A Most Wanted Man (3 page)

His last find was a key, a small pipestem key, no larger than one knuckle joint of his boxer’s hand. It was machine-turned and had complex teeth on three sides: too small for a prison door, he reckoned, too small for the gate in Gothenburg leading back to the ship. But just right for handcuffs.

Replacing Issa’s belongings in the purse, Melik slipped it under the sweat-soaked pillow for him to discover when he woke. But by next morning, the guilty feelings that had taken hold of him wouldn’t let him go. All through his night’s vigil, stretched on the floor with Issa one step above him on the bed, he had been tormented by images of his guest’s martyred limbs, and the realization of his own inadequacy.

As a fighter he knew pain, or thought he did. As a Turkish street kid he had taken beatings as well as handing them out. In a recent championship bout, a hail of punches had sent him reeling into the red dark from which boxers fear not to return. Swimming against native Germans, he had tested the extreme limits of his endurance, or thought he had.

Yet compared with Issa he was untried.

Issa is a man and I am still a boy. I always wanted a brother and here he is delivered to my doorstep, and I rejected him. He suffered like a true defender of his beliefs while I courted cheap glory in the boxing ring.

By the early hours of dawn, the erratic breathing that had kept Melik on tenterhooks all night settled to a steady rasp. Replacing the poultice, he was relieved to establish that Issa’s fever had subsided. By midmorning, he was propped semi-upright like a pasha amid a golden pile of Leyla’s tasselled velvet cushions from the drawing room, and she was feeding him a life-giving mash of her own concoction and his mother’s gold chain was back on his wrist.

Sick with shame, Melik waited for Leyla to close the door behind her. Kneeling at Issa’s side, he hung his head.

“I looked in your purse,” he said. “I am deeply ashamed of what I have done. May merciful Allah forgive me.”

Issa entered one of his eternal silences, then laid an emaciated hand on Melik’s shoulder.

“Never confess, my friend,” he advised drowsily, clasping Melik’s hand. “If you confess, they will keep you there forever.”

It was six o’clock in the evening of the following Friday as the private banking house of Brue Frères PLC, formerly of Glasgow, Rio de Janeiro and Vienna, and presently of Hamburg, put itself to bed for the weekend.

On the dot of five-thirty, a muscular janitor had closed the front doors of the pretty terraced villa beside the Binnen Alster lake. Within minutes, the chief cashier had locked the strong room and alarmed it, the senior secretary had waved off the last of her girls and checked their computers and wastepaper baskets, and the bank’s longest-serving member, Frau Ellenberger, had switched over the telephones, jammed on her beret, unchained her bicycle from its iron hoop in the courtyard and pedaled away to collect her great-niece from dancing class.

But not before pausing to administer a playful rebuke to her employer, Mr. Tommy Brue, the bank’s sole surviving partner and bearer of its famous name: “Mr. Tommy, you are worse than us Germans,” she protested in her perfectly learned English, popping her head round the door of his sanctum. “Why do you torture yourself with work? Springtime is upon us! Have you not seen the crocuses and magnolia? You are sixty now, remember. You should go home and drink a glass of wine with Mrs. Brue in your beautiful garden! If you don’t, you will be
‘worn to a raveling,
’” she cautioned, more to parade her love of Beatrix Potter than out of any expectation of mending her employer’s ways.

Brue raised his right hand and rotated it in genial parody of a papal blessing.

“Go well, Frau Elli,” he urged, in sardonic resignation. “If my employees refuse to work for me during the week, I have no choice but to work for them at weekends.
Tschüss,
” he added, blowing her a kiss.

“And
Tschüss
to you, Mr. Tommy, and my regards to your good wife.”

“I shall pass them on.”

The reality, as both knew, was different. With the phones and corridors silent, and no clients clamoring for his attention, and his wife, Mitzi, out on her bridge night with her friends the von Essens, Brue’s kingdom was his own. He could survey the outgoing week, he could usher in the new. He could consult, if the mood was on him, his immortal soul.

In deference to the unseasonably hot weather, Brue was in shirtsleeves and braces. The jacket of his tailor-made suit was neatly draped over an elderly wooden clotheshorse beside the door:
Randall’s of Glasgow,
it read, tailors to the Brues for four generations. The desk at which he labored was the same one that Duncan Brue, the bank’s founder, had taken on board with him when, in 1908, he set sail from Scotland with nothing but hope in his heart and fifty gold sovereigns in his pocket.

The outsized mahogany bookcase that filled the whole of one wall was similarly the stuff of family legend. Behind its ornate glass front reposed row upon row of leather-bound masterpieces of world culture: Dante, Goethe, Plato, Socrates, Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare and, somewhat mysteriously, Jack London. The bookcase had been accepted by Brue’s grandfather in part repayment of a bad debt, so too the books. Had he felt obliged to read them? Legend said not. He had banked them.

And on the wall directly opposite Brue, like a traffic warning permanently in his path, hung the original, hand-painted, gilt-framed family tree. The roots of its ancient oak struck deep into the shores of the silvery river Tay. The branches spread eastward into Old Europe and westward into the New World. Golden acorns marked the cities where foreign marriages had enriched the Brue bloodline, not to mention its disposable reserves.

And Brue himself was a worthy descendant of this noble lineage, even if he was its last. In his heart of hearts he might know that Frères, as the family alone referred to it, was an oasis of discarded practices. Frères would see him out, but Frères had run its natural course. True, there was daughter Georgie by his first wife, Sue, but Georgie’s most recent known address was an ashram outside San Francisco. Banking had never loomed large on her agenda.

Yet in appearance Brue was anything but obsolete. He was well-built and cautiously good-looking, with a broad freckled brow and a Scotsman’s mop of wiry red-brown hair that he had somehow tamed and parted. He had the assurance of wealth but none of its arrogance. His facial features, when not battened down for professional inscrutability, were affable and, despite a lifetime in banking or because of it, refreshingly unlined. When Germans called him typically English he would let out a hearty laugh and promise to bear the insult with Scottish fortitude. If he was a dying species, he was also secretly rather pleased with himself on account of it: Tommy Brue, salt of the earth, good man on a dark night, no highflier but all the better for it, first-rate wife, marvelous value at the dinner table and plays a decent game of golf. Or so the word went, he believed, and so it should.

Having taken a last look at the closing markets and calculated their impact on the bank’s holdings—the usual Friday-night sag, nothing to get hot under the collar about—Brue shut down his computer and ran an eye over the stack of folders that Frau Ellenberger had earmarked for his attention.

All week long he had wrestled with the nigh-incomprehensible complexities of the modern banker’s world, where knowing who you were actually lending money to was about as likely as knowing the man who had printed it. His priorities for these Friday séances, by contrast, were determined as much by mood as necessity. If Brue was feeling benign, he might spend the evening reorganizing a client’s charitable trust at no charge; if skittish, a stud farm, a health spa or a chain of casinos. Or if it was the season for number crunching, a skill he had acquired by hard industry rather than family genes, he would likely play himself Mahler while he pondered the prospectuses of brokers, venture capital houses and competing pension funds.

Tonight, however, he enjoyed no such freedom of choice. A valued client had become the target of an investigation by the Hamburg Stock Exchange, and although Brue had been assured by Haug von Westerheim, the committee’s chairman, that no summons would materialize, he felt obliged to immerse himself in the latest twists of the affair. But first, sitting back in his chair, he relived the improbable moment when old Haug had breached his own iron rules of confidentiality:

In the marbled splendor of the Anglo-German Club a sumptuous black-tie dinner is at its height. The best and brightest of Hamburg’s financial community are celebrating one of their own. Tommy Brue is sixty tonight, and he’d better believe it, for as his father Edward Amadeus liked to say:
Tommy, my son, arithmetic is the one part of our business that doesn’t lie.
The mood is euphoric, the food good, the wine better, the rich are happy and Haug von Westerheim, septuagenarian fleet owner, power broker, Anglophile and wit, is proposing Brue’s health.

“Tommy, dear boy, we have decided you have been reading too much Oscar Wilde,” he pipes in English, champagne flute in hand as he stands before a portrait of the Queen when young. “You heard of Dorian Gray perhaps? We think so. We think you have taken a leaf out of Dorian Gray’s book. We think that in the vaults of your bank is the hideous portrait of Tommy at his true age today. Meanwhile, unlike your dear Queen, you decline to age graciously, but sit smiling at us like a twenty-five-year-old elf, exactly as you smiled at us when you arrived here from Vienna seven years ago in order to deprive us of our hard-earned riches.”

The applause continues as Westerheim takes the elegant hand of Brue’s wife, Mitzi, and, with additional gallantry because she is Viennese, kisses it, and informs the gathering that her beauty, unlike Brue’s, is indeed eternal. Swept up with honest emotion, Brue rises from his seat with the intention of grasping Westerheim’s hand in return, but the old man, intoxicated as much by his triumph as the wine, enfolds him in a bear hug, and whispers huskily into his ear: “Tommy, dear boy…that inquiry about a certain client of yours…it shall be attended to…first we postpone for technical reasons…then we drop it in the Elbe…happy birthday, Tommy, my friend…you are a decent fellow…”

Pulling on his half-frame spectacles, Brue studied anew the charges against his client. Another banker, he supposed, would by now have called Westerheim and thanked him for his quiet word, thereby holding him to it. But Brue hadn’t done that. He couldn’t bring himself to saddle the old boy with a rash promise made in the heat of his sixtieth birthday.

Taking up a pen, he scribbled a note to Frau Ellenberger:
First thing Monday, kindly call Ethics Committee Secretariat and ask whether a date has been set. Thanks! TB.

Done, he thought. Now the old boy can choose in peace whether to push ahead with the hearing or kill it.

The second of the evening’s must-do’s was Mad Marianne, as Brue called her, but only to Frau Ellenberger. The surviving widow of a prosperous Hamburg timber merchant, Marianne was Brue Frères’s longest-running soap opera, the client who makes all the clichés of private banking come true. In tonight’s episode, she has recently undergone a religious conversion at the hands of a thirty-year-old Danish Lutheran pastor, and is on the brink of renouncing her worldly goods—more pertinently, one-thirtieth of the bank’s reserves—in favor of a mysterious not-for-profit foundation under his pastoral control.

The results of a private inquiry commissioned by Brue on his own initiative lie before him and are not encouraging. The pastor was recently charged with fraud but acquitted when witnesses failed to come forward. He has fathered love children by several women. But how is poor Brue the banker to break this to his besotted client without losing her account? Mad Marianne has a low tolerance of bad news at the best of times, as he has more than once discovered to his cost. It has taken all his charm—short of the ultimate, he would assure you!—to stop her moving her account to some sweet-tongued child at Goldman Sachs. There is a son who stands to lose a fortune and Marianne has moments of adoring him, but—another twist!—he is presently in rehab in the Taunus hills. A discreet trip to Frankfurt may prove to be the answer…

Brue scribbles a second note to his ever-loyal Frau Ellenberger:
Please contact director of clinic, and establish whether boy is in a fit state to receive visitor (me!).

Distracted by the mutterings of the telephone system beside his desk, Brue glanced at the pin lights. If the incoming call was on his unlisted hotline, he’d take it. It wasn’t, so he turned to the Frères’s draft six-monthly report, which, though healthy, needed sparkle. He had not engaged with it long before the telephone system again distracted him.

Was this a new message, or had the earlier mutterings somehow insinuated themselves into his memory? At seven on a Friday evening? The open line? Must be a wrong number. Giving in to curiosity, he touched the replay button. First came an electronic beep, cut off by Frau Ellenberger courteously advising the caller in German, then English, to leave a message or call again during business hours.

Then a woman’s voice, young, German, and pure as a choirboy’s.

The staple of your private banker’s life, Brue liked to pontificate after a scotch or two in amiable company, was not, as one might reasonably expect, cash. It wasn’t bull markets, bear markets, hedge funds or derivatives. It was cock-up. It was the persistent, he would go so far as to say the
permanent
sound, not to put too fine an edge on it, of excrement hitting your proverbial fan. So if you didn’t happen to like living in a state of unremitting siege, the odds were that private banking wasn’t for you. He had made the same point with some success in his prepared speech in reply to old Westerheim.

And as a veteran of such cock-ups, Brue over the years had developed two distinct responses to the moment of impact. If he was in a board meeting with the eyes of the world on him, he would rise to his feet, shove his thumbs into his waistband and meander round the room wearing an expression of exemplary calm.

Unobserved, he was more likely to favor his second option, which was to freeze in the position in which the news had hit him, flicking at his lower lip with his forefinger, which was what he did now while he played the message a second time and then a third, starting with the initial beep.

“Good evening. My name is Annabel Richter, I am a lawyer, and I wish to speak personally to Mr. Tommy Brue as soon as possible on behalf of a client I represent.”

Represent but do not name, Brue methodically notes for the third time. A crisp, but southerly German tone, educated and impatient of circumlocution.

“My client has instructed me to pass his best wishes to a Mr.”—she pauses, as if consulting a script—“to a Mr.
Lipizzaner.
I repeat that. The name is
Lipizzaner.
Like the horses, yes, Mr. Brue? Those famous white horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, where your bank was formerly situated? I think your bank knows Lipizzaners very well.”

Her tone lifts. A factual message about white horses becomes a choirboy in distress.

“Mr. Brue, my client has
very
little time at his disposal. I naturally do not wish to say more on the telephone. It is also possible you are more familiar with his position than I am, which will expedite matters. I would therefore be grateful if you would call me back on my cell phone on receipt of this message so that we can make an appointment to meet.”

She could have stopped there, but she doesn’t. The choirboy’s song takes on a sharper edge:

“If it’s late at night, that’s acceptable, Mr. Brue. Even
very
late. I saw a light just now as I went past your office. Maybe you personally are no longer at work, but someone else is. If so, please will that person kindly pass this message to Mr. Tommy Brue as a matter of urgency, because nobody but Mr. Tommy Brue is empowered to act in the matter. Thank you for your time.”

And thank you for
your
time, Frau Annabel Richter, thought Brue, rising to his feet and, with thumb and finger still fastened on his lower lip, heading for the bay window as if it were the nearest means of escape.