“How did you get here?” I said.
She put the hand which held the gun in the pocket of her coat. “I drove here to find you. I got your message from the taxi driver.”
“How did you know where to come?”
“The police raided Miss Green’s house. She told them where you were.”
I was so grateful for her explanation that I almost wept. For a moment of terrible stillness, during which the mountains had seemed as unreal as cardboard and the moon a silver coin pasted to a low hollow ceiling, I had imagined that she was another enemy. The sky expanded again into infinite pure space and the mountains resumed their solidity.
Then the whole fabric collapsed, with a grinding like bone being crushed in my head. “Why didn’t the police come?” I said.
While she was still hesitating on the point of speech, I struck at her. She stepped back out of my way and brought the gun out of its pocket. “Raise your hands. Walk ahead of me slowly into the house. Where’s Hector Land?”
“He ran away,” I said. “He killed Anderson and ran away.”
“Land killed Anderson?”
“I told him Anderson murdered Bessie. But you killed her, didn’t you?”
A sudden Gestalt which must have been preparing in my unconscious for a long time, held down by the will to believe in Mary Thompson, illuminated the past month in bitter colors. “That was why you had a headache and had to go back to the hotel. So that you could catch Bessie Land when she came home from the bar, and quiet her for good.”
Her face groped for an attitude. It is terrible to see a human face empty of meaning. Her face was still beautiful, but I saw for the first time its essential lack of humanity. It was like a silver face cast on a screen, sustained in beauty by the desire of the onlooker who wishes away its unreality.
“Turn around and walk into the house as I told you. I want to talk to you, Sam.”
I had thought that I knew her intimately, but for the first time I saw into her mind. She could pull the trigger easily because she could not imagine the consequences of killing, because to her human bodies were organic matter to be disposed of when it became inconvenient. She could betray her country because she had no country to betray. She could kill me easily because lovers were easy to find. I did as I was told.
The front door of the ranchhouse opened directly on the living room, a wide low room, heavily furnished with thick black furniture. There was a cavernous stone fireplace at one end, and before it a refectory table flanked by chairs with carved backs. The room was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp on one end of the table. Facing the fireplace, at the other end of the room, was a door which opened on darkness.
“Sit down there,” she said, pointing the revolver towards a chair at the end of the table.
I sat down and she sat facing me, with her back to the dead fireplace. I began to plan to overturn the table on her.
“Keep your hands on the table,” she said. “If you don’t I’ll have to shoot you.”
That repeated threat was beginning to lose its terror for me, but I put my hands on the table. My left hand was swollen and blue and almost rigid. My right hand was crusted with blood where the rope had torn the flesh.
“You’re having a bad time of it, aren’t you?” she said.
I felt free from fear and extraordinarily light, but I was beginning to lose my interest in things. I saw everything clearly, without conscious emotion, with the wan objectivity of a cynicism which is reached at the bottom of despair.
I told her the truth: “This is the worst time now.”
“Look, Sam. I gave Sue Sholto her chance but she wouldn’t take it. She’d been suspicious of me for a long time, ever since she caught me marking the records one day in the record-library. When she heard about the leak of information that night at Honolulu House, she finally caught on. But I gave her a chance. I didn’t want to kill her. I went to her in the women’s room where she was lying down, I even offered her money to keep quiet. She said she wouldn’t keep quiet. So I had to kill her. Hector Land almost caught me at it when he came up to the powder room to talk to me.”
“You must be strong.”
“Yes, I’m strong for a woman. But I don’t want to kill you, Sam. I don’t have to kill you if you’ll keep quiet.”
It struck me suddenly that Mary was a strange name for her to have. Mary was an innocent and feminine name, the name of virgins and mothers. Then I thought of Bloody Mary.
I said: “Did you ever hear of Bloody Mary?”
Her eyes were very pale, almost white. My mind was working at top speed in a vacuum, quick to find allusions which would do me no good. I thought of Scott Fitzgerald’s description of a woman who had “white crook’s eyes.”
“You don’t seem to realize, Sam,” she said in a flat tone. “I have to kill you now if you don’t agree to keep quiet. This is your only chance.”
I told myself that I would play for time. I was too tired to face death just then. “What’s your offer?”
“Life. That’s the main thing.”
“Go on.”
“You know that we can get along. Now that Jensen’s dead we can marry.” She saw no irony in her distaste for bigamy. “It’s best that way, I’ve found.”
“Was he your husband? No wonder you tried to steal Hatcher’s letter.”
“The last few years he was. It cuts down on the passport problem and a lot of other things.”
“I told him he was a pimp,” I said. “I didn’t know how right I was. He let you bed with me so I wouldn’t catch him sneaking off the train at Gallup. Didn’t he?”
“He couldn’t have stopped me,” she said with a perverse pride. “I wanted you. I still do, if you don’t make me kill you.”
“What would we do together? Make love?”
“You needn’t be cynical about it. I know how you feel about me. I could have you now.”
“One of the dangers of getting out of touch with normal human values is this.” I forgot that I was playing for time. “You make ghastly mistakes. Like murder. Like that one.”
Her lips parted, her teeth showed, her eyelids crinkled, but the movements of her face did not convey the intent of a smile. All I could see there was the terrible blank naïveté of evil. “Maybe not right this minute. You look pretty tired.”
I said: “What would my other duties be?”
She said: “The Baroness is dead. She committed suicide before the police got to her. Jensen is dead. Toulouse is in jail, but she doesn’t count. She doesn’t know the business, she doesn’t even know where this ranch is. She’s nothing but a graduate of a Paris bordello, a woman we paid for the use of her house. We could make a lot of money, Sam.”
“How?”
“I’ve got the brains and the contacts. You’re in the Navy, and you used to be a newspaper man. If you could get yourself transferred to Public Relations. There’s a thing in New Mexico that Jensen has been working on. You may have heard of the Manhattan Project. We need an inside man, someone in the services, and we haven’t been able to get one. You told me you wanted to make money, Sam. We could make more money than you’ve ever dreamed of.”
“How much?”
“A hundred thousand dollars in six months.” Her eyes glittered like glass, and I saw what her central emotion was. She loved money so passionately that she couldn’t imagine how cold her numbers left me.
My emotions were coming to life again, forming a new configuration directed against her. I said in cold fury:
“I’d rather go into business with a hyena and make love to a corpse.”
Her mouth fell open as if my sentiments surprised and offended her. “Don’t you understand, Sam? I have to kill you if you won’t cooperate. I have to kill you now. And I don’t want to. Why do you think I took the job of watching you? Why do you think I didn’t kill you in Detroit? I could have killed you there. I could have killed you in Honolulu. After his own attempt failed, Jensen wanted me to kill you on the train but I didn’t want to. Even when you started figuring out our code I didn’t want to. I thought perhaps we could get along.”