She told the Germans everything they asked, everything she knew. It wasn’t enough to satisfy them. Nothing, she thought, would have been enough to satisfy them. At one point, she moaned, “At least let me telephone the university and let them know I won’t be in today.” Whatever happened to her, she-and her administrators-reckoned classes sacred.

Her interrogator didn’t. He slapped her again, and painfully squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her nightgown. “I hope they fire you, whore,” he said with a laugh. “Then you can turn tricks for a living, the way you did with that kike of a Goldfarb. Who put him on to you, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He never told me.” That got her another slap.

After some endless time-long enough for Monique to piss herself, for they made her go through that humiliation rather than pausing long enough for her to use a toilet-they took her back to the cell, without food, without water, without anything worth having. She didn’t care. She was past caring. She lay down and fell asleep, or perhaps passed out.

And then, of course, someone shook her awake. Blearily, blurrily, she looked up (one eye was swollen nearly shut) and saw Dieter Kuhn standing over her. “Bonsoir, Monique,” the SS man said with a pleasant smile. “Would you care to take supper with me tomorrow night?”

She knew what she wanted to tell him. She almost did. But now she also knew what could happen to anyone who made the Germans unhappy. She’d thought she knew before, but now she understood the difference between academic knowledge and personal experience. Though she hated herself, what passed her bruised, dry lips was one croaked word: “Yes.”

Group Captain Burton Paston, the commander of the RAF radar station on the outskirts of Belfast, looked from the papers on his desk to Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb, who sat across the desk from him. “You truly wish to resign your commission in the Royal Air Force?” Paston sounded incredulous, as if Goldfarb were coming to him for permission to commit some particularly sordid crime.