There was, in fact, only one event of importance, of real significance, attached to this locale, and that was the arrival, early the previous fall, of Auguste Lupa.

Obviously, that wasn’t his real name, but no one had any idea of what it really was, so it didn’t matter. In Belgrade, he’d been Julius Adler. At Sarajevo, he was Cesar Mycroft. In Milan… but the list is immaterial, though impressive. Always a reference to one of the Caesars in one of the names-perhaps some family connection. We’d followed him when he broke out of jail in Belgrade a year ago June, lost him briefly, found him again in Geneva, trailing him to Valence. When he actually took a job here, I’d been sent.

Lupa was the unparalleled genius among the agents of Europe and he seemed to work for himself, for no government acknowledged him. As far as we knew, he’d been approached before, by us as well as the British and Russians, and to all he’d feigned an absolute innocence of any knowledge of espionage or even of the affairs of politics. His loves, he said, included only food and beer. In spite of his protestations of naivete, he’d been jailed for espionage in three countries and had turned over quantities of information, always by leaving a bag loaded with papers in a locker somewhere. The material was always typed, never on the same machine, never with the same paper, almost never in the same language, and always frighteningly exact. He was the best, and he’d been trying to discover the brains behind Europe ’s assassinations for two years. He obviously wanted us here, or he wouldn’t have let himself be followed, and yet he’d made no overtures of any sort and had forced me to contact him. It was barely possible that he didn’t suspect my associations, but it was probable that even as I sat down across from him, he was cataloguing everything he knew about me, deciding the time was right, and letting me set the tone of our relationship.