It certainly felt good in the summer of 1940. And there was no better place to be breathing air than Paris. Especially when I had the little maid from the Lutetia hotel to keep me amused. Not that I took advantage of her. As a matter of fact, I was rather scrupulous where Renata was concerned. It was one of the ways I had of convincing myself I wasn’t as big a rat as the field gray said I was. This wasn’t Onegin’s sermon. I mean, I wanted her. And eventually I had her. But I took my time about it the way you do when you like what’s between a girl’s ears as much as you want what’s between her legs. And when it happened, it felt like it was something shaped by a higher motive than simple lust. It wasn’t love, exactly. Neither of us wanted to get married. But it was romance: courtship, desire, fear, and dread. Yes, there was fear and dread, too, because Renata always knew I would go and slay my fire-extinguishing dragon just as soon as I knew why he’d sought to put me out for good.

While I’d been away in the south of France, Renata had searched Willms’s room and once or twice even followed him to discover that he ate at Maxim’s almost every other night. On a general’s pay this would have been unusual enough, but for a mere lieutenant it was nothing short of miraculous, and I resolved to visit the restaurant myself in the hope that this might provide me with some clue as to why he had tried to kill me. And, in this respect, it was fortunate for me that Maxim’s was now run by Otto Horcher, who owned a restaurant in Berlin-Schöneberg. In the spring of 1938, Otto Horcher had been a client of mine when I’d been running a successful business as a licensed private investigator. I’d worked undercover as a waiter in his place for a couple of weeks in order to find out who was stealing from him. As it turned out, everyone was stealing from him, but one man, the majordomo, was stealing a lot more than all of the others put together. After that we were friends, and even though he was a Nazi and a good friend of Goering’s—which was how he came to be managing the most famous restaurant in Paris—I could always count on him for a table when I needed to impress someone, because after Borchardt, Horcher’s was the best restaurant in Berlin.