“What are you doing in Milano?” he asked, still looking down.
“Business,” said Webster. “I came to see a client.”
The officer nodded slowly to himself and typed something into his computer, taking his time. Webster heard footsteps behind him and two men appeared at his shoulder, both in the uniform of the Polizia di Stato. One went to talk to his colleague in the booth, the other stayed back.
After a moment’s grave conversation the first officer came out and nodded to his colleague, who took Webster by the elbow and told him that he would have to follow him and answer some questions.
The two men led Webster past shops and sandwich bars to an unmarked gray door set in a long gray wall. Behind it was a white room, well-lit from two fluorescent strips that hung from the ceiling, its floor tiled with worn carpet, its only furniture a glass table with a metal-framed chair either side of it. He was told that he should sit and that someone would be with him soon. One officer left and the other stayed, standing with his back to the wall by the door. Webster watched him for a moment and decided that his rigid bearing and serious gaze were there to suggest that he wouldn’t answer questions if asked, so taking his phone from his coat he began to type a short message to Ike, letting him know where he was and why he might be late.
“No,” said the officer. “No cell. Please switch off.”
“Am I under arrest? Because otherwise I can make a call.”
“Switch off the cell or I am going to arrest you.”
He looked at his guard, saw that he was serious, cut his message to Ike short (“stopped at linate”) and turned off his phone.
“Can you tell me what this is about?”
“Someone come,” said the officer, and resumed his inspection of the opposite wall.
“If they don’t come soon I’m going to miss my flight.”
This was Italy. It could be hours. Resigned to being here for some time Webster took yesterday’s newspaper from his bag. Forty minutes passed, and he began to be frustrated with the silence. His guard didn’t move. Eventually the door opened a few inches and someone that Webster couldn’t see beckoned to the officer to leave the room. After a moment or two he was replaced by two men in suits, one old and balding gray, short and tensed, the other younger and less compact, his black jacket scarcely covering his paunch.
They stood in front of the table and the younger man spoke; his partner merely cocked his head and looked at Webster with implacable gray eyes.
“Signore Webster. I am sorry that you are made to wait. Please, come with us.”
Webster shook his head. “No. Either you tell me what is going on or I call my lawyer right now. And my embassy.” He reached for his phone.
“Signore, we need you to answer questions about Giovanni Ruffino.” Webster stopped and looked up. “Please, come with us.”
Ruffino. Webster thought he had heard the last of him long ago.
• • •
“YOU HAVEN’T BEEN TO ITALY in a long time, Signore Webster,” said the younger policeman. He had the high, sing-song voice of the Milanese, a little open trill on the end of any word that would take it.
“Not for a while.”
“Not in seven years.” He referred to a file that he had opened on the table in between them. “Is that a choice?”
“No. Just chance.”
A little nod. “So we must not feel hurt.” A quick, perfunctory smile at his joke and then a pause. “Why do you come here now? Chance?”
“No. I came to have a meeting. With a client.”
“An Italian client?”
“A client with a house in Italy.”
“Can you tell me the name?”
“Of the house?”
The detective smiled. He was being indulgent. “Mr. Webster, you will find it easier to be cooperative. We will all find it easier.” He looked sideways to his colleague, who sat with his legs crossed, one elbow over the back of his chair, tending to his nails with what looked like a toothpick. “His name?”
“I might tell you when you tell me why you’re wasting my day.” They were now in a police station in the city, on via Malpensa. Webster didn’t know enough about the complicated organization of the Italian police to know which branch was detaining him or what that might mean. All he knew was that it was eleven now, and the day was slipping into nothingness. He didn’t know whether to feel concerned or simply angry. That Ruffino should come up now was strange: he hadn’t given him a moment’s thought in years and could hardly believe that he was of interest to anybody still. He watched the two detectives and tried to learn something from their carriage, from their body language. The younger officer was resting his arms on the table and his back was curved, his shoulders slumped. It was hot in the room and he had taken off his jacket to reveal dark-blue patches under his arms. But he wasn’t anxious. He looked like a man with right on his side. His colleague continued to pick at his nails, unconcerned.
“Bene.” The younger detective ignored his question and looked down at the folder. “The last time you were here you came to Milano and saw a company of investigators. Investigazioni Indago. Yes?”
Webster merely returned the detective’s look.
“You had a meeting with them at two o’clock on Thursday, March 8th, 2004. You attended, with Antonio Dorsa and Giuseppe Maltese, two detectives. Private detectives. At that meeting you ordered them to put a wiretap on the home and office telephone lines of Giovanni Ruffino, a lawyer, from Milano also.”
“No, I didn’t.”
The detective looked at him for a moment with raised eyebrows before resuming.
“Also, you gave instructions to look in Signore Ruffino’s bank accounts, here and in Switzerland, and in his medical history and his garbage.”
Webster shook his head, partly in denial, partly in wonderment that this old, old story, which he had long presumed dead, had been merely dormant all this time. The interesting question was what had awakened it.
“No. I didn’t. This is all nonsense. Old nonsense.”
“Can you tell us what you discussed at that meeting?”
“Until you arrest me I’m not going to tell you anything. I have no idea why I’m here or why you’re dragging up this crap again. If you’re not going to charge me with anything you can open that door and drive me back to the airport.”
The younger officer looked at the older, who gave the slightest nod.
“OK.” The younger man shrugged. “That is fine. Benedict Webster, we are placing you under arrest on charges of illegal wiretapping, breaking of banking secrecy law, breaking of data protection law, commercial espionage and harassment. You have the right to speak to a lawyer. We can find one if you cannot.”
Webster shook his head, dumbstruck. Alarm took hold of him. To be questioned was one thing: in Italy an investigation was a political plaything to be started, discredited, ditched and revived at will, and he had assumed until now that he had merely been dropped by accident into some game being played many levels above him whose purpose he might never guess. They were accusing him of things that happened in Italy every day and almost always went unpunished, so this had to be mere harassment. But if these two were prepared to arrest him, then the game was about him, and it was being played with intent. He said nothing, watching the two policemen watch him with the ease of those who have all the power on their side.
“Now would you like to talk?” said the younger, smiling a slick smile.
“Only to a lawyer.” Webster sat back and crossed his arms.
At this the older man looked up from his nails and fixed a severe eye on him. There were dark hairs on his cheekbones and the skin on his cheeks was pockmarked and rigid with gray stubble. He didn’t smile.
“Wiretap. Six years.” He counted the charges out on his fingers as he spoke, his accent coarser and stronger than his
colleague’s, his voice a slow rasp. “Banks. Eight years. Other things. Five years.” He leaned forward over the table until his face was a foot from Webster’s. “Serious,” he said, nodding slowly. “No game.” He shook his head gently and sat back, resuming his former position, looking at Webster all the while. “No game. Your children grow old while you in Italy.”
Webster felt his body tense and a powerless fury hold him. The questions that had been crowding for attention left him and were replaced by pure imaginings: interrogations, meetings with lawyers, spells in prison, extradition requests, Elsa furious and scared.
These men across the table would once have had no power over him. He had sat in rooms like this before, with worse men than this, answering their questions and trying to work out what they really wanted, what part he was playing in their careful fantasies. But he had never known a fear like this. It wasn’t fear of them, or what they could do; it was fear of what he might once have done to destroy what he now held most precious.
He needed air, and time to consider, and for the first time that day it dawned on him that he wasn’t free. He couldn’t walk out of the door, take a stroll around Milan, call some people and return with the situation in hand. He couldn’t take the next flight home and pick up the children from school. He was here, and here was all there was.
“I need my call.”
“Signore Webster.” The younger man pulled his chair up to the table and rested his elbows on it, his hands clasped together, considering something grave. “I urge you to be cooperative. Easier for us, easier for you. There are many outcomes possible. This is Italy.”
Webster watched his pale doughy face and wondered whose bidding he was doing.
“Give me my call.”
“In a moment, Signore. We would like this to stay in Italy—a simple local matter, under control. If you cooperate I give you my word that we don’t involve the British police. They know about the case, of course, but it is, I think you say, dormant.”
“My call. Nothing until then.”
• • •
AFTER CAREFUL THOUGHT HE had phoned Elsa. She could tell Ike what had to be done but it wasn’t fair to ask him to give her the news. Being Elsa, she was calm and practical—how serious was it, she had wanted to know, and how long might he be—and he had been more reassuring than he yet had reason to be. In truth, he simply didn’t know.
His instructions for Ike had been simple: contact our best friends in Milan, ask them to recommend a good criminal defense lawyer who can find out what game the police were playing. In particular, have them discover who was making this happen. She had asked him if he was OK and he had answered, truthfully, that he was fine. Angry, frustrated, penitent about bringing this contaminant into their lives but otherwise fine.
The business of locating, instructing and sending a lawyer might take half a day, and in the meantime Webster, hungry now but calm again, had been shown to a cell, which mercifully he had to himself, and left alone. It was bare, well-lit, clean enough. From a high corner a camera watched him sitting on one of the bunks, staring at one wall, his back against the other.
This was the first time he had been in a cell since Kazakhstan over a decade before, where his friend Inessa, a journalist like him, had died beyond his reach four cells away. The memory, fresh at the best of times, steered him toward a more stable sense of proportion, and he began to take slow, careful stock. First, he hadn’t done half the things he was charged with, and no wiretapping, certainly; in the Anglo-Saxon world that had been a no-no for decades. That was one source of comfort.
Another was that the Ruffino affair had been dead, politically speaking, for years, and the whole business completed: the Austrians had lost, the Russians had captured the company, and Ruffino himself, despite all his protestations that he wasn’t their man, had no doubt been paid a handsome fee for the scheme’s success. When Webster had come to Milan on that day all those years before, the fight had been in the press every day and his brief to Dorsa and his decidedly shady friend supremely delicate: demonstrate that this Italian lawyer, intimate of a dozen grubby billionaires, owned all those shares in the Austrian’s company for the Russians and not on his own behalf. Delicate and grubby enough, in fact, that when Ruffino had filed a complaint against GIC, Webster’s old company, for running a vicious campaign to destroy his reputation, Webster had been astonished that anyone would want to draw more attention to a situation that was already dangerously exposed.
He hadn’t looked recently but he was sure that nothing had changed. The Russians were still in charge. Ruffino, so far as he knew, had moved on to new acts of complex dishonesty. The stakes were no longer high; for everyone but him, in fact, there were no stakes. Which meant that either there had been news he hadn’t heard, or he really was the center of all this attention.
So his first questions for the lawyer would be simple: is this a real investigation or an exercise in manipulation? Has something happened to prompt real interest in this ancient dead end of a case or is it being picked over to unsettle someone close to it? Am I that someone and if so, why?
A client had once given him a single piece of advice for surviving spells in prison: bring a book. Here he had nothing to fool time into speeding up. His phone and bag had now been taken from him, and all he could do was think, and overthink. An hour passed, and another.
At last the door to the cell opened and he was asked in Italian by a uniformed policeman to follow him. Who had Ike contacted, he wondered. The first time around, GIC had found him an excellent lawyer, by repute, a Signore Lucca, but before they could meet, or speak, Webster had been sacked, his job the price of wild coverage in the Italian press and a nervous legal department back in New York. This, then, would be his first meeting with an Italian defense lawyer—or with a defense lawyer of any kind, for that matter.
The cells were in the basement, the interrogation rooms upstairs. He was shown into one of them and told to wait, for the first time that day unguarded. He thought it was where he had been brought from the airport but couldn’t be sure. After only a minute the door opened and Senechal, still as pressed and neat as he had been at breakfast, came lightly into the room, closing the door silently behind him. Webster frowned involuntarily and gave his head a shake. It was an apparition that made no sense.
Senechal set his briefcase carefully on the floor and sat down, his near-black eyes on Webster the whole time. Neither said anything; neither looked away.
At last Senechal smiled, even less convincingly than usual, the sides of his mouth lifting perhaps an eighth of an inch.
“It was lucky for you that I am in Italy, Mr. Webster,” he said, his reedy voice high and cold.
“If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be in Italy at all.”
Senechal nodded. “That is true. But when we set up the meeting we had no idea you had these problems.”
“Neither did I.”
Another curt nod. “And now of course the problem is ours.”
Webster raised his eyebrows and cocked his head. “Yours?”
“Naturally. When we hired you we did not know that your reputation was compromised.”
“My reputation is fine.”
Senechal gave an awkward snorting laugh that was clearly not commonly part of his repertoire. “Mr. Webster, you have been charged with serious crimes. Very serious. I ask myself who would believe the Ikertu report if the man who wrote it was in an Italian prison.”
“Then you should find someone else.”
“It’s too late for that.” He smiled again, his eyes empty. “And it may not be necessary.” He took a crisply folded white handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. “I hope not.”
Webster waited for him to explain.
“I understand how things work in Italy, Mr. Webster. You, you know Russia. I am sure that you have done nothing wron
g. The law in these places is not about justice. It is about power. We know this. Everyone knows this, even the British and the Americans. This does not make things any less grave for you, of course. But it does mean that perhaps I can help. On Mr. Qazai’s behalf.”
Webster studied his flat gray eyes like old coins and tried to divine their intention. They revealed nothing.
“I have only one question for you, Mr. Webster. Can I assume that the charges against you have no merit?”
How Webster wished he liked this man and his client, or felt that he could trust him at all. He began to understand what Senechal had in mind. “You can assume what you like.” He paused. “How did you know I was here?”
Senechal, ignoring the question, made a last, brisk nod and stood up. “I shall be a moment only,” he said, and left the room.
He was gone for ten minutes, no more, and in that time Webster tried to imagine what he was saying and to whom. His body registered his unease: for the first time that day the restlessness that he had been carefully controlling got the better of him, and as his leg jigged and his fingers tapped he had the strong urge simply to leave, to get out into the air and walk and walk until this strange production and its bizarre cast felt far away. But he needed to get home. And he needed Senechal’s help. The realization sat unpalatably at the base of his throat.
The younger detective appeared first, followed by Senechal. The older colleague wasn’t in sight.
“I have talked to your lawyer, Signore Webster,” he said, standing with his hands behind his back, his belly out, and rocking slightly on his heels. “He assures me that you will return to Italy in three weeks. This is an informal arrangement. It is unusual but we are happy to do it because Mr. Qazai testifies to your character. You are fortunate to have friends like this.”
Webster, still sitting, looked from the detective to Senechal and back again. He’s not my lawyer, he wanted to say, and neither of them is my friend.
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