I had called Rubino after my long evening with Arthur Bowman—not to tell him anything about the conversation, which I regarded as private—but to let him know that I was going to China, and to see if I could coax more information out of him about the French-Chinese weapons project. He sounded pleased by the news of my China trip, which was fine with me.

He invited me to come have lunch with him that Saturday at his house. His tone was what you would use with an old college friend: Stop by, have a beer, see the kids. When I entered his house that day I was still, in my mind, a reporter only. I believed I could set the terms of my relationship with Rubino—get from him what I wanted, without giving him more than I should. By the time I left that afternoon I knew, in my heart, that my independence had been compromised.

Rubino greeted me at the door in a flannel shirt, blue jeans and running shoes. A little girl, perhaps six years old, was just inside the door, dressed in a baggy leotard and a ballet tutu. “Say hello to Mr. Truell,” urged Rubino. She promptly ran away to hide. We went down one flight to a large family room. Rubino went to the refrigerator to get some beers. I looked through the sliding glass door and took the measure of his backyard. There was a tetherball, a Weber grill, some molded-plastic lawn furniture, a row of battered shrubs. This wasn’t the world of Arthur Bowman and Elsbeth Parsons.

We drank beer and talked for a while, as if we were friends spending a Saturday afternoon together. Our careers had some obvious similarities. He had been in China in the early eighties; I had been in Hong Kong a few years later. We had both ended up in Paris in the 1990s. And the more we talked, the more obvious it was that when you boiled the externalities away, we had done much the same work. We had both been in the business of gathering information—eliciting it, trading for it, teasing it out of reluctant subjects. He called his informants “agents,” and paid them money. I called them “sources,” and gave them other kinds of rewards. I suppose that broke down more of the barriers—understanding that we were in similar fields.