“That’s right,” I said. “I’m the principal.”
“What is your name?”
“Franklin Bond.”
He had been smiling all the time. Now he tilted his head in a little hint of a bow, never taking his eyes off mine. There was nothing else impressive about him that you could put your finger on, but he did have the most piercing eyes I’d ever seen. “Good,” he said. “You will show me your school.”
“Gladly. But I’d like to know what you’re here for.”
He strode out, and a bayonet prodded the small of my back, in case I hadn’t gotten the message. My legs were a good deal longer than his; I caught up in two steps, and we went down the hall side by side. He glanced up at me with amusement. “I shall bivouac in your town.” Well, that sounded temporary. “I shall hold a dinner here tonight. You will be my guest.”
I showed him the new west wing first, with the kitchen and cafeteria and the wide folding doors opening into our gym that doubled as auditorium. He took it all in with those eyes of his, as if the fate of the world hung on everything he looked at. Then the library and the audiovisual room and the music room. Then I had to lead him back into the main block of the school.
“And what is this?”
“That’s the fire door.” Where he came from, it might be a revolutionary concept. “In case a fire ever broke out in one part of the building, we could pull this steel door down and keep it out of the other part.”
He nodded and ran his left hand up the tracks. “It is good,” he said. A connoisseur’s appreciation.
It wasn’t much different from a start-of-school guided tour for the PTA. A little pack of soldiers—half a dozen, maybe—seemed to be tied to General Arslan’s heels. I showed him the shop, the furnace room, the washrooms, the teachers’ lounges, the broom closets. We looked into every classroom. He asked the name of every teacher. The children sat subdued and uneasy at their desks; I was proud to see that the teachers were keeping them quietly busy.
The only classroom we actually went into was Nita Runciman’s eighth grade. Arslan paused a moment at the open door, resting his hand lightly on the frame, and then stepped in with a broad smile. He stood with arms akimbo, surveying the class. For the first time I noticed he wore a pistol on his left hip. The children watched him blankly.
Suddenly he stepped forward, down one aisle and back another, swiftly tapping three children on the shoulder as he passed. He was saying something, chuckling, to his men as he came back toward the door. Immediately the three were pulled from their seats and hustled after him. It was two girls and a boy—Paula Sears, LouAnn Williams, and Hunt Morgan. He had picked, very possibly, my three best eighth-graders.
“Wait a minute,” I said. He had to stop or walk into me. He stopped. “Where are you taking these children? And what for?”
He put on an expression of mocking innocence. Yes, he was too young. He shrugged. “Is it important that you should know this? However, I tell you. They will serve at my dinner tonight.” He stepped forward, and the faithful bayonet prodded me out of his way.
Back in my office, one hip perched on the edge of my desk, he lit cigarette after cigarette, smoking each one down in intense short drags till the live coal touched his fingers, flipping the smoldering butts onto my floor. He had a window opened, which let in a cold draft without clearing the air much. Meanwhile he was busy. The three eighth-graders had been led out and driven away in a truck. Soldiers kept coming and going, reporting to Arslan and receiving orders. Every one of them looked like a kid getting ready for a birthday party. I’d never seen so many jubilant faces on grown men at one time before. Whether it was a good sign or bad remained to be seen.
He wasn’t just planning a bivouac and a dinner. It was to be a feast. It was to be, all too obviously, a victory celebration. The cooks were put to work, not just in the kitchen but in the home ec room, with Maud Dollfus in charge there. Five of Maud’s best students were drafted to help, and so were the music teacher (Hunt Morgan’s mother Jean) and our new little librarian. The freezers were emptied. There was a regular procession of soldiers carrying cases of liquor. My phone kept ringing, and Arslan kept answering it himself, sounding brusque and casual in his ungodly language. I wasn’t much acquainted with the ways of generals, but it seemed to me he was an almighty informal commander.
I’d settled down in my desk chair at first, to keep him out of it; but the intrusion was getting to my stomach, and pretty soon I had to stand up and move around. I was just pacing back from the big window when he suddenly swung toward me with a friendly smile and announced, “Now it is your turn.” He waved his hand hospitably toward my phone. “You have three hours, twenty minutes; at five P.M. the telephone service stops. You will inform the parents of your students that their children are held as hostages for the good behavior of all citizens. You will inform them that they will surrender all vehicles and all weapons and ammunition to my soldiers on demand. You will inform them that each time one of my soldiers is attacked or resisted, two children will be executed—if possible, children belonging to the family of the guilty citizen. You will inform them that they may bring one blanket for each child, to be delivered to the southwest corner of the school grounds by five-thirty P.M. You will inform them that for each citizen seen outside his or her home after six P.M., one child will be executed—if possible, again, a child belonging to the family of the guilty citizen.” He straightened up suddenly from the desk and stepped close to me, thrusting his face up toward mine. He was alive with eager pleasure. “Have you understood?” he demanded exultantly. “Do you believe that I can do what I say—and that I will do it?”
Maybe and maybe not. I pushed past him, bumping his shoulder hard, and picked up the phone. He was still grinning as he led his retinue out.
There were about two hundred families represented in the school, and not all of them had telephones. I called first the ones who were most likely to be of help and gave each of them a list of others to contact, ticking off names in the school register. It wasn’t just a matter of spreading the news. Everybody had to be convinced. Everybody. The middle of southern Illinois might not be a very likely spot for military atrocities, but I was damned if I’d call his bluff. I wasn’t going to have children slaughtered—not my own students, not in my own school. And he looked like a man who could have a taste for blood.
The second call I made (I wanted to let Arslan’s men get out of the office first) was to Luella. “They’ve been here,” she said grimly. “They took the couch and the green armchair, for some reason. And they turned the whole house wrong side out. They just ransacked everything. It’ll take me
“But they didn’t hurt you?”
“No, no. I just stayed out of their way.”
I gave her a list of names to work on and told her to be careful—good advice in a cyclone, but there wasn’t much else to say.
I was still on the phone at five, checking with people who’d helped make calls. The line went dead almost on the second by the master clock. That was it. I rubbed my face and said a little prayer.
They had left me alone all this time, and when I stepped out into the hall nobody bothered me. I walked down to the cafeteria and through it into the gym. My living-room couch was standing in the center of the stage at the opposite end, with my coffee table in front of it. Some of the cafeteria tables had been moved into the gym, and between them the floor was crowded with chairs—all of the school’s folding chairs, teachers’ desk chairs, and a medley of chairs that must have been confiscated from people’s homes. No doubt my armchair was in there someplace. I strolled back into the main block of the school.
Relays of children were being led into the A-V room and the shop room, and a couple of Arslan’s officers were interviewing them there. The officers were polite, but it wasn’t likely they’d get much information, considering that the scared kids couldn’t understand one word in four of their accented English. A lot of blankets had already been delivered, and more were coming all the time. Grinning soldiers were distributing them, as friendly as you please. Little Betty Hanson was very shaky, but the rest of the teachers made me proud. I sent Nita Runciman down to help Betty with her third grade, and took Nita’s class across the hall to join the other eighth-grade class under Jack Partridge.
This time there was a colonel in my office. He was in the process of going through my desk, taking a few notes and helping himself to a few of my papers, which he filed neatly in a large folder. He glanced up when I came in and introduced himself in an atrocious accent. It went with his dark, sharp features and wolfish eyes; he would have made a pretty good villain in an old movie. I couldn’t make out the name very well, but part of it sounded like Nizam. I stood and watched him till he got through with my desk and applied himself to the file cabinet. Then I sat
