He side-glanced to Dalla again; she nodded.  The relationship between Zinganna and Salgath Trod hadn’t been purely business with her; there had been some real affection.  He told her what had happened, and when he reached the point at which Salgath Trod had called Tortha Karf to confess complicity in the slave trade, her lips tightened and she nodded.

“I was afraid it was something like that,” she said.  “For the last few days, well, ever since the news about the slave trade got out, he’s been worried about something.  I’ve always thought somebody had some kind of a hold over him.  Different times in the past, he’s done things so far against his own political best interests that I’ve had to believe he was being forced into them.  Well, this time they tried to force him too far.  What then?”

Vall continued the story.  “So we’re keeping this hushed up, for a while.  The way we’re letting it out, Salgath Trod is still alive, on Police Terminal, talking under narco-hypnosis.”

She smiled savagely.  “And they’ll get frightened, and frightened men do foolish things,” she finished.  She hadn’t been a politician’s mistress for nothing.  “What can I do to help?”

“Tell us everything you can,” he said.  “Maybe we can be able to take such actions as we would have taken if Salgath Trod had lived to talk to us.”

“Yes, of course.”  She got another cigarette from the case Vall had laid on the table.  “I think, though, that you’d better give me a narco-hypnosis.  You want to be able to depend on what I’m going to tell you, and I want to be able to remember things exactly.”

Vall nodded approvingly and turned to Dalla.

“Can you handle this, yourself?” he asked.  “There’s an audio-visual recorder on now; here’s everything you need.”  He opened the drawers in the table to show her the narco-hypnotic equipment.  “And the phone has a whisper mouthpiece; you can call out without worrying about your message getting into Zinganna’s subconscious.  Well, I’ll see you when you’re through; you bring Zinganna to Police Terminal; I’ll probably be there.”

He went out, closing the door behind him, and went down the hall, meeting the officer who had taken charge of the butler and housemaid.

“We’re having trouble with them, sir,” he said.  “Hostile.  Yelling about their rights, and demanding to see a representative of Proletarian Protective League.”

Vall mentioned the Proletarian Protective League with unflattering vulgarity.

“If they don’t cooeperate, drag them out and inject them and question them anyhow,” he said.

The detective-lieutenant looked worried.  “We’ve been taking a pretty high hand with them as it is,” he protested.  “It’s safer to kill a Citizen than bloody a Prole’s nose; they have all sorts of laws to protect them.”

“There are all sorts of laws to protect the Paratime Secret,” Vall replied.  “And I think there are one or two laws against murdering members of the Executive Council.  In case P.P.L. makes any trouble, they aren’t here; they have faithfully joined their beloved master in his refuge on PolTerm.  But one or both of them work for the Organization.”