"So anyway, we now have a well-staged scene in the old torture chamber, where you trick me into revealing where I have hidden all these priceless documents. You're doing a great show, Olga. If I could get my hands together I would applaud. You must be a full-fledged member of this lodge of Aryan cutthroats."
"Think what you please," she said indifferently. "It makes no difference."
She could always make him feel wrong. Like now, when she was not angry, but wounded in everything but dignity. Because that devastating ingenuousness of hers was real; because the bridges she walked on were firm and tried, and she had built them herself, and she was as sure of them and her way as he was sure of his own. There could be no facile puncturing of a foundation like that, with a skilled flick of the wrist.
She said, without any emotion: "You think of me as a mercenary adventuress. I don't deny it. I have worked for Maris — and other men — only for money. But that was before the Nazis invaded Russia. You will not believe that a greedy adventuress could have a heart, or a conscience. But it made all the difference to me… I pretended that it didn't. I went on working for them — taking their money, doing what they told me, trying to keep their trust. But I was only waiting and working for the time when I could send all of them to the hell where they belong… Yet, I had my own sins to redeem. I had done wrong things, too. That's why I thought that if I could bring something with me, something big enough to prove that all my heart had changed — then perhaps your FBI would understand and forgive me, and let me begin again here… I could swear all this to you; but what is swearing without faith?"
The Saint's head was much clearer now. He saw her again through the ruthless screen of his disbelief. And still she wasn't trying to sell him from behind the counter of any phony job of tying-up. Her wrists were lashed as cruelly tight as his own. He could see the livid ridges in her skin where the ropes cut. Her face was damp like his was from strain and pain.
"Damn it, tovarich," he said musingly, "you could act anyone in Hollywood off the screen. You've almost convinced me that you're on the level. You couldn't possibly be, but you sound just like it."
Her eyes were unwavering against his, and they looked very old. But that was from the patience of a great sadness.
"I only wish you could have believed me before the end. It would have been nicer. But it will not be long now. Siegfried Maris is one of the most important men that Hitler has in this country. He won't take any chances with us."
"At least," said the Saint, "we should feel flattered about getting the personal attention of the big shot himself."
He had crossed his left leg over his right now, but it "was not with the idea of striking an elegant and insouciant pose. He was pressing the outsides of his legs together, feeling for something. He had been searched and disarmed, he knew; but there was his own special armory which the ungodly didn't always…