The vice mayor, Aslanian, and Isoka sat around the War Room table. Their demeanor was attentive, even solicitous; their somber eyes were fixed on Benharash. Standing in the doorway, the general, in hoarse whispers, argued with Puglese. The cartographer-historian desperately tried to pull his champion away from the lair of his political opponents. The two friends did not look each other in the eye; rather, Puglese looked at the general’s breastplate, and the other, over the smaller man’s head, toward the wall map of California, with its long blue stripe. They whispered rapidly and tonelessly, with no emotion other than flat defiance. Benharash’s face was ghostly; his skin hung under his unshaven neck. He had not bathed since finding her body.
#
Coming home from a night of drinking at the camp wrestling matches, the general had been glowing with pleasure from being with his men. He was invigorated by the night of camaraderie spiced with the temptation of a new batch of prostitutes. With good humor, he turned his head from the dirty siren songs. This, too, gave the dry-docked warrior satisfaction, giving him, as it were, an opportunity to think well of himself.
He walked up the short wooden ladder to the immense loft that was their bedroom. He actually had a slight hard-on and was hoping that his young consort would be amiable and sympathetic. But when he walked into the candlelit room, he saw Elise lying on the floor in the twisted posture of the dead. He stood back without touching her. He knew at once.
After a long and horrid frozen moment, the weeping general put his lover’s small body on the bed. Tenderly, he composed her limbs and clothes. He washed the blood from her neck and covered the wound with a black silk scarf. Then he lay on the floor where she had breathed her last. He lay on his back, let his head loll to the side, and lovingly watched over the body.
#
Finally, Benharash pushed Puglese out the door. The subordinate man’s last words were, “Let’s not yet agree to disagree. We can talk later.”
Aslanian and the vice mayor exchanged twisted smiles. Isoka saw that Benharash had lost a lot of spiritual blood. His skin was gray and even his shining scars seemed to have lost their sheen. His great gray eyes were roving helplessly around, seeing nothing but the ghost. In a low, calm voice, Isoka said, “I won’t trouble you with our sympathies, but know for her sake that every man in this camp feels a loss. She made things good. That’s all I have to say.”
Benharash looked at Isoka, then nodded absently. “Yes,” he said. Looking about him, at the command tent and the General Staff, Benharash found a comfortable and familiar setting, just as he had expected. “Yes,” he said, this time with some strength. The general strutted to the table; he tossed down a large, rolled-up map. “Voilà!”
While the others looked at each other in silence, the vice mayor grabbed and unrolled the map. After squinting briefly, the commissar smiled.
Aslanian said, “What is this?”
Under his breath, the vice mayor said, “The true battlefield!” It was the Shambles as they had never seen it: Measurements and relationships of the chaotic heaps of debris were clearly drawn. The familiar landmarks were marked by yellow; the trails between landmarks, lined in brown. The general said, “Current troop concentrations are marked: ours in blue, Frisco’s in orange. The three green lines are tunnels we have not seen, but by their troop movements, I know they are there. God knows there are more. . . .”
The effect was to make the entire battlefield comprehensible. Benharash looked around the room. Even in grief, he relished the amazement on the faces of his previously-estranged colleagues.
Aslanian and Isoka stood gaping, eyes fixed on the map. The former, speaking slowly as though stunned by the familiar but hithertofore unarticulated intricacy of the rubblepit-battlefield, asked, “Where did you get this?!”
“This is phenomenal!” the vice mayor declared.
Benharash said indifferently, “Puglese’s work.”
Aslanian muttered, “Puglese?” He looked for flaws on the map. He shook his head. Given the source, he decided that the map could be misleading and dangerous.
Benharash turned slowly and studied the contemptuous twist of Aslanian’s lean white lips. He fixed the colonel in his eye and thought, Puglese advanced our interests more by map-making than you have with twenty thousand troops. But he said, “I have been wrong. I say this in the largest terms and I hope you will find it in yourselves to work with me. I will make you win.”
Isoka stepped forward. “Your man has done good work, Abe.” Isoka put his hand on Aslanian’s shoulder. He nodded at his compatriot and winked. Aslanian, although his bitterness was unabated, sat.
The vice mayor said, “Past is past, my friend, forever! Please do not apologize. You had a strong view and clung to it with honor. I will never hold it against you. Now, the tunnels? Your man just surmised their locations? How--surely there’s a methodology.”
Benharash nodded. “It’s all been confirmed. This morning I borrowed one of your POWs. I showed him the map and he confirmed our surmise.”
Isoka feigned puzzlement. “We’ve never been able to get a word out of any of them.”
“You didn’t try hard enough,” Benharash said.
The vice mayor went white. “You tortured him?”
Benharash shrugged.
Isoka came close to the vice mayor. The aristocrat stood behind the patrician, looked over his shoulder, and said directly to Benharash, “We can’t go that route! If this war takes on that complexion . . . ”
The vice mayor sputtered, “I understand your pain, your fury, but we don’t torture prisoners.”
Looking at the map and not the brass, Benharash said dully, “We do now.” He had to pause and collect himself. “She never hurt anyone.” Benharash struggled with his emotions. He looked at Isoka. “My heart is blackness.”
The vice mayor and Isoka, standing only inches apart, looked at one another. These men were practical, political, and had, throughout life, so controlled their emotions that soft feelings had disappeared from their characters. Their hearts had never known blackness. Had such despair ever shrouded their hearts, they surely would not have mentioned it to anyone. Their common response to the general’s melodramatic return to duty was, What an odd man.
The vice mayor was unnerved by the image of a man being tormented in his camp. Throughout the war, he and Isoka had been able to curb his barbaric mob’s appetite for cruelty. Now, those efforts in the name of humanity had been erased by an unauthorized brutality. This news obliterated the feeling of righteousness which he needed to maintain his conviction toward the war effort. This one incident, were it to get into public knowledge, would be a stain on any accomplishments his campaign might garner.
Yet the politician knew that Benharash and his ugly methods would end the wasteful conflict, and that nothing he had done or could imagine doing would net the same blessed results. He nodded grimly at his general. “Go on.”
Aslanian, like Benharash, was fixated on the map, fascinated by the detail he instinctively knew as the killing field in which he toiled daily. The antagonism between the two evaporated as they caressed the valuable chart with their eyes and fingers. Aslanian pointed to a spot on the map and grinned ruefully. “I had no idea we’d covered that ground so often. . . . Must be another tunnel nearby . . .without question! Now here is what we will do. . . .”
But Isoka stopped him with a hand to the shoulder.
Benharash waved his finger admonishingly. He said, “This map . . . with this map, we will annihilate our nemesis.”
The vice mayor said, “I’m all for that!”
Benharash struck the map with a long finger. “We attack here.”
The spot indicated puzzled the vice mayor, who, though he never went into the field, had a scholastic knowledge of the terrain and how the opposing armies made use of it. “Where the bulk of their resistance amasses?”
Benharash said, “At their heart. Up until now, they’ve spread themselves throughout the Shambles; it has been that kind of war, and it favors their less-disciplined fighting style. That alone, that dispersion of our forces over a wide ground, has kept them from falling to our native might. But no more. Their luck has run out.”
“They’ll respond by concentrating their forces. If they do that quickly enough, won’t they block our trust?” Isoka asked.
“Forty-eight hours and we’re in the city,” Benharash replied. The others nodded. Their eyes were riveted on the map. Benharash went on, “A square formation. Colonel Aslanian’s Advance Guard at the front; line up north to south. My marines come in behind their lead. Then the regulars. Colonel Isoka, you marshal the regulars. Minimal reserves. Every man in formation. How many prisoners do you have?”
The vice mayor kept track of any quantifiable element in his camp. He kept an active inventory of all guns, tents, and plunder; he maintained files on deserters, indictable crimes committed by the men, the amounts of food and fuel it took to keep up the siege and sustain his string of forts along the Aqueduct. His lists were up-to-date, and two men spent their entire service maintaining these lists, taking inventories weekly. “That’s forty men,” he said.
Benharash looked at each man, his gray eyes dry as sandpaper, as though all the moisture had been cried out. At that moment, the vice mayor noticed that the general smelled of an unnatural sweat, peculiarly acrid and metallic. Benharash held out his clenched fist as he spoke. “From this moment on, the POWs do not eat or bathe. In four days, we parade them out in front of this formation.”
Isoka swallowed and nodded. He looked back at the map. “We put a weak guard in front of our formation to invite attack?”
“Right,” Benharash said. “Prisoners march naked. Dirty, hungry, and naked.”
Aslanian smiled. The vice mayor recoiled.
Benharash now seemed to be talking only to Isoka. “Right before we move, we will release the Friscan prisoners. Colonel Wellman, I need a dozen grenade throwers off the right flank. When the Friscans move forward to help their pitiful comrades--”
Isoka said, “They will do that.” He glanced at the distraught vice mayor. The two aristocratic compatriots shrugged away their horror.
“Humanists!” mocked Aslanian.
Benharash said with flattening disinterest, “It is their nature. They believe in the communal good. They cannot resist aiding their own. Once they are on the field, white flags or no, the grenades fly into the midst of the prisoners and their would-be liberators. This outrage will incite the amateur enemy, and they will charge us.”
Aslanian grinned approvingly. “They didn’t teach this stuff at the police academy.”
Benharash concluded, “Then Colonel Aslanian attacks. Keep a tight formation. The days of a war of attrition and siege are over!”
The vice mayor shook his head grimly. Thus far, the war had been clean: no killing or torturing of prisoners, quick acceptance with generous terms of any surrender, and no random cruelty. It was the kind of war upon which the vice mayor could discourse at social gatherings back in Los Angeles. Total war was neither needed nor wanted. In a voice redolent with confidence and command, he said, “We’ve never fought like this. We have been able to hold this army intact because the attrition/siege tactics have worked since we crossed the Tehachapis. Minimal death, minimal killing. It suits the men.”
Benharash was silent for a moment, perhaps realizing for the first time that despite his immense power to affect the outcome of all that mattered, he remained, like all Angelenos, to one degree or another humbled in the presence of a person designated as higher ranking then himself. The general said respectfully, “Do this my way, sir. In a few days, we will fly our flag, burn the city, and leave.”
Aslanian asked, “No garrison left behind?”
Benharash shook his head. “Nothing left behind.”
All were silent. Aslanian and Isoka watched the vice mayor. Benharash, too, focused on the vice mayor. The titular leader felt their attention and was thankful for it. After some moments, the vice mayor looked about him. His eyebrow lifted and he said with finality, “So be it.”