Tanner's Virgin (6 page)

By seven-thirty it was time to leave. A lad named Pensomething was driving me to Torquay in his father's Vauxhall, and Poldexter had arranged to keep my stolen Morris until someone needed a ride to London, where it could be safely abandoned. We said our good-byes all around, toasted Free Cornwall as an equal partner in the Celtic-Speaking Union, and away I went. The Vauxhall was even worse than the Morris but at least I didn't have to drive it.

 

I don't know much about boats. The one I boarded at Torquay was about twenty feet long and it had a downstairs and an upstairs which I know aren't called that. I guess you call them “topside” and “below,” but I wouldn't swear to it. I really don't know much about boats beyond the fact that it's better to be on them than
in the water. I also know that starboard is the right and port is the left, unless it's the other way around.

Fortunately I didn't really have to know much. I bargained with the captain and wound up paying twenty-five pounds for my passage, which was five less than I'd anticipated. Then I got on board and found a nice quiet corner and pretended to go to sleep. More men got aboard, and some of them loaded crates of something into the downstairs part of the ship, call it what you will. I went on pretending to be asleep, and I kept up this pretense until we were well under way, at which point it became impossible to go on because sleeping men do not vomit, and I had to.

One other thing I know about boats—if you have to throw up, you don't do it into the wind. I threw up correctly and felt quite proud of myself. I was standing at the rail feeling proud of myself when a thin dark man with a spade-shaped beard came over and stood beside me. “You are not so much of a sailor,” he said dolefully.

“I picked the right side,” I said.

“How is this?”

“I didn't puke into the wind,” I said. “I went to the port side and—”

“But this is the starboard side.”

“Precisely,” I said.

I escaped from him, regained my quiet corner and wrapped my mackintosh around me. It wasn't raining but it might as well have been, because the Channel was choppy and there was enough of a wind to keep an icy spray zinging over the deck. For this I had left October in New York.

I heard footsteps approaching and forced myself not
to look up. The steps ceased. Beside me, a man cleared his throat laboriously. I ignored this, but he was not a man to be ignored. He sat down on the deck beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You,” he said.

I made a pretense of coming groggily awake. I blinked at him. He was a young giant with shaggy blond hair beneath a black beret. His face was a mass of amorphous dough, almost featureless, marked by diagonal scars on both cheeks.

“Ho,” he grunted. “You sick, hah? You want cup soup? Hah?”

I thanked him but explained that I didn't want a cup of soup just now.

“Tsigarette?”

Not that either, I said. Nothing just now, but thanks all the same.

“Is bad sea. Not to worry that you sick.”

His accent was hard to place. There was a Baltic undertone to it, and if I'd had to guess I'd have labelled him Finnish or Estonian.

“You American?”

“Irish,” I said.

“Irish. Hah.”

He went away. An odd crew, I decided. One expects smugglers to be natives of the port from which they operate. On the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, smuggling has long been a family occupation, with the tricks of the trade passed down from father to son over the centuries. It seemed odd that this particular smuggler would have put together a crew of foreigners. The Baltic giant was no native of Devon, nor was the
dark man with the spade-shaped beard, who, now that I thought about it, had a definite flavor of Eastern Europe in his voice.

Time passed slowly. Most of the men were downstairs, and I was torn between a desire to join them—obviously it would be warmer there, with the wind less of a factor—and the stronger desire to stay by myself. The channel crossing was something like eighty miles, and I had no idea how long it was going to take. The boat did seem to be traveling at a good pace, but I had no idea what that might mean in knots—or what knots meant in real miles per hour.

I suppose we were halfway across when the Irishman sat down next to me.

“I'm told you're a kinsman of mine,” he said. “Where are ye from?”

I looked at him. I couldn't place his accent. “Then you're Irish yourself,” I said.

“I am.”

That was no help. I said something about Liverpool.

“And you're after saying good-day to Mother England, are ye?”

“I am that.”

“Not one of those IRA lunatics, I hope.”

“Oh, hardly that,” I said. “It seems I wrote a check and put some other lad's name on the bottom of it, do you see?”

He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. He told me his name was John Daly, and that his home was in County Mayo, and he'd spent some good days in Liverpool. Just where did I live in Liverpool? And did I know this chap, and that chap, and—

Someone called him about then, and he slapped me on the back again. “More bloody orders,” he said. “What you get when you take up with foreigners. They won't keep me long, and I've a bit of holy water I'll bring with me when I can. We'll have ourselves a few jars and talk about the old place, shall we?”

“Ah, God save ye,” I said, or something like that.

And God help me, I thought. Something rather odd was going on and I seemed to be somewhere in the middle of it, along with being somewhere in the middle of the English Channel. I wondered whether he believed I was Irish or whether he was playing along with me. I wondered if we would ever get to France. I wondered why the crew was composed of so many foreigners. I wondered whatever had prompted me to leave New York.

A little while later I found out. The foreigners weren't members of the crew.

They were the cargo.

I was feigning sleep again when I got the message. Evidently my act was a good one, because a trio of men in leather jackets passed me without notice and stood talking at the rail. The group did not include any of the men I had previously spoken to. With the steady roar of the wind, I could not at first make out any of what they were saying, but they did not sound English. Then the wind died down a bit, and it became evident that the reason they did not sound English is that they were speaking Russian.

I caught a few words here, a few words there. They were talking about guns and supplies and explosives and revolution. I listened intently while the wind blew
up and died down, blew up and died down again. It was extremely frustrating. My Russian is fluent, but with the noise the wind was making I would have had trouble understanding them whatever language they spoke. On top of that they seemed to be speaking a dialect of Russian with which I was not familiar, so that of those words which were intelligible there were some I had trouble understanding.

Still, I got the gist of it. They were on their way to some country where the groundwork was already being laid for a revolution.

They were set to overthrow a government.

 

When they went away, leaving me with no idea of just what government they were overthrowing, or when, or why, I pulled the mackintosh over my head and thought about frying pans and fires. It occurred to me that all of this was some extraordinarily involved put-on concocted for my benefit. This was a tempting theory, and in a way it made as much sense as anything else. Because why on earth would a batch of Russian agents be sneaking across the English Channel in a smuggler's boat? And what government were they going to overthrow?

“Ah, there ye are!” It was Daly, my Irish friend, with a leather-covered flask in his hand. He sat cross-legged beside me, opened the flask, and took a long drink. “Bedad, there's no better remedy for the cold.”

He sighed and passed the flask to me.
“Slainte,”
I said, and drank. It wasn't just what my stomach had in mind, but by now I was used to the roll of the sea. Besides, the hell with what my stomach had in mind. A
good draught of Irish whiskey was certainly what my mind had in mind, and right now that seemed the most important consideration.

He said, “Bloody Rooshians and Ukrahoonians and God knows what-all.” He took another drink and passed the flask to me again. I drank. “The lads ye have to work with in this bloody business. A couple of fine boys like you and myself, there should be a better place for us than this slogging old tub and this mucking ocean. Sure, and half an hour more and we'll be in France.”

“A long way from County Mayo,” I said.

“Too far to walk, eh?” We laughed, and he had a drink and I had a drink. “Oh, a good long walk from County Mayo, and more than a hop skip jump from Liverpool, too. But France is still a damn sight closer to home than Afghanistan, I'd say.”

I went numb. I said, “How did you know I was going to Afghanistan?”

He looked at me, and I looked at him, and that went on for longer than was entirely comfortable. “Bejasus,” he said finally. “Then you're for it, too, are ye?”

“Uh—”

“Those bloody Rooshians. Here we are like McGinnis and McCarthy, two Irishmen in on the same show and neither bloody one knows that the other one's there. Do ye believe it now? Have ye ever heard its like?”

Oh, I thought, stupidly. He hadn't meant that Afghanistan was a long ways from Ireland for me to be. He had meant it was a long ways from Ireland for
him
to be. Which meant that he and the bloody Rooshians were on their way to just that spot, which in turn meant that I suddenly knew what government it was that they
intended to overthrow. And which also meant, now that I had opened my idiot mouth, that he thought I was a part of the group, bound for the same destination with the same purpose, and—

Oh.

“And here's everyone saying you're only a paying guest the captain was greedy enough to take on, and you not knowing about us or we about you. Why, I'll let them know how things stand.”

“No, don't do that.”

“What, and contend with these foreigners meself? Let the bleeders know from the start they've two Irish lads to deal with.”

“Have another drink first,” I suggested.

“Have it for me,” he said, passing me the flask. “I won't be a minute.”

I took a long drink, shuddered, capped the flask. I had made a grave mistake, but now that I thought about it I could see how it might work out for the best. If they were really a crew of spies and saboteurs en route to Afghanistan, and if they were fool enough to accept me as one of their own, things might be infinitely easier. I could forget about the headaches of border-hopping. I'd just tag along with them, and when the whole bunch of us got to Afghanistan I could slip away and find Phaedra while they were busy billing and couping. I didn't know very much about the government of Afghanistan, but I've long felt that most governments are better overthrown, and if they put up with slavery, that makes them even better candidates for a coup d'etat. So if my shipmates would get me into the country, they were then welcome to do as they pleased with it.

I had another drink, a long one, and by the time Daly came back with four of his friends in tow, I was feeling positively giddy.

“So we're all of us bound for Afghanistan,” I said. “Fancy that.”

“No one tells us of you,” the bearded one said.

“Nor I of you, for that matter. I received my instructions, how to cross the Channel and where to go. I thought I was to meet up with you on the other side.”

“Where?”

“I was to receive further instructions at a drop in Cherbourg.”

They looked at each other. “From whom did you receive orders?”

“A man called Jonquil. I do not know his actual name.”

“Which section are you?”

“Section Eight,” I said.

“You are in Section Eight and you were assigned to this operation?”

“I was requisitioned for it. Through Section Three.”

“Ah, that has more sense to it.” Thank heavens for that, I thought. “But this is most remarkable.” The man with the spade-shaped beard turned to a chunky man with a bald head and cheap false teeth. “Get Yaakov,” he said, in Russian.

“He sleeps.”

“He has slept since he boarded this garbage scow. Wake him.”

“He will be displeased.”

“Tell him such are the penalties of leadership.” He turned to me. I looked blank. In English he asked me if I spoke Russian. I told him I did not, and he told me
that Yaakov, the leader of the expedition, would come to have a look at me. While we waited, we chatted pleasantly about the wind and the condition of the sea. The crossing was slower than anticipated, I was told, but in another fifteen minutes we should be reaching shore. I looked for France out ahead of the boat, but I could see nothing but inky blackness.

And then Yaakov made his appearance.

He didn't look as though he was in charge of anything. What he really looked like was Woody Allen, small and skinny and ineffectual. He peered myopically at me through thick horn-rimmed glasses, while the man with the beard explained in Russian who I was and what I was doing there.

Yaakov asked if I spoke Russian. I looked as blank as ever, and the bearded man said I didn't. Yaakov nodded, fastened his eyes on me again, and smiled shyly.

I returned the smile.

In Russian he said, “You are all fools. This man is not Irish but American. His name is Evan Tanner, he is an assassin who killed a man in London. He is not one of us at all. He is a spy and an assassin.” He was still smiling the same shy smile, and his voice was very gentle. “I am going below now,” he went on. “I will not be disturbed again until we reach the shore. Have the sense to kill this man and throw him overboard.”

They were all looking at me. My friend Daly had evidently not understood the speech. The others had, however. Their faces showed that they had altered their opinions of me.