special dish. Tell him it’s called One-eye Cawdor on a
plate.”
Chapter Seven
With blasters pointed at their heads, Ryan and the others were pushed into the suite the baron had converted into a cavernous dining hall. The place was lit by banks of candles set on stanchions. Though there were many people in the smoky room, Elijah and his family were the only ones eating. The rest were either servants, who scuttled back and forth with food trays and beverage tankards, or the baron’s male toadies, who filled rows of straight-backed chairs like an audience gathered for an evening of chamber music.
Chewing pensively, Baron Willie Elijah sat in a black lounger behind a heavily laden table on a raised dais. The platform was so high, he risked bumping his head on the ceiling when he stood. Sitting at tables below him on die floor level, and also chewing, were his three wives and their three baby daughters. There was a strong resemblance between all the mothers, which came as no surprise to Ryan, since it was common knowledge that they had all been sired by the same man.
Johnson Lester bent in a low, scraping bow to his master, then half straightened and said, “Baron, I’ve captured the deserter, Ryan Cawdor.”
The room went silent.
“So I see,” Elijah said, looking up from his dinner to survey first Ryan, then his friends. On the dais beside Elijah’s feet was a great, brimming jar of tipple. He drew the long-handled dipper from the beer bucket and sluiced a half pint through his cheeks to clear his palate. The meal set out before him was plain fare, and plenty of it: huge clods of pan-roasted flesh; a steaming pile of potatoes cooked in their jackets; a predark, one-gallon plastic bucket full of brown gravy; stacked loaves of crusty flat bread. The baron ate it all with his bare hands.
While they awaited his further word, Elijah picked up a hot potato and squeezed it until the skin split, then sucked the white starch out through the crack. He followed it with a swallow of gravy right from the bucket, then a gulp of beer and quickly back to the roasted clods and bread.
Lester cleared his throat to regain the baron’s attention, then continued. “I caught him trying to sneak through the toll booth with these other stupes. I can’t tell about the others, but for sure, two of his nmnin’ buddies got bad blood-the red-eyed boy and the red-haired bitch. Looks like the butcher of Coupe ville’s gone mutie lover on us, Baron.”
Lester’s master failed to rise to the bait. Instead of exploding with rage, Elijah stared almost amiably at Ryan. He crunched into a fresh loaf of flat bread, sending a rain of crumbs and crust shards spraying over the table. After washing down the mouthful with more
tippie, die baron leaned forward and said, “Well, Cawdor, it’s been a good long while since you and me last faced off. What do you think of the way my little gals filled out?”
The baron’s wives blinked their pale, straight, corn-silk eyelashes at Ryan. They looked so much alike they could have been born triplets. Their round faces bore the same blank expression, and their straight, fine, blond hair was parted in the middle and fell to the middle of their backs. They appeared to be in their early to middle teens and were clad in long dresses with extremely low, tight necklines that with every breath threatened to send plump breasts popping out of their tense confinement.
Though he wanted to skip the small talk and rush into the important subject at hand, Ryan couldn’t risk offending Elijah with the very first words out of his mouth. “They look even younger than the last time I saw them,” he said with a straight face. “Which one’s Poonie? Which one’s Toonie?”
The wives bounced the baby girls on their laps and said nothing.
“You’re a whole generation off, Cawdor,” the baron said. “You’re looking at Poonie-Two, Toonie-Two and Roonie-T\vo.”
“Your granddaughters,1′ Ryan said, smiling at the three girls. “How’re your mothers doing?” He guessed mat Elijah’s daughters were already long dead, kilted by the baron just as their mother, his first wife, had