It was early the next morning when an SS staff car arrived to drive me back to the hotel, to collect my things, and then to the airport. Paris still wasn’t awake, but for any decent Frenchman the city probably looked better with eyes closed. A detachment of soldiers was marching along the Champs-Élysées; German trucks were pouring in and out of the army garage that was located in the Grand Palais; and in case anyone was still in any doubt about it, on the façade of the Palais Bourbon they were erecting a large V for victory and a sign that read “Germany Is Everywhere Victorious.” It was a bright, sunny summer’s day, but Paris looked almost as depressing as Berlin. Still, I was feeling better. At my request, the hospital doctor had shot me full of dope to put some raspberry into my beer. Amphetamines, he said. Whatever it was, I felt like Saint Vitus was holding my hand. It didn’t stop the pain in my chest and throat from all the retching I’d done, but I was ready to go flying. All I had to do was go back to the hotel, get into my uniform, and find a nice tall building for a takeoff.

The hotel manager was pleased to see me standing up. He’d have been glad to see me in a flower vase. It’s bad for business when guests die in their rooms. I was alive and that was all that mattered. My old room was closed up because of the strong smell of chemicals in there, and my clothes had been taken to a suite on another floor. He seemed relieved when I told him I was going south to Biarritz for a few days. I said I was going up to my new room and that I wanted to say thanks to the maid who’d saved my life, and he said he’d arrange this immediately.

Then I went upstairs and took my field gray uniform out of the closet. It carried a strong smell of chemicals or gas and brought on a strong feeling of nausea as I recalled breathing the stuff. I opened the French window, hung my uniform there for a minute, and then rinsed my face with cold water. There was a knock at the door and I went to open it with shaking knees.

The maid was prettier than I remembered. Her nose wrinkled a little when she caught the smell of chemicals on my uniform, although it could just as easily have been the sight of it. But in truth it probably was the smell; in the summer of 1940 it was only Germans, Czechs, and Poles who had good reason to fear the field gray uniform of an SD captain.

“Thank you, mademoiselle. For saving my life.”

“It was nothing.”

“Nothing to you. But quite a bit to me.”