Anselm Kessler

Anselm Kessler is 41 and sells tiny parts to those who make them turn. He was born in Graz, Austria, the son of a watchmaker and a piano teacher, and was raised between the ticking of the clocks in his father's workshop and scales repeated from morning till night. He studied commerce in Vienna, joined a watch-component factory as a salesman and today travels Europe as a representative, with a case of samples and an impeccable business card.

He lives in a two-room apartment in a stately building in Vienna, near the Ring, with a parquet floor he waxes on Saturdays and an iron balcony where he never sits. The dining table has six chairs and only one is used. There is a shelf of sheet music he inherited from his mother and never opens, a wall clock he sets every Sunday and a painting of an Alpine landscape nobody knows who painted. He spends more than two thirds of the year in hotels, and says he prefers them.

He has dark blond hair parted at the side, with brilliantine, a mustache trimmed with precision and thin metal-rimmed glasses. He wears a gray three-piece suit, impeccably cut and slightly old-fashioned, and very clean hands with short nails, which he rarely takes out of his pockets. He smiles like a salesman, just the right amount, praises his interlocutor's tea and English and answers almost every question with another, in a tone of such courtesy that one feels like thanking him.

About his stay in London, his account is commercial: he sells jewel bearings for watches, those little stones that hold the axles, and came for the watchmaking fair and to taste a tea said to be the best in Europe. He knew the host, he says, only by his voice, which he admired on the radio. He is staying at a cheap hotel in Bayswater, because the factory no longer pays, and left his business card with half a dozen people who will not call.

Anselm knows that a courteous foreigner in a city where an exile has died deserves, to the detective, more attention than the tea. When the question turns direct, the smile does not change, only the distance between sentences grows. It may be the care of a man who travels too much and has learned to say little. It may be someone who chooses every word because every word has a price. The detective will have to decide which.