Anne French sat down on a chair beside the table and stared straight ahead of her. She was wearing a sober-looking sleeveless blue dress. Her hair was gathered at the back of her head in a knot. She looked like an innocent schoolgirl. By now I could smell the cloying scent of her perfume, and I suddenly remembered where the red wallet file I had seen on the table in front of the monk must have come from. It was one of her research files from the cabinet in her office in Villefranche.

“What is your name?” asked the monk.

“Anne French.”

“Would you please tell us why you’re here?”

Imperfect and partial evidence that she was about to betray me swiftly became something much more concrete.

“I’m an author by profession.” She smiled a rueful smile. “Not a very successful one, I’m afraid. It’s a job that enables me to travel to lots of different places and provides excellent cover for a spy. Like Somerset Maugham himself, you might say. Until recently I was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an agent of the HVA—the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung.”

“What’s your connection with East Germany?”

“Originally my mother was German. From Leipzig.”

“Do you speak German?”

“Fluently.”

All of this was news to me. Not once had she ever given me to suspect that she could speak my own language.

“And for how long have you been an agent for the East Germans?”

“I joined what was later to become the HVA on a trip to Leipzig in nineteen fifty; since then I have been involved in a number of clandestine operations here on the Riviera. Most recently I was asked to befriend the French minister of defense, Monsieur Bourgès-Maunoury, who was staying at the Grand Hôtel Cap Ferrat. I was to become his mistress so that I might spy on him for the HVA. This, however, was not successful. He’s a happily married man with two sons. Not long after this I received new orders from Berlin to—”

“Did you receive any special training for your work?” asked the monk.

“Some. I attended a few classes at an espionage school in Tschaikowskistrasse, in Berlin-Pankow. But to be honest it was mostly teaching table manners and social behavior to young East Germans who lacked social niceties. That wasn’t much good to me since I already had those manners. I was trained to use a radio transmitter, however. And a gun.”

“How did you receive your orders from Berlin?”

“Mostly by radio.”

Suddenly Anne’s devotion to her Hallicrafters and the BBC World Service took on a different meaning.

“I’m sorry, my dear. Do go on with your story.”

The “my dear” was nice; it helped me understand that they already believed whatever it was she had to tell them now, and told me to prepare for the worst.