Général Fourés thought about Elisabeth von Hoffmann all the time. He thought about her in the morning and throughout the afternoon, and of course he thought about her at night, too. He played out in his mind any number of fantastic scenes between them, erotic and banal, though mainly erotic. He was exasperated, living under the same roof, and yet thrilled at the same time, because he could see her so often and without contriving to. The tensions of propriety (there had been none in his seduction of Letizia) were providing an unexpected satisfaction.

Elisabeth was short-tempered with him, especially if Günther was around. But, as the days passed, their brief interactions grew longer. She’d ask him a question or two now, just simple things, yet their conversations gradually took up a little extra time and so the moments between them lingered, acquired space. She still frequently bruised his brightness with her youthful, contemptuous dismissals of him (that look!), but soon it was done with a solicitous smile, brief, casual, intimate because it was almost unnoticeable, though the général noticed. He noticed everything to do with Elisabeth von Hoffmann, the smallest detail and slightest change in the air.

Except of course the night she came into his room and slipped into the bed and grabbed his hand and put it to her breast. All day, all week, he hadn’t noticed a thing that might have predicted the occasion.

She’d squirmed up against him, gathered his feet in hers. She’d said, ‘You know what to do, Général, don’t you?’

OBJETS D’HISTOIRE

Claus von Rolt held the square of bloodstained cloth in the palm of his hand. There was a vague swirl to the pattern, yellowish where it thinned out to the edges of the fraying material, and a rich red brown everywhere else. It looked like nothing, like a patch that had been used to dress a wound maybe, and Rolt was mildly repulsed by it, thinking of pain and blood, the stink of bandages. He held it up closer to his nose, expecting something pungent, but detected only a vague mustiness, and the slightly sweated odour of cold bedsheets. He touched a corner of the cloth with the tip of his little finger and couldn’t help but marvel at how close he was to history.

It was exactly things like this that thrilled him.

‘What do you think?’ Christophe Bergerard asked.

‘There’s the question of authenticity,’ Rolt said.

Général Fourés’s aide-de-camp carefully took the piece of cloth from Rolt’s palm and placed it back inside a small, velvet-lined box. ‘I assure you, sir,’ he said, ‘the article is genuine.’

Rolt smiled. ‘Yes, well, you may say it . . .’