The Clan of the Cats

by Robert Adams

  “Oh, if only I . . .”

  * * *

  A brace of his uncle’s bodyguards collected James Bedford’s luggage and effects and they arrived at the senator’s tightly guarded suburban residence at almost the same time as the elected legislator and his guest. James had been to the house in times past, but only for meals or small, informal gatherings.

  While they had awaited the senator’s copter on the roof of his office building, he had said. “You could’ve been put up in one of the so-called security-guest areas of several of the bigger hotels in town, but security is relative in such places, I’ve found; why, only last month one of those wild-eyed terrorist types got into one of them long enough to thoroughly kill a Turkish businessman before being cut almost in half at the waist by a guard’s machine pistol.”

  James Bedford sighed. “Armenian or Greek, this time?”

  The senator shrugged. “Neither . . . that is so far known. No, the perp had jumped a ship in Baltimore Harbor two weeks before, a Turkish-registered ship, at that. But, clearly, someone or some group had brought him here, hidden him, armed him, briefed him, gotten him into and up there. The only certain thing is that he’ll never be persuaded to tell us anything now.

  “No, the security-guest thing is obviously fallible, as full of holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese. My place, on the other hand, is about as safe as anyplace can be these days — protected by state-of-the-art equipment and a small but well-trained staff. Hell, James, it would take the likes of a platoon of air cavalry to get into the place, and even then they’d know damned well that they’d been in a fight.”

  Over dinner, the elder Bedford said, “Actually, I should’ve thought to invite you out here, overnight, anyway; I don’t see enough of any of the family anymore, it seems, and, between mistresses as I currently am, there’s no one to talk to out here except servants or bodyguards I don’t suppose I could persuade you to phone and reschedule your appointments, then stay over until one of the agencies determines just who was trying to snatch you and why, could I?”

  Chewing industriously at a gobbet of octopus, James could only shake his head.

  The senator nodded. “I thought not, but it was worth a try to me.” His voice sounded a bit sad and wistful.

  Finally swallowing, James asked, “What happened to . . . Sidonia, was it? She was your most recent, wasn’t she?”

  His uncle smiled. “No, you’re a bit out of date. Sidonia met and wed an Argentine chap, that was almost two years ago; I gave her away at the ceremony, in addition to paying for her trousseau and for the minor surgical procedure that restored her hymen.”

  “That did what?” James burst out, almost dropping his salad fork.

  “Restored Sidonia’s hymen, my boy, gave her the semblance of virginity for her wedding night. You or I wouldn’t’ve given much of a damn, of course, but to certain cultures, such things are still extremely important,” Taylor Bedford replied before forking half a cherry tomato and a soupçon of greens into his mouth.

  “Where in hell did she meet this antique gentleman?” asked James. “At a meeting of the Neanderthal Society?”

  Chewing, Taylor wrinkled his brows in thought, swallowed, then shook his head. “Never heard of a Neanderthal Society, James, but then we both have our own narrow fields of specialities. No, I believe they met at some charity function of the Roman Catholic diocese. I think that was it.”

  James snorted. “Figures. Saint Sidonia the Retreaded Virgin. So, how many came after her, Uncle?”

  “Only one, James, a young woman who called herself Deirdre and claimed to be French-Danish . . . but wasn’t. She and her employers had gone to great lengths to cover her well and very deeply, and she was basically a nice girl, I think; at least I was already becoming rather fond of her when I was presented with more than enough evidence that I had been, in effect, nurturing a potential viper in my bosom. Bringing her into the city and turning her over for interrogation — with all that I know about those procedures — was one of the most difficult things I ever have had to do And, in the end, it was all for nothing; she managed to remove a false tooth and bit into the cyanide capsule it contained before her interrogation had gotten beyond the stage of threats and the presentation of before-and-after photos of previous suspects.” Infinite sadness was evident in the older man’s tone and eyes.

  * * *

  “Oh, you poor bastard.” said Milo aloud and with sincere feeling, reading the words in the journal of the younger Bedford, there in that underground lamplit room, so many scores of years after the deaths of both the Bedfords and most of humanity. “You poor, poor old bastard.”

  Abruptly, his memory dredged up the scene in the dusty camp — that nameless security installation somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946. Holding in his arms the just-dead body of the Russian woman who had called herself Betty, the woman whom he had begun to love, the woman with whom he had sexed bare hours before, the woman from whose open lips arose the bitter-almond reek of cyanide.

  It had been in the aftermath of that terrible morning that he had left the operation headed up by Eustace Barstow. “I told him and myself that I was just tired of watching people die. Little did I know then just how much more dying would be brought about by the defection from his terribly important cause of me and people like me. And by the early seventies, by which time I knew, it was really too late for him or an army of hims to do anything that would’ve done anyone any good. And that’s just about what he told me that night in my hotel room, right after I was brought back from ’Nam, too.”

  Staring at the ice he was swirling around in his glass, the general officer in mufti had said sadly. “Thank you for the offer, Milo, but you made it about a quarter century too late. Had I had you and a few others even as late in the game as ’forty-eight or ’forty-nine . . . who knows? But now? Well, as one of my wives used to say, ‘Too much water has gone over the bridge’.”

  He had thrown down the drink, placed the glass on the table and fixed Milo with a stare. “Now, my friend, the world is bound irrevocably for hell in the proverbial bucket. Only a true miracle will stop it, and I’ve no faith in miracles. When will it happen? Well, it could be happening, the incident that will set off our Götterdämmerung, even as we two sit here tonight, but I rather doubt it, really. No, I give a minimum of twenty years and it might even go on as long as fifty years before we have true hell on this earth. But fifty is the maximum. Neither of us will live to see it, thank God.”

  Remembering, Milo thought, “How wrong he was. I didn’t live to see much of it, true, but I heard about it from points all over the globe on that radio. And what little I did actually witness was pure hell and no mistake.”

  The general had continued, “No, Milo, the time is now long past when you could help me or I could help anyone . . . almost. But I still owe you, owe you more than I could ever repay, really, and I still have a fairly good, fairly effective and powerful organization with which I can help you . . . if you’ll let me.” The officer stood, stepped across the room and built himself yet another drink, then turned and took his seat on the edge of the bed once more.

  Milo had just shaken his head. “General, I can’t think of how you could help me or exactly why I would need your help . . . or that of anybody else, for that matter. Look, the very worst that any of these leftist liberals could do would be to cashier me, throw me out of the army without a pension, maybe with a DD, though I doubt any of them would dare go so far, not in the case of a career officer who’s been through three damned wars. Even on the far-outside chance that this McGovern wins, no new administration is going to want to start off its hegemony with that kind of a stench to dog it through the next four years.

  “And even in the worst scenario, General, the last things I need are a pension and VA benefits to sustain me. Did you forget? Another general, my late buddy, Jethro Stiles, left me heir to an obscene amount of money and possessions. Yes, I’d miss the army after so many long years in it, but I
sure as hell won’t starve or be anything approaching impoverished, not if I live another hundred years.”

  “You’re most likely right about things, Milo,” said Barstow, tiredly. “Nonetheless, I’ll see that the skids are greased well for you, see that you get the kind of send-off your years of loyal service if nothing else merit you.” When Milo opened his mouth, Barstow waved a hand, saying, “No, no protests, my old friend. It will be no slightest trouble for me and mine, and, moreover, it will give me the chance and the great pleasure to jam a handful of stinging nettles up certain hemorrhoidal left-liberal arses over there in the puzzle factory, then be serenaded by the sweet music of their shrieks of outrage and agony.

  “But I’ll also be leaving you a card on which will be some telephone numbers and a couple of addresses for me. When, if, you ever need me, need any help I can give, call or wire or write me, Please promise me, Milo.”

  * * *

  Milo was vouschafed less than a week to enjoy wearing the silver eagles of his full-colonelcy before they were replaced with the single stars of a brigadier general, and within yet another week he was officially retired. After a brief trip to New York City and a few days spent with the aging attorney who had handled most of his affairs for a quarter century, he purchased a new automobile and drove back down through New Jersey, Maryland and the District of Columbia into northern Virginia. In no rush to get anywhere for any purpose, he drove in a leisurely manner, enjoying the sights of a peaceful, undevastated countryside, roads that might own a few potholes here and there but no shell craters, streets with green lawns upon which well-fed children played children’s games.

  Lulled by the steady throb of the big automobiles powerful eight-cylinder engine, he rolled along highways between fields of growing crops and pastures on which grazed sleek cattle or leggy, well-bred horses, with nowhere a rusting carcass of a tank or APC or SP-gun, no burned-out trucks or shattered jeeps hulks.

  It was an intensely soothing trip for him and he deliberately strung it out, made it last, driving only so far as he wished each succeeding day, then finding a place to stay each night — tourist court, motel or real hotel, whatever was available at the time and the place and took his fancy of the moment.

  He dined simply or elegantly or not at all in the same mode as he lodged, dependent mostly upon what facilities were there, were available wherever he decided to stop — Nabs and Cokes, hot dogs or hamburgers with french fries and malteds, chow mein and beer, Chateaubriand and vintage wines, all were the same to him and all were equally enjoyed in an unhurried manner, for he felt — to use the old-army expression — that he had the rest of his life to do this in . . . though he could not then have imagined just how long the rest of his life was to be.

  Other than the various potables consumed with his meals, Milo drank very little on the protracted trip down from New York to Virginia. Nor was his near-abstinence because he did not like spirits or lack a head for them, he just felt a need to see and feel what he saw and felt unaffected by drugs or stimulants.

  Benighted somewhere on the road from Baltimore to the District, he found himself seated in a bar enjoying a preprandial couple of whiskies before walking next door for dinner. While the paunchy bartender slowly polished glasses, most of the other patrons — clearly locals — sipped draft beer and watched the news on the television fitted into the paneled wall above the bartender’s bald head.

  Concentrating on enjoyment of the pleasant burn, the smoky fumes of the alcohol in mouth and gullet, Milo did not at first hear the man who stood before him, beyond the shiny bar.

  “Ready for another’n, sir?” smiled the bartender, with a real diffidence, for damned few of his customers were in the habit of ordering double Chivases, much less tipping handsomely with the service of each drink.

  Milo glanced down at the small swallow or so of whiskey left in the old-fashioned glass and shrugged. “Why not? Yes, one more, please.”

  As the bartender approached with the fresh drink, the outer door opened and a slight young man entered and limped up to the bar a few feet down from Milo, at whom he smiled and nodded in a polite manner. The man appeared to be in his twenties. In addition to the limp, his face and the backs of his hands were covered with shiny scar tissue. Milo had seen that kind of scarring before, over the years, and could make a pretty shrewd guess as to just what had caused it.

  Spying the newcomer, the bartender’s thick lips moved in an almost soundless “Oh, shit.” and he hurriedly glanced back at the knot of locals grouped before the television, but as they were rapt by the medium, he set the glass before Milo with a flourish, accepted the payment and tip with a smile and a nod, then passed swiftly down to lean as far as his belly would let him across the bar toward the scarred man.

  “Gawddammit, Billy,” Milo heard him urgently whisper, “won’t what Bubba done to you the lastest time enough? He ain’t seed you yet, so get to hell out, ’fore he does. Mist’ Chamberlin, he ain’t over here to drag Bubba and them off of you t’night, an by the time I could get the cops out here, you’d be dogmeat, and you knows it, too. Please, just leave, huh?”

  But it was too late.

  “Hey!” Milo heard a nasal voice ring from up the bar. “Hey, yawl, look who’s here. The fuckin’ baby-burner’s done come back to finish gettin’ his lumps. I got dibs on bashin’ the fucker first. Who wants to hol’ him for me, huh?”

  Chapter X

  Rocking slightly from the amounts of beer he had poured down his throat since he had gotten off work at the sand and gravel quarry, the big, rawboned man stalked up the bar, his fists clenched and cocked, the light of joyful sadism shining from his pale, bloodshot eyes.

  “Now, goddammitall, Bubba,” the bartender half-shouted, “you and them leave Billy alone, you hear? He’s a disabled vet’run, he cain’t fight you even was you to fight fair, one on one, and you knows it, too.

  “You jest tend to your own fuckin’ bizness, Chester,” said the big man, echoed by the two now coming in his wake. “ ’Lest we hev to whup your fat ass, too. Thet lil gal I useta fuck down in D.C., she tol’ me all bout these fuckin’ baby-burners and all. And I ain’t gone have none the fuckers drinkin’ in any bar I drinks in, hear?

  “You know how poorly I was for a long time, how plumb bad I felt when the fuckin’ jarheads wouldn’t take a big whole man like me, but took that gawdam little skinny pissant of a fuckin’ half-breed injun, there? The fuckers, they said I was soniethin’ like moshunly unstable or suthin’. But I’m fuckin’ glad them bastids didn’t take me, now, ’r the fuckin’ army neither, too, ’cause then they’d be calling me a fuckin’ baby-burner, too.”

  The bartender headed purposefully toward the far end of the bar, one hand in a pocket that jingled with change. But one of the two following the instigator turned, anticipating, and ripped the wire of the coin phone’s handset loose from the box. Grinning at the thus-stymied bartender, he headed back toward the helpless victim awaiting them.

  Standing, Milo stepped into the path of the trio of toughs. “If you’re so anxious to use those knuckles, you overgrown ape, why not try them on a man closer to your size, a man who isn’t crippled and can fight you back? Or do you lack the guts? No wonder the army and the marines wouldn’t accept you, you oversized, gutless cretin,” he remarked in a conversational tone, smiling the while.

  “You git the hell out’n my way, mister,” ordered Bubba, his face reddening with anger. “I’ll stomp you soon’s I’se done with this fuckin’ baby-burner. I’ll stomp your ass good, too.”

  “Just what is your moronic definition of ‘baby-burner,’ you pig?” demanded Milo. still smiling and seemingly friendly, “Or have you ever troubled your pea-brain enough to define it?”

  The big man stopped then, still red-faced and with clenched, cocked fists, but now with his forehead wrinkling up. “Wal, it’s like thet gal I useta fuck down ta D.C. useta say, anybody as was in the in . . . naw, unjust war over to Vietnam was bound to be one them damn baby-burners, wha
t burnt up lil babies alive jest for fun.”

  “And you never once wondered at whether or not this nameless woman was telling the truth or even was of sound mind? Consider, any woman who would willingly have sex with such a thing as you would have to be a mental basket case, as emotionally unstable as the Marine Corps and U.S. Army found you to be, you hulking lunatic,” said Milo, ignoring what sounded like a low moan from the fat, trembling bartender.

  Milo’s friendly smile suddenly became a mocking grin as he asked, “Or did she actually have sex with you at all, Bubba? I, for one, would doubt it. Things like you usually have three kinds of sex: what you buy from cheap whores, what you think about and what you talk about, generally out of the whole cloth, the lies that lead others to think you far more of a man than you really are or will ever be.

  “So, isn’t that it, Bubba? Didn’t you lie about this little gal in D.C.? Or was it really a little boy, eh? The men who talk the most about their vast and varied female conquests amazingly often turn out to be closet faggots. Is that what you are, Bubba? Do you get your jollies going to dark moviehouses on Saturday afternoons to jerk off little boys in the dark? Isn’t that the —”

  With a roar of pure rage from a wide-open mouth in a livid face that also now contained eyes filled with bloodlust, the huge man swung a big, knobby fist at Milo’s mocking face. Milo easily ducked the roundhouse swing and, as the man’s own force spun him half about, gave him the toe of one shoe in the right kidney.