The size of the tip delighted her. She squealed pleasantly and ran for the back room. Shortly, the manager came out to meet us, a big man with a limp and a scarred face. He introduced himself as Chevalier Iwo, confirmed with us what we had told the waitress, and offered us another round, on the house. We thanked him, said that our ladies were waiting, and declined the round. We started to leave. Iwo then became more persistent, insisting that we stay longer. We, in turn, insisted on leaving. Adam, in fact, even got a bit rude about it. As we left, I saw there was a certain look of sadness in the big chevalier’s eye.
THIRTY
“When I took the Oath of Absolute Obedience, I never thought that I would ever be involved in something like this,” Brother Bartholomew said.
“Nor did I, but our orders come directly from the archbishop, himself, and he is having us do this to ease the burdens on the duke.”
“But if brutal things must be done, why can’t they be done by men trained for brutality? Why can’t the duke do his own dirty work himself? And if this is really God’s work, why can’t we don our cassocks?”
“That was all covered in the archbishop’s speech. Weren’t you listening? Now, hush. Here they come.”
* * *
* * *
Once outside the door, Judah ben Salomon asked if it would be all right if he left us there, since he lived in the opposite direction from where we were going.
“Certainly, but how do we find our way home?”
There were no street signs on the island, no street or tunnel names, and no house or apartment numbering system. Since the island was mobile, even directions were hard to give. Designations like East, North, and South were meaningless. To make matters worse, few tunnels were straight. Dug over the centuries, they met each other at odd angles, most of them curved, and they were as apt to slant up or down as they were to go left or right. Some tunnels managed to do all four. Everybody on the island except us had lived there all their lives and already knew where everything was.
“Simply follow this tunnel until it comes to a split. Take the left-hand branch. When it comes to a crossing, turn left, and you are three steps from your doorway,” Judah said.
“That’s easy enough, but how do we get there in the dark? My penlight won’t last forever,” Adam said.
“The manager will sell you a lantern. The taverns all have them for sale.”
Adam stepped back in and came out with something similar to a Japanese paper lantern on a long, thin bamboo stick. We bid our guide good night and headed out on our way.
“That didn’t feel right,” Adam said.
“What didn’t feel right?”
“The way our guide took off. That innkeeper knew something we don’t, too. Something’s wrong.”
“It’s late and he’s been drinking. Probably, he was just in a hurry to get home to his girl. A lot of us are,” I said.
Adam was shifting his glance, trying to cover both directions of the long dark tunnel. “I’m serious, Treet. Keep your eyes open.”
“You’re getting paranoid. Anyway, there’s nothing to see,” I said, looking often over my shoulder. I like to argue with Adam, but I’m smart enough to take his advice.
“Look, you didn’t grow up in the slums of Detroit the way I did.”
“I thought you grew up in Hamtramck.”
“I lived in Hamtramck. I grew up two blocks away, in Detroit, if you get my meaning. On the streets, you get a kind of feeling about when trouble is coming.”
“Maybe I wasn’t raised in Detroit, but everybody has trouble growing up.”
Maybe Bay City was a lot less violent than Detroit, but I grew up as the only Oriental kid in my class, and I was always much smaller than the rest of the guys, besides. After being pounded a few times by the local hoodlums, I suppose that I overcompensated the way any other boy would. With the shining example of those Bruce Lee movies they were showing back then, I studied the martial arts all through high school under a Korean Tae Kwan Do master. After a while, the bullies learned to stay away from me.
Just after my high-school graduation, my problems with religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular came to a head. I had a row with my parents that got me thoroughly disowned. I was out on the street and absolutely penniless. Karate really came in handy then. Teaching it paid for most of my college expenses.
After I got my sheepskin, I grew up some, and have never needed to resort to violence since. I had been twenty years without even seeing a fight, let alone having to get involved in one.
Until that night with Adam in the tunnel.
I first noticed that something was definitely wrong when somebody hit me in the back of the head with a club.
I went flying down on my knees and elbows, but fighting is a lot like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, your head might forget how it’s done, but your body remembers just exactly what to do. I slapped the ground, yelled, and came up on the bounce, smashing someone’s testicles in the process.
A whole platoon of thugs was pouring out of a small doorway in the side of the tunnel. I caught a flash of Adam propping his lantern against the tunnel wall with one hand while swinging with the other, and then there were other things to do. It seemed like I was surrounded by dozens of the bastards!
In the movies, the hero can take on vast numbers of bad guys because the stunt men have the courtesy to come at him one at a time. That way, he only has to fight one opponent at a time, ten times in a row. If your enemies have any brains and coordination at all, they will mob you, all of them at once, and then you will go down, no matter how good you are. At best, you might take out one or two before you are deleted.
My opponents seemed to have neither brains nor coordination, but they did have enthusiasm, and there were an awful lot of them. Also, even waiting in line takes a certain amount of coordination, and for these idiots, fighting seemed to be a series of random events. Once, apparently by accident, four of them came at me at once, and I had to drop and roll. Fortunately, they weren’t bright enough to know what to do to me once I was down. I was up again in a hurry, and dancing around.
I swear that there were at least fifteen of them on me alone. Against odds like that, you fight to win, without thinking about the damage, jail time, or lawsuits you might be generating. The places you go for are right down the center, the weak “seam” where the two halves of the body seem to join together. Eyes, noses, throats, solar plexi, guts and testicles. That and the knees, and I’ve always been partial to knees. Knees are low and easy to get to without the flashy, dangerous, high kicks that some of the other good targets require. Also, knees break easily, they put your opponent down fast, and barring modern surgery, they generally don’t heal properly for years, if they heal at all.
I guess I broke a lot of knees that night. Six or eight, at least. In a while, the still-vertical portion of the crowd had thinned out quite a bit, and it was actually starting to get fun when a shot rang out loud in the stone corridor, and everything stopped.
“Figure it out, you bastards! I got five shots left and there are eight of you!” Adam said with a gun in his hand and blood running down his face. “All you need are five heroes who want to die, and the rest of you can get me! Okay! Step right up! What? No heroes? Okay, I’ll pick ’em myself. How ’bout you, ugly? Want to impress your girlfriend with your heroic dead body?”
As Adam pointed the pistol at him, the fellow who had been singled out froze, then broke and ran. That started the the rest of our playmates running for home, limping, bleeding, and dragging some of their friends behind. In a few moments we were alone, except for nine would-be muggers who were out cold on the floor. A few of them were groaning a bit, but none of them looked ready to get up.
Especially the one with the bullet hole through his throat.
“You okay, Treet?” Adam said, leaning wearily against the wall.
“A bump on the back of the head and a few bruises, but I’ll live. Your face is bleeding.”