A Most Wanted Man (4 page)

Yes indeed, my bank knows Lipizzaners
very
well, madam, if by
bank
you mean myself and my one confidante, Frau Elli, and not another living soul. My
bank
would pay top dollar to see the last of its surviving Lipizzaners gallop over the horizon, back to Vienna where they came from, never to return. Perhaps you know that too.

A sickening thought came at him. Or perhaps it had been with him these seven years, and only now decided to step out of the shadows. Would
top dollar
actually be what you’re after, Frau Annabel Richter—you and your sainted client who is so short of time?

Is this a blackmail job you’re pulling, by any remote chance?

And are you perhaps, with your choirboy purity, and your air of professional high purpose, dropping a hint to me—you and your accomplice, sorry,
client
—that Lipizzaner horses possess the curious property of being born jet black and only turning white with age—which was how they came to lend their name to a certain type of exotic bank account inspired by the eminent Edward Amadeus Brue, OBE, my beloved late father whom in all other respects I continue to revere as the very pillar of banking probity, during his final salad days in Vienna when black money from the collapsing Evil Empire was hemorrhaging through the fast-fraying Iron Curtain by the truckload?

Brue took a slow tour round the room.

But why on earth did you do it, dear father of mine?

Why,
when all your life you traded on your good name and that of your forebears, and lived by it in private as well as in public, in the highest traditions of Scottish caution, canniness and dependability: Why put all that at risk for the sake of a bunch of crooks and carpetbaggers from the East whose one achievement had been to plunder their country’s assets at the moment when it had most need of them?

Why
throw open your bank to them—your beloved bank, your most precious thing?
Why
offer safe haven to their ill-gained loot, along with unprecedented terms of secrecy and protection?

Why stretch every norm and regulation to its snapping point and beyond, in a desperate—and as Brue had perceived it, even at the time—reckless attempt to set himself up as Vienna’s banker of choice to a bunch of Russian gangsters?

All right, you hated communism and communism was on its deathbed. You couldn’t wait for the funeral. But the crooks you were being so nice to were part of the regime!

No names needed, comrades! Just give us your loot for five years and we’ll give you a number! And when you next come and see us your Lipizzaners will be lily-white, full-grown, runaway investments! We do it just like the Swissies, but we’re Brits so we do it better!

Except we don’t, thought Brue sadly, hands linked behind his back as he paused to peer out the bay window.

We don’t, because great men who lose their marbles in old age die; because money relocates itself and so do banks; and because strange people called regulators appear on the scene and the past goes away. Except that it never quite does, does it? A few words from a choirboy voice and it all comes galloping home.

Fifty feet beneath him the armored cavalry of Europe’s richest city roared homeward to embrace its children, eat, watch television, make love and go to sleep. On the lake, skiffs and small yachts skimmed through the red dusk.

She’s out there, he thought. She saw my light burning.

She’s out there practicing her scales with her so-called client while they argue the toss about how much they’re going to sting me for not blowing the whistle on the Lipizzaner accounts.

It is also possible that you are more familiar with my client’s position than I am.

Well, it’s also possible I’m not, Frau Annabel Richter. And to be frank I don’t want to be, although it looks as though I must.

And since you will tell me nothing more about your client by way of the telephone—a reticence that I appreciate—and since I possess no supersensory powers and am therefore unlikely to identify him from among the half dozen Lipizzaner survivors—assuming there are any—who have not been shot, jailed or have simply forgotten in their cups where in heaven they locked away those odd few million, I have no alternative, in the best tradition of blackmail, but to accede to your request.

He dialed her number.

“Richter.”

“This is Tommy Brue of Brue’s Bank. Good evening, Frau Richter.”

“Good evening, Mr. Brue. I would like to speak to you just as soon as it is convenient, please.”

Like now, for instance. With a bit less melody, and a bit more cutting edge, than when she had been pleading for his attention.

The Atlantic Hotel lay ten minutes’ walk from the bank, along a crowded gravel footpath that skirted the lake. Beside it a second path ticked and hissed to the oaths of homebound cyclists. A chill breeze had got up, and the sky had turned blue-black. Long drops of rain were starting to fall. In Hamburg, they call them bundles of thread. Seven years ago when Brue was new to the city, his progress through the throng might have been retarded by the last of his British diffidence. Tonight he cut his own furrow, and kept an elbow ready for predatory umbrellas.

At the hotel entrance, a red-cloaked doorman raised his top hat to him. In the lobby, Herr Schwarz the concierge glided to his side and led him to the table that Brue favored for clients who preferred to talk their business away from the bank. It lay in the farthest corner between a marble column and oil paintings of Hanseatic ships, under the liverish gaze of the second Kaiser Wilhelm, rendered in sea-blue tiles.

“I’m expecting a lady I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting before, Peter,” Brue confided, with a smile of male complicity. “A Frau Richter. I have a suspicion she’s young. Kindly make sure she’s also beautiful.”

“I shall do my best,” Herr Schwarz promised gravely, richer by twenty euros.

Out of nowhere, Brue was reminded of a painful conversation he had had with his daughter, Georgie, when she was all of nine years old. He had been explaining that Mummy and Daddy still loved each other, but were going to live apart. It was better to live apart in a loving relationship than quarrel, he had told her, on the advice of a psychiatrist he loathed. And how two happy homes were better than one unhappy one. And how Georgie would be able to see Mummy and Daddy as often as she wanted, just not together like before. But Georgie was more interested in her new puppy.

“If you’d only got one Austrian schilling left in the whole world, what would you do with it?” she demanded, thoughtfully scratching its tummy.

“Why, invest it, of course, darling. What would
you
do?”

“Tip someone,” she replied.

Mystified more by himself than by Georgie, Brue tried to work out why he should be punishing himself with the story now. Must be the similarity of their voices, he decided, with an eye to the swing doors. Will she be wired? Will her “client,” if she’s bringing him, be wired? Well, if so, they’ll be out of luck.

He reminded himself of the last time he’d met a blackmailer: another hotel, another woman, British and living in Vienna. Prevailed upon by a Frères client who wouldn’t trust his problem to anyone else, Brue had met her for tea in the discreet pavilions of the Sacher. She was a stately madame, dressed in widow’s weeds. Her girl was called Sophie.

“She’s one of my best, Sophie is, so naturally I’m ashamed,” she had explained from under the brim of her black straw hat. “Only she’s thinking of going to the newspapers, you see. I’ve told her not to, but she won’t listen, her being so young. He’s got some rough ways with him, your friend has, not all of them nice. Well, nobody wants to read about themselves, do they? Not in the newspapers. Not when they’re managing director of a big public company, it’s hurtful.”

But Brue had taken prior counsel from the Viennese chief of police, who happened also to be a Frères client. On the policeman’s advice, he meekly consented to a swingeing sum of hush-money while Vienna’s plainclothes detectives recorded the conversation from a nearby table.

This time round, however, he had no chief of police on his side. The intended target was not a client, but himself.

In the great hall of the Atlantic, as in the street outside, it was rush hour. From his vantage point Brue observed at his supposed ease the arriving and departing guests. Some wore furs and boas, some the funereal uniform of the modern executive, others the torn jeans of millionaire hobos.

A procession of elderly men in dinner jackets and women in sequined ball dresses emerged from an inner corridor, led by a page boy pushing a trolley of bouquets wrapped in cellophane. Somebody rich and old is having a birthday, thought Brue, and wondered for a moment whether it was one of his clients and had Frau Elli sent a bottle? Probably no older than me, he thought bravely.

Did people really think of him as old? Probably they did. His first wife, Sue, used to complain that he had been
born
old. Well, sixty had always been in the contract, if you were lucky enough to get there. What was it Georgie had once said to him, when she started going Buddhist? “The cause of death is birth.”

He glanced at his gold wristwatch, a gift from Edward Amadeus on his twenty-first. In two minutes she’ll be late, but lawyers and bankers are never late; nor, he presumed, are blackmailers.

On the other side of the swing doors a mistral was gusting down the street. The top-hatted doorman’s cloak flapped like useless wings as he scurried from one limousine to another. A dramatic rainstorm broke as cars and people vanished in a milky mist. Out of it, like the sole survivor of an avalanche, stepped a small, stocky figure in shapeless clothes and a scarf wound round her head and neck. For an appalled moment Brue fancied she had slung a child across her shoulders, until he realized it was a man-sized rucksack.

She mounted the steps, let the swing doors take her, stepped into the lobby and stopped. She was holding up the passage of people behind her but if she knew, she didn’t care. She removed her rain-spotted spectacles, pulled an end of the scarf from the depths of her anorak, polished the spectacles and replaced them on her nose. Herr Schwarz addressed her, she gave him a curt nod. Both peered in Brue’s direction. Herr Schwarz made to escort her, but she shook her head. Shifting her rucksack to one shoulder, she advanced on him between the tables, eyes fixed straight ahead of her, ignoring the other guests on her way.

No makeup, not a square inch of flesh from the throat down, Brue recorded as he rose to greet her. Firm, fluid movement of a small, capable body inside the frumpish gear. A bit martial, but women these days were. Round spectacles, frameless, catching the chandeliers. No blink rate. Child’s skin. About thirty years younger than me and a foot shorter, but blackmailers come in all sizes and get a little younger every day. A choirboy face to go with the choirboy voice. No visible accomplice. Navy blue jeans, army boots. A pocket beauty in disguise. Tough but vulnerable; hellbent on concealing her female warmth and not succeeding. Georgie.

“Frau Richter? Marvelous. I’m Tommy Brue. What can I get for you?”

The hand so small that he instinctively relaxed his grasp.

“Do they have water here?” she asked, glowering up at him through her spectacles.

“Of course.” He beckoned a waiter. “Did you walk?”

“Cycled. Still, please. No lemon. Room temperature.”

She sat opposite him, upright at the center of her leather throne, hands braced against its arms, knees tight together and her rucksack at her feet while she studied him: first his hands, then his gold watch and his shoes, then his eyes, but only briefly. She seemed to see nothing that surprised her. And Brue in return subjecting her to an equally searching inspection, if a more furtive one: the tutored way she sipped her water, elbow in, forearm across the upper body; her self-confidence in the rich surroundings that she appeared determined to disapprove of; her covert air of breeding; the hidden stylist who can’t quite hide.

She had removed her headscarf to reveal a woolen beret. An errant hank of gold-brown hair hung across her brow. She returned it to captivity before taking a pull of water and resuming her inspection of him. Her eyes, enlarged by the spectacles, were gray-green and unflinching.
Honey-flecked,
he remembered: Where had he read that? In one of the dozen novels always at Mitzi’s bedside. A small, high bosom, deliberately illegible.

Brue extracted a calling card from a pocket in the blue silk lining of his Randall’s jacket and, with his courteous smile, handed it to her across the table.

“Why
Frères
?” she demanded. No rings, fingernails childishly short.

“It was my great-grandfather’s idea.”

“Was he French?”

“I’m afraid not. He just wanted to be,” Brue replied, trotting out his stock answer. “He was Scottish. A lot of Scots feel closer to France than England.”

“Did he have brothers?”

“No. Neither do I, I’m afraid.”

She ducked to her rucksack, unzipped a compartment and then another. Over her shoulder, Brue noted in fast order: paper tissues, a bottle of contact lens lotion, a cell phone, keys, a legal pad, credit cards and a buff file flagged and numbered like a barrister’s brief. No identifiable tape recorder or microphone, but with the technology these days, how could you be sure? And anyway, under that garb, she could be wearing a twenty-five-pound bomb belt.

She handed him a card.

SANCTUARY NORTH
, Brue read.
A Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany.
Offices in the east of town. Phone and fax numbers, e-mail. Commerzbank account number. Have a quiet word with their city manager on Monday if I need to, check her credit rating.
Annabel Richter, Legal Counsel. Never believe a beautiful woman, Tommy. They’re a criminal class, the best there is.
His father’s words, coming back to haunt him.