A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “So tell me who the fat old bastard is.”

  “Fat bastard?” Niki was thrown momentarily off balance.

  “The fat bastard with the paper beaker. An elderly fat bastard talked to our boy on the railway concourse. He wore a black seafarer’s cap. Am I the only person to have seen that fat bastard? I am not. Our boy talked back to the said elderly fat bastard. In what language did they talk? Russian? Chechen? Arabic? Latin? Ancient Greek? Or does our boy speak German and we don’t know it?”

  Maximilian again has his arm up. With his other hand he is clicking on footage of the elderly fat bastard, bringing him closer. He plays him in real time, then in slow motion: a bald, burly old man with a military bearing and cavalry boots, ceremoniously proffering a polystyrene or paper beaker. Something quaintly dignified, almost priestly about his gestures. And yes, the elderly fat bastard and our boy are definitely talking back and forth.

  “Now show me his wrist.”

  “Wrist?”

  “The boy’s,” Bachmann snapped. “The boy’s right wrist, for Christ’s sake, as he takes the coffee. Show it me close.”

  A fine bracelet, gold or silver. A tiny open book dangling from it.

  “Where’s Karl? I need Karl,” Bachmann shouts, swinging round and opening his arms as if he’s been robbed. But Karl is standing right before him: Karl the onetime street kid from Dresden with three juvenile convictions and a degree in social studies. Karl of the timid, help-me smile.

  “Go down to the railway station for me, please, Karl. Maybe the chance encounter between the elderly fat bastard and our boy was not chance. Maybe our boy was getting orders or meeting his connect. Or maybe we’re looking at a sad old guy whose best thing in life is giving beakers of coffee to handsome young bums in railway stations at two o’clock in the morning. Talk to the good people who run the mission there for down-and-outs. Ask them whether they know who was it gave our boy that beaker of something in the middle of the night. Maybe he’s a regular. Don’t show them any photographs or you’ll scare them. Use your sweet tongue and steer clear of the railway police. Have a nice fairy story at your fingertips. Maybe the fat old bastard is your long-lost uncle. Maybe you owe him money. Just don’t break any porcelain. Be quiet, be invisible, the way you can. Right?”

  “Clear.”

  Bachmann is addressing all of them—Niki, her friend Laura, a couple of street watchers who had followed Karl upstairs, Maximilian, Erna Frey:

  “So here’s where we are, my friends. We’re looking for a man who has no patronymic and no relationship with normality. His record tells us he’s a militant Chechen-Russian who does violent crime and bribes his way out of Turkish jail—and what the hell was he doing there anyway?—gives the slip to the Swedish port police, buys himself back onto the boat he comes off, smuggles himself out of Copenhagen docks, charters himself a lorry to Hamburg, accepts a beaker of refreshment from an elderly fat bastard whom he engages in conversation in Christ knows whose language, and wears a gold Koran bracelet. Such a man deserves our considerable respect. Amen?”

  Upon which, he stomps back to his office, closely followed as ever by Erna Frey.

  Were they married?

  In every known respect, Bachmann and Erna Frey were opposites, so perhaps they were. While Bachmann loathed exercise, smoked, swore, drank too much whisky and could settle to nothing if it wasn’t work, Erna Frey was tall, fit and frugal, with cropped, sensible hair and a purposeful stride. Saddled with the Christian name of a maiden aunt, and dispatched by wealthy parents to Hamburg’s elite convent school for daughters of the eminent, she had emerged laden with the strict German virtues of chastity, industry, piety, sincerity and honor—until a mordant sense of humor and a healthy skepticism put paid to all of them. Another woman might have traded her antiquated first name for a newer model. Not Erna. At tennis tournaments she sliced and volleyed her way to victory over opponents of both sexes. On alpine excursions she outstripped men half her age. Her greatest passion, however, was lone sailing, and she was known to be storing away every penny she earned to buy herself a round-the-world yacht.

  Yet at work, this ill-matched pair were husband and wife, sharing the same room, telephones, files, computers and each other’s smells and habits. When Bachmann in defiance of regulation lit up one of his odious Russian cigarettes, Erna Frey would cough demonstratively and fling open the windows. But there her protest ended. Bachmann could go on puffing till the room filled up like a fish smokery and she wouldn’t say another word. Did they sleep together? According to rumor, they had given sex a try and declared it a disaster area. Yet on nights when they were staying late, they had no hesitation in bunking down together in the cramped emergency bedroom at the end of the corridor.

  And when the fledgling team assembled for the first time in the hastily redecorated upper gallery of the stables that was their new home, to be welcomed by Bachmann’s favorite choice of Baden wine and Erna Frey’s home-cooked wild boar and red berries, the two of them together were so uxorious, interacting so intuitively and well, that it would have come as no surprise to their guests to see them holding hands: until, that is, the moment when Bachmann took it on himself to explain to his newly mustered troops just what the hell it was they had been put on earth to do. His address, by turn ribald and messianic, was part idiosyncratic history lesson and part call to battle. Inevitably, it came to be known as Bachmann’s Cantata. It ran as follows:

  “When 9/11 happened, there were two ground zeros,” he announced, addressing them now from one side of the gallery, now from the back, before popping up like a squat djinni beneath the rafters in front of them, hands punching out the words as he spoke them. “One ground zero was in New York. The other ground zero that you don’t hear so much about was right here in Hamburg.”

  He jabbed an arm at the window.

  “That courtyard out there was a hundred feet high in rubble, all of it paper. And our pathetic barons of the German intelligence community were raking through it trying to find out where the hell they’d gone so terribly wrong. We had geniuses from all over the hemisphere fly to this town to offer advice and cover their arses. Top protectors of our sacred constitution from Cologne, God protect us from protectors”—laughter, which he ignored—“espiocrats from our own distinguished foreign intelligence service, fine ladies and gentlemen from our omniscient Bundestag intelligence oversight committee, Americans from more agencies than I ever heard of—sixteen of them at last count—falling over each other to dump the shit on anybody’s doorstep but their own. I tell you: so many wise arseholes gave of their wisdom in those weeks that the poor bastards who were trying to run the shop and sweep up the rubble couldn’t help wishing they’d dropped by a few weeks earlier. That way there’d have been no Mohammed Atta and no howling monkeys from the media pissing on them.”

  He took a tour round the gallery, elbows out, fists clenched.

  “Hamburg screwed up. Everybody else had screwed up, but Hamburg took the fall.” He was buffooning, playing both sides of an imaginary press conference: “‘Sir, can you tell us, please: How many Arab speakers precisely does your organization have operating here in town at this time?’” he squawked, hopping to his left. “‘At last count, one and a half.’” Hopping to his right: “‘Sir, who precisely have you been bugging and following around town in the months leading up to Armageddon?’” Another hop: “‘Well, madam, now I come to think of it…a couple of Chinese gentlemen suspected of stealing our fine industrial secrets…adolescent neo-Nazis who paint swastikas on Jewish gravestones…the next generation of the Red Army Fraktion…oh, and twenty-eight geriatric ex-communists who want to bring back the dear old GDR.’”

  He vanished from view to resurface at the far end of the gallery, a somber man.

  “Hamburg is a guilty city,” he announced quietly. “Consciously, unconsciously. Maybe Hamburg even pulled those hijackers. Did they pick us? Or did we pick them? What signals does Hamburg send out to your average Islamist anti-Zionist te
rrorist bent on fucking up the Western world? Centuries of anti-Semitism? Hamburg has them. Concentration camps just up the road? Hamburg had them. All right, I’ll grant you: Hitler wasn’t born in Blankenese. But don’t think he couldn’t have been. The Baader-Meinhof gang? Ulrike Meinhof, born not far from here, was Hamburg’s proud adopted daughter. She even got herself Arab trained. Partied with their crazies and went hijacking with them. Maybe Ulrike was some kind of signal. Too many Arabs love Germans for the wrong reasons. Maybe our hijackers did. We never asked them. And now we never shall.”

  He let the silence last awhile, then seemed to take heart.

  “And then there’s the good news about Hamburg,” he resumed cheerfully. “We’re sea people. We’re a world-wise, liberal-left, wide-open city-state. We’re world-class traders with a world-class port and a world-class nose for profit. Our foreigners aren’t strangers to us. We’re not some one-horse inland town where foreigners look like Martians. They’re part of our landscape. For centuries, millions of Mohammed Atta lookalikes have drunk our beer, screwed our hookers and gone back on their ships. And we haven’t said hello and good-bye to them, or asked them what they’re doing here, because we take them for granted. We’re Germany, but we’re aside from Germany. We’re better than Germany. We’re Hamburg, but we’re also New York. Okay, we don’t have Twin Towers. But then neither does New York anymore. But we’re attractive. We still smell right to the wrong people.”

  Another silence while he weighed what he had just said. “But if we’re talking signals, I think I’d blame our newfound, arse-licking tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity. Because a guilty city making amends for its past sins—parading its inexhaustible, amazing, indiscriminate tolerance—well, that’s a signal of a kind too. It’s practically an invitation to come and test us out.”

  He was homing in on his pet subject, the one they were all waiting for, the reason they had been dragged out of Berlin or Munich and relegated to a run-down SS stables in Hamburg. He was chafing against the dismal failure of Western intelligence services—and the German service most of all—to recruit a single decent live source against the Islamist target.

  “You think everything changed after 9/11?” he demanded, furious with them, or himself. “You think that on 9/12, our fine foreign intelligence service, fired by a global vision of the terror threat, put on their kaffiyehs and went down to the souks of Aden and Mogadishu and Cairo and Baghdad and Kandahar and bought themselves a little retail information about where and when the next bomb would go off and who would be pushing the button? Okay, we all know the bad joke: you can’t buy an Arab, but you can rent one. We couldn’t even rent one, for fuck’s sake! With a couple of noble exceptions I won’t bore you with, we had shit for live sources then. And we have shit for live sources now.

  “Oh sure, we had any number of gallant German journalists and businessmen and aid workers on our payroll, and even some who weren’t German, but only too happy to sell us their industrial waste for an untaxable second income. But they’re not live sources. They’re not venal, disenchanted, radical imams, or Islamist kids halfway to the bomb belt. They’re not Osama’s sleepers, or his talent spotters, or his couriers or his quartermasters or paymasters, not even at fifty removes. They’re just nice dinner guests.”

  He waited till the laughter had subsided.

  “And when we woke up to what we hadn’t got, we couldn’t find it.”

  We, they noticed. We in Beirut. We in Mogadishu and Aden. The Bachmann royal we. Bachmann had found live sources, real ones, good ones, all the secret world said so. Bought them or rented them, who cared? But perhaps he had lost them too. Or perhaps security obliged him to disown them.

  “We thought we could charm them across the line to us. We thought we could lure them with our good faces and fat wallets. We sat in car parks all fucking night, waiting for high-level defectors to get into the backseat and cut a deal with us. Nobody showed up. We trawled the airwaves to break their codes. They hadn’t got any fucking codes. Why not? Because we weren’t fighting the Cold War anymore. We were fighting off-cuts of a nation called Islam with a population of one and a half billion and a passive infrastructure to match. We thought we could do it the way we’d done it before, and we were plain, stupid, fucking wrong.”

  His anger subsided as he allowed himself a diversion. “Listen. I’ve been there,” he confided. “Before I worked the Arab target, I played games with my Soviet opposite numbers. I bought people and sold them. I doubled and redoubled joes till I couldn’t see up my own arse. But nobody sawed my head off. Nobody blew up my wife and children while they were sunbathing in Bali or riding to school on a train to Madrid or London. The rules had changed. Our problem was, we hadn’t,” he ended with a snap, and strode off to another part of the gallery to announce another switch of mood.

  “And even after 9/11, our beloved Fatherland—forgive me, Heimat—was immune, of course it was!” he declared with a hoot of bitter laughter. “We Germans could go naked anywhere! Still! Nobody would touch us because we were so wonderfully German and immune. Okay, we’d harbored a few Islamist terrorists, and a trio of them had gone off and blown up the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. So what? It was what they’d come here to do, and they’d done it. Problem solved. They’d struck at the heart of the Great Satan, and they’d killed themselves in the process. We were their launchpad, for Christ’s sake, not their target! Why should we worry? So we lit candles for the poor Americans. And we prayed for the poor Americans. And we showed them a lot of free solidarity. But I don’t need to tell you there were plenty of arseholes around in this country who didn’t mind too much about Fortress America getting a dose of its own medicine, and some of those arseholes were sitting quite high up in Berlin, and still are. And when the Iraq war came along, and we good Germans stayed aloof from it, that made us even more immune. Madrid happened. Okay. London happened. Okay. But no Berlin, no Munich, no Hamburg. We were too fucking immune for any of it.”

  Selecting a corner of the gallery he spoke diagonally at them in a more confiding voice.

  “But there were two tiny problems, my friends. The first tiny problem was that Germany was providing America with five-star military bases under leftover treaties from the days when they owned us because they’d defeated us. Remember the fine black banner that our elected masters hung on the Brandenburg gate? We mourn along with you. It didn’t arrive there by mistake. The second tiny problem was our unflinching, unqualified, guilt-ridden support for the State of Israel. We supported them against the Egyptians, the Syrians and the Palestinians. Against Hamas and Hezbollah. And when Israel bombed the living shit out of Lebanon, we Germans duly consulted our unquiet consciences and talked only about how gallant little Israel could be defended. And we sent our gallant little boys in uniform to Lebanon to do exactly that—which did not endear us to those Lebanese and other Arabs who felt we had hastened to the protection of a bully on the rampage who was acting with the permission and encouragement of Messrs. Bush, Blair and several other brave world statesmen who, for reasons of modesty, preferred that their names not be included in the roll of honor.

  “And the next damn thing we knew, there were a couple of Lebanese bombs on our German railway system that, if they’d gone off, would have made London and Madrid look like a rehearsal for the real thing. After that, even our own politicians accepted there was a price to be paid for giving the finger to the Americans in public and kissing their arses in private. German cities were victims-in-waiting. And that’s how they are tonight.”

  He scanned the room, studying their faces one by one. Maximilian’s hand had gone up, registering an objection. So had Niki’s next to him. Others followed. This pleased him, and he smiled broadly.

  “Okay. Don’t bother to say it. You’re telling me that those Lebanese guys who planted the bombs didn’t even know about the latest wreck of Lebanon when they started their plotting, is that right?”

  The hands went down. It was right.

&n
bsp; “They were pissed off by a couple of very bad Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that some German newspapers reprinted because they thought they were being brave and setting us free, okay?”

  Okay.

  “So am I wrong? No, I am not wrong! What pulled their triggers doesn’t matter a fuck. What does matter is, the threat we are dealing with doesn’t see the difference between personal and collective guilt. It doesn’t say: ‘You’re good and I’m good, and Erna here is no good at all.’ It says: ‘You’re all a bunch of no-good apostates and blasphemers and murderers and fornicators and God-haters, so fuck the lot of us.’ For those guys, and all the guys we’d like to meet who share their perceptions, it’s the western hemisphere versus Islam, and no stops between.”

  And then he went to the heart of it.

  “The sources that we newly assembled pariahs here in Hamburg will be looking for have to be conjured into life. They don’t know they exist till we tell them. They won’t come to us. We find them. We stay small. We stay on the street. We do detail, not grand vision. We have no preconceived target to direct them at. We find a man, we develop him, we see what he’s got, and we take him as far as he’ll go. Or woman. We work the people nobody else reaches. The baggy little guys from the mosques who speak three words of German. We befriend them and befriend their friends. We watch for the quiet incomer, the invisible nomad on his way to somewhere who is passed from house to house and mosque to mosque.

  “We comb the undead files of Herr Arni Mohr and his fellow protectors across the courtyard, we revisit old cases that started with a flourish and fizzled out when the prospect took fright or resettled in another town where the local outstation was so fucking dumb it didn’t know how to handle him and didn’t want to. We ignore the protests of our hosts, and we track these former prospects down. We take their temperature again. We make the weather.”

  He had one last word of caution, though it too was typically anarchic.