For all this, and it had taken Webster some time to realize it, Hammer was not a cold man. He liked people, and more than anything he liked to talk to them, energetically and at length, so that when he discreetly grilled a client as he had Qazai and Senechal the night before, he wasn’t just mining them for information, he was enjoying himself. Before founding Ikertu he had been a journalist, and a good one. His writing, which Webster had made the effort over the years to track down, had great range, moving from political scandal through corporate corruption to straight war-reporting during a spell in Afghanistan. But it had great compassion too. During his first few months with the company Webster had thought that Ike enjoyed a good fight for fighting’s sake and had found his zeal ghoulish, but he realized now that in conflict he found not just intellectual satisfaction (because conflict was always complex and always changing) but also the opportunity to see human beings at their best and their worst. More than anything he had become used to observing life when it was exaggerated, heightened in some way, and was impatient, as a result, with the mundane. This, Webster had come to believe, was why he lived alone.
Hammer’s enthusiasm for people was catholic, and refused to discriminate between rich and poor, young and old, men and women. It also tended to be instant: he was all curiosity, and for a man who had made his life’s work the discovery and keeping of secrets, strangely open. Webster was wholly different. Ever since his time in Russia he had been wary of the powerful. Unlike Hammer he was no logician, and had never stopped to analyze his condition, but he simply felt that people who sought wealth and influence beyond a decent norm were not to be trusted—that there was no honest motive for being an oligarch or a billionaire. The best were vainglorious, the worst vicious, and all, as far as he could see, in a world where most still had nothing, had much more than they could ever justify.
But Qazai was an interesting case. His fortune was innocuous, his reputation honorable, his politics sound. He gave to charity, helped preserve an ancient, delicate culture, railed publicly against a sinister and repugnant regime; Webster couldn’t hope to emulate the good that he had done, certainly not while he himself continued in this compromised job. He was even courteous—a little fond of himself, perhaps, but on the available evidence, with reason. And yet Webster sensed, with no strong grounds but great conviction, that Qazai was somehow not right.
He struggled as he swam to assemble his case. The uneasy register of Mehr’s memorial; the theatrics of the meeting; Qazai’s quick charm; cold, rigid Senechal, a man for hiding secrets if ever he had seen one, and for resenting them, too, perhaps. And the story—the sale of the company, the affront to the great man’s honor—was it plausible? Perhaps, but he had a feeling that a man like Qazai wouldn’t come to a lowly detective agency to restore his formidable dignity.
On the fortieth length he began to tire and his thoughts defaulted to Richard Lock, as they often did in this place: it was here that he tried to make sense of what had happened in Berlin half a year before. Lock had been a lawyer, paid to hide money and assets, claiming them as his own so that his powerful Russian client could continue to steal unobserved. Webster had been paid to reveal those lies, not by someone who wanted to see them corrected but by someone who wanted the liar exposed, for his own, less than noble ends. He and Lock had both been middlemen. They had both been manipulated. And the deepest source of Webster’s shame was that though he repented Lock’s murder his anger lay in having been made a fool. It would never sit easily with him, and when he looked now at Qazai he saw, behind the charm and the polish, someone bent on deceiving him once more.
THE HOUSE WAS STILL ASLEEP when he returned. He showered, shaved and took Elsa a cup of tea, sliding into bed beside her; barely awake, she worked her back into his embrace. The room was cool and dark, but through an open window the wind, softly flapping a blind, let in an occasional flash of morning light.
“Jesus, your hands are cold.” Her voice was laden with sleep.
“They’re not. You’re just warm.”
They lay there for a minute or two, breathing in time.
“No one up?”
“No. Just us.”
Elsa grunted. “Good swim?”
“All right. Quiet.”
“What time did you get up?”
“About six.”
“It was earlier than that.”
Webster didn’t say anything.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“Ben. Come on.”
“It’s fine.”
She turned onto her other side, facing him, and propped her head on her hand.
“I’m going to tell Ike I won’t do it.”
She didn’t reply.
“He’ll make a better job of it in any case.”
After a minute of silence she said, “I think he’s trying to help you.”
“How would that be?” He regretted the irritation in his voice.
“By getting you out of a rut.”
“I don’t see how this’ll help.”
Elsa was quiet again. She had the psychotherapist’s knack of creating silence for her patient to fill.
“I just don’t trust him,” he said. “Not Ike, although he’s being too clever by half. The client.” He moved onto his back. “He’s not a good man. And he wants us to say he is.”
A pause. “I don’t think that’s it.” He turned his head to look at her, and she went on. “Part of you was impressed by him. And that was confusing. You’ve got used to seeing the rich as the enemy. They’re all corrupt.” He looked away. “That’s dangerous. It lessens you. It’s an irrational fear.”
“It’s not a fear. It’s an observation.”
“All right, what about this one? He’s charming, he gives his money away, he makes a good speech. What if he’s OK? He’s not an oligarch. He didn’t have to steal anything. He just invests money.” She paused. “But that doesn’t fit, does it?”
“He makes a fortune doing nothing useful. I don’t particularly like that. And I don’t like the idea of being paid to give him a new lick of paint. I’m surprised Ike does. It’s not what we do.”
Elsa sat up in bed, reached for her tea and took a sip. She looked down at him but he didn’t meet her eye.
“Poor Ike,” she said. “One day he’s going to lose patience. Do you ever worry about that? I do.” He looked at her. “I don’t know how long it can go on. You resent your clients. It’s a strange form of self-loathing. If you’re not careful it’ll spread so you won’t trust anyone.”
Webster sighed. There were times when he would have preferred to be left alone with his delusions, but she was right. Five minutes into a new day, only half awake, without the benefit of cold and exercise, and she was effortlessly right.
4.
THE OFFICES OF TABRIZ ASSET MANAGEMENT filled four floors at the top of an unexceptional modern tower, clad in pristine white panels and dark glass, that rose high above Liverpool Street Station. Hammer and Webster exchanged their names for plastic passes and took the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor.
The doors opened on a grand lobby of polished wood and gray marble. Vast windows looked west across the city to St. Paul’s on one side, and on the other toward a scrappier, lower London that spread east for miles over the flat plain of the Thames. Ahead, three young women in identical dark suits sat behind a long, gently curved counter, on either end of which lilies and irises in bold displays did little to soften the strict, corporate space. Hammer, genial as always, told the first receptionist that they were a little early for a meeting with Darius Qazai and at her invitation found a seat, reaching for a copy of the company’s latest report to investors as he sat. Webster stood by the glass with his hands in his pockets and let his eyes wander over the view. From this height he could see the ancient plan of the city, though plan was a poor word for it: it was a twisted mess of old streets, high and narrow, set with squat Edwardian boxes and ugly postmodern towers and half-a-dozen piercing little church spires, all brightly lit by the noon sun.