“I need a week,” he said.
“Would you listen to me?” said Hammer, his patience cracking.
Webster turned to him, his jaw set.
“You think I trust this guy?” said Hammer, irritated now. “I don’t trust any client who badgers me as much as he does. He has his grim little sidekick call me every hour. He’s a bully, at best. Did he set you up? I still don’t know, and neither do you. But did he try to bribe you? I believe you. That’s what his kind do. They buy people. They’d like to buy me.”
Webster made to say something but Hammer raised his hand. “Would you wait? Jesus. OK. So he’s in trouble. You’re in trouble. I don’t like to see you in trouble. It’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for business. I have no desire, believe me, to see your name in all the papers, because do you know what? Mine’ll be there too. Again.” He raised his eyebrows. “Understand? Good. So here’s a guy, tried to pay off one of my people, and I don’t want to give him what he wants. Part of me also thinks, if I’m going to hedge my bets, I should take you seriously about the business in Italy. If Qazai’s not involved, then it’ll make no difference, but if he is . . . Well, maybe it can help.”
Webster had no idea where this was leading.
“But most of all,” Hammer went on, “I don’t know what he’s going to do with my report. Heaven knows. He may not have lied to me about it but he sure as hell hasn’t told me the whole truth. If we give him a glowing testimonial he can wave it around for the rest of time to whoever he likes, and he doesn’t qualify for that. Do I want you to write a eulogy? No, I don’t. So here’s what we’re going to do.” He took a deep breath and pointed at Webster. “You . . . you are going to write a report—hear me out—that says yes, the sculpture story was a crock, but ultimately we can’t say whether he’s a good guy. We’re going to put a story in there, about a reliable source—this is you, by the way—who witnessed him offering a bribe.”
“That was Senechal.”
“Same fucking thing.” He shuddered. “He really is one of the weirdest sons of bitches . . . Anyway, we give Qazai that report, and tell him that if he doesn’t like it, it will be quietly leaked that Ikertu actually had grave reservations about his ethics. That in the end we were pulled off the case before we could dig too deep. They’ve asked for a meeting. We’ll tell them then.”
Webster ran his hands through his hair, clasped them behind his neck and stared up at the ceiling. He shut his eyes against the fluorescent light. If only this would work. Like all Ike’s plans it was simple, a little devious, and apparently sound. But he couldn’t believe that Qazai would simply stand down, just as he knew he couldn’t. They were racing against each other, and Ike was calling time. Neither would hear him. Neither would choose to.
“I don’t think I can write that.” He sat upright and looked Hammer in the eye.
“If you want to be shot of this mess, you will.”
“We shouldn’t write anything. Believe me. With what I know.”
“Like what? Just tell me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Fletcher called yesterday. The investigation into Mehr’s death has been officially closed.”
“So what? I’m amazed it was ever opened.”
“The order to shut it down came from someone inside the Quds force.”
“Which is?”
“It’s part of the Revolutionary Guard. Like the Iranian SS.”
“Jesus. This is why I need to separate you two.”
“And Mehr was laundering money.”
Hammer’s face became set. “How do you know that?”
“Give me a week. You’ll thank me.”
Hammer shook his head.
“Ben, you’ll write it now.” His voice was firm, but there was a softness in his eyes, a sadness. “This is not your company. If you can’t do it, you should think seriously about whether you’d be happier somewhere else. Or on your own, where you can play out these romances of yours without interference.” He gave Webster a last look, which seemed to say that he regretted his firmness but would be tested no further, and left the room, somehow older than he had entered it.
• • •
TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEK a young German woman called Silke picked up Daniel from nursery and Nancy from school, took them to the park for a while and then brought them home for their tea. Webster liked Silke, and so did the children, but a part of him wished that he could do her work himself.
Today he was later than he would have liked; he had spent the afternoon talking to Oliver, and now tea was finishing. Silke was washing up; Daniel was scraping around the inside of a clearly empty yogurt pot; Nancy had pushed hers aside and was bent over a notebook, writing something with a crayon, her face three inches from the page. When he opened the kitchen door she looked up, scrambled down from her chair and ran to him.
“Daddy!”
He crouched down, wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up in a tight hug, arching his back and kissing her face above his. She would be six in August but she was still so light, so finely built, so distinct from the mass and clamor of the world outside the door that her touch and her laugh pulled him from it instantly.
When Elsa returned home the children were in their pajamas watching television and Webster was cooking, slicing onions into thin half-rounds with a satisfyingly sharp knife. He turned from his work and kissed her.
“How was your day?”
“Fine,” she said. “Good. How’s Nancy?”
“She seems fine. No problems to report.”
“Did you ask her about Phoebe?”
Webster looked over his shoulder at his wife. She was going through that day’s mail; her hair was up and the skin on her neck golden from the sun, and her beauty, as it often did, gave him a shock of elation, or privilege, or something else that he couldn’t wholly recognize. He hated it when there was distance between them, and this only served to heighten it.
“We just talked through her day. She didn’t mention anything.”
Elsa nodded, not looking up. “What are we having?”
“Chicken.” Webster turned back to his cooking and a second later felt Elsa’s hand on the back of his neck.
“How was yours?”
“Good. I had a chat with Ike. Or he had a chat with me.” He slipped his arm around her waist and for a second they stood rather awkwardly together in front of the stove, like partners in a three-legged race, until he had to pull away to slide the onions into the pan.
Elsa let her hand linger on his back and then went to sit down at the table.
“Are you two OK now?” she said.
“So-so. Better.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s come up with a way out of the whole mess.”
“Will it work?”
“It should all be over within a week.”
He glanced at her, his face concertedly frank, expecting her to spot the evasion in his answer.
“What then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will you stay?”
Webster stirred the onions, watching them bubble gently and turn translucent in the green oil.
“I’ll see what happens. When this is over I’ll know.”
He glanced up to see Elsa looking at him closely. She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Whether by training or nature she could always tell.
“I called him.” She paused. “Ike.”
“You called him? When?”
“At the beginning of the week. I was worried about you.”
He shook his head. “You should have talked to me first.”
“You’re not the easiest person to talk to at the moment.”
He turned to her, running a hand through his hair and grasping the back of his neck. Suddenly he felt a great weight of tiredness. “I’m sorry, baby. I
am. There isn’t long now.”
Elsa simply watched him for a moment. “What’s his plan?”
“It’s boring.” Her look told him to go on. “It’s very Ike.”
“You’re not going to do it, are you?”
He frowned, indignant. “I’m going to do my best.”
Not strictly a lie; but Elsa knew precisely what it meant. “Jesus, Ben. You know what?” Her voice was steady and clear. “There is more to your life than the absurd”—she searched for the word—“vanity of your work. Do you think it matters to me whether this man is good or bad? Do you think it matters to Nancy, or Daniel? I was sorry about Lock. I still am. But his boss? The Russian who’s quietly suffocated the last six months of our lives. I don’t care. We don’t.”
Webster, his eyes on the ground, didn’t answer.
“This is not a campaign. This is life. It’s not some assault on, on what? What is it you’re trying to destroy? Because I worry, I really fucking worry, that it’s us. That you won’t be happy until it is.”
He shook his head. “I’m not doing this for me.”
“Really? Who then? Mankind?”
He looked up at her, with all the candor—genuine now—that he could find.
“I’m not doing it for me. Not anymore.”
He had never seen Elsa so intense, so adamant. She gave him one last, angry look and pushed out her chair to leave; and as she did so his phone, lying dormant on the side all this time, chimed once, a startling trill. His eyes went to it involuntarily.
“I tell you what,” she said. “You deal with that. Save us all. I’m putting Daniel to bed.”
Webster stood to one side to let her pass and watching her leave let out a deep, long sigh. The onions were beginning to brown at the edges; he stirred them, shook the pan once or twice and turned off the heat. Part of him wanted to throw his phone across the room, but a greater part had to know what it said.
It was Constance. The message was only five words. “Timur Qazai dead. Please advise.”
15.
NO FUNERAL SHOULD TAKE PLACE in high summer. Even in Highgate, on the rising hills of north London, the city’s heavy air had found its way through the oaks and sycamores to the mourners gathered around Timur’s grave, bathing them in a waxy heat that seemed to drip onto the skin and stick there. Webster, sweating in his wool suit, could feel grime accumulating on the inside of his collar and ran a finger around it to loosen it from his neck. Ant-like bugs flew silently, drawn to the white shirts of the men; next to him Hammer swatted at one on his neck, caught it, discreetly flicked the remnants away.
Cool earth, that’s what Timur deserved, but the ground looked heated today and seemed to offer no rest. Webster couldn’t help but picture him in his coffin as it was borne in on the shoulders of the pallbearers, Qazai at the front. His body must have been badly broken. He had died, the Dubai police had said, when his car hit a wall at somewhere just under a hundred miles an hour. The collision had been side-on; at the last minute his car had swung around, flailing into the concrete and crushing him inside. Webster imagined the tremendous noise it had made and the greater silence that must have followed.
This was not a grand funeral—there was no splendor, no pomp—but there were many mourners. Webster could make out a wealthy Iranian set, some of whom he recognized from Mehr’s memorial service: a handful of Tabriz staff, several friends of Timur and Raisa, less moneyed than the rest. And then there were the Qazais, in their black dresses and black suits, reduced, a flat outline of the people he had last seen in Como just two weeks before.
Timur’s sons were both there, decked out in mourning, Raisa holding them close. Parviz stared quietly at the freshly dug black walls of the grave while Farhad hid his face in his mother’s waist, nestling there, more shy than sad, occasionally glancing out as she stroked his hair. Raisa herself, the color in her face leached out, kept shaking her head, as if she was simply lost in the wrong place.
From the other side of the grave Webster saw all this. He saw Timur’s mother, the former Mrs. Qazai, standing apart from the family with her new husband, her blonde hair piled up on her head and her eyes masked by sunglasses. He saw Senechal, in his usual uniform, looking like an agent of the afterlife come to take stock. Ava, with her head bowed and eyes shut. And he saw Qazai, pale, gaunt, erect and proper in his suit, working hard to counter the new look of fear and haunting in his eyes.
It was a quiet ceremony. The celebrant’s soft voice was directed only to the family and Webster, standing far from the grave, couldn’t hear the prayers that were said over the body as it was lowered into the ground. The words over, Raisa reached down, took a handful of damp soil from a neat pile at the edge of the grave, and threw it onto the coffin, where it landed with a gentle patter. As each of her sons did the same she squatted down and when they were done held them in a long, still embrace. Then she stood, smiled at both, wiped her tears and led them away down a dark avenue of oaks toward the waiting cars.
Timur’s mother was next, then Ava, then Qazai, who stood for a long time—a full minute, perhaps two—staring at the coffin with the earth in his hand before letting it drop. His gaze was unblinking, intense, yet somehow absent. Webster wondered whether he was looking through the wood to send a last message, or making some inward search of his own soul. Behind and around him the other mourners started to disperse, and as the soil slipped from his hand an abrupt, silent sob shook him and he too moved away, making the procession back to the road on his own. Webster watched him go, sensing that he had just seen his first glimpse of an unadorned Darius Qazai, the raw essence of the man that investors and grandees and private detectives didn’t ordinarily meet. He could not comprehend his pain. Even his tireless imagination baulked at the task.
By the grand gates of the cemetery people had stopped and were saying goodbye to each other. Senechal, bleached out in the full sun, had taken himself to one side and now stood waiting. Webster saw him ahead and waited for him to stroll lightly toward them.
“Mr. Hammer. Mr. Webster. It is good of you to come.” He didn’t offer his hand and spoke with greater than usual earnestness. “I felt sure that you would wish to have the opportunity to say your last respects.”
“We’re grateful to be invited,” said Hammer. “It came as a terrible shock.”
“To all of us, Mr. Hammer. To all of us.” Senechal paused. He seemed at home here, almost relaxed. No smiling was required, no positivity. Just a meek, lawyerly deference to the likelihood that things will, after all, almost always go wrong.
“There is nothing worse,” said Hammer, “than seeing someone die young.”
Senechal inclined his head in a sort of bow.
“Our meeting tomorrow . . .”
“We will cancel,” said Hammer. “Of course. Or rearrange.”
“No, no. That will not be necessary. No, the meeting will proceed as before.” Sensing their perplexity he went on. “I’m afraid that the death of Mr. Qazai does nothing to solve our problems. Indeed, it makes them more acute. When we see each other I shall want to know exactly where we are with the report, and when we can expect its release. In all honesty,” he attempted a smile, “I think we have waited long enough.”
Hammer checked Webster with a discreet motion of his hand. “I understand. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
But Webster had stopped concentrating. He was looking over Senechal’s shoulder at Ava, who had broken away from the people still milling around the entrance to the cemetery and was now walking toward them with purpose in her stride. As she drew near, Senechal followed Webster’s look and turned to find her already by him and fixing his eyes with her own, tired and red as they were. She glanced at Webster before addressing Senechal.
“Did you ask these two?” Senechal hesitated, apparently surprised, but not discomfited, by the question. “Did you?”
“Mr. Qazai asked me to i
nvite them, miss.”
Ava looked from one face to another, furious, shaking her head. Glancing behind her she leaned in slightly, lowering her voice. “This is not a business meeting. This is not a moneymaking exercise. Do you understand? For any of you. If he’s invited you to the wake, do the decent thing and go home. And you,” she turned to Senechal, jabbing a finger at him, “I don’t want you there. I don’t want you in my father’s home. Sucking the life from him. Doing whatever it is that you do.”
She glared at Senechal for a good two seconds, made to leave and then shook her head, as if remembering one last thing.
“Why did you come?” she said to Webster. “What is there to investigate here?”
“I came out of respect for your brother.”
“You didn’t know my brother.”
“Sadly, no.”
“I expected better from you.”
Her eyes were trying to impart some meaning that he couldn’t grasp; he felt baffled by her words, and awkward at having been singled out. Senechal, showing no signs of shock, looked intrigued, as if he had just heard something whose significance he couldn’t judge but whose importance he did not doubt.
• • •
TWO DAYS EARLIER, when Webster had first heard the news of Timur’s death, his response, after the shock, had been a strange, inappropriate lightness, almost peace: when he surveyed his thoughts the insistent muttering of his obsession had gone, and the switch was like moving from white noise to utter quiet. To continue his duel with Qazai now would be indecent and unnecessary. The man was already crushed, and though Webster wasn’t proud of it, beside his sympathy for Raisa, and her boys, and Ava, sat something like relief.
His first call that evening, after he had spoken to an excited Constance, had been to Ike. They talked about Qazai, and what this would mean for his plan, and agreed that without Timur it would at best have to be completely rethought; about Timur himself, the misfortune of being born the son of a rich man; and, with a certain amount of professional detachment, the difficulties of staging a car crash so that it might look like an accident. Hammer was of the opinion that it was more or less impossible, certainly a great deal harder than anyone might imagine, and Webster, though he disagreed, said little. Even before he had spoken to Constance, who was convinced, as ever, of a conspiracy (the car had been tampered with, no question; a mysterious Range Rover had been seen racing it shortly before the crash; the Dubai police were saying, unconvincingly, that crucial CCTV footage was missing) he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Timur’s death wasn’t the latest act in a sequence, a progression he could see but whose logic he couldn’t make out.
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