Arslan

“Then there’s some that don’t know what they’re talking about, Leland. I’m buying that house as a kindness to Christine. She can’t live there alone, a young widow and a baby—not with this billet rule. And she won’t want to be responsible for a house. This way she’s able to move back in with her folks and forget it. I’m taking the responsibility off her hands.”

“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