His complete works are memorialised in the frontispiece of the volume on my desk. It’s the one he inscribed to the Duchess of Kent one January night in 1939, in which the list of previous publications has been slyly and almost imperceptibly defaced with the word jésus.

‘Why, Notovitch!’ the duchess said afterwards, as his identity dawned on her. ‘The scoundrel who claimed Jesus was a Hindu!’ Her inaccurate judgement is not the unkindest verdict we need to consider.

In some volumes of the secret books, He is Himself Judas. Nicolas Notovitch and the tale of his lost gospel are real. It’s my fascination with him that has drawn me into this enchantment. The events he’s described to Vincenzo – foreshortened, condensed, assuming the liberties of fiction – impinged on the history we know roughly in the way he said they did.

The figure who bothers me is Mulhouse. Who is this thrusting young writer, so Gentile in origin and yet, in other ways, so close on the palette to Nicolas? As Notovitch has told the story, he’s pinned the blame on Mulhouse. But when you see them side by side, are they two different men, or one, gazing at his reflection in a pool of mercury?

No one knows who composed the Protocols. The strong evidence is that it was written on Rachkovsky’s orders, with aims much like Notovitch has described. Various candidates for authorship have been proposed. Mulhouse’s name conceals an author whose identity is, in fact, unknown and probably irrecoverable. If we could pull off that mask, who would we find behind it? A converted Russian Jew named Élie de Cyon, perhaps. Rachkovsky himself. Perhaps. But at the time the Protocols were composed, there was another bright young writer of Jewish ancestry in Paris, consumed with a frivolous attitude to words and stories, who believed that a writer could alter reality with his pen. I often wonder if Nicolas himself was the sorcerer’s apprentice who unwittingly unleashed poison and spent the rest of his life remorsefully searching for its antidote.

*

THE HOMELY FUG of a 1930s kitchen. Blacked stove. The crimson arms of Vincenzo’s wife, Peggy, in the washing copper. Everything covered with a layer of damp. The new Pye wireless, paid for with Notovitch’s guineas, warbles a dance tune. Shirt collar off, suspenders dangling, Vincenzo drinks sweet milky tea from a saucer. The little girl beside him with chapped red cheeks and hand-me-down woollen clothes is Francesca herself, future custodian of Notovitch’s memories.

‘You told him he was fibbing? What did you do that for, love? That’s looking a gift horse in the mouth,’ says Peggy.

Having confessed his outburst, Vincenzo has no sensible reply and takes refuge in his native tongue. ‘Vieni qua, tesoro,’ he says to his daughter. ‘Prendi il cestino.’ He closes her hand round the wicker handle of the basket.