Through the month of June, I took a long victory lap. I came back to New York and addressed a Mirror staff meeting. So many people wanted to come that they had to hold it in the ballroom of a nearby hotel. I recounted my story, yet again—emphasizing the silly parts like getting busted on the roof of the Élysées Models building and spending the night in the slammer on the Rue Nélaton—and answering gee-whiz questions from friends and colleagues. I did it all happily. This was a ritual of self-love, for the newspaper as much as for me. Afterward I had visitations from several of the younger women reporters, who previously had never given me the time of day when I was on home leave. I brought one of them back to my hotel room after a glorious night of dancing and drinking. We made love exuberantly through the night and woke up bleary-eyed the next morning. I had hit the jackpot. The quarters were tumbling out of the machine into my lap. The day before I left, Sellinger gave me the monthly Publisher’s Award, which came with a five-thousand-dollar bonus, and promised he would raise my salary next year to eighty thousand dollars, which was more money than I had ever dreamed I would make as a journalist.

Yet when I finally returned to Paris, a sense of unease began to grow in me, like mold in a remote corner of a bathroom. At the core of my great scoop were events I didn’t understand. We had been able to publish the exposé of Maurice Costa only because of information provided by an anonymous source. I was certain I knew who had given me this information, but I didn’t know why. I tried to find Rupert Cohen at UNESCO, where he supposedly worked, but they had never heard of him. That added to my disorientation. Had I been used in a covert campaign by the U.S. government, deliberately plotted in Washington, to change French politics? Or had a source in Paris—a weirdo in a black leather jacket—slipped me the information on his own? Had I been the active player in this drama or simply the object of other people’s designs? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, and that was the source of my unease.