Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

“ Bene .” The younger detective ignored his question and looked down at the folder. “The last time you were here you came to Milano and saw a company of investigators. Investigazioni Indago. Yes?”

Webster merely returned the detective’s look.

“You had a meeting with them at two o’clock on Thursday, March 8th, 2004. You attended, with Antonio Dorsa and Giuseppe Maltese, two detectives. Private detectives. At that meeting you ordered them to put a wiretap on the home and office telephone lines of Giovanni Ruffino, a lawyer, from Milano also.”

“No, I didn’t.”

The detective looked at him for a moment with raised eyebrows before resuming.

“Also, you gave instructions to look in Signore Ruffino’s bank accounts, here and in Switzerland, and in his medical history and his garbage.”

Webster shook his head, partly in denial, partly in wonderment that this old, old story, which he had long presumed dead, had been merely dormant all this time. The interesting question was what had awakened it.

“No. I didn’t. This is all nonsense. Old nonsense.”

“Can you tell us what you discussed at that meeting?”

“Until you arrest me I’m not going to tell you anything. I have no idea why I’m here or why you’re dragging up this crap again. If you’re not going to charge me with anything you can open that door and drive me back to the airport.”

The younger officer looked at the older, who gave the slightest nod.

“OK.” The younger man shrugged. “That is fine. Benedict Webster, we are placing you under arrest on charges of illegal wiretapping, breaking of banking secrecy law, breaking of data protection law, commercial espionage and harassment. You have the right to speak to a lawyer. We can find one if you cannot.”

Webster shook his head, dumbstruck. Alarm took hold of him. To be questioned was one thing: in Italy an investigation was a political plaything to be started, discredited, ditched and revived at will, and he had assumed until now that he had merely been dropped by accident into some game being played many levels above him whose purpose he might never guess. They were accusing him of things that happened in Italy every day and almost always went unpunished, so this had to be mere harassment. But if these two were prepared to arrest him, then the game was about him, and it was being played with intent. He said nothing, watching the two policemen watch him with the ease of those who have all the power on their side.

“Now would you like to talk?” said the younger, smiling a slick smile.

“Only to a lawyer.” Webster sat back and crossed his arms.

At this the older man looked up from his nails and fixed a severe eye on him. There were dark hairs on his cheekbones and the skin on his cheeks was pockmarked and rigid with gray stubble. He didn’t smile.

“Wiretap. Six years.” He counted the charges out on his fingers as he spoke, his accent coarser and stronger than his colleague’s, his voice a slow rasp. “Banks. Eight years. Other things. Five years.” He leaned forward over the table until his face was a foot from Webster’s. “Serious,” he said, nodding slowly. “No game.” He shook his head gently and sat back, resuming his former position, looking at Webster all the while. “No game. Your children grow old while you in Italy.”

Webster felt his body tense and a powerless fury hold him. The questions that had been crowding for attention left him and were replaced by pure imaginings: interrogations, meetings with lawyers, spells in prison, extradition requests, Elsa furious and scared.

These men across the table would once have had no power over him. He had sat in rooms like this before, with worse men than this, answering their questions and trying to work out what they really wanted, what part he was playing in their careful fantasies. But he had never known a fear like this. It wasn’t fear of them, or what they could do; it was fear of what he might once have done to destroy what he now held most precious.

He needed air, and time to consider, and for the first time that day it dawned on him that he wasn’t free. He couldn’t walk out of the door, take a stroll around Milan, call some people and return with the situation in hand. He couldn’t take the next flight home and pick up the children from school. He was here, and here was all there was.

“I need my call.”

“Signore Webster.” The younger man pulled his chair up to the table and rested his elbows on it, his hands clasped together, considering something grave. “I urge you to be cooperative. Easier for us, easier for you. There are many outcomes possible. This is Italy.”

Webster watched his pale doughy face and wondered whose bidding he was doing.

“Give me my call.”

“In a moment, Signore. We would like this to stay in Italy—a simple local matter, under control. If you cooperate I give you my word that we don’t involve the British police. They know about the case, of course, but it is, I think you say, dormant.”

“My call. Nothing until then.”

AFTER CAREFUL THOUGHT HEhad phoned Elsa. She could tell Ike what had to be done but it wasn’t fair to ask him to give her the news. Being Elsa, she was calm and practical—how serious was it, she had wanted to know, and how long might he be—and he had been more reassuring than he yet had reason to be. In truth, he simply didn’t know.

His instructions for Ike had been simple: contact our best friends in Milan, ask them to recommend a good criminal defense lawyer who can find out what game the police were playing. In particular, have them discover who was making this happen. She had asked him if he was OK and he had answered, truthfully, that he was fine. Angry, frustrated, penitent about bringing this contaminant into their lives but otherwise fine.

The business of locating, instructing and sending a lawyer might take half a day, and in the meantime Webster, hungry now but calm again, had been shown to a cell, which mercifully he had to himself, and left alone. It was bare, well-lit, clean enough. From a high corner a camera watched him sitting on one of the bunks, staring at one wall, his back against the other.

This was the first time he had been in a cell since Kazakhstan over a decade before, where his friend Inessa, a journalist like him, had died beyond his reach four cells away. The memory, fresh at the best of times, steered him toward a more stable sense of proportion, and he began to take slow, careful stock. First, he hadn’t done half the things he was charged with, and no wiretapping, certainly; in the Anglo-Saxon world that had been a no-no for decades. That was one source of comfort.

Another was that the Ruffino affair had been dead, politically speaking, for years, and the whole business completed: the Austrians had lost, the Russians had captured the company, and Ruffino himself, despite all his protestations that he wasn’t their man, had no doubt been paid a handsome fee for the scheme’s success. When Webster had come to Milan on that day all those years before, the fight had been in the press every day and his brief to Dorsa and his decidedly shady friend supremely delicate: demonstrate that this Italian lawyer, intimate of a dozen grubby billionaires, owned all those shares in the Austrian’s company for the Russians and not on his own behalf. Delicate and grubby enough, in fact, that when Ruffino had filed a complaint against GIC, Webster’s old company, for running a vicious campaign to destroy his reputation, Webster had been astonished that anyone would want to draw more attention to a situation that was already dangerously exposed.

He hadn’t looked recently but he was sure that nothing had changed. The Russians were still in charge. Ruffino, so far as he knew, had moved on to new acts of complex dishonesty. The stakes were no longer high; for everyone but him, in fact, there were no stakes. Which meant that either there had been news he hadn’t heard, or he really was the center of all this attention.