As he filled her glass, she studied the ring, her face quite calm, and then slipped it into her handbag. When she looked up, there was a slight crease between her eyes, the sure sign of stress.
“What’s happened to Mark?” she said simply.
Chavasse smiled. “Drink your champagne and don’t worry. We’re working together now. You’re supposed to take me back to your flat with you. He’ll meet us there as soon as he can.”
She sipped a little of her champagne and frowned down at the glass, as if considering what he had said. After a few moments, she looked up. “I think you’d better tell me everything, Herr Chavasse.”
He gave her a cigarette and took one himself. They leaned across the table like two lovers, heads almost touching, and he brought her up to date in a few brief sentences.
When he was finished, she sighed. “So Muller is dead?”
“What about his sister?” Chavasse said. “Is she here at the moment?”
Anna Hartmann shook her head. “I’m afraid not. When she didn’t report for work this evening, I phoned her apartment. Her landlady told me that she packed a bag and left this morning without leaving any forwarding address.”
Chavasse frowned. “That isn’t so good. We don’t have a clear lead to follow now.”
“There’s always the sleeping-car attendant you told me about,” she said. “Through him you can at least find out something about the opposition.”
“You’ve got a point there.” He checked his watch and saw that it was almost three-thirty. “I think we’d better make a move.”
She smiled. “I’m afraid that isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’m supposed to work until four-thirty. If you want me to leave before that time, you’ll have to pay the management a fee.”
Chavasse smiled. “You’re kidding.”
“No, it’s quite true,” she said. “But first, we must have a dance together to make it look good.”
She pulled him to his feet and onto the tiny dance floor before he could protest. She slipped one arm around his neck and danced with her head on his shoulder, her firm young body pressed so closely against him that he could feel the line from breast to thigh.
Most of the other couples on the crowded dance floor seemed to be dancing in the same way, and Chavasse whispered in her ear, “How long are we supposed to keep this up?”
She smiled up at him and there was a hint of laughter in her eyes. “I think five minutes should be enough. Have you any objection?”
He shook his head. “No, but if it’s all right with you, I’d like to relax and enjoy it.”
The smile slipped from her face and she regarded him gravely for a moment, and then she turned her head against his shoulder once more and he tightened his arm about her wasist.
Chavasse forgot about the job, forgot about everything except the fact that he was dancing with a warm, exciting girl whose perfume filled his nostrils and caused a pleasant ache of longing in the pit of his stomach. It had been a long time since he had last slept with a woman, but that wasn’t the whole explanation. That Anna Hartmann attracted him physically was undeniable, but there was something more there, something deeper.
They had been dancing for at least fifteen minutes when she at last pulled gently away from him. “We’d better go now,” she said gravely, and led the way back to the table.
She picked up her handbag and turned with a smile. “As I said, you’ll have to buy my time, otherwise I can’t leave.” She glanced at her watch. “I think thirty marks should cover it.”
He opened his wallet and counted out the money. “Do you do this often?” he asked.
She smiled delightfully, her whole face lighting up. “Oh, no, this will be my very first time. Until now, the manager has despaired of me. After this, he will go home to his breakfast a happy man.”
She moved away between the tables and disappeared through the door at the rear of the club. Chavasse called the waiter, paid his bill, and then he retrieved his hat and coat from the cloakroom.
He lit a cigarette and stood on the pavement outside the club, and after five minutes she joined him. She was wearing a fur coat, and a silk scarf was tied around her hair peasant fashion.
“Do we have far to go?” he asked as she slipped a hand into his arm and they moved along the street.
“I have a car,” she said. “It only takes ten minutes at this time in the morning when the roads are deserted.”
The car was parked round the corner, a small, battered Volkswagen, and a moment later they were moving away through the quiet, windswept streets. She seemed a competent, sure driver, and Chavasse slouched down into his seat and relaxed.
He was still puzzled by her. For one thing, she seemed young for the kind of work she was doing, and for another, there was no hint of the ruthlessness so essential to success. She was a warm, intelligent, and lovely girl and he wondered how the hell she had come to be mixed up in this sort of thing.
They came to a halt in a narrow street outside an old brownstone apartment house. Her flat was on the second floor, and as they went upstairs, she said apologetically, “Not very fancy, I’m afraid, but there’s an atmosphere of genteel decay about the place which pleases me for some strange reason and it’s nice and quiet.”
She opened the door, and when she switched on the light, he found himself in a large, comfortable room. “I must get out of this dress,” she said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
Chavasse lit a cigarette and moved casually around the room. On a table by the window, he found several Hebrew textbooks and an exercise book in which she had obviously been making notes. He was leafing through it when she came back into the room.
She was wearing an embroidered kimono in heavy Japanese silk and her hair was tied back with a ribbon. “I see you’ve found my homework. Mark said you were something of an expert on languages. Do you speak Hebrew?”
“Not enough for it to count,” he said.
She went into the kitchen, still talking, and he followed her. “I speak it well enough, but I still need to practice reading,” she said.
He leaned in the doorway and watched her prepare coffee. “Tell me something,” he said. “How did a girl like you get mixed up in this sort of game?”
She smiled briefly over her shoulder and then continued with her work. “It’s not much of a story, I’m afraid. I left school at sixteen and studied economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After that, I went into the Israeli Army.”
“Did you see any fighting?”
“Enough to make me realize I had to do more,” she said briefly.
She placed cups and the coffeepot on a tray, and then she moved over to a cupboard and took down a tin of cream. Chavasse watched her as she moved about the small kitchen. As she leaned over the table to pick up the tray, her kimono tightened, outlining the sweet curves of her body, and then she turned, the tray in her hands, and smiled at him.
No woman had ever smiled at him quite like that. It was the sort of smile that went with the surroundings, drawing him in, enveloping him with a tenderness he had never experienced before.
As if she sensed what he was thinking, the smile disappeared from her face. He took the tray from her hands and said gently, “The coffee smells good.”
She led the way into the other room, and they sat down by the empty fireplace and he put the tray on a small table. As he poured, he said, “Nothing you’ve told me fully explains why a girl like you should be doing this sort of work.”
She held her cup in both hands and sipped coffee slowly. “My parents were German refugees who went to Palestine during the Nazi persecution, but I’m a
“It sounds more like a king-size guilt complex to me.”
She shook her head. “No, that isn’t true. I volunteered for this work because I felt I had to do something for my people.”
“Surely there are other things you could have done back home,” he said. “There’s a new country to be built.”
“But for me it isn’t enough. This way, I feel I can do something for all men – not just for my own race.”
