“They’re in Moscow. Four years ago, when they disappeared, they went to the Soviet Union.”

“What makes you say that?”

I don’t answer. He nods and stands to look out the window at the sunrise, which has reached a tremendous zenith. The colors illuminate his face. I wait for him to think things over, weigh the risks versus the possible return, calculate how much he has to give in order to get something worthwhile back from me.

Without turning from the window, he speaks.

“On the fifteenth of November 1948, as you know, Sasha Digby failed to turn up at his office at the American embassy in London. There was no answer at his home telephone, nor did anyone answer the door at the family home in Kensington. Diplomatic staff established that neither he nor any member of his family had been seen since the previous Friday. The FBI was then alerted, but discovered no leads at all, not the slightest confirmed trace of them.”

“I remember it well. A couple of nice gentlemen turned up at my apartment building at Thanksgiving and gave me the third degree. So tell me something I don’t already know.”

“I can’t do that,” he says. “Not unless you tell me what you do know.”

“Ah. Clever.”

He turns his head to look over his shoulder. “Miss Macallister?”

I reach for the pack of cigarettes on the sofa table. “I first met Sasha Digby in Rome, right before the Italians entered the war. As I’m sure you’re aware, he was working at the US embassy as a junior diplomat, alongside my brother, Harry. He had just rescued my sister from a traffic accident outside the Borghese gardens, that’s how I met him.”

“He was previously unknown to you or your sister?”

“We might have been introduced at some party or another, but I didn’t take any notice of him until I saw him at the hospital afterward. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a harrowing day, and that night Harry and I took him out for dinner and drinks to thank him for what he’d done. Afterward, he came home with me and spent the night.”

Sumner Fox doesn’t show the slightest reaction to this information, not so much as an eyebrow raised in faint disapproval. “Go on.”

“We were both a little off our heads, after what happened, and needed to let off steam. Never occurred to me that Iris had any kind of crush on him, nor he on her. He came by the next night, and the next, and that’s when he told me he was spying for the Soviets.”

“He told you that?”