She came in with the flowers in a vase, and the smell of wistaria filled the room. 'Would you like a drink?'
'Can you make martinis?'
'Yes. Smoke if you want to.'
'Thank you.' She knew how to be hospitable, Vandam thought. He supposed she had to., given the way she earned her living. He took out his cigarettes. 'I was afraid you'd be out.'
'Not this evening.' There was an odd note in her voice when she said that, but Vandam could not figure it out. He watched her with the cocktail shaker. He bad intended to conduct the meeting on a businesslike level, but he was not able to, for it was she who was conducting it. He felt like a clandestine lover.
'Do you like this stuff?' He indicated the book.
'I've been reading thrillers lately.'
'Why'
'To find out bow a spy is supposed to behave.'
'I shouldn't think you-' He saw her smiling, and realized he was being teased again. 'I never know whether you're serious.,
'Very rarely.' She handed him a drink and sat down at the opposite end of the couch. She looked at him over the rim of her glass. 'To espionage.'
He sipped his martini. It was perfect. So was she. The mellow sunshine burnished her skin. Her arms and legs looked smooth and soft. He thought she would be the same in bed as she was out of it: relaxed, amusing and game for anything. Damn. She had had this effect on him last time, and be had gone on one of his rare binges and ended up in a wretched brothel. 'What are you thinking about?' she said.
'Espionage.'
She laughed: it seemed that somehow she knew he was lying. 'You must love it,' she said.
Vandam thought: How does she do this to me? She kept him always off balance, with her teasing and her insight, her innocent face and her long brown limbs. He said: 'Catching spies can be very satisfying work, but I don't love it.'
'What happens to them when you've caught them?'
'Then hang, usually.'
'Oh.'
He had managed to throw her off balance for a change. She shivered. He said: 'Losers generally die in wartime.'
'Is that why you don't love it-because they hang?'
'No. I don't love it because I don't always catch them.'
'Are you proud of being so hardhearted?'
'I don't think I'm hardhearted. We're trying to kill more of them than they can kill us.' He thought: How did I come to be defending myself? She got up to pour him another drink. He watched her walk across the room. She moved gracefully-like a cat, he thought; no, like a kitten. He looked at her back as she stooped to pick up the cocktail shaker, and he wondered what she was wearing beneath the yellow dress. He noticed her hands as she poured the drink: they were slender and strong. She did not give herself another martini.
He wondered what background she came from. He said: 'Are your parents alive?'
'No,' she said abruptly.
'I'm sorry,' he said. He knew she was lying.
'Why did you ask me that?'
'Idle curiosity. Please forgive me.'
She leaned over and touched his arm lightly, brushing his skin with her fingertips, a caress as gentle as a breeze. 'You apologize too much.' She looked away from him, as if hesitating; and then, seeming to yield to an impulse, she began to tell him of her background.
She had been the eldest of five children in a desperately poor family. Her parents were cultured and loving people' My father taught me English and my mother taught me to wear clean clothes,' she said-but the father, a tailor, was ultraorthodox and had estranged himself from the rest of the Jewish community in Alexandria after a doctrinal dispute with the ritual slaughterer. When Elene was fifteen years old her father began to go blind.
He could no longer work as a tailor-but he would neither ask nor accept help from the 'back-sliding' Alexandrian Jews. Elene went as a live-in maid to a British home and sent her wages to her family. From that point on, her story was one which had been repeated, Vandam knew, time and again over the last hundred years in the homes of the British ruling class: she fell in love with the son of the house, and he seduced her. She had been fortunate in that they had been found out before she became pregnant. The son was sent away to university and Elene was paid off. She was terrified to return home to tell her father she had been fired for fornication-and with a gentile. She lived on her payoff, continuing to send home the same amount of cash each week, until the money ran out. Then a lecherous businessman whom she had met at the house had set her up in a flat, and she was embarked upon her life's work. Soon afterward her father had been told how she was living, and he made the family sit shiva for her.
'What is shiva?' Vandam asked.
'Mourning.'
Since then she had not heard from them, except for a message from a friend to tell her that her mother had died.
