She was the first person I’d met here who had referred to the war at all. She was thin, with dark curly hair and a long neck held erect, a dancer’s posture. She had come in office clothes, a gray suit with padded shoulders over a white blouse. Given the cocktail dresses around the room, she should have receded, drab against all that plumage, but instead the suit, with its pointed lapels, gave her a kind of intensity. She held herself with an alert directness, full of purpose, so that everything about her, not just the suit, seemed sharply tailored.

“No, it gets rusty. Rusty, yes?” she said, waiting for me to nod. “I need practice. That’s why I asked to meet you.”

“Really? I thought Bertie-”

“Yes, I asked him. You’re surprised?”

“Flattered. I guess. Why me? Practically everyone here speaks English.”

She smiled a little. “Maybe now it’s not so flattering.” She glanced toward the room. “The others look-”

I turned to follow her glance-maids passing trays, everyone talking loudly through wisps of smoke, laughing as the light faded behind them through the window.

“Frivolous,” I said.

She looked surprised, then bit her lip, smiling. “Yes, but I was going to say old. And you were standing by the fire.”

“So I got elected. What if I’m frivolous too?”

“Signor Howard said you were in the war. So it’s different. You were in Germany? In the fighting?”

“At first. Then a kind of cop. Hunting Nazis, for war crimes.”

She stared now, taking this in, interested. “Then you know. How it was. Not like them,” she said, waving her hand a little to take in the room.

“Maybe they’re the lucky ones. Like Venice.”

“Like Venice?”

“You get off the train here, it’s hard to believe anything ever happened.”

“Well, from Germany. But even here, you know, wartime-it’s not so easy.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, imagining the lines, the shortages. “I just meant, no bombs. You were here?”