“Please, Herr Goedsche! I’m not here to sell you material that’s been invented.”
“I have no reason to think it is, but I too have obligations to those who pay me. The authenticity of the document still has to be proved. I have to show it to Herr Stieber at his offices. Leave it with me, if you wish, and return to Paris. You’ll have a reply in a few weeks.”
“But Colonel Dimitri told me it was already agreed—”

“Not at all. Not yet, at least. As I say, leave the document with me.”
“I’ll be frank with you, Herr Goedsche. What you are holding is an original document—original, do you understand? It is valuable for the information it contains, but more than that, for the fact that this information appears in an original report, written in Prague after the meeting described. I cannot allow the document out of my hands, or at least not until I have received the amount I have been promised.”

“You are far too suspicious. Very well then. Order yourself another beer or two, and give me an hour to make a copy of it. You yourself said that the information it contains is worth what it’s worth, and if I wished to deceive you, all I would have to do is retain it in my memory, since, I assure you, I can remember what I have read more or less word for word. But I wish to show the document to Herr Stieber. Therefore allow me to copy it. The original has been brought here by you and it shall leave with you.”
There was no way I could object. I humiliated my palate with several of those disgusting Teutonic sausages and drank a large amount of beer, though I have to say that German beer can sometimes be as good as French beer. I waited while Goedsche carefully copied it all out.

Our parting was cool. Goedsche suggested we should split the bill and, indeed, worked out that I had drunk rather more beer than he did. He promised me news within a few weeks and departed, leaving me seething with rage at the long, pointless journey I had made at my own expense without seeing a single thaler of the payment already agreed with Dimitri.
How stupid, I thought. Dimitri knew Stieber wasn’t going to pay and had simply secured my document at half the price. Lagrange was right: I shouldn’t have trusted a Russian. Or perhaps I had asked too much and should have been satisfied with the half I had received.

I was now convinced I would hear no more from the Germans, and in fact several months passed without any news. Lagrange, to whom I had confided my worries, smiled indulgently. “These are the risks of our trade,” he said. “We’re not dealing with saints.”

I was most irritated by the whole business. My story about the Prague cemetery was too well constructed to be allowed to go to waste on Siberian soil. I could have sold it to the Jesuits. After all, the first real accusations against the Jews, and the first suggestions about their international conspiracy, had come from Barruel, a Jesuit, and my grandfather’s letter must have attracted the attention of other leading figures in the order.

The only possible point of contact with the order was Dalla Piccola. It was Lagrange who had put me in contact with him, and Lagrange to whom I now turned. Lagrange told me he’d let him know I was looking for him. And some time later Dalla Piccola came to my shop. I showed him my wares, as they say in the commercial world, and he seemed interested.
“Of course,” he said, “I’ll have to examine your document and refer it to someone in the Society. These people aren’t going to buy sight unseen. I hope you’ll trust me with it for a few days. It won’t leave my hands.”
I felt I could safely trust a priest.

Dalla Piccola returned to the shop a week later. I invited him up to my office and tried to offer him something to drink, but his manner was far from friendly.
“Simonini,” he said, “you clearly took me for a fool, making the fathers of the Society of Jesus think I was a counterfeiter and ruining a network of good relationships I’d been developing over the years.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Simonini,” he said, “you clearly took me for a fool.”

“Stop playing games with me. You gave me this document, which is supposed to be secret,” and he threw my report about the Prague cemetery on the table. “I was about to ask a considerable sum of money for it when the Jesuits, staring at me as if I were a shyster, quietly informed me that my highly confidential document had already appeared as fictional material in a novel called Biarritz, by a certain John Retcliffe.

Exactly the same, word for word.” And he threw the book down on the table as well. “You obviously understand German, and must have read the book as soon as it came out. You found the story of that nocturnal meeting in the Prague cemetery, you liked it, and you couldn’t resist the temptation of selling fiction for reality. And you had the impudence to presume, as plagiarists do, that no one reads German on this side of the Rhine.”
“Please listen, I think I understand—”

“There’s little to understand. I could have thrown this paper into the bin and told you to go to the devil, but I’m stubborn and vindictive. I warn you, I’ll make sure your friends in the secret service know who you are and how much they can trust your information. And why have I come to tell you in advance? Not out of loyalty—someone like you has no right to such a thing—but if the service decides you are worth a dagger in your back, you’ll know who suggested it. There’s no point killing someone out of revenge unless he knows you’re the person who’s having him killed, don’t you think?”

It was all quite clear. That villain Goedsche (and Lagrange had told me he published feuilletons under the name of Retcliffe) had never taken my document to Stieber. He realized the story fitted into the novel he was about to finish, and it appealed to his anti-Jewish frenzy, so he took a true story (or at least he must have thought it was) and made it into a piece of fiction—his own fiction. Lagrange had warned me that the rogue was already a well-known forger of documents, and the fact that I had so naively fallen victim to a forger enraged me.

But my rage was matched by fear. When Dalla Piccola spoke of being stabbed in the back, he may have been talking metaphorically, but Lagrange had been quite clear. In the secret service, when someone gets in the way, he’s dispensed with. Just imagine an informer who is publicly exposed as untrustworthy because he sells fictitious rubbish as secret intelligence and, what is more, has made the service look foolish in the eyes of the Society of Jesus. Who wants to have him around?

A quick knifing and he’ll end up floating in the Seine.
This is what Abbé Dalla Piccola was promising me, and it was pointless trying to tell him the truth—there was no reason he should believe me. He didn’t know that I had shown my document to Goedsche before the scoundrel had finished writing his book; all he knew was that I had given it to him (Dalla Piccola) after Goedsche’s book had appeared.

There seemed no way out.
Apart from stopping Dalla Piccola from talking.
I acted almost out of instinct. I have a heavy wrought-iron candlestick on my desk. I grabbed hold of it and pushed Dalla Piccola against the wall. He looked at me, eyes wide open, and murmured, “You don’t want to kill me…”
“I’m sorry, yes,” I replied.
And I really was sorry, but it was a question of making a virtue of necessity. I struck the blow. The abbé fell, blood streaming through his protruding teeth. I looked at the body and felt not the slightest guilt. He had brought it upon himself.
Now all I had to do was get rid of that troublesome corpse.

When I bought the shop and upstairs apartment, the proprietor had shown me a trap door in the cellar floor.
“You’ll find there are a few steps,” he had said, “and at first you won’t have the courage to go down them because the stink will make you want to faint. But sometimes you’ll have to. You’re a foreigner so you may not know the whole story. At one time people threw all their filth into the streets, and a law was passed that you had to shout ‘Look out, water!’ before you tossed your business out of the window. But that was too much trouble—you emptied your chamber pot, and it was just too bad for anyone below. Then open gutters were built along the streets, and eventually these were covered over, and the sewers were created. Baron Haussmann has now, at last, built good sewers for Paris, but they serve mostly for draining away the rainwater, and (when the pipes under your lavatory are not blocked up) the excrement flows away by itself, into a pit that is emptied at night and the filth hauled off to large dumps.

There is now discussion about whether, at last, to adopt a system of tout-à-l’égout, where the