As Nicolas closes the door behind him, Anya puts down her brush and looks curiously at his weepy, flushed face. But Special Agent Notovitch is well schooled in the first and fundamental lesson of working with a false identity: you never, under any circumstances, change your story. ‘It’s just … I love you so much!’ he lies.

‘Mr Rozenfeld offered to make me the manager of a department store.’

Nicolas’s in-laws help the newly-weds buy a starter flat around the corner from their apartment. They’re used to being very involved in their daughter’s life. It dawns on Nicolas only gradually that Anya’s desire for marriage was driven by an urge to escape from her parents, as much as by an attraction to her new husband. She talks longingly of travelling far away with Nicolas – to Egypt, or India. But she falls quickly pregnant, and her mother posts an immediate ban on hot baths, soft cheese and heavy lifting. Foreign travel is out of the question.

Mr Rozenfeld takes Nicolas out boating on a lake in the Bois de Vincennes and turns the conversation, not very subtly, onto the subject of his son-in-law’s career. In Mr Rozenfeld’s view, Nicolas’s work in the wine business showed entrepreneurial flair. His literary pursuits, while commendable and a valuable ornament to his other accomplishments, are not a secure way to make a living. Mr Rozenfeld explains that he’s selling his shops and he intends to consolidate his business in a single department store. It will be called Étoile du Nord, and he invites Nicolas to manage the haberdashery section.

Sculling through the reedy water, Nicolas thinks smugly of how much he has earned from Rachkovsky in the last year. The work is exciting. There’s a trip to London in the offing, to liaise with Scotland Yard. The basement offices have had a long-distance telephone line installed, which can call as far away as Brussels. Rachkovsky’s talking about paying for key agents like Nicolas to have their own telephones at home. ‘For now,’ he says, ‘I’d rather keep going as I am.’

‘Very well,’ Mr Rozenfeld says. ‘For now.’

Nicolas, his reputation burnished by the adventure in Switzerland, and having been injured in the line of duty, enjoys increasing status at work. He runs other agents. He gives counterterrorism courses to embassy staff. There are only half a dozen full-time employees in the Third Section, so the work is diverse and interesting. He knows that two people of the six are used to intercept the post. Two run assets and compile intelligence for Saint Petersburg. And Mulhouse is occupied with a hare-brained project that Rachkovsky refers to proudly as ‘The Department of Secret Books’, which involves meetings with various disreputable-looking right-wing writer types and not much else that Nicolas can make out.

‘I was surprised to bump into General Skobelev.’

The hero of the Turkish wars is oddly diminished by the basement offices. Sitting in the reception area, with a laminated badge, a scuffed leather briefcase and badly ironed trousers, he’s hardly recognisable as the man who ceremonially accepted the swords of the defeated Ottoman generals.