Yet retirement would have bored Frend. He enjoyed the law – or more correctly, he delighted in finding ways around it on behalf of his clients, and the money he earned as a consequence was a pleasant bonus. In this he resembled a certain type of gambler, one who takes pleasure in the moments during which the ball is in play on the roulette wheel, or the final card is about to be turned; for whom the anticipation is more pleasurable than the outcome, and who can therefore win or lose with relative equanimity. It helped, of course, that Frend was gambling not with his own money and future but with those of his clients. If he failed these men and women – which, the nature of human existence dictated, he occasionally must – he could only shrug his shoulders and apologize while attempting to limit the damage for all concerned, because there are always gradations of loss.

But Frend’s reputation, like that of any good advocate, rested on rarely losing, and for this reason his services were eminently saleable. He was in the enviable position of being able to choose his clients as much as, if not more than, they selected him. Some of those clients, of course, took their occasional reversals better than others; in the case of a very small number, it was best for all involved, Frend included, if they did not lose at all.

Anton Frend, like all gamblers, was in love with risk, and men who become besotted with hazard also grow accustomed to it. In this it resembles other vices: the practice becomes habitual, and what is habitual inevitably becomes dull, thereby requiring greater extremes of behavior in return for rewards that will, at best, plateau. For Frend, this behavior manifested itself as an ongoing immersion in criminal society, and so he resembled a man wading deeper and deeper into colder and colder waters, gradually losing all feeling in his limbs and numbing his senses on the way to an inevitable drowning.

Among the most enduring of Frend’s clients in this regard were Radovan and Spiridon Vuksan. Frend had known the Vuksans since the mid-nineties, when Radovan Vuksan had commenced diverting funds from clandestine bank accounts, set up to bankroll Serb-backed militias in Croatia and Bosnia, into safe financial havens where the money could rest and cool. Occasionally, the funds would arrive at Frend’s offices in the form of hard cash, delivered in cheap gym bags by associates of the Vuksans – grim-faced men with the eyes of carrion crows – or, if the opportunity arose, by Radovan himself, after which he and Frend would dine together at Griechenbeisl or, after a walk in the hills, Der Pfarrwirt, where they would talk of music and books.