I was about to answer her when I heard two or three loud bursts of machine-gun fire, none of them longer than a couple of seconds; but then, it takes only five seconds to empty an MP 40’s thirty-two-round magazine. The sound and smell of it were still hanging in the air by the time I had sprinted down the slope into the clearing. Two storm troopers were standing a couple of meters apart, their jackboots surrounded with spent ammunition that looked like so many coins tossed to a couple of buskers. As well-trained soldiers, they were already changing the toylike magazines on their machine pistols and looking just a little surprised at their murderous efficiency. That’s the thing about a gun: It always looks like a toy until it starts killing people.

A little farther away lay the bodies of the eight prisoners we had brought from Gurs.

“What the hell happened here?” I shouted, but I knew the answer already.

“They tried to make a run for it,” said Bömelburg.

I went forward to inspect the bodies.

“All of them?” I said. “In a straight line?”

One of the shot men groaned. He lay on the forest floor, his knees collapsed under him, his torso lying back on his feet in an almost impossible position, like some old Indian fakir. But there was nothing to be done for him. His head and chest were covered in blood.

Angrily, I walked toward Bömelburg. “They would have run away in several directions,” I said. “Not all of them down the same slope.”

A pistol shot bored another hole through the still air of the forest and the groaning man’s head. I turned on my boot heel to see Kestner holstering his Walther P38. Seeing my expression, Kestner shrugged and said:

“Best to finish him, I think.”

“Back at the Alex, we’d have called that murder,” I said.

“Well, we’re not back at the Alex, are we, Captain?” said Bömelburg. “Look here, Gunther, are you calling me a liar? Those men were shot while trying to escape, do you hear?”

There was a lot I could have said, but the only thing that was true was the fact that I had no business being there. It wasn’t just the bodies of fallen heroes that the Valkyries carried up to Valhalla but also those of Berlin chief inspectors who criticized their senior officers in remote French forests. After I remembered that, there seemed little point in saying anything; but there was still plenty I could do.

For his face and my neck I even offered an apology to Bömelburg when the toe of my boot would have seemed more appropriate. In my own defense, I should also add that the two MP 40 machine pistols were now reloaded and ready for lethal business.