We speak in that low, husky tone of voice just above a whisper, and the only light comes from the bulb in the parlor, around the corner. Margaret stares not at me, but at the curtain covering the kitchen window.

“It seems to me,” she says, “that if B—’s decided it’s too dangerous to let you live with this information—whatever it is—he likely feels precisely the same way about Benedict.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mean to frighten you.”

“In other words, he’s not going to do a damned thing to help Thorpe. The Germans are doing him a favor. And if Thorpe manages to escape . . .”

From some floor below us comes the sound of a telephone ringing, the thump of footsteps. A cross, muffled voice. Margaret’s eyes are like discs, meeting mine. The voice drones on, a kettle whines.

“You have to understand,” she says. “It’s war. It’s about the end, not the means. They have to be ruthless, it’s their job.”

“And all this ruthlessness for the sake of that—that damned pair—”

“Shh. Don’t say it.”

I stare at my feet, which are clad in thick woolen stockings loaned to me by Margaret. I have the feeling she’s knitted them herself; they have that chunky, uneven texture with which I’m deeply familiar, from packing hundreds of boxes of same in the old Red Cross headquarters on George Street in Nassau. Ugly, serviceable socks distributed all over England by now, possibly all over Europe, possibly even Colditz.

“So what did you say to B—?” I whisper.

“What else could I say? I didn’t want to raise his suspicions. I said that I would of course keep my eye on the situation, here in German section, and that I stood ready to do whatever I could to help my brother. And he said . . .”

“Yes?”

I look up to find her watching me, arms still folded. At my look of inquiry, she levers away from the cupboard and stalks out of the kitchen to the parlor, where she takes the cigarettes and the matches from the mantel. She sticks a cigarette in her mouth and lights a match, and while she’s doing this, holding the cigarette in place with her lips, she says, “He said that if anyone should approach me about Benedict, anyone at all, I should come to him first. That he’d been engaged in some rather sensitive work in Nassau, and there were desperate people who might do anything to obtain that information.” She tosses the spent match atop the unlit coals in the fireplace and takes a long drag on the cigarette while she stares at me. “Who might attempt to win my trust in order to discover Benedict’s secrets.”

“He said that?”