“Why you?”
Luther wasn’t certain on this point. “I suppose he trusted me,” he said, shrugging.
“Ah.”
“Besides, somebody had to find the body, and I was the most believable candidate. He just wanted to make a clean getaway. Start again where he’d never be found.”
“And where was that?”
Luther shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Anywhere, I suppose, where nobody knows his face. He never told me.”
“He must have hinted.”
“No.”
Breer took heart at Luther’s reticence; his look brightened.
“Now come on,” Mamoulian coaxed. “You’ve given me the motherlode; where’s the harm in telling me the rest?”
“There is no more.”
“Why make pain for yourself?”
“He never told me, man!” Breer took a step up the stairs; and another; and another.
“He must have given you some idea,” Mamoulian said. “Think! Think! You said he trusted you.”
“Not that much! Hey, keep him off me, will you?”
The skewers glittered.
“For Christ’s sake keep him off me!”
There were many pities. The first was that one human being was capable of such smiling brutality to another. The second that Luther had known nothing. His fund of information had been, as he’d claimed, strictly limited. But by the time the European was certain of Luther’s ignorance the man was past recall. Well; that wasn’t strictly true. Resurrection was perfectly plausible. But Mamoulian had better things to do with his waning stamina; and besides, letting the man remain dead was the one way he could compensate for the suffering the chauffeur had vainly endured.
“Joseph. Joseph. Joseph,” Mamoulian chided. And the dark flowed on.