“Well, that was 1940, and when I left Paris I didn’t expect to see him again, and certainly never as soon as November 1941 in the Ukraine. Edgard was part of this French unit in the German army—not the SS, that was later, but the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, or some such nonsense. That’s what the French called it. I think we just called it the something infantry. The 638th. Yes. That was it. Mostly, the men were Vichy fascists, or even French POWs who didn’t fancy being sent to Germany as forced labor with the Todt organization. There were probably about six thousand of them. Poor bastards.”

“Why do you say that?”

I sipped some wine and helped myself to a cigarette from the packet on the table. Outside the window, in the central courtyard, someone was trying to start a motorcar without success; somewhere farther away, de Gaulle was waiting or sulking, depending on how you looked at it; and the French army was licking its wounds after getting its ass kicked—again—in Vietnam.

“Because they couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for,” I said. “Fighting partisans sounds fair enough back here in Paris. But out there, in Byelorussia, it meant something very different.” I shook my head sadly. “There was no honor in it. No glory. Not what they were looking for, anyway.”

“So what did it mean?” asked Eyebrows. “On the ground.”

I shrugged. “That kind of action was, quite often, nothing more than murder. Mass murder. Of Jews. All sorts of police actions and antipartisan activities were merely a euphemism for killing Jews. To be frank with you, the Wehrmacht High Command in Russia wouldn’t have trusted the 638th with any other kind of task but murder.”

“The name of the unit commander. Can you remember that?”

“Labonne. Colonel Labonne. After the winter of 1941, I lost touch with Edgard.” I clicked my fingers. “De Boudel. That was his name. Edgard de Boudel.”

“You’re quite sure of that?”

“I’m sure.”

“Go on.”