“Tonight,” Lukas said. “I will call him now. Quiet, I’m just going to say we have two guests. It will be a surprise.” He punched a number into his cellphone. He spoke quickly in German. There was agreement. We were invited to dine at eight.

“Where?” I asked.

“The same place,” he said. “It’s bigger now. But the same place.”

I looked at his jacket. “Police now, not gendarmes anymore?”

“Ja, ja. A few years back. We’re all federal, all polizie.”

“Is that better or worse?”

“The same, pretty much.”

I took that to mean in the small towns they still ran things their own way. “I have one more question.” I pointed to the dog. “That can’t be Rudi?”

“No, that Rudi passed on. This is great-grandson of Rudi.”

I knelt down. Looked up to Lukas, to make sure it was acceptable. Lukas nodded yes. I ruffled the big dog’s fur, scratched him behind the ears, looked into his warm brown eyes. “Your great-grandfather saved my life,” I told him. “Thanks.”

—

“What was that?” Allison said, when they were gone. “Who’s Rick? If I may ask. Or when were you Rick? Or something like that.”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

It was near the end of town, half behind the Shell station. The same sign, repainted, Rick’s Laundromat Americaine. “That was my business when I lived here. It was before the EU. It was hard for a foreigner to own a business. I bet it still is. These towns, these villages, they’re centuries old and they’re tight-knit. Anyway, I needed a local partner. Franz, he was the gendarme then, the cop in town. He actually put it in Lukas’s name. I barely knew Lukas. He was a kid then, away doing his national service.”

“You sold it to him when you left?”

I laughed. “It was more like it was the price of my ticket out of town.”

As Lukas said, the house had grown, longer, and higher. It had been a modest two stories. Now it was four. Where it had been three rooms deep, now it was six. Franz had the ground floor, Lukas and his wife and their two children a full apartment over him, and the top two stories were rented out, mostly weekly, and were a good source of income.

Franz greeted me with appropriate enthusiasm and astonishment.