Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

“Have you done his bins?”

“He’s too savvy for bins. He’s a shredder.”

“It’s worth doing. He may not realize what’s important.”

“Maybe. But the house is a nightmare. Right on Mount Street. Hundreds of eyes.”

“I know all the binmen in W1. They’ll do it for me.”

Webster shrugged. It seemed silly to refuse, like refusing a brandy at the end of a rich dinner. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead. Report to me. No one else at Ikertu. And only call me on my cell.”

Oliver smiled. “You gone rogue, Ben?”

THREE DAYS AFTER HIS MEETING WITH OLIVER,Webster received an e-mail from Ava Qazai.

Dear Mr. Webster,

I fear that I ended our conversation by the lake too abruptly. If you think it worth continuing, I’d like to apologize in person. Can I buy you a drink one evening soon?

HE WROTE BACK SUGGESTINGthey meet the following night at the bar of the Connaught, opposite her father’s house, and she, as he had hoped, agreed the time but changed the venue—to the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, which was far enough away to be discreet. Clearly she preferred her father not to know.

That day and the next he speculated on her motives. He thought back to her fury at her father during lunch in Como and to their talk by the lake. What might she know? She knew Iran, she knew her father. She seemed exercised by what had happened to Parviz. Perhaps she knew something about that, or about Mehr, or about Shiraz’s troubles. He hadn’t heard anything from Qazai since Como; perhaps he had sent her to gauge his mood. It could be anything, Webster realized, and tried to concentrate on the other work that was making a feeble claim on his attention.

The next evening, a Wednesday, he finished at Ikertu, took the tube to Marble Arch and walked across the park. A strong wind was gusting from the west, churning dust into the air, and when the sun moved behind the clouds any summer warmth dropped suddenly to a chill. Webster buttoned his jacket, rubbed some grit from his eye and struck out for the hotel.

The bar—low leather seats, mirrored walls—was busy with expensive shoppers and the odd tourist, but a pair of stools were free. Webster took one, waited for a group of American businessmen in high spirits to be served and ordered a whisky. The businessmen were toasting a success with champagne, and Webster tried to pick out the subtle signs that told you at a glance they weren’t English: the monogrammed shirts, the pleated trousers, the boxy jackets, the straightforward enthusiasm. To his left a young woman, dark, with thick eyebrows, Lebanese perhaps, listened patiently to the level monologue of an older, barrel-chested man wearing sunglasses and a bright yellow shirt under his blazer. Webster wondered at the possible connection between them and when Ava arrived he was so lost to his daydreams that she had to touch him on the arm before he noticed her.

“I’m sorry. I was miles away.” He stood and shook her hand, and she smiled at him with her black eyes. The truth was that he was more startled by her appearance than by her arrival: she wore a plain, short black dress, black high heels and a wrap of some silvery-gray fabric that managed to be shiny and discreet at once. Her hair was up, but artfully loose, and a single diamond hung around her neck on a white gold chain. She might have been going to meet a president or accept an award, and Webster’s first thought was that next to her he was a crumpled mess.

On his own, sitting at the bar, he had been an outsider, a wary observer of a different world; now, ordering a vodka martini for this beautiful woman, he was a part of it—incongruous, perhaps, but complicit.

“Are you going out?” he said.

Ava, straight-backed, sitting with a poise that seemed in an old-fashioned way to have been taught, swiveled toward him a few degrees and crossed her legs.

“I am out,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “What do you mean?”

“You look…” He hesitated, not knowing what to say that wouldn’t sound like a compliment. “I rarely have meetings with anyone so well dressed.”

She laughed. “You’re worried that I’ve dressed up for you? Mr. Webster, I just like to dress up. It’s not personal.”

The barman finished shaking her drink, strained it into a frosted glass and carefully squeezed a spray of oil from a strip of lemon rind onto its surface. Webster smiled, feeling foolish, and raised his glass to her.

“To dressing up.”

“To meetings,” she said, took a sip, put the glass back on the counter and ran her finger back and forth across the base of its stem. “You left very abruptly last week.”

That word again. “After what you told me I thought I should make myself scarce.” She frowned, not knowing what he meant. “About the likes of me never normally staying there.”

“You don’t seem the sensitive type.”

He returned her smile. “I’m not. I had to get back. In the event I could have taken my time.”

She looked faintly puzzled by the remark but let it go. Either she didn’t know what had happened to him in Milan or she had chosen not to refer to it, and by the look of her, making no effort to appear nonchalant, he’d have been prepared to swear that she had no idea. He didn’t think it wise to explain.

For a while they talked about Qazai, about Timur and Parviz, about Dubai, which she believed was no place to raise children. About Iran, which was quiet after months of unrest. He asked her about her childhood, and she sidestepped his questions with deft jokes and subtle shifts of subject that seemed to mask a mild prickliness. Webster wondered where she’d got her sense of humor from, and for that matter her real charm. If he was solving the mystery of the Qazai family—and thank heaven he was not—he would have looked forward to the interview with her mother.

He was enjoying himself, he realized, warily and not a little guiltily. For the last six months he had rarely felt lighthearted, and feeling it now was unexpected, and the more refreshing for it. This, of course, was not why he was here. He had now finished his second drink, Ava’s martini would soon be done, and after one more he would forget to ask half the questions that needed to be asked.

“That lunch in Como,” he said, turning toward her a little. “What was all that about? With your father.”

A lock of hair had fallen in front of her eye and she moved it out of the way, not smiling now. “Is this the part where you grill me?”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

She looked at him for a moment, then took her glass and emptied the last half-inch. “Are you going to get me another?”

Webster nodded and turning to get the barman’s attention signaled that he wanted the same again. When he looked back she was watching him with her head slightly tilted to one side, not for the first time weighing him up.

“I think,” she said at last, looking away, “that when your grandson has just been kidnapped it would be good not to pretend that everything is normal.”

Webster didn’t say anything.

Ava shook her head and flicked the lock of hair aside again. “Sometimes I wonder what goes on in his head.” She took an olive. “Tell me something. What do you think of him? You must have a sense of him by now. Who do you think he is?”

That was an excellent question, and it took Webster a moment’s thought to find something meaningful that was less than completely frank. “He strikes me as the sort of man who’s built his own world so carefully that other people are an inconvenience. He expects them to come into line.”

“That’s it,” she said, animated now, apparently surprised by Webster’s acuity. “That’s it. And what happens when your world starts to collapse? You prop it up. You can’t change it, because you can’t imagine another.”