Then Iris turned fiercely on Paul, knocking him off balance, while Cave ran to the door. Stokharin, his hand shaking and his face silver with fear, fired three times, each time hitting Cave who quivered but did not fall; instead, he got through the door and into the study. As Stokharin hurried after him, I threw myself upon him, expecting death at any moment; but it did not come for Stokharin had collapsed. He dropped his gun and hid his face in his hands, rocking back and forth on the floor, sobbing. Paul, free of Iris’s fierce grip, got to Cave before I did. By then it was finished. Cave lay in the corridor only a few feet from the elevator. He’d fallen on his face and lay now in his own blood, his hands working at the floor as though trying to dig himself a grave in the hard stone. I turned him on his back and he opened his eyes. “Iris?” he asked. His voice was ordinary though his breathing was harsh, uneven. “Here I am.” She knelt down beside him, ignoring Paul who stood looking down at them, his pistol held at an absurd angle in his inexperienced hand. Cave whispered something to Iris; then a flow of blood, like the full moon’s tide, poured from his mouth and he was dead. “Cavesway,” said Paul at last when the silence had been used up: the phrase he had prepared for this moment, inadequate to the reality at our feet. “_Your_ way,” said Iris as she got to her feet. She looked at Paul calmly, as though they’d met only at that moment. “_Your_ way,” she repeated. In the other room Stokharin moaned. TEN 1 Now the work was complete. Cavesword and Cavesway formed a perfect design and all the rest would greatly follow ... or so Paul assumed. I believe if I had been he I should have killed both Iris and myself the same day, removing at one stroke witnesses and opposition. But he did not have the courage and, too, I think he underestimated us, to his own future sorrow. Iris and I were left alone in the penthouse. Paul, after shaking Stokharin into a semblance of calm, bundled Cave’s body into a blanket and then, with the doctor’s help, put it upon the private elevator. The next twenty-four hours were a grim carnival. The body of Cave, beautifully arranged and painted, lay in the central auditorium of the center as thousands filed by to see him. Paul’s speech over the corpse was telecast around the world. Iris and I kept to our separate rooms, both by choice and from necessity since gentle guards stood before our doors and refused, apologetically, to let us out.