“It’s an odd business,” he said, turning and sitting by Hammer on one of the low chrome and leather chairs.
“What is?” said Hammer, not looking up.
“This. Making money by making money.”
Hammer raised his eyebrows half an inch. “They make a lot of it. He wasn’t kidding.”
“Not least because it’s so new.”
Hammer, frowning and shaking his head in friendly irritation, closed the report and put it back on the coffee table in front of them. “What’s new?”
“This industry. Investing other people’s money. It’s been around what, a hundred years? If that? There’s a reason no one trusts them.”
Hammer looked at him and smiled. “Why you don’t trust them.”
“I’m not the only one.”
Neither said anything for a moment. Webster reached across Hammer for the Tabriz newsletter and started leafing through it.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?” said Hammer at last.
“What?”
“The reason.”
Webster thought for a moment. “All right. If someone you didn’t know said to you, give me a hundred pounds and in a year’s time I’ll give you back a hundred and ten, you’d tell them to piss off.”
“I might.”
“It’s not a natural relationship.”
Hammer thrummed his fingers on his knee. “If they’d done it a thousand times for other people I might be tempted.”
“But you still wouldn’t have earned it. That’s the other problem.”
“You want to opt out of the pension scheme?”
Webster smiled. “Not just yet.”
For a minute he skimmed the pages in his hands, failing to concentrate. It was full of unfamiliar words and phrases that might have meant something in another context: asset classes, alpha, multiples, net asset value, uncorrelated returns. He pinched his eyes closed and gave his head a small shake.
“Do I take it,” said Hammer, “that you have taken against our client?”
Webster breathed in deeply and rubbed his chin. “I’m just not sure why you don’t give the job to someone else. Julia could do it.”
“Yes she could. Perfectly well. But she’d treat him like a client, and you won’t.”
Webster waited for him to explain.
“He’s buying a little chunk of the brand,” said Hammer. “A piece of my name. I want to make sure he deserves it. You were made to persecute your clients. Now’s your chance.”
Webster nodded, and thought for a moment. He was still suspicious of Ike’s logic. Like many of his ideas it had a neatness and a symmetry that he admired but didn’t wholly trust. One’s client should not be one’s subject. It was too circular. Clients paid money and expected a result, and without doubt Qazai thought he was buying a crisp, neatly bound report that would somehow perfume the air before him. He might smile and agree now, but in time he would no more expect Ikertu to contradict his version than he would his chef refuse to cook. A deal had been done, funds transferred, and value was due. Webster knew clients like this, and it was usually a long time since anyone in their pay had dared to cross them.
“Do you really think he hasn’t seen the Americans’ report?”
“That,” said Hammer, sitting forward, his leg jigging, “is an interesting question. Either he has and it’s nonsense or he’s very sure he has no skeletons. What did you make of it?”
“Bland. It looked like the only juicy bit was down to luck. Like they’d stumbled across it.”
“I agree. Who d’you think wrote it?”
Webster shrugged. “It’s American English. I don’t know. Not GIC, unless the house style’s changed a lot since I was there. And the name wouldn’t fit in the blanks. My money’s on Columbus. It’s about their level.”
Hammer grunted in agreement, and was about to say something more when the receptionist approached them to say that Mr. Qazai was ready now, and would they like to come through.
Qazai’s office, one story down, was entirely lined with glass on its two internal walls and gave out onto the trading floor, where perhaps a hundred people sat before pair after pair of computer screens; most were men, their jackets off and their ties loosened, and not one looked up as Hammer and Webster passed. An air of studiousness filled the long, low room.
“Gentlemen,” Qazai said, standing as they were shown through the door. “Thank you, Kirsten. Would you arrange for some tea? Most kind.” As Qazai shook their hands Webster nodded at Senechal, who was sitting with a phone pressed to his ear at a coffee table across from Qazai’s desk, and scanned the room. It was an elegant, functional space. All the furniture was steel and glass and leather; on Qazai’s desk was a svelte laptop, a single pile of papers and a speakerphone; and on the coffee table a fine ceramic bowl, intricately patterned in blue and green and ochre, provided the only color in sight.
That and Qazai, who looked fit and cordial and beaming, and who wore a bright scarlet tie as if to emphasize the point. “So. Please, sit, sit. Yves will not be a moment.”
Hammer sat on the edge of his chair, looking around and nodding slowly. “You like to be close to the action,” he said with approval.
“This is an information business, Mr. Hammer, like yours. I like to know what is going on.”
“Will you miss it? If you step aside.”
Qazai raised his eyebrows and nodded, a rueful acknowledgment. “I surely will. I surely will. There are things I want to do—with my foundation, mainly—but yes, it will be hard to give up the idea that somehow I am at the center of things. That is how I feel here. I should imagine you feel the same.”
“We like to be just off-center,” said Hammer.
Senechal finished his call, apparently without speaking, and by way of greeting exchanged nods with Hammer and Webster. Hammer, an assiduous shaker of hands, made no attempt to go further this time.
“So, gentlemen,” said Qazai. “I understand that you have a contract for me.”
Hammer nodded, and Webster passed him a document. “That’s not all we have.”
He handed both to Qazai, who thumbed through the first three or four pages, and turned to Hammer, his expression surprised and a little puzzled. “How did you get this?”
“I made some calls.”
“I’m impressed.”
In fact, Ike had made one call. He had simply phoned Qazai’s buyers, asked to speak to the chief legal officer, and during the small talk with which he liked to begin every conversation established that they had in common a Stanford education and at least three acquaintances. After that, it had just been a matter of persuasion: he had explained that Ikertu’s work was in the Americans’ interest; that he was happy for the document to be redacted so that its creators, and any sources it might name, were not revealed; that the fact of its existence would of course be kept confidential; and, finally, that this was probably altogether neater and more friendly than the other three or four ways that he could lay his hands on the thing, none of which bound him in a debt of gratitude that they both knew he would respect. The lawyer had thought for a moment and hung up saying that he would see what he could do, and twenty minutes later a fax—a great rarity these days—had arrived in the Ikertu mail room. It appeared to be the whole report, minus the first few pages identifying the client and the reasons for the work, but otherwise complete. The whole operation, if one could call it that, had been typical of Ike: direct, charming, and not without a certain suggestion of threat.