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.