“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 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.