Free The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal

Inner City was a good one, promising a firm of reputable standing accustomed to dealing with exceptional properties. And ‘Doktor’ Traumüller indeed! The man was a university graduate, a trained lawyer – not so usual among house agents. Kanakis appreciated the name, the address and the qualification. He was sure he could not be mistaken: this could not be a mere coincidence. Franz Traumüller had been the name of the man who had been his father’s bailiff, in charge of the care and the administration of the several large houses in which part of the fortune of the elder Kanakis had been invested. A descendant of the small and distinguished community of Greeks whose wealth had helped to finance Vienna’s expansion and development from a small town constrained within its ancient walls into a splendid imperial city, his father had inherited three imposing apartment houses in the most elegant section of the Ringstrasse, in one of which his family occupied the whole of the vast first floor.
    These houses, as well as a few others in the ‘suburbs’ – crowded hives of human dwellings – had been in the care, and under the supervision, of the said Franz Traumüller. He it was who collected the rents, attended to the repairs, listened to the tenants’ complaints, and dealt with them only after scrupulous investigation on behalf of the landlord. He evicted the unsatisfactory and leased, as far as possible, only to the trustworthy. But he was a fair and just man, as the elder Kanakis insisted that he should be, and if he shielded his employer from all unpleasantness, he was also charged to see to it that no slur of exploitation should ever be attached to his name. Two or three times a year at stated intervals, or in a special emergency when the landlord had to be consulted personally, he came to report to Kanakis’s father, who received him in his study at the far end of the suite of drawing rooms, and who was very polite to him, but a little distant and condescending.
    Theophil Kanakis remembered, when he was a boy, that his father always found these visits a nuisance. He never took any detailed interest in the houses and only kept a shrewd, but distant, eye on them, as he did on his other investments. So when the butler announced the ‘Herr Haus-Administrator’, he used to rise with a sigh from his newspaper or his book and tell the butler curtly ‘in the study’ – to which Herr Traumüller would be conducted through the dining room and pantry, not through the drawing rooms. Theophil had heard his father call the man ‘Traumüller’, whereas he said ‘Herr von Kanakis’. And when he himself had once met him in the hall as he was leaving, he had said ‘good day, young sir’, to which he had answered ‘good day, Herr Traumüller’, and had stood by embarrassed while Traumüller struggled into his overcoat, into which the butler did not help him as he helped his father or any other of his visitors, and saw him take his hat off the hall table, which was not held out to him, though the butler did open the door – the front door leading to the main staircase, not the back one. Herr Traumüller was, after all, not a tradesman.
    And now: Dr Franz Traumüller, estate agent – properties bought and sold and administered – expert valuations. This must surely be the Herr Administrator’s son, probably about the same age as himself, a man of professional standing, with a university education. Kanakis himself boasted no letters in front of or after his name. He had wasted no time on academic studies; just a short business course after leaving school (and that had been pretty useless, he mused – either you had got it or you hadn’t – business acumen, he meant) and then, when his father died and he himself had barely come of age, he took himself off to America with all his fortune.
    He had been pretty clever even then, for it was not easy, in those years, to transfer your assets abroad. But he had done it. And