The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (4 page)

Ikertu was everything to Hammer. He lived alone, with a housekeeper, ate badly, read books about military campaigns and game theory, and worked for his clients, who adored him. What Hammer and Ikertu did best, and liked to do to the exclusion of all else when times were good, was contentious work, in the jargon of their legal neighbors. They fought for their clients. They fought to recover money, to redeem reputations and dismantle them, to expose corruption, to overtake the competition, to right wrongs and sometimes to cover them up. Most of the time they worked for the right side.

On the wall of Webster’s office hung a political map of Europe and Asia, and into it he had stuck colored pins to mark the heart of each project. He looked at it now and wondered where this case would take him. There were tight clusters over Kiev and Almaty, Warsaw and Vienna; looser groups across the Urals, the Caucasus and southern Siberia; four or five apiece in Prague, Budapest, and Sofia; and solitary outliers in Tallinn, Ashgabat, Yerevan, Minsk. It was a heat map of money and trouble. He had stopped sticking pins in Moscow, a thick dark mass in the middle.

His phone rang.

“Hi,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Downstairs. Come for a coffee.”

“There’s nowhere to go for a coffee.”

Hammer laughed. “Meet me in Starbucks.”

Webster started to say that he didn’t think Starbucks was a good place to discuss anything, let alone what they had to discuss, but the line had gone dead.

Hammer had bought him a coffee, which he didn’t really want. He drank it anyway, absentmindedly. He noticed that behind his birdlike keenness and thick-rimmed black spectacles Hammer was beginning to look old. But there was still something daunting there, and Webster as always felt the need to perform well for him.

“Jesus, you were less grumpy before your holiday,” said Hammer, emptying a packet of sugar into his coffee. “How was it?”

“Wet and short. But lovely, thank you. Spent most of it pottering about in a bass boat in the drizzle trying to catch mackerel.”

“Any luck?”

“Elsa caught six on our first outing. Then nothing. Nancy ate it raw off my penknife. I was amazed.”

“And how was Turkey?”

“Hot. Tourna’s a piece of work.”

“What does he want?”

They were sitting at a counter in the window. Before he began, Webster instinctively looked around behind him to make sure no one could hear. He leaned in to Hammer a little and spoke softly.

“Do you know who Konstantin Malin is?”

“I know he’s come up before. Oil?”

“Oil. He’s the power behind the throne at the energy ministry. He advises the Kremlin on energy policy—some say he pretty much sets it. And he enforces it. He’s also extremely rich—one of the new breed. A silent oligarch.”

“What does the minister think about that?” Hammer was a fiddler, a tapper, a chewer of pens. He found it difficult to sit altogether still. Now he was blowing on his coffee to cool it, letting his glasses mist up and then clear, not looking at Webster.

“I suspect he gets his share, but a fraction of what Malin is taking. He’s been there for decades. He must have served under dozens of ministers.”

Hammer drank some coffee and watched people pass by on the street, then turned to Webster with a look of fresh concentration.

“How powerful is he?”

“A government intimate. For ten years or more, as far as I know, which is very rare. He may be unique. Every case we do in energy he’s there, somewhere. He’s the gray cardinal of the Kremlin.”

“Who looks after his affairs?”

“In Russia, I don’t know. A guy called Lock has been his lawyer for fifteen years or so. He manages an Irish company that seems to own most of the assets. And there’s a Russian called Grachev who runs a trading operation in Vienna.”

Hammer thought for a moment, tapping out a precise rhythm with his thumb and forefinger on the counter. His shirt collar, far too big, hung around his neck like a noose.

Webster continued. “I know Lock. Or know of him. There’s a joke in Moscow: why did Malin lose all his money? Because it was Locked up.”

“Hilarious.”

“It’s a pun. Lock means sucker.”

After a pause, Hammer said, “Who’s he fallen out with?”

“Malin? Besides Tourna? There’s an ex-employee who looks interesting. No obvious animus. There must be a few Russians who don’t like him, inside the Kremlin and out. Otherwise I don’t know. As far as I can see there’s no litigation we might follow.”

“That’s interesting.”

“It is?”

“And what does Tourna want?”

Webster told him. The fall of Malin.

“Is that all?” Hammer sat back and thought, tapping on the rim of his cup with his thumbs. “Did you discuss fees?”

“No. I told him I’d need to speak to you first about whether we do the work.”

Hammer frowned. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because being seen to work for Tourna is grubby. I don’t mind that but you might. But the main thing is, Malin’s a real player. He’ll have his own security people, good ones, and he has a lot to lose.”

“What’s the worst he might do?”

“Set his people on us, rake muck, make life difficult, especially in Russia. Revoke my visa, which would be a pain.”

“Will he shoot you?”

Webster laughed. “No, I shouldn’t think so. They tend not to kill Westerners. But thanks.”

“What about our sources in Russia?”

“I think the same applies. If Malin gets wind of us, and he will, he’ll disrupt life for them, maybe put them out of business. But we may not need to do that much in Russia. If Malin’s vulnerable it’ll be offshore somewhere. Perhaps in his past, but I doubt it.”

Hammer folded his arms and beamed at Webster. “This is juicy, isn’t it? Have you had any thoughts?”

“God yes. My head’s spinning with ideas. For once I need you to keep me in check.”

“That’ll be novel.”

Webster paused. Outside two men were getting out of a taxi, struggling with boxes of legal papers. He turned to Hammer. “Look. I need to be straight with you. I’ve been waiting for this case. Or one like it. I may not be the best judge.”

“You want to afflict the corrupt?”

“Something like that.”

Neither said anything for a moment.

“Maybe we shouldn’t take it,” said Webster at last.

“Can we do what he wants?”

“We’d have to be very lucky and very clever.”

Hammer leaned in confidentially, lowering his voice. “I think this has the makings of a landmark project.”

“I thought you might say that.” Webster felt a flutter in his chest.

“Tell Tourna we want two million U.S. up front. We’ll keep that on account and bill him a million a month until the end of the project. If we help him get his fifty back we want five percent. If we finish off Malin, we want another ten million.”

“You’re serious.”

“I am. You said it. If we can crack this without doing much in Russia, fantastic. If we can’t, we haven’t lost anything and we’ll probably help Tourna get his money back at least. If Malin kicks up a fuss it’ll die down and in the meantime you can do a few Kazakh cases. It’s not like we’ve got an office in Moscow to raid or employees to imprison.” He paused. “Where does Lock live?”

“Moscow.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Why?”

“Because he started to work for Malin before either of them knew what they were doing. That means he knows where the mistakes are. And if you’re right, he’s not exactly battle-hardened. Get him out of Moscow. He’s protected there.”

“With pleasure.”

“He’s worth a lot to us. Go after him.”

Three

L
ONDON WAS A GATEWAY FOR
L
OCK;
he passed through it often on the way to his island world, where the sun shone and he was in charge. But in a broader sense it led to a life that was closed to him in Moscow. He would buy his suits there, from Henry Poole—the oldest tailors on Savile Row, he had once discovered with satisfaction—and the shirts and ties, shoes and socks that set him apart, he liked to think, from his Russian colleagues. There he would boss his lawyers, have his hair cut, dine well with the very few friends he still had, and feel briefly his old self, part of a confident, distinguished fraternity, the equal of his peers. In London, too, he would occasionally see his family.

But he hadn’t seen Marina or Vika on his recent visits. He told himself that there were good reasons for this: he was usually passing through and was seldom in town for long; the greater the size of Malin’s secret empire the more meetings he was forced to have; Vika was in bed by eight, just as his working day tended to finish. Today, however, on his way to Holland Park to see them, scenes from the Riviera playing in his mind, he found guilt mixed in with the usual apprehension.

He had discharged his driver, and to stretch his back after the morning’s flight was walking across Hyde Park, happy that August and Monaco were behind him. His last four days there had been uncomfortable: he had been tetchy, Oksana sullen. He wanted to tell her what was troubling him but knew he couldn’t; she had taken his nervousness to mean that he didn’t trust her. Monaco, hot and threatening thunder, had tightened around him, and trips to Cannes and up into the hills around Grasse had failed to give release. The storms never came. He had felt relief when Oksana had boarded her flight, and no doubt she had too. Ten days were simply too many to spend in Monaco—perhaps too many, he thought, to spend with me.

The park was green, vivid, old, full of tourists. It was five o’clock but the sun was still high and Lock, in his shirtsleeves, his jacket over his shoulder, walked at an idling pace past the Reformers Tree and the Old Police House, across the Serpentine Bridge and toward Kensington Palace. He was aware of loving London for reasons that he imperfectly understood, something to do with its confidence: London never pretended to be something it was not.

He had never walked to her flat before. He continued to go slowly, eager and hesitant at once. He wondered which Marina would be there to greet him: the romantic whose broken hopes she still struggled to conceal or the cool rationalist who had understood long before him that they needed to be broken. It was this crisis in her that he loved, and it was this that made him dread seeing her: in her company he felt like either a heel or a quisling.

They had met in Moscow, early in Lock’s time there. She was a lawyer—she worked in Moscow City Hall, selling off state property to private developers—and Malin’s goddaughter. It was he that introduced them, inviting them to a small dinner at his dacha, where he made a big show of playing matchmaker, embarrassing them both. There were moments later when Lock would wonder if this had all been part of his grand plan.

For over six months Lock had been living the expatriate life in a city that absorbed him completely, and now he found himself in the Russian countryside for the first time. It was spring, and the low sun picked out the bright new leaves of the alders and silver birch. He first saw Marina as she walked with Yekaterina Malin in a grove of apple trees, and he thought immediately that even in this place she seemed to glow more intensely than the world around her. She was slight and fair-haired, with clear, white skin and a small nose, a little upturned. Her eyes were green, even and light, like peridots.

That night they talked about Russia. Lock had never been invited to a Russian’s home before, and it was made clear to him that this was an honor only granted to a few. Russians, he was told, were by nature an open and friendly people but their recent history—perhaps all their history—had caused them to reserve friendship for longer than they might like. Lock had suggested that perhaps now, for the first time truly democratic, Russia could look forward to a warming of its relationships, at a diplomatic and a personal level. One of the other guests, a doctor and an old friend of Yekaterina, thanked Lock for his eloquent words but feared that it would take more to repair this broken nation, ravaged for centuries by the cruelty of the leaders it craved and probably deserved. Marina bridled at this: she objected to the notion that Russians loved to suffer; and she saw now the opportunity for a real people’s revolution that would allow Russia to achieve at last the greatness that had always been its destiny. As she talked, her cheeks flushed red. Marina in argument captivated Lock, and he watched rapt as she made her case with passion, not caring, it seemed, that she was in the company of her elders. Malin, less forbidding then, had seemed to enjoy every moment, cheerfully goading on both sides.

Still dwelling on the past he arrived at her flat. It was on Holland Park, the road, and looked out onto the park itself. Lock remembered Vika telling him delightedly that she lived on Holland Park, in Holland Park, next to Holland Park. That too was London, ignoring any obligation to make sense. He stood outside the gate for a moment and looked up at the building: white stucco, double-fronted, huge but discreet about it. He breathed deeply, walked up the path and rang the bell.

He saw from the name card next to it that she was still Marina Lock. She had kept his name when she left him, and he still, despite attempts to be disciplined, found in this some small, unrealistic hope of reconciliation. In the rare moments when he honestly reviewed his life he knew, with a certainty he was generally denied, that Marina was too good for him—not perhaps for the man he had once been but certainly for the one he had become. This knowledge pained him, partly for her sake but mainly because it shook the delicate fiction on which his remaining self-esteem rested. He might sometimes succeed in forgetting who he had once been but Marina was always there to help him remember.

Her voice came over the intercom. “Hello?” Each time he heard it now it was a little less Russian.

“It’s Richard.”

“Come up.”

The two long flights of stairs left him out of breath. Vika was waiting for him on the landing, and ran to him as he climbed the last steps.

“Papa!”

He stooped to hug her but felt a short stabbing in his back and knelt down instead. His head rested on her shoulder. It was a long time, he realized, since he had hugged anyone.

Marina was in the door, smiling, less guarded than she would once have been. He stood up and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Come in,” she said. “You look well. Where have you been?”

“Monaco, for a week or so. It was hot.” A pause. He wouldn’t mention Oksana and Marina wouldn’t ask. And he wasn’t at all sure that he did look well.

“Come into the kitchen. I’m making Vika her tea.”

Lock ruffled the girl’s hair. She was fair, like her mother, but had his straight nose and his blue eyes. “And what are you having for tea, rabbit?”

“Daddy, I’m not a rabbit. I’m eight years old. And I’m having fish fingers.”

“Such an English girl these days.” Vika walked into the flat and he followed.

For an hour Lock sat at the kitchen table and talked with his wife and his daughter. Vika was shy with him, but relaxed as he quizzed her about school and England and her holidays. She and Marina looked deeply healthy. They had been to Cape Kolka in Latvia with Marina’s parents for three weeks. They had walked, and swum, and gathered berries. Vika had seen a buzzard. Marina had claimed to have seen an eagle, but Vika didn’t believe her. Lock remembered sitting in hunting blinds with his father-in-law; it had never really suited him.

“Daddy, when can you come on holiday with us?”

“Well,” said Lock, “perhaps you and I could go to Holland and see Opa. We could go at half-term.”

“Can you come too, Mummy?”

“We’ll see.”

They discussed Vika’s friends, and Marina’s parents, and Christmas arrangements. Lock would be in London for Christmas, he hoped. Marina cooked and tidied; Lock and Vika sat at the table. After her tea, Vika went to get ready for bed.

“Might you come again?” said Marina.

“I could. I have endless meetings with the lawyers. I may be here at the weekend as well. One night later in the week?”

“Don’t disappoint her, Richard. It’s getting harder to explain why you never see us.”

“I won’t.”

“Let’s set a day.”

“I can’t until I’ve seen the lawyer. I’ll know tomorrow.”

“All right. You’ll call?”

“I’ll call.”

Marina looked at him steadily and said, “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Things are good.”

“So no change?”

“Marina, come on.”

“Why don’t you move to London? I don’t miss Moscow. I’m ashamed to say it but I don’t. Not at all. You could be freer here.”

“It won’t work. You know that. He needs me where he can see me.”

“You know, I used to think Konstantin was the most wonderful man in the world. Like my father but more serious. Committed. I don’t understand what he’s become.”

Lock did not reply.

“What if you find a replacement?” said Marina. “For yourself?”

“What, put an ad in
Kommersant
? Monkey wanted for oligarch? Must be quiet and domesticated?”

“Please, Richard, don’t.”

Lock sighed and rested his head in his hands, rubbing his temples. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve sometimes thought the same myself. It won’t work.”

“But Dmitry managed it. Nina sent me an e-mail in the spring. They’re in Berlin and they’re happy. It’s like a new life.”

“Dmitry was different.” Lock shook his head. “He’d only been there for what—four years? Five? And Konstantin always preferred Grachev in any case. Part of the problem is he still likes me. But in the end we’ve been together too long. The balloon’s too high.”

Marina looked at him closely. Her silence meant that she didn’t concede that he was right but wouldn’t press her point. He was grateful to her for it.

Before he left, Lock read to Vika, lying next to her on her pink bed. He wondered whether he was making a good job of it: he wasn’t sure he was expressive enough. He was no actor. The book was about a Palestinian girl who longed to play football for her country; it seemed very grown up. It was cool in Vika’s room, and safe, and he wanted to fall asleep next to her and never leave.

By the time he said good-bye to Marina it was almost night outside; from the landing he could see the oaks in the park full and black against the dark blue of the sky.

“Look,” he said. “You’re right. Sod the lawyers. Let’s go away at the weekend. We could go to that place in Bath. The three of us.”

Marina crossed her arms. “No, Richard. That’s too much.”

“Vika would love it.”

“Until she came home.” She shook her head. “It isn’t right. And anyway she has dance on Saturdays.”

Lock’s smile was disappointed. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down, turning slightly as if to leave.

“You should come,” said Marina. “To watch her dance. She loves it.”

“When is it?”

“It’s at ten. Near the school.”

“On Saturday?”

“Saturday. It would mean more to her. Really.”

Lock nodded. He kissed Marina on the cheek, just once, and left.

T
HE NEXT DAY
K
ESLER,
in gray pinstripe, sat at the table, looking grave. Lock was eating a Bryson Joyce biscuit, sitting back in his chair, his right ankle resting on his left leg, his foot tapping impatiently in space.

He had spent the morning instructing a firm of investigators to take Tourna’s affairs apart. Kesler had decided that he should maintain a distance, and Lock had gone alone. He had used the firm before and was reassured by its air of secrecy and menace; rather Muscovite, he thought. It even had a portmanteau name that had a Russian ring: InvestSol Ltd.—Investigative Solutions. There were three partners: one had worked for MI5, one for Special Branch, and the other came with no obvious pedigree. Their office, in a large seventies block somewhere in Victoria, had the air of a slightly under-funded government department. All three partners had been present this morning, no doubt sensing a big assignment. Lock had told them what he wanted and they hadn’t told him much at all, but he knew that soon Tourna’s bank accounts, phone records, credit card statements, dustbins and medical history would be sifted through for signs of anything that looked like ammunition. When he got back to Moscow he would ask the Russians to look into Tourna’s Russian profile, perhaps see what they could get from Greek intelligence. He wasn’t sure the Londoners were up to that.

And now he was in an office on the twenty-first floor of a building near Moorgate, answering the many questions that Kesler was reading from a prepared list. There seemed to be several sheets and they were still on the first.

“So who ultimately owns Faringdon? Ultimately?” Kesler was looking down at his notes, searching them as if for an answer he knew was not there. Griffin, the associate, was to Kesler’s left, and another junior lawyer sat beyond him; Lock hadn’t caught his name. They were all taking notes.

“We’ve been through this,” said Lock.

“We have, and I apologize, but if I don’t understand it I can’t defend you, and at the moment I don’t.”

Lock breathed in deeply and let it out again, almost a sigh. As a lawyer himself he had always enjoyed telling other lawyers what to do, and over the years he had gotten used to it. He didn’t like this reversal, but more particularly he didn’t like to imagine the reasons for it. He wondered where Emily was. Was it Emily? Emma? On his previous visits, Kesler had always been accompanied by a pretty junior lawyer. Her absence no doubt indicated a shift in his status.

“I don’t really feel like the client here, Skip.”

“With respect, Richard, you’re not my client.”

“Faringdon’s your client. Whose signature’s on the engagement letter?”

“Yes. And my duty is to Faringdon, not necessarily to you—to the board and not the shareholder, to be precise.” Kesler held Lock’s eye for a moment. He looked over at his colleagues. “Lawrence, David, can you give us a moment?” Griffin hesitated. “Leave your things. Thank you.”