Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler

plunged.
    “Nietzsche,” I said, “is hardly the companion for a hot afternoon.”
    He turned his head slowly and examined me.
    His thin cheeks had more color in them now than on the night before; but in his blue eyes there was no longer misery. They expressed a more immediate emotion—suspicion. I saw the muscles at the corner of his mouth tighten.
    He removed his pipe and started refilling it. His voice when he spoke was casually deliberate.
    “You are probably right. But I was not seeking companionship.”
    At any other time this rebuff would have reduced me to miserable silence. Now I persevered.
    “Do people read Nietzsche nowadays?”
    It was a fatuous question.
    “Why shouldn’t they?”
    I blundered on.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I thought he was unfashionable.”
    He took his pipe out of his mouth and looked at me over his shoulder.
    “Do you know what you are talking about?”
    I was tired of this.
    “Frankly, no. I merely wanted to talk.”
    For a moment he glared at me; then his thin lips relaxed into a smile. It was a very good smile and infectious. I smiled, too.
    “Years ago,” I said, “a fellow student of mine used to spend hours telling me why Nietzsche was a great man. Personally, I foundered on Zarathustra.”
    He put his pipe between his teeth, stretched himself, and looked at the sky.
    “Your friend was wrong. Nietzsche
might
have been a great man.” He flicked the book lying on his knees with his forefinger. “This is his earliest work and there are seeds of greatness in it. Fancy diagnosing Socrates as a decadent. Morality as a symptom of decadence! What a conception. But what do you think he wrote about it about twenty years later?”
    I was silent.
    “He said that it smelt shockingly Hegelian. And he was quite right. Identity is the definition only of a simple, immediate, dead thing, but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality. Only in so far as a thing has in itself contradiction does it move, does it possess an impulse and activity.” He shrugged. “But what the young Neitzsche perceived with Hegel, the old Nietzsche despised. The old Nietzsche went mad.”
    I was having difficulty in following this. I said, rather uneasily: “I haven’t seen you bathing.”
    “I do not bathe, but I will play you a game of Russian billiards if you like. Or perhaps you call it bagatelle?”
    It was said distastefully. He had the air of a man bowing ungraciously to the inevitable.
    We went inside.
    The Russian billiard-table was in one corner of the lounge. We commenced to play in silence. In ten minutes he had beaten me easily. As he made the winning stroke he straightened his back and grinned.
    “That wasn’t very amusing for you,” he said. “You’re not very good at it, are you? Would you like another game?”
    I smiled. His manner was abrupt, almost brusque, but there was something tremendously sympathetic about him. I felt myself wanting to be friendly. I had almost forgotten that this was Suspect Number One.
    I said I would like another game. He turned the scoring dials back to zero, chalked his cue, and leaned forward to make the first shot. The light from the window falling on his face threw the rather wide cheekbones into relief, modeled the tapering cheeks, put a highlight on to the broad forehead. It was a beautiful head for a painter. The hands, too, were good; large, but finely proportioned, and firm and precise in their movements. His fingers lightly grasping the cue moved it easily across the thumb of his left hand. His eye was on the red ball when he spoke.
    “You’ve had some trouble with the police, haven’t you?”
    It was said as casually as if he were asking the time. Thenext moment there was a crash as three balls dropped in quick succession.
    I tried to be equally casual.
    “Good shot! Yes, there was a mistake over my passport.”
    He moved round the table slightly to alter the alignment of the balls.
    “Yugoslav, aren’t you?”
    Only one ball