Sunday afternoon, fuming, Louis Mueller unlocked the door of his school office and threw his heavy set of keys onto his desk. The ring should have held only the keys to the doors of his domain, but this one clanked with the means to enter the offices of department heads in the Sorbonne. Louis had taken the university president’s spinster secretary to Maxim’s and wooed an invitation afterward to her apartment for a nightcap. Leaving her drugged, he’d stolen her office key and met a locksmith at the Sorbonne who’d made paste imprints of select keys right on the site. The secretary woke at six o’clock the next morning with a headache but fully clothed and tucked cozily in her bed, the key safe in her purse, and a note from Louis apologizing for having overdined and overwined her but with the hope she’d allow him the pleasure again. Of course, the invitation was never extended.

Louis was a snooper, and he liked to know all about not only his staff but the people in authority over him. A man never knew to what use he might put the information. Usually, he carried the full ring to the school only on Saturday afternoons, when he ostensibly read students’ progress reports, checked sports equipment, and caught up on paperwork. The maintenance crew was gone by then, and unless Louis saw lights in some overzealous professor’s office, he had free access to other doors in the greater Sorbonne to examine at will personnel files, business papers, private correspondence, address and appointment books, cabinets and drawers and closets. Louis Mueller, lowly physical education director of a school created to instruct “the mongrels of Nazi bastards” so a private memo referred to the students, had collected enough incriminating material to hold over the heads of a goodly number of the senior Sorbonne staff.

But yesterday, he’d received a call from the father of one of his students, Major General Konrad March, requesting an interview on Sunday—today, October 11, the only day to spend time with his lover in Lyon. He had tried to beg off—his mother was ill—but the general had insisted. One did not say no to the head of the Abwehr in France, although that lofty position would gain the general little footing if he’d come to protest his son’s education. Louis Mueller’s physical education program had the full support and endorsement of the Führer, but still, he’d prefer not to cross swords with a man of Major General March’s authority and connections. He and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the entire Abwehr, a man of immense power and influence, were best friends. The general’s son, Wilhelm, was named after him.