XI
A Romantic Interlude
The servant Marya, in a woolly gray bathrobe, opened the door and sent me up to the black, white, and gray room, where the Minister’s secretary, still in the pink gown, was propped up among cushions on the divan. A tray full of cigarette butts showed how she’d been spending her time.
“Well?” she asked as I moved her over to make a seat for myself beside her.
“Thursday morning at four we revolute.”
“I knew you’d do it,” she said, patting my hand.
“It did itself, though there were a few minutes when I could have stopped it by simply knocking our Colonel behind the ear and letting the rest of them tear him apart. That reminds me—somebody’s hired man tried to follow me here tonight.”
“What sort of a man?”
“Short, beefy, forty—just about my size and age.”
“But he didn’t succeed?”
“I slapped him flat and left him sleeping there.”
She laughed and pulled my ear.
“That was Gopchek, our very best detective. He’ll be furious.”
“Well, don’t sic any more of ’em on me. You can tell him I’m sorry I had to hit him twice, but it was his own fault. He shouldn’t have jerked his head back the first time.”
She laughed, then frowned, finally settling on an expression that held half of each.
“Tell me about the meeting,” she commanded.
I told her what I knew. When I had finished she pulled my head down to kiss me, and held it down to whisper:
“You do trust me, don’t you, dear?”
“Yeah. Just as much as you trust me.”
“That’s far from being enough,” she said, pushing my face away with a hand flat against my nose.
Marya came in with a tray of food. We pulled the table around in front of the divan and ate.
“I don’t quite understand you,” Romaine said over a stalk of asparagus. “If you don’t trust me why do you tell me things? As far as I know, you haven’t done much lying to me. Why should you tell me the truth if you’ve no faith in me?”
“My susceptible nature,” I explained. “I’m so overwhelmed by your beauty and charm and one thing and another that I can’t refuse you anything.”
“Don’t!” she exclaimed, suddenly serious. “I’ve capitalized that beauty and charm in half the countries in the world. Don’t say things like that to me ever again. It hurts, because—because—” She pushed her plate back, started to reach for a cigarette, stopped her hand in midair, and looked at me with disagreeable eyes. “I love you,” she said.
I took the hand that was hanging in the air, kissed the palm of it, and asked:
“You love me more than anyone else in the world?”
She pulled the hand away from me.
“Are you a bookkeeper?” she demanded. “Must you have amounts, weights, and measurements for everything?”
I grinned at her and tried to go on with my meal. I had been hungry. Now, though I had eaten only a couple of mouthfuls, my appetite was gone. I tried to pretend I still had the hunger I had lost, but it was no go. The food didn’t want to be swallowed. I gave up the attempt and lighted a cigarette.
She used her left hand to fan away the smoke between us.
“You don’t trust me,” she insisted. “Then why do you put yourself in my hands?”
“Why not? You can make a flop of the revolution. That’s nothing to me. It’s not my party, and its failure needn’t mean that I can’t get the boy out of the country with his money.”
“You don’t mind a prison, an execution, perhaps?”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. But what I was thinking was: if, after twenty years of scheming and slickering in big-time cities, I let myself get trapped in this hill village, I’d deserve all I got.
“And you’ve no feeling at all for me?”
“Don’t be foolish.” I waved my cigarette at my uneaten meal. “I haven’t had anything to eat since eight o’clock last night.”
She laughed, put a hand over my mouth, and said:
“I understand. You love me, but not enough to let me interfere with your plans. I don’t like that. It’s effeminate.”
“You going to turn out for the revolution?” I asked.
“I’m not going to run through the streets throwing bombs, if that’s what you mean.”
“And Djudakovich?”
“He sleeps till eleven in the morning. If you start at four, you’ll have seven hours before he’s up.” She said all this perfectly seriously. “Get it done in that time. Or he might decide to stop it.”
“Yeah? I had a notion he wanted it.”
“Vasilije wants nothing but peace and comfort.”
“But listen, sweetheart,” I protested. “If your Vasilije is any good at all, he can’t help finding out about it ahead of time. Einarson and his army are the revolution. These bankers and deputies and the like that he’s carrying with him to give the party a responsible look are a lot of movie conspirators. Look at ’em! They hold their meetings at midnight, and all that kind of foolishness. Now that they’re actually signed up to something, they won’t be able to keep from spreading the news. All day they’ll be going around trembling and whispering together in odd corners.”
“They’ve been doing that for months,” she said. “Nobody pays any attention to them. And I promise you Vasilijie shan’t hear anything new. I won’t tell him, and he never listens to anything anyone else says.”
“All right.” I wasn’t sure it was all right, but it might be. “Now this row is going through—if the army follows Einarson?”
“Yes, and the army will follow him.”
“Then, after it’s over, our real job begins?”
She rubbed a flake of cigarette ash into the table cloth with a small pointed finger, and said nothing.
“Einarson’s got to be dumped,” I continued.
“We’ll have to kill him,” she said thoughtfully. “You’d better do it yourself.”