“Someone had betrayed him as a British agent, you see, and he’s presently imprisoned in the fortress at Colditz.”

“In Colditz!”

“Yes.”

“My goodness! Poor Thorpe. How very awful for you. My deepest sympathies.”

“Yes,” I said. “Quite.”

“Why, you can’t possibly think—”

“No, of course not. Perish the thought.”

We regarded each other for a moment or two, eyes of Wallis blue to eyes of plain brown, American to American, both of us all tangled up in the affairs of a country not our own.

I went on softly. “It would have been awful, wouldn’t it, if anyone had ever laid the finger of suspicion on Harold Christie. If Scotland Yard, say, had taken over the investigation, instead of those two incompetent specimens of the Miami Police Department the duke put in charge the very first morning. My God, heaven knows what they might have found. They might have found what my husband found. What my husband had already reported to his superiors back in London.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I reached up to my earlobes and unscrewed the first earring. “What would you say, Duchess, if I told you that I had made copies of all those documents I passed along to you? All those interesting financial statements.”

She stared, transfixed, at my fingers. The earring came free, and I went to the other ear.

“What, for example, would those documents be worth to you and your husband? I’m just speaking hypothetically, of course. It’s not as if I mean to blackmail you.”

“Mrs. Thorpe. Lulu. Really.” She forced her gaze away from my left earlobe and made a brittle laugh. “This has gone far enough. What documents do you mean? I’m afraid my memory fails me.”

I held out the earrings in my palm. She looked down, but she didn’t touch them. At her temples, a few beads of perspiration had begun to form. I thought I smelled something peculiar in the air, something tangy.

“How we trusted you,” she whispered.

“I trusted you, and now my husband’s imprisoned in Colditz.”

“I—we had nothing to do with that. Nothing at all. How could we? We are loyal servants of the Crown, Mrs. Thorpe. Loyal servants.”

“No doubt. In which case, I’m sure you’ll be more than happy to give me what I need to save him.”

“What do you need?”

I took her hand, stuck the earrings in the middle of her palm, and closed her cold fingers around them. Her eyes met mine, round and vulnerable. I thought of my dear, empty bungalow, my belongings packed in a few wooden boxes, on the slow boat back to the United States. I spoke softly, so as not to frighten her further.

“What I need, at your earliest convenience, is a place on one of those Liberators taking off from Windsor Field.”

Part VI

Ursula

January 1944

(Germany)