A Most Wanted Man Read Online Free Page B

Francisco. Banking had never loomed large on her agenda.
    Yet in appearance Brue was anything but obsolete. He was well-built and cautiously good-looking, with a broad freckled brow and a Scotsman’s mop of wiry red-brown hair that he had somehow tamed and parted. He had the assurance of wealth but none of its arrogance. His facial features, when not battened down for professional inscrutability, were affable and, despite a lifetime in banking or because of it, refreshingly unlined. When Germans called him typically English he would let out a hearty laugh and promise to bear the insult with Scottish fortitude. If he was a dying species, he was also secretly rather pleased with himself on account of it: Tommy Brue, salt of the earth, good man on a dark night, no highflier but all the better for it, first-rate wife, marvelous value at the dinner table and plays a decent game of golf. Or so the word went, he believed, and so it should.
     
    Having taken a last look at the closing markets and calculated their impact on the bank’s holdings—the usual Friday-night sag, nothing to get hot under the collar about—Brue shut down his computer and ran an eye over the stack of folders that Frau Ellenberger had earmarked for his attention.
    All week long he had wrestled with the nigh-incomprehensible complexities of the modern banker’s world, where knowing who you were actually lending money to was about as likely as knowing the man who had printed it. His priorities for these Friday séances, by contrast, were determined as much by mood as necessity. If Brue was feeling benign, he might spend the evening reorganizing a client’s charitable trust at no charge; if skittish, a stud farm, a health spa or a chain of casinos. Or if it was the season for number crunching, a skill he had acquired by hard industry rather than family genes, he would likely play himself Mahler while he pondered the prospectuses of brokers, venture capital houses and competing pension funds.
    Tonight, however, he enjoyed no such freedom of choice. A valued client had become the target of an investigation by the Hamburg Stock Exchange, and although Brue had been assured by Haug von Westerheim, the committee’s chairman, that no summons would materialize, he felt obliged to immerse himself in the latest twists of the affair. But first, sitting back in his chair, he relived the improbable moment when old Haug had breached his own iron rules of confidentiality:
    In the marbled splendor of the Anglo-German Club a sumptuous black-tie dinner is at its height. The best and brightest of Hamburg’s financial community are celebrating one of their own. Tommy Brue is sixty tonight, and he’d better believe it, for as his father Edward Amadeus liked to say: Tommy, my son, arithmetic is the one part of our business that doesn’t lie. The mood is euphoric, the food good, the wine better, the rich are happy and Haug von Westerheim, septuagenarian fleet owner, power broker, Anglophile and wit, is proposing Brue’s health.
    “Tommy, dear boy, we have decided you have been reading too much Oscar Wilde,” he pipes in English, champagne flute in hand as he stands before a portrait of the Queen when young. “You heard of Dorian Gray perhaps? We think so. We think you have taken a leaf out of Dorian Gray’s book. We think that in the vaults of your bank is the hideous portrait of Tommy at his true age today. Meanwhile, unlike your dear Queen, you decline to age graciously, but sit smiling at us like a twenty-five-year-old elf, exactly as you smiled at us when you arrived here from Vienna seven years ago in order to deprive us of our hard-earned riches.”
    The applause continues as Westerheim takes the elegant hand of Brue’s wife, Mitzi, and, with additional gallantry because she is Viennese, kisses it, and informs the gathering that her beauty, unlike Brue’s, is indeed eternal. Swept up with honest emotion, Brue rises from his seat with the intention of grasping