“Here’s the point,” I explained. “I’m charging you with complicity in the gutting of Couffignal, and in the murders that went with it. And I’m asking you where the loot has been hidden.”
Slowly she stood up, raised her chin, and looked at least a mile down at me.
“How dare you? How dare you speak so to me, a Zhukovski!”
“I don’t care if you’re one of the Smith Brothers!” Leaning forward, I had pushed my twisted ankle against a leg of the chair, and the resulting agony didn’t improve my disposition. “For the purpose of this talk you are a thief and a murderer.”
Her strong slender body became the body of a lean crouching animal. Her white face became the face of an enraged animal. One hand—claw now—swept to the heavy pocket of her jacket.
Then, before I could have batted an eye—though my life seemed to depend on my not batting it—the wild animal had vanished. Out of it—and now I know where the writers of the old fairy stories got their ideas—rose the princess again, cool and straight and tall.
She sat down, crossed her ankles, put an elbow on an arm of her chair, propped her chin on the back of that hand, and looked curiously into my face.
“However,” she murmured, “did you chance to arrive at so strange and fanciful a theory?”
“It wasn’t chance, and it’s neither strange nor fanciful,” I said. “Maybe it’ll save time and trouble if I show you part of the score against you. Then you’ll know how you stand and won’t waste your brains pleading innocence.”
“I should be grateful,” she smiled, “very!”