I had listened to the boy’s story with a great show of sympathetic attentiveness. Now I scowled at him and spoke accusingly, but still not without friendliness.
“Stop spoofing! The money Papadopoulos showed you didn’t buy you. You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in. But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn’t let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front. So you were meat to Papadopoulos’ grinder. He gave you a part you could play to yourself—a super-gentleman-crook, a mastermind, a desperate suave villain, and all that kind of romantic garbage. That’s the way you went, my son. You went as far as possible beyond what was needed to save the girl from the hoosegow—just to show the world, but chiefly yourself, that you were not acting through sentimentality, but according to your own reckless desires. There you are. Look at yourself.”
Whatever he saw in himself—what I had seen or something else—his face slowly reddened, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked past me at the distant road.
I looked into the lighted room beyond him. Tom-Tom Carey had advanced to the center of the floor, where he stood watching us. I jerked a corner of my mouth at him—a warning.
“Well,” the boy began again, but he didn’t know what to say after that. He shuffled his feet and kept his eyes from my face.
I stood up straight and got rid of the last trace of my hypocritical sympathy.
“Give me your gun, you lousy rat!” I snarled at him.
He jumped back as if I had hit him. Craziness writhed in his face. He jerked his gun chest-high.