“You know what it is, Arthur. There isn’t a polite way to say it.” I closed my eyes for a moment. I didn’t know what to do, other than blurt it out. Otherwise, we would keep dancing all night.

“Go on. I’m waiting.”

“You’re a spy,” I said slowly. “You have taken money from French intelligence.”

He looked away suddenly, like a dog who has been cuffed. This was not in his universe, the possibility that a thirty-seven-year-old reporter would make such an accusation against him, in his own club.

“That’s outrageous. Who told you that?”

“Wait until you hear the details, before you deny it. During the 1980s, did you meet a man named Salan, who was deputy chief of the French service?”

“I certainly know who Salan is. And I may well have met him. Why, were we being watched? My God! How stupid.”

“The CIA thinks he was your case officer.”

“That’s asinine.”

“Did you ever have a numbered account at a bank in Geneva? The CIA says that a French intelligence officer put money into an account there, and that you withdrew it.”

His eyes flashed. “This is outrageous! How dare you ask me a question like that? And how dare the CIA feed you such rubbish!” He was popping with indignation. It was the intense energy of a man who had been backed into a corner.

“Arthur.” I reached out my hand toward his arm. He pulled back. It was almost a cringe. I could see the hurt and anger in his eyes, and something else that I had seen that night at Mrs. Parsons’s when he had looked up from the fireplace. He was afraid.

“Arthur,” I repeated. “Your problem right now isn’t with the CIA, it’s with me. I have no desire to hurt you. You’re a colleague. But unless you tell me the truth, I’m going to go see Philip Sellinger, and give this same information to him.”

“Oh, Christ.” The look on Bowman’s face when I mentioned the publisher’s name told me I had made the one threat that would truly upset him. Anything else he could have handled. But Sellinger was his best friend, his windward anchor in life. And there was something else I couldn’t see, deep in that bottomless lake of secrets, that he owed to Sellinger and wanted to protect.

“I’ll leave now, if you want,” I said. “That was what I had to tell you.”

Bowman put his hand on top of mine. He looked so weary, so exhausted by his lies. I was, in that moment, the only person with whom he could share the truth. “Don’t leave,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs, eat some dinner. Talk.”