I thought it odd that it should have been that particular moment she chose to use my Christian name for the first time. I didn’t look at her. Instead, I kept my eyes on Klingerhoefer in the hope it might encourage him to say something else. I even smiled at him, I think. Just so he wouldn’t get the idea I was going to get rough with him. But he was stranded like a dog on an ice floe. And bowing a third time, he muttered an apology and went back to his own table with his face turning the color of his strange suit.

“I think I was telling you about some of the odd people this job brings me into contact with,” I said.

“Doesn’t it just?” she whispered, glancing nervously in Klingerhoefer’s direction. “Honestly. I don’t know where on earth he got the idea that we were acquainted. I’ve never seen him before.”

Honestly. I just love it when clients talk like that. Especially the females. All my doubts about her veracity were instantly removed, of course.

“In that suit, I think I’d have remembered him,” she added, quite redundantly.

“No doubt about it,” I said, watching the man. “You certainly would.”

She opened her bag and took out an envelope that she handed to me. “I promised you a bonus,” she said. “And here it is.”

I glanced inside the envelope at some banknotes. There were ten of them and they were all red. It wasn’t five thousand marks. But it was still more than generous. I told her it was too generous. “After all,” I said. “The evidence doesn’t help your cause very much.”

“On the contrary,” she said. “It helps me a great deal.” She tapped her forehead with an immaculate fingernail. “In here. Even if it doesn’t help my cause, as you say, you’ve no idea what a load off my mind this is. To know that he won’t be coming back.” And taking hold of my hand, she picked it up and kissed it with what looked like real gratitude. “Thank you, Herr Gunther. Thank you, very much.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” I said.

I put the envelope in my inside pocket and buttoned it down for safekeeping. I liked the way she had kissed my hand. I liked the bonus, too. I liked the fact that she’d paid it in hundred-mark notes. Nice new ones with the lady reading a book beside a mounted terrestrial globe. I even liked her hat, and the three scars on her face. I liked pretty much everything about her except the little gun in her bag.