Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

Out on the street the cold hit him again, making his eyes water. This was the bright street that he had seen earlier. He scanned it from left to right. To the right, at the corner of the hotel, stood the tall man, his arms crossed. Just standing, watching Lock. Lock stepped back onto the steps of the hotel and turned to go back in. Through the glass he could see the small man standing by the flowers in the middle of the room. For a moment his mind was blank. No useful thought was there. He had gotten this far on luck and what remained of his instinct.

It seemed he had a tiny scrap left. Going back up the steps he walked through a door to the left of the revolving doors, wrong-footing the doorman who was now on the other side. He walked toward the small man, who looked briefly taken aback. But instead of tackling him or challenging him, Lock climbed clumsily onto the table and with the sole of his shoe kicked the vase over, shouting as it fell, in his head or out loud he didn’t know, the words mangled and slow: would you just leave me the fuck alone.

Guests sitting nearby with their drinks recoiled but the heavy glass vase remained intact, landing on the carpet with a thud and spilling flowers and water onto the floor. Lock looked down at the strange scene he had made. He felt high above it. The small man had stepped well away from him, and was now by the exit. The doorman, joined by a colleague, was at the table, trying to work out how to get Lock down with the minimum of fuss. The only noise was the Chopin still piping from the speakers in the ceiling.

“English,” said Lock to the doorman. “Very drunk.” He sat down to slide himself off the table. The doorman took Lock firmly by the arm and walked him across the lobby to a door behind reception. His colleague followed.

EVERYTHING LOCK LOOKED at slipped away. The more effort he made the more it slipped. He tried to focus on a single point but there were no points. He felt himself being guided to a chair and pushed gently into it. There was a desk, and a computer, and beyond them a man with a mustache like a brush and above it a red, bulbous nose.

This man introduced himself in broken English as Herr Gerber. He was the head of security at the hotel and he was going to call the police. He said some other things in German, but Lock didn’t understand them. “Police” he understood, though, and “Polizei,” and he explained in broken phrases, stumbling through the words, that he was an important English businessman and that someone was trying to kill him. Gerber looked at him for a moment and then reached for his phone. Lock, holding up an unsteady hand, told him to wait and reached into his back pocket, expecting his wallet to be gone. To his surprise it was still there, and still full of money. He took two notes out, looked at them carefully as if making sure they were real, and put them deliberately on Gerber’s desk side by side.

“I need to call. One call.”

Gerber left the notes where they were and angled the phone toward Lock.

“Ikertu,” said Lock. “I don’t have the number. London.”

Gerber looked at him, shook his head and sighed. He tore a piece of paper from a pad in front of him and passed it across to Lock with a pen. Lock wrote on it feebly and passed it back. Gerber turned to his computer and after a minute took the phone and dialed a number. He passed the receiver to Lock.

The person who answered the phone refused to put him through to Webster, and Lock didn’t have the energy to argue. He left a number that Gerber gave him, and for two minutes the three men just sat in the office, not talking. Gerber busied himself at his desk; the doorman manned the door. Lock felt like his head was full of metal, and his gut ached. He could feel the nausea steadily returning and hoped it would wait until he was clear of the hotel. He wasn’t sure his money would stretch that far.

The phone rang. Gerber answered and passed the phone to Lock. Lock talked laboriously and then passed the phone back to Gerber, who, after a minute or two and a few grunted words of German, put the receiver down and said to Lock, “Give me another five hundred.”

Lock frowned. “Why?”

“I’m going to drive you.”

“Where?”

“Out of town. To meet your friend.”

WHEN THE CALL CAME THROUGH Webster was asleep on Lock’s bed, his head uncomfortably against the headboard, his chin pressing down onto his collarbone. As the phone rang, a loud old-fashioned ring, he opened his eyes and felt familiar pain along the side of his head. Lock and Inessa had been in his dreams. How could he have slept?

He had expected Hammer, and at first didn’t recognize the slow, stretched voice on the other end of the line. Then, with beautiful clarity, it made sense. It was Lock. He was alive. Hammer had gotten through to Malin. The deal was starting.

Lock sounded ill. Webster couldn’t make out what he was saying. When Lock passed the phone to Gerber, Webster had assumed that this was part of the ploy: he would now negotiate Lock’s release and the handover of the dossier. As he listened though, confused, it slowly became clear that something else was happening. Gerber was German, without any doubt, and incensed, in a rather bureaucratic way. He didn’t sound tense. He didn’t sound like he wanted anything. All he wanted was for Webster to come to the hotel now to pick up his friend. Only at that point did he realize that Lock was free. He looked up and said a silent thank you to the heavens.

Webster told Gerber that Lock was in danger and would pay to be taken from the hotel safely. Gerber grunted and said he would drive him to the north side of Gartenplatz; his car was in the garage under the hotel and Lock could lie down on the backseat. They would be there in fifteen minutes and would not be seen.

Instantly awake, relief and excitement coursing through him, his head forgotten, Webster washed his glass in the bathroom sink, put the books back on the bedside table, plumped up the pillows, smoothed out the covers on the bed and pulled the curtains open.

He looked at the note: what an innocent-looking document. He took two sheets of paper from the rack and three pens from his pocket. One was a blue ballpoint. He clicked the point into place and began to write on one of the sheets of paper, carefully copying Lock’s handwriting from the note. Since my friend. Since my friend. It needed to be rounder, steadier. He began to find some rhythm. Since my friend Dmitry Gerstman died I have been unhappy. The tails weren’t quite right but that didn’t matter. Taking the clean sheet he worked quickly through a fair copy. He sat back and looked at it. Not bad. It wouldn’t persuade a specialist for a moment but it might fool a glance, which was all he wanted. He folded it as the note had been folded, put it in an envelope and left it on the desk where the note had been. The original he put carefully back into its envelope and into the pocket of his coat. He tidied up, putting the scraps of paper in his pocket as well.

Checking that the room looked exactly as it had done he turned out the light and left. He picked up his bag and went out, telling Frau Werfel that he had found Mr. Green and would be bringing him back shortly.

He needed a pay phone and a taxi. More snow was falling, gently now. The hotel steps were newly icy and he came down them carefully, holding on to the railing. At the bottom he looked up and saw a car approaching from the west, going faster than was sensible on these roads: a gray Mercedes sedan, only the driver inside. It stopped across the entrance to a garage ten yards short of the Daniel and a small man wearing an overcoat and cap got out. He walked quickly toward Webster, half sliding on the ice, twisting in midstride to lock his car. As he turned back the two men came face-to-face and in that moment knew each other. Webster could see Lock’s torment in his unsurprised, colorless eyes.