either. I didn't say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them--or did I?'
She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.
He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.
He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: 'This isn't a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway, it'll have to wait now.'
She said: 'I suppose so.'
He said: 'It's no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?'
She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.
She said: 'Yes.'
'Well?'
'I'll tell you.'
He waited.
'I'll tell you,' she said, 'sometime this afternoon.'
'Why not now?'
'Because . . .'
The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.
'Barbara,' he said, 'it may not occur to you that I'm giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you're a technical acces-sory. You know the man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with--literally--murder. And you spend the hours you've been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you'll tell me all about it--at your own convenience.'
'No,' she said.
'I don't want you to think I'm getting tough with you, but I've known police matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that they ought to unburden their hearts in the interests of right and justice. And I'm sure that wouldn't appeal to you at all.'
She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.
'You sound as if you'd said all this before.'
'Maybe I have,' he admitted equably. 'But it doesn't make it any less true. Believe it or not, I've only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so charmingly referred to as 'custody'. Custody is a place out of the earshot of any unofficial person who might be too inquisitive; and it isn't a very pleasant place. In Custody, almost anything can happen, and often does.' He blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. 'You can still make your own choice, but I wish you'd make the right one.'
The moment's flare had died out of her as if it had never happened.
She said, as if she were repeating a lesson that she had worked out for herself until it became an obsession: 'I've got to tell--this person--first. I've got to tell htm that I'm going to tell you. I've got to give him a chance. He-- he's been the kindest person I ever met. I was nothing--I was practically starving--I'd have done anything--when I met him. He . . . he's been very good to me. Always. I want to do what's right, but I couldn't just give him to you-- like that. I couldn't be a Judas. At least they give foxes a start, don't they?'
Simon considered the question gravely, as though he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had. He felt as if she was important, in a way that was important only to him; and there-was always a little time for important things.
'They do,' he said. 'But that's only because they want the fox to run longer and give the valiant sportsmen a better chase. If they were just being noble and humane, they'd simply shoot him as quickly and accurately as possible, thereby saving him all the agonies of fear, flight, hope, and final despair. Of course that wouldn't be quite so sporting as letting him run his heart out against a pack of hounds, but the eventual result would be the same.'
'Sometimes the fox gets away,' she said.
'The fox never gets away in the end,' he said kindly. 'He ma get away a dozen times, but there'll always be a thirteenth time when he makes one little mistake, and then he's just a trophy for somebody to take home. It's almost dull, but that's how it is.'
'They've never caught you.'
'Yet.'
He went to the window and peered out. The sky was already darkening with the limpid clarity of sunset, the hour when it seems to grow thinner and deeper so that you almost begin to see through it into the darkness of outer space.
Without turning, he said: 'I gather that you've already told the fox.'
He heard her stir in the chair behind him.
'Yes.'
He said, without anger, without disappointment, without anything: 'I rather thought you would. I expected that when I left you. Because you really have too much heart for too little sense. I don't blame you for the heart, but now I want you to try and develop some sense.'
'I'm sorry,' she said, and she could have been. 'But I can't do anything about it.'
He turned.
'For Christ's sake,' he said, 'don't you get anything into your head? I told you I was expecting you to tip off the fox. Do you think I'd have expected that, and left you alone to do it, if I hadn't figured that you'd be doing something for me? I wanted you to make the fox break cover. I wanted him rushed into doing something that would give us a view of him. I wanted to force him into making the mistakes that are going to qualify him for his seat on the griddle. He's already made one of them, and any minute now he's going to make another. You've done that much to help him, and now you're doing your damn best to help yourself right into the soup with him. If that isn't devotion, I don't know what is.'
13 He saw the stunned shock petrifying her face, but he didn't wait for it to complete or resolve itself. He didn't have time. And now before she collected herself might be the best chance he would ever have.
He moved quickly across towards her and sat on the next chair, and his voice was as swift and urgent as the movement.
'Listen,' he said. 'This man is a crook. He is a thief--and stealing iridium is no different from stealing jewels or coffee or anything else. And in just the same language, he's a murderer.'
'He never killed anyone----'
'Of course not. Not personally. He didn't have to. A crumb in his class doesn't need to pull triggers himself, or knot ropes around an old fool's neck. He has other men to do that--or other women. But that doesn't make him any less a killer. There was murder done in the first stealing, at Nashville. Two guards by the name of Smith or Jones or Gobbovitch were shot down. Just a couple of names in a newspaper. Probably they had families and relatives and friends here and there, but you don't think about that when you're reading. You click your tongue and say isn't it awful and turn on to your favorite columnist or the funnies. But Mrs Jones has lost a husband who was a hell of a lot more real to her than your boy friend is to you, and the Gobbovitch brats are going to have to quit school after their primary grades and do the best they can on their own--just because your big-hearted glamor boy hired a couple of cannons to go out and do his shooting for him.'
'Please don't,' she said.
'I want to be sure you know just what kind of a man you're shielding. A cold-blooded murderer. And a traitor on top of that. Maybe he hasn't even thought of it that way himself. Maybe he's been too busy thinking about the money that was helping to keep you in that splendid apartment. But it's still just as true as if you both had your eyes open.'
'It isn't true.'
