Vigée put down his coffee cup and started to shake his head.

“No, please listen,” I said. “If I could spend a few hours with her, I’m sure I could persuade her to wait. Especially if I arrived with a few presents. A ring, perhaps. Nothing expensive. Just a token of my feelings for her.”

He was still shaking his head.

“Oh, come on, Émile, you know what women are like. Look, there’s a shop full of inexpensive jewelry on the corner of Speckstrasse. If you could advance me a few marks—enough to buy a ring—then I’m sure I could persuade her to wait for me. If this wasn’t my last chance, I wouldn’t ask. We could be back here by Monday evening. A full twenty-four hours before the train is even due in Friedland.”

“And what if you chose not to come back?” he said. “It’s very difficult bringing people out of Berlin across the Green Border. What’s to stop you from just staying there? She doesn’t even live in the French sector.”

“At least say you’ll think about it,” I said. “I mean, it would be a real shame if I allowed my own disappointment to cloud my eyes next Tuesday evening.”

“Meaning?”

“I want to help you find Edgard de Boudel, Émile. Really I do. But there has to be a little give-and-take, especially in a situation like this. If I’m to work for you, then surely it’s best that I’m completely in your debt, monsieur. That there’s nothing unpleasant between us.”

He smiled a nasty little smile and threw his cigarette over the wall and into the canal. Then he quickly gathered the lapels of my jacket in his fist and smacked me hard across both cheeks.

“Maybe you’ve forgotten La Santé,” he said. “Your boche friends, Oberg and Knochen, and their death sentences.” He slapped me again for good measure.

I took it as calmly as I was able and said: “That might work on your wife and your sister, Franzi, but not on me, see?” I caught the hand he was waving near my ear and twisted it hard. “No one gets to slap me unless I’ve got my hand in her panties. Now, take your paws off this cheap French suit before I teach you the Method on tough.”

I looked him in the eye and saw that he seemed to relax a little, so I let go his hand in order to prize his fingers off my coat, and that was when he punched me with a right hook that rocked my head like a balloon on a stick. Probably he’d have punched me again but for my own presence of mind, which is another way of saying that I banged its hard bony covering firmly against the bridge of his long hooked nose.