A Most Wanted Man (19 page)

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.

Now at last he was able to understand himself. He had mistaken his need. He had invested himself in the wrong market. It wasn’t copulation he had been looking for. It was
this.
And now he had found
this,
which was an important and rather astonishing clarification of his nature for him. Waning testosterone was not the issue. The issue was
this,
and
this
was Annabel.

And it was for
this,
as much as for any other reason, that he had lied to Messrs. Lantern and Foreman. They had talked about his father as if he was their property. They had bullied the son in the name of the father, and thought they owned him too. They had strayed too close to ground that was his and Annabel’s alone, and he had kept them out. In doing so he had consciously and deliberately entered her danger zone, which he now shared with her. And in consequence, his life had become vivid and precious to him, for which he thanked her from the heart.

“And the house of Brue Frères is going under, one hears,” Mitzi remarked. It was the same evening. They were sitting in the sunroom, admiring the garden. Brue was sipping old Calvados, a gift from a French client.

“Are we really?” he replied lightly. “I didn’t know. Who does one hear that from, if I may ask?”

“Bernhard, who got it from your geriatric friend Haug von Westerheim, who is supposed to know these things. Is it?”

“Not yet. Not that
I’ve
heard.”

“Are
you
going under?”

“Not noticeably. Why?”

“You seem unable to control your signals. One minute you’re leaping around like a puppy, the next you hate us all. Is it a woman, Tommy? I had the impression you’d rather given us up these days.”

Even by the rules of the games they played—and didn’t play—the question was unusually blunt, and Brue permitted himself an unusually long time to turn it round.

“A
man,
actually,” he replied, mentally taking refuge in Issa; at which Mitzi produced a knowing smile and went back to her book.

The building was not a sanctuary—or not from the outside. It was a guilty, down-at-heel accomplice of Nazi times, squeezed onto the corner of a traffic junction and walled in by garish cigarette hoardings. The graffiti on its weeping walls offered tropical sunsets and obscenities. To one side squatted a tin café called Asyl, to the other an Africa-Asia trading mart for cast-off clothing. Inside, however, all was bustle, efficiency and determined optimism.

And so it was this sunny Monday spring morning as Annabel, with every effort to appear her normal self, manhandled her bicycle up the steps into its usual place in the entrance lobby, chained it to a downpipe, and followed the glitter-painted arrows: up the tiled staircase to the lobby where she waved and waited as usual for Wangaza the receptionist to spot her through the glass door and press the button that made the lock buzz; into the lobby, past the usual rows of men in brown suits and women in
hijabs,
and shadow-eyed children piling up building blocks in the glass-walled playpen, or feeding lettuce to the tortoise family, or wistfully poking their fingers through the wire perimeter of the rabbit house—and why was everyone so quiet this morning or was it always like this?—into the open plan where Lisa and Maria, our in-house Arabists, were already sitting head-to-head with their first clients of the day; a quick hello and a smile to each of them, enter the lawyers’ corridor with its shafts of morning sunlight making it look more like a path to Paradise—and why was Ursula’s door closed this early on a Monday and her red don’t-enter light burning above it—Ursula who prided herself on keeping her door open to the entire world and urged everybody else to do the same? And so into her own office where she unharnessed her rucksack, dumped it onto the floor like the burden of guilt it had become, sat to her desk, closed her eyes and put her head into her hands for a moment, before taking refuge in her computer and peering sightlessly at its screen.

In the sudden quiet of her own office, in the very room where she had first received Ursula’s referred call from Melik imploring her to come and visit this Russian-speaking friend of his who desperately needed her help, she looked back on the weekend as if it comprised her entire life.

The pieces still refused to settle. Over two days and nights she had visited him five times. Or was it six? Or seven if you included taking him there? Again on the Saturday evening. Twice on Sunday. Again this morning at crack of dawn when I interrupted him praying. How many times did that make?

But ask her to account for the actual hours she had spent with him, arrange them in some kind of rational order—what they had talked about as they walked their separate tightropes, where they had laughed and where they had retreated to their separate corners—everything merged, and incidents started changing places with each other.

Was it for Saturday supper that they had cooked potato and onion soup together on her camping stove in the dark, like children at a campfire?

“Why do you not put on the lights, Annabel? Are you in Chechnya expecting an air raid? Is it illegal to show lights tonight? In that case, all Hamburg is illegal.”

“It’s better not to attract attention unnecessarily, that’s all.”

“Sometimes the dark attracts more attention than the light,” he observed after long reflection.

Nothing that was without its meaning for him; meanings from his world, not hers. Nothing that did not have the ring of hard-won profundity, arrived at in the face of despair.

Was it on the Sunday morning that she brought him Russian newspapers from the railway station kiosk—or afternoon? She remembered cycling to the station and spending a small fortune on
Ogonyok, Novi Mir
and
Kommersant,
and as an afterthought flowers from the station stall. Her first idea had been a begonia that he could tend. Then, given the plans she had for him, she decided it was better to buy cut flowers, but which? Did roses denote love to him? Heaven forbid. She compromised on tulips, only to find they didn’t fit into the box on the front of her bicycle so she ended up carrying them one-handed like an Olympic torch all the way down to the harbor front only to find that half the petals had blown off.

And when they sat with the length of the attic between them listening to Tchaikovsky, and he suddenly jumped up, switched off the tape recorder and returned to his place on the packing case beneath the arched window in order to recite a heroic Chechen poem to her about mountains, rivers, forests and the thwarted love of a noble Chechen hunter—arbitrarily translating patches into Russian when he felt like it or, as she suspected, when he knew their meaning, which was not always the case, and clutching his gold bracelet while he orated—well, was that last night or Saturday?

And when was it that he described, by way of distracted reminiscence, a beating he had received while being hauled from room to room by two men he insisted on calling “the Japanese,” though whether this was a true description of their ethnicity, or their prison nickname, and whether the beatings took place in Russia or in Turkey, he seemed unclear. He cared only about the rooms: in this room they beat my feet, in this one my body, in this one they electroed me.

Whenever it was, it was the moment when she felt most inclined to fall in love with him, when intimacy on such a scale became an act of stupendous generosity, and her whole being was responding to him: he is owed everything, he is humiliating himself so that I can know and heal him; what have I to give him in return? But no sooner had the answer threatened to present itself than she felt herself recoil absolutely, because that way lay the negation of the promise she had made to herself: to put his life—and not his love—before law.

She knew also that there were long passages when, like someone who has lived alone a lot, he barely spoke, or not at all. But his silences were not oppressive. She took them as some kind of compliment, as a further act of trust. And when they ended he became so garrulous that they were like old friends remet, and she found herself responding to him in kind, chatting away about her sister, Heidi, and her three babies, and about Hugo the brilliant doctor she was so proud of—Issa couldn’t get enough about him—even about her mother’s cancer.

Just never her father, don’t ask her why. Perhaps because of his old job as legal attaché in Moscow. Or perhaps it was Colonel Karpov’s long shadow that she felt. Or perhaps she knew that now at last it was she and not her father who was controlling her life.

Yet she was Issa’s lawyer, not merely his keeper. Not once but half a dozen times she had prevailed on him, besought him, practically
ordered
him, to make a formal claim to his inheritance, but always to no avail. What she expected him to gain by claiming was something she hardly dared think about. But who could doubt that, if the size of his inheritance was as large as Brue had hinted, all sorts of doors would mysteriously open to him? She had heard of cases—some whispered here at the Sanctuary—of wealthy Arabs and Asians whose records stank to high heaven, yet they had received benign treatment on the strength of a fine German property and a fine German bank account.

Get him cared for first, she told herself. When he’s calm and strong, work on him in earnest. Wait for the Hugo solution.

And Brue? Realistically yet intuitively, she believed she had come to understand who he was: a lonely rich man in the last part of his life, looking for the dignity of love.

Her phone was ringing. Internal from Ursula.

“We’re postponing our usual Monday meeting till two this afternoon, Annabel. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Fine.”

Not fine. Ursula’s crisp voice was a warning. She’s got somebody in the room with her. She’s talking for her audience.

“Herr Werner is here.”

“Werner?”

“From the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He wishes to ask you a few questions regarding a client of yours.”

“He can’t. I’m a lawyer. He’s not allowed to ask and I’m not allowed to answer. He must know the law as well as you and I do.” And when Ursula said nothing: “Which client of mine is he talking about, anyway?”

He’s standing over her, she thought. He’s listening to everything we say.

“Herr Werner has a Herr
Dinkelmann
with him, Annabel, also from the Office for Protection. They are very serious gentlemen and they wish to discuss with you urgently ‘a feared public outrage that they believe is about to occur.’”

She is quoting their words, deliberately making a meal of them for my benefit.

Herr Werner was in his late twenties and fleshy, with small watery eyes and ash-blond eyebrows and a sheen to his pale, overfed complexion. As Annabel entered the room, Ursula was seated at her desk and Herr Werner was standing behind her, exactly as Annabel had pictured him, with his head tilted back and his mouth set in an imperious downward curve while he subjected Annabel to a prolonged optical body search: face, breasts, hips, legs and face again. The inspection complete, he took a stiff pace forward, helped himself to her hand and bent over it with a quarter-bow.

“Frau Richter. My name is Werner. I am one of those people who are paid to help the great German public sleep peacefully at night. Under the law, my office has responsibilities, but no executive powers. We are officials, not policemen. You are a lawyer so you know this already. Allow me to present Herr
Dinkelmann
from our coordination unit,” he went on, releasing her hand.

But Herr Dinkelmann from our coordination unit was at first invisible. He had sat himself in the corner behind Ursula’s desk, and was only now emerging into view. He was mid-forties, sandy-haired and squat, with an air of apology about him that seemed to acknowledge that his best days were behind him. He wore a librarian’s rumpled linen jacket, and an old tartan tie.

“Coordination?”
Annabel repeated, with a sideways glance for Ursula. “Whatever do you coordinate, Herr Dinkelmann? Or are we not allowed to know?”

Ursula’s smile was tepid at best, but the smile of Herr Dinkelmann was briefly delightful: a clown’s smile, reaching right up into the cheekbones.

“Frau Richter, without me the uncoordinated world would fall apart immediately,” he said in a cheerful tone, holding her hand a trifle longer than she considered necessary.

They sat four in a ring round the low pinewood table, with blue-eyed, stiff-backed Ursula, her prematurely gray hair swept into a bun, playing Mother. Ursula had such deep upholstered chairs that it was impossible to be pompous in them. On each chair lay one of her hand-embroidered cushions. Needlework is my anger management, she had told Annabel at one of their little chats. Industrialsized coffee thermos, milk, sugar, mugs and a proud array of assorted waters. Ursula is a water gourmet like me. And midway between the coffee and the water tray, a high-gloss photograph of Issa, full face and both profiles.

But Annabel was the only person looking at Issa’s photograph. Everybody else was looking at Annabel: Werner with a show of professional shrewdness, Dinkelmann with his clown’s smile, and Ursula with the studied impassivity she adopted at moments of crisis.

“Do you recognize this man, Annabel?” Ursula inquired. “As a lawyer you don’t have to say anything to these gentlemen unless you are yourself an object of investigation. You and I are both aware of that.”

“But we know it also, Frau Meyer!” Herr Werner cried fulsomely. “Since day one of our training course! Lawyers are a no-go area. Keep your fingers off them, especially if they are ladies!” Relishing the innuendo. “And we do not forget that there is a legal requirement of confidentiality upon
you
too, Frau Richter, concerning your client. We respect that also. Totally, don’t we, Dinkelmann?”

The clown’s smile meekly confirmed
totally.

“For us to attempt to persuade Frau Richter to violate her client’s confidentiality would be
completely
illegal. For you too, Frau Meyer. Even
you
may not persuade her! Unless she is personally an object of investigation—which she is not, clearly. Not at this moment. She is a lawyer, she is a citizen, we assume a loyal one, a member of a distinguished legal family. Such a person is not an object of investigation, unless there are highly exceptional circumstances. That is the spirit of our Constitution, and we are its protectors in spirit and in law. So
naturally,
we know.”

At long last, he stopped. And waited while he watched her. As they all did, with Dinkelmann the only one who was smiling.

“As a matter of fact, I
do
recognize this man,” Annabel conceded, after a lengthy delay to signal her professional concerns. “He’s one of our clients. A recent one”—addressing Ursula, and Ursula alone—“You haven’t met him, but you passed him across to me because he’s a Russian speaker.” Calmly picking up the photograph, she affected to examine it more closely, and laid it down again.

“What is his
name,
please, Frau Richter?” Werner blurted into her left ear. “We are not pressing you. Maybe you are bound also to keep his name confidential. If so, we don’t press you. Only that we have a potential public outrage that is about to occur. But never mind.”

“His name is Issa Karpov. Or he says it is”—still firmly and deliberately to Ursula. “He’s half Russian, half Chechen. Or says he is. With some clients, one can never be certain, as we both know all too well.”

“Oh, but
we
can be certain, Frau Richter!” Werner contradicted her with unexpected vigor. “Issa Karpov is an Islamist Russian criminal with a long record of convictions for militant actions. He entered Germany illegally—smuggled by
other
criminals, maybe also Islamist—and has no rights in this country whatever.”

“Everyone has rights, surely,” Annabel suggested, in gentle reproof.

“Not in his situation, Frau Richter. Not in his situation.”

“But Mr. Karpov has approached Sanctuary North in order to
regularize
his situation,” Annabel objected.