Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

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 “No, you’re a bit out of date.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.