"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 311 - Death Stalks the U.N." - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

the skin. He said, "Somehow, that is typical of the man... knowing he was dying, to say..."

She waited quietly till he got a grip on himself. "Then he said, and I can't be too sure of this for his throat
was full of blood, 'Time...' Perhaps he just meant that time was short, for after that he had to gulp his life
blood down before he could say... 'Cap'... and that was all."

"Very well." Her voice was calm. She watched as he turned and went out the door, the same door that
Captain Derry had used. She thought, I wouldn't like to be in Derry's shoes. Yerkes loved Dom like a
father, and I'm sure Yerkes thinks the captain killed his friend.

Another man followed the thin form of Sarri from the door. There was some semblance of order coming
over the room now. The gavel was pounding a tattoo and the men in that room were conditioned to
responding to the sound of a gavel.

A question formed in Irene's mind. What was going on? Why had S. T. Tarr followed Sarri? She had
never quite made up her mind about Tarr's role. He was always around. He was invariably at the biggest
and most important cocktail parties. He looked naked without a woman on each arm, so used was she to
seeing him that way. Tall, good looking, he had something of the quality of Cary Grant, she thought.

Her thoughts spiraled back in time. Her lips had a wry twist as she remembered the past... It had been in
Europe and she had been young, so young. She had been politically undeveloped, she thought, as well as
immature in other ways... Tarr had been her youthful beau ideal... She sighed remembering the way she
had carried the torch for him... It had been really pathetic... he had treated her quite badly. She thought
of those months they had spent in the Tyrol... the world had been young and so had she. Then they had
left the mountains and gone to Biarritz... They did all the things that young lovers are supposed to... She
couldn't know, didn't know at the time, that to Tarr it was all a monotonous repetition, a thrice told tale.

It was only gradually that Tarr allowed her to see more and more of what went on in his mind. It was
only when she began to add up tiny clues as to his behavior, his political activities, that the bloom fell off
the rose.

She had felt at the time—and still did—a sensation of being cheated, of having lost at some kind of
thimble-rigged con game.

It had come to an end when she began to grow up a bit. As her love for him waned, as she began to see
through him and the shabby politics which he espoused, as she had escaped from the toils of love,
somehow their position had become reversed.

The more cold she had become to him, the more ardently he pursued her. Now things had come to
where she ducked him at every opportunity, while he went out of his way to be near her.

She wrenched her mind back to the present and thought, watching the men leave the room, that it was
like a child's game of follow the leader, first Captain Derry, Molvannian representative, then Yerkes Sarri
who had devoted his life to the problems of his country along with the Ruravian national hero, Dom
Brassle. And then, finally, S. T. Tarr who, for all Irene knew, was a man without a country.

She allowed herself a glance down at Brassle. Why did the good ones, the inspired ones, always die too
soon? Another week and he might well have finally welded his country into a whole that would be able to
stand up under the stresses and strains of Middle Europe's problems. It was as though she were in some
isolated cone of silence. She was so involved in her own thoughts that she wasn't even aware of the fact