She had a way of speaking without moving the muscles in her face, as if any contortion of her features would mar them. It annoyed Red, and made him anxious to see such a contortion. Still, it made him happy that to the waitress they must seem like a couple. He held the girl’s chair at their table, and she lowered her body into it, straight-backed. She wore a black wool dress under her red coat. He asked what brought her to this part of town, and she looked at the blackened window as if to see what part she was in.

“I was shopping,” she said.

“You don’t have any shopping bags.”

“I couldn’t find anything I wanted.” She seemed to mean it in a grander sense. “Someone told me about a shop in Wimbledon. But you need to know someone to get anything. Men think stockings are a luxury, but you’ve never worn a skirt in the cold.”

“Never assume,” Red said, and a flicker of a smile crossed her face, then vanished. She frowned at the menu, and Red was as grateful for the frown as for the smile—two quick ripples on the surface.

“Are you sad about something?” he asked. “Besides stockings.”

“Do I look sad?”

“Are you in love?”

“No.” Her voice was nice but careful: a voice to keep people at bay. A waitress came, and the girl asked for soup. Red ordered the same, too distracted for the menu, and asked the girl’s name, which was Irene.

“You don’t look like an Irene,” he said.

“What do I look like?”

“Sandra, or Sonia, or Zelda. Irene is a different girl.”

“People mistake me for Spanish,” she said.

“No, not Spanish. Russian. A Russian beauty.”

“I don’t look Russian.” Her skin’s milky surface had a hint of pink beneath it, and he could guess how the piled-up hair would fall around her shoulders if she let it down.

“It’s no insult,” Red said. He took pictures from his wallet of sweet Vera back home. “That’s a Russian girl,” he said.

Vera was as American as they came, but she was beautiful, and might pass for Russian. They’d been useful to each other, and she was useful even now, doing time as a Russian girl.

“She’s good-looking,” Irene said. She picked up another picture. “This is lovely.”

Red studied it. His sister Jackie, at nine or ten, wore his father’s tweed cap sideways, tilting her head in the direction of the brim. She smiled, closemouthed and knowing, straight at the camera. “My sister,” Red said, and his voice caught on the words.

The soup came, and he tucked the photographs away. “How many men have fallen in love with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”