Golden Trap by Hugh Pentecost Page B

he said. “Who can guess at the depth of a desire for revenge? You can only guess how much a person wants to live and what he has to live for. On that score I have some theories about the five people on our primary list.”
    “I’d like to hear them,” Kline said.
    Lovelace moistened his lips. “I put them in reverse order,” he said. “Killing me means risking death at the hands of the law. My Roumanian friend, Rogoff, is a blustering bully, but that bluster covers a basic cowardice. He thinks he has everything to live for—a successful business, a wife and children, a mistress in Vienna, a certain amount of power in his community. I think he would run fewer risks than anyone.”
    Kline nodded.
    “Louis Martine was once my good friend. I never hurt him directly. He understands the reasons for my behavior in the past. He is a real patriot, and he is serving his country in an important diplomatic post I think he would weigh his value to his country against anything personal. I would write him off entirely except for his almost fanatical devotion to his wife. A man may momentarily lose his balance when a woman is at the center of his life.”
    “And Madame Martine?” Kline asked.
    “Like a tigress hunting down the killer of her cubs,” Lovelace said. “She is a sophisticated and intelligent woman. If she stops to think, she may hesitate. She loves Louis. Their life together is a particularly good one. They have money, position, the capacity to enjoy the good things of life. If she stops to think—?” Lovelace shrugged. “But her devotion to her father was almost psychotic. It could trigger almost anything in a moment of passion.”
    Kline made no notes, but I had the feeling he had the kind of memory that would permit him five years from that moment to repeat everything Lovelace was saying, word for word.
    “Hilary Carleton is a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word fear,” Lovelace said. “Long ago he threatened to get even with me for exposing his brother. It could be that he was never able to find me till a year ago. He could enjoy playing me as he enjoys playing the Scottish salmon he fishes for so avidly in season. He would calculate risks without emotion. He would expect to be clever enough to outrun any consequences. If he has me in mind he’s the most competent of the lot.”
    “I mentioned your name to him a little while ago,” I said. “He didn’t seem to recognize it.”
    “But he would recognize me if he sees me,” Lovelace said, “as Michael O’Hanlon who exposed his brother.”
    “That leaves the German doctor,” Kline said.
    “One other before him,” Lovelace said. “Marilyn VanZandt.”
    “Not on my list!” Kline said sharply.
    “But on mine,” Lovelace said. “Does it occur to you, Kline, that what is happening to me might have nothing to do with my past as you know it? A purely personal matter? Marilyn VanZandt is a woman who loved me five years ago, who lived with me for three months, and whom I left cold one rainy Paris morning. She’s a woman of wealth who could follow me anywhere. She’s an alcoholic, a user of drugs, a woman whose beauty is fading and who has used up a life in thirty years of living at a blazing pace. She could hate me unreasonably and with an intensity it would be hard to believe. A woman scorned in the only relationship of her life in which she felt something real—God help her. She could be the most dangerous of all.”
    “And she could still be in love with you,” I said.
    “That still leaves Dr. Claus Zimmerman,” Kline said. If he had any feeling about Marilyn VanZandt he showed nothing.
    “Perhaps the most dangerous of all,” Lovelace said, “because he has the least of any of them to live for. I exposed him for the murdering butcher he was. I sent him to prison. I ended his medical career. I turned him into a man without a country. He drinks—and hates. By this time he must be running out of money, and when he does I