Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEKa young German woman called Silke picked up Daniel from nursery and Nancy from school, took them to the park for a while and then brought them home for their tea. Webster liked Silke, and so did the children, but a part of him wished that he could do her work himself.

Today he was later than he would have liked; he had spent the afternoon talking to Oliver, and now tea was finishing. Silke was washing up; Daniel was scraping around the inside of a clearly empty yogurt pot; Nancy had pushed hers aside and was bent over a notebook, writing something with a crayon, her face three inches from the page. When he opened the kitchen door she looked up, scrambled down from her chair and ran to him.

“Daddy!”

He crouched down, wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up in a tight hug, arching his back and kissing her face above his. She would be six in August but she was still so light, so finely built, so distinct from the mass and clamor of the world outside the door that her touch and her laugh pulled him from it instantly.

When Elsa returned home the children were in their pajamas watching television and Webster was cooking, slicing onions into thin half-rounds with a satisfyingly sharp knife. He turned from his work and kissed her.

“How was your day?”

“Fine,” she said. “Good. How’s Nancy?”

“She seems fine. No problems to report.”

“Did you ask her about Phoebe?”

Webster looked over his shoulder at his wife. She was going through that day’s mail; her hair was up and the skin on her neck golden from the sun, and her beauty, as it often did, gave him a shock of elation, or privilege, or something else that he couldn’t wholly recognize. He hated it when there was distance between them, and this only served to heighten it.

“We just talked through her day. She didn’t mention anything.”

Elsa nodded, not looking up. “What are we having?”

“Chicken.” Webster turned back to his cooking and a second later felt Elsa’s hand on the back of his neck.

“How was yours?”

“Good. I had a chat with Ike. Or he had a chat with me.” He slipped his arm around her waist and for a second they stood rather awkwardly together in front of the stove, like partners in a three-legged race, until he had to pull away to slide the onions into the pan.

Elsa let her hand linger on his back and then went to sit down at the table.

“Are you two OK now?” she said.

“So-so. Better.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s come up with a way out of the whole mess.”

“Will it work?”

“It should all be over within a week.”

He glanced at her, his face concertedly frank, expecting her to spot the evasion in his answer.

“What then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you stay?”

Webster stirred the onions, watching them bubble gently and turn translucent in the green oil.

“I’ll see what happens. When this is over I’ll know.”

He glanced up to see Elsa looking at him closely. She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Whether by training or nature she could always tell.

“I called him.” She paused. “Ike.”

“You called him? When?”

“At the beginning of the week. I was worried about you.”

He shook his head. “You should have talked to me first.”

“You’re not the easiest person to talk to at the moment.”

He turned to her, running a hand through his hair and grasping the back of his neck. Suddenly he felt a great weight of tiredness. “I’m sorry, baby. I am. There isn’t long now.”

Elsa simply watched him for a moment. “What’s his plan?”

“It’s boring.” Her look told him to go on. “It’s very Ike.”

“You’re not going to do it, are you?”

He frowned, indignant. “I’m going to do my best.”

Not strictly a lie; but Elsa knew precisely what it meant. “Jesus, Ben. You know what?” Her voice was steady and clear. “There is more to your life than the absurd”—she searched for the word—“vanity of your work. Do you think it matters to me whether this man is good or bad? Do you think it matters to Nancy, or Daniel? I was sorry about Lock. I still am. But his boss? The Russian who’s quietly suffocated the last six months of our lives. I don’t care. We don’t.”

Webster, his eyes on the ground, didn’t answer.

“This is not a campaign. This is life. It’s not some assault on, on what? What is it you’re trying to destroy? Because I worry, I really fucking worry, that it’s us. That you won’t be happy until it is.”

He shook his head. “I’m not doing this for me.”

“Really? Who then? Mankind?”

He looked up at her, with all the candor—genuine now—that he could find.

“I’m not doing it for me. Not anymore.”

He had never seen Elsa so intense, so adamant. She gave him one last, angry look and pushed out her chair to leave; and as she did so his phone, lying dormant on the side all this time, chimed once, a startling trill. His eyes went to it involuntarily.

“I tell you what,” she said. “You deal with that. Save us all. I’m putting Daniel to bed.”

Webster stood to one side to let her pass and watching her leave let out a deep, long sigh. The onions were beginning to brown at the edges; he stirred them, shook the pan once or twice and turned off the heat. Part of him wanted to throw his phone across the room, but a greater part had to know what it said.

It was Constance. The message was only five words. “Timur Qazai dead. Please advise.”

NO FUNERAL SHOULD TAKE PLACEin high summer. Even in Highgate, on the rising hills of north London, the city’s heavy air had found its way through the oaks and sycamores to the mourners gathered around Timur’s grave, bathing them in a waxy heat that seemed to drip onto the skin and stick there. Webster, sweating in his wool suit, could feel grime accumulating on the inside of his collar and ran a finger around it to loosen it from his neck. Ant-like bugs flew silently, drawn to the white shirts of the men; next to him Hammer swatted at one on his neck, caught it, discreetly flicked the remnants away.

Cool earth, that’s what Timur deserved, but the ground looked heated today and seemed to offer no rest. Webster couldn’t help but picture him in his coffin as it was borne in on the shoulders of the pallbearers, Qazai at the front. His body must have been badly broken. He had died, the Dubai police had said, when his car hit a wall at somewhere just under a hundred miles an hour. The collision had been side-on; at the last minute his car had swung around, flailing into the concrete and crushing him inside. Webster imagined the tremendous noise it had made and the greater silence that must have followed.

This was not a grand funeral—there was no splendor, no pomp—but there were many mourners. Webster could make out a wealthy Iranian set, some of whom he recognized from Mehr’s memorial service: a handful of Tabriz staff, several friends of Timur and Raisa, less moneyed than the rest. And then there were the Qazais, in their black dresses and black suits, reduced, a flat outline of the people he had last seen in Como just two weeks before.

Timur’s sons were both there, decked out in mourning, Raisa holding them close. Parviz stared quietly at the freshly dug black walls of the grave while Farhad hid his face in his mother’s waist, nestling there, more shy than sad, occasionally glancing out as she stroked his hair. Raisa herself, the color in her face leached out, kept shaking her head, as if she was simply lost in the wrong place.