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.