All clients are liars, I told myself. I haven’t yet met one who didn’t treat the truth as if it was something on the ration. And the detective who knows that his client is a liar knows all the truth that need concern him, for he will then have the advantage. It was no concern of mine to know the absolute truth about Britta Warzok, assuming that such a thing existed. Like any other client she would have had her reasons for not telling me everything. Of course, I was a little out of practice. She was only my third client since starting my business in Munich. All the same, I told myself, I ought to have been a little less dazzled by her. That way I might have been less surprised, not to catch her lying so outrageously, but to find her lying at all. She was no more of a strict Roman Catholic than I was. A strict Roman Catholic would not necessarily have known that Ulrich Zwingli had been the sixteenth-century leader of Swiss Protestantism. But she would certainly have known that it was Ignatius of Loyola who had founded the Jesuits. And if she was prepared to lie about being a Roman Catholic, then it seemed to me she was quite prepared to lie about everything else as well. Including poor Herr Klingerhoefer. I picked up the dollars and went over to his table.

Frau Klingerhoefer seemed to have overcome all her previous reservations about the price of dinner in the Walterspiel and was working on a leg of lamb like a mechanic going after a set of rusty spark plugs with a wrench and a rubber hammer. She didn’t stop eating for a moment. Not even when I bowed and said hello. She probably wouldn’t have stopped if the lamb had let out a bleat and inquired where Mary was. Her son, Felix, was partnered with the veal, cutting neat little triangles off it like one of those newspaper cartoons we were always seeing of Stalin carving slices from a map of Europe.

“Herr Klingerhoefer,” I said. “I believe we owe you an apology. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. You see, the lady is much too vain to wear glasses. It’s quite possible that you have indeed met before, but I’m afraid she was much too shortsighted to recognize you from wherever it was that you might have met. On a plane, I think you said?”

Klingerhoefer stood up politely. “Yes,” he said. “On a plane from Vienna. My business often takes me there. That’s where she lives, isn’t it? Vienna?”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Yes,” he said, obviously disarmed by my question. “Is she in any kind of trouble? My mother told me you’re a detective.”