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the bank. It lay in the farthest corner between a marble column and oil paintings of Hanseatic ships, under the liverish gaze of the second Kaiser Wilhelm, rendered in sea-blue tiles.
    “I’m expecting a lady I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting before, Peter,” Brue confided, with a smile of male complicity. “A Frau Richter. I have a suspicion she’s young. Kindly make sure she’s also beautiful.”
    “I shall do my best,” Herr Schwarz promised gravely, richer by twenty euros.
    Out of nowhere, Brue was reminded of a painful conversation he had had with his daughter, Georgie, when she was all of nine years old. He had been explaining that Mummy and Daddy still loved each other, but were going to live apart. It was better to live apart in a loving relationship than quarrel, he had told her, on the advice of a psychiatrist he loathed. And how two happy homes were better than one unhappy one. And how Georgie would be able to see Mummy and Daddy as often as she wanted, just not together like before. But Georgie was more interested in her new puppy.
    “If you’d only got one Austrian schilling left in the whole world, what would you do with it?” she demanded, thoughtfully scratching its tummy.
    “Why, invest it, of course, darling. What would you do?”
    “Tip someone,” she replied.
    Mystified more by himself than by Georgie, Brue tried to work out why he should be punishing himself with the story now. Must be the similarity of their voices, he decided, with an eye to the swing doors. Will she be wired? Will her “client,” if she’s bringing him, be wired? Well, if so, they’ll be out of luck.
    He reminded himself of the last time he’d met a blackmailer: another hotel, another woman, British and living in Vienna. Prevailed upon by a Frères client who wouldn’t trust his problem to anyone else, Brue had met her for tea in the discreet pavilions of the Sacher. She was a stately madame, dressed in widow’s weeds. Her girl was called Sophie.
    “She’s one of my best, Sophie is, so naturally I’m ashamed,” she had explained from under the brim of her black straw hat. “Only she’s thinking of going to the newspapers, you see. I’ve told her not to, but she won’t listen, her being so young. He’s got some rough ways with him, your friend has, not all of them nice. Well, nobody wants to read about themselves, do they? Not in the newspapers. Not when they’re managing director of a big public company, it’s hurtful.”
    But Brue had taken prior counsel from the Viennese chief of police, who happened also to be a Frères client. On the policeman’s advice, he meekly consented to a swingeing sum of hush-money while Vienna’s plainclothes detectives recorded the conversation from a nearby table.
    This time round, however, he had no chief of police on his side. The intended target was not a client, but himself.
     
    In the great hall of the Atlantic, as in the street outside, it was rush hour. From his vantage point Brue observed at his supposed ease the arriving and departing guests. Some wore furs and boas, some the funereal uniform of the modern executive, others the torn jeans of millionaire hobos.
    A procession of elderly men in dinner jackets and women in sequined ball dresses emerged from an inner corridor, led by a page boy pushing a trolley of bouquets wrapped in cellophane. Somebody rich and old is having a birthday, thought Brue, and wondered for a moment whether it was one of his clients and had Frau Elli sent a bottle? Probably no older than me, he thought bravely.
    Did people really think of him as old? Probably they did. His first wife, Sue, used to complain that he had been born old. Well, sixty had always been in the contract, if you were lucky enough to get there. What was it Georgie had once said to him, when she started going Buddhist? “The cause of death is birth.”
    He glanced at his gold wristwatch, a gift from Edward Amadeus on his twenty-first. In two minutes she’ll be