She almost left him that night, almost called for someone to collect her bags while he slept in the adjoining room, but finally it seemed that one minor quarrel hardly warranted such a drastic measure, particularly inasmuch as their relationship had reached such an interesting stage . . . which simply meant that she wanted him. Beyond everything else at the moment, she wanted him.

The affair ended as it had begun, on a casual note. Spangler told her that he was needed in Berlin, then handed her a one-way ticket back to Paris. There was also a promise to meet in the spring, and a last formal dinner on an enclosed terrace facing the lake. Conversation remained trivial, for the most part with Spangler describing a childhood in Bavaria that he had never experienced. His one or two questions about the earlier men in her life were not pressing, and there was still no mention of Rolland Michard.

This then, according to Zelle, was the sum total of her eight-day interlude with Spangler: a chance meeting in Vienna followed by a fairly uneventful week in Geneva. Apart from disappearing without warning and insisting that he sit with his back to a wall when dining in public, she would always maintain that he behaved like any respectable soldier. She would also insist that he had been an exceptionally skilled lover—which, oddly enough, finally convinced interrogators that she must have been lying in her teeth.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

SHE returned to Paris toward the end of November, leaving us with only scattered impressions: a photograph from a day at Longchamps, an exaggerated interview in the Daily Mail, and a letter to Nicholas Gray inviting him to visit her at the Ritz. There were also one or two newspaper articles linking her romantically to a certain Polish count, but in fact these were relatively solitary days.

She tended to live for herself now, answering neglected correspondence, spending long mornings in bed with popular fiction. On Tuesday afternoons she employed the services of a young masseuse. On Fridays she consulted an astrologer. She also—against the advice of her attorneys—attempted to contact her daughter, writing more than a dozen letters to Rudolph John MacLeod before receiving a curt and discouraging reply.

It might be said that these days were marked by a new maturity, perhaps even a degree of regret. For a time she worked with some enthusiasm on a series of dances thematically based on the Thousand and One Nights. Then, apparently without quite knowing why she abandoned the project, sending a young pianist back to the conservatory where she had found him. With no alternative project to fill her evenings she often took to walking into neighborhoods she scarcely knew—always alone, always avoiding the eyes of men. Occasionally she wandered as far as the kosher butcheries near the rue de Blanc-Manteau or the catacombs below Saint-Jacques. Then again there were nights when she simply walked in circles.