A Most Wanted Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

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