Arslan

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 Hittite 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 shifting 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 nobody, 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 massive 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. Nobody 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 pass 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 glass 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