“Benedict!” Onder said, with almost actorly diction, smiling broadly. “How nice to see you. Please, please. Come in.” One of the stranger facts about this unusual man was that at sixteen he had moved to England with his family and had spent the last two years of school at Eton. This had given him a certain stateliness that forty years later seemed old-fashioned, even imperial.
He ushered Webster through a faded reception area to his office at the back of the building. They saw no one else on the way. Onder’s office was large, and light enough, but drab. It had too much furniture in it: three wooden-topped desks, their varnish dry and worn; four dull gray filing cabinets; chairs everywhere, some stacked against the wall. Only the phones and the computers suggested that any time had passed since 1970. A bay window, its lower panes frosted, gave out onto a channel of gray house backs.
“I apologize for our surroundings, Benedict. Please, sit down. As you know I don’t go in for fancy offices.”
Webster sat on one of the chairs lined up in front of Onder’s desk, the biggest of the three. “Istanbul is a little smarter than this.”
“True. More by accident than by design.” Onder smiled. “I would offer you coffee but I would have to make it myself and it would be awful. There’s never anyone else here.”
“That’s fine. I’m trying to stop drinking it.”
They sat for a moment looking at each other. Onder’s eyes were a dark, almost Prussian blue. He had a friendly but distinctly firm gaze. Webster wasn’t sure how long he should hold it—was never sure, in fact, what these little sizing-up exercises, so favored by certain clients, really meant. He decided to start.
“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”
“Not at all, not at all. I’m always happy to help.” Onder didn’t only trade oil: among other things he also traded cartridges of printer ink, and three years earlier Webster had retrieved a large consignment from a Russian distributor who had forgotten to pay. Onder had liked Ikertu ever since.
“I didn’t want to talk about this on the phone, for reasons you’ll understand, I hope. It’s about Konstantin Malin.”
Onder looked closely at him again, a slight frown in his eyes.
“Malin.” He raised his eyebrows a quarter of an inch. “You deal with some charming people.”
“I know. He’s universally liked. I was hoping you could tell me something about him. Of course, if he’s a partner and you’d rather not we can end it here.”
Onder continued to look at him. Then he laughed and broke the gaze.
“No, Konstantin and I will not be doing business again. There is a kind of Russian who thinks it all right—no, clever—to cheat whenever there is an opportunity. Whenever they can make money. They calculate that there will be another fool along in a minute, and that the world is full of fools. One day they will find out they are wrong.”
“I hope so,” said Webster. “How much does he owe you?”
“Actually, he did not take money from me. He just reneged on an agreement. I have to go elsewhere for oil from Russia now. That is all. It has cost me a lot of money but I cannot say that he stole from me.”
“Is there oil elsewhere?”
“Yes, there is. He doesn’t control everything. Not yet.”
“Did you meet him?”
“Oh yes. Once or twice.” He smiled at Webster. “Perhaps you should tell me why you are interested?”
Webster told Onder the story. When he mentioned Tourna, Onder let out a snort. “That crook! My God, this is fighting among thieves. I thought you would be more choosy about your clients.” He smiled at Webster, who smiled back and carried on. He explained what Tourna wanted, and what his own priority was now: Lock.
“You want to bring down Malin? Good luck. A noble undertaking.”
“I know. We don’t get many shots at nobility.”
Onder smiled. “I know Richard,” he said. “Quite well. I used to deal with Dmitry Gerstman but when he left I refused to have anything to do with the thug they put in his place. I didn’t trust him—one of the new breed, who look a lot like the old, old breed. It was easy to imagine him arresting people at five in the morning. So they sent Lock. I liked him. Not an oil man but useful enough. Quite a simple character. I do not think he really belonged there.”
They talked for a while about Lock and Malin, Malin and Lock, and Webster felt that he was coming to understand them. The moment you met Malin, Onder told him, it was clear that he was “a creature of the Soviet.” He had been born when Stalin was in power, became an adult under Brezhnev, and worked for twenty-five years before Gorbachev departed, his job too well done, and Yeltsin finally appeared. If you were to give him the choice, he would reinstate Communist rule tomorrow, not because he despised capitalism, not because he didn’t enjoy its spoils, but because Communism had made Russia strong and, more important, feared. To sit opposite Malin and negotiate with him was to understand something about a totalitarian state: they shared the same refusal to communicate, and both equated that refusal with strength.
Onder had met Malin three times, it turned out, once socially, and on each occasion had been impressed by his reluctance to engage with the world; the world, it seemed, was obliged to engage with him. He was therefore a difficult man to read—Onder had seldom met anyone so difficult. But from his behavior he had eventually deduced certain things. He was obstinate; he cared little for his reputation in the West, whose opinion was nothing to him; but for all his apparent immobility he made decisions quickly and shrewdly, and was probably a more subtle and delicate thinker than his rather brutish persona would suggest. What drove him, though, was unknowable. “My guess,” said Onder, “is that he does everything for Russia, and for himself. Which is more dear to him I cannot say.”
Lock, meanwhile, was an unlikely associate. Onder thought him competent, but not talented; vain; both flattered and cowed by the company he kept.
“What you must understand,” said Onder, leaning forward and tapping out the important words with a finger on his desk, “is that Malin never expected to be so big. Every Russian is corrupt according to his station in life. If you are a schoolteacher, you sell grades. If you are a fishmonger, you give the best fish to those who can do something for you in return. Malin expected to be a mid-level technocrat taking a few million a year from the odd opportunity here and there. But he has managed to make himself a player and now it’s hundreds of millions, maybe billions. And for this he has Lock.” He gave a short laugh. “Lock is a great man for millions, but for billions he’s out of his depth. But he’s convinced himself somehow he belongs. It’s almost funny. And Malin’s not stupid, not at all—but he can’t change Lock. They cannot rewrite that story. They cannot divorce. It’s worse than a bad marriage.” Onder laughed at his own joke.
“So what’s wrong with Lock? Why can’t he cut it?”
“Listen, I may be wrong about him. He is smart enough, a decent lawyer, but he just doesn’t look the part.” Onder thought for a moment, all the while looking hard at Webster. “Do you know what it is? He’s not a shit. He’s too nice. He is deluded, yes, petty probably, limited, but not a shit. To survive in that world you have to be really hard or really stupid. Lock is pretty clever and soft. Much too soft. He would like to be a part of that world but deep down he doesn’t believe it. Maybe not even that deep.”
Webster nodded; this rang true. Experience told him that few of the Locks of this world had complete faith in their own myth. Another question sat waiting to be aired, and for a moment he considered whether he should ask it. Perhaps it simply wasn’t relevant.
“How nasty is Malin?”
“What do you mean?”
“How ruthless?”
“You mean, does he hurt people?”
“Yes.”
Onder smiled and thought. “To protect himself, maybe. To ge
t ahead, I doubt he has needed to. He’s of the old school. I shouldn’t think he fears justice.”
A sensible, balanced answer. In truth it was no more than Webster knew already.
They talked a little more, but he had enough. He knew now that this case would come down not to a story, a lead, a document, but to a man. It all came down to Lock. He was Malin’s great weakness. Turn him, and you would not only have the perfect witness but leave Malin unmanned and exposed.
“Would you be prepared to be a witness?” Webster asked Onder when they were done.
Onder looked at him and thought for a moment. “Against Malin, yes. For Tourna, I am not sure. Maybe. Let me think.”
“And how about doing a little work for me?”
Onder gave another smile, and held it for a moment. “Have you ever investigated me?”
“Remarkably, no. Why?”
“I was thinking that then I could be subject, client and source. A true honor that would be. What did you have in mind?”
“I might like you to have a word with Richard Lock.”
ONE OF THE THINGS THAT Webster enjoyed about no longer being a journalist, and not being a proper spy, was that he spent time with his family. He guarded that time diligently. Hammer was always on call; his phone was never switched off. He liked nothing better than to be called in the middle of the night because that meant something interesting was happening. But Webster would happily turn his phone off at six o’clock every evening and leave it in some dark drawer all weekend. Eventually Hammer had forced him to have it switched on every day until nine, Webster reluctantly conceding that if a client was good enough to give you money he had a right to talk to you when he wanted. But he still resented having to answer the thing, as he resented client dinners or breakfast meetings or trips that ate into weekends. He had an old-fashioned, sometimes indignant sense of the distinction between work and rest.
When his phone rang that Sunday, then, he was inclined not to answer it. The clear, cold weather of the previous two days had given way to low, dark cloud and a closeness that Webster found enervating. He, Elsa and the children were in the playground. Daniel was taking handfuls of wood-chippings from under the climbing frame and putting them in three neat piles by a bench. He had shed his coat and was going about his work with concentration, squatting on his thick toddler’s legs, standing, walking, squatting again. Webster watched him, fascinated by his determination. That was proper work. Elsa was on the seesaw, forcing her seat abruptly into the ground so that Nancy lifted clear off hers into the air. Nancy laughed each time, a conspiratorial chuckle.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. The caller came up as unknown and in that moment he imagined half a dozen conversations he didn’t want to have. Apologizing to Elsa he walked a few feet away and answered.
“Ben Webster.”
“Mr. Webster, hello, this is Philip on security. We’ve had a call to the main Ikertu number asking for you. We didn’t give your number out, sir, obviously, but perhaps you’d like to return it.”
“Thank you, Philip. What was the name?”
“A Mr. Prock, sir. P-R-O-C-K. He left a number. German, I think.”
“Thanks. I’ll take it.” Philip gave him the number, twice, slowly. Webster keyed it into his phone.
Prock. Why would Prock call? If he had Webster’s name then Gerstman must have given it to him: if he was calling Ikertu about anything else he wouldn’t have known to ask for him by name. Perhaps he knew something that Gerstman wasn’t prepared to disclose; perhaps he was going to warn him off. Perhaps he had a job for him. That wouldn’t have been unusual.
Webster gestured to Elsa that he had to make a call and left the playground. The line rang several times before Prock picked up.
“Grüss Gott. Prock.”
“Mr. Prock this is Ben Webster. You’ve been trying to reach me.”
“Wait a moment.”
Webster could hear Prock’s hand over the receiver and the muffled noise of a door closing.
“Mr. Webster.” Prock had a tenor voice with a thin, constricted tone, as if he was forcing out the words. His accent was demonstrative, even a little theatrical: Austrian, Webster thought. “I am with Nina Gerstman at the moment, Mr. Webster. Does that suggest anything to you?”
Webster answered honestly that it did not.
“I have been with Nina Gerstman from this morning, Mr. Webster. She is trying to understand who is responsible for the death of her husband.” Prock paused. Webster, off balance, said nothing, his mind empty of everything but a distant, closing fear. “Because somebody is, and I think it is you. I think it is you, Mr. Webster. I have not told her, because I do not want her to know that something so trivial,” Prock, quiet before, almost shouted the word, “so pointless, could have made her husband to die. What do you think, Mr. Webster?” Quietly again now. “What do you think?”
Webster felt a sharp pain in his right temple. He had been pacing but now he stopped and looked down at the ground. Pinching his eyes closed with his hand he saw Gerstman on his back, immaculate in a suit, his white shirt collar red with blood.
“I don’t understand you. What happened?”
“You don’t know what happened? I thought you knew everything that happened. I thought that was your job.” The line was quiet for a moment. “You don’t know? Let me tell you then. Two weeks ago, you threatened Dmitry Gerstman to meet with you. This morning, in Budapest, he was killed. The rest you will run off and discover, no doubt. You see, Mr. Webster? You don’t know everything. Not at all. You know nothing. And what you didn’t know about Dmitry Gerstman has killed him. It was you who did this. It was you who pushed him. I wanted you to know.”
Webster opened his eyes. A group of runners in training, each with a laden backpack, sprinted up the steepest part of Primrose Hill, their feet slipping in the mud. Tarmac paths divided the grass, and where they crossed wrought-iron lampposts stood, black and upright. His thoughts were thick but the world around unnervingly crisp. He could feel dread and guilt in his throat. But even as he feared, somehow, that Prock was right, he could feel a fragile sense of injustice asserting itself.
“I’m sorry. We barely spoke.”
“That was all it took.”
There was silence between them.
“Now,” said Prock. “I cannot prosecute you. I cannot sue you. But I can make sure you understand. I will let your conscience do the work. Good-bye.” The line went dead.
Webster felt hollow. He looked back at the playground, now a few hundred yards away, and began to walk toward it, unsurely, like a man who has just been knocked down.
As he walked through the gate he saw Elsa crouching down by Daniel, who was in tears, Elsa holding a handkerchief to his nose.
“There you are,” said Elsa. “Can you take over? Nancy wants me to push her.” She stood up with Daniel’s hand in hers. “What’s wrong? You look white.”
“I’m sorry, I . . . Christ, I . . .”
“What is it?” She looked at him, worried.
“The man I went to Berlin to see . . .” He hesitated, not knowing how to say it.
“The one who wouldn’t talk?”
Webster nodded. “He’s dead. That was his partner. He wanted to tell me.”
“Jesus. How?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Come here.” She took his hand and pulled him to her; he rested his head against hers for a moment. Daniel gave a little whimpering noise. “That’s quite a shock. Look, let’s go home. You need a cup of tea.”
He pulled back a little and looked at her. “Thanks, baby, but . . . I should see Ike. He was saying that it’s my fault.”
“Ike?”
“No, Christ no. The call. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . He seemed to think that if I hadn’t been to see him he’d still be alive.”<
br />
“Daniel, shush—just a minute. But that’s nonsense. You don’t even know how he died.”
“I don’t. I don’t know. I need to see Ike. I’m sorry. I . . . Can you manage here?”
“Of course. Why don’t we drive?”
“It’s OK. I think I’ll walk. Will you be OK?”
She took his hand again. “What if he’s not there?”
“He’ll be there.”
“All right. Be careful. And don’t walk under a truck, for God’s sake.” She looked at him, gripped his hand and then let go.
IT TAKES HALF AN HOUR, more or less, to walk from Primrose Hill to Well Walk in Hampstead. For all his urgent need to understand what had happened, Webster walked slowly, and it took him forty minutes. He wanted to recover himself before he got to Hammer’s house, and to make some calls. First, as he walked along, he used his phone to search the Internet for any reporting of Gerstman’s death. Nothing. He thought the newswires might have had it by now. Then he called Istvan in Budapest, and asked him to find out what he could from his former colleagues in the police. He called people in Germany to see whether news had reached there. Then he searched his mind for others to phone, as if by casting as many lines as possible he could improve the chances of discovering that he wasn’t to blame. But there was no one else. He would simply have to wait.
Prock’s theory wasn’t logical, of course. If Gerstman had actually revealed something, if their meeting had been clandestine, if it had been significant in any way, then perhaps it would have made sense. Gerstman must have known things—after all, that was why Webster had wanted to talk to him—but enough to make him dangerous? It seemed so unlikely. This rising anxiety wasn’t logical either, but rise it did. He imagined Gerstman being tailed by sinister men in silhouette and then shot, strangled, poisoned, his tanned skin growing pale and rigid. How slow he had been, how stupid not to realize that violence was lurking so close. That, of course, is what Inessa’s article should have told him. It was a sign that he had almost willfully ignored.
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