“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.”
PART TWO
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.