I looked around the room. There was a big bed, a comfortable seating area, an en suite bathroom, and a sun terrace as long as the Champs-Élysées. On the walls were some French prints depicting anodyne scenes of the French Riviera that always made me think well of gloomier artists like Bosch and Goya, and a large bowl of fresh fruit. On top of a chest of drawers was Hebel’s own portable Grundig tape machine. I switched it on and listened to a minute or two of bebop jazz, which I find is usually more than enough. There was an address book and a diary and a toilet bag filled with an optimistic number of condoms. Not unexpectedly, the closets and the drawers were home to a variety of fine clothes. But on top of a pile of neatly folded shirts from Turnbull & Asser I found an envelope addressed to Bernie Gunther, while under the rubble of socks and underwear was a nine-millimeter Sig, recently cleaned. It was a nice gun with a full clip and I was glad to see it there if only because it made me think Hebel wouldn’t be carrying a weapon when I met him later, but it was the cheeky letter that interested me more and I wondered how I might read it without him knowing that I had. Obviously he’d been expecting me to search his room, which made me think I was probably wasting my time in there. So, after a minute of just staring at the position of the envelope on the top shirt—could there have been a hair I hadn’t noticed that would tell him I’d been in that drawer?—I left it untouched exactly where it was. But on an impulse, and thinking I might use it to reason with Hebel later on, I took the gun, tucked it behind me under the waistband of my pinstripe trousers, and went downstairs again; he wasn’t going to complain to anyone about my borrowing his gun, especially if it was pointed at his head. I rarely ever do anything on impulse, however, and almost immediately it was an impulse I strongly regretted.