There were two things in particular that perplexed me: that sly, subtle smile that had appeared on Chanel’s face when I mentioned Madeleine, and the fact that she’d sent her man to Arthur’s apartment after the meeting. It took me half a pack of Salomés to figure out the puzzle, and when the answer finally came to me, I cursed myself. I’d made a grave tactical error. I ought never to have referred to Madeleine. Until I did, Chanel had not known what to say. It was only at the mention of Madeleine that Chanel had spoken. What would she have said had I not mentioned Madeleine—had I not given the game away? I would never know. But the fact that she had sent her man to find me after the meeting was itself a kind of clue. Of course, I’d pointed a gun at her, but had she been innocently aggrieved, she need only have called the police. The fact that she hadn’t suggested she had something to hide.

It wasn’t much to go on, but love thrives on ephemera: hunches, gut feelings, obscure clues are all the fuel it needs. Whenever the fragile fabric of a lover’s fantasy is undone by reality, all it takes is the merest hint of hope and its threads start knitting together again. Combined with what I’d seen—the manuscript, the scale model of the sailing ship, what Massu had told me—the memory of that smile punctured the certainty of Chanel’s argument. It introduced the element of doubt. And that faint glimmer of doubt was all that was required for the screaming voice of shame in me to subside, and for that other voice, the voice that hoped, that loved Madeleine, that spoke to her even now that she was gone, to make itself heard again. My first mistake had been to lose hope—to look away from Madeleine’s eyes at the very moment when I could have settled the question once and for all: were her stories true or not? Smoking Salomés in the darkness, there was nothing I wanted more than to find her again, to look into her eyes and discover their secret.

I woke from fitful sleep in a cloud of smoky light. The sky was smeared with an inexplicable orange fog and my nostrils stung with the smell of petrol. I checked out of the hotel and walked with my suitcase toward the Palais de Justice. Everyone on the streets was walking south carrying luggage. I’d done what Massu had asked, and even if I hadn’t learned anything of use to him, he owed me my notebook, at the very least, and perhaps I could still cajole a favor out of him.