With a languid hand Victor found and pressed a button embedded in the table near the edge.
“You have reason. Whatever my shortcomings, my good Sturm, they do not include hypocrisy; I do not pretend, like your noble Bolsheviki, I am in this business for the sake of humanity or anything but my own selfish ends—power, plunder”—a slight wait prefaced one final word, spoken in a key of sombre passion—“revenge.”
“Revenge?” Sturm echoed, staring.
“I have more than one score to pay out before I can cry even with life ... one above all!”
Studying intently that darkened face, and misled by its look of abstraction, Sturm was guilty of the indiscretion of his malicious smile.
“The Lone Wolf?”
Victor turned weary eyes his way, and under their black and lustreless regard the smile merged swiftly into a grin of nervous apology.
“You are shrewd,” Victor observed, thoughtfully. “Be careful: it is a dangerous gift.”
The man Nogam gently opened the door and approached the table, stopping just outside the area of illumination shed by the shaded lamp. But since Victor continued to smoke absently, paying no attention, Nogam resigned himself to wait with entire patience: the perfect pattern of a servant tempered by long servitude to the erratic winds of employers’ whims; efficient, assiduous, mute unless required to speak, long-suffering.
Victor addressed him suddenly, in a sharp voice that drew from Sturm a glitter of eager spite.