The phrase the others had her worried. She was trying to listen for any noises beyond the door, trying to keep her eyes on me and at the same time see what else there was around. How could she know it was a lie? Perhaps she did; perhaps she suspected it; but she could not be sure. There was an intelligent look in those mad eyes none the less.

She said: “What brought you here? Let me guess. My father sent you to bring me home.”

“Yes, he did. Will you come?”

“No.”

“Will you let me persuade you?”

“No.”

“Will you at least talk to me, listen to me?”

“Not that either.”

I reached out quite slowly for the gun. “Give it to me. It might go off and you wouldn’t like that.” She thrust it further forward, angrily, her finger on the trigger. I shot out a hand and gripped it hard by the chamber, preventing the chamber from turning and therefore the hammer from going back; I wanted to see if she’d apply—or try to—the necessary pressure, but she didn’t. She just struggled, and took it away from her without any trouble and slipped it into my pocket. She stepped back and glared at me as though she were going to spring at me with her fingernails, ripping at my eyes, and then she opened her mouth wide to scream, but I had a band over her mouth before any sound could come; it was like closing my hand over a dry skull.

I said urgently: “I’m not here to hurt you, can’t you understand that?”

She struggled for a moment, but there was no muscle there, only skin and bone and no blood to sustain the energy. In a moment she stopped struggling and went limp, and I set her down on that overly soft and feminine sofa; her body made almost no impression on the down cushions. All the fight had gone from her. She stared at me and said:

“A year ago I could have torn your eyes out, big as you are.”

I said: “Your father wants you back, Sally. I’m here to take you to him.”

“Let him go to hell and rot, the way I’ve rotted.”

“So that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“He’s not to blame, you know. He loves you. You’re the only thing he has.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. He’s got everything in the world except me.”

I said: “And he’s sure that his love for you is returned. He’s absolutely sure that you love him as much as he loves you.”

There was a terrible contempt in her voice: “Love him? Maybe I did, when I was a child—he tried hard enough to make me. But when I grew older, it began to fade...You don’t have to ask me why. And why should he need me? The kind of money narcotics brings in—he had everything else there was to have.”

“He gave up the drug business a long time ago.” An unlikely sort of thought came to me, and I said, not liking it: “Or did he?”

“Yes, he gave it up. He gave it up at a time when I’d learned all about it when the damage was done. It was too late then. Mr....Cain, or whatever your name is.”

“Cain is right. What do you mean, too late?”

My gun and hers tucked away out of sight. I sat beside her, keeping an eye on the other door, the one with the green drapes over it. It was an unnecessary question, somehow; I already knew what she meant.

She said scornfully: “It was easy for him to pull out. He’d collected all the millions together, and it wasn’t necessary to make more.”

“And since then, he’s spent them trying to make up for what he did in the past.”

The scorn in her voice was terrible, “He spent some of them. You mean he’s a poor man living in the gutter?”

“No, I know that.”

“He kept back plenty to live on, the way he’d always lived, only without the danger, without the excitement any more. And I’d learned, for years, that this was one way to make a dollar. And when he told me how evil it was, did he really expect me to believe that my own father, whom I’d once worshipped, was an evil man? No, of course I didn’t! It’s only now I realize just how right he was; but then it was too late.”

I said: “That’s a little bit incoherent, Sally. But you know that, don’t you?” Before she could answer, angrily, I said: “Is this your personal room?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“And who’s likely to come here?”

She was quite at ease now, leaning back and talking as though we’d been friends for a long time, as though it was time she should say politely: Would you care for a drink?

Her eyes glistened, and she said: “Suppose you tell me instead just who ‘the others’ are?” I knew it had been worrying her.

I said carelessly, watching her: “The whole place is lousy with them. Cops, mostly.”

She frowned. “This is Red China, have you forgotten that?”

I lied some more. “No. We’re just hoping that the Reds won’t find out until it’s too late. Once we’re gone, they can scream their heads off for all they’re worth, but they won’t. They are not going to admit that they’ve been sheltering Ming and his friends, not to anybody. And where is Ming now, by the way?”

She said promptly: “In Turkey.”

I knew this was not true either. O jeito again, only Sally, in spite of that high intelligence—or perhaps because of it—didn’t know how to play the game with any degree of persuasion. I heard the slightest sound at the door I’d come through, so slight that had I not been waiting for it and straining my ears I would have missed it. I made a mental note to tell Mai later on that she ought to learn how to open a door in absolute silence, the next best thing isn’t good enough; if you’re going to be heard at all, even by someone waiting for the sound, you may as well make a noise like a thunderstorm and have done with it.

But Sally heard nothing; her watery brown eyes were still on me, and she was wondering just how much of what I was saying was true, wondering if, now that I was seated and couldn’t move so fast, she should try for a good loud scream again.

I said: “Tell me when you first started truly hating your father?”

“When my brother died, that’s when.”

“Your father’s fault, you think?”

“Well, of course! The whole idea of heroin for the kids, my father practically invented it! If he’d been an insurance salesman, you think his kids would have grown up in a world where drugs were as common as apple pie? They were the source of our spending money, something we knew was bad but not so bad that it had to be rejected. Now I know better, and that’s why I hate him. Now I know that if we’d been brought up in a normal way, without all that money—and without the disgrace of it being discreetly tucked out of sight and not talked about unnecessarily, and even then in a deprecating sort of way—then it all might have been very different. But it’s too late now.”

“You’re still on them?” I didn’t believe she was, and she shook her head.

She said: “No. I’m not. But look at me, Mr. Cain. Just take one look and sicken yourself. I’ll be like this till the day I die, and that won’t be far off either. So until then...till then, I’m going to taste the power that he had, and I’m going to enjoy it just as much.” Her voice had taken a fierce kind of desperation.

I said gently: “Not enjoy it.”

She said savagely, insisting, persuading herself more easily than she could persuade me: “Enjoy it! There’s nothing in the world I can’t have now, except my health. That’s gone. So I’ll have everything else instead! Most of all, I’ll have the power to make this happen to others. I’m not going to be the only skeletal wreck in this world.”

“You think that’s a good philosophy?”

“No. But it’s the only one I have. Here, no one can see me, ever again, except those who are afraid to stare, to laugh, to snicker. And here, I pull strings and people dance, they dance or die, and I’m a kind of skeletal god, a god for everyone except myself. No, it’s not a good philosophy, but you can’t tempt me to look for anything else.”