A bowler-hatted Frenchman entered the premises the same time as Ganz and has been perusing the racks of wines. He carries a bottle to Nicolas’s desk and asks to buy it. Nicolas has to explain that they’re not that kind of wine merchants. They sell en primeur and by the case, but principally for export. That bottle belongs to the display. Nicolas feels unaccountably angry. This job only works for him if he can believe it has nothing to do with the world he came from. With one remark, it’s as though he’s found himself back in his father’s shop. Ganz smoothes out the misunderstanding, but it’s an inauspicious beginning.

The Frenchman, Monsieur Chabrot, is monastically bald: the removal of his hat reveals a tonsured pate and a fringe of dark hair. His upper lip is covered with a bristly, animated moustache. He’s here to request a favour. Suvorin’s name comes up again. Nicolas feels as though he’s being prodded with it.

‘Could I have a word in private?’ Chabrot says.

Ganz sits at the desk, flicking through the brochures, as though born to the job, while Chabrot and Nicolas go to the rear of the store. Chabrot shakes out a handful of mugshots from an envelope in his breast pocket. ‘I wondered if any of these look familiar?’

Nicolas scrutinises the pictures: the technology is still relatively novel, and there’s something unsettling about confronting the gaze of the photographic subject. The sight of a familiar oval face in the spread of images causes his heart to shut oyster-tight. ‘No, I’ve never seen them,’ he says, almost too abruptly.

‘If I might draw your attention to this one, Monsieur Notovitch.’

To Nicolas’s relief, it’s not the one of Bessie, but another, of a man. ‘Why, yes.’ Clean-shaven, with his hairstyle bizarrely reversed, it’s still unmistakably Verzilov. ‘Yes, I know the man. But I think that must be a wig. And not a very good one.’

‘I hate to presume again on your time but our mutual friend Suvorin assured me you would be keen to render assistance. We won’t need to trouble you again.’

There is a cab waiting outside. By now it is close to dusk. A bank of violet cloud has massed beneath the setting sun. They reach their destination – the Imperial Embassy on Rue de Grenelle – and are ushered into the basement through a side entrance. There’s a lime-green metal door with a spyhole. ‘Please take a look.’

Within, it’s brightly lit. The angle of the spyhole takes in a seated man whose face appears in Nicolas’s mind as instantaneously and indelibly as a photographic image: the head lolls back; blood dribbles and clots in its beard; one purple eye is swollen and half-closed. He’s motionless, dying, possibly already dead. Nicolas manages a nod and turns away. Yes, Verzilov.

Walking shakily out of the building, Nicolas justifies himself with boilerplate phrases: My duty as a citizen-subject. Enemies of order. Terrorist-fanatics.