Einarson tossed the whip up on top of the chest of drawers and crossed to the bed to pick up his tunic. A leather pocketbook slid from an inside pocket to the floor. When he recovered it, a soiled newspaper clipping slipped out and floated across to my feet. I picked it up and gave it back to him—a photograph of a man, the Shah of Persia, according to the French caption under it.
“That pig!” he said—meaning the soldier, not the Shah—as he put on his tunic and buttoned it. “He has a son, also until last week of my troops. This son drinks too much of wine. I reprimand him. He is insolent. What kind of army is it without discipline? Pigs! I knock this pig down, and he produces a knife. Ach! What kind of army is it where a soldier may attack his officers with knives? After I—personally, you comprehend—have finished with this swine, I have him court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years in the prison. This elder pig, his father, does not like that. So he will shoot me tonight. Ach! What kind of army is that?”
Lionel Grantham came away from his window. His young face was haggard. His young eyes were ashamed of the haggardness of his face.
Colonel Einarson made me a stiff bow and a formal speech of thanks for spoiling the soldier’s aim—which I hadn’t—and saving his life. Then the conversation turned to my presence in Muravia. I told them briefly that I had held a captain’s commission in the military intelligence department during the war. That much was the truth, and that was all the truth I gave them. After the war—so my fairy tale went—I had decided to stay in Europe, had taken my discharge there and had drifted around, doing odd jobs at one place and another. I was vague, trying to give them the impression that those odd jobs had not always, or usually, been ladylike. I gave them more definite—though still highly imaginary—details of my recent employment with a French syndicate, admitting that I had come to this corner of the world because I thought it better not to be seen in Western Europe for a year or so.
“Nothing I could be jailed for,” I said, “but things could be made uncomfortable for me. So I roamed over into Mitteleuropa, learned that I might find a connection in Belgrade, got there to find it a false alarm, and came on down here. I may pick up something here. I’ve got a date with the Minister of Police tomorrow. I think I can show him where he can use me.”
“The gross Djudakovich!” Einarson said with frank contempt. “You find him to your liking?”
“No work, no eat,” I said.
“Einarson,” Grantham began quickly, hesitated, said: “Couldn’t we—don’t you think—” and didn’t finish.
The Colonel frowned at him, saw I had noticed the frown, cleared his throat, and addressed me in a gruffly hearty tone:
“Perhaps it would be well if you did not too speedily engage yourself to this fat minister. It may be—there is a possibility that we know of another field where your talents might find employment more to your taste—and profit.”
I let the matter stand there, saying neither yes nor no.
VI
Cards on the Table
We returned to the city in the officer’s car. He and Grantham sat in the rear. I sat beside the soldier who drove. The boy and I got out at our hotel. Einarson said good night and was driven away as if he were in a hurry.
“It’s early,” Grantham said as we went indoors. “Come up to my room.”
I stopped at my own room to wash off the mud I’d gathered around the lumber stack and to change my clothes, and then went up with him. He had three rooms on the top floor, overlooking the plaza.
He set out a bottle of whisky, a syphon, lemons, cigars and cigarettes, and we drank, smoked, and talked. Fifteen or twenty minutes of the talk came from no deeper than the mouth on either side—comments on the night’s excitement, our opinions of Stefania, and so on. Each of us had something to say to the other. Each was weighing the other in before he said it.
I decided to put mine over first.
“Colonel Einarson was spoofing us tonight,” I said.
“Spoofing?” The boy sat up straight, blinking.
“His soldier shot for money, not revenge.”
“You mean—?” His mouth stayed open.
“I mean the little dark man you ate with gave the soldier money.”
“Mahmoud! Why, that’s—You are sure?”
“I saw it.”
He looked at his feet, yanking his gaze away from mine as if he didn’t want me to see that he thought I was lying.
“The soldier may have lied to Einarson,” he said presently, still trying to keep me from knowing he thought me the liar. “I can understand some of the language, as spoken by the educated Muravians, but not the country dialect the soldier talked, so I don’t know what he said, but he may have lied, you know.”
“Not a chance,” I said. “I’d bet my pants he told the truth.”
He continued to stare at his outstretched feet, fighting to hold his face cool and calm. Part of what he was thinking slipped out in words:
“Of course, I owe you a tremendous debt for saving us from—”
“You don’t. You owe that to the soldier’s bad aim. I didn’t jump him till his
