Arslan

He looked straight towards me. “Would you mind if I came back, Mr. Bond?” His voice was clear, level, and bitter.

“As far as I’m concerned you are back, Hunt, and always welcome.”

Luella came to him anxiously. “What happened, Hunt?”

“Forget it.” He was leaning against the door, his little bag in his hands. His eyes flared at me as he burst out, “He’s willing to take me back—on conditions! How about that? If you’ve got any conditions, I’d appreciate hearing them now.”

“No conditions, Hunt,” I said. “Never.”

Luella gasped wordlessly, and I followed her look. Hunt’s left pant leg was streaked with wet from thigh to ankle; the blood dribbled silently off his shoe onto the rug. “Yeah,” he said. She was trying to help him away from the door, but he leaned against it stubbornly. “I can walk very well, thanks.” His eyes were alight with fury. I touched Luella’s arm, and she stepped back.

It was Arslan’s turn now. He stood up at last, and Hunt limped across the room and allowed himself to be let down onto the couch. Arslan was on his knees beside him in an instant, ripping open the pant leg with his knife.

Luella surprised me. “You get your hands off him!” she snapped. “You’re the one that had him shot!”

“My own fault,” Hunt said calmly. “I know the curfew rule. I’m surprised, though,” he added to Arslan. “I thought you had better marksmen. Or don’t they shoot to kill?”

Arslan glanced up appreciatively. “Not to kill, no. To immobilize. It is often desirable to question those who break rules.”

“I wasn’t even immobilized,” Hunt said tightly.

“Yes. The sentry will be reprimanded.” The guards were reappearing with water, bandages, medicines. There was a well-rehearsed air about the whole thing. “For your information, Hunt,” Arslan was saying, “I have given standing orders not to fire on you unless you should actually attack me. Otherwise you would have been shot as soon as you left your parents’ house. But the man who fired was unable to recognize you in the darkness. I consider him justified.”

“How about a doctor?” I said.

“Unnecessary. It is a very simple wound.”

Maybe it hadn’t quite been rehearsed. Conceivably—just conceivably—the shot had been accidental. But, to whatever extent he had manipulated for it, I didn’t doubt that this was exactly the scene Arslan had planned. But Hunt had come to my house for shelter, and I’d given it, without conditions. That was what mattered.

I went to see Arnold Morgan first thing the next morning. He looked half relieved to see me and half belligerent. “Did Hunt get back to your place all right?” he demanded.

“Well, he got there, and by good luck he’s only got a bullet hole in his leg. Didn’t you people ever hear of the curfew?”

He went as white as if he’d been bleached. “We tried to keep him, Franklin. I did everything I could. How is he?”

“He’s all right. What I’d like to know is, if he started off intending to stay with you, and you did everything you could to keep him, what made him come back?”

He firmed up at that, and flushed angrily. “When Hunt comes home, it’s going to be the real thing, Franklin. Nobody’s going to use my house as a … a…”

“In other words, you sent your son out to be shot at because he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t be assaulted.”

“No, sir—and you ought to know me better than to say that to me. I didn’t send him anywhere. The only thing I asked for was that he wouldn’t volunteer himself to that greasy devil. For God’s sake, Franklin, what do you expect me to do—encourage him?”

“I did expect a little Christian charity and a little understanding for your own child. But it looks like that was too much to ask for.” We weren’t quite shouting yet, but we were getting close.

“You’re not in a very good position to—”

“—So how about a little common sense instead? The only things you’ve accomplished are convincing Hunt he can’t get back to a normal life—not that anything’s normal these days—and pushing him right into Arslan’s corner. His own father drives him out, and who takes him in? Arslan! Arslan! Just putting it bluntly, Arnold, anytime Arslan wants his body he can have it, and neither you nor I nor Hunt can stop him; and it doesn’t matter whose house he’s living in, either. What you’ve done is help Arslan get hold of his soul.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.” His voice shook. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to stop. He wouldn’t even agree—” He broke off, waving his open hand spasmodically, as if he was looking for something to hit with it. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s not too late even now. My door’s open whenever he’s ready to come home.”

“On your terms.”

“Now, listen, Franklin. If you’ve got anything practical to tell me, go ahead and say it. But if you’re just here to pass insults, let’s call a halt right now. Jean’s upstairs trying to get some rest, and I’ve got better things to do.”

“Yes, I’ve got one thing very practical—”

But he was so worked up now that he couldn’t let me go on till he got in his counterattack. “And I’ll tell you something, Franklin, there’s a lot of people who don’t think much of the way you’ve toadied up to that stinking Turk. Collaborator’s a dirty word, but that’s exactly—”

“I didn’t come to discuss myself.”

“No, you came to pull that holier-than-thou act because I’ve insisted on a little basic morality and loyalty— and coming from you it doesn’t look very good. Ever since they came shooting their way in here—”

“Nobody shot their way in.”

“—you’ve been preaching. ‘Cooperate! Cooperate!’ Well, I say that’s just the coward’s way to pronounce ‘collaborate.’”

If you think so, why haven’t you done something about it?”

“If we’d had a chance, we would have! You were so damn quick to inform on anybody who had a gun.”

“Do you have any idea what this town would look like now if we’d tried to fight?”

“We’d be able to hold our heads up, anyway.”

“After you’d scraped them out of the mud, maybe. I’m not hanging mine. Now, just shut up and listen to me for five seconds. For God’s sake—for Jean’s sake, Arnold—get word to Hunt that you want him back, no strings attached. Don’t do it through me if you don’t want to. You’re welcome to think whatever you want to about me, but it’s more important what you do about your son.”

I left that little scene with a feeling of satisfaction, all in all. Collaborator. Well, in a sense I certainly was. I’d gone all out to get people to do what Arslan and his henchmen demanded, and I’d been working hand-in-glove with Nizam on the economic plan. What Arnold Morgan didn’t know about—what nobody knew much about, I hoped, except a few people like Sam Tuller’s family and Leland Kitchener the junk man—was a little nonexistent organization that we called the Kraft County Resistance.

Arslan’s pistol and its eight cartridges were hidden in nine separate spots. They might as well be separate, for now. There was no possible way for that gun to do us any good tangibly, except the way I’d failed to use it in the Land Rover; but the fact that it existed was a solid rock to build a faith on. Sam Tuller and two of his boys had crawled in that oat field night after night, till they found every last cartridge. It had to be careful crawling, too. Aside from the matter of getting out of the house and back in again without disturbing their billeted soldier, it was likelier than not that Arslan would have the field watched. But we got them all, and got them safely squirreled away, without rousing the least suspicion. Or so we had to tell ourselves.

I had thought long and hard before I told Sam about the gun in his field. But he was a reliable man, the kind who could shoulder a risk like that, and I felt justified in giving it to him. If there was going to be any real Resistance at all, quite a few people would have to take quite a few risks. And, by God, there was going to be a Resistance.

That was why I had planted some rumors within a week of Arslan’s banquet. People needed something to hang onto, if it was only a name or an idea, and they needed it right from the start. It didn’t hurt that there was nothing to back it up at first—you couldn’t arrest a name without a body. The real organization developed very slowly. It had to be solid. It had to be built man by man.