‘What is it?’ Jean asked, clearly noticing his smirk.
‘It’s nothing.’ Tayte grabbed Jean’s hand and led her back to the pavement, heading the same way the taxi had gone. ‘Let’s get another cab and ask the driver to take us to the finest restaurant in Munich.’
Jean laughed. ‘Are you paying?’
‘Sure, but in that case maybe I’ll ask for the second or third finest.’
They were laughing as Tayte turned back to see if there was a taxi coming, although he thought they would have to keep walking until they hit a more touristy part of the city. As he looked over his shoulder his smile turned to excitement when he saw two people, a man and a woman, at the glass doors they had just left. He drew Jean’s attention to them.
‘Look, someone’s going inside.’
He let go of Jean’s hand and almost jogged back up the steps to the door. He reached it just as it was closing.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. He was too excited to recall how to say it in German.
The door opened again and Tayte saw a tall, slim woman in a navy trouser suit, whom he thought was about Jean’s age, in her late thirties. The man Tayte had seen with her was standing in the shadows further back. The woman smiled expectantly, as though waiting for Tayte to say what he wanted.
‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ the woman said, a little indignantly, Tayte thought, as if he should have known that every German in a business suit spoke English.
Tayte paused to give himself time to get the pronunciation right for his next line. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Die Freunde der Waffen-SS Kriegsveteranen. Is this the right place?’
The woman’s formerly pleasant expression changed to a frown. ‘We don’t have visitors.’
‘Well, can I make an appointment?’
‘No, I’m sorry. No visitors.’
She began to close the door, but Tayte quickly pulled out the photograph he had of his mother and thrust it across the threshold. He didn’t expect anything to come of it, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to be so direct as to ask if they were helping Volker Strobel evade the authorities.
‘I’m looking for this woman, or trying to find someone who can tell me her name. Can you at least tell me if you recognise her?’
The woman glanced at the photograph. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she repeated. She began to close the door again. ‘Now if you’ll—’
Jean stepped beside Tayte then and cut in. ‘Can we talk to you about Volker Strobel?’
The direct approach it is, then, Tayte thought. ‘Look, we’re not out to expose Strobel,’ he said. ‘We just want to talk to anyone who knows anything about him in the hope that it might help identify the woman we’re trying to find.’
The man came out from the shadows then. He appeared on the other side of the glass briefly before he slammed the door in Tayte’s face, rattling the frame. Tayte watched both figures silently recede into the darkness.
‘Well, that was a lot of good,’ Tayte said as he shoved one of his business cards through the letterbox, more out of habit than the belief that these people might change their minds about talking to him.
‘Don’t be too disappointed, JT. It went exactly as we expected it would.’
‘It did?’
Jean nodded. ‘Although, I’d say from the reaction we just got that it’s pretty clear the FWK know more than a thing or two about Volker Strobel.’
The taxi Tayte hailed soon after leaving Maxburgstrasse took them further into the centre of Munich, but instead of going straight to a restaurant as Tayte had hoped they would, the driver took them to the edge of the old town because Jean wanted to see the Munich Residence—a former royal palace of the monarchs of Bavaria. Jean had previously described the palace to Tayte, and he couldn’t imagine any royal historian wanting to miss the opportunity to see it, but he hadn’t let the taxi driver go without first getting a recommendation for a nearby restaurant that served traditional Bavarian cuisine. They spent an hour at the palace, which both Tayte and Jean agreed wasn’t nearly long enough to take everything in: the museums, the treasury and the historical gardens, not to mention all the artwork and the tapestries that were spread throughout numerous courts.
It was just after five o’clock when they left, and by now both Tayte and Jean were famished, so they set off south through the bustling streets of the old town, towards the heart of the city, in search of the restaurant the taxi driver had recommended—the Spatenhaus an der Oper, which he’d said was on Residenzstrasse opposite Max-Joseph-Platz.
‘We’ll have to come back before we return to London,’ Jean said as they strolled hand in hand across Odeonsplatz in the warm late-afternoon sunshine.