This was how they would find him, he thought savagely. Helpless and unable to hit back. They would drag him down the stairs, handcuffed, into the street for the crowd to gape at: there was nothing now he could do about it.
As he began to fall into the black chasm of unconsciousness, he had a vague idea that a hand came out of the darkness and caught hold of his arm.
IV
As he poured whisky into a glass, Preston Kile noticed his hand was unsteady, and he frowned. He shouldn’t be drinking this, he told himself. He was drinking too much these days. But what else could he do? A man must keep himself going somehow. He wasn’t sleeping well. There was a woolliness in his brain that alarmed him. He had felt it coming on slowly like a deadly, creeping paralysis over the past year. It was blunting his mind. It made thought an effort. At one time he had been able to make lightning decisions, and the right decisions at that. He had also been willing to take any risk, no matter how dangerous it had seemed. He had had a shrewd recklessness, if you could put it that way, that had carried him from a poorly paid desk job in a bank to a position that had made him the most feared man on the Stock Market. But that was two years ago. He had gone to pieces. He wasn’t the same man. His confidence had gone. He had lost his guts for a fight. Risks frightened him now. He found himself putting off making a decision until it was too late. And now, to worry him still more, there was this fantastic Rajah business.
He drank the whisky greedily, drained the glass and immediately refilled it. His heavy, bloodshot eyes moved to the mirror over the dressing-table, and he stared at himself.
Well, at least he looked as strong, handsome and ruthless as he had ten years ago when he was at the height of his career. Of course his hair was grey at the temples now, and he was getting a little thick around the middle, but his figure wasn’t bad for a man of his age. What was he thinking of? Age? Why, damn it, he wasn’t fifty-six yet! But at this moment he felt like an old, feeble man instead of a man in his prime. There was this dull ache under his heart. That worried him. He was afraid to consult a doctor: no news was good news. If his heart was bad, he didn’t want to know it. Probably indigestion, he told himself, his hand touching the smooth face of his evening dress shirt.
He took out a cigar-case from his inside pocket, hesitated, then put it back. Perhaps not just now. He was smoking too much. He would wait until Eve came out of the bathroom. What an interminable time she spent in the bath!
He sat down amid the confusion of her clothes. She had thrown them off, leaving them scattered on the bed and floor, saying she wanted to think, and she thought best in a bath. A beautiful woman like her had no right to think!
He picked up the sheer silk stockings and pulled them slowly through his fingers, thinking of Eve.
He had known her for two months. At first, he had thought of her merely as a woman to amuse him in his leisure moments. He had got rid of that dark girl — he had to think a moment to remember her name