THERE is a little alarm that goes off in us, a small inner voice that senses danger. On Thursday, June 30, 1983, on a busy commercial street in Paris, Bernard Boursicot - an attache in the French Foreign Service who has always dreamed of being a man of distinction - is hearing that alarm in his head.
It is odd. Usually he returns to Paris after being posted abroad the way a hungry man sits down at the table. Old friends, good food, all-night bars, the possibility of a brief and amusing love affair - he approaches it all with cheerful greed. But this morning, walking down Avenue Bosquet on the Left Bank, all he feels is tension. He tries fighting it, telling himself he should feel good. After waiting for years, he has been able to get his 16-year-old son, Shi Du Du - or as he prefers to call him, Bertrand - out of China.
Tomorrow, he will take Bertrand to his family in Brittany and show him off. He is proud of Bertrand. You can see at a glance that the boy is of mixed blood, but it is clear to Boursicot that he has his own wide face, brown eyes, adventuresome spirit. He is less proud of Bertrand's mother, the Beijing opera singer Shi Pei Pu.
'She has gotten old,' he thought when he first saw her in Paris soon after her arrival. She was in her usual guise, dressed as a man. She is his old love; he will provide for her, but it is finished between them. Already, over the years, he has given too much - television sets, tape recorders, Grundig radios, Rolex watches - because Madame must have only the best. He is the only spy in history, Boursicot thinks, who has had to pay to spy.
Suddenly, on Avenue Bosquet, two men tackle him. One of them grabs him from behind; the other from the side. They are the agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, which seeks threats to the national security of France. 'I am a diplomat,' Boursicot wants to say when the agents throw him in their car and tear off across Paris. 'You can't touch me.' But he is shaking and can't speak.
At their headquarters, the security agents seem to know a lot about him. 'You were at the Embassy of France in Beijing between '69 and '72 and in the embassy in Mongolia from '77 to '79, and there are 500 documents missing. Who is this Shi Pei Pu who is living at your place?' The game is over.
'I did nothing for money,' Boursicot says.