Qazai sat down at the head of the table with his back to the window, smiled at Hammer and Webster in turn, took an olive and chewed. He seemed as invincible in this small room as he had in church, but what Webster saw for the first time was his health. He glowed. According to the articles Webster had read he was sixty-one, but he moved and talked with the force of a much younger man; his cheeks were taut beneath the beard, his eyes glitteringly clear, and he held himself as an athlete might, as if every muscle was only for the moment in repose.
Webster had the sense, without understanding quite why, that Qazai was not a private man. His life was lived in view, and he liked it there. You had to read his face carefully to detect the faintest signs of what might be within: in the eyes and the lines around them you could see experience—hard-won, guarded—and a watchfulness that suggested he was slow to trust.
“Gentlemen, you will like this place. I have been coming here once a week for the last twenty-five years. It is nothing fancy, but trust me, the fancy places get it wrong. This is real Iranian food.” He took another olive and smiled benignly. Like a king condescending to visit his people, thought Webster, saying nothing.
Qazai, continuing to beam at his guests, shook out his napkin, and the others did the same. Hammer took his and, as he always did, tucked it into his shirt collar, a New York habit that he insisted was merely practical but clearly gave him pleasure; Senechal, for his part, carefully unfolded his and smoothed it out precisely on his lap. Waiters came and poured water.
“That was a beautiful service,” said Hammer.
“Wasn’t it? More so for being so sad. Thank you for indulging me. I had thought that we could come on here together but there were people to talk to. I was moved that so many came.”
Hammer gave a respectful nod in acknowledgment.
“How do you think he died?” said Webster, sensing that Hammer was shooting him a look for his directness.
“Like a hero. Or like a dog. You take your pick.” Qazai held Webster’s eye for a moment. “Mr. Webster, even the simplest things in Iran are difficult. Insanely difficult. They were hard before but now they are impossible. The Arab Spring is not a term I like. My people are not Arabs. But we are all caged together by these, these little men. These vicious little men.” He sighed and shook his head. “You were a journalist, I think?” Webster held his eye and nodded. “In Iran this simple thing—to find something out, to tell people about it—cannot be done. Journalists there are stooges of the state, or scared, or in prison.” He paused to allow the weight of his words to be felt. “So you see how impossible it is to investigate anything. Honestly speaking, to know what happened to Cyrus . . . You understand Russia. Iran has its similarities. You understand that some things will never be known in such places. I fear that this will be one of them.”
“Would you like to know?”
Qazai’s lips pressed together, his eyes lost their shine and for a moment Webster thought his composure was about to slip; but he caught himself, and his smile reappeared. “When we are done with this first piece of work, Mr. Webster, perhaps then I will send you to Isfahan to find out.” The smile stayed on his lips.
Two waiters came in bearing trays of food: small plates of smoked eggplant and spinach in yogurt; three bowls together, one containing walnut halves, one smoked fish, one unshelled broad beans; a basket of the thinnest flatbread; and a huge plate of radishes, spring onions, deep red tomatoes, bushy green bunches of coriander, tarragon and mint. Qazai passed the bread to Hammer and signaled that everyone should help themselves, while Webster watched him, marveling at the deep shine of the man.
“Now, gentlemen. To why I called you here. I will not insult you again by insisting what we say in this room is confidential. It is delicate. It goes to the heart of my affairs.” Qazai took sea salt from a small glass bowl, ground it between his fingertips onto his plate and rolled a radish slowly over it.
“I have been working for some time—quietly, you understand—to sell my business. Or some of my business. I plan to retire from the day-to-day and leave my son in charge. One day his reputation will eclipse mine, but he needs room. He is ready to move past his father. It is time. And I want to take some money out, for this and that.” He turned from Hammer to Webster and back again, diligently dividing his attention, underscoring his words with slow, deliberate gestures. “Now, for my investors to be happy I need a buyer with a name as powerful as my own, and up until two weeks ago I thought I’d found one. A fund manager in the U.S. You would know the name. A perfect fit. Talented people. They wanted emerging markets exposure, we have much the same risk profile—perfect.”
He paused to check that his audience was keeping pace; Hammer nodded for him to go on.
“The sale was agreed, we were due to announce it, and at the eleventh hour they called it off. Wouldn’t tell me why.” He put the radish in his mouth, chewed deliberately, and swallowed, frowning now at the thought of this reversal like a child who had been refused its way. “Yves and I,” he gestured to Senechal, “could not get them to tell us. I called and called. And then finally their legal counsel tells us that—what did he say, Yves?”
“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 do
wn.”
“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.
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.”
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