Evidently I’d misconstrued her attentive expression. I felt suddenly out of my depth, bewildered by her seemingly implacable tenacity, but also by my own apparent compulsion to defend Marco, or at least plead for mercy on his behalf.

“He has a gun in his drawer,” I heard myself say. “He showed me. He said he’d use it.”

“On me?” She looked momentarily fascinated.

“On himself. If you publish.”

“Oh, for god’s sake.”

“I’m just trying to convey how desperate he is.”

“I told you. That’s not my concern.”

“He has a daughter—”

She glared furiously at me.

“I don’t care. I don’t care.” She slammed down her glass of wine, which miraculously didn’t snap. “Why should I care? Would you care, if you were the one who’d been raped?”

I looked away, thrown off my guard.

“Would you give a fuck whether or not your rapist had a daughter?”

“Probably not.”

She gave a curt nod.

“He will fight you though,” I said. “He’ll fight you as hard as he can.”

“So what’s new?”

“Well . . . as long as you think it’s . . . worth it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just saying, in his mind, he’s fighting for his life. It’s you or him, basically. One of you ends up terminally discredited. Lying rapist or lying Nazi. That’s unfortunately the logic of the situation. And it could be you, Julia. He’ll show every publisher in London that letter from Gerald Woolley, along with the stuff about Hanna Reitsch. His father’ll make sure they all get copies, along with injunctions and writs and all the rest of it.”

She looked at me with sudden intense dislike.

“Now you’re trying to threaten me!”

“What?”

“You don’t believe a single word I’ve said, do you?”

“I do!”

“Then you don’t care!”

“The point is no one can prove it either way. That’s the nature of these things. And without proof he’ll always be able to raise the possibility that you’re making it up. Especially given the circumstances.”

“The circumstances?”

There was a brief pause, in which both of us seemed to reel a little at the suggestion that had slipped out of me.

“You mean, my going to his room voluntarily?”

I made an attempt to backtrack, though I didn’t feel entirely in command of myself at that moment.

“Well, it’s a factor. I mean, the world being what it is . . .”

She tilted her head, seeming to reappraise me.

“You don’t believe it was rape, do you, even if everything I say is true?”

“I do,” I protested, trying to sound like myself. “Of course I do.”

“You don’t. Not real rape. Not in a way deserving of real consequences. You think I should just shut up about it, don’t you?”