The longer Anton stayed in Paris, the better the story became. More than twenty-four hours, it seemed, had passed before anyone noticed that the painting had gone: the museum was simply too big to police. Glass panels previously erected in front of the Mona Lisa to stop vandals had inspired derision in the public because their reflections obscured the view. Some Parisians thought the Germans had stolen the painting to demoralise them; the German press claimed that the French had staged an act of self-sabotage to distract attention from their disastrous foreign policy. The wounding of French national pride was an easy target for the foreign press and Anton tried to find a better angle. The Spanish name of Pablo Picasso led him to investigate the extraordinary number of artists who had come from abroad to live in Paris and to ask them what made Montmartre, a semi-urban village on a slope, preferable to Málaga or Livorno.

He was able to sell these pieces to magazines in Vienna, where they were well received. As a result, one of them dispatched him later that month to Moscow to report on the assassination of the premier, Peter Stolypin, at the Kiev opera. What the two stories had in common was the gratifying sense of Austria’s enemies in turmoil: in Vienna there was a real hunger to hear how the tsar had been sitting in a box overlooking the stage when a man had walked down the aisle and shot Stolypin at close range with a revolver – a Browning, Anton specified, knowing his editor’s passion for detail. The assassin was a lawyer, a socialist and a police informer. He was also Jewish, and in the days that followed there were rumours of a pogrom against all Jews in retaliation.

The editor was pleased, but Anton remained sceptical about the value of what he did. He found it satisfying to build a picture, piece by piece, of what had happened. At first, he wrote down everything, his hand aching to keep up; but after some days the people he was questioning could tell him nothing new. By then, the flow of information was reversed and he was able to tell them what he’d discovered from previous interviews. If the page in his notebook was still blank at the end of the meeting he knew he had finished his research. The trouble was that when he spoke to painters in Paris or civil servants in Moscow, he imagined their lives and felt something close to envy. However poor the artist, however constrained the official, they seemed to have a purpose and an identity: they would have careers, a life with shape and purpose. Whereas he … As much as he enjoyed his truth-discovering, he felt inessential. No one at home needed to know every nuance or corrugation of a story. It was only entertainment for them, he thought – which in turn made him not much more than a parasite.

He tried not to think about it too much. In the morning, he could spin out a cup of coffee beneath the electric chandeliers of the Griensteidl while he read the French and English newspapers. The play of European current affairs seemed entertainment enough, albeit of a rather menacing kind. Lunch was often sausage and beer from a stand in the Prater before he headed off to do some tutoring in the afternoon. Poverty was relative, he thought. Magazine commissions would come again one day, and the habit of living cheaply didn’t diminish him if the alternative was a return to the family chitterlings.