A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  But Brue had taken prior counsel from the Viennese chief of police, who happened also to be a Frères client. On the policeman’s advice, he meekly consented to a swingeing sum of hush-money while Vienna’s plainclothes detectives recorded the conversation from a nearby table.

  This time round, however, he had no chief of police on his side. The intended target was not a client, but himself.

  In the great hall of the Atlantic, as in the street outside, it was rush hour. From his vantage point Brue observed at his supposed ease the arriving and departing guests. Some wore furs and boas, some the funereal uniform of the modern executive, others the torn jeans of millionaire hobos.

  A procession of elderly men in dinner jackets and women in sequined ball dresses emerged from an inner corridor, led by a page boy pushing a trolley of bouquets wrapped in cellophane. Somebody rich and old is having a birthday, thought Brue, and wondered for a moment whether it was one of his clients and had Frau Elli sent a bottle? Probably no older than me, he thought bravely.

  Did people really think of him as old? Probably they did. His first wife, Sue, used to complain that he had been born old. Well, sixty had always been in the contract, if you were lucky enough to get there. What was it Georgie had once said to him, when she started going Buddhist? “The cause of death is birth.”

  He glanced at his gold wristwatch, a gift from Edward Amadeus on his twenty-first. In two minutes she’ll be late, but lawyers and bankers are never late; nor, he presumed, are blackmailers.

  On the other side of the swing doors a mistral was gusting down the street. The top-hatted doorman’s cloak flapped like useless wings as he scurried from one limousine to another. A dramatic rainstorm broke as cars and people vanished in a milky mist. Out of it, like the sole survivor of an avalanche, stepped a small, stocky figure in shapeless clothes and a scarf wound round her head and neck. For an appalled moment Brue fancied she had slung a child across her shoulders, until he realized it was a man-sized rucksack.

  She mounted the steps, let the swing doors take her, stepped into the lobby and stopped. She was holding up the passage of people behind her but if she knew, she didn’t care. She removed her rain-spotted spectacles, pulled an end of the scarf from the depths of her anorak, polished the spectacles and replaced them on her nose. Herr Schwarz addressed her, she gave him a curt nod. Both peered in Brue’s direction. Herr Schwarz made to escort her, but she shook her head. Shifting her rucksack to one shoulder, she advanced on him between the tables, eyes fixed straight ahead of her, ignoring the other guests on her way.

  No makeup, not a square inch of flesh from the throat down, Brue recorded as he rose to greet her. Firm, fluid movement of a small, capable body inside the frumpish gear. A bit martial, but women these days were. Round spectacles, frameless, catching the chandeliers. No blink rate. Child’s skin. About thirty years younger than me and a foot shorter, but blackmailers come in all sizes and get a little younger every day. A choirboy face to go with the choirboy voice. No visible accomplice. Navy blue jeans, army boots. A pocket beauty in disguise. Tough but vulnerable; hellbent on concealing her female warmth and not succeeding. Georgie.

  “Frau Richter? Marvelous. I’m Tommy Brue. What can I get for you?”

  The hand so small that he instinctively relaxed his grasp.

  “Do they have water here?” she asked, glowering up at him through her spectacles.

  “Of course.” He beckoned a waiter. “Did you walk?”

  “Cycled. Still, please. No lemon. Room temperature.”

  She sat opposite him, upright at the center of her leather throne, hands braced against its arms, knees tight together and her rucksack at her feet while she studied him: first his hands, then his gold watch and his shoes, then his eyes, but only briefly. She seemed to see nothing that surprised her. And Brue in return subjecting her to an equally searching inspection, if a more furtive one: the tutored way she sipped her water, elbow in, forearm across the upper body; her self-confidence in the rich surroundings that she appeared determined to disapprove of; her covert air of breeding; the hidden stylist who can’t quite hide.

  She had removed her headscarf to reveal a woolen beret. An errant hank of gold-brown hair hung across her brow. She returned it to captivity before taking a pull of water and resuming her inspection of him. Her eyes, enlarged by the spectacles, were gray-green and unflinching. Honey-flecked, he remembered: Where had he read that? In one of the dozen novels always at Mitzi’s bedside. A small, high bosom, deliberately illegible.

  Brue extracted a calling card from a pocket in the blue silk lining of his Randall’s jacket and, with his courteous smile, handed it to her across the table.

  “Why Frères?” she demanded. No rings, fingernails childishly short.

  “It was my great-grandfather’s idea.”

  “Was he French?”

  “I’m afraid not. He just wanted to be,” Brue replied, trotting out his stock answer. “He was Scottish. A lot of Scots feel closer to France than England.”

  “Did he have brothers?”

  “No. Neither do I, I’m afraid.”

  She ducked to her rucksack, unzipped a compartment and then another. Over her shoulder, Brue noted in fast order: paper tissues, a bottle of contact lens lotion, a cell phone, keys, a legal pad, credit cards and a buff file flagged and numbered like a barrister’s brief. No identifiable tape recorder or microphone, but with the technology these days, how could you be sure? And anyway, under that garb, she could be wearing a twenty-five-pound bomb belt.

  She handed him a card.

  SANCTUARY NORTH, Brue read. A Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany. Offices in the east of town. Phone and fax numbers, e-mail. Commerzbank account number. Have a quiet word with their city manager on Monday if I need to, check her credit rating. Annabel Richter, Legal Counsel. Never believe a beautiful woman, Tommy. They’re a criminal class, the best there is. His father’s words, coming back to haunt him.

  “You’d better take a look at this too,” she said, thrusting an identity card at him.

  “Oh come, why should I do that?” he protested, although the same thought had occurred to him.

  “Maybe I’m not who I say I am.”

  “Really? Who else might you be?”

  “Some of my clients get people coming to them claiming to be lawyers when they’re not.”

  “How shocking. My goodness. I do hope that never happens to me. Well, of course, it may have done, mayn’t it? And I wouldn’t know. Awful thought,” he declared with false levity, but if he expected her to join him in it, he was disappointed.

  Her photograph showed her with her hair let down, older spectacles and the same face without the glower. Annabel Richter born Freiburg im Breisgau, 1977, which made her about as young as she could be for a German lawyer, if that was what she was. She had slumped back in her chair like a boxer relaxing between rounds, while continuing to watch him through her granny spectacles down the line of her bulked-out, buttoned-down, prim little body.

  “Heard of us?” she demanded.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Sanctuary North. Have you heard of our work? Has word of it reached you at all?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Slowly shaking her head, she gazed round the lobby in disbelief. At the elderly couples in their finery. At the raucous young rich in the bar. At the house pianist playing love songs nobody was listening to.

  “And your charity is financed by whom?” Brue inquired in his most practical tone.

  She shrugged. “Couple of churches. State of Hamburg when it’s feeling virtuous. We get by.”

  “And how long have you been in business—your organization, I mean?”

  “We’re not in business. We’re pro bono. Five years.”

  “And you yourself?”

  “Two. Give or take”

  “Full-time? You have no other practice?” Meaning, Are you moonlig
hting? Are you doing a bit of blackmail on the side?

  She had tired of his questioning.

  “I have a client, Mr. Brue. Officially he’s represented by Sanctuary North. However, as of a short time ago he has formally empowered me as his personal lawyer in all matters relating to your bank, and given his consent for me to get in touch with you. Which I am now doing.”

  “Consent?” His screwed-on smile widening.

  “Instructions. What’s the difference? As I indicated to you on the phone, my client’s situation in Hamburg is sensitive. There are limits to what he is willing to tell me, also limits to what I am able to tell you. My belief, after spending a number of hours in his company, is that the little he tells me is true. Not all the truth, but maybe a small part of it, edited for my consumption, but true all the same. That’s a judgment we have to make in my organization. We have to be content with the little we get and work with it. We’d rather be fooled than cynical. That’s who we are. That’s what we stand for,” she added defiantly, leaving Brue with the unspoken accusation that he would prefer things the other way round.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he assured her. “I respect it.” He was fencing. He knew how to do that.

  “Our clients are not what you would consider normal clients, Mr. Brue.”

  “Really? I’m not at all sure I’ve met a normal client.” A joke that she again refused to share.

  “Our clients are basically more like what Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth. You know the book?”

  “Heard of, but not actually read, I’m afraid.”

  “They’re effectively stateless. They’re frequently in trauma. They’re as frightened of us as they are of the world they have entered and the world they have left behind.”

  “I see.” He didn’t.

  “My client believes, rightly or wrongly, that you are his salvation, Mr. Brue. You’re why he came to Hamburg. Thanks to you, he will be able to remain in Germany, obtain legal status and study. Without you he will return to hell.”

  Brue considered an “Oh dear” or a “How very sad” but meeting her unyielding gaze, thought better of it.

  “He believes he has only to mention Mr. Lipizzaner and present you with a certain reference number—referencing who or what I do not know, and perhaps he doesn’t either—and abracadabra, all doors will be open to him.”

  “May I ask how long he has been here?”

  “Call it a couple of weeks.”

  “And he took this long to get in touch with me, although I was the reason for his coming, allegedly? I find that a little hard to understand.”

  “He arrived here in bad shape and terrified, not knowing a single human being. It’s his first time in the West. He speaks no word of German.”

  He started to say “I see” again, but changed his mind.

  “Also, for reasons I cannot begin to unravel, he detests the fact that this approach to you is in any way necessary. Half the time at least, he would prefer to remain in denial and starve. Unfortunately, given his situation here, you’re his only chance.”

  It was Brue’s turn, but for what? When you’re in a hole, don’t dig, Tommy, just put up more defenses. His father again.

  “Forgive me, Frau Richter,” he began respectfully, though in no way conceding he had done anything requiring her forgiveness. “Who or what precisely gave your client the information—the impression, I prefer to say—that my bank could perform this miracle for him?”

  “It’s not only the bank, Mr. Brue. It’s you personally.”

  “I’m afraid I’m somewhat puzzled as to how that can be. I was asking you about the source of his information.”

  “Maybe a lawyer told him. Another of us,” she added self-deprecatingly.

  He selected a different approach. “And in what language, may I ask, did you elicit this information from your client?”

  “About Mr. Lipizzaner?”

  “About other things too. My name, for one.”

  Her young face was hard as rock. “My client would say your question was immaterial.”

  “May I ask whether there were intermediaries present when he instructed you? A qualified interpreter, for instance? Or are you able to communicate with him directly?”

  The hank of hair had once more escaped her beret, but this time she grabbed hold of it and twisted it while she scowled round the room. “Russian,” she said—and with a sudden surge of interest in him: “Do you speak Russian?”

  “Tolerably. Quite well, actually,” he replied.

  The admission seemed to trigger some kind of female self-awareness in her, for she smiled and, for the first time, faced him directly.

  “Where did you learn it?”

  “I? Oh, Paris, I’m afraid. Very decadent.”

  “Paris! Why Paris?”

  “Sent there by my father. It was something he insisted on. Three years at the Sorbonne and a lot of bearded émigré poets. How about you?”

  The moment of connection had passed. She was delving in her rucksack. “He’s given me a reference,” she said. “Some special number that will chime Mr. Lipizzaner’s bells. Maybe it chimes yours too.”

  She ripped a page off her legal pad and gave it to him. Six digits, handwritten, he assumed by herself. Beginning with 77, which was how Lipizzaners were denoted.

  “Does it fit?” she demanded, challenging him with her unforgiving stare.

  “Does what fit what?”

  “Is the number I have just given you a reference in use at Brue Frères Bank? Or is it not?” As if addressing a recalcitrant child.

  Brue considered her question—or more accurately, how to avoid it. “Well now, Frau Richter, you place heavy emphasis on client confidentiality as I do,” he began easily. “My bank doesn’t broadcast the identity of its customers, or the nature of their transactions. I’m sure you respect that. We disclose nothing we’re not obliged to disclose in law. If you say Mr. Lipizzaner to me, I hear you. If you quote a reference number to me, I consult our records.” He paused to allow some acknowledgment but her face was set in resolute opposition. “You yourself, I am sure, are as honest as the day,” he went on. “Of course you are. However, you’d be surprised how many tricksters there are in the world.” He signaled to the waiter.

  “He’s not a trickster, Mr. Brue.”

  “Of course not. He’s your client.”

  They were standing. Who had stood first, he didn’t know. Probably she had. He hadn’t expected their meeting to be so short and, despite the chaos raging in him, he found himself wishing it were longer. “I’ll call you when I’ve completed my researches. How’s that?”

  “When?”

  “It depends. If I draw a blank, then very little time at all.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Are you going back to your bank now?”

  “Why not? If it’s a compassionate situation, as you seem to suggest, one does what one can. Obviously. We all do.”

  “He’s drowning. All you have to do is hold out your hand.”

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid that’s a cry I hear rather often in my profession.”

  His tone sparked her anger. “He trusts you,” she said.

  “How can he, if we’ve never met?”

  “All right, he doesn’t trust you. But his father did. And you’re all he’s got.”

  “Well, it’s very confusing. For both of us, I’m sure.”

  Shouldering her rucksack, she marched off down the lobby to the swing doors. On the other side of them, the top-hatted doorman was waiting with her bicycle. The rain was still pelting down. She extracted a shell hat from the wooden box strapped to the handlebars, set it on her head, buckled it, then pulled on a pair of waterproof trousers. Without a glance or wave, she was gone.

  The Frères strong room lay in a semi-basement at the back of the building. Twelve feet by eight were the dimensions, and there had been bad jokes with the architect about how many defaulting creditors it
could contain, hence its house nickname of oubliette. With the advance of modern technology, other private banks might have dispensed altogether with archives and even strong rooms, but Frères carried its history on its back and here was what remained of it, shipped by secure lorry from Vienna and laid to rest in a white-painted brick mausoleum pulsing with dehumidifiers and guarded by consoles of lights and digits that required a code, a thumbprint and a couple of soothing words. The insurance company had urged iris recognition, but something in Brue had revolted.

  Once inside, he picked his way down an alley of musty safe boxes to a steel cabinet perched against the end wall. Entering a code, he opened it and worked through the hanging folders until, consulting the page torn from Annabel Richter’s notebook, he found the folder he was looking for. It was colored a faded orange and held together by clips of sprung metal. A panel on its spine gave the reference but no name. By the sallow glow of the ceiling lights he turned the pages at an even speed, not so much reading as scanning them. Again groping inside the cabinet, he emerged this time with a shoebox of dog-eared cards. He flicked through them and extracted the card that bore the same reference as the file.

  KARPOV, he read. Grigori Borisovich, Colonel Red Army. 1982. Founder Member.

  Your vintage year, he thought. My poisoned chalice. Never heard of a Karpov, but I wouldn’t have done, would I? The Lipizzaners were your private stable.

  “All movements on this account and all client instructions to be reported immediately and personally to EAB before any action is taken. Edward Amadeus Brue,” he read.

  Personally to you. Russian crooks being your personal preserve. Lesser crooks—investment managers, insurance brokers, banking colleagues—may sit in the waiting room for half an hour and end up settling for the chief cashier, but Russian crooks, on your personal orders, go direct to EAB.

  Not printed. Not rubber-stamped by Frau Elli, at that time your young, devoted and very private secretary, but hand-inscribed by you in fine blue strokes of your ubiquitous fountain pen, ending with your signature in full, lest the casual reader—not, God knows, that there ever was one—happened to be unaware that EAB stood for Edward Amadeus Brue, OBE, the banker who throughout his life never bent the rules, until the end of it, when he broke them all.