Approached along a narrow, winding road bordered by pine trees, the Villa Mauresque stood on the very summit of the Cap and behind a large wrought-iron gate with white plaster posts on one of which was carved the name of the house and what I took to be a sign against the evil eye, in red. It didn’t slow me down and I drove through the gates in Robin Maugham’s dust as if I had the nicest baby blue eyes in France. The place couldn’t have looked more private if King Leopold II of Belgium had been living there with his pet pygmy and his three mistresses and his private zoo, not to mention the many millions he’d managed to steal from the Congo. By all accounts he had quite a collection of human hands, too, lopped off the arms of natives to encourage the others to go into the jungle and collect rubber, and I think the king could have taught the Nazis a few things about cruelty and running an empire. Unlike Hitler, he’d died in bed at the age of seventy-four. Once, he had owned the whole of Cap Ferrat, and the Villa Mauresque had been built for one of his confidants, a man named Charmeton, whose Algerian background had left him with a taste for Moorish architecture. I knew this because it’s the sort of detail a concierge at the Grand Hôtel is supposed to know.