A Most Wanted Man Read Online Free

first find was a bunch of faded Russian newspaper clippings, rolled up and held together with an elastic band. Removing the band, he spread them out on the floor. Common to each was a photograph of a Red Army officer in uniform. He was brutish, broad-browed, thick-jowled and looked to be in his midsixties. Two cuttings were memorial announcements, decked with Orthodox crosses and regimental insignia.
    Melik’s second find was a wad of U.S. fifty-dollar bills, brand-new, ten of them, held together by a money clip. At the sight of them, all his old suspicions came flooding back. A starving, homeless, penniless, beaten fugitive has five hundred untouched dollars in his purse? Did he steal them? Forge them? Was this why he had been in prison? Was this what was left over after he had paid off the people smugglers of Istanbul, the obliging crew member who had hidden him and the lorry driver who had spirited him from Copenhagen to Hamburg? If he’s got five hundred left now, how ever much did he set out with? Maybe his medical fantasies aren’t so ill-placed after all.
    His third find was a grimy white envelope squeezed into a ball as if somebody had meant to throw it away, then changed his mind: no stamp, no address and the flap ripped open. Flattening the envelope, he fished out a crumpled one-page typed letter in Cyrillic script. It had a printed address, a date and the name of the sender—or so he assumed—in large black print along the top. Below the unreadable text was an unreadable signature in blue ink, followed by a handwritten six-figure number, but written very carefully, each figure inked over several times, as if to say remember this.
    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.”

2
    It was six o’clock in the evening of the following Friday