A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  She thrust a writing block into Brue’s hands. One sergeant, one constable, names supplied. Not knowing what to do with it, he rose and showed it to Annabel, who handed it back to Leyla beside her.

  “They waited till Mother was alone in the house,” Melik put in from the door. “I had a swimming date with the team. Two-hundred-meter relay.”

  Brue offered a nod of earnest sympathy. It was a long time since he had attended a meeting where he was not in charge.

  “An old one and a young one,” Leyla said, resuming her complaint. “Issa was in the attic, thanks be to God. When he heard the doorbell, he pulled up the steps and closed the trapdoor. He’s been up there ever since. He says they come back. They pretend they’ve gone away, then they come back and deport you.”

  “They’re just doing their job,” Annabel said. “They’re visiting people all across the Turkish community. They’re calling it outreach.”

  “First they said it was about my son’s Islamic sports club, then it was about my daughter’s wedding in Turkey next month, and are we sure we’re entitled to return to Germany afterwards? ‘Of course we’re sure!’ I said. ‘Not if you obtained German residence on humanitarian grounds,’ they said. ‘That was twenty years ago!’ I told them.”

  “Leyla, you’re upsetting yourself unnecessarily,” Annabel said sternly. “It’s a hearts-and-minds operation to separate decent Muslims from the few bad apples, that’s all it is. Calm down.”

  Was the choirboy voice a notch too sure of itself? Brue suspected that it was.

  “You want to hear something funny?” Melik asked Brue, his expression anything but humorous. “You’re going to help him, so maybe you should hear this. He’s not like any Muslim I ever met. He may be a believer, but he doesn’t think like a Muslim, he doesn’t act like a Muslim.”

  His mother snapped at him in Turkish, but to no avail.

  “When he was weak—all right?—when he was lying in my bed, recovering? I read him verses from the Koran. My father’s copy. In Turkish. Then he wanted to read it for himself. In Turkish. He knew enough to recognize the holy words, he said. So I go to the table where I keep it—open, okay?—I say Bismillah, the way my father taught me—I made like I was going to kiss it but I didn’t, he taught me that too, I just touched it with my forehead, and I gave it into his hands. ‘Here you are, Issa,’ I said. ‘Here’s my dad’s Koran. Reading it in bed is not how you should do it normally, but you’re sick, so maybe it’s okay.’ When I come back into the room an hour later, where is it? Lying on the floor. My dad’s copy of the Koran and it’s lying on the floor. For any decent Muslim, never mind my dad, that’s unthinkable! So I thought: All right. I’m not angry. He’s sick and it fell from his grasp when he had no strength. I forgive him. It’s right to be generous-hearted. But when I yelled at him, he just reached down and picked it up—with one hand only, not two—and gave it me like it was”—at first he could find no suitable comparison—“like it was any book in a shop! Who would do that? Nobody! Whether he’s Chechen or Turkish or Arab or—I mean, he’s my brother, all right? I love the man. He’s a true hero. But on the floor. One hand. Without a prayer. Without anything.”

  Leyla had heard enough.

  “Who are you to bad-mouth your brother, Melik?” she snapped at him, also in German for the benefit of her audience. “Playing dirty rap music all night in your bedroom! What d’you think your father would make of that?”

  From the direction of the hall Brue heard cautious feet descending a rickety ladder.

  “Plus he took my sister’s photograph and put it in his room,” Melik said. “Just took it. In my dad’s time I should kill him or something. He’s my brother but he’s weird.”

  The choirboy voice of Annabel Richter took command.

  “You’ve missed your baking day, Leyla,” she said with a meaningful glance towards the frosted screen that separated the kitchen area from the drawing room.

  “That’s their fault.”

  “Then why don’t you do some baking now?” Annabel suggested calmly. “That way the neighbors will know you’ve nothing to hide.” She turned to Melik, who had taken up a position at the side of the window. “It’s nice that you’re keeping watch. Please continue to do that. If the doorbell goes, whoever they are, they can’t come in. Tell them you’re having a conference with your sports promoters. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “If it’s the police again, they must either come another time or speak to me.”

  “He’s not a real Chechen either. He just pretends to be,” Melik said.

  The door opened and a silhouette as tall as Melik’s but half his width advanced by slow steps into the room. Brue stood up, his banker’s smile aloft and his banker’s hand outstretched. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Annabel was also standing, but had not come forward.

  “Issa, this is the gentleman you have asked to meet,” Annabel said in classic Russian. “I am confident that he is who he says he is. He has come specially to see you tonight, at your request, and he has told nobody. He speaks Russian and needs to ask you some important questions. We are all grateful to him and I am sure that, for your own sake and for the sake of Leyla and Melik, you will cooperate with him all you can. I shall be listening, and representing your interests whenever I consider it necessary.”

  Issa had drawn up at the center of Leyla’s gold carpet, arms to his sides, awaiting orders. When none came, he lifted his head, placed his right hand over his heart and fixed Brue with an adoring look.

  “Thank you most respectfully, sir,” he murmured, through lips that seemed to smile despite him. “I am privileged, sir. You are a good man, as I have been assured. It is visible in your features and your beautiful clothes. You have also a beautiful limousine?”

  “Well, a Mercedes.”

  For reasons of ceremony or self-protection, Issa had donned his black overcoat and slung his camel-skin bag over his shoulder. He had shaved. The two weeks of Leyla’s motherly attentions had smoothed the crevices in his cheeks, giving him, to Brue’s eye, a seraphic unreality: This pretty slip of a boy has been tortured? For a moment, Brue believed none of him. The radiant smile, the stilted style of speech, too flowery by half, the air of false composure, were all the classic equipment of an imposter. But then as they sat down to face each other at Leyla’s table, Brue saw the film of sweat on Issa’s forehead, and when he looked lower he saw that his hands had remet each other, wrist-to-wrist on the table, as though waiting to be chained. He saw the fine gold chain round his wrist, and the talismanic golden Koran hanging from it to protect him. And he knew that he was looking at a destroyed child.

  But he remained master of his feelings. Should he count himself inferior to somebody merely because that somebody has been tortured? Must he suspend judgment for the same reason? A point of principle was involved here.

  “Well now, and welcome,” he began brightly, in a carefully well-learned Russian, curiously comparable with Issa’s own. “I gather we have little time. So we must be brief but we must be effective. I may call you Issa?”

  “Agreed, sir.” The smile again, followed by a glance for Melik at his window and a dropping of the eyes away from Annabel, who had taken up a place in the far corner of the room, where she sat sideways, with a folder set chastely on her averted knees.

  “And you will call me nothing,” said Brue. “I believe that is agreed. Yes?”

  “It is agreed, sir,” Issa responded with alacrity. “All your wishes are agreed! You permit me to make a statement, please?”

  “Of course.”

  “It will be short!”

  “Please.”

  “I wish only to be a medical student. I wish to live a life of order and assist all mankind for the glory of Allah.”

  “Yes, well, that’s very admirable and I’m sure we shall come to that,” said Brue and, as a sign of his businesslike intentions, drew a leather-backed notepad from one inside pocket, and a gold roller-ball pen from anot
her. “But meanwhile, let’s get down a few elementary facts, if you don’t mind. Starting with your full names.”

  But this evidently wasn’t what Issa wanted to hear.

  “Sir!”

  “Yes, Issa.”

  “You have read the work of the great French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre, sir?”

  “I can’t say I have.”

  “Like Sartre, I have a nostalgia for the future. When I have a future, I shall have no past. I shall have only God and my future.”

  Brue felt Annabel’s eyes on him. When he couldn’t see them, he still felt them. Or thought he did.

  “However, tonight we are obliged to address the present,” he countered glossily. “So why don’t you just let me have your full names?”—pen poised to receive them.

  “Salim,” Issa answered after a moment’s indecision.

  “Any others?”

  “Mahmoud.”

  “So Issa Salim Mahmoud.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And are those your given names or names that you have chosen for yourself?”

  “They are chosen of God, sir.”

  “Quite so.” Brue smiled to himself deliberately, partly to ease the tension, partly to show he was in command. “Then let me ask you this one, may I? We are talking Russian. You are Russian. Before God chose your present names, did you have a Russian name? And a Russian patronymic to go with it? What names, for example, might one find on your birth certificate, I wonder?”

  Having consulted Annabel with lowered eyes, Issa plunged a skeletal hand inside his overcoat, then his shirtfront, and drew out a grimy purse of chamois leather. And from it two faded press cuttings, which he passed across the table.

  “Karpov,” Brue ruminated aloud when he had read them. “Karpov is who? Karpov is your family name? Why do you give me these pieces of newspaper?”

  “It is not material, sir. Please. I cannot,” Issa muttered, shaking his sweated head. His hands had rejoined each other. His long thin fingers were fondling the gold Koran at his wrist.

  “Well, for me I’m afraid it is material,” Brue said, as kindly as he was able without relinquishing the upper hand. “I’m afraid it’s very material indeed. Are you telling me that Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov is, or was, a relative of yours? Is that what you are telling me?” He turned to Annabel, whom in his mind he had been addressing all along. “This is really rather difficult, Frau Richter,” he complained in German, starting stiffly, then instinctively moderating his tone. “If your client has a claim to make, he must either say who he is and make it, or withdraw, surely. He can’t expect me to play both sides of the net.”

  A moment of confusion intervened while from the kitchen Leyla called something plaintive to Melik in Turkish, and Melik said something soothing in return.

  “Issa,” Annabel said when they had all settled again. “It is my professional opinion that, however painful it is to you, you should try to answer the gentleman’s question.”

  “Sir. As God is great, I wish only to live a life of order,” Issa repeated in a strangled voice.

  “All the same, I’m afraid I need an answer to my question.”

  “It is logically true that Karpov is my father, sir,” Issa confessed at last with a mirthless smile. “He did all that was necessary in nature to secure that title, I am sure. But I was never Karpov’s son. I am not now Karpov’s son. God willing, sir, I shall never in my life be Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov’s son.”

  “But Colonel Karpov is dead, it appears,” Brue pointed out, with more brutality than he intended, waving a hand towards the press cuttings lying on the table between them.

  “He is dead, sir, and God willing he is in hell and will remain in hell for all eternity.”

  “And before he died—at the time when you were born, I should rather say—what first name did he give you in addition to your patronymic, which is presumably Grigorevich?”

  Issa was hanging his head, rolling it from side to side.

  “He chose the purest,” he said, lifting his head and sneering at Brue in a knowing way.

  “Purest in what sense?”

  “Of all Russian names in the world, the most Russian. I was his Ivan, sir. His sweet little Ivan from Chechnya.”

  Never one to allow a bad moment to fester, Brue decided on a change of topic.

  “I understand you came here from Turkey. By an informal route, shall we say?” Brue suggested, in the sort of cheery tone he might have used at a cocktail party. Leyla, contrary to Annabel’s instructions, had returned from the kitchen area.

  “I was in Turkish prison, sir.” He had unfastened the gold bracelet he was wearing and was holding it in his hand, agitating it while he spoke.

  “And for how long, if I may ask?”

  “One hundred and eleven and a half days exactly, sir. In Turkish prison, there is every incentive to study the arithmetic of time,” Issa exclaimed, with a harsh, unearthly laugh. “And before Turkey I was in prison in Russia, you see! Actually in three prisons, for an aggregate period of eight hundred and fourteen days and seven hours. If you wish, I will list my prisons for you in their order of quality,” he ran on wildly, his voice rising in lyrical insistence. “I am quite a connoisseur, I assure you, sir! There was one prison so popular they had to split it in three pieces. Oh yes! In one part we slept, in another we were tortured and in the third part there was a hospital for us to recover. The torture was efficient, and after torture one sleeps well, but unfortunately the hospital was substandard. That is a problem with our modern Russian state, I would say! The nurses were qualified in sleep deprivation but noticeably deficient in other medical skills. Permit me an observation, sir. To be a good torturer, it is extremely necessary to be of a compassionate disposition. Without a fellow feeling for one’s subject, one cannot ascend to the true heights of the art. I have encountered only one or two who are in the top class.”

  Brue waited for a moment in case there was more, but Issa, his dark eyes wide with excitement, was waiting on Brue. And yet again it was Leyla who inadvertently succeeded in breaking the tension. Troubled by Issa’s state of emotional excitement, if unable to understand its cause, she scurried back to the kitchen and fetched a glass of cordial, which she placed before him on the table, while fixing first Brue and then Annabel with a reproachful scowl.

  “And may one ask why you were in prison in the first place?” Brue resumed.

  “Oh yes, sir! Please ask! You are most welcome,” Issa cried, now with the recklessness of a condemned scholar speaking from the scaffold. “To be a Chechen is crime enough, sir, I assure you. We Chechen are born extremely guilty. Ever since czarist times, our noses have been culpably flat and our hair and skin criminally dark. This is an enduring offense to public order, sir!”

  “But your nose is not flat, if I may say so.”

  “To my regret, sir.”

  “But one way or another you made it to Turkey, and from Turkey you escaped,” Brue suggested soothingly. “And came all the way to Hamburg. That was quite an achievement, surely.”

  “It was the will of Allah.”

  “But with some assistance from yourself, I suspect.”

  “If a man has money, sir, as you will know better than I, everything is possible.”

  “Ah, but whose money?” Brue demanded archly, darting in swiftly now that money was in the air. “Who provided the money to pay for your many brilliant escapes, I wonder?”

  “I would say, sir”—Issa replied after prolonged soul searching, in which Brue half expected the answer to be Allah again—“I would say his name is very likely to be Anatoly.”

  “Anatoly?” Brue repeated, after allowing the name to resonate in his head—and in some distant chamber of his late father’s past.

  “Anatoly is correct, sir. Anatoly is the man who pays for everything. But especially for escapes. You know this man, sir?” he interjected eagerly. “He is a friend of yours?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  �
��For Anatoly, money is the purpose of all life. And death too, I would say.”

  Brue was on the point of pursuing this when Melik spoke up from his post at the window.

  “They’re still there,” he growled in German, peering through the edge of the curtain. “Those two old women. They’re not interested in the jewelry anymore. One’s reading the notices in the window of the pharmacist’s shop, the other’s in a doorway talking on her mobile. They’re too ugly to be hookers, even for round here.”

  “It’s just two ordinary women,” Annabel retorted sternly, going to the window and looking out, while Leyla cupped her hands before her face and closed her eyes in supplication. “You’re being dramatic, Melik.”

  But this was not good enough for Issa, who having caught the sense of Melik’s words, was already standing with his saddlebag slung across his chest.

  “What do you see there?” he appealed to Annabel in a shrill voice, swinging round accusingly to face her. “Is it your KGB again?”

  “It’s nobody, Issa. If there’s a problem, we’ll take care of you. That’s what we’re here for.”

  And once again, Brue had a sense that the choirboy voice was trying a little too hard to be nonchalant.

  “So now, this Anatoly,” Brue resumed with determined purpose, when peace of a kind had been restored and Leyla, on Annabel’s insistence, dispatched to make fresh apple tea. “He must be a pretty good friend of yours, by the sounds of it.”

  “Sir, we indeed may say that this Anatoly is a good friend to prisoners, no question,” Issa agreed with exaggerated alacrity. “It also unfortunately happens that he is the friend of rapists, murderers, gangsters and crusaders. Anatoly is broad-minded in his friendships, I would say,” he added, pushing away sweat with the back of his hand while he managed a rather dreadful grin.