“I think I can understand why,” said Angelika Rubusch. “This isn’t our tender. It’s on our notepaper, but these aren’t our figures. This is way above the price we put in to supply this quantity of limestone. About twice as much. I’m looking at this and thinking that it’s no wonder we didn’t get the contract.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I was my husband’s secretary. That was to stop him from . . . you know. Well, that’s not important now. I used to type all our correspondence, including the original letter of tender to the German Olympic Organizing Committee, and I can tell you that I certainly didn’t type this. For one thing, there’s a spelling mistake. There is no e in ‘Würzburg.’ ”

“There isn’t?”

“Not if you come from Würzburg, there isn’t. Also, the letter g on this typewriter is riding a little higher than the other letters.” She put the tender letter in front of me and placed a well-manicured fingernail under the offending g. “D’you see?”

In truth, my eyesight was feeling a little blurred, but I nodded all the same.

She held the notepaper up to the light. “And you know what? This isn’t even our notepaper. It looks like it, only the watermark is different.”

“I see.” And now I really did.

“Of course,” I said. “Max Reles must have been rigging bids. And I think that works like this: You put in a bid for something yourself and then make sure that competing bids are priced at an unreasonably high level. Either that or you chase off the other bidders, by whatever means necessary. If this is a fake bid, Max Reles must have an interest in the company that was awarded the contract to supply the limestone. Probably that was a high bid too, but crucially not as high as your husband’s bid. As a matter of fact, who did win the contract?”

“Würzburg Jura Limestone,” she said dully. “Our major competitor. The same company I’ve agreed to sell to.”

“All right. Perhaps Reles had already asked Heinrich to put in a high bid so that your competitor would get the contract. If he’d agreed to do it, he’d have been paid a commission. And maybe even ended up supplying Würzburg Jura himself. The advantage being that he could have been paid twice.”

“Heinrich may have been cheating on me as a husband,” she said, “but he wasn’t like that in business.”