A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet (5 page)

“A bonus? Free, you mean? No charge? That’s very generous of you, Gerber, quite generous, but I don’t know that I really need fifteen.”

“Please, sir. I’d consider it an honor,” and one less mouth to feed, not that he would have fed it for long.

“Well...all right, if you insist.”

The fifteenth infant was, of course, our heroine.

Mr. Gerber received his seventy crowns and disappears from our history, concerning us no more than the fate of the remainder of his stock, which, the reader will readily appreciate, is just as well.

Judikha received her name strictly as a matter of expediency. She was flanked, alphabetically, by Joram, Jorilla and Jotham on one side, and Jugutha, Jumel and Jumieges on the other. Pilnipott got the names from a book,
10,000 Perfect Names for Baby
, which he had stolen the very same week he had first started his enterprise, and was methodically working his way through it. It made no difference to The Fox whether the gender of the names was appropriate: a child received his or her name in the order in which they came, to do otherwise was a niggling detail upon which Pilnipott did not wish to waste time. Probability came to the rescue of most of the students who received names that were, if not particular sonorous, were at least appropriate. Still, there were husky male criminals named Dolores and Cissy and delicately feminine miscreants named Bruto and Edouard, but Pilnipott reasoned that this just made them tougher.

Judikha was at this time, of course, too young to be particularly interested in her surroundings, let alone her name. This did not particularly matter, since her surroundings did not change in all the time she was to remain under Pilnipott’s care. They were no different on the day she arrived then they were ten years later. The operation had established an efficient
status quo
long before her arrival and Pilnipott saw no reason to ever change it. He had created a fine machine that with very little attention methodically transformed useless, unwanted babies into productive, money-generating criminals and like any good engineer he wasn’t about to tamper with what was already perfect. The machine remained unchanging and the children were nothing more than the raw material that passed through it.

All of the children lived together, regardless of age or sex, in a kind of barracks-nursery. As the first class became older, they were put in charge of the younger, and so on until, after several years, there was established an iron-clad order of society and responsibility. This relieved The Fox’s mother, if she was his mother, of considerable burden.

Pilnipott, with his usual careful organization, had arranged the loft somewhat on the plan of an assembly line, with the newest infants at one end of the room and the oldest children at the other, with the remainder graded between according to age. The rows of wooden cots, placed only a couple of feet apart, were not unlike the conveyor belt of an assembly line, with raw material continuously pouring in one end and a finished product coming off the other. Every year, as the infants became old enough to begin their formal training, the two-year-olds moved to the next row of beds further down the room, the three-year-olds to the next and so on. The oldest children, of nine or ten, having no beds to move to, were therefore “graduated” and forced to find lodging outside the school, in whatever way they could, though their ties to The Fox were of course expected to be no less stringently observed.

Judikha’s earliest unambiguous memories were from the age of two or three years. By that time she was already well advanced in her training. There were three reasons for her rapid progress. The first to be exploited by Pilnipott was that she was a particularly appealing-looking child with a pale, fine-boned face and enormous dark eyes. She quickly became the infant of choice by those who were leasing babies from The Fox as props, as it were. Thereby she was exposed earlier and far more often to the outside world than most of her comrades, to say nothing of the role models who were her
de facto
employers. The second reason (and one that soon supplanted the first) was that she grew quickly. Tall for her age, and an early walker, she quickly graduated to more advanced training, while most of the other infants were still little more than toddling props. She developed into a long child, as skinny and lithe and quick as a salamander. A dark child, with mahogany eyes and fine, straight hair the color of oiled teak.

The third reason was her almost preternatural intelligence.

The Judikha of these first few years was a quiet, introspective, shy child who never voluntarily mingled with her surrogate brothers and sisters. She neither made nor encouraged friends. This aloofness at first involved her in a good many brawls with her classmates, who understandably felt slighted. But in addition to her intelligence Judikha was as tough as spring steel and not the least loathe to fight with an imaginative dirtiness against which the mere physical superiority of her enemies was no match. She was soon left alone, which was exactly her intention.

The Fox, after the first few years of his deanship, did not often thereafter take a great deal of interest in his pupils. The ministrations of the woman who may have been his mother, with the aid of trusties selected from the ranks of the eldest children, sufficed for all daily needs, such as they were. Every Friday morning, all were expected to file past his massive oak desk and render unto their master his rightful tithe. He took the offerings silently, entering the amounts in meticulous copperplate hand in the big ledger next to the appropriate names, otherwise neither acknowledging the receipt of the money nor the presence of the child, no more than someone would acknowledge receipt of a candy bar from a vending machine. He never questioned the accuracy of the amounts. They were always correct; on the rare occasions when they were not—when the child had held back a demipfennig or two for whatever purpose seemed important at the time, or for no purpose at all, perhaps, other than daring or rebelliousness—when there was even the slightest shortage, he knew instantly. There was never any need to count the coins. There was something about the way the small fist released its load of warm, moist coins, perhaps, a sense of haste, or of furtiveness, or of ill-feigned casualness, perhaps something entirely psychic—it did not matter because he
knew
and that was all there was to that. He never said a thing at the time because he never spoke to the children, but he made a mark beside the name in the ledger and later showed the book to the hag who might very well have been his mother. That same evening the miscreant was called from his or her bed and terribly punished. It did not matter whether the embezzled amount was a demipfennig—which was just barely capable of being traded for a piece of rock candy no larger than the end of one’s little finger—or an imperial eagle, the punishment was the same. And the punishment was always brutal because the woman who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother considered it an annoying chore and she disliked being annoyed even more than she disliked caring for the children.

Pilnipott took notice of Judikha because, of all the children who had filed past his desk, hundreds upon hundreds of them, to fulfil their weekly obeisance, she was the only one about whose honesty he was
not
certain. Over the decades the children had been reduced to an endless procession of shuffling feet, snuffling noses and downcast eyes, a kind of tattered mechanism depositing an endless stream of coins. Since it had been Judikha’s habit, from the very first, to stride purposefully across the room, never taking her eyes from her master, toss his share of her earnings onto the blotter, pivot on her heel and march back through the door, it is easy to appreciate how she came to not only attract Pilnipott’s attention but excite his suspicions as well. No one could be that self-assured without having something to hide.

Initially, the Fox did not quite know what to make of Judikha’s behavior. In the normal course of things he would have attached considerable doubt to actions far less overt than those of this scrawny, large-eyed girl. It was the
scale
that bothered him. He was far more accustomed to the detection of barely perceptible signs of guilt: an infinitesimal tic, a minute shift of an eye, a nanosecond’s hesitation. Judikha’s gestures were broad, coarse and overt. Too, anyone with something to hide wouldn’t charge through the door as though they owned the place and toss a fistful of money onto his blotter with same negligent—even supercilious!—gesture that would be used to fling a few coins to a street beggar. However, when he entered her accounts next to her name, he noticed that the numbers were never suspiciously less than he expected them to be and, surprisingly, were often more.

Not knowing what to make of her, he had her punished once or twice just as a precautionary measure. It was not until she was nearly seven years of age did Pilnipott realize what she had been doing.

One evening, in counting Judikha’s weekly tithe, he noticed—and noticed for no particular reason other than that they were
her
coins—that one of the bronze ten-pfennig pieces had two peculiar wedge-shaped cuts in it, as though someone had twice jammed the blade of a knife into its edge. There was no cause to take special notice of this anomaly: he merely glanced at the coin for perhaps a quarter second longer than usual before tallying it with the others. However, when on the succeeding Friday he saw a ten-pfennig piece bearing vaguely familiar wedge-shaped marks, he remembered the disfigured coin he had seen the week before.
Curious
, he thought, and was about to place the coin with the others when another, more disturbing, even horrifying, thought came to mind. Taking from his pocket his own penknife, he opened its blade and made a third notch in the rim of the coin adjacent to the others. He looked at it for a moment, wondering why he had done something so atypically capricious, then tossed it into the growing pile and returned to his accounting, trusting to a genius even he sometimes failed to fully understand.

Once again he had forgotten the strange coin until, on the following Friday, he saw it lying in the palm of his hand. It seemed to be sneering at him.
By Musrum’s bristly balls!
, he thought with more sincere reverence than any psychic eavesdropper would have thought.

When Judikha found herself unexpectedly summoned to The Fox’s office, she stood before the great desk, placidly looking at the fat man behind it with enormous, dark, vaguely disinterested eyes. There was nothing at all furtive, conciliatory nor cowed about her gaze and this impressed The Fox not a little. He knew that she knew perfectly well why she was there and that she could maintain an expression of such calm, clear dispassion impelled an unfamiliar sense of pride. She had no ready excuses, no wary mask of guilt—she was wasting nothing, waiting upon his initiative.

“Ah, Judikha,” he began, wondering why he began so hesitatingly. “You know why you are here.”

“If you say so, sir,” she replied. It should have sounded insolent but did not. It was just a polite statement of fact.

“Are you suggesting that you
don’t
know why you are here?”

“No, sir.”

“Then would you care to tell me why you are here?”

“Because you sent for me, sir.”

“And why did I do that?”

“Because you wanted to see me, sir.”

“And why do you think I wanted to see you?”

“Well, sir, I could only guess about that.”

“Try.”

“Well, perhaps you found an error in your arithmetic, sir, and wanted to refund some of my money.”

“Now you’re being insolent!”

“I don’t know what that means, sir.”

“There’s no use in pretending that you don’t know that I know you’ve been stealing from me!”

“No, sir?”

“No, there isn’t.”

“I’ve never stolen so much a demipfennig from you, sir,” she said, flatly, never taking her eyes from his.

Oh, what a good little girl!
he thought, happily.
Stout denial! The very first thing I try to teach them. And right here to my face! Without blinking an eyelash! Oh, she’s got a little nerve, she has!

“There’s no use denying it, Judikha. I’ve got proof.”

She didn’t reply, nor did her bland expression change.

He held up the marked coin between a chubby forefinger and thumb. “I’ve seen this coin,” he said, “three times, and each time it was in your payment.”

“I’m sure there must be many coins with nicks in them, sir.”

“No doubt. But not another one with a mark I put on it myself.”

She was silent for what could not have been more than three heartbeats, though her expression did not waver.

“Oops, huh, sir?”

“Oops, indeed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I should have been more observant.”

“No, no. Well, yes, you should have been more careful, but you did very well. Better than anyone has before you, I can tell you that. There’ve been some pretty bold liars in this office and some very slick operators, but no one, Judikha, no one among all the hundreds who’ve been through my academy, have had the nerve to steal from
me!”

“Thank you, sir. I really do try to do my best.”

“Would you mind telling me how you went about it?”

“Do I have to, sir?”

“No. No, I suppose not. But you’ve been punished once or twice before. How did you know that it wasn’t for stealing from me? Why did you keep on doing it?”

“Well, sir, I figured that if I was being punished for stealing from you, I surely would have been told. Just to make sure, I stole again the next week and nothing happened. So I knew that it must have been either for something else—though just what I couldn’t figure out—or you were only making an example of me.”

“Good heavens, you
are
nerveless!”

“Thank you, sir.”

Judikha was obviously such an apt pupil that The Fox felt a wholly unexpected and unfamiliar quiver of pride. He rewarded himself by increasing her tithe to an even ninety per cent. Nevertheless, he instructed the hag (his mother? some thought so) to punish the girl that night and he withheld the old woman’s gin to insure that it would be an experience Judikha would not soon forget.