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 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 Westerheim’s hand in return, but the old man, intoxicated as much by his triumph as the wine, enfolds him in a bear hug, and whispers huskily into his ear: “Tommy, dear boy…that inquiry about a certain client of yours…it shall be attended to…first we postpone for technical reasons…then we drop it in the Elbe…happy birthday, Tommy, my friend…you are a decent fellow…”
Pulling on his half-frame spectacles, Brue studied anew the charges against his client. Another banker, he supposed, would by now have called Westerheim and thanked him for his quiet word, thereby holding him to it. But Brue hadn’t done that. He couldn’t bring himself to saddle the old boy with a rash promise made in the heat of his sixtieth birthday.
Taking up a pen, he scribbled a note to Frau Ellenberger: First thing Monday, kindly call Ethics Committee Secretariat and ask whether a date has been set. Thanks! TB.
Done, he thought. Now the old boy can choose in peace whether to push ahead with the hearing or kill it.
The second of the evening’s must-do’s was Mad Marianne, as Brue called her, but only to Frau Ellenberger. The surviving widow of a prosperous Hamburg timber merchant, Marianne was Brue Frères’s longest-running soap opera, the client who makes all the clichés of private banking come true. In tonight’s episode, she has recently undergone a religious conversion at the hands of a thirty-year-old Danish Lutheran pastor, and is on the brink of renouncing her worldly goods—more pertinently, one-thirtieth of the bank’s reserves—in favor of a mysterious not-for-profit foundation under his pastoral control.
The results of a private inquiry commissioned by Brue on his own initiative lie before him and are not encouraging. The pastor was recently charged with fraud but acquitted when witnesses failed to come forward. He has fathered love children by several women. But how is poor Brue the banker to break this to his besotted client without losing her account? Mad Marianne has a low tolerance of bad news at the best of times, as he has more than once discovered to his cost. It has taken all his charm—short of the ultimate, he would assure you!—to stop her moving her account to some sweet-tongued child at Goldman Sachs. There is a son who stands to lose a fortune and Marianne has moments of adoring him, but—another twist!—he is presently in rehab in the Taunus hills. A discreet trip to Frankfurt may prove to be the answer…
Brue scribbles a second note to his ever-loyal Frau Ellenberger: Please contact director of clinic, and establish whether boy is in a fit state to receive visitor (me!).
Distracted by the mutterings of the telephone system beside his desk, Brue glanced at the pin lights. If the incoming call was on his unlisted hotline, he’d take it. It wasn’t, so he turned to the Frères’s draft six-monthly report, which, though healthy, needed sparkle. He had not engaged with it long before the telephone system again distracted him.
Was this a new message, or had the earlier mutterings somehow insinuated themselves into his memory? At seven on a Friday evening? The open line? Must be a wrong number. Giving in to curiosity, he touched the replay button. First came an electronic beep, cut off by Frau Ellenberger courteously advising the caller in German, then English, to leave a message or call again during business hours.
Then a woman’s voice, young, German, and pure as a choirboy’s.
The staple of your private banker’s life, Brue liked to pontificate after a scotch or two in amiable company, was not, as one might reasonably expect, cash. It wasn’t bull markets, bear markets, hedge funds or derivatives. It was cock-up. It was the persistent, he would go so far as to say the permanent sound, not to put too fine an edge on it, of excrement hitting your proverbial fan. So if you didn’t happen to like living in a state of unremitting siege, the odds were that private banking wasn’t for you. He had made the same point with some success in his prepared speech in reply to old Westerheim.
And as a veteran of such cock-ups, Brue over the years had developed two distinct responses to the moment of impact. If he was in a board meeting with the eyes o
f the world on him, he would rise to his feet, shove his thumbs into his waistband and meander round the room wearing an expression of exemplary calm.
Unobserved, he was more likely to favor his second option, which was to freeze in the position in which the news had hit him, flicking at his lower lip with his forefinger, which was what he did now while he played the message a second time and then a third, starting with the initial beep.
“Good evening. My name is Annabel Richter, I am a lawyer, and I wish to speak personally to Mr. Tommy Brue as soon as possible on behalf of a client I represent.”
Represent but do not name, Brue methodically notes for the third time. A crisp, but southerly German tone, educated and impatient of circumlocution.
“My client has instructed me to pass his best wishes to a Mr.”—she pauses, as if consulting a script—“to a Mr. Lipizzaner. I repeat that. The name is Lipizzaner. Like the horses, yes, Mr. Brue? Those famous white horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, where your bank was formerly situated? I think your bank knows Lipizzaners very well.”
Her tone lifts. A factual message about white horses becomes a choirboy in distress.
“Mr. Brue, my client has very little time at his disposal. I naturally do not wish to say more on the telephone. It is also possible you are more familiar with his position than I am, which will expedite matters. I would therefore be grateful if you would call me back on my cell phone on receipt of this message so that we can make an appointment to meet.”
She could have stopped there, but she doesn’t. The choirboy’s song takes on a sharper edge:
“If it’s late at night, that’s acceptable, Mr. Brue. Even very late. I saw a light just now as I went past your office. Maybe you personally are no longer at work, but someone else is. If so, please will that person kindly pass this message to Mr. Tommy Brue as a matter of urgency, because nobody but Mr. Tommy Brue is empowered to act in the matter. Thank you for your time.”
And thank you for your time, Frau Annabel Richter, thought Brue, rising to his feet and, with thumb and finger still fastened on his lower lip, heading for the bay window as if it were the nearest means of escape.
Yes indeed, my bank knows Lipizzaners very well, madam, if by bank you mean myself and my one confidante, Frau Elli, and not another living soul. My bank would pay top dollar to see the last of its surviving Lipizzaners gallop over the horizon, back to Vienna where they came from, never to return. Perhaps you know that too.
A sickening thought came at him. Or perhaps it had been with him these seven years, and only now decided to step out of the shadows. Would top dollar actually be what you’re after, Frau Annabel Richter—you and your sainted client who is so short of time?
Is this a blackmail job you’re pulling, by any remote chance?
And are you perhaps, with your choirboy purity, and your air of professional high purpose, dropping a hint to me—you and your accomplice, sorry, client—that Lipizzaner horses possess the curious property of being born jet black and only turning white with age—which was how they came to lend their name to a certain type of exotic bank account inspired by the eminent Edward Amadeus Brue, OBE, my beloved late father whom in all other respects I continue to revere as the very pillar of banking probity, during his final salad days in Vienna when black money from the collapsing Evil Empire was hemorrhaging through the fast-fraying Iron Curtain by the truckload?
Brue took a slow tour round the room.
But why on earth did you do it, dear father of mine?
Why, when all your life you traded on your good name and that of your forebears, and lived by it in private as well as in public, in the highest traditions of Scottish caution, canniness and dependability: Why put all that at risk for the sake of a bunch of crooks and carpetbaggers from the East whose one achievement had been to plunder their country’s assets at the moment when it had most need of them?
Why throw open your bank to them—your beloved bank, your most precious thing? Why offer safe haven to their ill-gained loot, along with unprecedented terms of secrecy and protection?
Why stretch every norm and regulation to its snapping point and beyond, in a desperate—and as Brue had perceived it, even at the time—reckless attempt to set himself up as Vienna’s banker of choice to a bunch of Russian gangsters?
All right, you hated communism and communism was on its deathbed. You couldn’t wait for the funeral. But the crooks you were being so nice to were part of the regime!
No names needed, comrades! Just give us your loot for five years and we’ll give you a number! And when you next come and see us your Lipizzaners will be lily-white, full-grown, runaway investments! We do it just like the Swissies, but we’re Brits so we do it better!
Except we don’t, thought Brue sadly, hands linked behind his back as he paused to peer out the bay window.
We don’t, because great men who lose their marbles in old age die; because money relocates itself and so do banks; and because strange people called regulators appear on the scene and the past goes away. Except that it never quite does, does it? A few words from a choirboy voice and it all comes galloping home.
Fifty feet beneath him the armored cavalry of Europe’s richest city roared homeward to embrace its children, eat, watch television, make love and go to sleep. On the lake, skiffs and small yachts skimmed through the red dusk.
She’s out there, he thought. She saw my light burning.
She’s out there practicing her scales with her so-called client while they argue the toss about how much they’re going to sting me for not blowing the whistle on the Lipizzaner accounts.
It is also possible that you are more familiar with my client’s position than I am.
Well, it’s also possible I’m not, Frau Annabel Richter. And to be frank I don’t want to be, although it looks as though I must.
And since you will tell me nothing more about your client by way of the telephone—a reticence that I appreciate—and since I possess no supersensory powers and am therefore unlikely to identify him from among the half dozen Lipizzaner survivors—assuming there are any—who have not been shot, jailed or have simply forgotten in their cups where in heaven they locked away those odd few million, I have no alternative, in the best tradition of blackmail, but to accede to your request.
He dialed her number.
“Richter.”
“This is Tommy Brue of Brue’s Bank. Good evening, Frau Richter.”
“Good evening, Mr. Brue. I would like to speak to you just as soon as it is convenient, please.”
Like now, for instance. With a bit less melody, and a bit more cutting edge, than when she had been pleading for his attention.
The Atlantic Hotel lay ten minutes’ walk from the bank, along a crowded gravel footpath that skirted the lake. Beside it a second path ticked and hissed to the oaths of homebound cyclists. A chill breeze had got up, and the sky had turned blue-black. Long drops of rain were starting to fall. In Hamburg, they call them bundles of thread. Seven years ago when Brue was new to the city, his progress through the throng might have been retarded by the last of his British diffidence. Tonight he cut his own furrow, and kept an elbow ready for predatory umbrellas.
At the hotel entrance, a red-cloaked doorman raised his top hat to him. In the lobby, Herr Schwarz the concierge glided to his side and led him to the table that Brue favored for clients who preferred to talk their business away from the bank. It lay in the farthest corner between a marble column and oil paintings of Hanseatic ships, under the liverish gaze of the second Kaiser Wilhelm, rendered in sea-blue tiles.
“I’m expecting a lady I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting before, Peter,” Brue confided, with a smile of male complicity. “A Frau Richter. I have a suspicion she’s young. Kindly make sure she’s also beautiful.”
“I shall do my best,” Herr Schwarz promised gravely, richer by twenty euros.
Out of nowhere, Brue was reminded of a painful conversation he had had with his daughter, Georgie
, when she was all of nine years old. He had been explaining that Mummy and Daddy still loved each other, but were going to live apart. It was better to live apart in a loving relationship than quarrel, he had told her, on the advice of a psychiatrist he loathed. And how two happy homes were better than one unhappy one. And how Georgie would be able to see Mummy and Daddy as often as she wanted, just not together like before. But Georgie was more interested in her new puppy.
“If you’d only got one Austrian schilling left in the whole world, what would you do with it?” she demanded, thoughtfully scratching its tummy.
“Why, invest it, of course, darling. What would you do?”
“Tip someone,” she replied.
Mystified more by himself than by Georgie, Brue tried to work out why he should be punishing himself with the story now. Must be the similarity of their voices, he decided, with an eye to the swing doors. Will she be wired? Will her “client,” if she’s bringing him, be wired? Well, if so, they’ll be out of luck.
He reminded himself of the last time he’d met a blackmailer: another hotel, another woman, British and living in Vienna. Prevailed upon by a Frères client who wouldn’t trust his problem to anyone else, Brue had met her for tea in the discreet pavilions of the Sacher. She was a stately madame, dressed in widow’s weeds. Her girl was called Sophie.
“She’s one of my best, Sophie is, so naturally I’m ashamed,” she had explained from under the brim of her black straw hat. “Only she’s thinking of going to the newspapers, you see. I’ve told her not to, but she won’t listen, her being so young. He’s got some rough ways with him, your friend has, not all of them nice. Well, nobody wants to read about themselves, do they? Not in the newspapers. Not when they’re managing director of a big public company, it’s hurtful.”