The Key to Rebecca - Ken Follett [49]
She came in with the flowers in a vase, and the smell of wisteria 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 had 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 how 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 he 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?”
“They 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 hard-hearted?”
“I don’t think I’m hard-hearted. 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