In a rented apartment at a resort in the Swiss Alps, a gravely ill man lifts his gaze and looks his lover in the eyes. At first he seems unsure how to begin. During the war, he tells her, he was loosely involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Then, after the collapse of the Third Reich, he became an agent for the Red Army. But now he is so unwell that he must leave for the Soviet Union, where a specialist medical facility will give him the treatment he needs to survive. And she, a secretary in the office of the West German chancellor, is in deep trouble. What will her employers do when they find out he’s vanished and realise she has been sleeping with the enemy these past two years? No one will believe she didn’t know.
