‘Where are we going?’ asked László.

‘Not far,’ said the younger man.

They pulled out into the traffic, driving fast where it was possible, but never too fast. László leaned back, staring out at the city, its public beauty. As they went west along the river, past Pont Neuf and the Musée d’Orsay, he tried to prepare himself, marshalling arguments and defences, rebuttals to imaginary accusations. Am I afraid? he wondered. He thought that he wasn’t.

At the Pont de l’Alma they headed south and circled round until they were on the avenue Bosquet, driving back towards the river again. Then, with a lingering look in the rear-view mirror, the driver accelerated and turned hard into the kind of street László always imagined to be inhabited solely by homesick filles au pair and widows with lapdogs. A place with no bars or restaurants and which by 7 p.m. would be deserted, shut down.

They stopped fifty metres from the end of the road, and László followed his young guide through a passageway at the side of one of the buildings to where a flight of narrow stairs wound like an iron vine up a corner of the interior courtyard. Several times the younger man stopped for László to catch him up. ‘Please,’ he said, anxious now, as if he might fail in this, the last part of his task. ‘Please...’

At the top of the building they entered a corridor with walls barely wider than László’s shoulders. They were, he realized, in one of the city’s secret places, where doors with worn handles led into rooms where any kind of life might be lived, almost invisibly.

At the second door on the right hand-side, the young man knocked with the conspirator’s three quick taps. The door was opened by Emil Bexheti.

‘Thank you,’ he said, ignoring the young man and shepherding László into the room. ‘I was sure you would come.’

‘In which case,’ said László, still husky from the climb, ‘you knew more than I.’

The room was extraordinarily small, a chambre de bonne in the shape of a blunt wedge, almost directly under the slates of the roof. Stifling in summer, bitterly cold in winter. László had done his time in such rooms; he had not thought to see one again.

In the middle of the room were three chairs – two facing one – and along one wall a single bed with a sagging mattress, stripped bare. On the table beside the bed were an alarm clock and a cellphone. From one of the chairs a young woman in a black dress, her face so pale it seemed somehow scraped down, examined László with a coolness, a hauteur, he found almost intolerable.

‘This,’ said László, ‘had better be very good indeed.’

‘But that depends on you, monsieur,’ said the woman, sharply. Emil waved her to silence.