Maugham stared into space for a moment and then adjusted his monocle. “Over the years since, I’ve done small jobs here and there for SIS,” he said, continuing. “And I’ve welcomed friends and acquaintances at the Villa Mauresque. In nineteen thirty-seven, not long after I first bought this place, I had a number of friends to stay, including two boys just down from Cambridge University, who came down here in Victor Rothschild’s Bugatti: Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Subsequently they went to work for MI5: MI5 is the UK’s domestic and counterintelligence agency. Blunt is rather less well known, at least to anyone outside of the world of fine art. But Guy Burgess is now infamous as a result of a press conference in Moscow just a few months ago when he and another man, Donald Maclean, were revealed to have been long-term spies for the Soviet Union—where they’re both now living. You may have read about it in the newspapers. Anyway, Guy is, and always was, notoriously homosexual. For that matter so is Anthony. And there’s a photograph of us and several others lying naked beside my swimming pool. This is the photograph that your friend Harold Hebel is in possession of and which he is threatening to send to the press in England. I can’t tell you the embarrassment it would cause me if it was revealed in the British newspapers that Guy and I were intimate. It’s not just a question of our homosexuality, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Herr Gunther; it’s also a matter of my loyalty to my country. I’m not a Soviet spy. Never have been. But given my service in Petrograd and my friendship with Guy, who knows the trouble the newspapers might cause for me? Certainly I had contact with people who worked for the Petrograd VRK and the Cheka—the forerunner of the KGB—when I was there. So you can see how vulnerable I am. Especially in America. Senator McCarthy hasn’t just been going after Communists but homosexuals, too. The so-called Lavender Scare, for example. So. Visas to the United States might be withdrawn. Lucrative film contracts cancelled. MGM are making a film of one of my books as we speak. And United Artists plan to film a short story of mine next year. I may be the most successful writer in the world but I am not immune to public opinion. To say nothing of the embarrassment it might cause for my poor brother, Frederic, in England, who just happens to be the former Lord Chancellor. We’ve never been close, he and I, but I would like to spare him that, if I can. He’s very old. Even older than I.”

“Where did Hebel get this photograph?”