I decided to walk to the rue de Provence in the hope that the exercise and the summer air might help me to figure things out. For a while I was racking my brains for something I might have said to Willms on the train from Berlin—something that might have made him think I was a threat to his nefarious little organization. And gradually I formed the conclusion that it was nothing I had said; it was what I was that might have alarmed him. At the Alex it was generally supposed that I was Heydrich’s spy, and Willms, who worked there for a while, would have known that; even if he didn’t, Paul Kestner would certainly have said as much. For his part, Kestner had hardly believed that I’d come all the way from Berlin to arrest just one man. If the two of them were partners, then getting rid of me might have looked like a wise precaution, and Willms was just the type to have taken the matter in hand. Of greater concern, perhaps, was how General Schaumberg was involved, and before my theory was complete I was going to need to know something more about him. This seemed more urgent when, arriving outside 22 rue de Provence, I discovered even more staff cars than had been parked in front of Maxim’s.

For several minutes I stood at a distance, in a doorway on the opposite side of the street, watching the comings and goings at what, on the face of it, was a smart address with a liveried doorman. Twice I saw a German officer arrive, utter a single word to the doorman, and be admitted inside, and it seemed obvious that unless I uttered the code word I had no chance of getting into the maison. I was just about to give up and return to my hotel when a staff car turned the corner and I caught a glimpse of the officer in the backseat. He was unremarkable in every way save the red and gold patches on his collar and the Blue Max he wore around his neck. The Pour la Merité—popularly known as the Blue Max—isn’t a common decoration and led me to think that this could be none other than the commandant of Paris, General Alfred von Vollard-Bockelburg himself. And seeing him headed to the maison gave me an idea. What you have to remember is that many of the general staff in Paris in 1940 were tremendous Francophiles, that relations with the French were good, and that German officers all went out of their way to avoid giving offense to the French or to tread on their administrative toes.

By now, the general, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, even in his boots, had got out of the car and was repeating the code word to the doorman.