But Finn is blessed with another meeting that comes from this first meeting and that he hasn’t planned. Finn was always lucky. It is this other, unscheduled meeting that arises from the first which opened his eyes a little further to the Plan of Vladimir Putin.
He meets his old contact at a cafe in the square. Frank is not a former spy, like Dieter, but a private investigator Finn has known, and used, many times before. Finn has known Frank for a very long time, fifteen… twenty years, maybe. Frank is another of Finn’s ferrets who hunts the enemies of the West through the warrens of their financial transactions.
Frank Reisler is a short, plump man with a reddish-tinted beard, and with an impish, cheerful smile that belies his life of private investigation. ‘As my daughters say,’ Frank chuckles, ‘they never knew a time in their lives when I wasn’t deep into some secret affair or other.’
In his youth Frank had been a computer programmer and had set up the computer system at Westbank. He knew the way that published and unpublished- or secret- accounts operated because he had worked them out in the first place.
And then he had seen how his own system was manipulated, how certain customers were allowed to open secret accounts without possessing the published accounts that were a legal requirement. And his life changed.
‘Some potential clients,’ Frank tells Finn over a cappuccino and a bottle of water, ‘they went to Brussels up the road, to open secret accounts at the world’s other clearing bank. They were turned away. My contact at the Brussels bank told me that these people were deeply unsatisfactory. You wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole, he said. And so these would-be clients simply drove two hours down the road to Luxembourg, and were able to open secret accounts at Westbank without any problem at all. Against all the rules of Luxembourg and of Westbank, they opened these accounts.’
Finn and Frank are sitting in a cafe in the main square of the city. It is a cold, sunny day and the plastic cows gleam with the night’s dew that won’t go away. Shoppers are dressed well against the cold, the cafes are half full; it is morning, between breakfast and lunch.
For exposing these illegal practices, Frank loses his job in the middle of the 1980s. And he finds that, even for a citizen, Luxembourg is a closed circle of interests protecting each other. He cannot find a job anywhere else until he eventually finds employment as a union official. But he keeps his contacts at Westbank well nurtured. He is obsessed. And to pursue his obsession he has taken the precaution of bringing with him out of Westbank thousands and thousands of microfiches that demonstrate the truth of his allegations- that some entities have opened secret accounts at the bank without having the normal, published ones.
‘They are my insurance, Finn, the microfiches,’ Frank says, and sips from his glass of water. ‘I have them safely locked away in an attorney’s office at a secret location in France. If anything untoward happens to me, they will be revealed.’
‘What kind of customers, clients, are we talking about?’ Finn asks.
‘People with dirty money from all kinds of places. Colombia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Afghanistan- all kinds of places where, shall we say, normal commerce is overlaid with the fruits of black money from ventures that are, to say the least, below the line.’
‘Very nicely put,’ Finn says.
Frank chuckles and his whole face lights up with jolly amusement. He is a man made for his kind of work, Finn thinks, someone who isn’t ever going to descend into discouragement, let alone despair. He is an individual strengthened rather than weakened by the huge odds against him. Finn identifies with Frank a little, or tries to, as he does with all his closest contacts. But Frank is very special to Finn, like a father, a benevolent version of Adrian. Finn works best at the level of the personal and nobody is closer to him among his contacts than Frank.
‘I’m looking at a company here in Luxembourg and in other places. It’s called Exodi,’ Finn says.
He lights another cigarette, of which Frank imperceptibly disapproves, and scrapes the froth from his cappuccino out of the cup with a spoon.
‘Exodi?’ Frank thinks and his eyes glitter at some memory from his vast archive. ‘Yes. I think I have heard of Exodi,’ he says after a pause.
‘There are several companies called Exodi,’ Finn prompts him. ‘They’re all connected to one another. One or more of them have secret accounts at Westbank.’
‘I will have to look at my files, Finn. It will take time. But I have heard of Exodi, I think, in another context.’
Frank frowns, looking cross at the unreliability of a memory that contains thousands of pieces of numeric and alphabetic information.
‘Ah yes!’ The frown disappears; he beams again. ‘There was a story I heard here, in Luxembourg…when? I don’t remember, but not long ago, a few weeks, maybe. Wait.’
Frank takes a mobile phone from the pocket of his tatty blue woollen coat and makes a call. He speaks first in German and then is passed to someone else, to whom he speaks in French. He writes down a name and address on a scrap of paper. He ends the call with some small joke or other and replaces the phone in his pocket and looks at Finn with disappointment.
‘It’s nothing, I think. Just a kid, a twenty-two-year-old boy who worked here in Luxembourg for a company called Exodi. He serviced their computers or something, that’s all. But he was sacked a few weeks ago and told to say nothing about the company. That’s normal, I guess. But apparently they didn’t pay him his final pay cheque. He told a friend of a friend of a friend that Exodi doesn’t pay its employees’ insurance here either. That’s illegal, of course. It seems the company got to hear about his conversations on the subject. He was telephoned and warned to stop talking about Exodi.’
‘Telephoned by whom?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps there’s more, Frank.’
‘Perhaps. If you are interested in this company, Finn, you must have a reason. Perhaps there is something to look into further. Here. Here’s the boy’s name and address.’ He handed the scrap of paper across the table. ‘Perhaps you’re right. My friend just said that the boy is scared of something.’
Finn pockets the scrap of paper after a brief glance.
‘The address is across the bridge, a street behind the railway station,’ Frank says. ‘Let me know what happens. I will look in my files over the next few weeks. See if we have any Exodi for you, Finn.’
15
FINN PREFERS TO WALK. Even when he was in Moscow in winter, when even the moderately rich and relatively rich don’t go anywhere without their cars, he preferred to walk. While they kept their chauffeurs running car engines for hours outside bars and restaurants simply to imply the status of urgency, Finn walked. He likes walking. Walking is the appropriate pace of humanity, he says, everything else is too fast for the brain. He always liked the French word for ‘day’
Like so much about Finn’s own analysis of himself, however, this represents only part of the truth. He likes walking because, as well as giving him time to think, it also delays the moment when he arrives. For Finn the journey- the
Walking also delayed the moment when he needed to act. There was now a reluctance in Finn, as so often on a job. There is a period of time he needs in order to steel himself to act, even in the most trivial actions, even going to the shops or telephoning his aunt. This reluctance reflects the deepest, most concealed aspect of Finn’s nature–a lack of simple, fundamental self-belief that comes from his childhood, from the shocking few minutes of being ringed with adults, the shouting, his childish tears. As an adult he overcame the rising fear by sheer willpower. Most people never saw it.
So he walks from the main square of Luxembourg’s city and across the long, wide bridge over the gorge that once protected the ancient fortress, until he comes to the Rue de Greves on the far side of the gorge, behind the
