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regarded the decision. "Come into the living room. He vill be down in a
minute."
They entered, and the door shut, leaving Ron Moosic outside and his quarry
inside with the man who was the object of it all. He cursed to himself that
he'd let the golden opportunity slip away, that he'd given them li-cense to do
damage, by his own failure to be as cold-blooded as they.
"But it wouldn't be sportin',"
his Alfie part seemed to say.
"If we did it that way, we'd be just like them, wouldn't we?''
To beat them, you often had to be like them, he re-flected sourly. But he
wasn't like them, and never had been. Not yet.
The living room was on the first floor in front of the house, and the curtains
were only partly drawn.
Stealthily he crept up onto the porch and made his way to below one of the
windows. Both were raised an inch or so to allow some air to circulate, and he
could hear, and occasionally risk seeing, what was going on.
That is, if the beat cop didn't come around and catch him first.
Karl Marx was a striking figure in person. Although thin, he had an athlete's
build and broad shoulders that gave the impression of great mass and strength.
His car-riage was strong and upright, the body of a much younger man than his
fifty-seven years. It was clear that his trip had done him much good; he
looked excellent for any age.
He had a large brow framed by curly, white locks that reached to his powerful
shoulders, a snow-white beard that flowed deep down, and brown eyes that
sparkled with warmth and intelligence from underneath black, bushy eyebrows.
The eyes, in fact, were a giveaway that did not generally reveal itself in
photographs. They were warm, human, emotional eyes, highly expressive and
penetrating at one and the same time. He was full of what the Greek called
charisma
both visitors involuntarily stood up and waited in awed silence when he
entered the room, not just from politeness but from the strength and magnetic
power he radiated without doing or saying a thing.
He had changed into informal black pants, a white shirt, and had obviously
thrown on an old smoking jacket for the visitors.
If Marx more than lived up to what the visitors expected to see, they
certainly lived up to Helene
Demuth's descrip-tion in his own mind. In his hand he held the envelope they
had handed to the housekeeper, its top now torn open. "So," he said in an
orator's baritone that more than fit his striking appearance, "vat in hell is
the meaning of this?" He held up the envelope and shook it for emphasis.
His speech was heavily accented, and somewhat hesitant. Although he spoke,
read, and wrote a half-dozen lan-guages with ease, it was clear that he was
not blessed with the translator's talent of thinking in the tongue he was
using. Everything, although extremely quickly, was trans-lated into German in
his mind and then back again when he spoke.
"If y' please, sir," said the woman, "that is, as y' must know, the title and
first few pages of yer rev'lut'nary book in the French and Russian tongues,
along with some words from a letter y' haven't yet mailed to yer
Russian friend."
"I am veil avare of the content, young lady," Marx responded coldly. "I vish
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to know how it is possible for you to know a letter I am writing still, and
vhy somevun vould to the trouble go of printing up pages of books not yet
published. Und Russian, yet! Vhen it is possible to Russian publish, they vill
still be too stupid to read it!"
"They're for real, sir," she assured him, somewhat shocked by his rather
anti-Russian scorn. "It was the only way to show you we ain't what we seem,
sir."
The massive brows came down. They were all still standing. "Und, just vat
'ain't' you, then?" he responded scornfully.
She blushed, feeling ashamed of her dialect. In point of fact, it was taking
an extreme amount of will to take the lead in this conversation at all. Her
upbringing and back-ground was as deferential and passive as
Sandoval's had been commanding and assertive. Clearly, whatever laws of time
there were had moved hardest on Roberto Sandoval, to quench his fanatical
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