Hollingsworth plucked still another paper neatly from the file, and spread it before him on the desk. “Here is what he says:
It is not enough to work for the revolution. One must put oneself into the very heart of the fight, one must accept those tasks which, quite to the contrary of those missions most gratifying to our socialist heart, the building of collectives, the industrialization of the wilderness, and other of our remarkable achievements, is in contradistinction to these, tasks of a less pleasant character. One tests one’s revolutionary fiber by accepting with joy the most difficult, the most unrewarding, indeed even the most painful of assignments. It is in no way to be construed that I offer other than the highest praise to our national security organization, the watch-dog of the revolution, when I say it is with great joy I accept my new high position in the heart of the fight where one is tested a thousand-fold.”
Hollingsworth nodded. “The potentate of that very country spoke with praise of the author.”
“He would not today,” McLeod said.
“One never knows.” Hollingsworth coughed. “This is a fellow who says he wants to test himself, and conditions being what they are in said civil conflict, he has plenty of opportunity. The first case which comes to my attention is a minor one. Elements in this brigade are ranged on the battle front next to other political elements with which they are not sympathetic. I have to admit I never get it clear in my head because all the parties and groups are so complicated, but the said other elements are made up of workers who claim to be revolutionary—if I remember they are called something like the Pow-wow—and they don’t get along politically with the brigade. One time ammunition comes through under the aegis of the great power which supports the brigade, and the arms are so distributed that the elements of the Pow-wow receive nothing. When the enemy attacks, the Pow-wow is routed, and the result is disaster for the flank is turned and much ground is lost. Afterward there is dissension in the brigade. Why, they ask, was our flank given no arms, and this dissension reaches the point where a delegation goes in protest to our Balkan friend. He argues with them, he attempts to dissuade them, but his efforts unavailing; he is obliged to order imprisonment, and word is sent back that they have been discovered to be enemy agents. Moreover, the rumors that the Pow-wow was not provided with arms proved to be false, our friend announced. They were provided with arms but sold them to the enemy, and retreated from cowardice and not from lack of munitions. This story is distributed by all the best propaganda agents. The Balkan gent in question confided to one of his subordinates that a terrible blunder had actually been made in not supplying arms to the Pow-wow, even though they were some kind of anarchists. But, and I quote directly, ‘It is better to carry through a blunder with all one’s energy, than attempt to halt midway and retrace one’s steps.’ Now, what do you think of this fellow?”
“He was the product of a system,” McLeod muttered. Perspiration had begun to form on his forehead.
Hollingsworth offered a cigarette and was refused. “Our information is extremely detailed on these points, for several subordinates sent continual reports on the fellow to the mother country, and through certain special contacts we were able to obtain copies. So another case comes to mind. Of a prominent Pow-wow leader, or maybe he’s an anarchist or whatever, who refuses to collaborate and is attempting to incite the workers to a revolution before the war is ended. This is against the policy of the great power who supplies arms. One fiery evening the leader makes a speech to some kind of Pow-wow council.” Hollingsworth sighed. “The speech is to the effect that they will lose the war unless the workers know that they are fighting for their own revolution and not for the promise of one. There is activity in the air, and who knows what is possible? The Balkan fellow apprised of the situation moves fast on orders from above. A couple of paid killers murder the particular leader and several of his companions two nights later, and forged documents are distributed showing that he too was an enemy agent.”
“Workers bled,” Lannie said suddenly. Her voice was hollow and resounded in the room. McLeod supported his elbow upon his hand and lit a cigarette.
“I’ve made a study,” Hollingsworth went on, “of this Balkan gentleman, and one has to admire his efficiency. Let me cite another case …”
But another was hardly to exhaust it. While my mind whirled and my reason grew leaden, incident tumbled upon incident, and forgery upon weapon, until arrests and murders, betrayals and slander, jumbled into an olio of secret inks, Magyar knives, and the swollen spider mesh of the Balkan gent. Hollingsworth ticked it off in a mild flat voice, a clerk reciting from his ledger, fingers extended one by one as Case Three, Item Four, and Subject Five were elaborated and folded back into the brief case again, until the first hand enumerated, he must employ the second, and Project Seven, Case Eight continued the list. With the expansion of the dossier, McLeod fought a rear-guard action, listening in silence to story after story while the perspiration gathered on his forehead and wet the front of his shirt, listening with such apparent patience that I was on the point of protesting myself, only to attack with all his resource on a detail I might have considered trivial. Lannie listened, her lips parted, her eyes bright, shaking her head and clucking her tongue, an audience animated beyond the expectation of any actor, attention given wholly to whoever was speaking.
“I come now,” Hollingsworth said, “to a special incident which attracted my attention when going through these files. It’s a minor problem I should say, but I found it of unusual interest. There is a young fellow who works in the field organization of the gentleman we have been talking about, a nice young fellow from all reports, but a little impractical. And after a year or so in which he’s up at the front and back again all the time, he begins to act in a manner which is very unusual. Our reports say that he goes around to everyone telling them things like this, ‘We are losing the war and it is all our fault. We are murdering innocent men. The anarchists and the Pow-wow are genuine revolutionaries, but are we? That is what I ask.’ And it is amazing how little discretion the fellow has. Reports bombard his Balkan boss about what he is saying, and indeed he even says it to that very fellow himself.” Hollingsworth looked at each of us in turn, his pause manufacturing drama. “Orders come through. The young man is counterrevolutionary and must be eliminated. A simple enough case up to this point.” Gently Hollingsworth was rubbing the end of his nose with the eraser tip of the pencil. “What does the boss do? Something one might say is unforeseen, judging him on his past actions. He doesn’t kill the young man. He hides him away in a secret place, and sends in a false report. A very unusual action. So unusual that he almost gets away with it. But somehow he’s found out, and then he’s told in no mistakable terms that if the young man isn’t disposed of, he himself will be.”
“Ohhh,” Lannie breathed.
“Yes. He then does what one would expect him to. The young man is eliminated. Only, for reasons which I suppose are psychological, he does something very exceptional. He kills the young man himself.”
“What’s exceptional?” McLeod asked flatly.
“Well, you see the boss has never done any of this in the past. There are lots of employees for that. But in this case he goes to see the young man who trusts him implicitly, surprising as that may seem, and after hours of talk, he carries out the orders. And when he goes home he sits down and writes out the whole thing for himself alone, never knowing that eventually it will turn up in our files. What would you say to all this?”
“That’s so cruel!” Lannie exclaimed with a smile.
Hollingsworth shook his head. “He was commended for it, and they were right. That gentleman might have been ready to … deviate, is that the word? But when he alone killed the young fellow, I guess they figured that would straighten him out. Maybe he did it to straighten himself out. Cause you know he committed another murder after this. All by himself again.”
“What was the condition of this second murder?” McLeod asked hoarsely
.
“Oh, a more routine affair.” And Hollingsworth went on at even greater length. There was a friend, a great friend, of the Balkan boss, and they had known each other for years, and had worked together more than once. He was sent on a mission to the very capital of the very Mediterranean country where our protagonist disported, a mission from the mother country as Hollingsworth described it, an important mission, and yet before he had been in the city two weeks, it was obvious that his behavior was odd. He drank, a man who had seldom touched liquor; his hands shook, a man with nerves of steel, veteran of an earlier civil war; and although he had been a big man, none of his clothing would fit. He completed his work, and went to his hotel room, and there he stayed for three days, seeing no one, and only drinking. A passport arrived for his return to the east, and he mailed the passport back to his Balkan friend in the very same city. So the Balkan went to see him, and as Hollingsworth told us with relish, they once again talked for hours, and they had a discussion. “We have sabotaged the revolution,” the old friend said, “and we have eaten ourselves. The trials. Do you know the lie of the trials.? Do you know that equality is a bourgeois principle, and we have cheered for piecework, and our wives wear fur coats. We have put dung in the milk and poison in the honey, and we have retarded socialism a hundred years. For socialist morality is dead, and I have come to the conclusion it is the head of a pin, and unlike angels not a single lie may dance upon it.” And so they argued, or rather the old friend declaimed, and finally the man swore that he would not return unless it were by force, and he dared his old comrade to employ the force.
“At the end of it,” Hollingsworth said, “this idealist fellow was dead. An extraordinary case. You see the boss overstepped his authority. All he was supposed to do was give him the passport. He should have left the rest to somebody else.”
“I say,” McLeod muttered thickly, the skin of his face drawn back against the bone, “that a man who would perform such acts had become untrustworthy, and divided painfully by his own doubt, could only resolve it by driving himself further, by forcing himself into the position he now dreaded to place his subordinates.”
“I’m sorry to disagree,” Hollingsworth murmured quietly, “but this goes against all the facts. Even by his own admission the fellow remained with the organization through to the end of that Mediterranean ruckus, and then quite a while after that. There is reason to believe he is still with them.”
“I am not that man,” McLeod said desperately.
“One never knows exactly. You defend him.”
“I explain him.” McLeod wiped moisture from his upper lip with a quick motion of his tongue.
“That is possible,” Hollingsworth nodded, “but still it’s interesting. In each case they talked for hours. A lot must have been said in that time.”
High on McLeod’s temple a pulse was throbbing, the vein standing out against the skin. “You assume these acts were done coldly.”
Hollingsworth seemed indifferent. “I’ve discovered in my line of work that it’s actions which count. A fellow, after all, can get to feel one way and then he can feel the other way, but in the long run it’s what he does that keeps me busy. Now, in this particular circumstance, the man we’re discussing goes in with a weapon, he feels it against him, so to speak, all the time he’s talking. Suppose once or twice during all those hours, he even decides he won’t use it after all, he likes the other fellow too much. Still, no matter what he thinks, he ends up by pulling the trigger. He comes with the lethal instrument”—Hollingsworth was outlining the brief on his fingers— “and he goes away with same said lethal instrument … fired. A lawyer fellow can argue about cold blood or not cold blood, but it seems to me if his mind isn’t made up at bottom, then he doesn’t bring the murderous weapon in the first place. You know, I ask myself a question.”
“What?” McLeod croaked.
“Isn’t that fellow still doing the same work right up to this day? That is, unless he can show proof to the contrary. According to my modest opinion, he must be, because nobody could admit they had been that wrong. That’s proved by statistics. None of the bureaucrats, as I have said, turn back to theory. For a fellow to admit all those things and then say he was wrong, why he couldn’t set himself up over anybody. He couldn’t set himself up over me, for example.”
“It is only by admitting your guilt that you can ever judge,” McLeod said slowly.
“Fiddlesticks. You’re a fellow likes to turn everything into a discussion. But it’s facts and not words a fellow like me must accept.”
McLeod’s eyes, burning out of his gaunt face, looked across the desk at Hollingsworth. “I am not a servant of any power.”
“Then you have what we are looking for.”
“I do not.”
“Are you the Balkan gentleman I was referring to?”
“No.”
“What would you say if you were?”
“That one of the two propositions you have outlined would have to be correct.”
“Finally.” Hollingsworth sat back and lit a cigarette. But though his arms were folded neatly in his lap and his shoulders touched the wood of the chair, he was hardly relaxed, and the sense of continuity he had pursued was so painfully close that he could not contain it.
“Miss Madison,” he said, “will you please leave the room for a moment?”
She stood up without a word and obeyed him, closing the door behind her. Hollingsworth leaned forward and switched on the lamp so it shone directly into McLeod’s face.
“You see,” he murmured, “I have the utmost admiration for you, and it makes a fellow feel bad to have to tell you all these things. There’s no need for you to have to go through all this. Everything would be so simple if only you would accept my offer, and you could go away.”
“The offer has never been definite,” McLeod managed to articulate.
“It is now. I can’t tell you the respect I feel for a gentleman like yourself who commanded so many men, and if he so desired could have supped in the lap of luxury.” Lust marched in Hollingsworth’s speech. “A fellow could buy an army.” And his voice dropping until all feeling was suppressed, he added, “It’s only hard times has come upon you, and one should never aggravate himself for nothing.”
He paused, and in the pause he struck his little lightning. A hand scratched on the door outside as it scratched once weeks before, and continued with mounting hysteria until a finger was crying at the wood and nibbling at our ear. The lamp bulb glared into McLeod’s eyes, the finger scratched and importuned until it might have been beneath our flesh, and all the while Hollingsworth was watching him.
“Stop that sound,” McLeod said.
“It disturbs you?”
“Let it continue.”
But he was gripping the edge of the desk, and across the rigid muscle armor of his mouth, a tremor rippled as though another mouth long concealed would present its frail credential.
“This was the sound,” Hollingsworth stated, “which the Balkan gentleman employed on certain secret work. It is a password one might say, and he used it the night he visited his old friend. It is obvious from your reaction that this same sound is not unfamiliar to you.”
McLeod made no answer.
“Are you the so-called Balkan gentleman?”
Half a minute might have elapsed, the scratching continued, the lamp burning.
“Yes,” McLeod said.
“Did you really leave that organization?”
McLeod nodded.
“Then you still have the little object?”
“Yes,” McLeod said.
“Where is it?”
“No, that’s enough, that’s enough,” McLeod shouted. “Not today. Give me time.” In his agitation he had come to his feet and was leaning over the desk. I thought he was about to weep.
“All right, that is enough,” Hollingsworth said. “Easy does it, easy does it.” And to my bewilderment he crossed the desk to McLeod’s side and stood patt
ing him on the shoulder with the gentle sympathetic attention of a man who has told another some tragic news. “Yes, easy does it, and pull yourself together,” he murmured in a demulcent voice.
“Go away,” McLeod said thickly.
“We’ll adjourn and continue this upon further notice,” Hollingsworth said quietly, “and may I thank you, sir, for your co-operation.”
With a last soothing touch of his hand on McLeod’s neck, he gathered his papers and quit the room.
TWENTY-FIVE
NOW, in the short time that remained, in the evening after their audience and the next evening, McLeod came to my room and talked for hours. And like a man who carries his mortal illness within him, and obsessed with the death he contains, must constantly exhume it, he would pace my floor through the middle of the night and relate from his incalculable necessity a list of the crimes he had performed. Fluvial, torrential, he could have dammed it no more than I could have stopped my ears, and while the night air stagnated in the attic room and insects battered themselves in frenzy against the wall looking for the window from which they had entered, it poured forth over my head in a storm of recrimination and justification, of places I had never known and names I could hardly untangle. He would lacerate himself, searching deeper and deeper into the mesh of motive until each successive reason for what he had done became more frightful than the one which had preceded it, and when he had finally, to his satisfaction if not to mine, exposed the last festering cocci of the sore, he would close the incision only to open another. And if, at last, I could begin to shift from the mystification of such an ordeal to the first perception of its extent, he would halt me, before I had even succeeded, to demonstrate with what desire he could hardly support that in such an instance, all perfidy granted, he had nonetheless … he had made efforts, he had tried … he had even … So through one night and most of another I listened to him, not knowing what to say, while he continued, half for himself and half for me, defense combined with prosecution, the moralist and the criminal brought to dock and each arguing at odds, for even as I, the judge, would pardon the accused he was delivering himself to execution.
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