A Most Wanted Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

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