Rachkovsky responds to his requests for information with excessive helpfulness. He sends round so many crateloads of documents that Skobelev is inundated. The general has to stack them in his hotel room, and still they keep coming, piling up into walls, within which Skobelev paces, like a rat in a maze of paperwork.

The general has developed various anxious tics, repeatedly smearing balm on his cracked lips as he sorts and re-sorts documents he hopes will turn out to be incriminating. He adds up the figures over and over again, and each time comes to a different total.

Skobelev senses he’s losing his mind. There’s mental illness on both sides of his family. Sometimes he hears voices speaking about him through the walls of the hotel bathroom. Sometimes he thinks he’s being followed. Sometimes, of course, he is.

Nicolas offers to help. He’s got a good sense where the bodies are buried: start with the mansion in Saint-Cloud – prima facie evidence of embezzlement; request a meeting with the Bourse; get the Russian ambassador onside. It’s age-old journalistic best practice: follow the money. But he makes the mistake of telling Skobelev about the document, about Mulhouse’s forged paper describing the machinations of global Jewry.

Skobelev is as enamoured as anyone of easy answers. ‘The Jews! Rachkovsky’s working for the Jews!’ He won’t let the matter lie.

‘The department store never felt like my vocation. Nonetheless …’

Mr Rozenfeld’s new venture, Étoile du Nord, is a success from the start. It manages to retain the customers loyal to its predecessor boutiques and then add new ones. Cosmetics concessions in the ground-floor pharmacy are staffed by pretty women in lab coats who dole out free samples of anti-ageing serums. Pyramidal displays of macaroons under glass domes stand on the counter of its coffee shop. The whole place smells enticingly of perfume and new fabric.

Nicolas is put in charge of the menswear department. Mr Rozenfeld regards writing as a waste of time, and is watching to see if Nicolas possesses sufficient acumen to succeed him one day at the head of the business. He needn’t worry. Nicolas has been working in shops since he was eight years old. He knows how to sell anything, whether it’s dried fish, lamp oil, fine wine or shirt collars. Every encounter is a transaction, he remembers his father saying. Everyone who walks through that door wants something. The real skill of business is selling intangible goods: pride, gratitude, health, self-esteem – learn to deal in these and you’ll never go hungry. He’s a capable accountant, has a good head for figures, can be steely with suppliers, and the soul of charm with customers. He has some good ideas about interior design too, and a spy’s eye for window dressing.