A Most Wanted Man Read Online Free Page A

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