The door swung open to reveal a windowless room. It was sparsely furnished, with a table and several chairs; the walls were painted a tired pastel blue. Atop the table was a plastic decanter of coffee and two Styrofoam cups. At the far end sat a man in shirtsleeves, leaning his chair back against the wall. It was at once chilling and reassuring to me that I knew him. The man at the end of the table was Tom Rubino.

“Thanks for coming, Eric,” he said, rising from his chair and shaking my hand. The man from public affairs exited the room, leaving us alone. Rubino looked a little more tired than he did the last time I had seen him in Paris, nearly two years before. His tie was loose, his sleeves were rolled up, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He looked almost like a newspaperman. In front of him on the table was a large briefing book. He could see that I was uncomfortable, and tried to put me at ease. “How’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since your big scoop on Maurice Costa. That was a hell of a story. Nice work.” He winked.

Rubino explained that he was chief of the European division now, but that he continued to spend most of his time working on “the French target,” as he put it. He had told public affairs he wanted to brief me personally, he said, because of the sensitivity of my query and the fact that I was regarded by the agency as a “straight shooter.” That rang an alarm bell, I will admit, but I chose to ignore it. Rubino wanted to tell me things. That was all that was clear; the rest was fuzzy.

“So where should I begin?” he said. “With a little recent history, I guess. I’m not sure you realize how much impact your Costa story had on France Inc. I’ve read everything you’ve written since then, looking to see if you’d picked up what was happening behind the scenes, but I think you missed it.”

“Nobody in France would talk to me after the Costa story. How could I have known what happened? My sources all dried up.”

“What happened was that the system changed. Maurice Costa represented a way of doing things—a ‘certain idea of France,’ to bastardize de Gaulle’s phrase—that had survived for fifty years. It was part of the apparatus of the French state. The system operated through state-owned companies and government contracts. It was old-fashioned graft—a whole country operating by the same rules as Chicago under Mayor Daley.” Rubino was rocking back and forth in his chair as we talked; he was wired.

“What’s different, now that Costa is gone?”