A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  He smiled and broke off, waiting for her to come in with one of her favorite Lewis Carroll quotes, but in vain.

  “So what I suggest is,” he went on, like someone who has had a jolly good idea, “a big pot of your lovely Viennese coffee and some of your mother’s homemade Easter biscuits, and two cups. And while you’re about it, tell the switchboard I’m in conference and so are you.”

  But the tête-à-tête Brue had proposed did not run its course. Frau Ellenberger did indeed come back with the coffee—though it took longer to prepare than a man might decently expect—and she was, as ever, the soul of courtesy. When called upon to smile, she smiled. Her mother’s Easter biscuits were incomparable. But the moment Brue attempted to draw her out further on Colonel Karpov, she rose to her feet and, staring before her like a child at a school concert, delivered herself of a formal statement.

  “Herr Brue, I regret to inform you that I am advised that the Lipizzaner accounts transgress the outer borders of legality. In view of my junior position in the bank at the time, and the undertakings I gave your late father, I am also advised that I must not discuss these matters with you anymore.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Brue airily, who prided himself on being at his best when suffering a reversal. “Fully understood and accepted, Frau Elli. The bank thanks you.”

  “And Mr. Foreman called,” she said at the door, when Brue hurried after her to help her with the coffee tray.

  Why was she talking with her back to him? Why was the back of her neck scarlet?

  “Again? What on earth for?”

  “He was confirming your lunch today.”

  “He confirmed it on Friday, for heaven’s sake!”

  “He needed to know whether you had any dietary requirements. La Scala specializes in fish, apparently.”

  “I know it specializes in fish. I dine there once a month at least. I also know it’s not open for lunch.”

  “It appears that Mr. Foreman has made an arrangement with the manager. And he’s bringing his business partner, a Mr. Lantern.”

  “His ray of light,” Brue suggested, mordantly pleased by his own wit. But she was still avoiding him as if he had the evil eye, and Brue for his part was wondering what manner of man was this who could persuade Mario the proprietor of La Scala to open his premises for lunch on a Monday of all days, tiny though the restaurant was.

  Frau Ellenberger had finally agreed to face him.

  “Mr. Foreman comes with solid credentials, Herr Tommy,” she said, with an emphasis he couldn’t read. “You asked me to check him out, so I did. Mr. Foreman is personally recommended by your own firm of London solicitors, and by a major city bank. He is flying from London specially.”

  “With his ray of light?”

  “Mr. Lantern will come separately from Berlin, where I understand he is based. They are proposing an exploratory luncheon with no commitment on either side. Their project is a substantial one and will require an extensive feasibility study.”

  “And I have known this for how long?”

  “One week exactly, Herr Tommy. We discussed it at this hour last Monday, thank you.”

  Why on earth the thank you? Brue wondered. “Has the world gone mad or have I, Frau Elli?”

  “That’s what your father used to say, Herr Tommy,” Frau Ellenberger replied primly, and Brue went back to thinking about Annabel: that vibrant, sovereign young woman on a bicycle, who was not dependent on social occasions for her identity.

  To his surprise and relief, Messrs. Foreman and Lantern turned out to be rather amusing company. By the time he arrived at La Scala, they had charmed Mario into pointing them to Brue’s favorite table in the window, and advising them which Etruscan white Brue favored so that they could have it ready for him. And there it was now, nestling uncorked in an ice bucket.

  Afterwards, Brue puzzled about just how they knew La Scala was his favorite watering hole, but he assumed that since most of banking Hamburg knew he ate there, they did too. Or maybe Foreman had succeeded in charming the information out of Frau Ellenberger, because charm was what Foreman had in bucketfuls. Sometimes you meet a twin, and relate to him immediately. Foreman was Brue’s height and Brue’s age, and had Brue’s shape of head. He was tweedy, in a patrician sort of way that Brue admired, with merry eyes and a smile that was so disarming it made you smile too. And a confiding, low-pitched voice that had learned to take the world as it came.

  “Tommy Brue! Well done, sir, well done, all of us,” he murmured, rising to his feet as Brue came through the door. “Meet Ian Lantern, my partner in crime. Mind if we call you Tommy? I’m another Edward, I’m afraid, like your dear papa. Ted for short, though. He would never have put up with that, would he? It was Edward or nothing for him.”

  “Or when in doubt, sir,” Brue countered, to their collective enjoyment.

  Did he take any particular note of this first proprietorial reference to his father? Deep down in himself, where Brue had never lost his balance—or never until Friday night? Not that he was aware of. Edward Amadeus OBE had been a legend in his lifetime and was a legend still. Brue was well used to hearing people speak of him as if they knew him, and he took it as a compliment.

  His first impression of Lantern was equally favorable. Young Englishmen, in Brue’s limited experience of the breed, didn’t come like Lantern these days. He was small and trim and well turned out in a charcoal suit with sloping shoulders and one button to the jacket, all in the style of your upwardly mobile executive when Brue had been one himself. His light brown hair was cropped army-style short. He was softly and thoughtfully spoken and had an engaging courtesy. But like Foreman, he radiated a quiet self-assurance that told you he was nobody’s man. He also had what Brue had learned to call a classless accent, which touched the democrat in him.

  “Jolly good of you to think of us, Ian,” he said heartily, to make the instant bridge. “We private bankers get to feel a bit marginalized these days, what with all the big boys strutting their stuff.”

  “It’s a privilege to meet you, Tommy, and that’s a fact,” Lantern responded, giving Brue’s hand a second sporting squeeze as if he couldn’t bear to let it go. “We’ve heard all these great things about you, haven’t we, Ted? Not a dissenting voice anywhere.”

  “Nary a one,” Foreman quaintly confirmed, on which note they sat down, and Mario scurried over with a giant bass that he swore had been killed in their honor and which, after a bit of banter, they agreed he should bake in sea salt. And why not a couple of scallops in garlic sauce while they were waiting?

  Our lunch, they insisted.

  Absolutely mine, Brue protested. Bankers always pay.

  But he was outnumbered. And besides, it was their idea. So Brue did exactly what he knew he was supposed to do: he sat back and prepared to enjoy himself, in the full knowledge that Messrs. Foreman and Lantern were in all probability out to fleece him, as were most people he did business with. Well, let them try. If they were predators, they were at least civilized predators, which God knows wasn’t always the case. After a gruesome weekend and not a peep out of Annabel, let alone his unsettling nondialogue with Frau Elli, he was not disposed to be critical.

  And he liked Brits, dammit. As an expatriate, he nursed a powerful nostalgia for the land of his birth. His eight dismal years of Scottish boarding school had left a void in him that no amount of foreign living could fill: which probably explained why, from the outset, he got on so swimmingly with Foreman, while little Lantern, like an enraptured elf, switched his respectful smile from one player to the other.

  “Ian doesn’t touch it, I’m afraid,” Foreman said, apologizing for his companion’s disinclination to drink the wine that Mario had poured for him. “One of the new breed. Not like us old farts at all. To old farts! Cheers!”

  And cheers also to Annabel Richter, who insists on riding her bicycle through my head whenever she feels the urge.

  Afterwards again, Brue struggled to remember what on earth they had talked
about for so long before the bombshell hit. They did mutual friends in London, and probably, but not certainly, it occurred to Brue that the mutual friends knew Foreman rather better than Foreman knew the mutual friends. But if so, he made little of it. People who networked did it all the time. There was nothing sinister about it. He said he supposed they should be talking business, although neither of his hosts seemed in any hurry to do so. And he’d done his usual material about the integrity and soundness of Frères, and duly speculated about whether Wall Street was in adequate health, what with the subprime mortgage stuff—Frères, thank God, had trodden warily on that front!—and whether the rise in commodity prices would affect the move towards soft assets on the global market, and would the Asian bubble reinflate itself or stay down there, and did China’s domestic boom mean we should be scouting around elsewhere for cheaper labor? Subjects in which Brue was tolerably well-versed from his reading of the financial prints, but about which in reality he had no opinion whatever: a fact that enabled him to indulge in further musings about Annabel Richter without troubling his audience.

  And then there was the Arab stuff. Which of the two of them brought the subject up, Brue never worked out. Was it Ted, who was right in thinking that Brue’s father had been one of the first British bankers to woo back disaffected Arab investors after the 1956 mess—or was it Ian? Never mind: whichever of them had set up the hare, the other one chased it. And yes it was indeed true, Brue conceded cautiously, mentioning no names, that one or two of the lesser members of the Saudi and Kuwaiti households held accounts with Frères, although Brue himself, being more of a European chap, had never quite shared his father’s enthusiasm for that market.

  “But no hard feelings?” Foreman asked solicitously. “No bad blood or anything?”

  Good lord, no, God forbid, Brue replied. Everything sweet as pie. A few had died, some had moved away and some had stayed. It was just that rich Arabs liked to bank where other rich Arabs banked, and Frères today wasn’t really in a position to offer that size of golden umbrella.

  At the time they had appeared satisfied with his answer. In retrospect it was as if the question had been hanging around on their checklist, and they had artificially shoehorned it into the conversation. And perhaps subconsciously it was this awareness that caused him, if belatedly, to turn the conversation upon themselves.

  “So now, how about you gents? You know our reputation or you wouldn’t be here. How can we help you? Or as we like to put it, what can we do for you that the big fellows can’t?”—Because without my fucking bank, you wouldn’t be here.

  Foreman gave up eating and dabbed at his lips with his napkin while he peered around at the empty tables for an answer, then at Lantern who, by contrast, seemed not to have heard anything. With his nicely groomed jockey’s hands, he was performing a surgical operation on his sea bass, skin to one side of his plate, bones the other, and a little pyramid of flesh that he was stacking in the middle.

  “Mind awfully if I ask you to turn that thing off a moment?” Foreman asked quietly. “Makes me bloody nervous, quite honestly.”

  Brue realized that Foreman was referring to the cell phone he had set beside him on the off chance that Annabel called. After a moment’s puzzlement, he switched it off and dropped it in his pocket, by which time Foreman was leaning across the table at him.

  “Now buckle your seat belt for a moment and listen,” he advised in a confiding murmur. “We’re from British Intelligence, okay? Spooks. Ian here’s from the Berlin embassy, I’m London-side. Our names are kosher. If you don’t like ’em, check ’em with Ian’s ambassador. My patch is Russia. Has been for the last twenty-eight years, God help me. That’s how I came to know your revered late father, Edward Amadeus. My name was Findlay in those days, as far as he was concerned. Perhaps you heard your old man talk about me now and then?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Marvelous. That’s Edward Amadeus for you. Silent to the end. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m the chap who got him his OBE.”

  Brue might reasonably have expected Foreman to break off at this point, allowing him an opportunity to ask a few clarifying questions from among the few thousand coursing in his head, but Foreman had no intention of offering such respite. Having made a breach in Brue’s defenses, he was pressing forward to entrench his victory. True, he was sitting comfortably back in his seat by now, with his fingertips together and a benign, even pastoral expression on his weathered features, to all outward appearance the picture of a mellow luncheon guest offering his observations on the state of the universe. His voice, adjusted for short range, was light-toned and mysteriously happy. There was music playing in the kitchen—lute as far as Brue could make it out—and Foreman spoke beneath it. He was painting a picture of a time that was as dead and gone as Brue’s father but, like his father’s ghost, wouldn’t lie down: last years of the Cold War, Tommy, when the Soviet knight was dying in his armor and the whole of Russia stank of decay.

  He didn’t talk about the greater loyalty of the Russians who had spied for him, their ideals or their higher motives: If you were trying to induce a ranking Soviet to risk his neck for capitalism, then believe me, Tommy, you had to offer him what capitalism was all about: money and sackloads of it.

  And you didn’t just offer him money by itself either, because for as long as he worked for you he couldn’t spend it, couldn’t flaunt it, couldn’t slip it to his kids or his wife or his lover. If he tried, he was a bloody fool and deserved to be caught, which he usually was. So you offered your spy-to-be a package.

  And a key component of this package was a sound, flexible Western bank with plenty of tradition behind it, because you know as well as I do, Tommy, your Russian loves tradition. Another key component was a waterproof system for transferring his hard-earned loot to his heirs and assigns without the formalities that normally attach: probate, estate duty, full disclosure and the inevitable questions about where said loot came from, all the stuff you know about, Tommy.

  “So it was chicken and egg,” he went on in the same endearing tone while Brue struggled to collect his thoughts. “In this case, the egg came first. A golden egg. A walk-in Red Army colonel who’d seen which way the wind was blowing decided to sell off his assets before the Big Crash. He reasoned the way you fellows reason. The share price of Sovs Incorporated was on the slide, so he wanted to sell his stocks and shares before they became a drug on the market. And he had a lot to sell. He also had some interesting friends to introduce to us. Like-minded chaps who would strangle their own mothers for a spot of the hard currency. I’ll call him Vladimir, okay?” he suggested.

  And I’ll call him Grigori Borisovich Karpov, Brue was thinking. And so will Annabel. After the first shock waves, an unexpected calm had settled over him.

  “Vladimir was a shit, but he was our shit, as the saying doesn’t quite go. Cunning as they come, venal to his boots, but alpha-plus access to military secrets. In our job, that’s a recipe for pure love. He sat on three intelligence committees, he’d served with Soviet special forces in Africa, Cuba, Afghanistan and Chechnya and run every kind of racket you can think of and some you can’t. He knew every bent brother officer, the scams they got up to, how to threaten them and how to buy them. He was running a Red Army mafia five years before anyone outside Russia knew they had mafias: blood, oil, diamonds, heroin out of Afghanistan by way of Red air-force cargo planes. When his unit was demobilized, Vladimir had his boys put on Armani suits but keep their guns. How else were they going to negotiate the competition?”

  Brue was doing what he had by now decided to do: saying nothing, looking attentive but detached and secretly wondering why Foreman was telling him all this, and in such detail, and beaming all his considerable befriending powers at him, as if the three of them were already brothers in an enterprise yet to be unveiled.

  “Our problem was—not the first time it’s happened in our business or the last—that in order to keep Vladimir happy, we not only had to ban
k his money and add to it, we had to launder it for him as well.”

  Surprisingly, as Brue was now getting to know him, Foreman seemed to feel that this needed some justification.

  “Well, I mean, if we didn’t do it, the Americans would have done it and fucked up. Which was how we came to have a quiet word with your papa. Vladimir liked Vienna. He’d done a couple of delegations there. He liked the waltzes and the whorehouses and the Wiener schnitzels. What better place for him to visit his money, from time to time, than dear old Vienna? And your papa was, well, just marvelously receptive. Mustard, in fact. That’s one of the amusing things about this caper. The more respectable chaps are in their public lives, the faster they come running when we spies whistle. The moment we suggested Lipizzaners, he was away. If we’d given your old man his head, he’d have turned his whole bank into a substation of the Service. We’re rather hoping that, when we explain our little problem to you, you’ll feel the same way, aren’t we, Ian? Not the substation bit”—jolly laughter from both men—“we’re not going that route, thank God! Just, well, a helping hand here and there.”

  “We’re counting on you, Tommy,” Lantern agreed, with his soft Northern accent and the ever-ready smile of a small man trying to please.

  And once again Foreman might decently have called a break, but he was approaching the nub of his story and wished no diversion. Mario was hovering with the dessert menu. Brue was hovering too, but in his father’s sanctum in Vienna with the door locked, furiously scripting the last part of the unfinished row he had had with him about the Lipizzaner accounts: So you were a British spy, they now tell me. Selling Frères down the river for a British medal. Pity you didn’t feel able to tell me yourself.

  Vladimir’s last posting was Chechnya, Foreman was saying. And if Brue took everything he’d ever heard about that hellhole and multiplied it by ten, he’d have a rough idea of what it was like: the Russians pounding the place into ashes, and the Chechens returning the compliment whenever they got a chance.