From the grimy window in the holding cell at Paris’s Cherche-Midi prison I could just see the front of the Hôtel Lutetia, and for a long while I stood pressed into the cobwebbed corner, watching the hotel closely, as if I almost expected to see myself coming out of the door with poor little Renata Matter on my arm. It was hard to know whom I felt more sorry for, her or me, but eventually she edged it. She was dead, after all, when she would have had every reason to expect that she might still be alive. But for me. I didn’t spare myself anything in the way of reproach or blame. If only I hadn’t fixed her up with a job at the Adlon, I told myself, then she wouldn’t have been killed. If only I had left her here in Paris, then there would have been a small but nonetheless real possibility that she could have turned left out of the Lutetia, crossed the boulevard Raspail, and come to see me in the Cherche-Midi. It would have been easy enough. The Cherche-Midi was, after all, no longer a prison but a court, and like many others in Paris—most of them journalists—she might have gone there to see the trial of Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and seen me there, too, my hosts in the SDECE—a French counterespionage service—having thought it necessary to remind me that I was in their power, and that like Dreyfus, who had also been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, they could do what they liked with me now that I had been extradited to their custody.

Not that custody in Paris was such an enormous hardship. Not after everything else. Not after Mainz and the French Sûreté. They had been a little rough. And it was true that La Santé Prison, where I was currently held, wasn’t exactly the Lutetia, but the SDECE wasn’t so bad. Probably not as bad as the CIA, anyway; and certainly not as bad as the Russians. Besides, the food at La Santé was good and the coffee even better; the cigarettes were tasty and plentiful; and most of the interrogations at the Caserne Mortier—nicknamed “the Swimming Pool”—were conducted politely, often with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Sometimes the French even gave me a newspaper to take back to La Santé. None of this was what I’d been expecting when I left WCPN1 in Landsberg. My French improved—enough to understand what was in the newspapers and a little of the proceedings on the day I went to court, which just happened to be the day when the military tribunal brought in its verdict and handed down the sentences. My hosts in French intelligence had a point they wanted to make, after all. I could hardly blame them for that.