The Silent Oligarch: A Novel

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  There was no one in Lock’s room. Frau Werfel let him in and he made a show of looking in the bathroom for the medication. But the moment the door had opened he had noticed on the desk an envelope he was sure had not been there earlier.

  “He seems to have taken it,” he said, coming out of the bathroom, “which is good. Look, I’d go and try to find him but I have no idea where to look. His phone is turned off. I think I’ll wait here for him. I want to be sure to catch him if he comes back.”

  “I could tell you when he comes back in.”

  “But you’re busy, Frau Werfel. I don’t want to force you to be at your desk all evening.”

  She seemed ready to challenge him. But she merely nodded, wished him a good evening and left, closing the door behind her.

  The envelope was unmarked, off-white, small—the kind used for personal correspondence. It looked identical to the hotel stationery in the rack next to it. Webster took a sheet of paper from the rack and used it to flip the envelope over. It was not stuck down; the flap had been tucked inside. Webster tore the sheet of paper in two and using the two pieces to cover his fingers carefully pulled the flap back and out. There was a single sheet of paper inside, folded once. Still covering his fingers Webster removed it from the envelope and spread it out on the desk. It was a piece of Hotel Daniel writing paper. Its edges were a little bruised, as if it had been in the room a long time before being used.

  The paper was covered with an even longhand in royal-blue ink. The script was regular but showed signs of flamboyance: a flourished tail to the “f,” the “g” looping elegantly up into an “s.” Webster recognized the hand from the signatures on a hundred documents he had recently examined.

  Since my friend Dmitry Gerstman died I have been unhappy. I have lost a good friend. I lost my family long ago. In the courts and the newspapers I have lost my reputation. I have nothing. I do not want to continue.

  Webster read it again, and a third time, his heart beating heavily against his ribs. He read it once more but it yielded nothing new. He looked around the room to see if anything else had changed. Lock’s things were still in place: his old shoes with their water stains by the radiator, yesterday’s shirt hanging off the back of the chair by the desk. The bed had been made, and the bedside table tidied: on one side the two books, neatly against the wall; on the other the two bottles of Scotch and an empty bottle of gin, tightly together. The bottle of gin had not been there before, he was sure. Pulling his hand up inside the sleeve of his coat he picked it up by the cap. There was a trickle left in the bottom.

  Using a pen to dial, he called reception. Frau Werfel answered.

  “Frau Werfel, this is Mr. Webster in Mr. Green’s room. Could I ask when you were not at reception over the last hour? I’m sorry but it might be important.”

  Frau Werfel gave a small harrumph to let Webster know that she had been very helpful but was beginning to tire of all this irregularity. “I can’t say. Before you arrived I had been there for half an hour, I suppose, because some guests arrived at about half past four.”

  “And did anyone else come in in that half hour?”

  “No one, Herr Webster. Is that all?”

  “That’s all. Thank you very much, Frau Werfel.” He longed to be able to do something. He did the one thing that was of any practical use and called Berlin’s central police station. He explained to them that his friend had gone missing and that he had just found what looked like a suicide note in his hotel room. The police asked him whether he had tried to call his friend. Yes, of course. Did he have any idea where his friend might have gone? No, none; he understood that there was little the police could do, but they could find photographs of Richard Lock on the Internet and perhaps circulate them to their patrol cars. The German policeman snorted and said yes, they could do that.

  He hung up and looked out the window. The street below looked the same as before. He could tell from the snow on them that all the cars he could see were cold and hadn’t recently moved. There was no movement; only the snow falling thickly, round flakes dropping like rain, sometimes flurrying in a gust of wind. He drew the curtains and stood for a moment with his hands together, gripping the material, his eyes closed. This cannot be happening again.

  He had to speak to Hammer but didn’t want to leave the room in case by some miracle Lock returned. He took a risk and used the hotel phone on the desk. Even Malin’s people weren’t agile enough to have tapped these lines by now. In any case, it didn’t really matter. Let them hear it.

  “Ike, it’s Ben.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m at the hotel. This isn’t a secure line. There’s a bogus suicide note and an empty bottle of gin that wasn’t here when we left four or five hours ago.”

  “So there’s a pattern.”

  “There’s a pattern.”

  “Do the police know?”

  “They know he’s missing and depressed.”

  “OK. I just left a voice-mail message for our fat Russian friend. Our favorite Etonian had a number for him. I didn’t want to involve the client yet. I don’t know which of his mobiles it is. I could try the client but I figured that he wouldn’t have any number we didn’t already have.”

  Webster grunted in agreement. “What about Lock’s phone?”

  “The signal’s dead.”

  “Christ.” Webster pinched his eyes closed with his free hand. “The files?”

  “They’re next.” Hammer paused. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

  “There’s nothing else.”

  “You OK?”

  “No. I’m tired of making mistakes.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Hammer. “When did Lock call Nina?”

  “Yesterday morning. Marina the night before.”

  “And by the afternoon there’s someone tailing him? That’s quick work.”

  “I think they were PIs. Locals.”

  “Locals don’t fake suicides. Not the ones I know anyway.”

  “The Russians could have gotten here late yesterday.”

  “That’s true.”

  Webster thought for a moment. “Might be worth checking.”

  “That’s not easy.”

  “Have our travel-agent friend check for last-minute bookings.”

  “What about private flights?”

  “Yuri should be able to help.”

  “OK.” Hammer paused. “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m going to stay here and go quietly nuts. He may come back. If you need me call the Hotel Daniel and ask for Mr. Green in room 205.”

  “OK. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “OK.”

  There was nothing else to do.

  He sat on the bed and picked up Lock’s copy of Middlemarch. The spine was broken about a hundred pages in and the book fell open naturally. Six hundred pages left. He wondered whether Lock would have the chance to finish it.

  Where was he now? In a dark basement somewhere; in a van barreling out of Berlin; in the river, deep under the squares of ice that flowed on its surface like cold fat. How would they do it this time? Throw him under a train; off a bridge; from a window? He saw Lock, stupid and terrified, pulled along by two slablike faceless men, his eyes wide and red, knowing and not knowing what was next; Lock in a bright cell, his clothes filthy, a crowd around him, the only color in the scene the red line across his throat.

  And for what? A vain quest for some distant, flickering justice that Webster knew he would never grasp.

  He jerked his head back and beat it against the wall. Fresh pain stabbed at his wound. He did it again, his eyes looking up to the heavens, imploring them, filling with angry tears. And again, harder.

  Fifteen

  EVEN BEFORE he opened his eyes Lock was conscious
of motion. He was lying down, he knew that, and shaking gently, unevenly, sharply jolting every now and then. A rumbling sound went through him. His knees were up and his feet pressed against something solid. He tried to move his hand to his head but his arm felt weighed down, as if no amount of effort would release it. He was hot and wanted air; he wanted to take air deep into his lungs but something was stopping him and each breath was short, tight, painful as he inhaled. Everywhere—in his head, in his stomach, rising into his throat—he felt nausea: surging, ebbing, always there.

  Against his instincts, he opened his eyes a crack. It was dark, but orange light was pulsing across his vision. He opened them wider and with pain lifted his head an inch or two. He was in a tight space. One arm he couldn’t move at all, the other only a few inches. He could see his knees, and beyond them things were racing, lights were flashing past, white lights and yellow lights. They were spinning around him. He forced himself to watch for a while and slowly the space grew sharper. He made out a tree between the lights, and windows, and a wall. That was the world. Then where was he? He looked to his right. A man’s head, and the man was sitting down. He was in a car. He was being driven, at night, like a small child who has been told he can sleep in the backseat.

  His body wanted him to be sick. He shut his eyes and resisted it, but he couldn’t control the urge. He rolled onto his side and felt all his muscles lock in a violent spasm. Then he collapsed onto his back once more.

  “Fucker.” In Russian. The voice came from the front of the car. The head of the man in the seat turned around to look at him. More words in Russian followed. Lock couldn’t make them out. The smell of vomit reached him and made him gag, but he felt a little clearer, a little more like Richard Lock. In the stink he could smell gin. He raised himself up on his elbows and looked down at his body. He recognized his coat, his new shoes. This was him, all right. The same him.

  Outside the window a city was flowing past. He tried to catch some of it, a shop name, a street sign, but the car was too fast and his eyes too slow; they slipped from point to point. It was definitely a city: the buildings were tall and the streets so wide that sometimes the buildings disappeared from sight. When they slowed he could hear other cars, tires rolling on wet tarmac, engines sawing through the gears.

  The whole of his head hurt, from his forehead to the nape of his neck. He could sense the shape of his skull enclosing the pain. He tried to think through it. He remembered being in the taxi, with Webster, and walking ahead of him on the ice and seeing Webster fall. Then nothing, just emptiness. An impression of a bare bulb hanging from a cord, but nothing more.

  He needed to know where he was. He forced himself to sit up a little farther, his head now resting against the car door, closed his eyes for a moment, and passed out.

  PEOPLE FLITTED through his dreams in a feverish, messy procession. No one stayed for long. He could hear their chatter but not grasp what they were saying, even when they were talking to him. Some images stuck: Marina, her back to him, typing on a clanking typewriter a message that he couldn’t read; Oksana in the sea, beckoning; a huge, inflated Malin comical behind a tiny desk; Vika on a beach, pouring water from a plastic watering can onto the sand. Whenever he reached out the scene quickly switched: that lawyer, Beresford, steering him in a panic against a tide of people on some nameless Moscow street; Webster holding up a thick black hair like a piece of wool for him to inspect.

  When he came to, he barely knew that time had passed, let alone how much. He was still; the car was still. The door behind him opened and his head flopped back into space. Then he felt hands on the collar of his coat pull him backward and up, and he was on his feet, standing on unruly legs. The icy night air braced him, and when he lifted his head he found he was with two men, one short and one tall, both wearing long coats and black caps. Behind him the car locked with a faint beep. The taller man put his arm around his shoulders and together they walked up a frozen pavement. The man was surefooted; Lock knew he wouldn’t slip.

  For the first time Lock looked around him. The street was wide, dark, empty. He felt snow landing softly on his nose, on his cheek. A single car passed. Up ahead a brighter street crossed this one, and he could see traffic and trees lit yellow by the streetlights. The smaller man said something softly in Russian: keep him upright. If they’re happy talking Russian in front of me, Lock thought through the dense fug in his head, I’m not meant to survive.

  He twisted away from the man holding him, trying to free his shoulders and run, but his feet could find no purchase on the ice and the man merely held him up, his powerful arm keeping him from falling. The smaller one, walking slightly ahead, turned and gave the other a taut look.

  Twenty yards from the car the smaller man stopped by a large metal double door set back slightly from the road in a shallow recess. Lock looked up in time to see a massive building above him, several stories high and as wide as the whole block. Then he felt the strong arm around him pull him in. The smaller man pressed four numbers on a keypad with a gloved hand and the door opened.

  Lock squinted at the sudden, stark light stretching ahead of him down a low, wide corridor. Its white walls were streaked with black marks, and plaster showed in places through flaking paint; the floor was tiled with large linoleum tiles, like a hospital. The men walked Lock, staggering, into the building, his feet skipping clumsily along, trying to keep up. They passed two dark-gray doors with small frosted windows and stopped by a pair of lifts on either side of the corridor. The smaller man pressed the button and called one. By the lifts were two large metal bins on wheels and in them Lock saw a white tangle of sheets like balled-up paper. There was a smell in the air of soap powder and steam that made him want to lie down in a clean bed in a warm home. He could feel his head lolling on his neck as if he were coming in and out of sleep.

  The lift door opened with a low creak. Lock was shuffled in and propped against a metal wall, the tall man finally taking his arm away. He felt the lift jerk a little under him and presumed that it was going up. The smaller man pulled a tissue from his pocket and looking up at Lock dabbed flecks of vomit from his chin and lapels as a mother might clean up a child. Lock watched him with a puzzled, helpless frown. The man was pallid, brittle looking, his almost translucent skin showing clearly the shape of the skull beneath. His irises were light gray against milky whites. Straw-colored hair showed under his cap. He looked vicious but less powerful than his friend.

  The lift trundled up. Sixth floor, seventh. Eventually it stopped on the eighth floor, the last. The small man pulled Lock away from the wall by the arm and the door slid slowly open. From the lift opposite a maid in a pink housecoat, a white maid’s cap on her head, was pulling a trolley laden high with toilet paper and bath caps and slippers in transparent plastic bags. Her back was to Lock and the two Russians and they were forced to wait. As she reversed out onto the landing she turned, saw the three men, and began to smile before she realized that something about them was not right. The small man had his arm linked through Lock’s, and the taller of the two was right behind them, ready to push Lock out of the lift. The maid looked at Lock as if for explanation. In that moment he shrugged himself free of the smaller man’s grip and half lunged, half fell toward the trolley, now blocking the corridor. His shoulder smashed into it, wheeling it around and knocking pens and tiny bottles of shampoo onto the floor. Pushing the trolley end into the small man, who tottered backward, off balance, Lock backed into the other lift, clawing at the closing door for support and pressing madly at the bank of buttons. He watched the tall man try to push past the maid; as she crouched to pick up her things he stumbled over her back. The last thing Lock saw through the narrowing crack was the man’s outstretched hand, failing to find a grip.

  It was quiet in the lift. With a gentle jolt it began to descend. Lock leaned against the wall, the metal cold against his temple. His nausea had subsided, but his head throbbed with grim intensity.
So this is what had happened to Dmitry. It was possible that he wasn’t even conscious when he died. He may not have known.

  The lift stopped. The fifth floor: in his panic Lock had pressed the wrong button. As the door opened he hit frantically at the ground-floor button, then at the button that closed the doors. It appeared to do nothing; in its own time the door inched back. Above him Lock thought he could hear the metallic clatter of steps being taken three at a time. When the door shut the noise stopped.

  He pinched his eyes with his hand. He had to work out what to do. He felt in his pocket for his phones but found only the smashed remains of one. Christ. The numbers over the door counted slowly down. No ideas came to him and he struggled to stand. He took deep breaths to steady himself. Two. One. Ground. The corridor was still empty. He set off away from the street door, lurching against the walls. At the end of the corridor he turned right, on instinct, shouldering into a maid carrying an armful of towels. Ahead of him was a pair of wooden swing doors, in each one a small glass pane at head height. He heard a door open behind him and quick steps coming his way; over his shoulder he saw the small man running toward him, his rubber shoes squeaking on the linoleum, his coat open and swinging at his sides. Lock forced his legs to work faster but he couldn’t control them. They gave, as if the tendons had gone, and he crashed through the doors in a running fall, rolling into the room beyond.

  He was on his back. His hands felt carpet under him, and he could hear piano music playing. Lumbering over onto his knees he looked sluggishly around. People were looking at him: people in deep chairs having drinks, people standing at reception checking in. In the center of the room, setting off the sober marble and the deep dark wood, was a vase full of tall flowers: lilies, delphiniums. He was in the lobby of a hotel. Still on his knees, Lock glanced behind him. Through the glass in the door he could see the black cap and ghost eyes of the small man, watching him. Lock stood up, painfully, and steadied himself. The concierge and a receptionist were having an urgent, whispered conversation; then the concierge gestured to a doorman, who was walking purposefully toward Lock. Lock held his hand up, and started walking shakily past the flowers toward the revolving glass door that led onto the street, feeling everyone’s eyes on his back. The piano music played on.