Wolfe ignored it. “You can do us one more favor,” he suggested. “Tell me, is there a hotel in town with good beds?”
“By God,” Danilo growled. In Serbo-Croat “by God” is “Boga ti” — good for growling. Danilo repeated it. “By God, without papers, with nothing but money, you would go to a hotel! You’d get a good bed all right! Gospo Stritar is a man who is capable of a thought, or you would be in jail now, and not in bed either! He merely decided you would be more interesting loose, and by God he was correct! You tell me to my face you know where our cache is, and tomorrow in the sunshine, like going to a picnic, you will go there, doubtless to the very spot, and shout for Josip Pasic!”
He calmed down a little. “Only,” he said, “you would be dead before you got there, and that would be nothing to regret. You may be fit to live in America, but not here. There are only twenty-two men in Montenegro who know where that cache is, and you two are not with us, so obviously you must die. Damn it, sit down!”
“We’re going, Danilo.”
“You can’t go. While I was out I made other arrangements besides Jubé. There are men out front and out back, and if you leave and I don’t go to the door with you and give a signal, you won’t get far. Sit down.”
Wolfe told me, “There’s a snag, Archie,” and sat, and I followed suit.
“I would like to say something, Danilo,” Mrs. Vukcic said quietly.
He frowned at her. “Well?” he demaned.
She looked at Wolfe, at me, and back at her husband. “These men are not crazy like you and me,” she told him. “They are not doomed like us. We try to pretend there is hope, but our hearts are dead, and we can only pray that someday there will be real life for Ivan and Zosha, but we know there can be none for us. Oh, I don’t complain! You know I love you for fighting instead of giving in like the others, and I’m proud of you — I am, Danilo — but I don’t want to be afraid of you. It is too easy for you to say these men must die, and it makes me afraid, because they are the only hope for Ivan and Zosha, men like them. I know you had to kill Jubé Bilic, I can understand that; but these men are our friends, or anyway they are the friends of our children. Do you love anybody?”
“Yes. I love you.”