“Will you step off by yourself,” asked Julius, “or would you prefer to be pushed?”
He was not joking. In those words and in his face was the whole evil softness of the man. His round face gleamed with a thin film of sweat, and his small protruding slaty eyes were liquid with pleading. He licked his lips, leaving them wet.
Simon turned and looked down into the pit again, where the terrible revolving iron pistons jolted up and down. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“You must make up your mind,” Julius insisted at length.
Simon waited as long as he could before he raised his head.
“I would much rather be pushed,” he said.
Then they took hold of him, one of them on each side.
And at that moment the last cigarette which he had dropped behind him went off, for he had prepared it for just such a desperate diversion with a roll of toy caps and some photographer’s flash powder which he had bought that afternoon. It was not a new trick, even for him, but it could always be counted on to create one or two precious seconds of disorganisation. And such stolen seconds often made all the difference between reminiscences and obituaries.
It went off with a sharp crack like a small-calibre pistol shot, and a brilliant burst of blue-white luminance that splashed through the shed as if a bolt of lightning had gone through it. The other two men would not have been human if they hadn’t loosened their hold on him and started to turn to see what had happened. And that was as much as he needed. He slipped one hand out of the rope around his wrists, and took hold of them in his turn.
He took Julius’s right wrist in his left hand, and Eberhardt’s left wrist in his right hand, and with simultaneous reverse twists he wrenched each man’s arm backwards and around and high up between the shoulder blades. The agonising leverage bent them forward over the rail. They struggled and kicked deliriously but there was nothing they could do against that lock clamped by fingers of steel. Eberhardt yelled out inarticulately, and the Magnum in his free hand crashed twice like a cannon, but he couldn’t get it around to aim it.