“Mr. Ademian,” said the dean of students, Bancroft, “the college has full insurance—any damages to your vehicle will be fully covered, never you fear.”
Rupen shook his head. “You don’t understand, sir. I don’t give a damn about the car itself; it’s insured, too. and it’s a company car. anyway, not mine. But I don’t think that you. I. any of us want that gang of hoodlums in there to get their grubby hands on a certain wooden box that’s in the back of the wagon, covered by an old GI blanket. We were going out to my brother’s home from here today to make ready for a shooting match this weekend coming, so within that box are a dozen one-pound canisters of black powder and six or seven tins of percussion caps.”
Bancroft stared, open-mouthed, at Rupen for a long moment, then sank into a nearby chair, moaning, his face in his hands. “Oh, my sweet Jesus God! Do you know what you’ve done, Mr. Ademian? That group in there are most of them foaming fanatics—they’re perfectly capable of blowing up the building, just to prove a point!”
“Mr. Bancroft,” said Rupen wryly, “don’t worry about your precious building, hear? A measly ten pounds of black powder wouldn’t put much of a dent in reinforced concrete, steel girders, and brick. But the danger is that they just might have along someone who knows how to make antipersonnel bombs, and I don’t want to load down my conscience with that responsibility.”
He, Bagrat, the two nephews, and Paul Czemik, along with two of the security guards—unarmed, save for billy clubs and transceivers—arrived before the vertically sliding fire door to the tunnel that connected directly to the underground parking facility for the now-occupied administration building.
Before helping his partner raise the door, one of the guards said, “Mr. Ademian, sir, the little fuckers prob’ly done closed the door leads out onto the street by now, but if it ain’t too big and wide a car you got, you could just drive ‘er straight through this tunnel here. We does it at night with two-wheelers and jeeps all the time.”
In the opened doorway, Rupen told his pudgy, out-of-shape younger brother, “Bagrat, you stay here, you and Al. If Haigh and I can’t get our wagon and get it out of there, four wouldn’t be able to do any better.”
Bagrat opened his mouth to protest, but the tone of his elder brother’s voice, the look in his eyes, told him that it would do him no good to say anything. He just watched Rupen and Haigh walk away through the short, wide, brightly lit tunnel
As they came out into the somewhat less well-lit parking area, the two were confronted by a pack of some half-dozen young men—bearded (most of them, those old enough or sufficiently masculine to grow a decent crop of facial hair), shaggy, and grubby, dressed in a rare collection of military-surplus clothing, beads, rawhide, and either boots or homemade-looking sandals. Two of them hefted police-type billies, one bore a sawn-off pool cue. and the foremost held an elegant-looking walking stick that Rupen was dead certain concealed a steel blade.
“Man,” crowed the scruffy blond boy with the cane, “don’t they look pretty, like they just fell out of a bathtub. Not just coats and ties, three-piece suits, by damn. How fucking establishment can you get. huh?” Then, in a hard, cold voice to Rupen, “Whatta you two fuckers want over here? This building’s been took over for the people by the Revolutionary Peace Committee. It and nothing in it belongs to you cocksuckers anymore, see?”
Rupen slowed, stopped, stood stock-still, his system pumping with adrenaline, but not one trace of excitement in his stance, his demeanor, or his voice. Quietly, but firmly, he said, “I am not in any way connected with this college, young man. I am a visitor on this campus, and I have come to get my car, that dark-grey Mercury station wagon, over there behind you.”
The blond boy snarled. “Who the hell you think you are, you old faggot, with this ‘young man’ shit? My fucking daddy? You two get your ass back into that fucking tunnel or I’ll spill your chitlins all over the floor!” With a sibilant zzweep. he withdrew the blade from the mahogany cane and shook it at Rupen.
He did not even have time to show shock at the sight of the PPK coming out of the shoulder holster in Rupen’s hand before a noise so loud that it stunned him and all his pack and a spurt of flame from the muzzle of the pistol sped a lead slug that left a silvery smear on the concrete between his feet, then caromed off, whining like a banshee until the crashing of glass announced that it had found a lodgment somewhere among the parked automobiles.
Both blade and cane dropping from his suddenly weak and nerveless grasp, the blond boy held both hands out toward Rupen and backed away on unsteady legs, shaking his head and stuttering, a damp satin spreading from his crotch and down the left leg of his baggy, filthy suntan slacks. Bypassing the elevator completely, the pack poured up the fire stairs at a speed of knots, leaving their billies and the pool cue on the floor of the parking facility along with the sword-cane.
When he had negotiated the tunnel and come to a stop in the basement of the lecture hall, Paul Czernik remarked, “Company car or not, Rupen. you’d better get a good mechanic to look at that engine. That backfire over there was as loud as a gunshot. Did you have any trouble getting to the car?”
Both hands on the wheel, Rupen shook his head. “There was a small reception committee, Paul. But they were all just posturing kids—I outbluffed them.”
Young Haigh Panoshian knew the truth of the matter, of course, but Uncle Rupen’s stock had gone up a thousand percent during those few moments and only a quiet word was required to gain his instant silence on the matter, except among family members, naturally.
“Would you have really shot the boy, Rupen?” asked the archbishop.
“Him or any or all of them, had I felt I had to, Hal,” replied Rupen, adding. “But I knew I wouldn’t have to, that one, possibly two warning shots would assuredly do the trick with them. A hideaway weapon like that sword-cane is not designed or intended as a threat, it’s to be drawn and immediately used. I could tell from the way he held and flourished it that he’d never really applied it to its true purpose before; he was making to slash at me with a stabbing weapon, one that didn’t even have a true edge, so I knew I was confronting, at best, a thoroughly inexperienced amateur whose closest exposures to that kind of violence previously had most likely been watching movies or television.”
The Archbishop of York nodded. “You’ll work out very well in this world, Rupen. You’re truly a gentleman and gentle—which two do not always come in one package—
but you can be as hard as tempered steel, without qualms or regret. You’re a true survivor type.”
A smile flitted briefly across Rupen Ademian’s olive-hued face. “I am pure Armenian, Der Hal, so what else could I be but a survivor? But back to how I met the woman who became my second wife.
“After that hellish afternoon, Bagrat and I became very popular with the administration, the most of the faculty, and a fair number of the students of that college; we all had—to use a Civil War term—’seen the elephant together.’ A few months later, when Ademian Enterprises found itself in dire need of a hefty income tax deduction, Bagrat and I persuaded Kogh to donate it, or most of it, to the city college building fund, whereupon we all were in like Flynn, and that following June, they had Kogh speak at their commencement ceremony, then conferred honorary degrees on all three of us.
“At the faculty-administration-alumni cocktail party that followed, that evening, Carolyn Foote Carter was introduced to me by someone or other. I don’t know to this day exactly how the hell she got into that party, for she wasn’t faculty or an alumna, just a graduate student in the Master of Social Work program offered by that college.
“At twenty-six, Carolyn was a most attractive young woman, really far too young for me by the standards of that time and place, but she gave the impression of being much taken by me … and I fell for her wiles, too, there being no fool like an old fool, as the song says. I rationalized it all out to where it made good sense, of course. I’d refused, over the sixteen years since Marge’s murder, to allow myself to become deeply involved or committed to any woman, so I had right often been very lonely, when I wasn’t too busy to notice it. I was, by then, almost forty-eight years old and financially not too bad off for a foreign-born immigrant with not a hell of a lot of formal education, and I figured that if anybody had earned a few years of happiness, it was me.