The Clan of the Cats

IX

The senator just regarded his nephew over steepled fingers for a while after the conclusion of the tale, facing him across the card-sized table in the safe room. At length he said, slowly, “Boy, you should go back to Idaho or wherever and just stay them until we get all this sorted out, you know. Will you? If I arrange for you to fly out tonight, will you do that. for me?”

James shook his head. “I can’t, Uncle Taylor. I’ve some very important appointments in Dade County and other places. If you’re able to get us funding and if the Japanese investors come through, fine, but we need money now. We’ve somewhat less than four million, as it sits, and that’s simply not enough to tide us over until you or they can infuse bigger chunks of cash.

“That damned Harel/Markov is still costing us money, whether up there in the body or not. His precious yaks somehow knocked down enough Cyclone fencing to get loose on the higher end of the plateau, the whole pack of wisents followed them, and they all managed to make it down an almost vertical rock face into the woods down below without so much as a scratch, it would seem. Don’t ask me or anybody else just how they all did it—maybe the bastard taught them how to levitate.”

The senator chuckled. “Animals can do some truly remarkable things when they put their minds to it James, you of all people should be aware of that. Don’t you recall the story of Grandad’s—your great-grandfather’s—bay hunter? Of how he not only knew when the old man was near death, but got out of his paddock, into the house, up the stairs and into Granddad’s bedroom, all sixteen-plus hands of him through a yard and house crowded with servants, relatives and nurses on a twenty-four-hour basis … and no single soul could later recall having seen him do any of it?

“Now I don’t know spit about those wisents, other than that they look and act a lot like our native buffalo … bison, if you will … but I do recall having read somewhere that yaks are a mountain animal, even live high up in the Himalayan massif, so a puny little Rocky Mountain plateau was probably no obstacle—actually, more of a lighthearted romp to them.”

James grimaced and remarked, “Well, that lighthearted romp of those bovids has already taken a sizable chunk out of what little the group had of existing funds and will take more before it’s over and done. See, not only did they damage the fencing, they wandered around for a while near the plateau and then just seemingly disappeared from off the face of the earth. I had to hire on half a tribe of local Indians and actually put up cash bounties for their safe return before any of them turned up.”

“They were found, though, I take it?” asked the senator.

James grimaced again. “In a way, I wish they had really just disappeared from off the face of the globe, all things considered. Yes, they were found, but not by the Indians. Twenty-odd crow-flight miles away, some state rangers who were on the lookout for poachers saw buzzards and rode into some very rugged country to find a dead bison bull—one of the forest bison, rare and so valuable, worse luck for our group.

“The beast was breathing his last and his wounds were acrawl with maggots, but even so it was easy for the rangers to see that be hadn’t been done in by the hand of man but rather by another horned animal. They put him down with a bullet, took off his ID tag to turn in to the proper authority and set out to backtrack him, but had to turn back before they found what had been his herd.

“That night it started to rain, and it alternately rained, drizzled and threatened for three days, then came a weekend, so it was a total of five days before a larger number of men, with jeeps, horses and a chopper, went back up there to find what little the scavengers had left of the bull’s carcass. The chopper it was finally located the herd—five bison cows, two calves, three wisent cows and a calf, one bull wisent that had been in a recent fight, and one yak cow.

“The wisent bull apparently had driven off the smaller, lighter yak bull while they all still were fairly close to the plateau area, because the yak Look off in another direction, chanced across a pasture of a small dairy operation and decided this must be his new home and harem laid out for him. You can imagine the shock of the gentleman-rancher on finding a long-haired, long-horned and rather cantankerous wild bull among his prize cows; it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot the bastard out of hand, but he didn’t.

“When we were passed word of where the escapee was, we went down there with the big truck and brought him back. But now the owner of the cows is rumbling about suing the group for probable damages to his purebred, prize-winning cows … and if he does, he’ll probably win, be awarded a hefty settlement by any jury of locals, and we will be faced with the unhappy choice of either paying it or of paying more in the long run by going through the appeals process and, if we choose the latter, making local enemies we do not either need or want.”

Taylor Bedford shrugged. “Settle out of court—that’s the best way, I’ve found, in damage cases.”

His nephew made a rude noise. “Tried. The bastard wants a truly stupendous sum, more than I think his entire hashup up there is worth, seems to be under the impression that we’re a lavishly funded or endowed government project or, at least, a tax writeoff for some gigantic corporation or conglomerate. Gouging bastard!

“Even so, were that the only cost, I just might be able to do it, much as bowing to his demands would grate. But it’s not. No, far from it. When the rangers found the wisents and the yak cow, they notified the project, of course, announcing that if we wanted any of them back alive, we had better get up there and get them out, pronto. Seems the wisent bull had taken the whole of his new-won herd up into an area that was almost inaccessible to even a horse. The big fucker had already injured one saddle horse and treed its rider for some hours, and the rangers were seemingly anticipating shooting him with some relish.”

“So what did you do, James?” asked the senator. His nephew sighed and cracked a knuckle, “Zeppy … Dr. Baronian and I jeeped up there, borrowed a brace of horses and rode up fairly close to the herd, then went in—very cautiously, mind you—afoot to find that the rangers were right about that big wisent bull being as mean as a Kodiak bear with a toothache, as murderous as a great white shark. He came close to getting us, too, he and the wisent cow with the calf. It was on our ride back to the jeep track that we two decided the only feasible way of getting the brutes out alive was by drug gun, cargo net and copter, and that’s what we promised the rangers we’d do.

“Back at the project center, I phoned the outfit that had been providing us with copter services and explained the problem, and the next day, the president of the firm arrived aboard one of his smaller helicopters. He had been all smiles and cheery words when he first arrived—for after all, the group has been a really good, cash-on-the-barrelhead customer during our time up there—but after he had heard the details and had carefully studied the maps, seen exactly where he or one of his other pilots was going to have to take a copter large enough for the job—furthermore, take it up there and back for each of the animals—he became much cooler of manner and far more serious. After he had done some calculations, he came up with a figure that jarred me, nor would he budge from it, wouldn’t come down one red cent, telling me in effect to take it or leave it, though offering the names of a few other copter services that might be willing to undertake the work.

“As I continued to try to haggle him down, he finally took my arm, walked me out to his copter, strapped me into it and then flew us both up to the area in question. Uncle Taylor, I’ve heard you and others—racing yachtsmen—speak in the past of ‘living, prescient gales and storms,’ but I never then knew, could not really picture, just what any of you meant by the phrase; well, I do now, please believe me, I do.

“That man is an exceedingly skillful copter pilot of many years experience, and I thank God for the fact, else I’d likely not be here talking to you now. The winds up in those mountains, in and over the small, deep canyons we had to fly into, then lift out of, seemed to know just the best ways in which to see us crash into a wall of rock and seemed to do their utter damnedest to see us dead somewhere up them. I can’t recall ever being so damned scared in my life, I mean it, every word of it.

“After that, after we’d gotten back safely to the project and I was outside a very stiff drink, I left the pilot nursing one of his own, met with the others in private and explained just how much the man was demanding for the services of his men and his copters, how hazardous was the area in which they would have to operate. I said that having flown in and out of there, I felt the astronomically steep price to be cheap, all things considered, did we feel it necessary to get those bovids out alive at all.

“Drs. Baronian and Marburg were of the opinion that we should just cut our losses there and then, and allow the rangers to put all the exotic strays down and, if nothing else, have a barbecue of wisent and yak up them. But, of course, Drs. Stekowski and Singh felt that as we had been responsible, at least in part, for having the animals imported to this area, we owed them all possible protection. whereupon Dr. Marburg took Dr. Stekowski’s side and Dr. Baronian and I were outvoted.

“So I went out and signed a contract and gave over a check for a healthy deposit, then contacted the rangers—who, of course, would’ve been happiest had everything been done yesterday if not before—and we all went about setting up schedules, tentative ones, naturally, tricky as the weather can be that high up.

“The copter people got out the heavy-duty cargo nets they had used to transport some of the animals up to us with, before we’d acquired the big truck. Dr. Baronian and I tested the two carbon-dioxide-powered anesthetic rifles, and she carefully measured the doses for each syringe of dope. Then, on the appointed day, we jeeped back up there, rode and walked in, and put that damned killer of a wisent bull out first, then had to do the same for the nursing cow before we could even get close enough to wave in the copter and the men who’d help us get him in the net.

“To make a longish story a bit shorter, we did get all the big beasts out of that high canyon and back down to our plateau, though it ended up taking us two days and therefore costing us a good bit more, but that was the fault of the devilish weather and couldn’t have been avoided. The only one we lost was that biggest wisent cow. Being sedated twice in two days was apparently more than her constitution could take, and she never woke up after she was back on the plateau, so I just had her skinned, dressed, butchered and hung … waste not, want not, you know. Besides, it was that much less flesh I had to buy for the cats, not to mention far fresher and far less likely to be full of chemicals and hormones.”

“The native buffalo … ahh, bison, gave you no trouble, then?” asked the senator.

The younger man grinned. “Not really, no, though they did get into the way a lot, whenever the copter came in low and hovered. But, as the rangers explained, in really bad weather up there, the mountain bison herd is dropped bales of hay from choppers, so they’ve learned to associate the sounds of a low-flying or a hovering copter with food drops; they just thought it was chow time and were jockeying to be first in line. But compared to the damned wisents, the bison are almost tame as milk cows.”

The senator nodded, smiling. Then, suddenly, he raised his eyebrows and snapped his fingers. “By the way, James, something you’d better know early on about that piece I gave you is this: the second, third and fourth round in each of those magazines is loaded with a very special bullet, a purple load.”

“Purple load?” queried the younger.

“Explosive,” replied his uncle. “Explosive on impact against anything hard, explosive very shortly after penetration of flesh or muscle. They’re supposedly safe until fired and thereby armed—at least, so the manufacturer avers. Nonetheless, be very careful about dropping them or the magazine in which they’re loaded, eh?”

James Bedford hissed between his teeth. “And this weapon came out of your private arsenal, Uncle? By God, you play hardball … and for keeps, don’t you?”

A grim look came over the senator’s patrician face. “James, you have spent precious little time in cities of past years. or you’d know whereof I speak. The entire megalopolis here, from Boston to Norfolk, is become a jungle. Even with police and security people thick as flies hereabouts, still there exists all too often a real need for self-protection if one appears at all afluent, and that is not even to mention the plots of one or another sort always bubbling somewhere in some embassy or terrorist group. Yes, I do have personal bodyguards, quite a few of them, but sometimes they might not be sufficient. Therefore I go armed, well armed, at all times and in almost all places, day and night. And now that it is made clear that some one has targeted you, you must quickly learn to emulate me in regard to self-protection.

Furthermore, the problems never seem to improve, only to get worse and even worse, everywhere … and those are only the problems of which almost everyone is aware, things that can be easily seen, experienced, read in everyday life. There are other things, however, things of bone-chilling terror, which I am forbidden to impart to you or most people due to my security oaths, and seemingly there is nothing that the Congress, the Executive or any others can do to halt or even slightly ameliorate these things.

“My boy, I am deeply fearful. I am fearful that we now are living out the last days, weeks, months, possibly years of civilization as we know it. I feel a sense of foreboding, of an impending doom looming, glowering, gathering closer and ever more closely around us all … and I, I just feel so utterly helpless. With all my wealth, despite all my power, I feel completely alone sometimes, and as defenseless as a day-old baby. I can only pray that I be proved wrong.”

Riffling back through the read pages until he found a date, Milo shook his head sadly. “No, you weren’t wrong. Senator. Only a few more years prove your forebodings with a vengeance. And you were helpless to stop it, by then. Of course, no one will now ever know exactly who started that last, deadly exchange, not that it is of any importance; it just happened, and a whole world, billions of its people and ten thousand years’ worth of cultural accretions, went down the tubes in mere weeks of elapsed time.

“The Russians of course thought we, the U.S., had started it, and we immediately assumed that they had, but from what little I was able to pick up over that powerful private radio setup, other persons around the world had other culprits in mind. A few of them suspected China, though how they could’ve gotten their relatively short-ranged missiles to points as far distant as Cairo and Rome or why they would’ve targeted such cities to begin, no one seemed able to imagine, not even their accusers.

“Some accused the Union of South Africa, too, but here again the distances and targets would’ve been unreal for South African equipment and motives. Not a few thought it to have been Cuba, but if so it was most odd that some of the earliest strikes were on a couple of far-southern Russian areas. The same is true as regards Iraq, too. Why would Iraq have struck at its longtime ally and armorer?

“A good deal of suspicion, from a good many quarters, fell on Israel, and with good reason. For decades, by then, they had been growling a nuclear-tipped threat at all their neighbors while their so-called Defense Forces gobbled up a bit of land here and a strip of land there from neighboring states for ‘purely defensive purposes.’ Had they for any reason or none at all come to feel threatened? Well, both their civil government and their military had full quotas of hotheads who could’ve launched at all real or imagined enemies. Others suspected India and/or Pakistan, too. But the weight of opinion was that it had been done by an aging, megalomanic Moslem dictator in North Africa—a man who had been so meddlesome and erratic over the years that even most of his own coreligionists had ended by virtually outlawing him and his country, and after a brief flirtation following his illegal seizure of power, not even the Kremlin or its satellites would have any more dealings with him than selling him military hardware for hard cash on the barrelhead. And what in hell could this United States senator have done to halt such an act of hatred and madness from so totally unexpected a quarter? What could anyone have done?

“And, sadder still, even if that one madman had been taken out of the world picture by some fortuitous happenstance prior to his final act of savage aggression, I’m dead certain that it would’ve been only a matter of time—likely a very short time, all things weighed and considered at that—before one of the other suspects or yet another aggregation of fanatics or lunatics did the same thing.

“And, saddest of all, in the world political and military climate of that era—every nation of any power or aspiration armed to the teeth, treatied to the eyebrows, trusting the sworn words of neither allies nor enemies but fully expecting treachery at any moment, scared shitless of annihilation, yet determined to take any attacker down into death with it—what finally happened to the world and its people was a foreordained outcome, the worldwide nightmare of billions of folks for decades of time that became horrible reality overnight.

“By the time of Senator Taylor Bedford’s tenure of office, it was become impossible for anyone to do anything to reverse the trends, save the nations from themselves, almost half a century too late. But my country the one nation that could have done something to help set the other nations and nations then unborn, undreamed of, on a different, less destructive course, didn’t; it let the brief chance slip by. The U.S. just let … hell, helped! … the juggernaut of global disaster start to roll, ignored by everyone until it had gained such momentum that no one, no nation or group of nations could’ve stopped it or even slowed it down.

“Eustace Barstow,” he thought, his lips shaping the words, soundlessly, a horde of bitter memories welling up from below his conscious level, “General Eustace Barstow might, just might’ve been able to do something, there very shortly after the beginning of the thing, of that juggernaut’s roll that took so much of the world and its people down into dark disaster, doom, death.

“He recognized the menace, the true enemies of all freedom, of all civilization, early on, before World War Two even was concluded in Europe, but those who even took him seriously mocked him and his aims, called him ‘superpatriot,’ ‘red-baiter’ and much, much worse, most people just ignored him, wrote him off as some variety of looney-tune and forgot him. And I, more’s the pity, especially so as I had experienced firsthand just what the foe was capable of in pursuance of its selfish ends, deserted him too, got to hell away from him and the army and set about getting married and falling into a pisspotful of money I’d done nothing to earn or even deserve, a fine and loving woman I deserved even less and four children I adopted and reared as my own. And the end of it was suffering and death for all five of them and uncounted billions more, and all because none of us few who might’ve helped the even fewer who knew, who could look below the surface or into the future, if you will, and see what must be unless it could be quickly brought to a screeching halt, would do so.

“Eustace at least was able to keep his freedom, his status, his life, despite his lifelong efforts to fight the menace, to convert others to his beliefs. Some of the visionaries were not so fortunate. Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for nearly half a century, the last twenty-one years of it in what amounted to solitary confinement, until at last the poor old man hanged himself. General George Patton, unabashable, suffered an auto ‘accident’ that proved fatal. Others, like Ezra Pound, were locked away for years in madhouses and there subjected to the spate of twentieth-century tortures known as ‘behavior modification’ or were rendered intellectually impotent through means of icepick lobotomies. Most were simply pressured or ridiculed into silence.

“Oh, if only I …”

A brace of his uncle’s bodyguards collected James Bedford’s luggage and effects and they arrived at the senator’s tightly guarded suburban residence at almost the same time as the elected legislator and his guest. James had been to the house in times past, but only for meals or small, informal gatherings.

While they had awaited the senator’s copter on the roof of his office building, he had said. “You could’ve been put up in one of the so-called security-guest areas of several of the bigger hotels in town, but security is relative in such places, I’ve found; why, only last month one of those wild-eyed terrorist types got into one of them long enough to thoroughly kill a Turkish businessman before being cut almost in half at the waist by a guard’s machine pistol.”

James Bedford sighed. “Armenian or Greek, this time?”

The senator shrugged. “Neither … that is so far known. No, the perp had jumped a ship in Baltimore Harbor two weeks before, a Turkish-registered ship, at that. But, clearly, someone or some group had brought him here, hidden him, armed him, briefed him, gotten him into and up there. The only certain thing is that he’ll never be persuaded to tell us anything now.

“No, the security-guest thing is obviously fallible, as full of holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese. My place, on the other hand, is about as safe as anyplace can be these days—protected by state-of-the-art equipment and a small but well-trained staff. Hell, James, it would take the likes of a platoon of air cavalry to get into the place, and even then they’d know damned well that they’d been in a fight.”

Over dinner, the elder Bedford said, “Actually, I should’ve thought to invite you out here, overnight, anyway; I don’t see enough of any of the family anymore, it seems, and, between mistresses as I currently am, there’s no one to talk to out here except servants or bodyguards I don’t suppose I could persuade you to phone and reschedule your appointments, then stay over until one of the agencies determines just who was trying to snatch you and why, could I?”

Chewing industriously at a gobbet of octopus, James could only shake his head.

The senator nodded. “I thought not, but it was worth a try to me.” His voice sounded a bit sad and wistful.

Finally swallowing, James asked, “What happened to … Sidonia, was it? She was your most recent, wasn’t she?”

His uncle smiled. “No, you’re a bit out of date. Sidonia met and wed an Argentine chap, that was almost two years ago; I gave her away at the ceremony, in addition to paying for her trousseau and for the minor surgical procedure that restored her hymen.”

“That did what?” James burst out, almost dropping his salad fork.

“Restored Sidonia’s hymen, my boy, gave her the semblance of virginity for her wedding night. You or I wouldn’t’ve given much of a damn, of course, but to certain cultures, such things are still extremely important,” Taylor Bedford replied before forking half a cherry tomato and a soupçon of greens into his mouth.

“Where in hell did she meet this antique gentleman?” asked James. “At a meeting of the Neanderthal Society?”

Chewing, Taylor wrinkled his brows in thought, swallowed, then shook his head. “Never heard of a Neanderthal Society, James, but then we both have our own narrow fields of specialities. No, I believe they met at some charity function of the Roman Catholic diocese. I think that was it.”

James snorted. “Figures. Saint Sidonia the Retreaded Virgin. So, how many came after her, Uncle?”

“Only one, James, a young woman who called herself Deirdre and claimed to be French-Danish … but wasn’t. She and her employers had gone to great lengths to cover her well and very deeply, and she was basically a nice girl, I think; at least I was already becoming rather fond of her when I was presented with more than enough evidence that I had been, in effect, nurturing a potential viper in my bosom. Bringing her into the city and turning her over for interrogation—with all that I know about those procedures—was one of the most difficult things I ever have had to do And, in the end, it was all for nothing; she managed to remove a false tooth and bit into the cyanide capsule it contained before her interrogation had gotten beyond the stage of threats and the presentation of before-and-after photos of previous suspects.” Infinite sadness was evident in the older man’s tone and eyes.

“Oh, you poor bastard.” said Milo aloud and with sincere feeling, reading the words in the journal of the younger Bedford, there in that underground lamplit room, so many scores of years after the deaths of both the Bedfords and most of humanity. “You poor, poor old bastard.”

Abruptly, his memory dredged up the scene in the dusty camp—that nameless security installation somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946. Holding in his arms the just-dead body of the Russian woman who had called herself Betty, the woman whom he had begun to love, the woman with whom he had sexed bare hours before, the woman from whose open lips arose the bitter-almond reek of cyanide.

It had been in the aftermath of that terrible morning that he had left the operation headed up by Eustace Barstow. “I told him and myself that I was just tired of watching people die. Little did I know then just how much more dying would be brought about by the defection from his terribly important cause of me and people like me. And by the early seventies, by which time I knew, it was really too late for him or an army of hims to do anything that would’ve done anyone any good. And that’s just about what he told me that night in my hotel room, right after I was brought back from ’Nam, too.”

Staring at the ice he was swirling around in his glass, the general officer in mufti had said sadly. “Thank you for the offer, Milo, but you made it about a quarter century too late. Had I had you and a few others even as late in the game as ’forty-eight or ’forty-nine … who knows? But now? Well, as one of my wives used to say, ‘Too much water has gone over the bridge’.”

He had thrown down the drink, placed the glass on the table and fixed Milo with a stare. “Now, my friend, the world is bound irrevocably for hell in the proverbial bucket. Only a true miracle will stop it, and I’ve no faith in miracles. When will it happen? Well, it could be happening, the incident that will set off our Götterdämmerung, even as we two sit here tonight, but I rather doubt it, really. No, I give a minimum of twenty years and it might even go on as long as fifty years before we have true hell on this earth. But fifty is the maximum. Neither of us will live to see it, thank God.”

Remembering, Milo thought, “How wrong he was. I didn’t live to see much of it, true, but I heard about it from points all over the globe on that radio. And what little I did actually witness was pure hell and no mistake.”

The general had continued, “No, Milo, the time is now long past when you could help me or I could help anyone … almost. But I still owe you, owe you more than I could ever repay, really, and I still have a fairly good, fairly effective and powerful organization with which I can help you … if you’ll let me.” The officer stood, stepped across the room and built himself yet another drink, then turned and took his seat on the edge of the bed once more.

Milo had just shaken his head. “General, I can’t think of how you could help me or exactly why I would need your help … or that of anybody else, for that matter. Look, the very worst that any of these leftist liberals could do would be to cashier me, throw me out of the army without a pension, maybe with a DD, though I doubt any of them would dare go so far, not in the case of a career officer who’s been through three damned wars. Even on the far-outside chance that this McGovern wins, no new administration is going to want to start off its hegemony with that kind of a stench to dog it through the next four years.

“And even in the worst scenario, General, the last things I need are a pension and VA benefits to sustain me. Did you forget? Another general, my late buddy, Jethro Stiles, left me heir to an obscene amount of money and possessions. Yes, I’d miss the army after so many long years in it, but I sure as hell won’t starve or be anything approaching impoverished, not if I live another hundred years.”

“You’re most likely right about things, Milo,” said Barstow, tiredly. “Nonetheless, I’ll see that the skids are greased well for you, see that you get the kind of send-off your years of loyal service if nothing else merit you.” When Milo opened his mouth, Barstow waved a hand, saying, “No, no protests, my old friend. It will be no slightest trouble for me and mine, and, moreover, it will give me the chance and the great pleasure to jam a handful of stinging nettles up certain hemorrhoidal left-liberal arses over there in the puzzle factory, then be serenaded by the sweet music of their shrieks of outrage and agony.

“But I’ll also be leaving you a card on which will be some telephone numbers and a couple of addresses for me. When, if, you ever need me, need any help I can give, call or wire or write me, Please promise me, Milo.”

Milo was vouschafed less than a week to enjoy wearing the silver eagles of his full-colonelcy before they were replaced with the single stars of a brigadier general, and within yet another week he was officially retired. After a brief trip to New York City and a few days spent with the aging attorney who had handled most of his affairs for a quarter century, he purchased a new automobile and drove back down through New Jersey, Maryland and the District of Columbia into northern Virginia. In no rush to get anywhere for any purpose, he drove in a leisurely manner, enjoying the sights of a peaceful, undevastated countryside, roads that might own a few potholes here and there but no shell craters, streets with green lawns upon which well-fed children played children’s games.

Lulled by the steady throb of the big automobiles powerful eight-cylinder engine, he rolled along highways between fields of growing crops and pastures on which grazed sleek cattle or leggy, well-bred horses, with nowhere a rusting carcass of a tank or APC or SP-gun, no burned-out trucks or shattered jeeps hulks.

It was an intensely soothing trip for him and he deliberately strung it out, made it last, driving only so far as he wished each succeeding day, then finding a place to stay each night—tourist court, motel or real hotel, whatever was available at the time and the place and took his fancy of the moment.

He dined simply or elegantly or not at all in the same mode as he lodged, dependent mostly upon what facilities were there, were available wherever he decided to stop—Nabs and Cokes, hot dogs or hamburgers with french fries and malteds, chow mein and beer, Chateaubriand and vintage wines, all were the same to him and all were equally enjoyed in an unhurried manner, for he felt—to use the old-army expression—that he had the rest of his life to do this in … though he could not then have imagined just how long the rest of his life was to be.

Other than the various potables consumed with his meals, Milo drank very little on the protracted trip down from New York to Virginia. Nor was his near-abstinence because he did not like spirits or lack a head for them, he just felt a need to see and feel what he saw and felt unaffected by drugs or stimulants.

Benighted somewhere on the road from Baltimore to the District, he found himself seated in a bar enjoying a preprandial couple of whiskies before walking next door for dinner. While the paunchy bartender slowly polished glasses, most of the other patrons—clearly locals—sipped draft beer and watched the news on the television fitted into the paneled wall above the bartender’s bald head.

Concentrating on enjoyment of the pleasant burn, the smoky fumes of the alcohol in mouth and gullet, Milo did not at first hear the man who stood before him, beyond the shiny bar.

“Ready for another’n, sir?” smiled the bartender, with a real diffidence, for damned few of his customers were in the habit of ordering double Chivases, much less tipping handsomely with the service of each drink.

Milo glanced down at the small swallow or so of whiskey left in the old-fashioned glass and shrugged. “Why not? Yes, one more, please.”

As the bartender approached with the fresh drink, the outer door opened and a slight young man entered and limped up to the bar a few feet down from Milo, at whom he smiled and nodded in a polite manner. The man appeared to be in his twenties. In addition to the limp, his face and the backs of his hands were covered with shiny scar tissue. Milo had seen that kind of scarring before, over the years, and could make a pretty shrewd guess as to just what had caused it.

Spying the newcomer, the bartender’s thick lips moved in an almost soundless “Oh, shit.” and he hurriedly glanced back at the knot of locals grouped before the television, but as they were rapt by the medium, he set the glass before Milo with a flourish, accepted the payment and tip with a smile and a nod, then passed swiftly down to lean as far as his belly would let him across the bar toward the scarred man.

“Gawddammit, Billy,” Milo heard him urgently whisper, “won’t what Bubba done to you the lastest time enough? He ain’t seed you yet, so get to hell out, ’fore he does. Mist’ Chamberlin, he ain’t over here to drag Bubba and them off of you t’night, an by the time I could get the cops out here, you’d be dogmeat, and you knows it, too. Please, just leave, huh?”

But it was too late.

“Hey!” Milo heard a nasal voice ring from up the bar. “Hey, yawl, look who’s here. The fuckin’ baby-burner’s done come back to finish gettin’ his lumps. I got dibs on bashin’ the fucker first. Who wants to hol’ him for me, huh?”