A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  But it seemed to embarrass her, for she was by now scarlet in the face.

  “How aware is your client of his situation?” Brue asked, after a prolonged silence.

  “It’s my job to tell him, so I’ve told him.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “What’s bad news for us isn’t necessarily bad news for him. He was interested, but he’s confident you’ll fix it. The house is being watched, perhaps you hadn’t noticed. Those hearts-and-minds policemen who paid Leyla a courtesy call—sure, they do hearts and minds all right.”

  “I thought you knew them.”

  “Everybody at Sanctuary knows them. They’re the sniffer dogs.”

  Partly to escape her stare and partly to gain a moment’s respite, Brue took a tour round the room.

  “I have a question for your client,” he said, turning to confront her. “Perhaps you can answer it for him. Under the terms relating to his supposed late father’s account, there’s something called an instrument. An instrument would be an essential part of any claim.”

  “Is it a key?”

  “It might be.”

  “A small one with teeth on three sides?”

  “Conceivably.”

  “I’ll ask him,” she said.

  Was she smiling? It seemed to Brue that a spark of complicity had passed between them, and he prayed it had.

  “That’s if he makes a claim, obviously,” he added sternly. “Only if he can be persuaded to. Otherwise we’re back where we started.”

  “Is it a lot of money?”

  “If he claims, if his claim is successful, no doubt he’ll tell you how much is involved,” he replied primly.

  But here, out of the blue, either his good heart became too much for him, or he just forgot for a moment that he was a hardheaded banker born and bred. An eerie sensation swept over him that someone else—someone real, someone prepared to embrace spontaneous humanity rather than treat it as a threat to sound financial management—had commandeered him and was speaking out of him:

  “But if there’s anything personal I can do in the meantime—to help, I mean—quite honestly, anything at all within reason—I’d really be very happy to. Delighted, in fact. I’d regard it as a privilege.”

  She was watching him with such stillness that he began to wonder whether he had spoken at all.

  “Help how, exactly?” she asked.

  He had nowhere to go but forward, which was as well, because he was already going there. “Within reason, any way I could. I’d be guided by you. Totally. I’m assuming he’s genuine. I have to do that, obviously.”

  “We both have to assume that,” she said impatiently. “I’m trying to find out what you were talking about when you said you’d really like to help.”

  Brue had no better idea what he had been talking about than she did, but he knew that her stare no longer accused him: rather, that he had said something that suited her purposes in some way, even if the realization was only now dawning in her mind.

  “I suppose I was really thinking money,” he said a little shamefacedly.

  “Could you lend him money now, for instance, up front, against his future expectations?”

  The banker in him came briefly awake again. “Through the bank? No. Not while his expectations are unsubstantiated, and he won’t claim. That would be out of the question.”

  “So what kind of money are you talking about?”

  “Has your organization no funds for contingencies of this sort?”

  “Sanctuary North has about enough funds at the moment to pay his fare to the nearest deportation center.”

  “And no—facility—where he can be accommodated temporarily?”

  “Without the police finding him in five minutes, no.”

  Brue hadn’t quite given up. “And if he’s really ill? If he pleads sick? Nobody deports a seriously sick man, surely.”

  “If he pleads sick—which half of them do—which we did in Magomed’s case—and the doctors agree he’s not fit to travel, he’ll be treated in a secure hospital till he’s fit enough to be deported. Let me ask you again: What kind of money were you thinking of?”

  “Well, the sum would rather depend on actual need, I suppose,” said Brue, back to playing the banker. “If you can give me some idea of what you propose to do with it—”

  “I can’t. It’s client confidential.”

  “Of course. And it should be. Clearly. But if we’re talking of, well, relatively modest money, just to tide him over—”

  “Not that modest—”

  “—then in that case, given the circumstances, it would be money lent out of my own personal resources. To your client, obviously. Via yourself, but for his use.”

  “Does it have to be secured?”

  “Good lord, no!” Why was he so shocked? “Simply an informal loan that one hopes in due course to get back—or not, so to speak. Depending on the amount that you have in mind, obviously. But no. No security asked for or needed.”

  He’d said it. And now that he’d said it, he knew he believed it, and was ready to say it again, and if need be, again after that.

  It was her turn to be uncertain. “It could be—well—a lot.”

  “Ah, but that depends on how much a lot is,” he could not resist replying, with the banker’s smile that tells you that what may sound a lot to you may not sound a lot to him.

  “If he doesn’t end up needing it, I’ll give it you back. You’ve got to believe that.”

  “I’ve no doubt of it. Now what sum are we thinking of?”

  What was she calculating? How much he was good for, or how much for what she had in mind? And how long had she had it in mind? From the moment they came in here, or only when he put the idea into her head?

  “For what he needs to do—if I can persuade him to do it—I reckon it’s not going to be less than—thirty thousand euros,” she said, gabbling the sum as if to make it smaller.

  Brue’s head was swirling, but not in a way to alarm. She’s not a dubious entrepreneur. She’s not an overdrawn client or a bad debt or a brilliant loser with a crazy idea. The crazy idea was mine, or rather: it was mine and it wasn’t crazy.

  “How soon do you want it?” he asked, before he could stop himself—another stock question.

  “Very soon. Within a couple of days at most. Things could go fast for him. If they do, I’ll have to have the money fast.”

  “And today’s Friday. So why not do it now, then there’s no missing the bus? And since you’ll be giving back what you don’t use, let’s chuck in a bit in reserve too, shall we?” As if they were making something together, which was how in his out-of-body state he felt.

  As ever, Brue had a checkbook handy, issued by a major clearing bank. But where on earth was his pen? He patted his pockets, only to remember that he had left it with his notepad on the table in the living room. She handed him her own, and looked on while he made out a check to Annabel Richter in the order of fifty thousand euros, dated today, Friday. On a calling card, of which he had half a dozen secreted in his Randall’s jacket, he wrote out his cell phone number and as an afterthought—might as well be hanged twice!—his direct number at the bank.

  “And you’ll call me, I imagine,” he added in an embarrassed mumble, when he discovered that she was still staring at him. “The name is Tommy, by the way.”

  In the drawing room, Issa had been persuaded to lean his head back on the sofa while Leyla laid a poultice on his brow.

  “Best you don’t come back here,” Melik growled, escorting Brue to the front door. “Best you don’t remember the name of the street. We don’t remember you, and you don’t remember us. Deal?”

  “Deal,” said Brue.

  “Von Essens cheat,” Mitzi announced, unfastening her sapphire earrings while she watched herself in her dressing mirror and Brue watched her from the bed. At the age of fifty, thanks to high maintenance and the attentions of a fashionable surgeon, she was still a ravishing thirty-nine, or almost
.

  “Von Essens play all the tricks in the book,” she went on, critically examining the cords on her neck. “Fingers to the face, fingers on the cards, scratch your head, yawn, mirrors. And that tarty little maid of theirs pushing drinks and looking over our shoulders when she’s not making eyes at Bernhard.”

  It was two in the morning. Sometimes they spoke German, sometimes English, and for fun a mix. Tonight it was German, or Mitzi’s soft, Viennese version of it.

  “So you lost,” Brue suggested.

  “And von Essens’ house smells,” she added, ignoring him. “Considering that it’s built on top of a sewage system, no wonder. Bernhard should never have played the king. He’s so rash. If he’d held his nerve we could have taken the rubber. It’s time he grew up.”

  Bernhard, her regular partner, and not only at bridge, one suspects. But what can one do? Life’s a botch. Old Westerheim hit it on the head when he called her the best First Lady in Hamburg.

  “Did you work late again, Tommy?” Mitzi called from the bathroom.

  “Fairly.”

  “Poor you.”

  One day, he thought, you’ll really ask me where I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to. Except you never will. You won’t ask me anything you don’t want to be asked yourself. Wise girl. Wiser than me by a mile. Give you your head and you’d turn the bank round in a couple of years.

  “You sound sharp,” she complained, emerging in her nightdress. “You’re not Friday night at all. You’re flushed and busy. Have you taken your sleeping pill?”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t worked.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Couple of scotches.”

  “Are you worried about something?”

  “Of course not. Everything’s fine.”

  “Good. Maybe after sixty we want only to stay awake.”

  “Maybe we do.”

  She put the light out.

  “And Bernhard wants to fly us up to his house in Sylt for lunch tomorrow. He’s got two spare seats. Do you want to come?”

  “Sounds fun.”

  Yes, Mitzi, I am flushed and busy. No, I am not Friday night. I just gave away the best fifty thousand euros of my life, and have yet to work out why. Buy time for him? What are you going to do with him? Get him a suite at the Atlantic?

  This Friday night I walked all the way home on my own. No cab, no limousine. Lighter by fifty thousand euros, and feeling better for it. Was I followed? I don’t think so. Not by the time I got lost in Eppendorf.

  I marched through flat, straight roads that all looked the same, and my head refused to tell me where to go. But that wasn’t fear. That wasn’t me shaking off my pursuers, even if there were any. That was my compass going on the blink.

  This Friday night I hit the same crossroads three times, and if I were standing there now, I still wouldn’t know which way to turn.

  Look back on my eventless life, what do I see? Escape. Whether it’s been woman trouble, or bank trouble or Georgie trouble, dear old Tommy’s always been halfway out of the door by the time the balloon goes up. It wasn’t him, it was two other people, he wasn’t there and, anyway, they hit him first: that was dear old Tommy for you.

  Whereas Annabel—if I may call you so—well, you’re all the other way, aren’t you? You’re a collision girl. The real thing—which presumably is why I’m thinking Annabel, Annabel, when I should be thinking: Edward Amadeus, you mad, dead, beloved man, and just look at the mess you’ve left me in!

  But I’m not in a mess. I’m a happy investor. I haven’t bought out, I’ve bought in. That fifty grand was my ticket of entry. I’m a partner in whatever plan you’ve got up your sleeve. And the name is Tommy, by the way.

  Who’ve you got, Annabel? Who do you talk to—now, this minute? Who do you share yourself with when you hit the bottom of the sea?

  One of Georgie’s radical blowhards with long hair, no fifty grand and no manners?

  Or some older, richer man of the world who can talk you down when you go off-scale?

  Fathers, he thought as the pill began to take hold of him. Mine and Issa’s. Brothers in crime, riding into the sunset on pitch-black Lipizzaners that refuse to turn white.

  And your father, who’s he when he’s at home? Another one of me? Rejected and reviled—with justice? Only loved, if at all, from a range of eight thousand miles? But he’s part of you all the same, I can feel it. I can feel it in your self-assurance, in your whiff of social arrogance, even when you’re saving the wretched of the earth.

  Issa, he thought. Her foundling. Her tortured man-child. Her black-arsed Chechen who is only half a Chechen, but insists he’s a whole one, while he spouts ironies at me like those bearded Russian émigrés who used to hang around Montparnasse, every one of them a genius.

  Issa’s the chap who should go walkabout in Eppendorf, not me.

  5

  Günther Bachmann was at first annoyed, then alarmed, to be summarily bidden to the ample presence of Herr Arnold Mohr, head of the protectors’ Hamburg station, at midday on a Sunday when Mohr, an ostentatious Christian, should by rights have been parading his family at one of the city’s best churches. Bachmann had spent the night plowing through background files on Chechen jihadis, prepared for him by Erna Frey, who, in a rare burst of self-indulgence, had taken herself off to Hanover for a niece’s wedding. His reading complete, he had been thinking of flying up to Copenhagen and having a couple of beers with the Danish security crowd, whom he liked; and, if they let him, a word with the good-brother lorry driver who had smuggled Issa to Hamburg and made him a present of his overcoat. He had gone so far as to call his connection there: No problem, Günther, we’ll send you a car to the airport.

  Instead of which, he now found himself apprehensively prowling his office in the stables while Erna Frey, still in her festive clothes, sat primly at her desk laboring at a monthly summary of costings she was preparing for Berlin.

  “Keller’s here,” she informed him without lifting her head.

  “Keller? Which Keller?” Bachmann retorted irritably. “Hans Keller from Moscow? Paul Keller from Amman?”

  “Dr. Otto Keller, the most protective of all protectors, flew in from Cologne one hour ago. Look out of the window and you can admire his helicopter cluttering up the car park.”

  Bachmann looked as he was told and let out an exclamation of disgust. “What the hell does Uncle Otto want from us this time? Have we jumped another traffic light? Bugged his mother?”

  “The meeting is top secret, operational and terribly urgent,” Erna Frey replied, calmly continuing with her work. “That’s all I can winkle out of them.”

  Bachmann’s heart sank. “Meaning, they’ve found my boy?”

  “If by your boy you mean Issa Karpov, rumor has it that they’re warm.”

  Bachmann clapped a hand to his brow in despair. “They can’t have arrested him. Arni swore the police wouldn’t do that without consulting us first. Your case, Günther. Your case, old boy, but we confer. That was the pact.” A different thought occurred to him, an even more appalling one: “Don’t tell me the police arrested him just to show Arni who was boss!”

  Erna Frey remained unmoved. “My Deep Throat—in the form of one very bad tennis player in Arni’s very incompetent counterespionage section—assures me that the protectors are warm. That’s the entire sum of her message. She’ll never forgive me for beating her six–love in two straight sets, so she brings me gifts of gossip from the canteen. Then she tells me I mustn’t tell you, so naturally I’m telling you,” she said and, watched by Bachmann, again returned to her calculations.

  “Why so sour this morning?” he demanded of her back. “That’s my job.”

  “I loathe weddings. I consider them unnatural and insulting. Every time I attend one, I see another good woman go to the wall.”

  “How about the poor bloody groom?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, the poor bloody groom is the wall. Keller wishes the meeting to be principals
only. You, Mohr, Keller.”

  “No policemen?”

  “None advertised.”

  Mollified, Bachmann resumed his study of the courtyard. “Then it’s two against one, the shining-white protectors versus one excommunicated black sheep.”

  “Well, just remember you’re all fighting the same enemy,” said Erna Frey tartly. “One another.”

  Her skepticism shocked him, since it was much like his own.

  “And you’re coming with me,” he retorted.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I detest Keller. Keller detests me. I shall be a liability and speak out of turn.”

  But under his unflinching eye she was already closing down her computer.

  Bachmann had reason to be concerned. Rumors from Berlin abounded, some wild, others disconcertingly plausible. What was certain was that the old demarcations between rival services were indeed disappearing, and that Joint Steering, far from being the advisory body of wise men that it was designed to be, had become a house bitterly divided against itself. The running feud between those determined to defend civil rights at all costs, and those determined to curtail them in the name of greater national security, was approaching critical mass.

  In the leftist corner, if such antiquated distinctions still counted for anything, presided the urbane Michael Axelrod of Foreign Intelligence. Axelrod was a keen European, an Arabist and—with reservations—Bachmann’s mentor; and in the rightist corner, the archconservative Dieter Burgdorf from the Ministry of the Interior, Axelrod’s rival to fill the post of intelligence czar once the foundations of the new structure had been laid: Burgdorf, the unashamed friend of Washington’s neoconservatives, and the German intelligence community’s most vocal evangelist for greater integration with its American counterpart.

  Yet for the coming three months these two men, who could scarcely have had less in common, were committed to sharing equal power and exercising a duty of consensus. And as the two generals grew further apart, so did the troops they commanded, each jockeying and maneuvering to gain real or imaginary advantage. Since Burgdorf was from the interior ministry, and Mohr and Keller were employed by the domestic intelligence services, then logically it was to the highly personable and shamelessly ambitious Burgdorf that they would look for favor; and since the debonair but slightly older Axelrod was from Foreign Intelligence, and Bachmann was his protégé and colleague, then logically Bachmann was Axelrod’s vassal heart and soul. Yet with the borders between the two services in flux, and the reach of the Federal Police adding to the confusion, and the ley lines of Berlin’s power not yet drawn, who could tell anymore what was logical?