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The commissaire who received me looked like a detective in a crime film: impassive face, icy voice, penetrating stare. He asked to see identification, and I showed him my press card. “Citizen of?” Stateless, I said. “I see.” He pondered in silence while examining a file on the desk in front of him. I would have given a lot to know what was in that file. “So,” he finally said, glancing at me sidelong as if to see if I would fall into the trap, “tell me about Vargas.” I told the policeman I didn’t know any Vargas. “Are you sure?” His voice seemed threatening. “You maintain you don’t know Vargas?” My brain whirled. If I gave the wrong answer, I was obviously in deep trouble, but I didn’t know any Vargas, except for the president of Brazil, which is what I told him. Did the commissaire think I was toying with him and with the authority he represented? “Okay,” he said. “Forget Vargas. Tell me about Jacques Rubinstein.” Rubinstein? I knew a tailor named Rubinstein on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, but his name was Boris, not Jacques. I also knew a medical student by that name whose father had just died, but that was Albert. The commissaire was obviously displeased. “All right,” he said. “Let’s forget Jacques Rubinstein too. What do you know about Kurt Zeligman? And don’t tell me you don’t know him either.” Unfortunately, I was forced to admit that I knew Zeligman no better than I knew Vargas or Rubinstein. Surely this commissaire was anti-Semitic. What did he want from me? I was so tense I thought I would eventually confess to every unsolved crime in Paris. Without taking his eyes off me, he opened another file and slid a photograph across the table to me. “I suppose you don’t know him either,” he said sarcastically. I gave a start. “But that’s …” The commissaire jumped. “That’s who?” The man with the shoes, I said. “Shoes?” he exclaimed, clearly excited. “Did you say shoes?” I told him the whole story, and he picked up the phone and issued instructions that were later explained to me. The man in question had been traveling from continent to continent on false passports. He was wanted by Interpol. He had just stolen some diamonds which, thanks to me, would now be returned to their rightful owner. When I asked the commissaire how they had connected me to all this, he explained with a smile, “Your card. We found it in his pocket. If you hadn’t mentioned that business about the shoes, we would have had to let him go.” The commissaire invited me to attend the trial. The thief did not act guilty. He claimed to speak only Yiddish, and after considerable effort the court managed to come up with a sworn interpreter. The defendant was convicted and sentenced to several years in prison. I’m not sure why but I avoided looking at him as I left the courtroom.

Years later he sent me an angry letter. “If you had agreed to wear my shoes, we would both be millionaires today.”

I finally met Mendès-France at a reception at the Weizmann Institute in New York, but by then he was out of power. So I never did get that scoop, though not for lack of trying. But there is always a reason for everything in this life, even if it takes time to see the links. It was thanks to Mendès-France that I made the acquaintance of François Mauriac, whom I had initially contacted in the forlorn hope that he might help me get an interview with Mendès-France, whose intellectual master he was. Yet it was my encounter with the great writer and Nobel laureate that turned out to be one of the most important in my life.

I first saw Mauriac in 1955 during an Independence Day celebration at the Israeli embassy. As always, he was surrounded by a throng of people hanging on his every word, and I wasn’t sure how to approach him. Plagued by my usual cursed timidity, I stood on his right, on his left, and finally directly in front of him, not daring to open my mouth. Constantly underfoot, I was unable to utter a single word. At last he said goodbye to his official