“Enough! Let her go, man!” He spoke Sicilian Italian this time, his command voice snapping like a whip.
Sara the Snake recognized the voice of a leader of men at once. He released Evelyn Mangold and spun to face Rupen. Speaking in a deferential tone in the same dialect in which he had received the order, he asked, “You speak my language, then, honored sir?”
“Only a little,” replied Rupen, shrugging and flapping his spread hands slowly. “Just the small amount I learned while fighting the Nazis in Sicily, during the war.”
Rupen saw the very first of Mineo’s excessively rare smiles. “1. too, fought the tedesci and the fascist* before them, honored sir. All of my brave family, we fought them. Many, they killed, but many more of them did we kill until none of them would dare to come into our lands and hills without carri armari and many lorries full of troops and velivoli flying overhead to guard them, and still we attacked them and fought them and killed them, except for those few we took alive for information or for ransom or for … sport.”
“We will leave the woman here until morning,” Rupen announced, in English, this time. “She can swap notes with the rats tonight.”
“R … r … rats?” quavered Evelyn from where she had crawled to huddle on the bunk.
“Sure, rats, great big brown ones, a whole damn family of them,” said Bagrat, with a merry grin. “This is an old smokehouse here, and they live under the floor. That’s why we just put in the light, so’s you can see them coming for you. Heh, heh, hen.”
Evelyn really began to scream then, piercingly, without pause, for longer than it took to breathe in enough air to scream yet again. She was still screaming as they closed and locked the heavy old door.
“Are there really rats in there, Bagrat?” Boghos asked.
“I sorta doubt it, Doc,” replied the youngest Ademian brother. “We found where a weasel or a skunk had been denning up in there when we first got the idea of cleaning it out and using it, and if it’s critters that rats won’t stay anywhere around, it’s skunks and weasels. That’s one of the biggest reasons it smells so bad in there, you know; there’s just no way to get that skunk-weasel smell out quick. But that bitch in there, she thinks it’s rats in there, and I guarantee you she’ll get damn few winks of sleep this night.”
“She’d not sleep anyway, you know,” said Boghos. “Not in this stage of drug withdrawal. By the time our friends get down here on Friday night, she should be malleable enough to tell us anything and everything about her past misdeeds.”
Krystal Foster was in seventh heaven for the first few days she spent in company with the five young women who had been projected into this world with the Ademian band—Jenny Bostwick, lisa Peters, Kitty Hutchinson, Helen Pappas, and Rose Yacubian. She had done her level best to explain to them just what had happened to them and the men of the band, reciting her own similar experience of years back and trying to give the impression of an assurance that she did not truly feel that everything would be all right for them all when once they had adapted to this strange, primitive world and its people and the incomprehensible language they called English.
But then the exposure began to pall. Two of the women had had husbands and children in the other world, one had been a new bride of less than six months, and all three were worried, terribly homesick, and skating perilously close to mental derangement, in KrystaTs professional opinion. The other two just might make it, she thought, though she could not say she liked either of them, nor did she admire the “talents” that bettered their chances of survival.
As for the men, Arsen Ademian spent half of his time brooding and the other half drinking copious quantities of ale along with any other alcohol he could lay his hands upon. Greg Sinclair and Mike Vranian did their best to match him gallon for gallon, which meant that all three were nearly comatose much of the time.
John Othondoyatros, since being granted access to the estate library was usually nosed into one quarto and surrounded by any number of others, as he could read both Greek and Latin. The other Mike, Mike Sikeena, a young man of Lebanese extraction and a onetime United States Marine, could usually be found in company with Buddy Webster, who also had served in that branch of the services. Al and Haigh Ademian, too, were well occupied, all day, every day. They had found and had had borne up to the suite an immense chess set—the board a yard square and fashioned of squares of semiprecious stones framed in gilded silver, the pieces each an exquisite little marble or alabaster statuette, the kings and the queens wearing real golden crowns with tiny gem-stones inset, the knights all armored and grasping perfect little swords of real steel, the bishops equipped with steel maces, the rooks complete to the last detail and including infmitesimally small bombards of brass mounted on the towertops. The pawns were all pikemen, each of them wearing a steel cap and a scaleshirt and bearing a pike. The chess game had been going on ever since the set had been brought upstairs, and as both men were good players and evenly matched, no end was in sight.
Krystal would have liked to talk with the oldest man, Rupen Ademian, but he seemed to always be closeted with Hal.
Then, of a day, completely unexpected and unannounced, his grace, Sir Sebastian Foster, Duke of Norfolk, Markgraf von Velegrad, Earl of Rutland, Baron of Strathtyne, Lord Commander of the Royal Horse, and Krystal’s husband, came riding into the forecourt followed by his gentlemen, staff, and entourage. He was traveling light this time; only some hundred and fifty horsemen accompanied him onto the archepiscopal estate.
Krystal’s cup then ranneth over, for only a fortnight earlier, the archbishop had arrived; a week later Reichsherzog Wolfgang and his troop of Kalmyks, then, two days ahead of her noble husband, Pete Fairley and the hulking Dan Smith.
The breaking of Evelyn Mangold was accomplished rather more quickly than had been anticipated, after only a few days of a multipronged attack. Early in the morning that followed her first night-long vigil against the dreaded rats, a woman and an old man brought hei; food and coffee. Although she could not see their faces well because of the nylon stockings— the only face she ever was allowed to see unmasked was that of Mineo—they were both soft-voiced, gentle with her, and considerate of her, doing what little they could to make her comfortable. They admitted to having no real power in the group that held her captive, admitted to a shared fear of Mineo and the other men, and urged Evelyn, for her own good, to be cooperative with her cruel, merciless, murderous captors.
Evelyn’s next visitor was the doctor, fresh, neat sutures showing on the back of the hand she had gashed with one of his instruments. For a long while he stood just out of her reach, verbally abusing her and tormenting her drug craving with a three-gram vial and a hypodermic syringe, demanding that she confess to the murder of Marge Ademian.
When he had driven her to a frenzy, when she began to scream invectives and deadly threats and lunge against the ankle chain that restrained her, the doctor opened the door behind him to admit Sara the Snake Mineo, smiling in a way that turned Evelyn’s legs to rubber, her bowels to water.
Mineo would never allow her to actually lose consciousness, stopping the torment just long enough to restore her to full sensibility before he again went to work on her nerve centers with skilled fingers, a knowing touch, and no more mercy than a graven image of some centuries-dead Roman. By the time she had finished cleaning up the mess of vomitus, feces, and urine which her suffering body had voided under his ungentle ministrations, and he had promised, in a soft tone that chilled her very soul, to soon return, it was nearly noon.
They took turns at her thus for nearly three days before she began to talk about things they wanted to hear, at which point Bagrat and Kogh brought in, loaded, and wired up a tape recorder with seven-inch reels. By the time the two attorneys came out to the old farm—one from Richmond, one from upper New York State—there was a goodly amount of tape for them to hear before they themselves actually questioned the multiple murderess.
By Sunday night, the conspirators had amassed miles of recording tape on which were detailed confessions of criminal acts spanning fifteen years and nine states, including no less than four cold-blooded murders and one infanticide. For the five homicides and certain of the other crimes, they had typed, signed, attested, and properly witnessed confessions, several copies of each. This time, the legal net would be drawn tight-shut and there would be no way in which Evelyn Mangold could wriggle out and away from the punishments she had so fully earned over the years.