“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?”