All My Sins Remembered [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The curtain parted swiftly with a clang of rings on rod. "I repeat, Madam, what would you do if I tried to throw you off the terrace?" The question had not been answered and would not be answered now. It was not a question to be answered easily. I wasn't certain just how rhetorical it was; and any reaction whatsoever might make the awful possibility quite probable. Always so certain of everything, I was now sure of nothing, least of all my sanity. Beads of cold sweat dropped on the book I was pretending to read with such self-containment. My eyes had been riveted to the same line for ten minutes. They were tattooing a hole in Louis Bromfield's Green Bay Tree. My absoi-ption in the book was ridiculous—my calm catatonic. My heart was shattering my chest and the pulse in my eyes was blinding me. I couldn't break my tableau even with a sigh. The slightest animation could cue him to violence. What would you do if I tried to throw you off the terrace? There had been times when I could have answered his query with an airy, "I would change into something more suitable for the occasion." It would have shattered his dark mood. It would have made him laugh. It would have given me a reprieve and would eventually have thrown the whole scene into an exciting perspective. This was not one of those moments. We were twenty stories above Seventy-ninth Street and we were alone. He was the sickest he had ever been, and I had to control both my tongue and the situation. Utter passivity was my only chance. A veteran of a hundred campaigns, I had been forced to study every subtlety of armed conflict, including strategic 7