A Most Wanted Man (15 page)

By the same evening, the flat was miraculously hers, a Karsten-free life in the making, and for the last six weeks she had been cosseting it, fussing over its wiring and plasterwork and paintwork, replacing rotting floorboards, and in the evenings, after another sickening tribunal or another lost battle with authority, racing down here on her bicycle, just to stand at the arched window with her elbows on the sill and watch the sun go down, and the cranes and cargo ships and ferries interweaving and relating in the way that human beings should, respectfully and without crashing into one another, and the gulls swirling and warring, and the kids rampaging on the playground.

And in what she knew to be a rosy surge of optimism, she would congratulate herself on the woman she was about to become, married to her work and her family at the Sanctuary—Lisa, Maria, André, Max, Horst and doughty Ursula, their boss—men and women who like herself were dedicated to fighting the good fight for people whom the accidents of life had earmarked for the scrap heap.

Or put another way: coming home exhausted and as empty as the flat that awaited her, knowing that however hard she had pushed herself all day, there was only herself to look forward to at night. But even nothing was better than Karsten.

They climbed the stairs slowly, Annabel leading, and at each floor she put down her bin bag of provisions and made sure Issa was struggling after her with the holdall and the bedroll. She would have shared more of the load with him but every time she tried he waved her angrily away, although after two flights he was looking like an old, thin child, and after three his breathing was coming in rasps that echoed up and down the stairwell.

The din they were making alarmed her until she remembered it was Saturday and there were no other tenants. All the other floors were given over to fancy offices of haute couture, designer furniture and gourmet food companies: worlds she told herself that she had resolutely left behind.

Issa had stopped halfway up the last flight and was staring past her, his face stiff with fear and incomprehension. The door to her loft was of old hammered iron with heavy bolts. Its giant padlock would have secured the Bastille. She hurried down to him and this time accidentally seized his arm, only to feel him recoil.

“We’re not locking you up, Issa,” she said. “We’re trying to keep you free.”

“From your KGB?”

“From everyone. Just do as I say.”

He slowly shook his head, then in an act of terrible submission lowered it, and step after step, but so laboriously that his feet might have been chained together, he followed her up the last of the stairs. Then stopped again, head still bowed and feet together, while he waited for her to unlock the door. But all her instincts told her not to.

“Issa?”

No reply. Stretching out her right hand until it was directly in his eyeline, she laid the key on her open palm and offered it to him the way she had offered carrots to her horse when she was small.

“Here.
You
open it. I’m not your jailer. Take the key and unlock the door for us. Please.”

For a lifetime, as it seemed to her, he remained staring downward at her open hand, and at the rusted key lying on it. But either the prospect of taking it from her was too much for him, or he was fearful of making contact with her bare flesh, for abruptly his head, then his whole upper body, turned away from her in rejection. But Annabel refused to be rejected.

“Do you want
me
to open it?” she demanded. “I need to know, please, Issa. Are you telling me I may open this door? Do I have your permission? Answer me, please, Issa. You’re my client. I need your instructions. Issa, we’re going to stand here and get very cold and tired until you
instruct
me to open this door. Do you hear me, Issa? Where’s your bracelet?”

It was in his hand.

“Put it back on your wrist. You’re not in danger here.”

He put the bracelet back on his wrist.

“Now tell me to open the door.”

“Open.”

“Say it louder. Open the door, please, Annabel.”

“Open the door, please.”

“Annabel.”

“Annabel.”

“Now watch me unlock the door at your request, please. There. Done. I go in first and you follow me. Not like prison at all. No, leave the door open behind you, please. We won’t close it until we need to.”

It was three days since she had been here. A swift look round told her that the builders were more advanced than she had feared. The plastering was nearly complete, the tiles she had ordered were stacked and waiting, the old bathtub her mother had found in Stuttgart was in place, fitted with the brass taps Annabel had bought at the flea market. The water supply was restored, or why would the builders have left their coffee cups in the sink? The telephone she had ordered was in its blister pack at the center of the floor, waiting to be connected.

Issa had discovered the arched window. Stock-still, his back to her as he contemplated the lightening sky, he was tall again.

“It’s only for a day or two while I make other arrangements,” she called to him lightly down the room. “This is where we keep you safe for your own good. I’ll bring you books and food and visit you every day.”

“I cannot fly?” he inquired, his gaze still on the sky.

“I’m afraid not. You can’t go outside either. Not until we’re ready to move you.”

“You and Mr. Tommy?”

“Me and Mr. Tommy.”

“He will visit also?”

“He’s consulting his files. That’s what he has to do. I’m not a banker, neither are you. Not everything can be solved at once. We have to move one step at a time.”

“Mr. Tommy is an important gentleman. When I am appointed a doctor, I shall invite him to the ceremony. He has a good heart and speaks Russian like a Romanov. Where did he learn to do this?”

“In Paris, I believe.”

“Is that where you learned your Russian also, Annabel?”

This time, at least, it wasn’t about Karsten. He had stopped sweating. His voice was calm again.

“I learned my Russian in Moscow,” she said.

“You were at school in Moscow, Annabel? That is most interesting! I too was at school in Moscow. Only for a short time, it is true. What school, please? What number? Maybe I am familiar with this school. Did they accept Chechen students?”—clearly excited to be making a connection between his world and hers, imagining perhaps that they were school friends.

“It didn’t have a number.”

“Why not, Annabel?”

“It wasn’t that kind of school.”

“What kind of school is it that doesn’t have a number? Was it a KGB school?”

“No, it most certainly was not! It was a private school.” In her sudden weariness she heard herself telling him the rest. “It was a private school for the children of foreign officials living in Moscow. So I attended it.”

“Your father was a foreign official living in Moscow? What kind of official, Annabel?”

She was backtracking. “I happened to be staying in the house of an official foreign family. I was eligible to attend this private school, and that’s where I learned to speak Russian.”

And that’s more than I meant to tell you, because not even you are going to drag out of me the fact, unknown even to the Sanctuary, that my father was legal attaché to the German embassy in Moscow.

A beeper was screaming and it was not her own. Fearing they had set off some clever alarm left behind by the builders, she peered anxiously round the room for the source, but it was Issa’s electronic pager, given him by Melik, summoning him to the first prayer hour of the day.

Yet he remained at the window. Why? Was he looking for his KGB followers? No. He was plotting the direction of Mecca by the dawn light before his pencil-thin body folded to the bare floorboards.

“You will please leave the room, Annabel,” he said.

Waiting in the kitchen, she cleared a space and unpacked the bin bag. Sitting on a stool with one elbow on the decorators’ table and her fist bunched against her cheek, she lapsed into a daze in which, by an act of self-transposition, she found herself staring, as often when she was tired, at her father’s collection of small paintings by Flemish masters that hung in the drawing room of the family estate outside Freiburg.

“Bought at auction in Munich by your grandfather, darling,” her mother had replied when, as a rebellious fourteen-year-old, Annabel had launched her one-woman investigation into the paintings’ provenance. “The way your father likes to collect his icons.”

“How much for?”

“In today’s money, they’re no doubt worth a great deal. But back in those days, pennies.”

“Bought at auction
when
?” she had demanded. “Bought who
from
? Who did the paintings belong to before Grandpa bought them for pennies at an auction in Munich?”

“Why don’t you ask your father, darling?” her mother suggested, altogether too sweetly for Annabel’s suspicious ear. “It’s
his
father, not mine.”

But when Annabel asked her father, he became someone she didn’t know. “Those times are over and done with,” he had retorted, in an official tone he had never used to her before. “Your grandfather had a nose for art, he paid the going price. For all I know, they’re fakes. Never dare ask that question again.”

And I never did, she remembered. Not in all the family forums since, whether out of love, or fear or, worst of all, submission to the family discipline she was in revolt against, had she dared ask that question again. And her parents considered themselves radicals! They were rebels, or had been: sixty-eighters who had manned the barricades at student protests, and carried banners urging the Americans to get out of Europe! “You young of today don’t know what real protest is about!” they liked to tell her laughingly, when she overstepped the mark.

Taking a notebook from her rucksack, she began jotting herself a must-do list by the glow from the skylight. Her lists were as much a family joke as her intransigence. One minute she was this chaotic snail with her whole disorganized life in her rucksack, the next she was this German over-organizer who made herself lists about the lists she was going to make.

And no, I won’t buy a bloody iPod, I refuse to be a slave to consumerism.

Unsure whether Issa was still at prayer, she softly returned to the big room. It was empty. She ran to the window. It was locked, no broken glass. She swung round and, with the light behind her, looked back into the room.

He was standing two meters above her on top of a builder’s ladder. Like some Soviet-era statue, he was holding a giant pair of scissors in one hand and in the other a paper airplane he must have cut from the roll of lining paper at the foot of the ladder.

“One day, I shall be a great aeronautical engineer like Tupolev,” he announced, without looking down at her.

“No more doctor?” Annabel called up, humoring him as she might a suicide.

“Doctor also. And maybe, if I have time, lawyer. I wish to acquire the Five Excellences. Do you know the Five Excellences? If you do not, you are not cultivated. I have already a good grounding in music, literature and physics. Maybe you will convert to Islam and I will marry you and attend to your education. That will be a good solution for both of us. But you must not be severe. Look, Annabel.”

Articulating his long body forward to a point where he defied the laws of gravity, he gently laid his paper airplane on the still air.

He’s simply another client, she repeated to herself angrily as she closed the door behind her and snapped shut the aged padlock.

A client who’s in need of special attention, granted. Unorthodox attention. Illegal attention. But a client for all that. And soon he’ll get the medical care he needs as well.

He’s a case. A legal case. With a file. All right, a patient too. He’s a damaged and traumatized child who’s had no childhood, and I’m his lawyer and his nanny and his only connection with the world.

He’s a child but he knows more about pain and captivity and the worst of life than I ever will. He’s arrogant and helpless, and half the time what he’s saying bears no relation to what he’s thinking.

He’s trying to please me and he doesn’t know how. He’s saying the right words, but he’s not the man who should be saying them: Marry me, Annabel. Watch my paper airplane, Annabel. Convert to Islam, Annabel. Don’t be severe, Annabel. I want to be a lawyer, a doctor and a great aeronautical engineer and a few other things that will occur to me before I’m shipped back to Sweden for onward transportation to the gulag, Annabel. You will please leave the room, Annabel.

On the harbor front, dawn had turned to early morning. She mounted a pedestrian walkway that ran alongside the harbor wall. In the past weeks while she waited for her new apartment to materialize she had walked here often, notching up the shops she would use and the fish cafés where she would meet her friends, and fantasizing about the routes she would take to work: one day, ride all the way, the next put her bike on the ferry, stay aboard three stops, hop off and ride again, but now all she could think of was Issa’s parting words after she had prepared him for being locked up again:

“If I sleep, I shall return to prison, Annabel.”

Back in her old flat, Annabel moved with the elaborate precision for which the family forum never ceased to tease her. She had been frightened and refused to admit it. Now she could celebrate her victory over fear.

First she basked in the shower she had promised herself, and washed her hair while she was at it. Her near exhaustion of an hour ago had been replaced by a thirst for action.

Once showered, she dressed for the road: knee-length Lycra shorts, trainers, a light blouse for a hot day, Sherpa waistcoat, and—on the bamboo table next to the door—her shell hat and leather gloves. Her need for physical exercise was insatiable. Without it, she was convinced, she would turn to blubber in a week.