“And yet it’s a lot easier, too. Anyone who can slice a loaf can cut a throat. But it’s been a long time since I pulled the trigger on a man. Believe it or not, I came down here to get away from all that.”

“What I’m asking is if perhaps you could arrange for Herr Hebel to have an accident. What I mean to say is that a car might easily knock him down. Or the brakes on his own car might be fixed to fail on some precipitous corner. There are plenty of those around here. I’d be quite prepared to pay you what I’m going to have to pay him, just to be sure that he’s not going to come back and ask for more. I mean it. Fifty thousand dollars if you bump him off. At my age one is inclined to consider anything for a quiet life. Even murder. And frankly that isn’t such a crime these days, is it? Not since the war. Look, all I’m asking is that you think about it.”

“I know what you’re asking, sir. And the answer is no. I’d much prefer to disappear again than have to kill our friend Harold Hebel. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus. Let justice reign even if the world should perish from it. That’s just my version of the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.”

“What’s that—Kant?”

I nodded. “It’s not because I care what happens to Hebel. I wish him as much ill as can befall any man. And there was certainly a time when I’d have cheerfully murdered him without a second thought. It’s that I care about what happens to me rather more than him. I have no wish to add an eleventh volume to that ten-volume apologia pro vita sua I was telling you about before. Besides, you have no way of knowing what elaborate precautions a man like that has already taken with his life. He almost expects to be murdered. I daresay he has already sent a local lawyer an envelope that is to be opened in the event of his sudden death while he’s down here in Cap Ferrat.”

“That’s a disturbing thought.”

“It’s certainly what I would do in his handmade English brogues.”

“Yes, Robin noticed them, too. It’s just too awful to be blackmailed by a chap who goes to the same shoemaker as oneself. At least Louis Legrand looked like what he was: a cheap little hustler. Apparently, this fellow looks like a successful businessman.”

Maugham lit a cigarette and his eyes turned melancholy.