I was still coughing and retching when two men in white jackets came and carried me away on a stretcher. Outside the hotel, on the boulevard Raspail, I started to feel a little better as I managed to haul some of the fresh morning air into my lungs.

They took me to the Lariboisière Hospital on rue Ambroise-Paré. There they put a drip in my arm and a German army doctor told me I’d been gassed.

“Gassed?” I said wheezily. “With what?”

“Carbon tetrachloride,” said the doctor. “It seems that the fire extinguisher in your room was faulty. But for the maid who detected the smell outside your room door, you’d probably be dead. The CTC converts to phosgene when it’s exposed to air, which is how it puts the fire out. It suffocates it. You, too, very nearly. You’re a lucky man, Captain Gunther. All the same, we’d like to keep you here for a while, to keep an eye on your liver and kidney functions.”

I started coughing again. My head felt like the Eiffel Tower had collapsed on top of it. My throat felt like I’d tried to swallow it. But at least I was alive. I’d seen plenty of men gassed in France, and this wasn’t anything like that. At least I wasn’t bringing anything up. You’ve got to see a man retching two liters of yellow liquid every hour, drowning in his own mucus, to know how appalling it is to die from a gas attack. It was said that Hitler had been gassed and was temporarily blinded, and if that was so, it explained a lot. Whenever I saw him on a newsreel yelling his head off, gesticulating wildly, beating his breast, choking with his hatred of the Jews or the French or the Bolsheviks, he always reminded me of someone who had just been gassed.

In the early evening I started to feel better. Well enough to receive a visitor. It was Paul Kestner.

“They said you had an accident with a fire extinguisher. What did you do? Drink it?”

“It wasn’t that type of a fire extinguisher.”

“I thought there was only the one kind. The kind that puts out a fire.”

“This one was the type that smothers a fire with chemicals. Takes away all the oxygen. That’s kind of what happened to me.”

“Someone catch you smoking in bed?”

“I’ve spent most of the day wondering that myself. And not liking any of the answers.”

“Such as what, for instance?”