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 him 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."
His face had neither pity nor passion, but only a relentless and inescapable sincerity that was out of a different universe from the lazy flippancy which he usually wore with the same ease as he wore his clothes.
"Barbara, there are little guys from farms and filling stations who wouldn't even know how it all worked who're fighting more odds than just the enemy because of what he's doing. They're wading through steamy slime in South Pacific jungles, and chewing sand in Africa, and freezing to death in their tracks in the Ukraine. But that doesn't bother your private Santa Claus, so long as there are still a few good chefs in Manhattan and he ha» plenty of green paper to pay for all the little luxuries that help to alleviate the hardships of the home front. And if you take his side, all that is true about you too."
"I'm not taking his side," she said desperately. "He's been good to me, and I'm just giving him a chance."
"Of course he's been good to you. You wouldn't have done anything for him if he hadn't. No crook or traitor or any other kind of louse can afford to be any other way with anyone he needs for an enthusiastic accomplice."
She rocked back and forth in the chair, with a kind of unconscious automatism, as though she was somehow trying to lull back all the tormenting consciences that his steady remorseless voice awakened.
"I've told you," she repeated dully. "I've told you I'll talk to you later. It's only a little while. And then you and all your policemen and secret service and FBI men can go after him like a pack of wolves."
"There's just a little more to it than that," said the Saint quietly. "Us wolves, as you call us, would like to go after him very respectably, and give him a fair trial with proper publicity just to encourage anyone else who might have similar ideas.
"How nice of you," she said.
He didn't know why he went on trying.
"The evidence you could give," he said rather tiredly, "could be quite important. That's just half the reason why I'm talking to you now, and using up all this good breath. The other halt is because I'm trying to give you a break. This is your chance to get out from under. I'm not trying to sell you now. Its too late for that. But I've still got to try and make you see that the jig is up, no matter what you do; but you can come out in quite a different light if you just make it possible for me to swear quite truthfully that you'd cooperated to the fullest extent with those fine creatures whom John Henry Fernack loves to refer to as the proper authorities'."