The Frenchman yelped with pain, and finally letting go of my coat, he pressed his fingers to the side of his nose and took several steps back until he reached the garden wall.

“Look,” I said, “stop trying to polish my chin and take it easy, Émile. I’m not asking for the return of Alsace-Lorraine, just one lousy Sunday afternoon with the woman I love. Some compassionate leave, that’s all. And none of that gets in the way of me helping you find your traitor. I help you, you help me. Unless you want me to enroll in a course at the university, it’s not like I have anything much to do before next Tuesday evening.”

“I think you broke my nose,” he said.

“No, I didn’t. There’s not nearly enough blood. Take it from someone who’s broken a few noses in his time. Although nothing on the scale of that Eiffel Tower on your face.” I shook my head. “Hey, I’m sorry I hit you, Émile, but for the last nine months a lot of people have been getting tough with me and I’ve had enough of it, see? I have to look at my face every morning, Frenchman. It’s not much of a face, but it’s the only one I’ve got. And it’s got to last me for a while yet. So I don’t like it when people think they can knock it around. I’m sensitive like that.”

He wiped his nose and nodded, but the incident hung strong in the air between us like the smell of burned hops from a brewery. And for a moment we both stood there stupidly, wondering how to proceed.

It could have been worse, I told myself. There had been a brief moment when I had actually contemplated tipping him over the wall and into the canal.

He lit a cigarette and smoked it as if he thought it might improve his humor and take his mind off his nose, which, now that he had wiped away the blood, was already looking better than he might have supposed.

“You’re right,” he said. “There’s no reason at all why this thing can’t be fixed. After all, it is, as you say, just one Sunday afternoon, yes?”

I nodded. “Just one Sunday afternoon.”

“Very well. We will fix it. Yes, I tell you, I would do anything to get de Boudel.”

Including lie to me, I thought. After I had served my purpose and identified de Boudel, there was no telling what the French might do with me: send me back to La Santé, to the Amis, even the Russians. France was, after all, cozying up to the Soviet Union in its foreign policy, and the return of an escaped prisoner was not beyond its perfidy.

“And a ring?” I asked, as if such a bauble really mattered to me or to Elisabeth.