A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré Page B

understand its cause, she scurried back to the kitchen and fetched a glass of cordial, which she placed before him on the table, while fixing first Brue and then Annabel with a reproachful scowl.
    “And may one ask why you were in prison in the first place?” Brue resumed.
    “Oh yes, sir! Please ask! You are most welcome,” Issa cried, now with the recklessness of a condemned scholar speaking from the scaffold. “To be a Chechen is crime enough, sir, I assure you. We Chechen are born extremely guilty. Ever since czarist times, our noses have been culpably flat and our hair and skin criminally dark. This is an enduring offense to public order, sir!”
    “But your nose is not flat, if I may say so.”
    “To my regret, sir.”
    “But one way or another you made it to Turkey, and from Turkey you escaped,” Brue suggested soothingly. “And came all the way to Hamburg. That was quite an achievement, surely.”
    “It was the will of Allah.”
    “But with some assistance from yourself, I suspect.”
    “If a man has money, sir, as you will know better than I, everything is possible.”
    “Ah, but whose money?” Brue demanded archly, darting in swiftly now that money was in the air. “Who provided the money to pay for your many brilliant escapes, I wonder?”
    “I would say, sir”—Issa replied after prolonged soul searching, in which Brue half expected the answer to be Allah again—“I would say his name is very likely to be Anatoly.”
    “Anatoly?” Brue repeated, after allowing the name to resonate in his head—and in some distant chamber of his late father’s past.
    “Anatoly is correct, sir. Anatoly is the man who pays for everything. But especially for escapes. You know this man, sir?” he interjected eagerly. “He is a friend of yours?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    “For Anatoly, money is the purpose of all life. And death too, I would say.”
    Brue was on the point of pursuing this when Melik spoke up from his post at the window.
    “They’re still there,” he growled in German, peering through the edge of the curtain. “Those two old women. They’re not interested in the jewelry anymore. One’s reading the notices in the window of the pharmacist’s shop, the other’s in a doorway talking on her mobile. They’re too ugly to be hookers, even for round here.”
    “It’s just two ordinary women,” Annabel retorted sternly, going to the window and looking out, while Leyla cupped her hands before her face and closed her eyes in supplication. “You’re being dramatic, Melik.”
    But this was not good enough for Issa, who having caught the sense of Melik’s words, was already standing with his saddlebag slung across his chest.
    “What do you see there?” he appealed to Annabel in a shrill voice, swinging round accusingly to face her. “Is it your KGB again?”
    “It’s nobody, Issa. If there’s a problem, we’ll take care of you. That’s what we’re here for.”
    And once again, Brue had a sense that the choirboy voice was trying a little too hard to be nonchalant.
     
    “So now, this Anatoly, ” Brue resumed with determined purpose, when peace of a kind had been restored and Leyla, on Annabel’s insistence, dispatched to make fresh apple tea. “He must be a pretty good friend of yours, by the sounds of it.”
    “Sir, we indeed may say that this Anatoly is a good friend to prisoners, no question,” Issa agreed with exaggerated alacrity. “It also unfortunately happens that he is the friend of rapists, murderers, gangsters and crusaders. Anatoly is broad-minded in his friendships, I would say,” he added, pushing away sweat with the back of his hand while he managed a rather dreadful grin.
    “Was he a good friend to Colonel Karpov also?”
    “I would say that Anatoly is the best friend a murderer and rapist could possibly have, sir. For Karpov, he acquired places for me at the best Moscow schools, even when I had been rejected for disciplinary reasons.”
    “And it was