“You Hindu cretin!” Harel half shouted from a near-livid face.
Before he could say more, Singh bristled with the closest thing to anger Bedford had ever seen him display. “As you well should know after our close association over these last years, Dr. Harel, I am no Hindu, I am rather a Sikh.”
“Pah!” snorted Harel. “One of you swine is alike to all the rest. Need I ask how you say, Dr. Marberg?”
“I say yes, Dr. Harel. Let us begin Project feethami. It was to have been our original project, and you have seen it delayed for quite long enough,” she answered calmly.
“Unrepentant fascist!” he hissed, enraged. “Nazi bitch!”
She shook her head, displaying no anger only disgust. “Your research has been incomplete, Dr. Harel, in this instance. Some of my father’s relatives were Nazis, yes, but he was not. No, he emigrated from Germany to the United States with my mother … who was Jewish.”
“Your husband was a Nazi, I know that much!” shouted Harel beating the side of a fist on the table.
“Klaus Marberg was a member of the Hitler Jugend, Dr. Harel,” she answered. “It was then a totalitarian government in Germany, and he never had a choice. But although he regretted even that slight association with Nazism until his dying day, since he was only eleven years of age in 1945, when the war and Nazism both ended, he could not have contributed much to Nazism, the war or any atrocities… . Dr. Harel, what does any of this baseless slander of me, my father and my late husband have to do with the matter at hand here, under discussion? I can discern no slightest degree of relevance, the one matter to the other.”
“Oh, shut up, you withered old crone!” snapped Harel. Then, “Well, Dr. Baronian. Armenian scientist, do you stand with me?”
Her lips curled. “Yes, I’m a scientist, and yes, I am of Armenian heritage, but I am first and foremost an American, and I spit on you and your asinine latifrons project. Dr. Harel. And I am sick unto death of your beans and greens and tasteless, ill-seasoned messes of boiled grains. I want meat!”
He glowered at her and opened his lips to speak, but she spoke again first. “No more veiled threats, Dr. Harel don’t waste your breath. Yes, I do have a scattering of very distant relatives still living in the Soviet Armenia and in Syria, but they’ve lived there all their lives and so I seriously doubt that what I do or do not do here, on this project, could in any way seriously affect them; I’ve thought it all out while I lay in my bed of nights trying to digest those godawful vegetarian meals of yours. Christ, I’ve never before in all my life experienced such horrible gas pains, eating as you do, it’s no longer any wonder to me why you’re always so nasty to those around you.”
Bedford nodded. “I say yes, too. So its settled, Dr. Hareclass="underline" Project latifrons is hereby canceled and Project feethami is begun. If you want to and will work on the new project, I’m certain that you could contribute—”
“NO!” Harel, now utterly livid, sprang suddenly to his feet, so forcefully shoving back his chair that it slammed onto its back and then slid on to crash into the baseboard. “No, I refuse to be bound by this outrageous, fascistic capitalist conspiracy against me! I will institute lawsuit. I tell you, you cannot so easily misuse me, so flagrantly to disregard my wishes, so insubordinately to disobey my orders. When I am done you all will wish that never had you allowed this spawn of foul exploiters of workers and the peasants to lead you from the right and proper and bring those accursed, filthy cats to this place.”
“What?” remarked Bedford a note of mockery clear in his tone. “No threats of physical violence against us this time, Harel? No more fist-shakings and table-poundings and wall-beatings? No real tantrum at all? Why is this, pray tell? Did your masters warn you against any more exercises of such behavior … or did my fist in your solar plexus painfully point out to you that you can only browbeat and intimidate those who cannot or will not return blow for attempted blow? For all your size and strength, your bluster and violent posturings, you’re just a bully and a coward, after all, aren’t you, tovarisch?”
With a wordless roar, Harel grasped his blackthorn stick and stalked down the length of the table, using his free hand to sweep Singh brutally hard into the wall, swinging a cane-cut at Zepur Baronian but, thanks to her quick reflexes, missing her. His eyes were bloodshot and blazing, bulging from their sockets in the intensity of his rage, and he again was grasping the stick as if it were an edged straight-sword, his right hand a couple of inches above shoulder level, the length of the stick back almost parallel to the floor.
As he drew near, he hissed, “A coward, Bedford? To show you who the coward is I will. To whimper and scream and cry piteously for mercy and surcease you will before done with you I am. To see much of your blood and your tears, I mean and—”
Bedford arose slowly, almost languidly. “I’d hoped you’d feel that way, Comrade Harel. I came prepared to this meeting today, you see—that’s why I deliberately provoked you.”
Reaching beneath the table, be took from where it leaned against a table leg a dark-stained, brass-handled rattan cane of antique appearance, almost as long as Harel’s blackthorn stick, though a bit more slender.
Placing himself directly in the bigger man’s line of advance, he assumed a fencer’s stance—feet heel to heel and at right angles one to the other, the right toe pointed at his opponent, the left knee flexed, only his right side presented, the rattan cane held easily at guard in the fourth, its brassbound tip winking upward in the direction of Harel’s throat. With two long steps, the big man closed the distance and swung the blackthorn down at the smaller man’s bare head. Singh gasped, Stekowski’s lips moved soundlessly, Dr. Baronian moaned and shut her eyes, bunching her body, awaiting the fearsome sound of the hardwood striking flesh and bone, but Ruth Marberg just sat in silence, watching the unfolding of the combat carefully, the ghost of a smile haunting her lips.
Gracefully, James Bedford swayed his body and head from out the path of the long stick, his feet never moving, his legs but barely, even when the side of the stick brushed against them. Then, at the split second the tip of the stick smote the hard floor, his left hand took a grip on Harel’s wrist while he backed sufficiently to give himself room enough to deliver a vicious cut with the rattan to the side of Harel’s head, the rattan punishing flabby jowl, ear and upper neck, alike.
Crying out in surprise, shock and pain, Harel stepped back reflexively, jerking out of Bedford’s grasp. Also reflexively, he put his hand to his left jowls and ear, then stared stupidly for a moment at the bright-red bloodsmear on his palm. With a bestial growl, his big teeth bared in fury, he took a two-hand swing at the composed, hated face before him.
Bedford ducked easily beneath that swing and the stick struck the wall, the shock of the impact clearly to be seen in every inch of Harel’s big, paunchy body, and before he could so much as think of recovery, Bedford had split his right ear as well, and had himself recovered and was once again in his fencing stance, his guard now in the seventh, pointing vaguely in the direction of Harel’s feet.
Drs. Singh and Baronian had retreated to join Drs. Stekowski and Marberg on the other side of the table. Stekowski still was shaking his old head and moving his lips, but Ruth Marberg’s ghost of a smile had fleshed out to a real, tooth-flashing grin.
“You, too, should have learned how to fence, Dr. Harel,” she chided the big, shaken, puffing, bleeding man. “In your clumsy hands, a stick is only a mere club with which to beat helpless, unarmed victims. Jimmy will show you how a proper gentleman can use a cane, won’t you, Jimmy? Do they no longer teach the light sword in the USSR, then?”