“He was a decorated lieutenant colonel. In the SS, I mean. Easy to be with. Charming, even. Good-looking. Unscathed by the war, you might even say. He was one of those types who looked like he was always going to survive pretty much anything. He spoke good Russian. Edgard was the kind for whom languages are easy. His German was perfect, of course. Even I couldn’t have guessed that he was French if I hadn’t already known that about him. I think he might have spoken Vietnamese, too. It was his facility with languages that made him especially interesting to the MVD. In the beginning, they made life pretty difficult for him. And, of course, once they had got their hooks into you it was very difficult for any man to resist them. I know that from my own experience with them.”

“What specifically did they want him for? Do you know?”

“Well, it wasn’t K-5. That’s for sure.”

“That’s the forerunner of the Stasi.”

“Yes. I don’t know what they had in mind for him. But the next thing I knew, he’d been sent to the Anti-Fa School in Krasnogorsk for reeducation. As you know, I almost ended up there myself. They’d have got me, too, but for the fact that the MVD officer who interrogated me was a man I’d known from before the war. A man named Mielke. Erich Mielke. He was the German political commissar in charge of recruiting us plenis for K-5.”

The French asked me some more questions about Edgard de Boudel and then took me back to La Santé. It means “health,” but that didn’t have much to do with what went on inside the prison. It was called La Santé because of the prison’s proximity to a psychiatric hospital, the Sainte-Anne on the rue de la Santé, which was just east of the boulevard Raspail.

In La Santé I kept to myself as much as possible. I didn’t see Helmut Knochen, which suited me just fine. I read my newspaper, which reported that things in North Africa were as bad for the French as they had been in Vietnam. In spite of my new friends in the SDECE, this news was not displeasing to me. There were times when I was never very far away from the trenches. Especially given all the rats there were at La Santé. Real rats. They walked along the landings as coolly as if they’d been carrying keys.

Back at the Swimming Pool the next day, the French asked me about Erich Mielke.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, as if unaware of what my audience would best like to hear—or, to be more accurate, what it was best they were told. “It’s all ancient history. Surely you don’t want me to go over all that.”

“Everything you can tell us.”