“I knew some French policemen. The ones I’ve already told you about. But not any French Gestapo. Now, the French SS, that’s something else again. But none of them were Muslims. As I recall, they were nearly all Catholics.”

“Did you know many from the SS-Charlemagne?”

“A few.”

“Let’s talk about the ones you did know.”

“All right. Mostly they were Frenchmen captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin in 1945. They were men in the POW camps, like I was. The Russians treated them the same way they treated us Germans. Badly. We were all fascists, as far as they were concerned. But really there was only one Frenchman in the camps I got to know well enough to call him a comrade.”

“What was his name?”

“Edgard,” I said. “Edgard de something or other.”

“Try to remember,” one of the Frenchmen said patiently.

“Boudin?” I shrugged. “De Boudin? I don’t know. It was a long time ago. A lifetime. Not a good lifetime, either. Some of those poor bastards are only just coming home now.”

“It couldn’t have been de Boudin. Boudin means ‘sausage’ or ‘pudding.’ That couldn’t have been his name.” He paused. “Try to think.”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Maybe if you told us something of what you can remember of him, the name will come back to you,” suggested the other Frenchman. He uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured a little into a small round glass, and then sniffed it carefully before tasting it and pouring some more for me and the two of them. In that room, on that dull summer’s day, this small ritual made me feel civilized again, as if, after months of incarceration and abuse, I amounted to something more than just a name chalked on a little board by a cell door.

I toasted his courtesy, drank some wine, and said, “I first met him here in Paris in 1940. I think it must have been Herbert Hagen who introduced us. Something to do with the policy on Jews in Paris, I don’t know. I never really cared about that sort of thing. Well, we all say that now, don’t we? The Germans. Anyway, Edgard de something or other was almost as anti-Semitic as Hagen, if such a thing was possible, but in spite of that, I quite liked him. He had been a captain in the Great War, after which he’d failed in civvy street, and this had led him to join the French Foreign Legion. I think he was stationed in Morocco before being sent to Indochina. And of course, he hated the communists, so that was all right. We had that much in common, anyway.