Tanner's Virgin (2 page)

O
n my fourth day
in London it rained. It had been doing this more or less constantly since my arrival, sometimes with fog as an accompaniment, sometimes without. I got back to the Stokes' flat a few minutes after six, rerolled the umbrella that Nigel Stokes insisted I carry, and went into the kitchen. Julia was hovering at the stove, and I hovered beside her, as much for the stove's warmth as for hers.

“I'm just getting tea,” she said. “Nigel's shaving, I think. It's desperate out, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“How did it go?”

“No luck at all.”

She was pouring the tea when her brother joined us. He was in his early forties, some ten years older than Julia. His guards' moustache, which added several years to his appearance, was a recent addition; he'd grown it for his role in a farce that had opened a few weeks ago in the West End, and planned to shave it off as soon as the play closed. From the reviews it seemed that this would happen rather soon.

“Well,” he said. “Any luck?”

“None, I'm afraid.”

“And bloody awful weather for hunting wild geese, isn't it?” He added sugar to his tea, buttered a slice of bread. “Where'd you go today? More of the same?”

I nodded. “Travel agencies, employment agencies. And I went to half the rooming houses in Russell Square, and I suppose I did have a bit of luck. I found the last place she stayed before quitting London. She had a room around the corner from the museum. The dates fit; she checked out on the sixteenth of August. But she left no forwarding address, and no one there had any idea where she might have gone.”

“It seems hopeless,” Julia said.

That seemed a concise summation of the state of affairs—it seemed quite hopeless, and I was beginning to wonder why I had let myself be panicked into making the trip in the first place. One reason, of course, was the emotional state of Mrs. Horowitz. Alarm is contagious, and the woman was profoundly alarmed. But it was also true that Phaedra's letters did nothing to dispel this alarm. There was the last letter from England:
I can't tell you much for security reasons, but I have this fantastic opportunity to travel through lands I never even hoped to see. I wish I could tell you more about it.
And a postcard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, mailed from Baghdad and with an indecipherable date with this chilling scrawl:
Everything's gone wrong. Am in real trouble. You may never hear from me again. Hope I can mail this.
Evidently she had been in so much trouble that she had neither pen nor pencil; the message was in charcoal.

I don't remember what I told Mrs. Horowitz. I calmed her as well as I could, then took Minna back to
the apartment, disconnected the telephone, and worked nonstop on the thesis for three days and two nights. I speeded things up by fabricating most of the footnotes. Karen Dietrich paid me my thousand dollars. I cashed her check while the ink was still drying, put the bills in my money belt and the belt around my waist, threw things into a flight bag, boarded a reluctant Minna at Kitty Bazerian's in Brooklyn, considered and rejected risking a direct flight to London, and caught—with less than ten minutes to spare—an Aer Lingus jet to Shannon and Dublin.

The British government has my name on several lists, and I had a feeling they might give me a hard time. The Irish also have me listed as a subversive—I'm a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood—but they don't make a fuss about that sort of thing. Since most people are trying to get out of the country, they've never been able to take illegal entry very seriously.

But all I saw of Ireland was the inside of Dublin Airport. I had breakfast there before catching a BEA flight to London. You don't have to show a passport to get from Ireland to England. The flight was routine, except for the casual regurgitation of several babes in arms, and in due course I was in London and on my way to Nigel Stokes' flat in Kings Cross.

And I was still there. I had corresponded with Nigel over the years and met him once in New York when a play of his made a brief appearance on Broadway. He was a fellow member of the Flat Earth Society and had been working for years to build an elaborate true-to-scale two-dimensional globe, a project I greatly admired. Julia didn't. She thought the whole thing was
madness. Nigel damn well knew it was madness, and took great delight in it.

 

And now, pouring us each a second cup of tea, he said, “This is madness, you know.” But he wasn't talking about the shape of the earth.

“I know.”

“It's bad enough looking through haystacks for needles, but you don't really know that it's a needle you're hunting, do you? I was thinking about that letter, Evan. Somehow I don't think a travel agent—”

I nodded. “I've been keeping busy, that's all.”

“Quite. And employment bureaus—oh, that's possible, of course, but somehow I don't think you'll have much luck. It's rather a case of going around Robin Hood's barn, isn't it?”

“It is,” I agreed.

Julia drew up a chair and sat down between us. “Have you thought of going to Baghdad?”

“That's ridiculous,” her brother said. “Where would he begin looking in Baghdad?”

I closed my eyes. He was right—it would be quite pointless to try looking for Phaedra in Baghdad. And Julia, for her part, seemed able to read minds, because I bad been thinking of doing just that, ridiculous or no.

Nigel stroked his moustache. “Perhaps I've been seeing too many films, but—Evan, let me see that letter again, will you?” I quoted it to him by rote. “Yes, I thought so. You know, I get the impression of some sort of cloak-and-dagger operation here, don't you? Spies and such, midnight rides on the Orient Express. What do you think?”

“Mmmm,” I said neutrally. The same thought had occurred to me, but I had tried to suppress it. Some time ago I found myself working for a nameless man who heads a nameless U.S. undercover operation. I'm not being coy—I don't know his name or its. Since then he's been under the impression that I work for him, and now and then I do. For that reason, thoughts of cloaks and daggers come to mind rather more often than they ought to, and in this case I had discounted them.

But—

“Evan?” I looked up. “Now here you have a girl who'd come to London, where as far as we know she didn't know a soul. She might make friends, but—”

“But they wouldn't make her,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“Quite. Now I can't see MI 5 knocking on her door in Russell Square, can you? Nor do I think she'd have gone the rounds of the employment agencies, and I don't suppose she had much money—”

“Probably not.”

“—so I wonder if she mightn't have answered a Personal in the
Times.
Had you thought of that?”

“No.” I straightened up. “I should have thought of that myself. We would want the issues for the first two weeks in August. I suppose the newspaper offices have them on file, or is there a library that—”

“Courtney,” Julia said.

“Why, of course,” Nigel said. “Courtney Bede.” He turned to me. “There's an old fellow who keeps every issue of the
Times.
And all the other papers as well. He's
what you would call a character. Quite daft, actually, but not a bad sort. Do you want to go round there?”

 

The English have certain words that are better than ours.
Daft
is one of them. Such American alternatives as
flaky
don't quite do the job.

Courtney Bede was daft. He was a short, round man who might have been anywhere from fifty to ninety—it was quite impossible to tell. He performed some backstage function in the theater and lived alone in a basement apartment in Lambeth not far from the Old Vic. There, in four sizable rooms, he existed as a rather orderly version of the Collier brothers.

He saved things. He saved string, and empty bottles, and bits of metal, and theater programs, and keys that didn't fit anything, and all of the items that most people throw out. His collections, which he showed me with more pride than I thought justified, did not really thrill me as much as he felt they should. But he did have newspapers, all right. Ten years' worth of all of the London papers, stacked neatly in piles by date.

“And not one of 'em cost me a ha'penny,” he said, poking out his stomach for emphasis. “London's full of fools and spendthrifts, lad. Men and women what'll pay sixpence for a paper and throw it away after a single reading. I get all me papers every day, and not one of 'em that costs me a ha'penny.”

“And you read all the papers yourself?”

“Oh, I'll give a glance at one now and then. Mondays I'll generally have a look at Sunday's
News of the World.
But it's not the reading of 'em, it's the having that does for me.”

I told him the issues we wanted. This August was easy, he said, but if it was two or three Augusts ago we wanted it wouldn't take ten minutes to dig 'em out for us. He found the issues, and Nigel and I divided them up and went through the long columns of personal ads. There were endless appeals for donations to obscure charities, odd coded notices, occasional sex solicitations by self-styled models, palmists, strict governesses,
et al.
And, ultimately, there was this:

“It needn't be that,” Nigel pointed out. “Might be any of these we checked, you know. ‘Companion wanted for journey to Continent,' anything of that sort.”

“Still…”

“Yes, it does look promising. Damn, I've got to get to the theater. If you'd like, I'll go round to Great Portland Street with you in the morning.”

“I'll go now.”

“I shouldn't think they'd be open, actually.”

“I don't even think they exist,” I said. “That's what I want to find out.”

 

The building on Great Portland Street housed a dealer in coins and medals on the ground floor, with the other four floors broken up into a variety of small offices, all
of which were closed for the day. The name Carradine did not appear either on the directory posted on the first floor or on any of the office doors. I waited in the coin and medal shop while a small boy and his father selected several shillings' worth of small foreign coins. The transaction took an inordinate amount of time, and when it was finally completed the clerk seemed relieved that I didn't want to buy anything. “Carradine,” he said. “Carradine, Carradine. Would that be a Mr. Carradine, do you suppose, or the name of the establishment?” I told him his guess was as good as mine, if not better. “Carradine,” he said again. “August, you say. First fortnight of August. Would you excuse me for a moment, sir? I'll ask our Mr. Talbot.”

He disappeared into the back, then reappeared a few moments later. “If you'll step into the back room, sir, our Mr. Talbot will see you.”

Our Mr. Talbot was a red-faced man with uncommonly large ears. He sat at a rolltop desk dipping coins into a glass of clear liquid and wiping them on a soft rag. The solution, whatever it was, managed to turn the coins bright and silvery while staining the tips of our Mr. Talbot's fingers dark brown.

“Carradine,” he said. “Never met the gentleman, but I do recall the name. Late summer, I think. Don't believe he was here long. Have you tried the owner?”

I hadn't. He gave me a name and address and telephone number, and I thanked him. He said, “Not a collector, are you?” I admitted that I wasn't. He grunted and resumed dipping coins. I thanked the clerk on the way out and called the building's owner from a booth down the block.

A voice assured me the man was out and no one knew when he might be returning. I thought for a moment, then called again and announced that I was an inquiry agent interested in the whereabouts of a former tenant. The same voice introduced itself as the owner. Evidently he'd been avoiding some tenant who wanted his office painted; landlords, after all, are the same the whole world over.

He told me what I wanted to know. A Mr. T. R. Smythe-Carson had taken a third-floor office under the name of Carradine Imports in late July, paid a month's rent in advance, left before the month was over, and provided no forwarding address.

For form's sake, I looked for Smythe-Carson in the telephone directory. He wasn't there, and I wasn't surprised.

There are some nights when I envy those who sleep. I have not slept since World War 2.1, when a sliver of North Korean shrapnel entered my mind and found its way to something called the sleep center, whereupon I entered a state of permanent insomnia. I was eighteen when this happened, and by now I can barely remember what sleep was like.

In the past few years scientists have taken an interest in sleep. They've been trying to determine just why people sleep, and what dreams do, and what happens when a person is prevented from sleeping and dreaming. I could probably answer a few of their questions. When a person is prevented from sleeping and dreaming he embraces a wide variety of lost causes, studies dozens of languages, eats five or six meals a day, and uses his life to furnish those elements of fantasy that
other men find in dreams. This may not be how it works for every absolute insomniac, but it's how it works for the only absolute insomniac I know, and for the most part I'm quite happy with it. After all, why waste eight hours a night sleeping when, with proper application, one can waste all twenty-four wide awake?

Yet there are times when sleep would be a pleasure, if only because it provides a subjectively speedy way to get from one day to the next when there is absolutely nothing else to do. This was one of those times. Nigel and Julia had repaired to their separate bedrooms. There was no one in London whom I wanted to see. The hunt for Smythe-Carson and Carradine would have to wait until morning. Meanwhile…