“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.
“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.
“I wanted to know what we were up against,” said Hammer.
“And?”
“Most of it’s unremarkable. Not a great job, but adequate. The fun comes on the last page.”
Qazai nodded, bidding Hammer to go on.
“Ben.”
So this was to be his role. Hammer would be nice to Qazai; Webster would accuse him.
“They think you’re a smuggler.” He hoped to see in the reaction some confirmation that Qazai already knew what the report said, but his only response was to look up and narrow his eyes a little.
“A smuggler?”
“Yes.”
“What do I smuggle?”
“Specifically? A stone relief from the eighth century B.C.”
“The Sargon relief?”
“You know it?”
“Of course I know it. It’s one of the great masterpieces of Assyrian art. Of art full stop. Everyone knows it.” He gave a single, abrupt laugh, throwing his head back. “They think that was me? I wish they were right.” Smiling, his brow raised, he looked at Senechal for confirmation of the sheer absurdity of the accusation; Senechal nodded once, gravely, in response.
“So you know it was looted?”
“From the National Museum in Baghdad. Of course. It is probably the most important piece still missing.”
Webster watched him carefully but could see no hint of a lie.
“Do you know a man called Zia Shokhor?”
Qazai shook his head. “Yves. Do we know a Shokhor?”
“Not that I am aware, sir.”
“He’s an Iraqi,” said Webster. “Lives in Dubai. The report says that some time in the spring of 2003, just after the invasion, he arranged for the relief to be taken by truck through Kuwait and then by sea to Dubai, where it sat for a week in the free trade zone. Then it went to Geneva on a private plane, and into the hands of a Swiss dealer, whose name we don’t have.”
“And he sells it to me?”
“No. Not exactly. He sells it to Cyrus Mehr, who sells it to you.”
Qazai raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms, the levity gone from his face. “Naturally.”
“Apparently you ordered it,” said Hammer.
“Excuse me?”
“The theory goes,” said Webster, “that no thief would choose to steal something that distinctive if it wasn’t already sold. Especially when it weighs half a ton.”
“Where did they get this nonsense?”
“The report doesn’t say. Those parts have been redacted. But my guess is it’s taken from the U.S. Army investigation into the looting. There’s a lot of detail in there, and the only name missing is the Swiss dealer’s. Maybe it comes from him.”
Qazai sat back in his chair, took a deep breath through his nose and shook his head.
“And you don’t know who he is?”
“Not yet,” said Webster.
• • •
THE PHONE COULD NEVER do justice to Fletcher Constance, but even over a weak line there seemed to be a great deal of him and Webster, as always, had to adjust himself, as if stepping back to take in the tremendous whole.
“Benedict!” His voice was seldom less than a roar, his full Boston vowels unsoftened by thirty years away from home. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Lying low. You?”
“Me? In Dubai, as usual. I don’t know how I stand it. Can’t remember the last time I saw Beirut. My housekeeper thinks I’m dead. Ha.” A single, staccato laugh. “Sometimes I’m not sure I’m not. In this shiny mausoleum.”
“You wouldn’t be anywhere else.”
Constance sighed a long, bass sigh. “Ben, when was the last time you were here?”
“God. Three years ago.”
“With Ike?”
“That’s right.”
“Three years ago. That was an innocent time, wasn’t it? That was fun. They were still building then. Towers going up easy as you’d set ten pins. Now they’re up and empty, and one day someone’ll come along with a big ball and bang, down they’ll all come, but I’ll tell you this, Ben my boy, fuck me if the money isn’t coming back. Unbelievable. Is that why you’re calling?”
Webster laughed. “Not exactly.”
One of the many pleasures and difficulties of dealing with Constance was providing him with an audience. He couldn’t survive without one. Most of his ranting he did in writing, on his blog, but there was nothing so rewarding for both parties as being railed at in person, when his height and breadth, his creased linen suits and extravagant neckwear (sometimes a blooming cravat), his antique beard and the solid boom of that rhythmic voice made a total, compelling p
erformance, with a great deal of the old American showman about it.
Fletcher Constance was an unlikely banker, by trade, and a controversialist in every ounce of his nature. He had arrived in the Gulf in 1986, working for an American bank and leaving when, in his words, “I realized that my colleagues were halfwits trying to patronize their betters, and I was probably the worst of them all.” This was disingenuous, of course, not least because he had been taken on by one of his clients and for a fruitful five years or so had found and made deals on his behalf. The two had fallen out around the turn of the century and now Constance—wealthy, unencumbered with either debts or family—did little but rage against the world, or at least that large part of it that he found venal, shallow, unjust or corrupt.
He occasionally did this in print, for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine, but most of his impressive output found the world through his blog—cheerily called “The Gulf Apart”—in the form of a daily sermon on the region’s commercial excesses. Recent posts had included a diatribe against the management of an underperforming construction company, bold predictions about the number of Gulf businesses that would default on their debt within the coming year, and an analysis of United Arab Emirates politics that had compared the relationship between Dubai and Abu Dhabi to that between “a hooker and her john.” What made him so valuable was that he was no crank, that when his enthusiasms didn’t get in the way he was usually right, and that for all his noise and bluster he knew everybody—everybody, from sheikhs to ex-pats—and a little under half of them liked him. For as long as Webster could remember, Constance had been trying to leave Dubai to retire to Beirut, to a beautiful 1930s house in the hills whose picture he would produce at the smallest opportunity.
Ike knew him best. They had become friends when Hammer had spent time as a journalist in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and now if Constance liked the story or the cause he would help Ikertu with what he knew or could find out. His was the most effortless cover: no one ever believed that someone so relentlessly loud could possibly have been a spy.
“So when are you coming out?” said Constance.
“Next week.”
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