wanted to stay and see what I could get out of Klingerhoefer. Klingerhoefer won.
All clients are liars, I told myself. I haven't yet met one who didn't treat the truth as if it was something on the ration. And the detective who knows that his client is a liar knows all the truth that need concern him, for he will then have the advantage. It was no concern of mine to know the absolute truth about Britta Warzok, assuming that such a thing existed. Like any other client she would have had her reasons for not telling me everything. Of course, I was a little out of practice. She was only my third client since starting my business in Munich. All the same, I told myself, I ought to have been a little less dazzled by her. That way I might have been less surprised, not to catch her lying so outrageously, but to find her lying at all. She was no more of a strict Roman Catholic than I was. A strict Roman Catholic would not necessarily have known that Ulrich Zwingli had been the sixteenth-century leader of Swiss Protestantism. But she would certainly have known that it was Ignatius of Loyola who had founded the Jesuits. And if she was prepared to lie about being a Roman Catholic, then it seemed to me she was quite prepared to lie about everything else as well. Including poor Herr Klingerhoefer. I picked up the dollars and went over to his table.
Frau Klingerhoefer seemed to have overcome all her previous reservations about the price of dinner in the Walterspiel and was working on a leg of lamb like a mechanic going after a set of rusty spark plugs with a wrench and a rubber hammer. She didn't stop eating for a moment. Not even when I bowed and said hello. She probably wouldn't have stopped if the lamb had let out a bleat and inquired where Mary was. Her son, Felix, was partnered with the veal, cutting neat little triangles off it like one of those newspaper cartoons we were always seeing of Stalin carving slices from a map of Europe.
'Herr Klingerhoefer,' I said. 'I believe we owe you an apology. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. You see, the lady is much too vain to wear glasses. It's quite possible that you have indeed met before, but I'm afraid she was much too shortsighted to recognize you from wherever it was that you might have met. On a plane, I think you said?'
Klingerhoefer stood up politely. 'Yes,' he said. 'On a plane from Vienna. My business often takes me there. That's where she lives, isn't it? Vienna?'
'Is that what she told you?'
'Yes,' he said, obviously disarmed by my question. 'Is she in any kind of trouble? My mother told me you're a detective.'
'That's right, I am. No, she's not in any kind of trouble. I look after her personal security. Like a kind of bodyguard.' I smiled. 'She flies. I go by train.'
'Such a good-looking woman,' said Frau Klingerhoefer, gouging the marrow out of the lamb bone with the tip of her knife.
'Yes, isn't she?' I said. 'Frau Warzok's divorcing her husband,' I added. 'As far as I'm aware, she's undecided whether she's going to stay on in Vienna. Or live here in Munich. Which is why I was a little surprised to hear that she mentioned living in Vienna to you.'
Klingerhoefer was looking thoughtful and shaking his head. 'Warzok? No, I'm sure that wasn't the name she used,' he said.
'I expect she was using her maiden name,' I suggested.
'No, it was definitely Frau something-else,' he insisted. 'And not Fraulein. I mean, a good-looking woman like that. It's the first thing you listen out for. If she's married or not. Especially when you're a bachelor who's as keen to get married as I am.'
'You'll find someone,' said his mother, licking the marrow off her knife. 'You just have to be patient, that's all.'
'Was it Schmidt?' I asked. That was the name she had used when first she had contacted Herr Krumper, my late wife's lawyer.
'No, it wasn't Schmidt,' he said. 'I'd have remembered that, too.'
'My maiden name was Schmidt,' his mother explained, helpfully.
I hovered for a second in the hope that he might remember the name she had used. But he didn't. And after a while, I apologized once again and made for the door.
The maitre d' rushed to my side, his elbows held high and pumping him forward like a dancer. 'Was everything all right, sir?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said, handing over her dollars. 'Tell me something. Have you ever seen that lady before?'
'No, sir,' he said. 'I'd have remembered that lady anywhere.'
'I just got the impression that maybe you had met her before,' I said. I fished in my pocket and took out a five-mark note. 'Or maybe this was the lady you recognized?'
The maitre d' smiled and almost looked bashful. 'Yes, sir,' he said. 'I'm afraid it was.'
'Nothing to be afraid of,' I said. 'She won't bite. Not this lady. But if you ever see that other lady again, I'd like to hear about it.' I tucked the note and my card into the breast pocket of his cutaway.
'Yes, sir. Of course, sir.'
I went out onto Marstallstrasse in the vague hope that I might catch a glimpse of Britta Warzok getting into a car, but she was gone. The street was empty. I said to hell with her and started to walk back to where I had left my car.
All clients are liars.
SIXTEEN
Walking down Marstallstrasse onto Maximilianstrasse, I was already thinking of how I was going to spend the next day. It was going to be a day without Nazi war criminals and Red Jackets and crooked Croatian priests and mysterious rich widows. I was going to spend the morning with my wife, apologizing for all my earlier neglect of her. I was finally going to call Herr Gartner, the undertaker, and provide him with the words I wanted on Kirsten's memorial tablet. And I was going to speak to Krumper and tell him to drop the price on the hotel. Again. Maybe the weather at the cemetery would be fine. I didn't think Kirsten would mind if, while I was in the garden of remembrance where her ashes were scattered, I got a little sun on my face. Then, in the afternoon, maybe I'd head back to that art gallery--the one next to the Red Cross building--and see if I could sign up for a crash course in art appreciation. The kind where a slim but attractive younger woman takes you by the nose and escorts you around a few museums and tells you what's what and what's not, and how to tell when a chimpanzee painted one picture and a fellow wearing a little black beret painted another. And if that didn't pan out, I would head to the Hofbrauhaus with my English dictionary and a packet of cigarettes and spend the evening with a nice brunette. Several brunettes probably--the silent kind, with nice creamy heads and not a hard-luck story between them, all lined up along a bartop. Whatever I ended up doing I was going to forget all about the things that were now bothering me about Britta Warzok.
I had left my car parked a few blocks east of the Vier Jahreszeiten, pointed west toward Ramersdorf, in case I fancied the idea of checking out that address she'd given me. I didn't fancy it much. Not on top of two Gibsons. Britta Warzok had been right about that much, at least. The Vier Jahreszeiten did serve an excellent cocktail. Near the car, Maximilianstrasse widens into an elongated square called the Forum. I guess someone must have thought the square reminded them of ancient Rome, probably because there are four statues there that look vaguely classical. I daresay it looks more like the ancient Roman Forum than it once did, because the Ethnographic Museum, which is on the right side of the square as you go toward the river, is a bombed-out ruin. And it was from this direction that the first of them came. Built like a watchtower and wearing a badly creased, beige linen suit, he walked meanderingly toward me with his arms spread wide, like a shepherd trying to intercept escaping sheep.
Having no wish to be intercepted by anyone, let alone someone as large as this fellow, I turned immediately north, in the direction of St. Anna's and found a second man coming my way down Seitz-strasse. He wore a leather coat, a bowler hat, and carried a walking-stick. There was something in his face I didn't like. Mostly it was just his face. His eyes were the color of concrete and the smile on his cracked lips reminded me of a length of barbed wire. The two men broke into a run as I turned quickly on my heel and sprinted back up Maximilianstrasse and straight into the path of a third man advancing on me from the corner of Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. He didn't look like he was collecting for charity either.
I reached for the gun in my pocket about five seconds too late. I hadn't taken Stuber's advice and left one in
