At last he stopped writing and, leaning back on the chair, turned to look at me. Feeling this was my chance to put him on the spot, I tried to frame a question of the kind that Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, might have asked. But this was more difficult than I might have imagined. There wasn’t any single question beyond a simple “Why?” that I could have asked, and I was still wrestling with this realization when he spoke to me:

“So, what happened next?”

I tried to stifle a yawn. “You mean when I left Le Vernet?”

“Of course.”

“We went back to Toulouse,” I said. “From there we drove to Vichy and handed our prisoners to the French. Then we drove to the border of the occupied zone—Bourges, I think it was—and waited for the French to deliver them back to us. A ridiculous arrangement, but one that seemed to suit the hypocrisy of the French. These prisoners included poor Herschel Grynszpan. From Bourges we drove back to Paris, where the prisoners were locked up before being flown to Berlin. Well, you probably know better than me what happened to Grynszpan. I know he was in Sachsenhausen for a while. And there never was a show trial, of course.”

“A trial was unnecessary,” said Hitler. “His guilt was obvious. Besides, it might have been embarrassing for Pétain. Just like the Riom trial, when that Jew André Blum gave evidence against Laval.”

I nodded. “Yes, I can see that.”

“I didn’t hear anything about what happened to him,” said Hitler. “At any rate, I cannot recollect. At the end, I had quite a lot on my mind. Himmler probably dealt with him. I daresay he was one of those whose hash got settled by the SS at Flossenburg in the last days of the war. But, you know, Grynszpan had it coming. After all, there’s no doubt that he really did murder Ernst vom Rath. No doubt at all. The Jew just wanted to kill an important German, and vom Rath was merely the unlucky man he killed. There were plenty of witnesses to the murder who came forward and told the truth about what happened. Not that you would know the meaning of truth. Your behavior at Le Vernet was a gross act of deceit and betrayal. To me and your fellow officers.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “But I’ll live with it.”

“Did you go straight back to Berlin?”