pay, then what possible value his work might have. He didn’t doubt himself; he knew that he was good at what he did. Rather, he watched the hours being worked and noted and charged and found it hard to believe that any of them were contributing much to the well-being of the world.

  There was a message for him from the office. Waiting at Ikertu was a new client who had dropped in unannounced, asked to speak to Hammer, and in his absence said that he was happy to wait for Webster’s return. The ones who didn’t make appointments were usually flakes, and Webster found himself hoping that it wouldn’t take long.

  His first thought, on seeing the strange figure across the Ikertu lobby, was that he must have been raised in the dark—forced, perhaps, in an unlit shed, and not yet colored in. He was rigidly monochrome: black hair, precisely parted against the palest skin; a white shirt framed by a black tie and suit; black socks, black shoes and beside him a briefcase, also black, which had folded over it a dark-gray macintosh. He read a newspaper at arm’s length and sat so still that he might have been set from a mold. An hour had passed since he had called but he seemed unconcerned, as if time, like color, was something worldly that he scorned.

  Sensing that someone was approaching he looked up and stood. He was a head shorter than Webster, insubstantial inside his well-cut clothes, and gave a strange, confusing impression of lifelessness competing with great energy. Webster couldn’t tell how old he was: forty, perhaps, or fifty.

  “Ben Webster,” said Webster. “Sorry to have kept you. I had a meeting.”

  The man’s hand was cool as Webster shook it, but dry, the bony grip weak. He held Webster’s for a moment and smiled an empty smile. Up close his skin was like wax, tight against his cheekbones and faintly translucent, and his eyes were a deep petrol gray, the fine red lines in the whites the only color in his face. But what was most striking as he talked were his teeth, which were little and sharp like a badger’s and discolored almost to blackness.

  “Delighted, Mr. Webster.” The voice was thin and slightly hoarse. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a wallet and drew from it a business card which he handed to Webster. On the thick cream card were the words Yves Senechal. Avocat à la Cour, Paris. No address, no telephone number. Webster had not expected him to be a lawyer. Lawyers tended to try harder to make a first impression benign.

  “Mr. Hammer, he is not here?”

  “I’m afraid not. Did you have an appointment?”

  “I prefer to see you as I find you. You are his partner?”

  “I’m his associate.”

  Senechal thought for a moment, the smile gone.

  “Very well. Can we talk in private?”

  Webster nodded and led him down a dark corridor past several closed doors to a meeting room, Senechal following with a slow, light step. When Ikertu had taken this office, a floor in a tall glass-lined box, Hammer had named each of these rooms after his favorite fictional detectives: Marlowe, Maigret, Beck. This, the largest of them all, was the Wolfe room. Through the window that made up one wall it looked west across Lincoln’s Inn, today a dull green square in the spring gloom.

  Senechal declined coffee, took a glass of water, sipped it almost imperceptibly through his thin lips and began. He sat upright, tucked in close to the table, perfectly still.

  “I am not here on my own behalf. I have a client who needs your assistance, perhaps.”

  Webster let him go on.

  “He is a very significant man.” He spoke slowly, his accent heavily French, and his eyes never left Webster’s. “Very significant.”

  Webster waited again, struggling to maintain Senechal’s gaze and finding his ghostly face difficult to address. There was something unfinished about it.

  “Before I begin,” said Senechal, showing no signs of losing his self-possession, “can I ask you who you are? What is your career? I like to know who people are.”

  So do I, thought Webster, but let it go. “I’ve worked here for six years, more or less. Before that for a large American company doing much the same thing.”

  “You have always done this work?”

  “I used to be a journalist. In Russia.”

  Senechal nodded. “So you know about lies. That is good.” He looked at Webster for a moment, as if assessing him dispassionately. “Why did you move companies?”

  “Why did I come here? For the chance to work with Ike. With Mr. Hammer.”

  Another nod, and a pause.

  “My client, he has a problem with his reputation,” Senechal said at last. “We believe that someone has said things that are unjust about him.”

  Webster thought he knew what that meant. Some powerful man who had grown accustomed to his lawyers smoothing out every problem had been refused a visa or a loan and was experiencing an unfamiliar sense of powerlessness. He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You’d like us to find out who?”

  “Later, perhaps. No. That is not it.” Senechal shook his head once, an exact movement. “He would like you to investigate himself. To discover that which can be discovered.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, if there are lies, you can correct them.”

  “If they’re lies.”

  “They are lies.” Senechal’s meager lips pressed tight in a line.

  Webster thought for a moment. “We don’t often do that sort of work.” He paused, watching his guest. “How bad is it?”

  “Excuse me?”

 
“The damage. To your client.”

  “It is an irritant.”

  “Because this is expensive work.”

  “I know,” said Senechal, with another unexpressive smile.

  “Who is your client?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “I can’t help you until you do.”

  Senechal reached down for his briefcase and put it on the table. He took a key from a ticket pocket inside his jacket, unlocked the single clasp and from within drew out two or three pages of paper bound in a Perspex folder. Sliding the briefcase to one side he placed the document neatly in front of him.

  “This,” he said, “is an agreement I wish you to sign. It commits you to make a proposal in general terms. You will tell us how you work and how much it will cost. If we are satisfied I will reveal my client’s identity to you and we can decide the specific things. Between times you will not tell anyone of this conversation.”

  Webster smiled. “I’m afraid we don’t work like that.”

  Senechal shifted forward in his chair and leaned his elbows carefully on the table.

  “This matter is sensitive. Very sensitive. If we do not like the way you work, my client must have protection.”

  “Everything you say in this room is confidential. As is the fact that you’re here. But I’m afraid I won’t sign anything until I know who you work for.”

  Senechal’s eyes registered a moment’s confusion, as if he found something illogical. “This is a lucrative project. For a significant client.”

  “I won’t make commitments to a man I don’t know.”

  Senechal breathed in sharply, rubbed his chin, made to say something and after some internal calculation thought better of it. Fixing his gaze on Webster and letting him know by it what a foolish decision he had just made, he stood up. “Very well. We can go elsewhere. Thank you for your time.”

  Webster nodded and at that moment realized what had been troubling him: Senechal’s eyes did not belong in his face. Somewhere deep inside them, behind the gray irises, there was a fervor, all too alive, that his pallid body struggled to contain.

  He saw his peculiar visitor to the elevators, thanked him, and without anxiety filed him among Ikertu’s discarded clients, a motley group of suspicious husbands, miserly bankers and sinister fantasists whose cases were too slippery or too preposterous to take. The client who was too grand to be identified was a rare subclass that would usually have piqued his interest, but some strong instinct told him that he had been right not to compromise—that whatever conflicting forces drove this odd, unpalatable man they were not worth closer acquaintance.

  Senechal, though, was too ghostly not to haunt him, and he wasn’t surprised when he returned. Two days later an envelope had arrived at Ikertu’s offices, of the finest cream paper, addressed to Webster in looping black ink. It had been delivered by hand. The lettering was bold, just short of elaborate, and on the flap was embossed a capital Q. Inside was an invitation to Mehr’s memorial service and a note, in the same hand, on a small sheet of paper with another Q at its head:

  Dear Mr. Webster,

  I would be honored if you and Mr. Hammer would join me at this important service. We will have time to talk afterward. I may need to call upon your assistance.

  Yours sincerely,

  Darius Qazai

  Looking back, Webster thought that this had been a fitting introduction—grand, proper, apparently frank but in the end thoroughly calculated—but at the beginning he was intrigued, as anyone would be. Qazai had never been a target, nor a client, but if the rich lists were to be believed, it was only a matter of time before he became one or the other. And if this was Senechal’s master, he might become both.

  3.

  AFTER THE SERVICE SENECHAL’S DRIVER took them west across town through Knightsbridge and Kensington, the sun now low ahead of them and London, all red brick and cream stucco, lit up with spring light. The trees of Hyde Park were newly in leaf. Hammer talked, as he always did, quizzing Senechal about his business, his acquaintances in Paris, his views on colonial corruption, Camus, football. Senechal’s replies were courteous, brief and unsatisfying. Webster watched the city glide past and listened to Hammer show off his range.

  The car eventually stopped outside a restaurant on an otherwise residential street in Olympia. Lavash, it was called: Iranian cuisine, Berian our specialty. It was early still, and they were the first people in the place. Senechal was clearly known here, and the manager ushered them through the cramped restaurant to a private room that gave onto a courtyard at the back of the building. The simple decoration did its best to conjure Iran. Two of the walls were hung with a gold fabric, a third with a dozen photographs of Iranian landscapes: a fortress in the mountains, a palace on a lake, shepherds’ huts on green foothills. Opposite, through the French doors, a band of light touched the roofs of the houses beyond.

  Drinks were brought, with olives and flat bread, and the three men sat, Senechal unhurriedly typing e-mails on his BlackBerry, Hammer—finally out of questions—stirring his Scotch and soda, and Webster wondering silently whether a glass of white wine was likely to do much to encourage Senechal to open up. He eventually broke the silence.

  “So it was Qazai.”

  Senechal tapped a few last keys and put down his phone. He looked no more human than he had under the bright office lights of Cursitor Street, and his black teeth showed as he talked.

  “Yes. It was Qazai.”

  “When I looked you up after our meeting I found no mention of him.”

  “Good. That is as it should be. I am Mr. Qazai’s personal lawyer. I never engage with his public affairs.”

  A moment’s silence, broken by Hammer. “Who else do you represent, Mr. Senechal?”

  “That is not relevant here. But most of my time I dedicate to Mr. Qazai and his family.”

  Hammer nodded. “The faithful retainer. Could you tell us a little about him? While we’re waiting.”

  “You have done some research, I imagine,” said Senechal. Not an objection, just a statement of fact.

  “Only so much.”

  Senechal paused a moment, looking at Hammer and making a decision.

  “I will start with his business, then I will talk about him and finally his family.” He said it with the air of a man who leaves nothing unorganized.

  Senechal gave them a well-rehearsed account, beginning with some figures that were clearly intended to impress. Tabriz Asset Management was one of the largest asset management companies in the world. Its headquarters were in London but a large office in Dubai, run by Qazai’s son Timur, looked after its many clients and investments in the Middle East. Altogether it looked after some sixty-three billion dollars of clients’ money, investing it in debt, properties, currencies, public companies, private companies—anywhere it believed it could make money. And it made money. In the previous decade it had made a return, on average, of twelve percent a year: a million dollars invested in 2000 was now worth three. Hammer said that he wished he’d had a million dollars back then, and Senechal ignored the pleasantry as completely as if it made no sense to him at all. Hammer sat back and let their stand-in host continue his eulogy uninterrupted.

  Tabriz was not a company, it was an institution. It had been built by the vision and fortitude of one man, and if they took the job they would soon discover how great Darius Qazai truly was. In 1978, still young, he and his family, alongside so many of his countrymen, had been forced to flee to London from Iran; and with his father, a senior banker and confidant of the Shah, he had set up the first Tabriz company. Poor health had seen the father retire not long afterward, but Qazai was unstoppable. He had invested heavily in property in the eighties and emerging markets in the nineties, had made a fortune in both and today could be said to be the most successful Iranian businessman in the world.

  His success had been others’
good fortune, too. He was a generous and enlightened philanthropist who funded educational projects throughout the Middle East, favoring those that helped women to raise their families out of poverty. Schools in Palestine, Yemen and Oman bore his name. And he was perhaps the world’s most serious collector of Persian art, his foundation the leading authority on pre-Islamic and Islamic art from the region.

  Senechal was certainly a loyal evangelist for his client. Most of this Webster had found out for himself in the last day or two but hearing it delivered coherently—and not without an odd vehemence, even passion—Qazai’s life story was impressive. He was not wholly self-made, since his family had been rich before the revolution and wealthy enough afterward, but his achievements were his and his talents clear. One of the articles that Webster had read had put it simply: “a canny investor and a brilliant salesman, not least in selling himself.” His clients loved him, if Senechal and the newspapers were to be believed, and his commitment to education seemed genuine. For Webster, schooled in the ways of Russia, where it was almost impossible to be a billionaire without stealing something from someone, all this seemed strange, refreshing and unlikely.

  Senechal had more, but before he could move on to his master’s family, Qazai himself arrived, immediately supplying all the color that his lawyer seemed to drain from the room. As everyone stood, he made for Hammer, took his hand and shook it vigorously, his other hand on Hammer’s elbow, his face smiling and earnest.

  “Mr. Hammer. It is a great honor to meet a leader in his field. A great honor.” For once, though he wouldn’t have disagreed with Qazai’s judgment, Hammer seemed off balance, and despite himself Webster smiled.

  “I have read about your exploits with pleasure,” Hammer said. “If I was not doing what I do I should want your job.”

  Qazai moved around the table to Webster. “You must be Mr. Webster. A Russian expert, if I am not mistaken. Of some distinction, I understand. I must thank you for seeing Mr. Senechal, and apologize for the clumsy introduction we tried to make. I have got used to guarding my personal affairs more closely than perhaps is necessary.” Webster was wary of the flattery, but had to concede this was elegant. “Gentlemen, many thanks to you both for coming all this way. I appreciate it greatly. Please, sit, sit.”