A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “But for Vladimir and his lot it was one long happy party,” he confided in the same intimate tone, as if the story had lain deep inside him for years, and only Brue’s presence here had succeeded in coaxing it out of him. “Bombing, boozing, raping and looting. Syphoning off the oil and selling it to the highest bidder. Then lining up the locals and shooting them in reprisal for what you’ve done, and getting promoted for your trouble.” This time Foreman did allow a pause, if only to signal a change of direction in his story. “Anyway, that was the backcloth, Tommy. And it was against this backcloth that Vladimir fell in love. He’d got wives all over the globe, but this one for some reason got under his skin. Some Chechen beauty he’d grabbed, installed in the officers’ compound in Grozny, then fallen for in a big way. And she for him, or so he convinced himself. Love and Vladimir didn’t sit well together, I’ll admit, or not the way you and I might understand the word. But for Vladimir she was the real thing at last. Or so he told me. In his cups. In Moscow. While enjoying a spot of well-earned leave from the Chechen front.”

  Foreman had become a player in his own narrative. His face had softened, and his confiding voice also. And Brue was being invited to enter the circle of his strange affections, dragging Annabel and her bicycle with him.

  “In our business, Tommy, as we get older, those are the bits of our lives we’d give our eyes to talk about, and never can. I’ll bet it’s much the same in your world?”

  Brue offered some platitudinous reply.

  “You’re banged up in a stinking safe flat in subtopian Moscow with your joe. You’ve got embassy cover and it’s taken you all day to get there unnoticed. You’ve got an hour maximum with him and you’re listening for footsteps on the stairs. He’s pushing microfilm at you across the table, and you’re trying to debrief and brief him at the same time. ‘Why did General So-and-So say that to you? Tell me about the rocket site at So-and-So. How do you like our new signals procedure?’ But your joe’s not listening. He’s got tears running down his cheeks and all he wants to tell you about is this amazing girl he’s raped. And now, God help him, she loves him and she’s bearing him a child. And he’s the happiest man in the world. He never knew it could be like this. So I’m happy for him. We drink to her. Here’s to Yelena, or whatever her name is. And here’s to the baby, God bless it. That’s my job, or used to be. Half spy and all welfare officer. I’ve got seven months to go. Lord alone knows what I’ll do with myself. The private security firms are all over me, but I think I’d rather reflect on times past,” he added disarmingly, and smiled a sad smile that Brue dutifully attempted to reciprocate.

  “So that was Vladimir in love,” Foreman resumed more cheerfully. “And like all great loves it didn’t last. As soon as she’d had her baby boy, her family smuggled one of her brothers into the camp to kill her. Vladimir was desolate, well he would be. When his unit was posted back to Moscow and disbanded, he took the kid with him. The reigning wife in Moscow wasn’t at all happy. Told Vladimir she resented having a black-arse bastard dumped on her. But Vladimir didn’t give up on him. He loved the boy born to him by the love of his life, and he’d made him heir to his slush fund, and nothing was going to change that.”

  Was the story over? Foreman’s eyebrows lifted and he gave a shrug as if to say: Way of the world, what can one do?

  “So now?” Brue asked.

  “So now the great wheel of history has turned full circle, Tommy. The past’s the past, Vladimir’s son has attained man’s estate and is on his way to visit the son of Edward Amadeus and claim his portion.”

  This time, Brue was not as easily won as they seemed to expect. He was growing into the part, whatever the part was.

  “Forgive me,” he began, after invoking the banker’s moment of sober reflection. “I don’t wish to spoil your fun, but I’m pretty sure that if I went back to the bank now, and called up the Lipizzaner files, and established which client most closely resembles the description you have provided, together with the provisions he has made for his heir—”

  He needed to say no more. From a jacket pocket, Foreman extracted a white envelope that reminded Brue of the little white boxes of sticky wedding cake wrapped in doily that his daughter, Georgie, had sent to absent friends to celebrate her brief marriage to a fifty-year-old artist called Millard. Inside the envelope was a piece of blank card on which the name KARPOV was written in ballpoint pen. On the reverse side, the name Lipizzaner.

  “Ring a bell?” Foreman inquired.

  “The name?”

  “That’s right. Not the horse. The chap.”

  But Brue would not be stampeded. Some mulish objection was forming in him, and it went way beyond his banker’s duty of discretion. It went way beyond the occasional fits of Scots cussedness that came over him unannounced, and which he was always quick to redress. It was multistranded, and in due course he would separate the strands, but he knew that Annabel Richter was woven in there somehow, and she needed his protection, which meant that Issa needed it too. Meanwhile he would respond in the way that came most naturally to him. He would hedgehog, as Edward Amadeus used to call it. He would hunker down and put up his quills. He would tell the minimum, and he would let them fill the silences for themselves.

  “I would have to consult my chief cashier. Lipizzaners are something of a world apart at Frères,” he said. “That was how my father wished them to be.”

  “You’re telling me he did!” Foreman exclaimed. “Your proverbial grave was a bloody chatterbox where E.A. was concerned! Exactly what I said to Ian here before you showed up. Didn’t I, Ian?”

  “His words, Tommy. Literally,” said little Lantern with his pretty smile.

  “Then perhaps you know more about them than I do,” Brue suggested. “The Lipizzaners are something of a gray area to me, I’m afraid. They have been a thorn in my bank’s side for two decades and more.”

  Lantern, unlike Foreman, didn’t lean across the table to confide in Brue, but his Northern voice, like Foreman’s, knew how to stay beneath the level of the music.

  “Tommy. Give us the form here. If the boy in question—or somebody delegated by him and equipped with the necessary password or reference—walked into your bank—right?”

  “I’m listening.” And so is Annabel, intently.

  “And this person made a claim on a Lipizzaner account—cleaned it out, say—at what point would this come to your knowledge? Would it be straight away? A couple of days later? How would it work?”

  Brue the hedgehog left the question unanswered for so long that Lantern might have wondered whether he had grasped it.

  “First of all, one assumes he would make an appointment and state his business,” he said warily.

  “And if he did?”

  “In that case, my senior assistant, Frau Ellenberger, would alert me in advance. And all being well, I would make myself available. If there was a personal element—I’m not sure it would apply in this case, but let’s suppose for argument’s sake it does—if his father knew my father, for instance, and he let this be known—then obviously one would make a point of receiving him more warmly. Frères set considerable store by that kind of continuity.” He allowed time for this to sink in. “If, on the other hand, there was no appointment, and I was in conference, or away from my desk, then it’s possible, though unlikely, that the business would be transacted without my knowledge. Which would be unfortunate. I would regret that.”

  Judging by Brue’s preoccupied air, he seemed to be regretting it already.

  “Lipizzaners are, of course, very much a separate category,” he went on disapprovingly. “And not a very happy one, frankly. If we think of them much at all, I suppose we have come to regard those that have remained to us over time as either dormant, or lockaway. No direct correspondence with clients. All papers and accounts kept at the bank. That sort of thing,” he added with disdain.

  Foreman and Lantern exchanged glances, apparently uncertain who should go next, and how far. Somewhat to Brue�
�s surprise, Lantern decided he would.

  “We need to talk urgently to the boy, you see, Tommy,” he explained, his Midland murmur sinking even lower. “We need to talk to him privately and immediately. Off the record and as soon as he appears. Before he talks to anyone else. But it’s got to be natural. The very last thing we want him to think is that anyone is looking out of the window for him, or the staff have been in any way alerted, or there’s some kind of agenda out there for him, at the bank or anywhere else. That would kill everything stone dead, right, Ted?”

  “Totally,” Foreman confirmed in his newfound role as second fiddle.

  “He strolls in, he announces himself, sees whoever he would normally see. He makes his claim, does his business, and while he’s doing it, you press the button to us. That’s all we’re asking for at this stage,” Lantern said.

  “I press the button how, exactly?”

  Foreman again, as Lantern’s adjutant: “You call Ian’s number in Berlin. Right away. Even before you shake the boy’s hand, or he’s brought upstairs to have a coffee in your office. ‘The boy’s here.’ That’s all you need to say. Ian will do the rest. He has people. His phones are manned round the clock.”

  “Twenty-four seven,” Lantern confirmed, passing Brue his card across the table.

  A nearly royal crest in black and white. British Embassy, Berlin. Ian K. Lantern, Counselor, Defense & Liaison. A cluster of phone numbers. One of them underlined in blue ballpoint and starred. How did they know my office was upstairs? The same way that Annabel did—by bicycling past my window? Avoiding eye contact with his hosts, Brue put Lantern’s card in his pocket alongside the card marked Karpov and Lipizzaner.

  “So the scenario you’re proposing is presumably this,” he suggested. “Correct me if I’m wrong. A brand-new client enters my bank. He’s the son of an important client, now deceased. And he makes a claim for—certainly a substantial sum of money. And instead of advising him, as I might, on how we could best look after it for him, and invest it, I deliver him into your hands without so much as consulting him.”

  “Wrong, Tommy,” Lantern corrected him. The smile was unchanged.

  “Why?”

  “Not instead of. In addition to. We want you to do both. First tip us off, then behave as if you hadn’t. He doesn’t know you’ve told us. Life goes on completely normally.”

  “So cheat.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “For how long?”

  “I’m afraid that’s our business, Tommy.”

  Perhaps Lantern had sounded more abrupt than he intended, or perhaps Foreman as the older man only thought he did, and felt he ought to put it right.

  “Ian just needs to have this very private, very helpful talk with the boy, Tommy. You won’t be harming a hair of your new client’s head. If we could tell you the whole story, you’d know you were giving him a considerable helping hand.”

  He’s drowning. All you have to do is hold out your hand, a choirboy voice was telling him.

  “All the same, I think you’ll agree it’s a very tall order for a banker,” Brue insisted, while the two men conferred with each other with their eyes. This time it was Foreman who got the job of answering him.

  “Let’s just say it’s an untidy bit of history that’s got to be sorted, Tommy. Would you settle for that? Some messy loose ends a certain late client of yours left lying about.”

  “If we don’t catch them now, they could come back to haunt all of us in a pretty serious way, Tommy,” Lantern agreed earnestly. The loose ends, he apparently meant. The haunting loose ends.

  “All of us?” Brue repeated.

  After another glance for Lantern, Foreman pulled a resigned shrug, indicating that, having gone this far, he might as well go the whole hog and be damned.

  “I’m not sure I’m briefed to say this, Tommy. But I will. There’s a bit of a question mark in London about how all of this might impact on your bank if we leave it unattended, if you follow me.”

  Lantern was quick to add his own personal assurance. “We’re doing absolutely everything we can, Tommy. At the highest level.”

  “Can’t get any higher,” Foreman agreed.

  “Just one more thing, Tommy,” Lantern put in, by way of what could have been a warning. “It’s just possible you’ll get some strange Germans sniffing around. If that should happen, we would once more ask you to give us a bell right away so that we can sort it out. Which of course we will, without delay. Provided you give us the chance.”

  “What on earth would the Germans want?” Brue asked, thinking that one German at least was already sniffing around, but she was not the sort of German they were warning him against.

  “Maybe they’re not too fond of British bankers operating black bank accounts on their patch,” Lantern suggested, with a pretty lift of his young eyebrows.

  In the taxi, Brue checked his mobile, then called Frau Ellenberger. No, not a word from her, Herr Tommy. Not on your direct line either.

  There was a place, a precious place, open to the general public yet private to himself, that Brue repaired to when his life became oppressive. It was a small museum dedicated to the work of Ernst Barlach, sculptor. Brue was no art buff, and Barlach had been no more than a name in his head, and a pretty hazy one at that, until a day two years ago, when a flat-voiced Georgie informed him over the transatlantic telephone that her six-day-old baby boy was dead. On hearing the news, he had walked into the street, hailed the first taxi and told the driver, who was elderly and, to judge by the name on his license, Croatian, to take him somewhere private, he wasn’t particular where. Half an hour later, without another word passing between them, they drew up at a low brick building at the far end of a great park. For a sickening moment Brue believed he had been delivered to a crematorium, but a woman was selling tickets at a desk, so he bought one and entered a glazed courtyard inhabited by nobody but mythic figures from the middle world.

  One was in monk’s habit, floating. Another was lost to depression, a third to contemplation or despair. Another was screaming, but whether from pain or pleasure it was not possible to tell. What was evident to Brue, however, was that each figure was as alone as he was, and that each was communicating something; but nobody was listening, each was searching for a solace that was not available, which was a kind of solace of its own.

  And that taken all in all, Barlach’s message to the world was one of deeply perplexed pity for its suffering, which was why, ever since that day, Brue had come here maybe a dozen times, either when he was in temporary despair—“the black dog,” as Edward Amadeus used to call it—or when things were going seriously awry at the bank, or for instance when Mitzi told him, practically in as many words, that he didn’t match up to her exacting standards as a lover, a thing he had more or less assumed, but would have preferred not to hear. But he had never before come here in quite the state of delayed anger and perplexity as now.

  I kept faith, he told Barlach’s familiars. I stood up for her, and I dissembled. I lied the way they lied: by omission. Their lies contained so many omissions that by the time they’d finished telling them, the lies were all I could hear. Spies’ lies, not spoken aloud but, like empty centers, described by what wasn’t said:

  Issa never was, is not now, a Muslim, they lied.

  Issa was never a Chechen activist. He was never anybody’s activist, they lied.

  Issa is just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill spy’s son, like me, on his way to claim his dirty legacy from me, they lied.

  And he certainly hasn’t been tortured or imprisoned, or jumped jail, God no!

  And he is not remotely connected with an alleged Islamist terrorist on the run who is wanted by the Swedes and featured on every police website—including, therefore, it is a fair presumption, the website of the omniscient British Secret Service.

  No to all of that! Issa’s problem—if it’s his problem at all—is to do with untidy history, whatever that might be. It’s about some m
essy loose ends that our fathers left lying about, and which make us, in some undefined way, jointly culpable.

  But mercifully, if I do everything I’m told, Messrs. Foreman and Lantern, with the assistance of their highest level, will save my skin. And while they’re about it, they’ll save me from the Germans too.

  Yet Brue was not at odds with himself as he bade farewell to Barlach and strolled into the sunlit park. He had not misstepped. A Barlachian cry of both pain and pleasure swelled in him as he woke to the reality of his feelings. Ever since their meeting at the Atlantic, which was eons ago, Annabel Richter had been an instructive, he might almost say a moral force. From that moment on, he had seen and thought nothing without referring it to her in his mind: Is this the right way to go, would Annabel approve?

  At first he had seen himself as the put-upon victim of a hostile takeover. Then he had sneered at himself: me, an adolescent of sixty, grappling with my waning testosterone. At no point had the dread word love, whatever that had meant to him, entered the dialogue he was having with himself. Love was Georgie. All the rest—the sticky hot-breath stuff, the eternal protestations—frankly, that was for the other fellows. Cut through the posturing, and he wondered whether it was for the other fellows either, but that was their business. All the same, when somebody half your age barges into your life and appoints herself your moral mentor, you sit up and listen, you have to. And if she happens to be the most attractive and interesting woman, and the most impossible love to have come your way ever, then all the more so.

  And sex? By the time he married Mitzi, he had recognized he was punching above his weight. He bore her no grudge for this, nor she him, apparently. Pressed to take a view, he would probably argue that she had kept him in the style to which he was accustomed and sent him the bill, which was fair-do’s. He could hardly blame her for having appetites he failed to satisfy.