“By the obligation that brought us here. What Danilo’s wife told him was cogent but not strictly accurate. If personal vengeance were the only factor I could, as you suggested, go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man’s sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy; masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom. I reject it and condemn it. You look skeptical. I suppose you’re thinking that I have sometimes been high-handed in dealing with the hired protectors of freedom in my adopted land — the officers of the law.”
“Not more than a thousand times,” I protested.
“You exaggerate. But I have never flouted their rightful authority or tried to usurp their lawful powers, and being temporarily in the domain of dictatorial barbarians gives me no warrant to embrace their doctrines and use their methods. Marko was murdered in New York. His murderer is accountable to the People of the State of New York, not to me. Our part is to get him there.”
“Hooray for us. The only way to get him there legally is to have him extradited.”
“That isn’t true. You’re careless with your terms. Extradition is the only way to get him there by action of law, but that’s quite different and of course impossible. The point is to get him under the jurisdiction of civilized law without violating it ourselves.”
“I see the point all right. How?”
“That’s it. Can he walk?”
“I should think so. I heard no bones crack. Shall I go and find out?”
“No.” He got to his feet with only a couple of grunts during the operation. “I must speak with that man — Stan Kosor. I don’t want to leave you here alone, because if someone should come you couldn’t talk except with the gun, so I’ll try this first.”
He faced in the direction of Montenegro and beckoned, using the whole length of his arm, again and again. I booked it as a one-to-ten shot, because first, Kosor might not be up in the niche at all, and second, if he was there I doubted if he trusted Wolfe enough to cross the border to him. I lost the bet. I don’t know how the man got down from the crag so quickly unless he just let go and slid, but I hadn’t even begun to look for him in earnest when my eye was attracted by movement, and there he was on the bend in the trail where it emerged from a defile. He strode along until he reached the spot where the trail began to widen for the space in front of the fort, stopped abruptly, and called something. By then I had seen that it wasn’t Kosor but Danilo Vukcic. We had been honored. Wolfe answered him, and he came on.