The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter XVII
The lawyer’s name was Anton Frend, and his offices occupied two floors of a beautiful fin-de-siècle building in the Neubau area of Vienna. Even by the standards of remuneration available to lawyers of the most expert, mendacious, or downright crooked stripe, the location was enviable, and the rooms concealed behind its walls were worthy of the façade. The building had been in his family’s ownership for more than a hundred years, the Frends having provided legal advice to the great and the good – as well as, inevitably, the not-so-good – of Vienna since the early nineteenth century.
The common factor shared by their clients was money, the firm of Frend Rechtsanwälte being disinclined to deal with those whose tribulations extended to cashflow problems. Frend Rechstsanwälte specialized in the protection of the wealthy, and by doing so had enriched itself. The Frends had also proved adept at anticipating the direction of impending political and social winds, enabling them to survive not only the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ravages of World War II but also the various peaks and troughs that had followed over the succeeding three-quarters of a century, all while remaining impressively unremarked, except by those who availed of their expensive services. The Frends had this in common with Austria itself, a country that somehow managed to remain simultaneously part of, yet apart from, the larger European community, and with which most of Europe’s citizens would have struggled to make very many associations at all beyond white horses, Danube waltzes, and an unfortunate connection with the progenitor of Nazism.
Anton Frend could have sold the building, invested most of the proceeds, acquired a more modest property with the rest, and still have continued to practice in the most salubrious of surroundings. Alternatively, he could have entered into a comfortable retirement, being unburdened by debt or any familial complications beyond the norm. He was an only child, and an orphan to boot. Now in his sixties, and admirably well-preserved, he was in possession, to varying degrees, of a wife, a daughter, three properties – the others being the family’s city residence, and a summer-cum-winter retreat in the Tyrol – and a long-standing mistress whom he occasionally entertained in the apartment above his offices.
Yet retirement would have bored Frend. He enjoyed the law – or more correctly, he delighted in finding ways around it on behalf of his clients, and the money he earned as a consequence was a pleasant bonus. In this he resembled a certain type of gambler, one who takes pleasure in the moments during which the ball is in play on the roulette wheel, or the final card is about to be turned; for whom the anticipation is more pleasurable than the outcome, and who can therefore win or lose with relative equanimity. It helped, of course, that Frend was gambling not with his own money and future but with those of his clients. If he failed these men and women – which, the nature of human existence dictated, he occasionally must – he could only shrug his shoulders and apologize while attempting to limit the damage for all concerned, because there are always gradations of loss.
But Frend’s reputation, like that of any good advocate, rested on rarely losing, and for this reason his services were eminently saleable. He was in the enviable position of being able to choose his clients as much as, if not more than, they selected him. Some of those clients, of course, took their occasional reversals better than others; in the case of a very small number, it was best for all involved, Frend included, if they did not lose at all.
Anton Frend, like all gamblers, was in love with risk, and men who become besotted with hazard also grow accustomed to it. In this it resembles other vices: the practice becomes habitual, and what is habitual inevitably becomes dull, thereby requiring greater extremes of behavior in return for rewards that will, at best, plateau. For Frend, this behavior manifested itself as an ongoing immersion in criminal society, and so he resembled a man wading deeper and deeper into colder and colder waters, gradually losing all feeling in his limbs and numbing his senses on the way to an inevitable drowning.
Among the most enduring of Frend’s clients in this regard were Radovan and Spiridon Vuksan. Frend had known the Vuksans since the mid-nineties, when Radovan Vuksan had commenced diverting funds from clandestine bank accounts, set up to bankroll Serb-backed militias in Croatia and Bosnia, into safe financial havens where the money could rest and cool. Occasionally, the funds would arrive at Frend’s offices in the form of hard cash, delivered in cheap gym bags by associates of the Vuksans – grim-faced men with the eyes of carrion crows – or, if the opportunity arose, by Radovan himself, after which he and Frend would dine together at Griechenbeisl or, after a walk in the hills, Der Pfarrwirt, where they would talk of music and books.
After the end of the Balkan conflict, Radovan and his brother had entered into an association with the Zemuns, who had become aware of some, although not all, of the Vuksans’ financial activities. The Zemuns had by then already established footholds in Amsterdam and Paris, and suggested that the Vuksans might wish to enter into an alliance as junior partners, with a considerable upfront investment on the Vuksans’ part as a gesture of good faith.
The Vuksans had agreed, the alternative being conflict with the Zemuns that would undoubtedly have resulted in the deaths of Spiridon, Radovan, their families, friends, and anyone who might once have sold them a loaf of bread or given them the time of day, as well as the exhumation of their ancestors’ remains, the scattering of said bones on distant, hostile seas, and the destruction of the stones that once bore their names, so that the very memory of them would be erased forever from this world. But the Vuksans were shrewd and ambitious, and eventually outmaneuvered the Zemuns’ representatives in the Netherlands to assume control of the operation, assisted throughout by the best legal and financial advice money could buy in the form of Anton Frend.
In the beginning, when the Balkan wars were still ongoing, Frend had taken care only of the paperwork, negotiating the potential legalities and illegalities arising from the transfer of funds. He sourced compliant accountants, and bankers who had learned not to ask too many questions about deposits. He had no difficulty in separating Radovan Vuksan from the reports of rape, murder, and attempted genocide appearing nightly on his television screen. Radovan was not stripping victims of their valuables before sending them to the gas chambers, or mining gold from the teeth of the dead. This was not some modern version of Nazi atrocities, no matter what the liberals might have alleged. Radovan was simply claiming a small percentage of war capital as a reward for his efforts, as any good businessman did. In fact, Frend might even have argued that by redirecting money from the Serbian government, money that would otherwise have been used to buy weapons and pay militias, Radovan was actually saving lives. Such rationalizations were endemic to Frend’s profession, and explained why so many lawyers were destined to burn in hell.
Also, Radovan was an Austrophile who loved the writings of Stefan Zweig and the motets of Anton Bruckner. He had never killed or raped anyone, and appeared to find the savagery that was engulfing the former Yugoslavia deeply unpleasant. Frend, meanwhile, was sufficiently versed in twentieth-century European history to accept that the violence was a consequence of old enmities, held in check by the force of will of the dictator Josip Broz Tito before once again being exposed to the light following his demise in 1980. Frend nodded sympathetically when Radovan opined that it would be best if the struggle played itself out as quickly as possible, resulting in the redrawing of boundaries so that nationalities and religions were separated by clear, internationally recognized borders. This, said Radovan, could most efficiently be achieved by a resounding Serb victory, and Frend saw no reason to demur.
But when the Vuksans joined forces with the Zemuns, Frend was confronted with a clearer moral choice. Previously, he had been complicit in the dispersal and investment of cash illegally acquired from an internationally reviled regime, although the funds themselves were technically clean. Now he would be working with money that came from smuggling, narcotics, prostitution, people trafficking, kidnapping, and contract killings. A closer examination of his conscience might therefore be required.
Except Frend did not have a conscience, which made the whole process significantly easier for him. (In Frend’s opinion, a conscience was a poor companion for a lawyer, one that always took but never gave.) But just in case, by some miracle, a conscience began to assert itself, he had made it clear to the Vuksans – or more correctly, to Radovan – that he preferred to dwell in blissful ignorance of the more ‘colorful’ details of their operations, except on those rare occasions when Spiridon chose to join them for dinner and Frend permitted himself the indulgence of vicarious sadism by listening to the latter’s tales.
Frend’s distancing also served a practical purpose: the less he knew, the less he would have to hide from the authorities in the event of any unfortunate investigation into his links with the Vuksans; and the less he had to hide, the less reason the Vuksans would have to kill him in order to ensure his silence. By his knowledge and competence, he had made them all wealthier than they might otherwise have been, but no one was indispensable, and the prospect of dying behind bars made pragmatists of even the most cultured of men.
Yet so critical had Anton Frend become to the Vuksans’ operation, and they to his prosperity, that the activities of Frend Rechtsanwälte now revolved almost entirely around the brothers’ needs, apart from a handful of clients – some honest, a few less so – retained either to keep up appearances or because they would have taken their abandonment ill. As a consequence, the firm’s offices, which had once echoed with many voices, now held only two: those of Frend and his secretary of many years, Fraulein Pichler, whose moral sensibilities were at least as nebulous as her employer’s.
Anton Frend and Fraulein Pichler existed in a state of mutual dependence, which meant that when one finally elected, or was forced, to retire, the other would have no option but to do likewise. Frend would never be able to find or trust another secretary like Fraulein Pichler, and she, in turn, would never be able to train another employer as she had Anton Frend. Around them, like planets orbiting major and minor suns, revolved an assortment of bankers and accountants of similarly abiding association. It was a delicate construct, built on deceit and moral compromise. Had the light of honesty been shone on its workings, it would have crumbled to dust.
Regrettably, the Vuksans’ actions in Amsterdam, and the death of Nikola Musulin in Belgrade, now threatened to undo decades of good work. Frend had, in recent hours, been the recipient of panicked phone calls. He had been forced to rouse financiers from their beds, and conspire in the kind of rapid movement of funds that risked inviting the scrutiny of international law enforcement. He had called in favors, and promised greater favors in return. He was exposed, and his clients were in danger, all because of Spiridon Vuksan’s reckless need for revenge.
So Frend sat in his dimly lit office, the banker’s lamp on his desk the sole illumination, catching the gold of his antique tie pin as he worked. It was one of a collection of such pins that he maintained, each seemingly more ornate than the last. They were as close to an eccentricity as Frend was ever likely to come, and he had often considered adding some versions of one as a watermark on the firm’s stationery. He had removed his jacket, but not so much as loosened his tie, because certain standards had to be maintained, in private as in public. He had poured himself a glass of Rochelt schnapps, but so far it remained untouched. It would not help, not at this moment. He required a clear head.
Because someone would come, he was sure of this.
Someone would come, and it might be the end of them all.