In the fraught silence that followed it was Melik’s turn to make his feelings felt:
“You want to look out,” he warned Brue roughly in German. “If you wind him up too tight, he’ll have a fit.” And in case Brue hadn’t understood the point: “Take it easy with him, okay? He’s my brother.”
When Brue at last spoke, he did so in German, in words of studied casualness directed not at Issa but at Annabel.
“And do we have that solemn promise in writing anywhere, Frau Richter, or must we depend solely on the hearsay evidence of Mr. Anatoly, as relayed to us by your client?”
“All we have in writing is the name and reference number of an account at your bank,” she replied tautly.
Brue affected to ruminate. “Let me explain my little problem to you, Issa,” he suggested in Russian, selecting from among the voices screaming in his head the tone of a reasonable man doing his sums. “We have an Anatoly, who you tell me is or was your father’s lawyer. We have a Colonel Karpov, who you tell me is your natural father, although you otherwise disown him. But we don’t have
you,
do we? You have no papers, and you have by your own account a substantial prison record which does not exactly inspire confidence in a banker, whatever the reason.”
“I am a Muslim, sir!” Issa protested, his voice soaring in agitation as he again glanced at Annabel for support. “I am a Chechen black-arse! Why do I have to have a reason to go to prison?”
“I need to be
persuaded,
you see,” Brue continued implacably, ignoring Melik’s scowl. “I need to know how you came to be in possession of privileged information concerning a valued client of my bank. I need, if I may, to dig a little deeper into your family circumstances, starting, where all good and bad things start in this world, with your
mother.
” He was being cruel and knew it, even wished it. Melik’s warning notwithstanding, Issa’s grotesque mimicry of Edward Amadeus had sickened him. “Who is she, your dear mother, or who was she? Have you siblings, alive or deceased?”
At first Issa did not speak at all. His spindly body was stretched forward, elbows on the table, the bracelet now halfway down his emaciated forearm, long hands sheltering his head inside the upturned collar of his black coat. Suddenly the child’s face emerged and became a man’s.
“My mother is dead, sir. Most dead. My mother died many times. She died on the day that Karpov’s fine troops seized her from her village and drove her to the barracks for Karpov to defile her. She was fifteen years old. She died on the day the elders of her tribe decreed that she had collaborated in her defilement, and ordered that one of her brothers be sent to kill her in the tradition of our people. She died every day she waited to bear me, knowing that as soon as she had brought me into the world, she would be obliged to leave it, and that her child would be sent to a military orphanage for the children of violated Chechen mothers. She was correct in anticipating her death, but not in anticipating the actions of the man who had caused it. When Karpov’s regiment was recalled to Moscow, he elected to take the boy with him as a trophy.”
“You were by then how old?”
“Sir, the boy was seven years old. Old enough to have glimpsed the forests, hills and rivers of Chechnya. Old enough to return to them whenever God allowed him. Sir, I wish to make a further statement.”
“Please do.”
“You are a gracious and important man, sir. You are an honorable Englishman, not a Russian barbarian. The Chechens once dreamed that they would acquire an English queen to protect them from the Russian tyrant. I will accept your protection as promised to Karpov by your respected father, and in God’s name I thank you from my heart. But if it is Karpov’s money we are speaking of, I must regretfully refuse it. Not one euro, not one dollar, not one ruble, not one English pound, please. It is the money of imperialist robbers and infidels and crusaders. It is money that has grown in usury, which is against our divine law. It is money that was essential to my difficult journey here, but I will touch no more of it. Kindly obtain for me a German passport and a permit of residence, and a place where I can study medicine and pray in humility. That is all I ask, sir. I thank you.”
His upper body flopped forward onto the table as his head buried itself in his folded arms. Leyla darted from the kitchen to console him as he heaved and sobbed. Melik placed himself in front of Brue as if to shield Issa from further assault. Annabel was also standing, but for reasons of decorum had not presumed to approach her client.
“And I thank you too, Issa,” Brue replied after a prolonged hush. “Frau Richter, I wonder whether we might have a word alone, please.”
They were standing two feet apart in Melik’s bedroom next to a punchball. If she had been a foot taller they would have been face-to-face. Her honey-flecked gaze was rock steady behind her spectacles. Her breathing was slow and deliberate, and so, he realized, was his own. With one hand she unknotted her scarf and exposed her features, challenging him to throw the first punch. But she had Georgie’s fearlessness and her own unassailable beauty, and part of him knew already that he was lost.
“How much of this did you know?” he demanded, in a voice that was scarcely familiar to him.
“That’s my client’s business, not yours.”
“He’s a claimant, but he’s not a claimant. What am I supposed to do? He’s withdrawn his claim but he wants my protection.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t
do
protection. I’m a bank. I don’t
do
permits of residence. I don’t
do
German passports or places at medical school!” He was gesturing naturally, a thing he seldom did. With each
do
he was hammering his right fist into his left palm.
“As far as my client’s concerned, you’re a high official,” she retorted. “You own a bank, so you own the town. Your father and his father were crooks together. That makes you blood brothers. Of course you’ll protect him.”
“My father was
not
a crook!” He collected himself. “All right, your emotions are engaged. So it seems are mine. So they should be. Your client is a tragic case, and you are a—”
“A mere woman?”
“A conscientious lawyer doing your best for your client.”
“He’s your client too, Mr. Brue.”
In any other circumstances Brue would vigorously have disputed this, but he let it go. “The man has been tortured and for all I know his mind is disturbed in consequence,” he said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth. Who’s to say he hasn’t appropriated the belongings and identity of a fellow prisoner in order to stake a bogus claim to somebody else’s birthright?—have I said something amusing?”
She was smiling, but only in vindication. “You just admitted it’s his birthright.”
“I admitted nothing of the kind!” Brue retorted, incensed. “I said the absolute reverse. I said it might well
not
be his birthright! And even if it
is
his birthright, and he won’t claim it, what’s the difference?”
“The difference is, Mr. Brue, that without your fucking bank, my client wouldn’t be here.”
An armed truce followed while each appraised her startling choice of vocabulary. He was trying to be aggressive, but not feeling it. To the contrary, he had increasingly the feeling of going over to her side.
“Frau Richter.”
“Mr. Brue.”
“I will not concede, without overwhelming evidence, that my bank—my father—provided aid and comfort to Russian crooks.”
“What
will
you concede?”
“First your client must make a claim.”
“He won’t. He has five hundred dollars left over from what Anatoly gave him and he won’t touch them. He intends to give them to Leyla when he leaves here.”
“If he won’t claim, then I have nothing to respond to and the entire situation is—academic. Less than academic. Void.”
She considered this, but not for long. “All right. Suppose he claims.
Then
what?”
Sensing she was wrong-footing him, he hesitated. “Well, first, obviously, I would need minimum, basic proofs.”
“What’s minimum?”
Brue was extrapolating. He was taking refuge behind the regulations that Lipizzaners had been set up to avoid. This is now, not then, he was assuring himself. This is me aged sixty, not Edward Amadeus in his years of wild dotage.
“Proof of his identity, obviously, starting with his birth certificate.”
“Where would you get that from?”
“Assuming he has no means of providing it, I would request the assistance of the Russian embassy in Berlin.”
“After that?”
“I would need proof of the father’s death and a sight of any will he made, together with a notarized affidavit from his lawyer, obviously.”
She said nothing.
“You can hardly expect me to rely on a couple of chewed-up press cuttings and a dubious letter.”
Still nothing.
“That would be the normal procedure,” he continued bravely, only too aware that normal procedures did not apply. “Once the necessary proofs had been obtained, I would recommend that you take your client to a German court and seek a formal probate or court order. My bank operates here on license. A condition of that license is that I abide by the jurisdiction of the State of Hamburg and the Federal Republic.”
Another unnerving pause while she took a reading of him with her steadfast eyes.
“Those are the rules, then. Yes?” she asked.
“Some of them.”
“What would happen if you bent them? Suppose a smart Russian exec in a thousand-dollar suit had flown in first-class from Moscow to collect his portion—‘Hi, Mr. Tommy. It’s me, Karpov’s kid. Your dad and mine were drinking buddies. Where’s my money?’ What would you do then?”
“Precisely as I am doing now,” he retorted with spirit, but without conviction.
Now it was Annabel Richter who was the defeated one, and Tommy Brue the victor. Her face had softened in resignation. She took a slow breath.
“All right. Help me. I’m out of my depth. Tell me what to do.”
“What you always do, I imagine. Throw yourself on the mercy of the German authorities and have his situation normalized. The sooner the better, by the look of things.”
“Normalized how? He’s young, younger than me. Suppose they
don’t
normalize his situation? How many more of his best years are they going to beat out of him?”
“Well, that’s your world, isn’t it? Fortunately, it’s not mine.”
“It’s both our worlds,” she snapped, as the color shot to her face and stayed there. “You just don’t care to live in it. You want the best bit of the story? I don’t think you do. Here it is anyway. You said take him to a court. Seek a formal probate. The moment I do that, he’s very likely dead. Okay?
Dead.
He came here via Sweden. Sweden, then Denmark, then Hamburg. His ship wasn’t meant to stop in Sweden, but it did. Ships do that sometimes. The Swedes arrested him. He was so screwed up from prison and the journey that they thought he couldn’t stand up. Somehow he ran. Money helped. He’s deliberately hazy about it. Before he ran, the Swedish police took his photograph and fingerprints. You know what that means?”
“Not yet.”
She had recovered her equilibrium, but with difficulty. “It means that his fingerprints and photograph are on every police website. It means that under the Dublin treaty of 1990, which you have no doubt read from cover to cover, the Germans have no option but to post him back to Sweden express. No appeal, no due process. He’s an escaped prisoner and illegal immigrant to Sweden, wanted in Russia and Turkey, with a record of Muslim activism. It’s the Swedes, not the Germans, who get to deport him.”
“The Swedes are as human as anyone else, I take it.”
“Yes. They are. In the matter of illegal immigrants they’re particularly human. As far as the Swedes are concerned he’s an illegal immigrant and an absconded terrorist on the run,
period.
If the Turks want him back to serve the rest of his sentence—plus an extra few years for bribing his way out of jail—the Swedes will give him to the Turks and to hell with him. All right, there’s a thousand-to-one chance that some Swedish saint will intercede, but I don’t set much store by saints. When the Turks have had their fun with him, they’ll give him to the Russians for more of the same. On the other hand, the Turks may feel they’ve had the best of him and pass, in which case the Swedes will give him straight to the Russians. Whichever they do, it’s more prisons and more torture. You’ve seen him. How much more of it can he take?…Are you listening to me? I can’t tell. I don’t know your face.”
He didn’t know it himself. He didn’t know how it should look, or what to inject into it by way of feeling.
“You speak as if there are no grounds for a simple compassionate appeal,” he complained lamely, while she went on staring at him.
“Last year I had a client called Magomed. He was a twenty-three-year-old Chechen who’d been tortured by the Russians. Nothing personal, nothing very scientific, just a lot of beatings. But he was a soft kid, a bit crazy like Issa. Beatings hadn’t suited him. Maybe he’d had one beating too many. We applied for asylum, played the compassion card. He liked the zoo. I was worried for him, so Sanctuary broke the bank and hired a hotshot lawyer who said the compassionate case was overwhelming, then went to sleep on it. Theoretically Germany has strict laws about where it can’t send people. While we were waiting for the verdict, we planned another day at the zoo. Magomed didn’t have Issa’s track record. He wasn’t a militant or a suspected Islamist. He wasn’t wanted by Interpol. Five in the morning, they dragged him out of his hostel bed and put him on a plane to St. Petersburg. They had to gag him. His screams were the last anybody has heard of him.” She blushed, unaccountably, and took a breath.
“In my law school we talked a great deal about law over life,” she said. “It’s a verity of our German history: law not to protect life, but to abuse it. We did it to the Jews. In its current American form it licenses torture and state kidnapping. And it’s infectious. Your own country is not immune, neither is mine. I am not the servant of that kind of law. I’m the servant of Issa Karpov. He’s my client. If that embarrasses you, I’m not sorry.”