From not talking at all, she was now beginning to talk too much. I saw her steal a glance at her wristwatch and look up quickly, clearly hoping I hadn't caught her at it.
"If I were to try to talk you into sparing my life," she said, "If I were to try, where should I start?"
"I told you where. I'd like to know who's offered you fifty grand for what." I glanced at my own watch as I turned toward the stove. The time was a few minutes after ten, if it mattered, and apparently it did. I went on, "Oh, and there's another question I'd like an answer to. Why did you send your boys after me tonight?"
"What do you mean?"
"Don't act stupid, Skinny. You know I've made only two of my scheduled five contacts. Yet you sent a couple of fumble-fingered goons to grab the dog collar tonight instead of waiting until it held all the information you wanted. They were going to grab it, they were going to question me, and then they were going to dispose of me. It seems like a pretty shortsighted performance. Who was going to get the rest of the stuff for you if you had me killed?"
"But I wasn't really…" She stopped. "I mean, I didn't really…"
"You didn't really what?"
"They weren't really trying to kill you."
I said, "I was there. I heard what they said."
"They were just supposed to talk as if they were going to kill you. To scare you. And then I'd have come in and stopped them and you'd have been grateful and…" She grimaced. "All right, maybe it was silly. But that's the way I was told to do it. You're not the only one operating under orders, Mr. Nystrom, or whatever your real name is.',
"I see," I said. "So you'd been instructed to grab the available stuff now, and then try to get me to cooperate gratefully to bring you the rest, because you'd saved me from your terrible thugs." I laughed. "Whose brainwave was that?"
"I can't tell you."
"Sure you can."
"He… he'll kill me if I talk."
I put a plate down in front of her. "I'm right here, sweetheart, dangerous old me. Where's this other guy? What can he do to you that I can't?" I set my own plate on the table, dumped a fistful of implements between us, and sat down. "Dig in," I said.
She took a bite, and started to speak, and stopped. We ate in silence. Not until she had cleaned off her plate thoroughly did she look up and say. "He was Chinese. A Chinaman named Soo."
I regarded her small tomboy face across the table. She was telling the truth now, and I thought I knew why. She was telling the truth because for some reason she had to keep me talking in here for a certain length of time, and if I caught her in a lie I might get annoyed enough to break off the conversation. What she'd said was highly interesting. I guess I should have felt kind of vindicated and triumphant. After all, I'd suggested the possibility of Chinese involvement to Libby Meredith, who hadn't seemed very impressed by my logic. But the fact that my guess had proved correct didn't intrigue me as much, at the moment, as the name that had been mentioned.
"Soo?" I said. "Kind of a stout Charlie Chan type with a precise way of speaking English?"
"Yes, do you know him?"
"We met over in Hawaii a year or so back. If it's the same Soo. Did he by any chance tell you that his name wasn't really Soo, but it would do for purposes of reference?"
"Why…why, yes, that's exactly what he said! It must be the same man. What was he doing in Hawaii?"
"Just about the same as he seems to have been doing in San Francisco or wherever you met him: making trouble for decadent capitalist nations like the U. S. of A. for the benefit of a certain People's Republic of the Orient." I grinned. "I saved his life out there, in a manner of speaking, but I don't suppose the debt really weighs on him. Well, well. Good old Peking Soo. With fifty grand to shell out for what?"
"For information on the Northwest Coastal System, naturally."
"How did you happen to meet him?"
"He looked me up. He'd heard of me from some characters I'd met, political types."
"I don't suppose I have to ask what brand of politics."
She shrugged. "There's no bore as deadly as a Marxist bore. We didn't have any more to do with them than we could help. But they sicked Mr. Soo on us."
"We?" I said. "Us?"
She hesitated. "At the University, I'd got to know some pretty bright people, several of whom later wound up working in some pretty hush installations. In fact, there was a kind of group of us that used to get together and experiment with… well, never mind that. It was just experimental. We weren't hooked or anything, but you like to try anything once. Anyway, even after we all graduated, we'd still meet from time to time, those of us who could make it."
"Did Mr. Soo use your experiments for blackmail?"
"Oh, no. Nothing like that. He just laughed his slick laugh and said he enjoyed meeting young people with inquiring minds. And then he started dropping hints…" She moved her shoulders awkwardly once more. "Of course, some of the characters I'm talking about, the bright people, turned out to be totally square about things like security and loyalty and patriotism, real conformist jerks. I was kind of surprised. I mean, you know a guy for years and you still don't know how he's going to react to…"
"To treason?" I said.
She made a sharp little gesture. "Why make with the loaded words? Anyway, the rest of us… well, as far as we're concerned, that kind of stuff is strictly for laughs these days. What's to betray, what's to be loyal to, Nystrom? You start getting an attack of ideals about something, peace for instance, and a cop comes and beats you over the head with a club, right? And these were pretty bright people, too bright to go around demonstrating in the streets and getting their brains knocked out. Even if you take your ideals that seriously, why buck city hail when you can dig the foundations right out from under it and get paid for doing it?"
I said, "Did you work this out in advance, or did it take Mr. Soo to help you see the light?"
She said sharply, "We didn't need any help to see that things were all wrong and getting worse! It's fairly obvious, isn't it, that the older people who've been running things have made a mess of them and just won't admit it…"
I said, "Personally, I don't trust anybody under thirty. But then, I don't trust anybody over thirty, either."
"Funny!" she said bitterly. "That's all people like you can do when challenged: make jokes!"
I caught that quick sneaky glance at the watch once more as I refilled the coffee cups. It would have been nice to know how much time we had to kill and what was supposed to happen when it was up. Obviously she was stalling desperately, trotting out all the youth-versus-age and world-we-never-made clichйs and rationalizations; as well as all the excuses and justifications they always have, young or old, for selling out.
I'm not saying that some of her points weren't valid. I'm just saying that it gets kind of monotonous, to a man in my line of work, the way they've always got it worked out so neatly, all the clever folk, when they hand the stuff over to the enemy-whatever it may be and whoever he may be-and walk off with the cash.
Somehow, they're always saving the world by betraying a piece of it. I bet myself that in a minute this girl would come up with some ingenious twist that would clinch the argument, proving that actually she and her friends had been working in behalf of the human race as a whole, and that the fifty grand was just incidental to the whole shining scheme of world improvement.
But she fooled me. She said, "We don't make jokes. We don't think it's funny, Nystrom. We think it's a dirty, fouled-up mess that's been left us, and there just isn't a damn thing that can be done about it now. It's too late now, so we might as well make a little money any way we can and have a few kicks while we can, before the whole thing blows up with us…"