Quite where I’d go I have no idea, although I hear North Africa is accommodating where Germans on a wanted list are concerned. There’s a Fabre Line boat that sails from Marseilles to Morocco every other day. That’s just the sort of thing that a concierge is supposed to know, although it’s much more likely that there are rather more of the hotel’s well-heeled guests who’ve fled from Algeria than there are those who want to go there. Since the massacre of pieds-noirs civilians at Philippeville last year, the war against the FLN in Algiers isn’t going so well for the French, and by all accounts the colony is ruled even more harshly than it ever was when the Nazis left it to the tender mercies of the Vichy government.

I’m not sure if the effortlessly handsome, dark-haired man I saw checking into one of the hotel’s best suites the day before I tried to asphyxiate myself was on any kind of wanted list, but he was certainly German and a criminal. Not that he looked like anything less affluent than a banker or a Hollywood film producer, and he spoke such excellent French that it was probably only me who would have known he was German. He was using the name Harold Heinz Hebel and gave an address in Bonn, but his real name was Hennig, Harold Hennig, and during the last few months of the war he’d been a captain in the SD. Now in his early forties, he wore a fine, gray lightweight suit that had been tailored for him and black, handmade shoes that were as shiny as a new centime. You tend to notice things like that when you’re working at a place like the Grand Hôtel. These days I can spot a Savile Row suit from the other side of the lobby. His manners were as smooth as the silk Hermès tie around his neck, which suited him better than the noose it richly deserved. He tipped all of the porters handsomely from a wad of new notes that was as thick as a slice of bread, and after that the boys treated him and his Louis Vuitton luggage with more care than a case of Meissen porcelain. Coincidentally, the last time I’d seen him he’d also had some expensive luggage with him, filled with valuables he and his boss, the East Prussian gauleiter Erich Koch, had probably looted from the city. That had been in January 1945, sometime during the terrible Battle of Königsberg. He’d been boarding the German passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff, which was subsequently torpedoed by a Russian submarine with the loss of more than nine thousand civilian lives. He was one of the few rats that managed to escape from that particular sinking ship, which was a great pity since he’d helped to bring about its destruction.