by M J Engh
“Vodka,” Arslan said flatly. He backed away from the couch and sank into the armchair. He was staring steadily at Rusudan. The bodyguard flashed into clockwork action. One produced a bottle, another a glass. Arslan took the drink in his left hand and looked at it; and slowly, deliberately, he clenched his hand upon it, till the glass broke with a snap and he crunched the pieces in his tightening fist. Blood spurted, squirting between his fingers. He opened his hand slowly, shedding glass fragments and liquor and blood, and still looking blankly at it.
Two of the guards had sprung forwards, one of them jerking out a handkerchief and the other one grabbing Arslan’s forearm, but he shook them off with a wordless grunt, and they backed away. His right hand fastened and tightened on his left wrist, the nails and joints of the fingers standing out pale, and he bowed intently over his locked hands. His blood dribbled slower and slower.
There was a flurry of action at the door. The jeep charged away. Arslan raised his head at last, and his face was absent as a death mask. Now he began to talk, asking questions, giving orders, but his voice was soft and distant, and the eyes in that blank face stayed fixed on Rusudan.
In a few minutes, Dr. Allard was escorted in by the jeep driver. He looked perfunctorily at Rusudan, nodded to me, and turned to Arslan. One of the hovering bodyguard pointed unnecessarily to the wounded hand.
“Now, why do a stupid thing like that?”
I stood up quickly; I thought the doctor had really put his foot in it this time. But Arslan only looked at him, a bleak, defensive look I’d never seen. The doctor spread out Arslan’s hand on the arm of the chair, getting blood on Luella’s doily. “Sure, broken glass is all right; but it can’t compare with tire chains, can it?” He pulled up a chair, settled himself domestically, and went to work. “Stings, doesn’t it?” He was pouring something into the cuts. “Here, I’ll give you a good dose. Now see if you can hold that still while I sew you up.”
The bodyguard crowded close, suspicious and helpless. In a little while the doctor stood up and waved his hand casually towards Rusudan. “You want me to do an examination on her?”
“No.” Strength and timbre had come back into his voice.
“Okay,” the doctor agreed with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
He sprang up, bumping the doctor backwards. His eyes blazed and his face was flushing. “Get out! Out!”
Jack Allard wasn’t the man to be hurried by a tornado. He closed his bag calmly, nodded to me again, and moseyed out. Arslan had stood silent and vibrating. Now he spun on me. He took a handful of my shirt front, and I was on my feet instantly. I didn’t know I could move that fast, but I wasn’t going to be jerked up.
His voice was low and staccato. “Tell me anything that you know about this, tell me anything that can help me. Do not quibble about words now. You understand. Tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I know nothing about it, thank God, and I don’t want to know anything.”
He let go of me slowly. “If you learn anything, at any time, by any means, you will tell me at once.” Something blazed suddenly in his face. “If you betray me, sir, you will beg me to let you die,” he cried, and whirled away from me. A moment later he was snapping out orders. One of the soldiers waved me brusquely towards the stairs. The last I saw of Arslan, he was sinking back into the armchair, and he was still talking.
No, I didn’t want to know anything about it. That night I lay awake, trying not to think. I couldn’t afford it. And lying there with open eyes in the dark, I felt an ugly joy in my soul. If only it had been done outside of Kraft County!
I took a deep breath and willed that joy away. I was ready to stake my life that it hadn’t been done by anybody in the KCR. Nobody in my organization would make such an all-out mistake. Not now, above all, when we were so near to starting the upheaval that was to put the world back on its track. Revenge was sweet, sure; there’d be plenty of people who felt the same vicious little joy I did when they got the news, plenty of nice ladies who’d nod their heads and say, “It served her right.” But Kraftsville had taken on an expert. If you betray me … It was the first personal threat he’d ever given me, and unfortunately I had no doubt he could make it good.
All through that night they were coming and going. There were hoofbeats—usually one or two horses, sometimes more. A jeep drove up, later another; after a while they left. Rusudan’s women had been brought down early, and Hunt shortly after. I had fallen into a sickly doze when I heard a cry from below, and then a whole chorus of shrieks and moaning wails. Luella sat up and clutched at me. “What is it?”
“Put the pillow over your head.” And pretty soon she did. There was something funny about those shrieks; they didn’t have exactly the wholehearted spontaneousness of cries of pain. After a while, they stopped as suddenly as if they’d been cut off by a switch.
I had slept and waked again to hear the first roosters crowing, when Arslan’s quick step drummed up the stairs. He paused at our door and said something (the sentry must have been posted there while I was asleep) and went on to his own room. From then on, there was an irregular stream of footsteps up and down. I went to sleep again to that ragged beat.
Luella woke me with breakfast on a tray. “This is just to get you started,” she said. “There’s plenty more downstairs. I would have let you sleep, but I thought you’d better have something in your stomach.” She was right; I could feel the warning sensations already. “You’ll have to go down for your coffee. I knew if I brought it up you’d drink it the first thing.”
It was already nine o’clock. Arslan was still in his room, where he’d had breakfast. Hunt was locked in. Luella had tried to take him some breakfast, too, but the soldiers wouldn’t let her get near the door. She thought Arslan had forgotten about him. The women had fared better. A couple of them had been allowed to bring Sanjar down to eat, and Luella said they’d gone back with enough food for a week. Arslan had come out just long enough to claim Sanjar. The boy had been in his father’s room nearly two hours now.
The sentry let me pass with hardly a look. Downstairs the house was deserted. Rusudan was gone. There was a clean afghan on the couch.
My coffee tasted very good, rich and warm and heartening. There was no use fretting over the hours I’d wasted. The thing now was to get out and try to find out. I’d enjoyed the comfort of ignorance as long as I wanted to.
I had more to tell the KCR that morning than they had to tell me. But there were a few items of information. She had been found in the edge of the woods on the old Karcher place, not far from the road. That whole area had been sealed off, and Nizam’s men had been in and out all right. Dr. Allard’s off-the-cuff diagnosis wasn’t the only evidence that she’d been beaten with tire chains; a set of them had disappeared yesterday from the camp. Just about anybody could have picked them up. The Russians tended to get sloppy whenever they were allowed to, and the chains had just been piled in a heap of gear outside their fence.
The Turkistanis had been very busy. They were going over the district with a fine-tooth comb, questioning everybody. Whether they’d found the tire chains, or anything else, nobody knew. Nobody was allowed to budge out of his home without special permission—apparently I’d been granted the special permission. Nevertheless, news was getting around. The KCR was functioning, like the lungs of a sleeping man.
The Russians were confined to camp. Maybe they were getting the same comprehensive once-over as the civilians, or maybe Arslan just wanted them out of the way. If a Russian soldier had done it (and nobody would have had a better chance), we would have to write him off; the Russians were, for the moment, totally out of our hands, and at best they were too numerous and too anonymous. We had to work on the assumption that this murder was a native product.
One thing you could just about bet on: when there was anything really nasty going on, Ollie Schuster was going to be involved in it.
Kraftsville had always had pretty nearly its share of shift
less no-accounts. Ollie had been no good even when he was young, and age had made him meaner without making him any smarter or more industrious. A lot of people, including me, thought he had been mixed up in what we still referred to as Kraftsville’s crime wave, a few years before Arslan appeared, when quite a series of local businesses had been hit by vandalism and even arson. He had certainly been arrested, at one time or another, for everything from drunkenness to indecent exposure. He lived now with his widowed niece in one of the shacky little houses on the north edge of town, not far from Torey McArthur, not far from Leland Kitchener.
I visited Jack Allard, and he made a house call to the McArthurs—as a doctor he was able to get the necessary permission—and somehow word seeped across the back yards from there. By midafternoon Susie Mitchell’s house had burned to the ground, and Susie, with a wet rag on her forehead, was resting on her neighbor Leland Kitchener’s couch, while her Uncle Ollie sat in the kitchen with Leland. It was a pretty drastic method of winning half an hour’s direct conversation, but we were pressed for time.
That was Tuesday. After the fire, we sat tight. But Arslan’s machine rolled on, through that day, through that night. “I don’t think he’s eaten anything since breakfast yesterday,” Luella said to me Wednesday morning. “And he surely hasn’t slept at all.”
“Don’t tell me you’re worrying about Arslan,” I said.
“Well, I suppose he’s human.”
He hadn’t left the house. He hadn’t spoken to me or to Luella since Monday night. We had never been questioned, and nobody had offered to restrict my movements in any way. In all likelihood, Arslan was eager to have me play detective; I might serve as a telltale to lead them to the quarry, or as a sponge to soak up information and then be squeezed.
But that morning the sentry at the front door sent me back to my room. And when all the breakfasts were over with, Luella was sent up to join me. She came and stood beside me at the window, and together we watched.
The town was filling up, the way it used to do on Saturdays when I was young, when all the farmers would come in for the week’s trading and gossip. But today people weren’t coming by choice. They were being herded. There was a cordon of soldiers around the schoolground, standing along the far sides of all four streets with their guns at the ready. They made a very deadly-looking cage. And from all four directions people were pouring into that cage.
“We can go out any time now,” Luella said after a little while. “We’re supposed to go over there.”
“Where’s Hunt?”
“In his room, I suppose. I don’t know, Franklin.”
She sounded very subdued. I asked her if she’d heard anything new downstairs, and she shook her head.
“I just feel like it’s the end. What’s he going to do now?”
“Let’s find out.”
Everybody I talked to had the same story. Arslan’s men had routed them out of their houses and fields and ordered them to go to the school. They were coming in waves—the folks from Baptist Creek, the folks from Reeves Mill, the whole town of Carey in a solid line of wagons. It looked like a clean sweep. Even the bedridden had been loaded into the wagons, and now they had to be unloaded and carried onto the schoolground. All the horses and wagons had to be hitched along the side streets. It was going to be another hot day; the whole neighborhood was already starting to smell like a barnyard. I wondered if it was physically possible to get the entire population of the district into the two square blocks of the schoolground and the adjacent streets.
The sun was high. The early-comers were getting restless—thirsty and sweaty and wanting to go to the toilet. There was still no word of what was going to happen, except for the rumors that churned the crowd. Maybe Arslan was going to produce the murderers. Maybe we were just going to be exhorted, or more likely threatened. Or maybe he was preparing to do a really thorough job of local extermination.
Lieutenant Z appeared at my shoulder, gently urging Luella and me along onto the east walk. Rusudan’s women stood in a dejected knot, with a little space left clear around them, and then a circle of curious and hostile faces. Hunt stood at the edge of the space, not quite a part of the crowd. He looked pale and haggard, but cheerful enough. We nodded to each other.
Then a little procession came down my front walk and speared its way into the crowd. First two soldiers with dogs on leash, then Arslan with Sanjar in his arms, then Nizam, then Arslan’s bodyguard. The crowd split frantically, almost silently, to let them through. They reached the east steps, and the men with the dogs cleared them of people in a matter of seconds. Arslan mounted the steps without pausing and turned to face us. A stillness rolled out over the crowd, and we stood waiting. Now the guards were spreading out, pushing people back, clearing an open space in front of the steps. I put an arm around Luella and held my ground in the jostling, so that when the movement stopped we were near the front rank of people. Nizam mounted the steps to stand a little behind his master, and, as he passed, Arslan put Sanjar into his arms.
He looked at us a few moments longer. He lifted his arms a little way and flexed them in a curious gesture and let them fall. His face, from where I stood, looked like a mask of sorrow, drawn and bleak. Then he lifted his head a little, and his voice rang out: “Ollie Schuster!”
The crowd quivered, as a flash of horrible relief ran through it: Thank God it’s just Ollie.
“Bill T. Carmichael!” Uncertain eddies of sound and movement were beginning here and there. “Fred Gonderling!” Beside me Luella gasped. “Morris Schott!”
That was all. He stood easy and quiet, his arms barely swaying at his sides, and minute by minute his face cleared, as the crowd milled and twisted and muttered, and here and there his men worked their way through it, and at last, across from where Luella and I stood, Ollie Schuster was disgorged into the open space.
Fred Gonderling came forth under his own power and stepped out on the walk, being careful to keep his distance from Ollie. But it took about ten minutes more, and a lot of poking through the crowd with bayonets, before Morris Schott and finally Bill Carmichael were brought out. Fred had tried to say something two or three times, but a gun in front of his face had stopped him.
Now the crowd was quiet again, quieter than ever. People were straining themselves into a desperate silence. In the depth of it, Arslan looked down on the four men and spoke.
“Ollie Schuster and Bill T. Carmichael”—their names sounded quaint and exotic in his foreign mouth—“you have committed murder.” There were bayonets at their throats before they could begin their protests. “Fred Gonderling, you have helped these two. Morris Schott, you have known this and tried to hide it.” He looked up, and out over the crowd, and his chest swelled like a singer’s, and he cried in a voice that rang with exultation, “Now I will kill you!” and only then did his eyes come back to the four men.
The guards fell away to the edge of the open space and took their places in what was now a double circle like concentric gears, the outer ring of rifles facing the crowd, the inner the four scared men. Arslan came down the steps with a movement that made my neck prickle and my arm tighten on Luella’s shoulders—the hard, flowing motion of a dancer, muscle without bone. The holster on his hip was empty; the sheath knife was gone from his belt.
They backed and bunched before him, and Fred Gonderling was making one more try at formal protest. But before their indecisive movements had brought them into any defensive position, Arslan was already on them. With the unhesitating assurance of a trained herd dog cutting out a sheep, he pulled Ollie Schuster away from the others, a long one-handed yank on Ollie’s right arm. The first cry went up from the little arena, a hopeless yelp of pain, or fear, or both; and before it died, Arslan’s other hand rose and fell, and again, in two streaking hammer blows to the back of Ollie’s head as the first pull jerked him past. He crumpled, half on his slack knees, half dangling by the arm in the iron grip. He’s dead, I thought. But instantly Arslan ran his free hand into O
llie’s left armpit, lifting him bodily, and smashed him sidelong down onto the walk. The noise of it was a solid crunch, mechanical and lifeless as breaking machinery or the chunk of a butcher’s cleaver. Luella turned against me.
Arslan spun back to the others, his face drawn taut with a passionate smile. Morris Schott, unexpectedly resolute, dived forward; Arslan met his tackle with a stooping embrace. They skidded and rocked in the dust. Carmichael started forward, hesitated. It was already too late to help Morris. Arslan had flung him loose and was systematically demolishing his head with kicks and stamps. A very eclectic wrestler, I remembered Hunt saying.
Strange noises came from the crowd—cries of protest and exhortation and horror and rage that united and emerged as an inarticulate muttering groan. Carmichael and Gonderling had fled to opposite segments of the circle, as if neither one of them had any hope beyond seeing the other killed first. Gonderling was almost directly in front of us. I leaned forward and bellowed at him, “Stay together, you damned fools! Fight him!”
Fred looked at me with startled eyes. He jerked a glance at Arslan, still occupied with Morris, and took off at a scared run around the circumference of the circle. Pausing in his work, Arslan stood still and watched him. Morris lay twitching; his wrecked head in a puddle of blood. Gonderling and Carmichael braced themselves, shoulder to shoulder. Arslan set one foot deliberately on what had been Morris’s face, and swung across him with a vaulting stride.
He walked into them as if he expected no resistance at all. But Carmichael almost managed to sidestep his belly-punch; it took him grazingly under the ribs, and even at that, it staggered him away from Fred. Now they were separated again, but by the same token Arslan had to turn his back on Fred to follow up Carmichael. From our position, I couldn’t make out the action exactly. I only saw that Arslan waded into Carmichael with fists and knees, and that Fred Gonderling threw himself wildly onto Arslan’s back, flinging his arms around his neck to jerk his head backwards. Arslan hunched under the onslaught, turning spasmodically back towards us. His left hand was knotted under Fred’s gripping arms—saving him, maybe, from strangulation or a broken neck, but otherwise useless for the moment. With his other hand he was reaching behind him to get at Fred. Bill Carmichael righted himself and plunged at Arslan’s unguarded front. A howl went up from the nearer ranks of the crowd as Carmichael’s knee found Arslan’s groin. Bull-like, Arslan swung right and left, right and left again, moving forward staggeringly with every swing. Fred—I thought it was Fred—screamed suddenly, and at the same moment Arslan fell forward bulkily, bearing Carmichael down beneath him. For a few seconds the battle heaved on the ground, three men deep; then Arslan was up and out of it, stepping lightly backwards. He stooped and grabbed Fred’s ankles, just as Fred was rolling onto his side and pushing himself up. One jerk put him flat on his face again. Arslan backed, dragging him partway across the sidewalk; then, with a lifting twist, he half turned him over, dropped his ankles, and leaped forward onto him. He banged Fred’s head on the edge of the walk, and then his hands were on Fred’s throat.