“That you did not pass the test.” Senechal let the words slip from his mouth with distaste.
“Ridiculous. That I didn’t pass the test, and that they were sorry. He wouldn’t elaborate. When I asked him was this final, could I do anything, all he said was that I might talk to you.”
“Who was he?” said Hammer.
“Can we come to that in a moment?” Qazai took another radish and dredged it in salt. “Now, what does this suggest to you, Mr. Hammer?”
“That you failed the due diligence.”
“Exactly. I failed the due diligence. They ran the rule over me, and they think they have found something.” Arms wide he appealed to Hammer and Webster in turn. “Preposterous.”
“Have you any idea what that might be?” Webster asked.
“None at all, gentlemen. That’s what I want you to find out.”
“What they think they know?” asked Hammer.
“Whatever nonsense they think they know. Then I want you to tell everybody that it is nonsense.”
Webster asked the next question. “Is this for your pride, or to complete the sale?”
Qazai smiled, a different smile with steel in it, and scratched at the beard along his jawbone. “For my honor, Mr. Webster.” Webster held his eye, something stern in it now, and gave the merest nod.
“Why don’t you just sell to someone else?”
“Because they may find the same thing.”
Hammer interposed. “You know we only do this when we’re fairly sure we won’t find anything?”
As he turned to Hammer Qazai’s brow relaxed. “I am confident you will find nothing to trouble you.”
Hammer sat back in his chair. “We need their report,” he said finally. “Have you asked for it?”
“I have not seen it.” Qazai looked to Senechal.
“We asked for any documents that might help. They gave us nothing.”
“We’ll get a copy,” said Hammer. “If we decide to take you on we’ll need to investigate that problem, whatever it is, and we’ll need to investigate you. I can’t say that this little piece of you is OK until I know that the rest of you is OK.” He stopped to check that Qazai had understood.
“OK.” He went on. “You’ll give us full access—to files, colleagues, yourself. Perhaps even your family. We’ll ask a lot of questions, and we’ll poke around. Then we’ll write a report. What’s in the report is entirely up to us; where it goes is up to you. Tell us to destroy it and we’ll destroy it. The whole thing will cost a lot of money and you’ll have to pay us up front because otherwise no one will believe that we’re telling the truth.”
Qazai laughed. “You’ve done this before.”
“Not often. We turn most people down.”
“Excellent. I do not like ambiguity.”
“Neither do I. Questions?”
“No. I don’t think so.” He looked down the table at Senechal. “Yves?”
Senechal, Webster realized, hadn’t yet eaten anything. Throughout the conversation he had been sitting perfectly still at the end of the table, his hands in his lap, moving only to take the occasional sip of his wine. “Who will do the work?”
“If we take it on, Ben.”
“This is not a Russian matter.”
Hammer smiled. “It might be. You never know.” He turned to Qazai. “He’s the best I have. Whatever’s ailing you, he’ll figure it out.”
Qazai gave a single deep nod and looked at Senechal. “Are you happy?”
“I think so.”
“Yves is never sure if he is happy.” Another smile, bold and reassuring, to contrast with his lawyer’s empty expression. “When will you decide?”
“Give us a week.”
“A week it is. And if you say no, who else might we consider?”
Hammer smiled. “Mr. Qazai, I can with a clear conscience tell you that no one else could do this work. Everyone else is too small to take it on or too big and ugly to be believed.”
“And people believe you?”
“They appear to.”
Qazai nodded slowly, looking down at the table, considering something new. “So you and Mr. Webster, you are whiter than white? For you to judge my reputation yours must be spotless, no?” He turned to Webster; though smiling, he had a certain challenge in his eyes.
“We don’t judge it,” said Webster. “We report it.”
Qazai thought for a moment. “But to be good at your job you must lie from time to time?”
Hammer answered for him. “You’re confusing two things. We don’t lie about what we find.”
“But you might lie to find it?”
Hammer’s smile became a little fixed. “We will be very happy to lie on your behalf. With your permission.”
Qazai laughed, beamed at Hammer and raised his glass.
THE NEXT MORNING, in the hope that air and water might bring some order to them, Webster woke early and took his thoughts to the bathing pond on Hampstead Heath. Long before six the sun was already full over the city but a northerly wind blew, and as he cycled uphill along the quiet streets it froze his hands until they were raw and locked on the handlebars. He passed milkmen crawling from house to house, dogs being walked, minicabs waiting for their passengers, until abruptly the houses ran out, the roads turned into tracks and he was on the heath, nature’s stronghold in the north, extravagantly free and green this morning, the freshly opened leaves of the oaks and beeches calming the gusting wind and dulling the noise of London below.
To swim here through the winter you had to start in late summer and allow your body to adapt as the water gradually chilled, fooling it into accepting the unnatural cold. Webster had been coming here for years and knew its reserved rhythms. Even in May it was truly icy; by August, perhaps July, it would warm a little, and the summer swimmers would come—until October, when the temperature would drop and the pool would empty once again. There were no casual cold swimmers. Today there were a half-dozen people at most, and no one paid any attention to anyone else.
The water, as it always did, seemed to strip him of himself. In the changing room he shed his clothes, and as he dived into the still green-black the rest of him was sheared away. The cold left no space for thought. He swam lengths, dutifully, taking oxygen deep into his lungs, refreshing his blood, but the swimming was not why he came here: the water alone, that first dive, took all his clashing thoughts from him, and when they came back they were different. They had shape; they had order. They fit together.
He swam briskly from end to end, a mechanical crawl, his mind empty of everything except strains of organ music and images of the day before. Qazai in the pulpit; Senechal sitting rigid, not touching his food; Qazai’s set smile, with its hint of what, exactly? Superiority. Or menace.
Hammer had liked Qazai, that was clear. When Webster had first met Ike Hammer, he had thought that two things governed him: logic, and a love of games. Games and battles. He lived on his own, and when he wasn’t working or running over the heath he was reading—countless books of military history and game theory, accounts of political contests and corporate disputes, biographies of generals, statesmen and revolutionaries. The book he made reference to most often was Napoleon’s Military Campaigns, a volume eight inches thick that he loved so much he kept two copies, one in his office, one in his study at home. But if he had a favorite subject it was boxing, the purest contest of all. He had no television in his house, but would watch film of old fights on his computer, and if you drew him out could talk entertainingly for hours about the relative merits of his four favorites: Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis. Robinson always came out on top: “Brains will outfox power every time,” he would say, in what might have been a summary of his personal creed. One of the few times Webster had seen him lose his temper was when a colleague had suggested that to fight for the pleasure of others was barbaric.