is also very well trained, and if you had made the wrong move, you might be bleeding on the floor at this moment.”

Margrit took my hand and offered what I took to be a tiny apology before turning off the hall light and disappearing again into the side room. Jenö motioned to the stairs. “Follow me, we’ll eat up there. Watch your step, the stairway bulb is out. The place is closed today, so we won’t be interrupted. Your M. Beret will have to wait outside. It will not make him happy, but”—Jenö shrugged—“he’ll live with it. The Swiss take disappointment well. Must be in the genes.”

3

We went up seventeen stairs—the five I saw, a sharp turn left, then twelve more. I pay attention to stairs; you never know when you’ll have to use them in a hurry. These treads were so narrow I thought to myself that the Swiss carpenters must have tried to save all the wood they could. Maybe Swiss had tiny feet. There were two rooms at the top of the stairs. The door to one of them was shut, which is something I don’t like when I’m in a strange place. The other room was brightly lit, but without much furniture. A small table with two chairs sat by a heavily curtained window.

Jenö indicated the chair where he wanted me to sit. “How about something with cheese? Fondue?” There was a black shoulder bag on the floor under the table. I kicked it to one side as I sat down.

“If you recommend it. I don’t know what fondue is.”

“A pot of melted cheese. You dip different things in it.”

“And they come out covered with cheese, I suppose.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Do you have another suggestion? Something simple.”

“Snails.”

“Simpler.”

“Frog’s legs.”

“What ever happened to chicken? Or beef?”

“Calf. Brains.”

“Pass.”

“Liver.”

“Pass.”

“You eat dog but you won’t eat calf? You eat ox knees but you won’t touch liver?”

“Who says I eat dog? Perhaps some soup, a salad, bread. Fish—anything but perch.”

“Let me order.” He stood up and called down the stairwell. When he was seated again, he put his fingers together, one at a time. I remembered not to interrupt his thoughts. “Will you have some wine?” he asked at last.

“You didn’t have me come here to eat brains and drink wine.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“Your black bag is clicking. Maybe you should check the mechanism. Odd placement, under the table. I wouldn’t think it would pick up sound very well from there.”

He reached under and pulled up the bag. “Did you kick this? You really shouldn’t mess with other people’s instrumentation that way. Besides, I thought things that were digital didn’t click.” He took out a small device and held it up for me to see. “This doesn’t actually record anything. The recorders are somewhere else.” He waved his hand to indicate somewhere and nowhere around the room. “Devices are not my specialty, so I don’t ask where they put those things.”

“Then what is that?” I pointed to the device, which was still clicking.

“I was told it was a transmitter of some sort. How it works from inside a bag I couldn’t tell you. I’d turn it off, if I knew how.”

Margrit came up the stairs with several plates, a basket of bread, and a bottle of wine. Jenö lifted his napkin from the table and waved it open. It looked like the pictures I’d seen of a matador waving his cape in front of the bull, which, I was once told by a Spanish tourist, is later dragged out—dead—by its tail. The matador, I seemed to recall, gets an ear.

“First we eat,” said Jenö, “then we talk.” He turned to Margrit, and they discussed something for several minutes. She shook her head vigorously; he shook his finger at her. Finally, she picked up the bag and heaved it out the door and down the stairs. She turned to him.

“Okay?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said and picked through the breadbasket for a roll that suited him.

4

After I was back in my hotel room, I mulled over what Jenö had told me during dinner. “This shouldn’t be so difficult, Inspector.” He’d had several glasses of wine and was about to pour himself another. “It’s straightforward, but your people keep dodging and wriggling. I argued that we should deal with you differently than we do with the Arabs, but maybe I was wrong.”

“You want to give me a clue, even a little one? Because otherwise, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I could have pretended to go