When he’d finished talking I sat on the edge of the bed and thought things over for a minute or two before I spoke again.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Certainly you are. I suggested to Herr Maugham that you would be the man best placed to help him. You’re here because he needs you. And if it comes to that, so do I. You’re a perfect cutout, Bernie. Reliable. Intelligent. With much to lose. Useful to me, and to Herr Maugham.”

I shook my head. “What I mean is, I should be dead.”

“All of us who survived the war were fortunate,” said Hebel, and poured me another glass. “You and me perhaps especially so.”

“Were we? I wonder. Anyway, I’m not supposed to be alive right now. A little while ago I tried to kill myself. I sat in the garage with the car engine running and just waited for it to happen. I’m still not exactly sure why I kept on breathing air and not Fina gasoline but, for a while, I understood what death really is. Of course we all know we’re going to die. But until it happens, none of us really understands what it means to be dead. Me, I understood it, perfectly. I even saw the beauty of it. You see, Hebel, you don’t die; death isn’t something that just happens to you, no. It’s like you become death. You’re a part of it. All those billions who’ve lived and then died before you. You’ve joined them. And when you’ve felt that, it never goes away, even if you think you’re still alive. Just remember that when all this is over. Just remember that it was you who chose to involve a dead man like me in your little scheme.”

After that I told him we—by which I meant me and my client—would be in touch as soon as we’d listened to the tape. Then I collected the envelope with the photographs and the neg, the Pan Am flight bag with the money, pushed the muzzle of the gun under my waistband, and, without another word, left the room.

Downstairs in the hotel lobby, I returned to the front desk.

“When you speak to your friend in the PJ see what he can find out about a man called Louis Legrand.”

“I already did,” said Henri, writing down the name. “Speak to my friend, I mean. She left her scarf.”

“Who did?”

“The woman suspected of Spinola’s murder. I called my friend in the PJ and asked him, like you asked. Whoever it was shot him left a green chiffon scarf beside his dead body.”

“Is that all? Now, with her underwear they might have proved something. Sexual behavior. Hair color. Who she likes for the Tour de France. Anything.”