Willms sat down, only he didn’t sit on the chair but on the floor, like a Boy Scout dropping onto his backside beside a campfire. Then I saw the blood boiling out of his skull like hot mud. He collapsed onto his side and lay still except for his legs, which straightened slowly, like someone trying to get comfortable enough to die; and all the time his head painted the beige carpet a very dark shade of red as if an indifferent claret had been poured onto the floor by a truculent guest in an unsatisfactory restaurant.

With shaking hands, I made my Walther safe and then holstered it, asking myself if I couldn’t have aimed at something other than his head. At the same time, I told myself that one of the easiest ways to end up dead is to leave your wounded adversary with an opportunity to shoot you.

I bent down and made sure the Luger was safe, too, and it was then I started to see how much of a jam I was in, what with all the generals and counts and princes who were in league with Willms. And thinking it might be better if Willms’s death at least looked a bit less like a murder, I swapped the Luger for my own Walther. Then, seeing Willms’s tunic and belt, I took his Walther and put it in my holster before replacing the cold Luger in the desk drawer. Things only looked like a mess. Suicide was actually a nice, tidy solution for the French police, for Sipo, and for the red stripes over at the Majestic hotel. I wondered if they’d even bother to look for a powder burn on Willms’s head. Because cops all over the world love suicides; they’re nearly always the easiest homicides to solve. You just lift the rug and brush them underneath.

I picked up the telephone and asked the operator for the Préfecture de Police, in the rue de Lutèce.

23

GERMANY, 1954

I sat up and blinked hard in the near darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I’d been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn’t much like his questions or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I’d been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I’d have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw him again, and the last I heard of him he’d been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.