‘Really?’ Kauffmann frowned. She appeared genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t think that at all. Most of these people may be nameless, but they have not been forgotten. Every year, for one day, they are remembered. The fishermen leave flowers for them, and set a boat of wreaths adrift on the Danube. That is more than is done for many who have families to recall them, or who lie beneath memorials more lavish than a simple cross. And someday, we will be as they are. When there is no one left alive to recall us, no one for whom our mention causes even a flicker of recognition, then we, too, will have become nameless, whatever the stone above our head may say to the contrary.’

She finished her cigarette and stamped it out on the ground, which detracted somewhat, in Frend’s view, from the impact of her testimony.

‘Or,’ she resumed, ‘one could look upon it as a lesson in the transitory nature of identity.’

Ah, thought Frend, that’s more like it. Now we break through the bone to get to the marrow.

Kauffmann was a lawyer, specializing in banking and capital markets law, but she also maintained a lucrative sideline as a broker of passports, because some of her clients occasionally had need of such a service. From Austrian Bar gossip, Frend was aware that Kauffmann’s contacts in the Caribbean were second to none, although she had been forced to sever her ties with Cyprus and Malta following their inclusion on an OECD blacklist of countries believed to be facilitating tax evasion through their passports-for-sale schemes. There was also the case of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had been killed by a car bomb outside Mosta in 2017 while investigating Maltese government corruption, including the trade in passports. Her death had brought unwelcome international attention on the Maltese and the conduct of their affairs.

‘One should always be open to change,’ said Frend. ‘I currently have clients who share this view. One might even say they’re quite passionate about it.’

Kauffmann lit another cigarette. The tips of the fingers on her right hand were as yellow as her teeth. Frend imagined her body as a veritable petri dish of cancers.

‘I know the circles in which you move,’ said Kauffmann. ‘That’s why we’re meeting out here and not at Café Landtmann. There are rumors, Anton.’

‘There are always rumors. It would not be Vienna otherwise.’

‘These rumors come from farther afield,’ said Kauffmann. ‘Podgorica, for example.’

Podgorica, capital of Montenegro. Four hundred thousand dollars for a passport, give or take. Independent from Serbia since 2006, but still with deep ties to the old union. During the wars in the 1990s, the Montenegrins had bombed Dubrovnik for the Serbs and handed over Bosnian refugees to be tortured and executed. The Vuksans might once have had friends there, but not any longer.

‘And what do you hear from Podgorica?’ said Frend.