The Language of Cannibals

by George C. Chesbro

  Under any other circumstances I would have half expected my brother to faint dead away after being kissed on the lips by Mary Tree, but now he was tightly focused on the matter at hand, all business. “Let’s get out of here,” he said curtly.

  I sat up as Mary turned on the engine and, still leaving her lights off, eased forward out of the alley into a parking lot by the emergency room entrance, then proceeded to the street. Garth motioned for me to lie down again, which I did, and he ducked out of sight.

  “Drive around awhile, Mary,” he continued, his voice muffled by the seat between us. “We want to make sure we’re not being followed.”

  “Right,” Mary replied, and made a left turn. She switched on her lights, drove a block, and made another left turn, then started up a hill. I saw her shift her head to look down at Garth and heard a sharp intake of breath. “Garth, is that a gun?” she asked tightly.

  “It most certainly is.”

  “Garth, do you really think it’s necessary to—?”

  “Mary, listen to me,” Garth said in a firm voice that had a touch of coldness in it. “I know you’re a pacifist. For the life of me, I’ve never understood how a person who lives on this planet could be a pacifist, but that’s neither here nor there. I suppose it’s a perfectly workable philosophy, just as long as some soldier in an opposing army doesn’t have you lined up in his sights. Right now it looks like there are people who mean to see us dead; unfortunately they’re not pacifists. I don’t intend to cooperate. If I so much as get a glimpse of this Gregory Trex or Jay Acton or anybody else who means to harm you or my brother, I am going to put a bullet through that man’s brain. I’m telling you this up front, just so there’ll be no misunderstanding on your part if we meet up with any of these men. If the idea of killing or the sight of blood offends you, look away. I will kill them. Clear?”

  Garth had never had any problems in making himself understood; there was no need for Mary to reply, and she didn’t. However, judging from the stiff angle at which she held her head, she was now considerably more tense as she continued to drive through Cairn’s night streets, occasionally going around a block, and once even abruptly making a U-turn and reversing direction. After one right turn she accelerated. The car kept going in a straight line, and I guessed that we were up on 9W. Not knowing how much Garth had told her over the phone, I used the time to fill Mary in on the details of what I’d learned at the meeting with Harry Peal, the fruits of my preliminary computer search, what had happened at the police station later Sunday afternoon, and the subsequent ambush. She listened without interrupting, an occasional, sibilant hiss her only show of emotion.

  “How does it look, Mary?” Garth asked quietly when I finished.

  I watched as she craned her neck to again glance in the rearview mirror. “I think we’re in the clear,” she replied evenly.

  “All right,” Garth said, “let’s head for your place.” He sat up, looked back at me. “How’s the head holding up, brother?”

  I sat up, groaned. “Don’t ask.”

  Mary turned around and headed back toward Cairn. Ten minutes later we were at the Community of Conciliation mansion. Just before she pulled into the long driveway, Mary turned off her lights. As we approached the looming, gabled structure she pulled off the gravel drive, drove on the lawn around to the back of the mansion, then turned off the engine. The digital display on the dashboard clock read 4:08. To the right, sixty or seventy yards down the sloping lawn, the Hudson gleamed silver in the moonlight.

  Mary got out, then motioned for us to do the same. We stepped out onto the lawn, and with Garth supporting me with a large, strong hand under my left armpit, we followed her the short distance from the car to the mansion. She opened a screen door, which led into a pantry area off a huge kitchen. To our left, barely visible in the moonlight that spilled in through the doorway, was a cobweb-covered door that creaked on its hinges as she opened it. Placing our hands on the wall to our right to guide us in the darkness, we started up a narrow, winding flight of stairs that, judging from the thick curtains of cobwebs that brushed across my face and clung to my flesh, hadn’t been used since sometime around the Revolutionary War. After two flights of this I was beginning to feel nauseous and dizzy, but I concentrated on taking deep, measured breaths and placing one foot after the other on the stairs.

  On the fourth floor Mary pushed open another door, led us out of the staircase into a musty-smelling corridor that was dimly, eerily illuminated by moonlight streaming in through a large stained-glass window at the opposite end. She led us into the third room on the right, closed the door, and turned on the light. I looked around, saw piles of broken furniture, steamer trunks, dozens of standing lamps without bulbs, assorted bric-a-brac. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. I turned to Mary, found her staring at me; her face was ashen, her eyes filled with alarm. I felt the warm blood on the lid of my left eye a moment before it oozed into the eye itself. Suddenly I was in total darkness.

  “Mongo, you’re bleeding!”

  “Mmm,” I replied as Garth grabbed me under the arms, marched me back a few steps, and planted me in the depths of an overstuffed armchair. A cloud of dust rose up around me, and I sneezed.

  Garth wiped the blood away from my eye with his handkerchief, then began carefully unwrapping the bandage from my head. “I’ll need fresh bandages, alcohol, and lots of cotton swabbing,” he said over his shoulder to Mary, who continued to look very pale. “Do you think you can find those things around here?”

  Mary swallowed hard, nodded. “Yes. We have medical supplies. I’ll get them.”

  But she didn’t move.

  “Don’t panic, Mary,” Garth said in the same quiet, soothing tone as he continued to unwrap my bandages. “And don’t worry. The hardest part of Mongo is his head, and we know there’s no fracture. Just get the bandages and alcohol, and try not to be seen. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Mary replied in a small voice, and then hurried from the room.

  Garth, who was kneeling on the floor in front of me, finished his unwrapping job. He dropped the blood-soaked bandages on the floor, then wrinkled his nose as he studied the gash above my right eye.

  “How does it look?” I asked.

  “Gory. Want to see?”

  “Why not? I’ve never seen my own brains, and I need something to cheer me up.”

  Garth got to his feet and rummaged around in the surrounding piles of junk until he found a cracked hand mirror, which he brought back to me. I looked at myself in the mirror, decided that, all in all, my head didn’t look as bad as I had expected. The right eye was swollen shut, which was no surprise. Scalp wounds are notoriously bloody, and all the blood was coming from an area above my right eye where two or three of the dozen or so stitches closing the gash had torn loose. There was also a shaved area the size of a pancake on the right side of my head, just above the ear, and another cut; I counted eight stitches there, and they had held firm.

  “No sign of any brains,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you actually said that. You’re stealing my best lines.”

  A few minutes later Mary came back into the attic storage room, quickly and quietly closing the door behind her. She carried a paper bag, which she set down beside her as she knelt on the floor in front of me. Her face was still ashen, but she didn’t flinch when she saw my wounds, and her voice was steady when she spoke.

  “I’m afraid this is going to hurt a bit, Mongo,” she said as she removed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a thick roll of bandages, and cotton swabbing from the bag. “There’s nobody living on these two upper floors, so you can yell a little bit if you want to.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Mary,” Garth said evenly but firmly as he took the bottle of hydrogen peroxide from her hand. “I like to hear Mongo squeal.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll take care of it. Now, I don’t know about you two, but I’m hungry. We have to keep our energy levels up. Mary, do you suppose yo
u can sneak us all up something to eat?”

  “I think so,” she replied distantly. She studied Garth intently for a few moments, then abruptly got to her feet and once again slipped out through the door.

  I leaned back in the chair and closed my good eye as Garth began his ministrations. He daubed more blood away from my eye and cleansed the wound with peroxide, then fashioned an effective pressure bandage from cotton wadding held in place by surgical tape. As his fingers moved, he had an almost blank stare, and he was humming some tune in a voice so low it was nearly inaudible. His touch and the humming had a near-hypnotic effect, and for the first time since I had awoken in the hospital I was virtually free of pain. When I opened my eye, I was startled to see Mary sitting on the floor a few feet away, staring at Garth as he worked on me. I had not heard the door open or close. Beside her was a silver tray containing a loaf of bread, cold cuts, silverware, a tall pitcher of orange juice, and glasses. It seemed Garth’s usual calming influence had also worked its powers on the woman, for some color had returned to Mary’s face, and she no longer seemed as tense and nervous.

  “It’s not serious, Mary,” Garth said softly, tilting his head back in her direction as he began to quickly and expertly rebandage my head, this time leaving both eyes uncovered. “Just messy. You have to understand my brother. The man craves constant attention, and he’s not past flying his car through the air, banging up his head, and bleeding all over the place just to get sympathy.”

  I tried to think of an appropriate reply, but I didn’t feel I knew Mary Tree well enough yet to employ the obscenities required; besides, I was too tired, if now pleasantly so, to engage in a lot of bantering. I satisfied myself with an exaggerated roll of my good eye.

  The woman removed her bifocals and set them on the floor beside the tray, then brushed her hands back through her long, fine, graying golden hair. She cocked her head slightly and continued to stare at Garth’s profile as he worked on me. There was a strange light in her eyes. “Garth Frederickson,” she said at last in a low, husky, decidedly sexy voice, “we’ve only just met, and yet I have this odd feeling that I’ve known you a very long time. Maybe it’s just that I’ve wanted to know someone like you. I don’t really understand it. There’s no artiface or sham in you, and yet I think you’re the strangest man I’ve ever met.”

  I mumbled, “You’ve got that right, Mary.”

  But the, folksinger had eyes only for Garth and no time for my piquant observations. I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me.

  “There’s such a strange mix in you,” she said, still staring at Garth. “There’s no cruelty in you, and yet I sense a great capacity for violence … even brutality. At the same time there’s this incredible gentleness in you, which is what I’m seeing right now. You’re like some great jungle cat, ready to either purr or pounce at any given moment. I suspect that with some people you display infinite patience, and no patience at all with others. A half hour ago you were prepared to kill two men on sight.”

  “Oh, I’m still prepared to kill those two particular men on sight,” Garth said mildly.

  “I don’t understand how you can live with those kinds of emotional extremes, two personalities which are contradictory, and at war in you.”

  Garth merely shrugged. “I don’t see, or feel, any contradiction. Different types of people elicit different reactions and require different handling.”

  I said, “Garth has never hurt anyone who wasn’t truly deserving, Mary.”

  “Violence begets violence,” the woman said quietly, her tone slightly accusatory, but also uncertain.

  “There’s nothing complicated about me, Mary,” Garth said evenly. “I am what you feel I am.”

  “But what I feel you are would be—is—quite different from what Gregory Trex or Jay Acton would feel if they met up with you.”

  Garth finished bandaging my head, using thin strips of surgical tape to secure the end of the bandage just behind my left ear. It was an excellent job, much better than had been done at the hospital; I felt considerably less pressure on the gash over my right eye and on the wound on the side of my head. Garth studied his handiwork for a few moments, grunted with satisfaction, then turned to face Mary and resumed speaking as if no time had passed between her words and his.

  “Mary, you’re a person who would sacrifice her life to save the life of another. But there are people who would gladly accept your sacrifice and laugh at you as they spat on your corpse. Dying for those kinds of people makes no sense to someone like me; you’ll save far more lives if you just kill them and be done with it. It’s what’s called for, and it’s what they really deserve. To me, your way of thinking is hopelessly complicated, like your behavior. I don’t understand it. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve more than earned the right to think and behave as you like. I think we’re about the same age. At a time long ago when my biggest concerns were pimples and finding ways to get girls to go out with me, you were already a world-class performer, singing on stages around the world and using your music to try to get nations to stop wasting their money on arms and use it to feed their people. You’d fight evil with a song, and that makes you the bravest person I know. I’ve always loved your music, and I’ve always thought you were just about the sexiest woman alive. Those tapes you gave Mongo to give me were a very fine gift, and I thank you.”

  Mary blushed—but she did not take her eyes away from Garth’s. It certainly looked to me like the beginning of a mutual admiration society.

  I said, “Let’s eat.”

  The three of us sat cross-legged on the floor around the tray, making sandwiches from the bread and cold cuts and drinking the fresh-squeezed orange juice. With some food in my stomach, and my swollen right eye beginning to open, I felt a little better; my vision was not quite so blurred, and my headache was no worse than what I might suffer from a serious hangover—pesky, but not hopelessly debilitating.

  “Well, Mongo,” Garth said when we finished eating, “now I think it’s time to evaluate our situation. I’d say we’re in a peck of trouble. What do you say?”

  I looked at Mary, grinned. “That brother of mine is such a perceptive analyst. Some of his insights will take your breath away.”

  Garth smiled benignly at me. “A local loony wants you dead because you embarrassed him. The KGB wants you dead because you can unmask one of their agents. A very powerful right-winger and his FBI buddy would probably be just as happy if either the KGB or the local loony succeeds in getting you dead, because then you won’t be in a position to embarrass them. The police around here turn out to be local errand boys who are willing to lock you up on a trumped-up murder charge, which has probably been engineered so that some sniper will know where to find you in order to put a bullet through your head. The FBI could probably guarantee your—our—safety, but Culhane’s buddy Hendricks will make sure the FBI doesn’t touch you—us—with a ten-mile-long pole. You’re a fugitive from justice, and a warrant for my arrest is going to be issued just as soon as the police find out you’re missing. Having talked to you means that both Mary and I are marked for death. The FBI will almost certainly ignore what we have to say, the local police can’t guarantee our safety, and there are no good guys in the local vicinity; it seems all the guys around here are bad, hopelessly biased, blind, buffaloed, or simply don’t want to be bothered. Have I left anything out?”

  “No, I think that about covers it.”

  “Now, what’s our next move?”

  “Surely you jest,” I said with a shrug. “Our next move is obvious; we call in the very old, very bald cavalry.”

  “My thinking exactly,” Garth said, and turned to Mary. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

  “There are three, but they’re all down on the first floor—two in our offices, and one for personal use in our recreation room.”

  “You don’t have one in your room?”

  “No.”

  “Can I get down there and use the phone without anyone seeing me?�
��

  Mary grimaced. “I’m not sure, Garth. We have some early risers here. You’d have to go through the main living areas to get to any of the phones, and you’d have to stand out in the open to use them.”

  Garth grunted, then pushed himself to his feet and began searching through the dusty rubble in the storage room. In an old rolltop desk he found yellowed paper and a stub of a pencil. He wrote on the paper, then came back across the room and handed the slip to Mary.

  “This is a number where you can reach a friend of ours,” he said, smiling reassuringly. “His name is Mr. Lippitt. It isn’t necessary that you know who he is or what he does. He’s a heavyweight, and he can guarantee our safety until we get this business all straightened out. When you call that number, somebody will answer by repeating the number. Identify yourself as a friend of Robert and Garth Frederickson, say you want to talk to Mr. Lippitt, and state that it’s a ‘Valhalla priority.”

  Mary studied the name and number on the slip of paper, then looked up at Garth and me. “Valhalla priority? What does that mean?”

  “It’s not important,” Garth said curtly, shaking his head. “After you make the call, you’ll forget those words, Mr. Lippitt’s name, and the number. Also, please destroy the paper immediately. What will happen is that you’ll get through to Mr. Lippitt at once, with no questions asked, no matter where he is. He won’t have much to say, and he’ll probably be suspicious because he doesn’t know you. Just tell him what’s happened; tell him everything Mongo told you. Tell him where we are, and why we need him to help us get out of here. There should be men here within the hour to take us out, maybe by helicopter.”

  “Wow,” Mary said softly as she once again looked at the slip of paper in her hand.