“I’m sorry. I was miles away.” He stood and shook her hand, and she smiled at him with her black eyes. The truth was that he was more startled by her appearance than by her arrivaclass="underline" she wore a plain, short black dress, black high heels and a wrap of some silvery-gray fabric that managed to be shiny and discreet at once. Her hair was up, but artfully loose, and a single diamond hung around her neck on a white gold chain. She might have been going to meet a president or accept an award, and Webster’s first thought was that next to her he was a crumpled mess.
On his own, sitting at the bar, he had been an outsider, a wary observer of a different world; now, ordering a vodka martini for this beautiful woman, he was a part of it—incongruous, perhaps, but complicit.
“Are you going out?” he said.
Ava, straight-backed, sitting with a poise that seemed in an old-fashioned way to have been taught, swiveled toward him a few degrees and crossed her legs.
“I am out,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “What do you mean?”
“You look…” He hesitated, not knowing what to say that wouldn’t sound like a compliment. “I rarely have meetings with anyone so well dressed.”
She laughed. “You’re worried that I’ve dressed up for you? Mr. Webster, I just like to dress up. It’s not personal.”
The barman finished shaking her drink, strained it into a frosted glass and carefully squeezed a spray of oil from a strip of lemon rind onto its surface. Webster smiled, feeling foolish, and raised his glass to her.
“To dressing up.”
“To meetings,” she said, took a sip, put the glass back on the counter and ran her finger back and forth across the base of its stem. “You left very abruptly last week.”
That word again. “After what you told me I thought I should make myself scarce.” She frowned, not knowing what he meant. “About the likes of me never normally staying there.”
“You don’t seem the sensitive type.”
He returned her smile. “I’m not. I had to get back. In the event I could have taken my time.”
She looked faintly puzzled by the remark but let it go. Either she didn’t know what had happened to him in Milan or she had chosen not to refer to it, and by the look of her, making no effort to appear nonchalant, he’d have been prepared to swear that she had no idea. He didn’t think it wise to explain.
For a while they talked about Qazai, about Timur and Parviz, about Dubai, which she believed was no place to raise children. About Iran, which was quiet after months of unrest. He asked her about her childhood, and she sidestepped his questions with deft jokes and subtle shifts of subject that seemed to mask a mild prickliness. Webster wondered where she’d got her sense of humor from, and for that matter her real charm. If he was solving the mystery of the Qazai family—and thank heaven he was not—he would have looked forward to the interview with her mother.
He was enjoying himself, he realized, warily and not a little guiltily. For the last six months he had rarely felt lighthearted, and feeling it now was unexpected, and the more refreshing for it. This, of course, was not why he was here. He had now finished his second drink, Ava’s martini would soon be done, and after one more he would forget to ask half the questions that needed to be asked.
“That lunch in Como,” he said, turning toward her a little. “What was all that about? With your father.”
A lock of hair had fallen in front of her eye and she moved it out of the way, not smiling now. “Is this the part where you grill me?”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
She looked at him for a moment, then took her glass and emptied the last half-inch. “Are you going to get me another?”
Webster nodded and turning to get the barman’s attention signaled that he wanted the same again. When he looked back she was watching him with her head slightly tilted to one side, not for the first time weighing him up.
“I think,” she said at last, looking away, “that when your grandson has just been kidnapped it would be good not to pretend that everything is normal.”
Webster didn’t say anything.
Ava shook her head and flicked the lock of hair aside again. “Sometimes I wonder what goes on in his head.” She took an olive. “Tell me something. What do you think of him? You must have a sense of him by now. Who do you think he is?”
That was an excellent question, and it took Webster a moment’s thought to find something meaningful that was less than completely frank. “He strikes me as the sort of man who’s built his own world so carefully that other people are an inconvenience. He expects them to come into line.”
“That’s it,” she said, animated now, apparently surprised by Webster’s acuity. “That’s it. And what happens when your world starts to collapse? You prop it up. You can’t change it, because you can’t imagine another.”
Their drinks arrived. Webster took a sip of his, waiting for her to continue, wondering what she meant by “collapse.”
“Come on,” she said, getting down from her stool. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Somewhere no one can hear us.” And before he could object she was walking out of the bar, throwing the end of her wrap over her shoulder as she went. Webster fished his wallet out of his back pocket, put down some notes on the counter and left at a brisk walk. Out of the bar he turned right, expecting her to be heading for the hotel’s main entrance, but there was no sign of her in the lobby or on the stairs that ran down to Knightsbridge. To his left was the restaurant and a private room with grand, tall French doors, one of which was open. He looked inside. The room was laid for a dinner, and beyond the long table running down its center more French doors gave out onto a wide terrace above the park. Ava was there, leaning against the balustrade, struggling to get a cigarette lit, her back hunched against the wind.
“Can I help?” Webster said as he approached.
“This fucking lighter is useless,” she said without looking up. He moved around in front of her, took the lighter and cupping it closely in his spare hand struck the flint wheel as she leaned in. It was a cheap, plastic lighter, he noted with mild surprise. “Thank you,” she said. “Do you want one?”
“No, thank you. I only smoke abroad.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
She inhaled deeply and smiled as she blew out the smoke, her poise restored.
He waited for her to speak again but for half a minute she simply smoked, looking out at the park and the runners and cyclists coursing around the sand track.
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” she said at last, dropping her cigarette to the ground and twisting it out with her shoe. “When I saw you in Como… when we had that lunch, I felt sure that something would change, but it hasn’t. I think he’s made his choice.”
Webster did his best to look understanding, but what she said made little sense. After a pause she went on.
“You love your family, don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“How would you expect to be dealt with if you put them in danger?”
The words caused a brief flush in Webster’s chest. “Harshly.”
Ava said nothing but nodded twice, finally settling something.
“I don’t know where to start.” She paused, searching for the beginning. “OK. OK. I went to Paris, what, two months ago? To see a friend. I can’t give you his name. Since I haven’t been able to go to Iran he’s become important to me. He’s an exile, a politician.” She felt in her handbag for her cigarettes, took one from the pack and passed the lighter to Webster, who lit it as before. “Thank you.” She took a deep draw. “So I see this man every so often and ask him about what’s going on in Iran. He has excellent sources. God, it’s not warm, is it?” She shivered, drawing the shawl more closely around her. “This last time he called the meeting, which he’s never done before, and when I got there he was odd. Cagey. He had something to say but it took him a long time to get there.”