“Oh? And whose murder is it that I’m supposed to have attempted?”

“Mine.”

“You can prove that, can you?”

“I’m a detective, remember? I’ve got a little thing called evidence. Not to mention a witness. And if I’m right, a motive, too. Not that I’ll need any of these things when Himmler finds out what you’ve been up to here in Paris, Willms. He’s rather less understanding than me when it comes to the conduct of men wearing the uniform of his beloved SS. Somehow I get the feeling that his opinion of your conduct is going to matter a lot more than General Schaumberg’s.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I always take it seriously when someone tries to gas me with the contents of a chemical fire extinguisher. And by the way, I checked back with the Alex. It seems that before you joined the police, you worked for the fire brigade.”

“I don’t see that that proves a thing.”

“It proves you know something about fire extinguishers. And it would account for how it was that the missing plug from the extinguisher that almost killed me was found in your hotel room.”

“Says who?”

“The witness.”

“You think that a court-martial will accept the word of a Frenchman against the word of a German officer?”

“No. But they might accept it against the word of a greasy little pimp.”

“You might be right,” said Willms. “We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

Uttering a weary sort of sigh, he sat back in his chair and, in the same movement, pulled open the drawer of his desk. Even before I saw the gun I knew it was there, and after that it was simply a question of who could shoot first, him or me. On my SS soft-shell holster there was just a brass stud to keep the flap down, but even so I was no Gene Autry and the Luger was in his hand before the Walther P38 was in mine. It was the Walther’s double-action trigger that probably saved my life. Like most policemen, I was in the habit of carrying it with one in the chamber and the hammer down. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. Willms ought to have known that. The toggle-lock action on his Luger was much more cumbersome, which was why cops didn’t carry them, and by the time his pistol was ready to fire I was already shouting a warning. I might have finished the warning, too, if he hadn’t started to straighten his arm and point the gun at me, at which point I fired at the side of his head.

For a moment I thought I’d missed.