“Do you have many of those, too?”

She smiled sadly but didn’t answer, which left me to draw my own conclusions. Had she been married before? I realized I didn’t know and resolved to ask her everything about herself when she was feeling a little more forthcoming. Perhaps.

“How’s it going? The book, I mean.”

“Well.” She paused and lit another cigarette, inhaling it fiercely. “As well as can be expected, I guess.”

“Sounds more like a crash victim.”

She shrugged. “It’s never easy.”

“You’ve had a better time than me, at any rate. I’ve spent the whole evening at the Villa Mauresque. It’s been difficult, to say the least.”

“What happened? More hijinks?”

“You could say that.”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering for the first time just how much I could really trust her.

“Look, I hate to bring this up again, but you haven’t forgotten our deal,” I said. “That you won’t write about this until after he’s dead. Or unless I say otherwise.”

“Of course I haven’t. A deal is a deal. I’m surprised you need to ask.”

She shrugged. “But don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I shan’t mind in the slightest. Really. I was only making conversation.” She smiled thinly and looked into the distance.

“It’s just that things up at the villa are getting serious now. Maybe even dangerous. Not just for him. Perhaps me, too. And anyone close to me.” I paused to allow that one to sink in. “Meaning you, of course.”

“The plot thickens. Tell me more.”

“I’m serious.”

“I can see you are. But you needn’t worry about me, Walter. I can look after myself.”

“I do worry about you. I’ve just realized that. Maybe more than I should.”

“No one knows about us, do they?”

“No.”

“Well then.” She sounded calm—so calm that I felt there was something she had nailed down very tightly indeed, like the escape hatch on her one-man lifeboat. “There’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

“There is when there are men with guns on the scene. Up at the villa. Muscle types. Ex-army probably. The kind that shoot people and think of questions later. If they think at all.”

“But why are there men with guns? Somerset Maugham doesn’t strike me as the dangerous sort.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I thought I had a past. He’s had several. And all of them secret. You’ll have a hell of a book on your hands when you’ve finished it. What happened tonight would make a very long chapter on its own.”

Then I told her about the two spymasters from London and how, as a result of listening to the Guy Burgess tape, they thought they’d identified yet another spy working for the Soviets at the heart of the British intelligence services.