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cell phone, keys, a legal pad, credit cards and a buff file flagged and numbered like a barrister’s brief. No identifiable tape recorder or microphone, but with the technology these days, how could you be sure? And anyway, under that garb, she could be wearing a twenty-five-pound bomb belt.
    She handed him a card.
    SANCTUARY NORTH , Brue read. A Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany. Offices in the east of town. Phone and fax numbers, e-mail. Commerzbank account number. Have a quiet word with their city manager on Monday if I need to, check her credit rating. Annabel Richter, Legal Counsel. Never believe a beautiful woman, Tommy. They’re a criminal class, the best there is. His father’s words, coming back to haunt him.
    “You’d better take a look at this too,” she said, thrusting an identity card at him.
    “Oh come, why should I do that?” he protested, although the same thought had occurred to him.
    “Maybe I’m not who I say I am.”
    “Really? Who else might you be?”
    “Some of my clients get people coming to them claiming to be lawyers when they’re not.”
    “How shocking. My goodness. I do hope that never happens to me. Well, of course, it may have done, mayn’t it? And I wouldn’t know. Awful thought,” he declared with false levity, but if he expected her to join him in it, he was disappointed.
    Her photograph showed her with her hair let down, older spectacles and the same face without the glower. Annabel Richter born Freiburg im Breisgau, 1977, which made her about as young as she could be for a German lawyer, if that was what she was. She had slumped back in her chair like a boxer relaxing between rounds, while continuing to watch him through her granny spectacles down the line of her bulked-out, buttoned-down, prim little body.
    “Heard of us?” she demanded.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Sanctuary North. Have you heard of our work? Has word of it reached you at all?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    Slowly shaking her head, she gazed round the lobby in disbelief. At the elderly couples in their finery. At the raucous young rich in the bar. At the house pianist playing love songs nobody was listening to.
     
    “And your charity is financed by whom?” Brue inquired in his most practical tone.
    She shrugged. “Couple of churches. State of Hamburg when it’s feeling virtuous. We get by.”
    “And how long have you been in business—your organization, I mean?”
    “We’re not in business. We’re pro bono. Five years.”
    “And you yourself?”
    “Two. Give or take”
    “Full-time? You have no other practice?” Meaning, Are you moonlighting? Are you doing a bit of blackmail on the side?
    She had tired of his questioning.
    “I have a client, Mr. Brue. Officially he’s represented by Sanctuary North. However, as of a short time ago he has formally empowered me as his personal lawyer in all matters relating to your bank, and given his consent for me to get in touch with you. Which I am now doing.”
    “Consent?” His screwed-on smile widening.
    “Instructions. What’s the difference? As I indicated to you on the phone, my client’s situation in Hamburg is sensitive. There are limits to what he is willing to tell me, also limits to what I am able to tell you. My belief, after spending a number of hours in his company, is that the little he tells me is true. Not all the truth, but maybe a small part of it, edited for my consumption, but true all the same. That’s a judgment we have to make in my organization. We have to be content with the little we get and work with it. We’d rather be fooled than cynical. That’s who we are. That’s what we stand for,” she added defiantly, leaving Brue with the unspoken accusation that he would prefer things the other way round.
    “I hear what you’re saying,” he assured her. “I respect it.” He was fencing. He knew how to do that.
    “Our clients are not what you