Arslan. Part 9

She put her hand on my arm. "All right, but you come up with me."

It must have been about nine o'clock when I heard the front door open after a period of quiet, and came downstairs to see a Turkistani sergeant frozen in a salute that Arslan did not return. The man's face was blank and hard as a glazed brick. Arslan stood in front of the couch, his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes dogged. There was dead silence in the room.

"What is it?" I asked the sergeant. Most of them knew a little English by now.

He dropped his salute, and spoke a few stiff words to Arslan. Arslan gestured silently towards the door, and was through it himself before any of his bodyguards had time to open it for him.

They brought her in within the hour. Sanjar had run downstairs in his pajamas when he heard the jeep, with the women fluttering after him. Arslan in the doorway shouted; one of them scooped up the boy, and they rushed back up the stairs.

His arms were full of her. She looked grotesquely big; she should have been doll-size, she seemed so broken. Clothes and hair, tangled and soiled, stuck out every which way; here a limp arm, there a dangling foot. He laid her on the couch and straightened her.

She was mired with her own blood. Whatever she had been beaten with had smashed full across her bright, queenly face. She was unquestionably dead.

"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 gla.s.s. Arslan took the drink in his left hand and looked at it; and slowly, deliberately, he clenched his hand upon it, till the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 bodyguards 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 gla.s.s 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, b.u.mping the doctor backwards. His eyes blazed and his face was flus.h.i.+ng. "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 s.h.i.+rt 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 G.o.d, 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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.s 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 night. 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, n.o.body knew. n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sumption 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 s.h.i.+ftless 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 Mitch.e.l.l'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 n.o.body 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 s.p.a.ce left clear around them, and then a circle of curious and hostile faces. Hunt stood at the edge of the s.p.a.ce, 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 bodyguards. 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, pus.h.i.+ng people back, clearing an open s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 a.s.surance 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 Ollie'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 pa.s.sionate 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 demolis.h.i.+ng 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 d.a.m.ned 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 circ.u.mference 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.

The crowd was screaming. It was as if all the feelings of all these past years had found voice at last. But the only words I could make out in the uproar were the ones in my own throat: "Get up! Get up!" And they were aimed not at Fred Gonderling-no use to yell at him-but at Bill T. Carmichael. He had dragged himself up to hands and knees, or nearly so. Blood dripped from somewhere on his face, but he looked fairly intact. Suddenly the yelling seemed to reach him. He got his feet under him with surprising speed and lunged at Arslan.

Arslan knelt like an incubus on Gonderling's chest, one knee and foot on the ground for stability. Carmichael hit him like a tidal wave hitting Gibraltar. Arslan's head was bowed, his lips drawn back in an animal grin. His hands were rooted in Gonderling's neck. He crouched there immovable, while Carmichael clubbed and tore at his uns.h.i.+elded head with fists, knees, fingers. The crowd throbbed with hope, and in the froth of sound I heard myself howling, "His eyes! Get his eyes!" The faces of the double ring of soldiers were set grimly; every rifle seemed trained on some appropriate target, one of which was my chest. Nizam on the steps with Sanjar in his arms stood like a statue of poised vengeance. The child stared, motionless. I caught another glimpse of Arslan's face through the welter of blows, and I could have sworn he was laughing.

Then in an instant the battle was reversed once more. Carmichael was down again. It took me a moment to realize Arslan's hands had come up like lightning and yanked him down by an arm and knee. Now he had his own knee in Carmichael's back, one arm binding his arms and chest, the other wrapping his head and dragging it back in a series of brutal jerks. The noise of the crowd swelled painfully, off-key, and died. Arslan clambered upright, shedding Carmichael's body across Gonderling's.

Luella stirred in my arms, and I realized I was gripping her painfully tight. I relaxed my hold. The crowd was still.

Arslan stood breathing in hard gasps, mouth open, arms hanging slack. He said something hoa.r.s.ely, pointing at the ground. Then he turned toward the steps, and Nizam came quickly down them and put Sanjar into his arms. The boy's little arms went around his neck and held fast. Without another look at the bodies at his feet, he started back the way he had come. This time he went first, and only the men with the dogs followed. The crowd split away from his path as if some electric field had hurled them back. As he walked he swayed, and once I saw him stumble.

Even before he was through the crowd, some of the soldiers had brought out shovels from the school and started to dig. And long after Arslan and his child and his dogs had disappeared into my house, we stood like a herd of cattle in the sun and watched them dig the four neat graves and tumble in the bodies with their feet, and fill the graves again and tramp and stamp them down.

Chapter 11.

He must have slept the rest of the day and through the night. The house was very still, with a closed feeling. All the bedroom doors stayed shut. Next morning I was up early, before Luella. I was just starting downstairs when he came out of his room. "Good morning, sir," he said-his commonplace greeting-and went on towards the bathroom. He was still wearing the dirty fatigues in which he'd killed the four men yesterday, very rumpled now. His hair was awry, his face was bruised and his right eye swollen, and the ragged scratches where Bill T.'s fingernails had dug his face were blood-caked and inflamed. But he looked rested.

We were eating breakfast an hour later when he came in, clean, shaved, with Hunt at his heels. Luella jumped up to pour coffee and slice ham and fry eggs, and while Arslan plunged wordlessly into his meal, Hunt opened a book and began to read: "In regard to tunicated bulbs, those consisting of broadened and fleshy leaf-like coats, as in the onion, no one not absolutely certain of his diagnosis should ever attempt to eat any which lack the familiar odor of onions..."

So it was business as usual-but business with a difference. There was a kind of fury in Arslan's actions, in his voice, his laugh, his stride. Every movement he made looked like a blow held back. He'd never wasted time before, but he'd never seemed pressed for it, either; he'd had the leisure to enjoy everything. Now, suddenly, he was in a hurry. Business as usual-but he plunged into that business with a very unusual fervor, burrowing his way into mountains of work that seemed to disintegrate under his attack and leave him unsatisfied, unprotected again. And after dark, pleasure as before; even beginning that first night, with Rusudan hardly cold in her grave under his window, he dove into the black sea of his old pastimes. He had his two bottles of vodka every night, and every night now he had to have a new girl. He wasn't interested in the esthetic niceties of rape any longer; he took whatever the daily dragnet brought him. One of his lieutenants was in charge of picking up a new girl every day and getting rid of the used one. So day by day I saw a procession of the pretty kids who had been in second and third grades the last year of school, delivered and discarded like daily newspapers. A girl would be picked up sometime during the day, whenever the roving lieutenant spotted a likely prospect, and held at Nizam's till evening. Then the lieutenant would escort her over to Arslan's room, as forcibly as necessary. In the morning he was on duty from five o'clock, ready to whisk her away as soon as Arslan emerged and deposit her where he had found her.

But there were also nights when Arslan turned away from his door and crossed the hall with two quick steps. In the morning, the girl would be turned loose as if she had served her purpose-and, judging from what I heard in town, as often as not she was a little disappointed. Those mornings, Hunt would be aquiver with the same fury, as if Arslan's pain was contagious. His voice, as he read about Hitt.i.te cuneiform or coefficients of expansion, was throbbing and throaty with bitterness. It was the voice I heard one night, through my closed door and his, cry wildly, "-never will!" I wondered who it was that never would. I never will. You never will. There were other possibilities, but they seemed less likely.

The nights with Hunt came more often, and so did the mixed nights, when Arslan went into his own room after supper and came out of Hunt's room for breakfast. There were days when the circles under Hunt's eyes looked like bruises, and more than once there were real bruises showing on his arms and neck. He had started drinking during the day.

Two days after the killings on the schoolground, Rusudan's women were gone. They loaded their multicolored booty mournfully into a truck and were driven off eastward. The crowded room where they had hovered around little Sanjar was now Sanjar's room exclusively.

He spent a lot of time there, just sitting, tracing rust lines on the windowscreen with his fingers. The bottom had been broken out of the world for him. His mother was underground in the front yard. His nurses were gone. The men he had watched his father slaughter were buried across the street. That father had turned away from him. He was alone, and the world was s.h.i.+fting and violent.

Luella gave him all the time she could, and all the loving he would take. But he never went to her now; she had to go to him. Only when he woke out of his nightmares he called for her, and that was every night for weeks.

He still went to Arslan, but he went cautiously, expecting the worst, and Arslan's reactions were brusque and harsh. They seemed to make their only contacts physically now. Sanjar would worm his way inch by inch into some firm position where he could press against his father, and stay there, silent and watchful, till Arslan's business dislodged him. Arslan hardly seemed to notice him, but again and again his hand would brush swiftly over the boy's hair or close hard for an instant on his shoulder. And maybe a minute later he would stand up, talking to one of his men, shaking off his son like a clod of dirt.

He had tortured n.o.body, unless it was Rusudan's women-and they hadn't looked any the worse for wear, physically. He had done it by simple, thorough detective work. In about thirty-six hours he and his men had questioned something like three thousand people, and (at least as important and a lot harder) found and compared the relevant answers. The questions had been very standardized and very few: Where were you between five-thirty and eight? What were you wearing? Whom did you see? What were they wearing? Meanwhile they had confiscated the shoes and clothes allegedly worn by every able-bodied man in the district that night. It was a ma.s.sive job, but very effective if you had the manpower to do it fast and thoroughly. One of its virtues was that it touched everybody. It didn't much matter whether Arslan's conclusions were accurate or not, either. Kraft County had been impressed.

It was plausible enough. Everybody knew that Rusudan had talked to Fred Gonderling pretty often, in spite of the fact they didn't speak the same language. And in a way it was easy to imagine what Arslan's mistress could see in Fred Gonderling. He might have seemed, in comparison, downright courtly. Some people thought Fred had masterminded the whole thing. He would have thought he was smart enough to get away clean. Others figured it was Ollie Schuster's idea. Some said it must have happened on the spur of the moment-that Fred didn't have the meanness or the guts to plan such a thing, and Ollie didn't have the brains. n.o.body imagined that Carmichael had been more than a willing henchman, and nearly everybody felt that Morris Schott-a respectable man who had never made any kind of trouble in his life-had gotten a very raw deal.

Of course there was plenty of outrage over the killings, but nothing that Arslan couldn't have turned to his own advantage. It had needed something exactly like this, I couldn't help thinking, to make him the veritable king of Kraft County. But he had thrown that possibility away by his behavior since then. He wasn't just asking for trouble; he was building it with his own hands.

But Rusudan's murder had stopped our timetable cold. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I honestly couldn't make up my mind. Maybe this was the perfect time to strike, while Arslan had other things on his mind and the flood-tide of feeling was running against him. But maybe it was the worst possible time, with Nizam's crew wound up to the highest pitch of alertness and suspicion, and all the troops ready for blood-ready, too, I noticed, to stand by and let Arslan risk his own neck against four men.

The whole district was like one raw wound. Not all the shootings of the past six years had had the effect of that one morning's work on the schoolground; and now every family with a teenage girl had a very personal stake in getting rid of Arslan. But by the same token, people had never been so demoralized, so distrustful of each other and so in awe of Arslan. I felt it myself, and cursed myself for it; normally I wouldn't be hesitating like this. What we needed-what we all needed-was something to pull us together. Something simple and immediate, a rallying point, a straight road, a slogan.

Day and night, for the first two weeks, two of Arslan's own bodyguards stood watch at Rusudan's grave, incidentally commanding a good view of the schoolground. Then one day they were gone. The next morning there were flowers on Fred Gonderling's and Morris Schott's graves.

Quite a few people found reasons to pa.s.s by the school that morning. None of the soldiers paid any attention. It was Arslan himself, on his way across the graves to the school, who nudged the two Mason jars over with his toe, shattered them with his heel, and carefully ground flowers and gla.s.s into the bare, packed earth under his boots. I watched from the living-room window, and I felt a beat of hope. We had our slogan!

Chapter 12.

Decorating the graves... It was ticklish. The graves were in full view of my house and yard. I let the word get around that the KCR would take care of the decoration, if interested parties would supply the bouquets. That way we could keep it a popular movement without jeopardizing too many people too much. I put Leland Kitchener in charge of collecting the flowers. After a little experimenting, we settled on the three Munsey boys to do the decorating. From the corner of their yard they could see my bedroom window, which made it easy to let them know the best time to move. I would stand at that window for hours sometimes, watching the shrubbery and the shadows and the open places in the moonlight, the wind stirring the close-packed branches of a juniper beside the school steps. It always made me think of muscles moving under an animal's skin.

Every morning the flowers were there. Not in jars any more-there weren't that many jars to spare-but just laid in bunches, big or small, neat or sloppy, beautiful or scraggly. Usually every grave was decorated, and always at least one.

It was a little war that went on in silence. Every morning Arslan walked across the schoolyard, and every morning he paused at the graves and methodically trampled the flowers. He was careful to crush every blossom. After a few weeks the graves were covered with a mulch of broken, withered flowers. I never saw or heard of his exchanging a word with anybody about the decoration-or, for that matter, about anything connected with Rusudan. Sometimes I saw a couple of soldiers nudge each other and nod towards the latest decorations, but that was all. It could be they were under orders to pay no attention to the flowers, or to the thin parade of Kraft County people who pa.s.sed along the streets by the school every morning. It could be they were under orders not to bother Leland in his rounds or the Munsey brothers on their nightly strolls. Arslan was capable of that.

Day by day the mulch deepened. Marigolds and zinnias gave way to chrysanthemums. The last roses bled under Arslan's heels. Night after night I listened for the shot that would mean the end of the Munseys. Morning after morning the graves were decorated. And every morning Kraftsville was a little stronger.

The first light frost came the first week in October. Then we had a warm spell-Luella always said we had our nicest weather in October-and then it began to get steadily more chilly. We had our hands full, citizens and troops alike, getting in crops and laying in meat for the winter. Along towards the last of the month, we had frost four nights running, hard enough to finish off the tomatoes and all the tender flowers. Sprays of bittersweet started to turn up in the bouquets. A lot of the ladies had been drying cornflowers and everlastings and pampas gra.s.s and all the other things Kraftsville ladies did dry. If Arslan was counting on the weather to win his battle for him, he was going to be disappointed.