The Bormann Testament by Jack Higgins

her handbag and turned with a smile. “As I said, you’ll have to buy my time, otherwise I can’t leave.” She glanced at her watch. “I think thirty marks should cover it.”
    He opened his wallet and counted out the money. “Do you do this often?” he asked.
    She smiled delightfully, her whole face lighting up. “Oh, no, this will be my very first time. Until now, the manager has despaired of me. After this, he will go home to his breakfast a happy man.”
    She moved away between the tables and disappeared through the door at the rear of the club. Chavasse called the waiter, paid his bill, and then he retrieved his hat and coat from the cloakroom.
    He lit a cigarette and stood on the pavement outside the club, and after five minutes she joined him. She was wearing a fur coat, and a silk scarf was tied around her hair peasant fashion.
    “Do we have far to go?” he asked as she slipped a hand into his arm and they moved along the street.
    “I have a car,” she said. “It only takes ten minutes at this time in the morning when the roads are deserted.”
    The car was parked round the corner, a small, battered Volkswagen, and a moment later they were moving away through the quiet, windswept streets. She seemed a competent, sure driver, and Chavasse slouched down into his seat and relaxed.
    He was still puzzled by her. For one thing, she seemed young for the kind of work she was doing, and for another, there was no hint of the ruthlessness so essential to success. She was a warm, intelligent, and lovely girl and he wondered how the hell she had come to be mixed up in this sort of thing.
    They came to a halt in a narrow street outside an old brownstone apartment house. Her flat was on the second floor, and as they went upstairs, she said apologetically, “Not very fancy, I’m afraid, but there’s an atmosphere of genteel decay about the place which pleases me for some strange reason and it’s nice and quiet.”
    She opened the door, and when she switched on the light, he found himself in a large, comfortable room. “I must get out of this dress,” she said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
    Chavasse lit a cigarette and moved casually around the room. On a table by the window, he found several Hebrew textbooks and an exercise book in which she had obviously been making notes. He was leafing through it when she came back into the room.
    She was wearing an embroidered kimono in heavy Japanese silk and her hair was tied back with a ribbon. “I see you’ve found my homework. Mark said you were something of an expert on languages. Do you speak Hebrew?”
    “Not enough for it to count,” he said.
    She went into the kitchen, still talking, and he followed her. “I speak it well enough, but I still need to practice reading,” she said.
    He leaned in the doorway and watched her prepare coffee. “Tell me something,” he said. “How did a girl like you get mixed up in this sort of game?”
    She smiled briefly over her shoulder and then continued with her work. “It’s not much of a story, I’m afraid. I left school at sixteen and studied economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After that, I went into the Israeli Army.”
    “Did you see any fighting?”
    “Enough to make me realize I had to do more,” she said briefly.
    She placed cups and the coffeepot on a tray, and then she moved over to a cupboard and took down a tin of cream. Chavasse watched her as she moved about the small kitchen. As she leaned over the table to pick up the tray, her kimono tightened, outlining the sweet curves of her body, and then she turned, the tray in her hands, and smiled at him.
    No woman had ever smiled at him quite like that. It was the sort of smile that went with the surroundings, drawing him in, enveloping him with a tenderness he had never experienced before.
    As if she sensed what he was thinking, the smile disappeared from her face. He took the tray from her hands and said gently, “The coffee smells good.”
    She