Read Online A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré - Free Book Online Page B

in defiance of regulation lit up one of his odious Russian cigarettes, Erna Frey would cough demonstratively and fling open the windows. But there her protest ended. Bachmann could go on puffing till the room filled up like a fish smokery and she wouldn’t say another word. Did they sleep together? According to rumor, they had given sex a try and declared it a disaster area. Yet on nights when they were staying late, they had no hesitation in bunking down together in the cramped emergency bedroom at the end of the corridor.
    And when the fledgling team assembled for the first time in the hastily redecorated upper gallery of the stables that was their new home, to be welcomed by Bachmann’s favorite choice of Baden wine and Erna Frey’s home-cooked wild boar and red berries, the two of them together were so uxorious, interacting so intuitively and well, that it would have come as no surprise to their guests to see them holding hands: until, that is, the moment when Bachmann took it on himself to explain to his newly mustered troops just what the hell it was they had been put on earth to do. His address, by turn ribald and messianic, was part idiosyncratic history lesson and part call to battle. Inevitably, it came to be known as Bachmann’s Cantata. It ran as follows:
     
    “When 9/11 happened, there were two ground zeros,” he announced, addressing them now from one side of the gallery, now from the back, before popping up like a squat djinni beneath the rafters in front of them, hands punching out the words as he spoke them. “One ground zero was in New York. The other ground zero that you don’t hear so much about was right here in Hamburg.”
    He jabbed an arm at the window.
    “That courtyard out there was a hundred feet high in rubble, all of it paper. And our pathetic barons of the German intelligence community were raking through it trying to find out where the hell they’d gone so terribly wrong. We had geniuses from all over the hemisphere fly to this town to offer advice and cover their arses. Top protectors of our sacred constitution from Cologne, God protect us from protectors”—laughter, which he ignored—“espiocrats from our own distinguished foreign intelligence service, fine ladies and gentlemen from our omniscient Bundestag intelligence oversight committee, Americans from more agencies than I ever heard of—sixteen of them at last count—falling over each other to dump the shit on anybody’s doorstep but their own. I tell you: so many wise arseholes gave of their wisdom in those weeks that the poor bastards who were trying to run the shop and sweep up the rubble couldn’t help wishing they’d dropped by a few weeks earlier. That way there’d have been no Mohammed Atta and no howling monkeys from the media pissing on them.”
    He took a tour round the gallery, elbows out, fists clenched.
    “Hamburg screwed up. Everybody else had screwed up, but Hamburg took the fall.” He was buffooning, playing both sides of an imaginary press conference: “‘Sir, can you tell us, please: How many Arab speakers precisely does your organization have operating here in town at this time?’” he squawked, hopping to his left. “‘At last count, one and a half.’” Hopping to his right: “‘Sir, who precisely have you been bugging and following around town in the months leading up to Armageddon?’” Another hop: “‘Well, madam, now I come to think of it…a couple of Chinese gentlemen suspected of stealing our fine industrial secrets…adolescent neo-Nazis who paint swastikas on Jewish gravestones…the next generation of the Red Army Fraktion…oh, and twenty-eight geriatric ex-communists who want to bring back the dear old GDR.’”
    He vanished from view to resurface at the far end of the gallery, a somber man.
    “Hamburg is a guilty city,” he announced quietly. “Consciously, unconsciously. Maybe Hamburg even pulled those hijackers. Did they pick us? Or did we pick them? What signals