We had rolls and cheese and some rather good wine. Afterward Monet poured cognac for each of us. We raised our glasses to toast the eternal memory of Napoleon Bonaparte and pray for a speedy restoration of his line to power in France. I made my brandy last. He had three more before his nephew arrived.

“A grand occupation for such as me,” he said, waving a hand to include the shop. “Eh? A wine shop for a drunkard, a dusty shop for a man with impossible dreams. You will not tell them that I drink?”

“No.”

“You are a good man. I drink up all the profits. I talk when I drink. Tell me nothing.”

“All right.”

The nephew was my age, dark, sullen, handsome, and uncommunicative. He drove a Citroën. The car was silent, the ride soft, the countryside beautiful under a hot sun. The nephew did not ask me who I was or why I wanted to go to Italy. He did not seem to care.

“The old man is crazy,” he said once.

I did not answer.

“He thinks he’s Napoleon.”

“Oh?”

“Crazy,” he said. And that was all he said for the rest of the ride. He stopped the car finally at the side of the road-a narrow road winding through hilly country. From here, he said, I would have to walk cross-country. He pointed the way through the fields and asked me if I had something with me to cut the wires. I did not. He grumbled, rummaged through the trunk of the Citroën, and found a pair of wire-cutting pliers.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be able to return these,” he said. “They’re not cheap, you know. Every time the old bastard calls me, it costs me money. He must think I’m made of it.”

I offered to pay him for the pliers. He said they cost twenty-five francs, a little over five dollars. This was obviously untrue, but I paid the money, and he left without a word.

I walked about a mile through the countryside to the six-foot barbed-wire fence dividing France and Italy. I looked in both directions and saw no sign of life. I cut out a large section of the fence and crawled through. It seemed overly simple. I got to my feet in Italy, flipped the pliers back into France, and looked around vacantly, waiting for whistles to blow or sirens to sound or bullets to whine overhead. Nothing happened. I turned, finally, and walked on into Italy.

A farmer in a light pickup truck drove me as far as Torino, where I caught a train to Milan. With Mussolini gone, the Italian trains no longer ran on time. Mine was an hour late leaving Torino and lost another hour on the way to Milan. I left it in Milan and thought about buying a car. I had no contacts in Italy that lay anywhere near my route to Udine near the Yugoslav border. A secondhand Fiat would cut the distance and might be safer. I could drive without stopping and no one would notice my face, as might happen on a train.

But did one need a driver’s license to purchase a car? I was not sure. I found a dealer’s lot on the northern outskirts of Milan and looked at several cars. The cheapest was 175,000 lire, a little less than three hundred dollars. I could afford to pay for it in Swiss francs. I presented my Swiss passport as identification, and the dealer took it into the shop with him. I patted the little Fiat on the fender. With luck, I thought, the car could be a tremendous asset. I would have the registration and the passport and I might be able to drive it right across the Yugoslav border without any difficulty. That would cut down the risk considerably, leaving me only one tricky border to cross-the one into Turkey. And by that time I would be able to think of something. I was sure of it.

But the dealer seemed to be taking an unduly long time with my passport. I walked over to the office and saw him crouched over his desk, talking on the telephone.

There was something furtive in his manner. I moved closer and caught a few words. “Swiss passport…Henri Boehm…the one you are looking for, the fugitive-”

I ran like a thief.

In downtown Milan I picked up a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and learned what all the fuss was about. The passports were a dead issue, worthless now, a liability. Someone had connected me to the tall man who had been shot down in Dublin. The paper didn’t spell it out but explained that the fugitive Evan Michael Tanner had stolen important government documents in Ireland and was thought to be making his escape through continental Europe. They knew I had left Dublin under the false American passport and knew I had changed money under the British one at Madrid.

In an alleyway I destroyed the other two passports. I broke the cases open, tore the printed matter into scraps, and tossed the scraps to the winds. I was about to do the same to the remaining passport, the one for Mustafa Ibn Ali, but it seemed to me that there might be a use for it sometime, perhaps in Yugoslavia. One never knew.

The newspaper article described the black attaché case I was carrying, so I had to rid myself of that, too. I didn’t know where to throw it away, so I sold it in a secondhand store for a handful of lire. The money was scarcely enough to matter, but I was getting to the point where money mattered, even small amounts. The damned car dealer still had my Swiss francs, and I was starting to run out of cash.

I buttoned under my shirt the packet of papers I had taken from the attaché case and walked to the railroad station. Would they be watching it? I had no doubt that they would. They had had a call from the car dealer, and I had confirmed his suspicions by bolting like a bat out of hell. I stopped on the way and bought a change of clothes, a hat, heavy shoes. At least I no longer matched the description the dealer would have given them.

I caught a train for Venice without incident. I bought my ticket on the train, locked myself in my compartment and read the rest of the Herald Tribune. The sky was dark by the time we reached Venice. I was glad of this. I felt safer in the dark, less conspicuous.

Another bus took me northeast to Udine. I felt as though I had been traveling forever, moving endlessly and to no great purpose. Plane, bus, train, hay wagon, train, bus, car, truck, train, bus-I wondered why I hadn’t flown from Dublin to Venice in the first place and cut out all the island-hopping in between. The answer, of course, was that I had wanted to get out of Dublin as quickly as possible. But I seemed to be doing everything wrong. I had put them on my trail all over again by stupidly flashing the Swiss passport in Milan. They probably realized I was on my way to Turkey. If nothing else, they obviously knew I was in Italy and would be able to guess that I was heading east.

And all I could do in the meanwhile was run from burrow to burrow like a frightened rabbit. I had the names of some Croat exiles in Udine, but I couldn’t be sure they would help me. And if they did, what then? They could sneak me into Yugoslavia, and I could shuttle around from one band of Balkan conspirators to another. This time, though, I would be doing it all behind the Iron Curtain, where every third conspirator was an agent for the secret police.

Marvelous.

I wished, suddenly, that I could sleep. Just close my eyes and let everything go blank for a while. I had been running too long, I realized. I needed some time to let loose. That was one of the troubles with being able to live without sleep. Because one never got sleepy, one now and then failed to realize that one was tired. I had been going without any real rest since…when? Since the few hours of relative rest in the attic hideaway at the Dolans’ house in Croom. And how long ago was that?

It was hard to calculate. It seemed as though the whole span of time was only one endless day, but that wasn’t right. I’d been at the Dolans’ one night, spent the next night skulking around Dublin waiting for the plane, spent the night after that waiting for Vicente to cut my throat in the hay cart, and now it was night again.