“Sure. We’ve all been through it.” I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. The little piece of black fishnet on the side of her hat was covering the three scars on her cheek. “You, too, by the look of things.”

She touched her face. “Actually, I was quite lucky,” she said.

“That’s the only way to look at it.”

“There was an air raid on the twenty-fifth of April 1944,” she said. “They say that forty-five high-explosive and five thousand incendiary bombs fell on Munich. One of the bombs shattered a water pipe in my house. I got hit by three red-hot copper rings that were blown off my boiler. But it could just as easily have been my eyes. It’s amazing what we can come through, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“Herr Gunther, I want to get married.”

“Isn’t this a little sudden, dear? We’ve only just met.”

She smiled politely. “There’s just one problem. I don’t know if the man I married is still alive.”

“If he disappeared during the war, Frau Warzok,” I said, “you would be better off inquiring about him at the Army Information Office. The Wehrmacht Dienststelle is in Berlin, at 179 Eichborndamm. Telephone 41904.”

I knew the number because when Kirsten’s father had died, I had tried to find out if her brother was alive or dead. The discovery that he had been killed, in 1944, had hardly helped her deteriorating mental condition.

Frau Warzok was shaking her head. “No, it’s not like that. He was alive at the end of the war. In the spring of 1946 we were in Ebensee, near Salzburg. I saw him for only a short while, you understand. We were no longer living together as man and wife. Not since the end of the war.” She tugged a handkerchief down the sleeve of her tailored suit jacket and held it crushed in the palm of her hand, expectantly, as if she was planning to cry.

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“The German police say it’s an Austrian matter. The Salzburg police say I should leave it to the Americans.”

“The Amis won’t look for him either,” I said.

“Actually, they might.” She swallowed a bolus of raw emotion and then took a deep breath. “Yes, I think they might be interested enough to look for him.”

“Oh?”

“Not that I have told them anything about Friedrich. That’s his name. Friedrich Warzok. He’s Galician. Galicia was part of Austria until the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after which it was allowed its autonomy. Then, after 1918, it became part of Poland. Friedrich was born in Kraków in 1903. He was a very Austrian sort of Pole, Herr Gunther. And then a very German one, after Hitler was elected.”

“So why would the Americans be interested in him?” I was asking the question, but I was beginning to have a shrewd idea.