Simon didn't take his eyes off her, although it called for a little effort to hold them there. His first reaction was to feel outstandingly foolish, and he hid it behind a coldly unflinching mask. He hadn't held anything back in his statement — he had no reason to — and so there was no reason why Kinglake shouldn't have been there before him. It was his own fault that he had made a slow start; but that was because he hadn't been receptive to a coincidence that was too pat to be plausible.
He couldn't tell whether her green eyes were laughing at him. He knew that he was laughing at himself, but in a way that had dark and unfunny undertones.
"Tovarich," he said frankly, "suppose we let our back hair down. Or are you too steeped in intrigue to play that way?"
"I could try, if I knew what you meant."
"I'm not one of Kinglake's stooges — in fact, the reverse. I just happened to find Henry. He mumbled a few things to me before he died, and naturally I repeated what I could remember. But on account of my evil reputation, which you know about, I end up by qualifying as a potential suspect. So I'd have to be interested, even if I wasn't just curious. Now it's your move."
Olga Ivanovitch eyed him for a long moment, studying his clean-cut devil-may-care face feature by feature.
She said at last: "Are you very tired of being told that you're a frighteningly handsome man?"
"Very," he said. "And so how well did you know Henry?"
She sipped her drink, and made patterns with the wet print of her glass on the bar.
"Not well at all. I work here as a hostess. I met him here like I meet many people. Like I met you tonight. It was only for a few days. We had a lot of drinks and danced sometimes."