"Before you add half the cops in New York to half the waiters, in this audience of yours," he said, "I think we should talk some more."
"Let me go!" she blazed.
"After all," he continued imperturbably, "it is a pretty nice apartment. And you did invite me here originally, if you remember. There must be some handy dough in this modeling racket for you to be able to keep up a pied-d-terre like this. Or, if it isn't rude question, who else is contributing at the moment?"
Her ineffectual struggle almost ceased for a moment; and then, when it sprang up again, for the first time it had the wild flurry of something close to the delayed panic that should have been there long before.
"You must be crazy! You're hurting me—"
"And that," said the Saint, nodding towards a veneered cabinet against the wall, without any change either in the steel of his grip| or the engaging velvet of his voice, "is presumably the radio whose| dulcet tones were to beguile me last night — while I was being cosily framed into the neatest murder rap that I've had to answer for a long time."
"You crazy lunatic…"
Her voice faded out just like that. And the fight faded out of her in exactly the same way, abruptly and completely, so that she was like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut.
"What do you mean," she whispered, "murder?"
Simon let go her wrist and put his cigarette to his mouth again, gazing down at her with eyes of inexorable blue ice. His mind was clear and passionless like the mind of a surgeon in an operating room. In the back of his mind he could hear the whirr of wheels in a production line, and again he could remember candlelight and soft music and rich food and wine in a penthouse hideaway, and still behind that in his mind was the rumble of tanks and the drone of airplanes and the numbing thunder of shells and bombs, and men sweating and cursing in the smoke of hell; and the war was there in that room, he could feel it as fierce and vital as the hush in a front-line trench before an attack at dawn, and he knew that even in those incongruous and improbable settings he was fighting not one battle but many battles.