“I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to my being here in Paris.”

“You should allow us to be the judge of that.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps if I knew why you were interested in him, I could be more specific. After all, it’s not like this is a story that takes only a couple of minutes to tell. Christ, some of this stuff is twenty years old. Or even older.”

“We’ve got plenty of time. Perhaps if you went from the beginning. How you first met and when. That kind of thing.”

“You mean the whole novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

“Precisely.”

“All right. If you really want to know this stuff. I’ll tell you everything.”

Of course, I hardly wanted to do that. Hell, no. Not all over again. So I gave them an edited, more entertaining version of what I’d already told the Amis. A French version. A smooth-tongued précis, if you like, that was not spoiled by the inclusion of too many facts and that, like the French themselves, was the result of an exhausted conscience wrestling with simple pragmatism and being very quickly overcome. A story that was the best kind of story being better told than believed.

“The decision was made in the Ministry of the Interior to let Mielke make his escape. Despite the fact that he had participated in the murders of two cops. It came about like this. Department IA had been brought into being to protect the Weimar Republic against conspirators on the left and on the right, and we decided that the best way to do this was to cultivate a few informers on both sides. But on the face of it, that hardly applied to a man like Mielke. We had arrested him and fully intended to send him to the guillotine. However, the Abwehr—German intelligence—persuaded the ministry that they might turn Mielke into their agent. And this is what happened. We were persuaded to let him escape so that he might become our long-term agent, the Abwehr’s Moscow mole. In return, we looked after his family. The Abwehr kept him going all the way through the thirties and the Spanish Civil War. As well as passing us some very important information on Republican troop movements that was extremely helpful to the Condor Legion, he was able to initiate several political purges of some of their best men, on the grounds that they were Trotskyites or anarchists. In that respect, Mielke was doubly useful.