“Truth, superior sir,” Felless said. “In fact, if you will recall, I was the first to warn the Deutsche that we were on the point of instituting such a policy.” She wanted credit for it, too.

“I do recall, Senior Researcher. I was there, after all.” Veffani sounded amused.

She didn’t mind if he laughed, so long as he remembered it, But, having reminded him, she thought it wiser to change the subject: “Slomikk tells me my hatchlings have shed their egg teeth.” As he might have sired them, that might be of some small interest to him, as it was to her.

“Yes, it would be about time for that,” he agreed, with the polite attention she’d expected. “Now, back to ways of dealing with the miserable Deutsche…”

Monique Dutourd angrily shook her head. “No, I don’t want to go to the cinema with you,” she told Dieter Kuhn. “I don’t want to go to supper with you. I don’t want to go anywhere with you. If you care anything at all about making me happy, go away and leave me alone.”

Kuhn was slight and dark. He looked as much like a native of Marseille as Monique did. She’d assumed he was a Frenchman when he enrolled in her Roman history class at the university. He wrote French like a native. But he was no Frenchman. He was a Sturmbannfuthrer in the SS, in Marseille to bring ginger smuggling through the port under the control of the Reich.

He folded his arms across his chest in the lecture hall, which was, to Monique’s dismay, empty but for the two of them. “I do not ask this because of my duty,” he said. His spoken French was good, but doubly alien in her ears: he used Parisian French, not the local dialect, and had a guttural accent that showed he was from the wrong side of the Rhine. “I ask for myself.”

“How big a fool are you? How big a fool do you think I am?” Monique demanded hotly. “You’ve arrested my brother before. Now that Pierre’s gone back on the arrangement he had with you, you want to kill him. The only reason you ever cared about me was to get at him.”