The Jackal's Share (13 page)

“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.”

•   •   •

A
FTER 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 wrong. 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.

“Come, Mr. Webster,” said Senechal. “Let me drive you to the airport. We should be able to get you on a flight back to London tonight.”

Webster tried to imagine what had just passed between them. With a short sigh and a shake of his head he stood, stiff from a day’s sitting, and as he followed Senechal, his uninvited savior, out of the room, he turned to the detective.

“Don’t think I won’t find out what happened here today.”

The detective smiled, his full cheeks sweating and dimpled.

•   •   •

I
N THE BACK OF
Senechal’s car on the way to the airport conversation was sparse. His host didn’t seem to expect any thanks and Webster expressed none. He called Elsa and Hammer, but his mind was turning on the question that Senechal had left unanswered. It made no sense.

In the end he repeated it, his eyes straight ahead, watching the road past the driver’s ear.

“How did you know where I was?”

“We had a call. From the police. They wanted to know if you were indeed working for us.”

“I never mentioned Qazai.”

“Well, they knew. It is good that they did.”

As the car slowed onto the slip road to Linate Senechal turned to him.

“I do not believe you will hear from them again, Mr. Webster. They are interested in those private detectives, not you. Not for now. But it would be well for you to express your thanks to Mr. Qazai. In any way you believe appropriate. I do not need your gratitude but he is a man of honor and likes his acts of kindness to be recognized.”

Webster blinked slowly. Now he understood. He turned his head to look at Senechal, frail but energized beside him, and found nothing to say.

“So,” said Senechal, “I am not sure that the police will pursue the matter. But if they do I am quite certain that Mr. Qazai would be happy to offer the same assistance again. For the good of our project.”

Our project. Now there really was no such thing.

12.

K
ENSAL
G
REEN,
after a day in the cells, felt almost comically sheltered and still under its dull summer clouds. The first rain in weeks was falling and through the open window of the taxi came the stony smell of hot pavements being washed of their dust. Webster paid the driver early so that he could walk the last few streets to his house, turning his face up to the sky and stretching some of the stiffness from his neck, and as he turned off the Harrow Road the city noise dropped until all he could hear was the magpies chatting at each other across the rooftops.

In that brief interval he breathed deeply and tried to clear the day from his head, but it sat there, obstinately refusing to quiet down. He regretted phoning Elsa. It would have been better to have kept the whole incident from her, but of course he hadn’t known at the time that it would be over so soon. As it was, the thing that he feared most—puncturing the perfect safety of their home—he had already half done, and he knew that no matter how much he made light of it and no matter how much she acquiesced, unease would now be sitting in the house like a canker.

If Elsa was downstairs that meant the children had gone to bed, and he found himself wishing keenly that bath time and stories had taken a little longer than usual so that he could properly wish them goodnight. He badly wanted to see them. With luck, he could slip into bed beside Nancy and read her one last story. But even as his key turned in the lock he could hear cooking noises coming from the kitchen and knew that he was too late. Putting his bag down in the hall he gave a matter-of-fact “hello” to the house, conscious that this was what normal people do when they get home from work and, threading his way past the bicycles and over the children’s shoes, he joined Elsa, who was drying her hands on a tea towel and looking at him like a mother whose son has been in a fight.

“Come here,” she said, setting the towel aside and drawing him into a close hug. Holding him around the waist she leaned back, looked at him and smiled. “You don’t look too bad.”

He snorted. “It was a bit like a day in the office. One big long meeting.” But he knew she was being kind. Tiredness sat across his shoulders and he could sense the bags under his eyes.

“Do you want a drink?”

“God, yes.”

She took a bottle of whisky from one cupboard and two tumblers from another and poured an inch into each.

“Water?”

He shook his head, took a glass and leaning back against the kitchen counter raised it to her and drank. Neither said anything for a moment.

“So you’re free,” said Elsa, a hesitant question in her voice.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t come.” He tried a smile. “It was nothing in the end.”

She took a drink. “It wasn’t nothing earlier.”

“No. I’m sorry. They were putting the wind up me.”

She raised her eyebrows and looked at him.

“Some Italian policemen enjoy it,” he said.

“Just a game?”

“Something like that.”

She pushed her lips out and nodded. “What did they want from you?”

“I don’t know.” With his free hand he rubbed his brow from temple to temple. “They were fucking about. I got caught up in their latest project. You’d have to be an Italian to understand the rules.”

A pause.

“Why drag it all up again?” Her eyes were guarded, screening off some pressing anxiety. GIC had sacked Webster three months before he and Elsa had been due to marry, and that unforeseen reverse, he knew, had played on her mind ever since as something that might one day be repeated; but despite this he felt a flash of resentment that his problems couldn’t simply be his own.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Really. Because they can, I suppose.”

Elsa turned away and checked a pan on the stove, stirring its contents before replacing the lid.

“Can I do anything?” he said, watching her turn down the heat. She shook her head. “I might look in on the children.”

“Don’t, Ben.” She turned to look at him. “They’re asleep.”

“I’m just going to look around the door.”

“You’ll wake them.”

“I won’t.” He put down his drink and walked toward the kitchen door.

“Ben. Leave them. Please. It took an age to settle them. I know you’ve had a bad day but so have I. They’re not a comfort blanket. They need their sleep.”

He stopped short of the door, closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

“They’ll be there in the morning,” she said softly. “In the meantime you can tell me how worried I should be by all this. Because I just don’t know.”

He turned, relenting. He knew that she was right, and scared, but he couldn’t answer her question. Perhaps it had all ended when he left the police station; perhaps it hadn’t even begun. If it hadn’t been for Senechal’s parting threat—because that was surely what it was—he would have expected nothing more than to keep quiet for a few months and avoid traveling to Italy, but now? Now he simply couldn’t say. He hadn’t had time to think it through.

“As far as I know, it’s fine. Really. Stupid charges, no evidence. They don’t have anything.”

“How good is your lawyer?”

“Good, apparently.” The first real lie.

“And he thinks you’ll be all right?”

“He thinks it’ll just go away. If it doesn’t, the Italians will have to extradite me, and their case is feeble. It won’t happen.” He paused, waiting for her to respond, then tried a smile. “We may have to holiday somewhere else for a while.”

But Elsa wasn’t ready for the mood to lighten. She continued to frown, her eyes lit with that light he knew so well.

“What did you do out there?” she said at last.

“I went to see Qazai.”

She shook her head. “No. Back then. What did you do?”

“Are you asking me if I’m guilty?”

She didn’t reply.

“Jesus. This isn’t about what I did.” He had a sudden, childish urge to smoke. And to get out.

Elsa watched him for a moment, unmoved. “That’s good. That’s all I wanted to know.”

He shook his head. “Do you know what? Forget it. I’ve been interrogated enough for one day.”

“Where are you going?” she said after him, as he left the kitchen and started wheeling his bicycle toward the door.

“Just out.” But he knew. He was going to see Ike. “Why you can’t just trust me I don’t know.” He looked over his shoulder at her, a righteous, fraudulent challenge.

“I want to. But if you were telling me everything you wouldn’t be running away.” Elsa’s arms were crossed and her eyes steadily on his. When he couldn’t look at them anymore, he left.

•   •   •

A
BOUT HALF A MILE
from his house Webster stopped pedaling, pulled over and reached down awkwardly to tuck the flapping trouser leg of his suit into his sock. The rain, which had been light, was now full and steady and as he bent over he could feel his thighs and shoulders cold with wet.

He should turn around, of course, apologize to Elsa, tell her everything—or more, at least. But he knew what her advice would be, saw its sense and had no intention of taking it, because it clashed with the plan lurking in his thoughts. So he cycled on, furious with himself, past Queen’s Park, slowly climbing across the Finchley Road and then the last, sheer push straight up into Hampstead, the houses growing older and richer beside him all the while. It was cooler now. Water dripped from his forehead and his calves burned with the work. Through the clouds and the plane trees overhead the last light barely found its way, and in his dark suit, made darker by the rain, with no lights on his bike, he felt pleasantly invisible after a day of scrutiny. He didn’t like attention, never had. The cold air and the exercise began gradually to sort his thoughts.

Hammer’s house was over by the heath on the prow of Hampstead where it fell away down to Kentish Town and the city beyond. He had lived in it for twenty years and under his ownership it had taken on something of its original eighteenth-century air: he had reinstated its oak paneling throughout, kept his one television out of the way in an upstairs room and favored low light and log fires, so that on a night like this the only way of telling whether he was inside was by looking for a faint glow around the edges of the shutters. But for his housekeeper, who occupied the attic floor, Hammer lived alone.

He was at home tonight and that, Webster had the sense to realize, was a relief. Ike had a way of making the complicated and unpleasant seem manageable, and there was no one better to see when you were feeling disordered. I’ve fled from one therapist into the arms of another, Webster thought as he chained his bike to the railings, because I didn’t like what the first was going to say.

He knocked briskly with the brass knocker. The door, when it opened, was on a chain; it jarred, somehow, that someone so pugnacious should consider such things as home security. Hammer pushed the door to, unhooked it and looked down on Webster with mild surprise in his eyes.

“My God. They waterboarded you. Come in, come in.”

It was warm in the hall and Webster could see orange light flickering on the gray-green walls of the study on the left. Hammer was wearing his reading glasses, more delicate than the thick-framed tortoiseshell he wore in the office, and in the near-dark looked more delicate himself, and older.

“Did you walk?”

“I rode.”

“Elsa has the car?”

Webster only smiled.

“You look like shit. Take that jacket off. I have no trousers that will fit but a sweater I can manage. Luckily we have a fire. Go on.”

He started up the stairs. Webster took off his jacket, which was wet through, hung it on a coatrack in the corner and went into the study. On a table by Ike’s chair, a high-backed affair with wings, stood a spotlight, an empty glass and a copy of Livy’s
History of Rome
, open, pages downward, its spine cracked about halfway through. Webster stood over the fire for a moment, looking at the books on the shelves either side of the mantel.

“You caught me lighting fires in June. I’m ashamed. The truth is I wasn’t feeling too good but the sight of you is enough to make anyone feel better. Here, try this.” Hammer passed Webster a thick brown cardigan with a shawl collar, not unlike the one he was wearing himself. “No one’ll see you. There. Now, do you want a drink?”

Webster shook his head. “I shouldn’t, thanks.”

“You should. I’m having beer.”

Webster asked for whisky, put on the cardigan, which was tight and heavy, and sat down on the far side of the fire. He should have phoned Elsa before coming in. He looked at his watch and realized with a lingering sting of regret that by the time he got home she would be in bed, either asleep or pretending to be.

“Here. There’s a drop of water in it.”

“Thank you.”

He watched Hammer pour his beer from a bottle into the long glass, failing to tilt it so that it ended up with a thick head of froth. They drank.

“So,” said Hammer, licking foam off his top lip. “You owe your freedom to Mr. Senechal.”

“I owe everything to him.”

“What happened? I was expecting another call.”

“I wanted to leave it to tomorrow. Let it settle. Which wasn’t a great idea, as it happens.” He took another drink; it was good whisky and he relished the burn in his throat. “They set me up. Or they took advantage of a gift-wrapped opportunity. I think they set me up.”

“They had you arrested?”

“Why not? It’s Italy. He’s had that house for twenty years. Enough time to put down roots.”

Hammer frowned. “They did a nice job. If it was them.”

“They’ve been checking me out. I’m sure of it. The other morning all our rubbish had gone by six. Our recycling’s gone missing. And I had a call last week from Lester at GIC after he had a call from a headhunter wanting to know why I’d left.” He paused. “It’s them.”

Hammer took a deep breath in through his nose. “You think Darius Qazai is going through your bins?”

“Wouldn’t you in his position?”

Hammer raised his eyebrows and nodded. His fingers thrummed on the arm of his chair as he continued to nod, a slow, gentle bobbing that meant he was really thinking.

“So,” he said. “Their plan is to make you beholden to them. The carrot is they stop beating you with the stick.”

“That’s the second carrot.”

Hammer looked quizzical.

“Senechal tried to offer me a bribe. He told me good work would not go unappreciated.”

“You’re sure?”

“If I’d looked greedy they’d have told the Italians to stand down. No question. It was a test. The whole Como trip.”

Hammer sat thinking a little longer. “It seems a lot of effort. I had no idea he cared so much.”

“Quite. His daughter thinks that we’re more important to him than we might imagine.”

“She was there?”

“Oh, they were all there. I suspect so that it wouldn’t look like the visit was all about me.”

Another deep breath. “If you’re right, we stop the case.”

Webster put his glass down and shook his head. “We can’t stop until we know what he’s scared of. What it is he thinks we’ll find. Otherwise he’ll carry on, and so will the Italians.”

Hammer paused to take a long sip of beer. “What have they got on you?”

Webster blinked and tried to hold Hammer’s look, but it was no use. “This and that.”

“What, precisely?”

“The PIs I used were . . .” He sighed. “They were thorough.”

“How thorough?”

Webster hesitated. “Some hacking.”

“In 2004? Pioneering work. Is that it?”

Webster looked up at him and after a pause gave his answer. “All the usual stuff. Banks. Phone records. I think they paid someone in the Polizia for his file. And they broke into his office.”

“Whose office?”

“Ruffino’s. Photographed everything they could get their hands on. You could say they exceeded their brief.”

Hammer’s fingers thrummed and his head bobbed. “The police know about that?”

“From something they said yesterday, it could come out, yes.”

“And you didn’t know what these idiots were doing?”