Now everyone performs as if the ritual has been rehearsed. Sister Leonide accompanies the prisoner to the stake, then withdraws. Reverend Arboux and four officers move slowly to the right. The sentence is read, and although Mata Hari refuses the blindfold, she accepts the last glass of rum (roughly the same portion allotted to soldiers before battle).

Traditionally, only one member of a firing squad is actually issued a bullet; the others are given blanks. On this day, however, all the cartridges are live.

She remains unmoving until the officer raises his sword, then shuts her eyes.

There is a photograph of the execution. Obviously taken only minutes before the shots were fired, she appears as a dark silhouette against the surrounding vegetation. Also visible are the expressionless faces of soldiers, a few spectators, and a handful of journalists who would eventually become obsessed with the woman.

Over the months that followed, dozens of those who had known Mata Hari were contacted and interviewed by European journalists: former lovers, friends from the theater, servants, and casual acquaintances. Yet despite an intensive search, the one man who supposedly knew her better than all of them continued to remain a mystery. His name was Nicholas Gray and this, more or less, is his story. As, of course, it is hers.

About twenty-five years after the execution a rumor began to circulate that a particularly key participant in the Mata Hari affair was living in the monastery at Montserrat, a truly remarkable place. Founded by Benedictine Monks in the eighth century, it stands three thousand feet above the river Llobregat outside of Barcelona. Traditionally held to be the site of the Holy Grail, it is also, one would think, a rather perfect setting to meet the only man said to have loved Mata Hari till the end.

He has been described as a gaunt figure with white hair and pale eyes. Although he never took monastic vows, apparently he lived as if he had. His room was a low rectangular cell adjacent to the outer court. The furniture was crude. He was an accomplished painter; visitors often found him sitting at an easel by the window or wandering along the plateau with a sketchbook. It was said that he never tired of the landscape.

Gray first met Mata Hari in 1905, and then carried her photograph for years. A fairly well-known publicity shot, it shows her half naked, with studded breastplates and an Indian diadem. There are dozens of hothouse orchids at her feet, potted palms along the edge of the stage.

Of course he insisted that she was very beautiful, with particularly captivating eyes. Then, too, he maintained that she possessed a certain dark charm, a certain sensual innocence that always left men enchanted.