“That’s good news,” I said, although I could hardly have cared less about Knochen’s fate. All the same, I was surprised at this conversational turn of events and I spent the drive back to the Swimming Pool feeling encouraged. Perhaps my prospects were improving after all. Despite the trial of Oberg and Knochen, and the verdict, there was perhaps good reason to imagine that the SDECE was keener on cooperation than coercion, and this suited me very well.

From the Cherche-Midi we drove east to the outskirts of Paris. The Caserne Mortier in the barracks of the Tourelles was a traditional-looking set of buildings near the boulevard Mortier in the Twentieth Arrondissement. Made of red brick and semirusticated sandstone, the C.M. held no obvious affinity with a swimming pool beyond an echo in the corridors and an Olympic-sized courtyard, which, when it rained, resembled an enormous pool of black water.

My interrogators were quiet-spoken but muscular. They wore plain clothes and did not give me their names. No more did they accuse me of anything. To my relief, they weren’t much interested in the events that had happened on the road to Lourdes in the summer of 1940. There were two of them. They had intense, birdlike faces, five-o’clock shadows that appeared just after lunch, damp shirt collars, nicotine-stained fingers, and espresso breath. They were cops, or something very like it. One of the men, the heavier smoker, had very white hair and very black eyebrows that looked like two lost caterpillars. The other was taller, with a whore’s sulky mouth, ears like the handles on a trophy, and an insomniac’s hooded, heavy eyes. The insomniac spoke quite good German, but mostly we spoke in English, and when that failed I took a shot at French and sometimes managed to hit what I was aiming at. But it was more of a conversation than an interrogation, and save for the holsters on their broad shoulders, we could have been three guys in a bar in Montmartre.

“Did you have much to do with the Carlingue?”

“The Carlingue? What’s that?”

“The French Gestapo. They worked out of rue Lauriston. Number ninety-three. Did you ever go there?”

“That must have been after my time.”

“They were criminals recruited by Knochen,” said Eyebrows. “Armenians, Muslims, North Africans, mostly.”

I smiled. This, or something like it, was what the French always said when they didn’t want to admit that almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis. And given their postwar record in Vietnam and Algeria, it was tempting to see them as even more racist than we were in Germany. After all, no one had forced them to deport French Jews—including Dreyfus’s own granddaughter—to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Naturally, I hardly wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying so directly, but as the subject remained on the table, I shrugged and said: