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Wulff any way he could, but Williams did not really count. If he ever got in touch with the man and he suspected that he would it would be strictly business. That was all. He would be getting in touch with Williams because he needed something out of the man. Whereas this was different. There was nothing this girl could do for him. Anything that she
could
do would lead only to disaster. If nothing else, even if all of his luck had run out, Wulff still had his instincts. His instincts told him that there was no future here at all.
    Who needed a future? He had all the past that he could take. He reached out and touched her again, in the sensitive part in the small of the back. She stirred in the deep sleep, seemed to revolve to the finger-point, fluttered her eyes again. “Tamara,” Wulff said, “please get up.”
    She rolled toward him, her eyes still closed. “I don’t want to get up,” she said.
    “You can go back to sleep in just a minute.”
    “I don’t want to sleep either.” She pivoted on her back, opened her arms. “Do you want to hold me?” she said. “I want to hold you, Avenger.”
    “Not now.”
    “Can’t I hold you, Avenger? I’ve wanted to hold you for so long. You can do anything to me you want.” Her eyes opened then, slightly and suddenly, her mouth poised into a smile more open than he had ever seen, her breasts straining against her sweater. She was very pretty. He should have seen that all along. How had he not been able to see it? Tamara was a very attractive girl.
    “Come,” she said, “come here now.” She put a hand against his lips. “It’s all right,” she said, “it’s all right. I don’t mind. I want you.”
    “No,” he said, feeling the gentle pressure of her finger, and with that pressure it was like moving back into an abcess of memory he had deserted a long time ago, thin tubes of sensation opened within him and he felt the stirrings of old, grey liquids which slowly moved through him. And more insistent than all of this was a sensation of tenderness, and it was this, more than anything else, which stopped him from what he otherwise might have been tempted to do. Not the men staked out in the car, not the attache case and its thousand horrid reasons why he had come to San Francisco—he could have dealt with any of these; he might even have been able to deal with the memory of Marie Calvante who was, after all, and he could now admit this, dead.
    But he could not deal with the tenderness. Because a dead man could not, would not, must not feel tenderness and Wulff had worked himself into a territory now where the only way he could operate at all was if he calculated himself to be dead. A dead man could exact penalties but he could not be destroyed himself. A dead man knew the darkness and there was no greater darkness into which he could be dragged. Only the living felt fear, only the living would be able to calculate the odds against him and the furious quest of revenge that he had set himself upon in New York months before. He would not join them. If tenderness would vault himself into the land of the living he could not afford it.
    Later on he might be able to deal with the two of them together. The ability to feel and the ability to go on and do the job that must be done. But not now. He was not ready. It was as simple as all that. It was too early.
    He pressed a hand against the bed and came away from her, gently, but so quickly that she must have felt it only as a kind of ferocity. “No,” he said, “no, Tamara.”
    She caught the force in his voice and something seemed to collapse within her. “All right,” she said. “All right. See if I care, Avenger.”
    “I have to go now,” he said. “I may be back, I may not. But I wanted to tell you that I was going.”
    “All right.”
    “You may hear some shooting and some excitement downstairs. There are two men sitting in a car waiting for me and they’re going to have bad luck and find me. But nothing