Tony regarded her in weary gloom.
“Oh, all right!” He spread out his hands, holding the cigarette lighter in one of them. “Maybe you don’t. But I’ll bet Esir and Esim would!”
He went out the door to find Abdul waiting for him expectantly. Behind the door he heard Ghail sob. He marched heavily off toward the palace door, a quarter of a mile away. Abdul followed interestedly. Tony’s conscience spoke to him acidly, mentioning his discourtesy to Ghail and the fact that he hadn’t even said good-by to the Queen of Barkut. He snarled at it, out loud. In consequence he did not hear Ghail say, between weeping and fury:
“The—b-beast! Oh-h-h-h, the beast!”
Nor did he hear the Queen say approvingly:
“I’m sure you’re going to be very happy with him, my dear! You’ll never quite know what he’s going to do next!”
This was, however, one of the few times when Tony himself did know what he was going to do. He was angry. He grew angrier. The whole affair was simply too pat. It was too perfectly coincidental. It was exactly the sort of thing that the heads of nations in his own world—the heads of some nations, at any rate—had pulled off too many times. Tony had not yet met the djinn king, but he felt that he was being manipulated with the sort of smug clumsiness characteristic of power politicians. The djinn king in all his official acts was ineffably virtuous and chivalrous. He’d invited Tony to visit him under safe-conduct, he’d provided him with a guard, with entertainment, he’d paid him extravagant honors—and he was arranging for him to be assassinated by someone whom he could afterward execute with every expression of horror for his crime.
“He’s a damned—he’s a damned totalitarian,” Tony growled.
He stamped into the palace, too angry to be scared any longer. There is a certain indignation of the naive and the imaginative which practical men and politicians never understand. The innocent common citizen who believes in hair tonics and television commercials and the capitalist system, believes most firmly of all that justice and decency are going to triumph. He will endure with infinite patience as long as that belief is not challenged. But let him see injustice fortifying itself for a permanent reign; let him see deceit become frankly self-confident; then he explodes! More tyrants and dictators have been overthrown for trying to make their regimes permanent than for all their crimes. In all that had gone before, Tony had been less active than acted-upon. But now he was furious.
He found the fifteen-foot captain of his personal guard of honor. He said harshly to that cat-eyed giant: