Arslan (8 page)

“That's what I tell them, Mr. Bond. Nobody wouldn't think any different if it wasn't for him being your coach at school, and the house being right next door to yours. They're saying
—some
people are saying—you bought it for these Turks.”

“I tell you what, Leland. We're all in this together, and we can't afford not to trust each other. You tell them so. I didn't buy the house for anybody else, and nobody's going to be able to say I did. By next week there won't
be
any house.”

His smile went sly and sweet. “You need any help, Mr. Bond, I'm your man.”

It was true the Turkistanis looked interested in Perry's house. It would be convenient to barrack the bodyguards, at least, next door to General Arslan. But it would be more convenient from my point of view to have an empty lot there. The house belonged to me now, and legally I could tear it down any time I wanted to, but it was just as well not to confront Arslan head-on—not with anything less than a
fait accompli
.

That meant getting busy before the Turkistanis moved in and made it impossible. Even now, it was tricky. We had to get the fire well started before they noticed it; and there was some remote chance of it blowing across the side yards and catching on my house. But we were lucky enough to have a dry, windless night. The Turkistanis got there with the city firetruck in time to save the shell of the house, nothing else.

That brought me on the carpet before Arslan himself. I didn't deny I'd had the place burned.

“Why do you destroy your own property, sir?”

“Why take over the world and then start tearing it down?”

He laughed outright, but his face hardened again in a hurry. “Who are your subordinates? Who have helped you?”

“You wanted me to spread the word, General. I can't do that unless people know they can trust me.”

He eyed me steadily for a while—and those eyes could be pretty damned steady. Then the hardness relaxed, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “Let them trust.”

There were other kinds of planning besides economic, and other kinds of survival. Above all, there was one thing I was anxious to keep from getting started. I didn't need a preacher to tell me that the best of us at the best of times were no more than poor ornery sinners. And Arslan had put a terrible weapon within our reach—a weapon to use not against him but against ourselves: the billet rule.

I didn't think there had ever been a murder in Kraft County in my lifetime, or, in the normal course of things, ever would be. But who was to say there might not have been, if there had been a really sure and safe and well-established method handy? Now we were living in a time of violence and stress and permanent emergency, and we had that kind of a method. To get rid of your enemy and his whole household, you only had to throw a rock at his billeted soldier. There were risks, of course, but they didn't amount to much, compared with the certainty of the return. There was the little matter of incidentally murdering maybe three or four innocent children; but these were desperate times, and anyway, you wouldn't have to pull the trigger on them yourself.

I worked as hard at it as I'd ever worked at anything. What with this, and laying the groundwork for the economic plan, and a few other things, I had become a first-class rumor mill. I started a lot of talk under the pretense of just passing it on, and I learned to convey a lot of information and opinion by asking questions. Some people I could talk to straight, which was more comfortable, but most of it was sideways and round-about.

We had to keep up the faith that there was a viable United States and a viable Christian Church somewhere over the boundary of District 3281; that the old rules were still essentially valid, however much we might have to twist them to fit new cases, and that the old penalties would descend all the harder after the time out.

We needed that assurance. Arslan's brothel was more than a convenience for his soldiers; it was a deliberate focus of corruption for the county. In other words, it was free and public. There would even have been a useful side to that, except that the American girls were reserved for the troops. A truckload of foreign girls (it was one of them that Arslan had led up the stairs, and not the last one) had been installed in the north wing of the high school, and that wing was open to all comers. It emerged—emerged pretty fast for a supposedly Christian town—that these girls were Russians. And, not to make it worse than it was, most of the north wing's business was Russian soldiers. You might put it down to homesickness.

There were bound to be a few failures; you couldn't expect any better. I came home one day and found Luella waiting for me in the bedroom.

“I just couldn't face it down there,” she said.
Down there
was downstairs, among Arslan's men.

“What's the matter?”

Her face was anguished. “You know Mattie Benson, don't you?” she said tremulously. “Howard Benson? Mattie was a Schuster. I can't remember their boy's name. He graduated from high school about three years ago and went to Chicago or somewhere.”

“That would be Paul Benson. I don't remember ever knowing his folks especially. What about them, anyway?”

She looked away from me desolately. “Well, you know the billet rule...”

The soldier had been jumped down by the railroad embankment and beaten—how badly, and by how many, nobody seemed to know. He was said to be one of a bunch who had raped a young farm wife near Blue Creek a couple of weeks before. Whether that was true or not didn't matter. Whether the soldier deserved his beating, whether Kraftsville was satisfied or shocked—all that was immaterial. The billet rule had been broken.

“I'll try to see Arslan.”

He saw me readily enough, but only to put me under temporary arrest (he actually called it that) till the executions had been carried out. That was interesting, too. Because just what was it he was afraid I might do in the interval?

We got used to people being killed. Arslan's rules were one hundred percent enforced—which was, after all, a lot better than unpredictable terrorism. He had a peculiarly unattractive way of disposing of the bodies. They would be dragged behind a jeep or truck, like Hector's corpse in the
Iliad
—dragged all the way out to the city dump, which was three miles on a dirt road, and deposited there. Some of us saw to it that everybody got buried eventually. It wasn't pleasant to collect the remains of your kinfolk from out there, and some people didn't have kin. There were two funeral parlors in town, but of course their hearses had been confiscated. Two months later, they were still discussing deals for suitable conveyances, and meanwhile anybody that wanted to be buried had better have his own transportation.

But Leland Kitchener had been shrewd enough to trade himself into a wagon and a team of lethargic but durable mules within two weeks of Arslan's arrival. They were too old, slow, and dilapidated to tempt confiscation, but they served Leland's turn all right. They were just about exactly the unmechanized equivalent of the old stave-sided truck he'd limped about his business with, before Arslan. The business was junk and trash generally, but he would haul anything that could take a rough ride. It was Leland who always made the trip to the city dump.

We could have used a lot more like Leland. It was funny how many people didn't really believe in Arslan—seemed to take him for some sort of optical illusion that would probably disappear when the weather changed. Meanwhile they went on doing what they'd always done, like a bunch of stubborn robots tying to march forward with their noses pressed against a wall. Then there were those who fell all over themselves to lick Arslan's boots before he kicked them. I preferred Leland's attitude.

Chapter 5

You couldn't accuse Arslan of laziness, anyhow. He would be up and working long before daylight, and he didn't really stop till after supper—sometimes long after. He
worked
, too, he didn't just diddle with papers and assign jobs to other people. He worked, though God only knew what he was working at, and though he was restive as a hot-blooded colt, interrupting his day at odd times for a bath, a shave, a meal. He had the appetite of a field hand in harvest-time, and he washed every meal down with milk. The liquor didn't come out till the day's work was done.

He'd taken over everything except our bedroom and as much of the kitchen as Luella absolutely required for cooking. Anywhere else in my own house I might be refused admittance—at the very best, I had to share space and facilities with a bunch of enemy aliens—and those three upstairs rooms were completely off limits to me, where he presumably slept and certainly practiced his obscenities. What this came to in terms of practical living was one continual aggravating hassle. The bathroom had to serve a minimum of eleven people, counting Arslan's bodyguard, and with the daily and nightly comers and goers there seemed to be no maximum.

It cost me an effort to open my bedroom door in the morning; and coming back to the house from outside, I could feel my neck prickle as soon as I got near the front walk. I had had that house built when I could ill afford it, when Luella and I were first married, the year after I came back to Kraftsville for good; and nobody but my family and myself had ever lived in it, and nobody had ever set foot in it without my invitation till now. And now I might as well have invited a circus in.

None of his soldiers lived in the house, strictly speaking. But there was an orderly forever popping up (the same corporal who had jumped onto the stage to tie his shoe), and there was a bodyguard of six men attending him every moment of the day and night. I counted seventeen individual guards, once I learned to tell them apart. They relieved each other according to some complicated system of rotation, so there always seemed to be a different combination of them on duty. “If it was my bodyguard,” I told Luella, “I'd have them set up in teams. You can train a team to work together.”

“It does seem inefficient this way,” she agreed. But maybe it wasn't. They kept on their toes; they didn't all get bored at once. Besides, it meant sharing the goodies all round. Because that bodyguard was with him enough to make voyeurism one of the main fringe benefits of their job.

Betty Hanson was still cloistered, if the word can be applied, in the northwest room. A cot had been brought in for her, and—after I insisted on it to Arslan—Luella's sewing machine had been brought out. Luella cooked her meals, but one of the bodyguards always carried them up. As far as we were concerned, she might as well have been invisible. Even her trips to the bathroom were guarded sneak operations.

I could have wished, if only for Luella's sake, that she was inaudible, too. She seemed to go into an explosion of some sort every few days—screams of what might have been fear or pain, sounding unpleasantly genuine sometimes; or long, heartbroken wails of sorrow; but most often just an outburst of assorted hysterics. There wasn't anything to be done about it, short of suicide, so I got into the habit of ignoring these commotions right away. There was enough on my mind that I
could
do something about. But it was hard on Luella, no question of that.

Maybe it didn't mean anything, but I noticed that Hunt Morgan rated a real bed, even if it was just a little rollaway. I didn't ask for my record player out of that room; I thought it might be of some help to him. But I never heard it play except when Arslan was in there. There were no disturbances from Hunt. I'd have felt better if there had been.

Arslan must have been born in a crowd—or maybe picked up in the middle of a desert. Whatever the reasons, he couldn't seem to get too much of human company. He was literally never alone, as far as I could tell, or not more than five minutes at a time now and then.

Not just human company, either, and not just the horses. Sam Tuller told me the fairground camp was full of dogs and puppies; and in a very short time my house was, too. “Every time he goes out in that Land Rover,” Luella complained to me, “he brings back another animal.” The first pup was a beagle. The next was a bluetick hound. Then came a German shepherd bitch with a litter of puppies that didn't look much like German shepherds. In between he had picked up half a dozen kittens and Paula Sears's pet monkey. All of them except the monkey had the run of the house, and all of us were under orders to let them in or out whenever they wanted—which wasn't the kind of order I was going to pay any attention to.

Luella had to feed them most of the time and clean up after them all of the time, but it was Arslan who trained them, and did it very well, too—if you didn't count the monkey. “To be fair,” I told Luella, “I don't think you
can
housebreak a monkey.”

She sniffed. “Not without trying, I'm sure of that. But if he just won't, he could at least keep it in a cage. Paula had a perfectly nice, big cage for it.”

He kept it in the coal bin. A couple of his men shoveled what little coal there was left into a corner of the furnace room, and mopped out the bin. From then on, it was Luella's job to go in every day and clean up; and of course that was on top of all the damage it managed to do around the house when Arslan had it out. I objected, not only because it was a dirty, mean job, and it was his monkey, or rather Paula Sears's, but because Luella was getting physically worn out.

“You are wrong, sir; it
is
woman's work. My men have other occupations.”

“Then let one of those girls help her—or Betty. It wouldn't hurt Betty to do a little work around here.”

He shook his head. “They do woman's work also,” he said cheerfully, “but of another type.”

I hadn't ridden a horse in ten years, hadn't owned a hunting dog in six, and I had missed them. In a way, it did me good to have them around the place again. And Arslan was undeniably good with all of the animals. He would pet a cat about the same way he petted his girls—expertly and with interest, but a little offhandedly. I'd never had anything against cats, but it still looked peculiar to me, a grown man fondling one like a little girl with her doll. What was beautiful was to see him with the dogs. He reminded me of a good teacher—the kind whose technique is so good it looks like all rapport and no technique. The dogs
wanted
to please him, wanted to understand what he was telling them to do, and do it; and he could make them understand. He knew something about training, no doubt of that.