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didn’t belong to any seam, this thread; it had been drawn out of the lining material itself. So he tugged at it with a quick, firm snap. The thread ran along the lining for a good three inches, and the material parted in a neat line.
    There you’ve done it, he told himself angrily. Then he looked in amazement at the two gaping lips of cloth. He hadn’t pulled at a thread; he had opened a secret kind of zipper. His watch was still firmly trapped by the end of the thread. With the coat over his arm, he went into the bathroom, found his small folding scissors in his shaving kit, and cut his watch free. After all that trouble, he felt he was owed a look at the secret pocket. Inside, lightly held in place with Scotch tape, was an envelope. It was unaddressed, opaque. There was something inside, not heavy, not bulky; smooth and firm.
    Fenner walked back into the bedroom, threw the coat on the nearer bed, and ripped the envelope open. He was angry and he was troubled. The incredible secrecy of the pocket was much too professional a job for a normal person to have planned. The man in the brown suit had been either a very clever criminal or a canny lunatic.
    Fenner’s first reaction was embarrassment. He never liked handling someone else’s money. All that secrecy for a few dollar bills? He counted them—there were ten—thinking of the complications ahead of him. When he called Orly, he would have some explaining to do. Or would the currency-control people be interested? Ten bills of—he looked again, thinking his eyes had added zeros and a comma. My God, he said to himself. “My God,” he said aloud. In his hands he held ten bills, each worth ten thousand dollars.

4
    Fenner recovered from the shock. A hundred thousand dollars carried in a raincoat? Of all the crazy places—why not in a money belt hidden around a man’s waist? Beyond that first reaction, he did not waste any time trying to fathom the implications of this puzzle for himself. There would be plenty, he knew. He wanted someone else to start on that, someone, too, who would take the ten monstrous bills safely into keeping. Even the thought of a hundred thousand dollars lying on his dressing-table was more than disconcerting.
    He put them out of sight in the envelope, replaced it in the coat (damn him for an idiot: why hadn’t he kept his eyes glued on his luggage like some first-time-abroad tourist, and saved himself this trouble?), hung the coat in the wardrobe once more. He had better start telephoning Orly.
    But would they believe him? They would begin by thinking that he was some kind of crank. Perhaps he had better take thecoat all the way back to Orly. The idea depressed him. What a damned waste of time, what a— If only he knew someone at the Embassy—no, the Consulate: that was the right place to inquire about this, so that it could be handled for him by the proper people in the proper way. Besides, it would be easier on his temper to be able to explain in English. This was going to take a lot of explaining, he thought gloomily. Surely Mike Ballard knew someone at the Consulate, who’d know someone, who’d know... The roundabout approach could be the quickest one.
    So his first call was to the Chronicle ’s Paris office, which was a general headquarters for the collation and distribution of news reports gathered mostly from European sources. (It had been established just before the war, when suspicions were aroused that one of the big European news-gathering agencies had sold out to the Nazis. Today, with the wire service doing a reliable job, it might have been disbanded, but the Chronicle maintained it as possible insurance. Walt Penneyman had very firm ideas about news: he wanted not only accuracy, but accuracy double-checked, with no opinion-moulding additions or subtractions in the presentation of facts.)
    But Mike Ballard was not in his office. His secretary was French, and well trained. She was precise on all the information Fenner did not