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put down her glass, stood up and walked restlessly across the room. When she turned, there was an expression of real anguish on her face. She pushed her hair back with a quick nervous gesture and laughed.
    “The trouble is, I’ve always worked inside. Never in the field. I just don’t know what to do in a situation like this.”
    Chavasse produced his cigarettes, put one in his mouth and tossed the packet across to her. “Why not tell me about it? I’m a great one for pretty girls in distress.”
    She caught the packet automatically and stood there looking at him, a slight frown on her face. She nodded slowly. “All right, Paul, but anything I tell you is confidential. I don’t want any of this getting back to my superiors. It could get me into real trouble.”
    “Agreed,” he said.
    She came back to her chair, took a cigarette from the packet and reached up for a light. “How much do you know about me, Paul?”
    He shrugged. “You work for us in Rome. My own boss told me you were one of the best people we had out here and that’s good enough for me.”
    “I’ve worked for the Bureau for two years now,” she said. “My mother was Albanian, so I speak the language fluently. I suppose that’s what first interested them in me. She was the daughter of a gegh chieftain. My father was a colonel of mountain troops in the Italian occupation army in 1939. He was killed in the Western Desert early in the war.”
    “Is your mother still alive?”
    “She died about five years ago. She was never able to return to Albania once Enver Hoxha and the Communists took over. Two of her brothers were members of the Legaliteri in North Albania, which had royalist aims. They fought with Abas Kupi during the war. In 1945 Hoxha called them in from the hills to a peace conference at which they were immediately executed.”
    There was no pain on her face, no emotion at all, except a calm acceptance of what must have been for a long time quite simply a fact of life.
    “At least that explains why you were willing to work for us,” Chavasse said softly.
    “It was not a hard decision to make. There was only an old uncle, my father’s brother, who raised us, and until last year my brother was still in Paris studying political economy at the Sorbonne.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “When I last saw him, he was facedown in a mud bank of the Buene Marshes in Northern Albania with a machine-gun burst in his back.”
    Out of the silence, Chavasse said carefully, “When was this?”
    “Three months ago. I was on leave at the time.” She held out her glass. “Could I have some more?”
    He poured until she raised her hand. She sipped a little, apparently still perfectly in control of her emotions, and continued.
    “You were in Albania not so long ago yourself. You know how things are.”
    He nodded. “As bad as I’ve seen them.”
    “Did you notice any churches on your travels?”
    “One or two still seemed to be functioning, but I know the official party line is to clamp down on religious observances of any sort.”
    “They’ve almost completely crushed Islam,” she said in a dry, matter-of-fact voice. “The Albanian Orthodox Church has come out of it a little better because they deposed their archbishop and put in a priest loyal to Communism. It’s the Roman Catholic Church that has been most harshly persecuted.”
    “A familiar pattern,” Chavasse said. “The organization Communism fears most.”
    “Out of two archbishops and four bishops arrested, two have been shot and another’s on the books as having died in prison. The Church has almost ceased to exist in Albania, or so the authorities hoped.”
    “I must admit that was the impression I got.”
    “During the past year there’s been an amazing revival in the north,” she said. “Headed by the Franciscan fathers at Scutari. Even non-Catholics have been swarming into the church there. It’s had the central government in Tirana quite worried. They decided to do