might have learned God only knew what, if any of us had understood Russian or Turkistani. I made a special effort to locate the Cuban propaganda station we used to hear sometimes. There wasn’t a sign of it. TV screens showed nothing at all, except some variegated static.
Then there were the maps. Arslan was forever on the move, shuttling up and downstairs, in and out of the house, to school, to Nizam’s, to the stable, out of the district, and back to my house every time. And the maps followed him. There always seemed to be a messenger trotting up with another bunch of them. Arslan labored over those maps morning and night, brooding, scribbling, comparing, like a boy who’d just discovered the new world of geography. And since he did a good deal of it on my coffee table, it didn’t take the CIA to figure out that Kraftsville was being turned into a nerve center for some intercontinental operation. Which was all very interesting, of course; but for right now the question of what Arslan and his army were doing in America and the rest of the world had to take a back seat—pretty far back—to the question of what they were going to do in Kraftsville.
Arslan was as good, or as bad, as his word. The interpreter he provided was a pleasant-faced, serious-faced young lieutenant with a mustache, whose name I never did exactly catch—something that started with a sharp “Z” sound. He escorted me silently to Frieda’s—Nizam’s—wearing a peculiar strained look all the way. I didn’t know enough yet to recognize it as the expression of a frustrated longing to practice English small talk.
The big front room was being transformed into Colonel Nizam’s office, though a burrow would have been more appropriate. He looked hunched and blinking, at his desk in the middle of that spacious parlor. The big windows let in too much light, even in December, and opened too many walls. He was doing what he could to make himself a homey atmosphere, though. Filing cabinets stood among Frieda’s overstuffed divans and shelves of bric- a-brac. There were three subsidiary desks, all busy. Two soldiers in a corner were putting a just-uncrated tape recorder through its paces. A crew of half a dozen or so seemed to be operating on the house wiring, yelling at each other up and down the big staircase that climbed from the back of the room. A piece of the wall was knocked open there, and thick black electrical cords trailed around the floor and up the stairs like endless leeches, barely alive enough to wriggle and suck.
We stood in front of Nizam’s desk, observed but not acknowledged, till he deigned to look up. My polite little lieutenant saluted—not very snappily, I thought—and presented me. Colonel Nizam’s eyes scraped over my face like claws. If I’d known where we were going, I’d have had one of my stomach pills before we started, or maybe two. Then he lowered his eyes to his deskful of papers and uttered a quantity of Turkistani in an unencouraging voice. The lieutenant translated, with about as much feeling for the original as a sixth-grader reading Shakespeare: “Mr. Bond, will you please supply all the information about the conditions of District Three-Two-Eight-One?”
“What?” I said blankly. The words registered, but they didn’t mean anything. He repeated them. “I don’t know what District 3281 is. I certainly can’t supply all the information about it.” Not that I’d undertaken to supply anybody with anything.
Lieutenant Z looked apologetic and surprised and a little uncertain—running over his English lessons in his mind to see if he’d forgotten anything vital. He made a little circular gesture with his hand, forefinger pointing down. “District 3281 is
So there it was, and Colonel Nizam was to be the officer I worked with.
Chapter 4
The colonel and I didn’t make a very good team. That first day I got off on the wrong foot by declining to pour forth “all the information about the conditions” at the flick of a switch. But I was as tactful as I could figure out how to be in those circumstances. I very politely indicated that I couldn’t answer him on such short notice and very politely asked him just exactly what he wanted to know and just exactly what he wanted to know it for.
I got the impression that Colonel Nizam had a constitutional impediment to answering questions. But after a certain amount of dickering he unbent enough to give me, via Lieutenant Z, a very lucid account of what was wanted. Arslan was serious about his economic theory, at least as far as Kraft County went—or District 3281, which wasn’t quite the same thing. There was no telling—not right now—how good a seal that guarded border was from the military point of view, but there was no doubt about it economically. My role in the Turkistani scheme of things was to work out a plan that would keep the local economy from collapsing altogether. If I could get it done before anybody starved, fine; if not, well, it would have been an interesting experiment. Nizam was ready, Lieutenant Z assured me, to cooperate in every way; but the plan was my responsibility.
It was clear enough. I thanked him—for the clarity—and I got to work.
That evening, in the kitchen, Arslan passed me with a knowing smile. “You are busy, sir?”
I was scribbling figures while I ate. “It’s a long winter yet, General.” Already the food was sticking in my throat. A long, hungry winter.
He paused beside the table, resting the blunt fingertips of one hand on my papers. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his bare forearms were burly but smooth, like a store-window dummy or a polished statue. “You will not find Colonel Nizam unreasonable. Probably some form of relief can be arranged.” With the other hand he was holding the wrist of a very pretty, very bored-looking girl, the way he might have held a dog’s leash.
“Can you do something with this another time?” I asked Luella, pointing to what was left on my plate.
“Oh, yes,” she said abstractedly. “It will keep.”
I pulled my papers out from under his hand and got up, starting for the door and upstairs. With a broad grin he shouldered in ahead of me, dragging the girl against me and past. I went on steadily up the stairs behind them.
So, like it or not, I was in the economic planning business. It didn’t suit my politics or my experience, but it looked like a job somebody had to do. There wasn’t time enough to let supply adjust itself to demand—or supply enough, maybe. I got the basic figures from the County welfare people, and went at them with old-fashioned arithmetic.
I had to take Arslan at his word. We were cut off from the rest of the world, and we had to survive with what we were and what we had—survive maybe two weeks, maybe two years. It might not be true at all, but there wasn’t anything to gain from betting it wasn’t.
Back in the eighteen-hundreds, southern Illinois had done pretty good business in castor beans, sunflower seeds, sorghum, cotton, and tobacco. Times had changed, and the crop land had nearly all gone into newer cash crops—corn and soybeans, mostly, then oats and wheat. Well, we could grow the old crops again. There were still private patches to seed from. There were sheep in the county, beef cattle, clean milk cows, good hogs, good poultry, some beehives. Deer and small game hunting was pretty good, fishing just passable but with a few good spots. Plenty of vegetables, plenty of fruit and nuts. Wood to burn, and stoves that could burn it. It would be primitive, all right, but Kraft County wasn’t going to suffer as much of a shock as a lot of places might. And there were worse things than old-fashioned smoked ham and hot cornbread with sweet cream butter and sorghum molasses on it.
Nizam’s English turned out to be nearly as adequate as Lieutenant Z’s, when he chose to exercise it, except that his accent was a lot nastier. The lieutenant was dispensed with after our first few meetings. I was sorry to see him go. For one thing, it nearly broke his heart, to judge from his woeful look; and for another, it meant I had to deal with Nizam directly, without a shock-absorber.
I took care of the real work of planning in my own bedroom. When I needed information from the Turkistani side, I went to Nizam. At first that meant a wait of anywhere from one hour to six on Frieda Althrop’s front porch, in full view of Pearl Street and the hardroad—and if Nizam didn’t have enough business on hand to keep me waiting that long, he would find some. As soon as that became clear, I quit waiting. If he wasn’t ready to see me when I got there, or within a few minutes, I went away and came back exactly two hours later. The longest streak of such visits we ever worked up to was a day and a half, with time out for a night’s sleep. After that, I never had to come back more than once, and those few occasions I was perfectly willing to put down to genuine business.
I never tried to analyze Nizam’s motives, any more than I’d analyze a snake’s; but I learned to tell which way he was likely to wriggle. And by a combination of growling and playing possum, I managed to get some fine cooperation out of him. But it was a hassle and a haggle, day after day, and no Sundays off. It gave me a feeling like listening to a record played at the wrong speed.
The relief operation alone took an almighty lot of dickering. Colonel Nizam’s ideas of what constituted
