There weren’t any.
Quincy was standing in the middle of a ring of at least six bodies, some of whom were twitching, but none very vigorously.
“Not bad, youngster, but that last one was a bit of overkill, don’t you think?”
I realized that I was still holding the man in the air by his throat. Surprised, I let him go. He fell, convulsing, to the ground. “I guess I wasn’t thinking at all. But now, well, now I think they all had it coming.”
“You are doubtless correct, my general, but at the moment perhaps a bit of tracheotomy is in order.”
I got the shakes about then, and leaned against a wall, watching Quincy. He opened a small pen knife, and without taking the time to sterilize anything, he punched a vertical cut in the man’s throat, low, and just to the right of center. He twisted the blade sideways, and I could hear the air being sucked into my assailant’s lungs. Then he got out a ball point pen, unscrewed it with one hand, dumped the workings out on the ground, and pushed the barrel of the pen into the hole while removing his knife.
“Now, you hold this thing just so,” he said to his patient. “If it comes out, you will suffocate, and you will die.”
I don’t know if the guy spoke any Kashubian, but he nodded his head “Yes!”
Quincy said to me, “There’s no point in killing anyone now that it’s over, and I, for one, would like to find out just what this was all about.”
About a dozen uniformed police arrived at that point, followed by two ambulances.
“General Derdowski? We got a call from a woman named Agnieshka who said that you needed help, but I see that you have matters well in hand,” a police lieutenant said in passable Kashubian.
Quincy said, “Nonetheless, we thank you for coming so quickly. We’ll see to it that your superiors hear of your prompt and professional behavior. But just now, I think that a few more ambulances might be in order.”
“They have been sent for. But I think that it would be wise if the two of you came along to the clinic, just to be on the safe side.”
“We will, soon. But that one and that one should be hospitalized immediately,” Quincy said, pointing them out, and not referring at all to the guy who was breathing through a ball point pen.
“Yes, sir,” he said, waving the ambulance crews over to the two men indicated. “Would it be convenient if someone dropped by your hotel rooms tomorrow, to get your statements, and for you to prefer charges against these hooligans?”
“That would be good,” I said, thinking that a foreigner who beats up a bunch of locals usually doesn’t get this sort of polite treatment from the police. Being a general and a famous war hero sure helps, sometimes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Recruiting a New Army
After a short visit to the emergency clinic, where Quincy again encouraged the staff to look after the more seriously damaged hooligans first, and to attend our minor injuries afterward, we finally got back to my hotel room at four-thirty in the morning.
“You look like you got hit by a brick wall,” Kasia said.
“Only by a very small portion of one,” I replied. “One brick, to be exact. I’ll live. Let’s go to bed.”
After a bit of discussion, it was decided that Quincy and Zuzanna would use one of our guest rooms rather than go back to their own hotel.
It turned out that our suite had a third large display screen, this one on the ceiling above the bed in the master bedroom. We watched some of the offered fare for a few minutes, laughed, and turned the thing off.
We rolled into each other’s arms, and had a very fine night together, indeed.
There is something about combat, and especially raw, brutal, personal, physical violence, that excites the sexual urges in a man. Maybe, it is nature’s way of replacing those of the tribe who might have been lost in the fight. Whatever causes it, I was far more active that night than I had ever been in Dream World.
* * *
It was midafternoon before I rolled out of bed and cleaned up. I found that a large breakfast was laid out in the dining room, and Quincy was diving into it. He was in the class A military uniform of a Tanker First, slightly less gaudy than my officer’s getup, but decorative, none the less.
“Get some food into you, sir. Then we have some errands to run. Those hooligans we beat up last night want to talk to us, and I think we ought to hear them out. And, uh, I’d suggest a class A uniform.”
“I thought that the police were coming over here.”
“They’ll come when we ask them, but let’s see what the punks want before we do anything official.”
“If you say so. I’m not thinking too clearly, yet.”
“Get some coffee into you. This stuff from New Macedonia is pretty good.”
An hour later, the same police lieutenant we had talked to the night before escorted us into the secure ward of the hospital. There turned out to be ten battered young men in the clean, white room, but only eight of them were conscious.
“I thought that I counted nine of them last night,” I whispered to Quincy.
“The little one on the left had two of the bigger fellows on top of him.”
A guy with a bandaged head wound had apparently been elected to be the spokesman.
He said, “Sir, we want to apologize to you. We didn’t know that it was you when we went at you in that dark alley. If we’d known it was you, we’d never have tried to hurt you.”
When the lieutenant had translated that, I said, “You are saying that if you’d known that we were warriors, you wouldn’t have attacked us. How wonderful. You were looking for some nice easy targets! That would have been wise, since you bunch of incompetents. . . . Do you realize that seven of you were defeated by one eighty-nine-year-old man? That he could have killed every one of you if he’d wanted to? That he went out of his way to save the life of you, over there in the corner, after I’d smashed your trachea without much thinking about it? That two more of you would be dead by now if he hadn’t made the police get you to a hospital immediately? And yet you expect us to accept your apology and forgive you? To let you go out and murder some decent civilians?”
“No, sir. We don’t expect anything. We just wanted to say that we respect all of the things that you have done for our country, and that we are ashamed of what we have done.”
“Well, if you are so damned patriotic, what are you doing rolling drunks in the streets? Why don’t you join the army, and do some good for your country?”
“We’ve all tried to, sir. They don’t want us.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. I looked about, and the police lieutenant said, “The New Croatian Army has very strict standards for its enlistees. They must have high moral, physical, and educational qualifications. These ‘men’ obviously don’t measure up.”
“Huh,” I said. “In the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, we take what we can get. Our training methods can turn the worst slime balls you can find into first-rate fighting men. If you gave me these men, we’d make Christians out of them, I promise you, and after a twenty-year enlistment, they’d come out as well-educated, productive, and law-abiding members of society.”
The police lieutenant looked at me uncertainly. “Sir,” he said, “I’m not sure if I understand you completely. Please understand that at this point, no charges have been brought against these men. You two warriors were the only witnesses to their offenses, and neither of you is seriously injured. If what you are saying is that if these men would enlist in the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, then you would drop all charges against them, well, I think that I could arrange that for you.”
“I guess I am saying that. Yes. If they will enlist in my army, then I will drop all charges against them. They would each start out with a clean record. If they work hard, and stay with the program, they will have a very pleasant and worthwhile life ahead of them. They might even get rich. If they are stupid enough to buck the system, they will live lives of pure hell. And if they don’t choose to join, I will prefer charges against each of them for assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and anything else my lawyer can come up with. Ask them if they understand this.”