Tanner's Virgin (4 page)

She went. I caught a glimpse of her face on the way out. She looked slightly nauseous. I picked up the cleaver and looked at Hyphen. For the first time his eyes had lost that maddening assurance.

I said, “You think I'm bluffing but you're not certain. You can gamble, but if you're wrong it'll cost you a finger. Ready to talk?”

He nodded. I yanked the gag off. “Last chance,” I said. “Make it good.”

“You'd cut off a bloke's finger.”

“Yes.”

“Undo that wire, mate. Me whole finger's throbbing.”

“Talk.”

He sighed heavily. “It's a fiddle I've got. A smuggling fiddle, the birds do the smuggling. A perfect blanket, six lonely birds looking at bleeding tombs.”

“Go on.”

“I could do with a cigarette, mate.”

“You could do without one. You took the girl along. Then what happened?”

His face clouded. “Bloody thing went bad. The peelers landed on us with both feet. All six girls wound up in the moan-and-wail.”

“And you?”

“Bought me way out. Would have bought them out, but I hadn't enough of the ready.”

“Where did this happen?”

“Turkey. Ankara. We brought guns in and would have brought gold out, but the bloody—”

I never found out what the last
bloody
was intended to modify, because I cut off the flow of words by slapping the tape back in place. I said, “You're very stupid. You don't know how much I know, so it's a bad time to try lying to me. You're a dreadful liar to begin with. It's just not your bag, and from now on you'll have to avoid it. This one particular lie just cost you a finger.”

He struggled. His whole body went rigid, and for a moment I thought he might be strong enough to snap the wire. He wasn't.

I cut through the finger just above the second joint, about half an inch below the wire tourniquet. There was hardly any bleeding at all.

He did not turn his eyes aside. He watched his finger until I had succeeded in separating it from his hand, his face growing steadily paler, and then he quietly passed out.

 

“Just never expected it of you. The way you talk and all, and how you handle your face, and especially you being a Yank.” His tone was soft and marveling,
as if he had just witnessed something extraordinary on the telly. “You're all at once Lee Marvin in the bloody movies. An effing butcher working on a side of beef.

“I told you.”

“Don't say you didn't, but Jesus effing Christ, you could have told me forever and I'd have gone on sending you up. You know what? Me finger hurts. Now why in hell should it do that? I mean it hurts where it was. Like the air hurts where me finger would be if you hadn't sliced it off. I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't such an important finger. The little one on the left hand, say.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Did you cosh me afterwards or did I do a faint?”

“You fainted.”

“What I thought. Never did that before in me life. And you just sat there cool as ice.”

“No. I went into the other room and was sick to my stomach.”

“Did you? And if I don't talk now, or don't tell it straight, you'd do it again?”

“I'd do the thumb next.”

He sighed again. “Not half hard, are you? And then?”

“Use your imagination. An eye, an ear, I don't know.”

“Holy Bloody Mary. Imagine if the peelers bought your line. They'd never bring a lad in but he'd tell 'em anything they wanted to know. Be no staying out of jail then, would there? And imagine the poor bloody pickpockets with their hooks trimmed down like this. Be the end of crime, wouldn't it?”

He clucked at the wonder of it. Oh, it would be quite
an innovation, I thought. It would return English criminal procedure to the days of the sixteenth century.

I said, “The girl.”

“Oh, you'll get the whole of it now, mate. The fiddle's a sweet one. I worked it twice last year and once in the spring, and then in August with your bird. How it works, see, you try to attract the type of bird who's all alone in the world. They all of 'em come to London, you know. Maybe they've got a mother in Ireland that they don't even write to, or a maiden aunt up in Geordie country, or nobody at all. The others you send away, tell 'em the position's filled. You do the same with the dogs. They don't have to be beauties, you know, but they won't do if they're too fat or too thin or too old.”

“Go on.”

“Well, you get six or seven, see, just enough but not too many, and then you feed 'em a tale. The first time I made it that we were off to rob a tomb and everybody'd have a share in the plunder. Didn't go down as well as it might have. Oh, I filled my boat, you know, but some right ones shied away from it.” He smiled suddenly. “Got the tale from the only other man who ever worked this fiddle, him that told me about it when we did a spell at Broadmoor together. And since then somebody put a flick in him, so I'm the only chap who knows it. Made up a better tale since then. I sort of worked in this espionage angle, James Bond and all, and—”

“I know the story.”

“Oh, right, your bird told you. Well. I check 'em all out, see, and then I swear them all to secrecy. Nothing a bird likes better than being trusted with a secret, especially the lost and lonely ones that wouldn't know
who to tell it to anyway. Once they're sworn to secrecy and once you've got the right crew, then you fly the lot of them to Istanbul. That's in Turkey.”

“I know.”

“Pack the lot of 'em into a Land Rover and just keep driving east. It's a grand time for them. You get girls who've never been out of London in their lives, or spent thirty years in a cottage in Cornwall, and here they're getting the grand tour. Turkey, Iraq, Persia. I don't rush 'em, I let 'em have their bit of sightseeing. And you just keep heading east until you get to Kabul. That's in—”

“Afghanistan.”

“Right you are, Afghanistan. Never heard of the bloody country before me china put me onto this fiddle, let alone Ka-bloody-bul. Just drive straight on into it. There's some desperate roads on the way, and this last time I was carrying extra water the whole trip, what with the radiator boiling over, but that's the only problem there is. Crossing the borders is safe as houses, what with me own passport in order and all of the birds' too. You have to make sure of that ahead of time, that the birds have their passports right, and the visas and all. Customs is no problem. There's no smuggling, see, just the lot of birds.”

“And then what?”

“And then there you are in Kabul.”

I looked at him. I had the feeling I was missing a fairly obvious point. He wasn't lying now. Somehow my act of dedigitation had elevated me to the level of a man he could respect, and he seemed to be telling me the details of his fiddle with a pride akin to Court
ney Bede's delight in showing off his stacks of old newspapers.

“I don't understand,” I said. “Do you have sex with the girls?”

“With the birds?” He frowned, thinking. “I suppose a chap could if he wanted. You'll get some who are proper dying for it, but I never fool with any birds that way.”

“Then what in hell do you do with them?”

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “You're not half thick, are you? Now you can work it out. Here you are in bloody Kabul with six or seven girls, and what do you do?”

“I don't know.”

“Why, you
sell
'em, don't you see? What the hell else would you do with them?”

I said, “You sell them.”

“And to think you couldn't guess it! White slaves is what they call it. And a thousand nicker each is what they pay. That's six or seven thousand a trip, and add a bit of profit on selling the Land Rover and take away the cost of flying 'em to Turkey and you're still five or six thousand quid ahead of the game. Just play it out four times a year, say, and—”

“Wait a minute. You sell them. Who buys them?”

“Chap named Amanullah. A great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. Never an argument on price, not once.”

“What happens to the girls?”

“They make brasses of them. Tarts. They've a shortage of them over there, do you know?” He gave a short laugh. “Fancy bringing a boatload of tarts to Soho
and trying to sell 'em. Be coals to Newcastle all over again.”

“They work in Kabul, then?”

He shrugged. “Got me there. I'd say they don't, now that I think on it. I'd say they ship 'em out where birds are scarce. For them that work in the mines and such. You know what? I never gave it much thought. Once I sell 'em they're nothing to me, and it's hop a plane and Hello, Picadilly! with a purse full of the ready.”

I sat beside him, my mind quite numb, while he added details. I nodded at the right places, put in the right questions, and tried to convince myself that all of this was really happening. I glanced from time to time at his index finger on the floor. It looked like one of those plastic things they sell in novelty shops along with rubber dog shit and dribble glasses. It wasn't real, and neither was anything else.

He'd never had trouble with the girls until this last trip, he told me. Then two of them got wind of something, Phaedra and a farm girl from the Midlands, and in Baghdad he caught them trying to escape to the British Embassy. “Had to drug them and keep them in a fog the rest of the way. Told the others they were sick with a fever. Cost me a few quid that way, bribing the hacks at the borders. But the rest never did catch on.”

I pumped him for more details about Amanullah and how he could be located. Finally it got through to him that I actually wanted to go to Afghanistan and get Phaedra back. I think this shocked him more than the loss of the finger. All along he had thought that I wanted to muscle in on his racket.

“You must be crackers,” he said. “You'd never find
her, and they'd never let you have her. She's been sold, don't you see? Oh, you might buy her back, but after a few months of that life, why, what would she be good for? They don't last long there, you see. That's why they've got a steady need for fresh birds—”

I thought of Phaedra, my little Phaedra, Mama Horowitz's Deborah. Sweet, virginal Phaedra, who lived with me for a month and emerged intact. It's not logical just to save yourself, I had told her once. You have to be saving yourself
for
something.

And what had my Phaedra saved herself for? A whorehouse in Afghanistan?

I stood up. Hyphen—I still didn't know his name, or much care—was saying something. I had stopped listening. I found the square of adhesive tape and slapped it in place across his horrible mouth.

Julia was in the bedroom. She was pressed up against the far wall, her arms across her chest, hugging herself and silently shaking. She looked like certain pictures of Anne Frank.

“Did you hear any of that?”

She nodded.

“I want you to go into the hallway now. I want to be certain that there's no one around when I walk out of here. Go out and close the door. I'll be ready in a moment or two, and I'll knock on the door. If it's all clear, return the knock and I'll come out.”

She nodded again, rigidly, then grabbed up her purse and walked straight to the front room and out the door without looking at him. I went over to him and picked up the cleaver, but it was no good. I took it to the kitchen and exchanged it for a more pointed knife.

He didn't like the looks of it at all.

I spent a few unintentionally brutal seconds standing there trying to think of something to say, but there was no way to say it and no reason to try. So I put the knife in his heart, and took it out, and put it back a second time and left it there.

A
fghanistan consists of
a quarter of a million square miles of mountainous terrain bordered on the west by Iran, on the south and east by Pakistan, and on the north by the Turkmen, Uzbek and Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republics. The population is slightly in excess of fifteen million, a thirtieth of whom live in greater Kabul. The monetary unit is the afghani. Major languages are Afghan and Persian. The chief religion is Islam. Camels and sheep constitute the most important livestock. There is some gold mined in the extreme northeast in the Hindu Kush, in which area is located the highest peak in the nation, which rises 24,556 feet above sea level. Substantial amounts of coal and iron are also to be found here and there. Major rivers include—

If you care, you might check out Hammond's Medallion Atlas, which was my own source for all of the above information. Nigel had a copy, and I divided my time that night between it and the coal fire, which was not throwing as much heat as I thought it should.

By midnight, both Nigel and Julia had gone off to bed. Our conversation until then was forced and uncomfortable. No one much wanted to discuss what had
gone on at the Old Compton Street flat, and it was difficult to put one's mind to anything else, but we did make a pretense of talking over the barbarous notion of white slavery and the possible course of action I might take.

The former topic was limited to lines like, “Imagine that sort of thing in the twentieth century,” and so on. I didn't find it all that hard to imagine, but then I'm not all that thrilled with the twentieth century, which may explain my feelings. The latter subject, just what to do about it, kept running into conversational dead ends. As far as I could see, there was only one thing to do. I had to go to Afghanistan, find Phaedra, and lead her Mosaically out of the house of bondage. I didn't imagine this would be a simple matter, but neither did I see how discussing it could render it a whit less difficult.

So they went to bed, and I read the atlas and poked at the fire and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

I'd have saved a lot of time if it hadn't been for the silly atlas. But the more I concentrated on the precise geographical location of Afghanistan, the more elaborate plans I devised for working my way into the country. The best route, I finally decided, would constitute a close approximation of the course the girls themselves had followed. I'd have to omit Turkey, of course, where I am as
non grata
as a
persona
can possibly be. But other than that it wouldn't be too difficult to get into Iraq, then move on to Iran, then make the final crossing into Afghanistan.

Would Iraq be a problem? I wondered about this.
The Kurds have been in armed rebellion against the Iraqi government for over twenty years, fighting incessantly and heroically for autonomy, and theirs is not the sort of struggle from which I am inclined to remain aloof. This might well limit my chances of obtaining an Iraqi visa. Still, that couldn't be too hard a border to cross, could it?

I studied maps.

This sort of thing went on for hours. I brewed fresh tea, added more coal to the fire (without adding more heat to the room), and wasted more time. I prepared for a variety of unlikely contingencies, none of which I'll bore you with now. My mind went on and on, never hitting upon the basic geometrical postulate that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Blame it on my past. When one is sufficiently experienced in the devious, one rejects the straightforward approach as a matter of course. It took me hours and hours before I realized that the easiest way to go to Afghanistan was to go to Afghanistan.

Quite so.

No one in Afghanistan had anything to fear from me. It was one country where I was as welcome as any other stranger. Nor was there anything at all clandestine or subversive in my purpose for going there. I wanted to repurchase a slave and take her home, and I intended to do this quietly and discreetly, thus constituting not the slightest threat to the peace and stability of the Afghan nation.

So why not fly to Kabul?

I closed the atlas and returned it to its place on the shelf. There was probably an Afghan embassy or con
sulate somewhere in London. I could go to it in the morning and find out what I would need in the way of visas and inoculations. Any of the travel bureaus I had previously haunted could find a way to book me straight through to Kabul. A direct flight seemed too much to hope for, but no doubt there was a way to make connections through Teheran or Karachi or something. I wouldn't have any trouble flying out of England, either; my passport, with the entrance visa stamped at Dublin, was in good order. The British might have made it hard for me to enter their country, but my leaving it could only please them, if in fact, they took any particular note of it at all.

 

It was a few minutes past four when Julia screamed.

This wasn't the first time that sounds had come from behind her door. Periodically I had heard moans and groans, and while these did nothing for my concentration, they came as no great surprise to me. She was a fine girl, strong and resolute and bright, an echo of those superb English girls who distinguished themselves during the blitz in movies of the Second World War. But it had been a hell of an evening, and the episodes of amateur surgery and murder were the sort that might disturb anyone's sleep.

I thought the scream would wake Nigel. It didn't. I walked slowly toward her door, listening for another cry. It didn't come, and I stayed with my ear to her door for a few minutes, but she seemed to be sleeping again. I went back to my fireside chair and sat down.

An hour later there were more moans. Then, a few minutes after that, her door opened and she appeared.
She was wearing a shapeless robe the color of an army helmet. Her feet were bare.

“I can't sleep, Evan,” she said. “I've been dreaming like a small child with indigestion. I must look frightful.”

Her hair was snarled and her face drawn, but she looked remarkably fine in spite of this. I told her so, and she told me I lied superbly but she knew better. She went away and came back with her face washed and her hair combed and looked even better.

“I hope I'm not disturbing you?”

I said she wasn't, that I'd run out of things to read and had made all the necessary plans. She wanted to know about these, and I explained that I intended to go to Kabul by going to Kabul, which struck her as good sense all around. She drew up a chair and sat beside me near the fire. It wasn't doing very well. She studied it for a few moments, then rearranged a few coals with the poker. Flames leaped almost instantly.

“When I do that,” I said, “nothing happens.”

“You want practice. Tell me about her, Evan.”

“Phaedra?”

“Yes. You must love her very much.”

“I did.”

“And don't you now?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Were you lovers for very long?”

“We weren't lovers at all,” I said. She looked at me oddly, and I went on to explain the particular relationship Phaedra and I had shared. She found this revelation quite extraordinary. Then her face went positively gray.

“A virgin,” she said. “And her first time must have been—”

“Yes. In Afghanistan.”

“That's absolutely horrid. Defloration is dreadful under the best conditions, isn't it? My own first time—” she colored very slightly, then suddenly grinned. “Hear the girl go on and on! And see her blush with echoes of the old Victorianism. I don't really suppose you suspected I was a virgin, and it would be shameful if I were, wouldn't it? Yet one feels reluctant to abandon that little charade unless one is married. Do you know that I've never even discussed my affairs with Nigel?”

“That's not surprising.”

“Then the surprise is that there's no surprise, because it
is
absurd, don't you think? We're closer than the average sister and brother, and I'm sure he knows I've had lovers, and neither of us has any moral objection to that sort of thing, God knows, and still I couldn't possibly discuss it with him. We sort of assume that I'm intact, and if I married we'd assume that I weren't. I don't want to be, actually.”

“Intact? Or married?”

“Either. You've never married, have you, Evan?”

“No.”

She looked into the fire. “Of course men marry later. I'm getting on to thirty, though, and one does feel one is missing something by not having children, and one can't very well have them without being married. I suppose one could, but—”

“I have two,” I said. And then I found myself telling her about Todor and Jano, my two magnificent sons who live in the Macedonian hills with their mother,
Annalya. I have seen Todor once; I bounced him upon my knee at the time that Jano was conceived. (Not the
precise
time, that would have been indecent, but that week.) I have not yet seen Jano, except in a charcoal sketch which some IMRO patriots smuggled out of Yugoslavia and mailed to me. Todor looks like me. Jano thus far just looks like a baby.

“How remarkable,” Julia said.

“Not really. Most babies—”

“No, no. That you compartmentalize your life the way you do.”

I had never thought of it that way. The fire had died down again, and Julia crossed her arms over her breasts and gripped each elbow with the opposite hand. She had clutched herself thus in the bedroom on Old Compton Street, but there the chill had been emotional.

“It's so damned cold,” she said. “I ought to be in bed but I can't sleep. When will you go to Kabul?”

I turned. “I don't know. As soon as I can. A day or two, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Depending on visas and—”

She stood up abruptly. “Could we make love, do you think?”

“Uh—”

“I hate being so awkward about it, but there's so little time.” She was facing away from me. I looked at the khaki robe and imagined the body beneath it. “This ought to be romantic, and instead it's a damp morning with a dying fire and a memory of nightmares and death.”

“Julia.”

She turned to face me. “And I feel neither passionate nor in love, which is an awful thing to admit at such a moment, and I look a fright—”

“You're beautiful.”

“—and perhaps it's obscene to use sex as therapy, but I do want to be in bed and I don't want to be alone, and I'm not saying this at all well, I know that. When I close my eyes I see that wretched man's finger. I never actually saw it, I rushed through there without looking at him, but with my eyes closed I see it dismembered and flapping about on the floor like a bisected angle-worm. I shouldn't talk about this, it's as romantic as a stomach pump—”

I took her arm. “Be still,” I said.

“Evan—”

I kissed her lips. She said, “I wish we were on a hill in Macedonia. In a little hut in the middle of nowhere eating charred lamb and drinking whatever they drink. I wish—”

“Don't talk.”

“I wish I were ten years younger. Children take this sort of thing so much more casually. I wish I were either more or less emancipated. I—”

“Be quiet.”

“All right.”

 

Her room was small and dark, her bed narrow. We kissed with more love than passion. I felt the warmth of her flesh through her robe. I touched the belt of the robe and she stiffened. “Oh, damn,” she said. “You mustn't look.”

“What's the matter?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh it's so bloody unromantic. If you laugh I shan't blame you, but I'll never forgive you.” With a defiant flourish she opened the robe. Beneath it she was wearing a one-piece suit of red flannel underwear. I didn't laugh. I just asked if the outfit had a drop seat.

“Damn you,” she said.

I told her she would look pretty whatever she wore. She said it was bad enough that I was seeing her like this but that she couldn't let me watch her remove the garment. I turned around and got out of my clothes. By the time I had finished she was in bed beneath a mountain of quilts and blankets. I joined her, and we huddled together for warmth and love.

I held her close. She pressed her face to my throat while my hands stroked the smooth taut skin of her back and bottom. This, I knew, was what mattered—the warmth, the closeness. Whether or not we consummated the morning's entertainment was immaterial. There was no urgency to it, and might not be, and it hardly mattered.

“I won't be able to bear you a bonnie English bastard,” she whispered. “I take the pill.”

“Good.”

“Wouldn't you care for an English bastard?”

“You talk too much.”

“Silence me with a kiss.”

And it was slow and thoughtful, a sweet sharing with little love and less passion and worlds of warmth and tenderness. Kisses both long and slow, and bits of whispered nonsense, and the comfortable touching of secret flesh.

A little at a time the world went away. The horror of Old Compton Street, the ice-eyed man in the chair, the wire wound round his finger, the sound of the cleaver parting flesh and bone. And the long knife, and his blenched face, and the knife going in and out and in again. All of this faded slowly, as did all the burden of time and place.

Until, in the manner of a surprise guest, passion came.

I touched and kissed her, and her breathing deepened and she clutched me with sweet urgency. A pulse pounded in my temples. She beamed, wide-eyed, and said, “How nice!” and closed her eyes and sighed. I kissed her. I felt her firm little breasts against my chest and her legs, the muscles now taut, against my own. I touched the moist warmth of her loins. She opened for me, and I rolled hungrily atop her, and she said, “Yes, yes,” and we kissed again, and—

And a querulous voice said, “Julia! Evan! Where in hell is everyone?”