Tanner's Virgin (7 page)

So I spun to my right and bellowed,
“Man overboard!”

They turned to look. I shrugged my mackintosh off my shoulders and looped it over the head and shoulders of the man immediately to my left. While he was clawing at it I dodged around him and raced for the rail. I had time for another fleeting thought of frying pans and fires, and then I vaulted the rail, and then I was in the water.

T
he water permanently
dispelled thoughts of frying pans and fires. If it had been any colder I could have played hockey on it. I left the rail in a lifesaver's jump, body bent forward, legs apart, arms wide, but at the last moment I must have done something wrong, because instead of staying above water I sank like a brick. Eventually my brain sent a night letter to my arms and legs and I made furious scrambling motions while waiting for my whole life to pass before me. I guess that only happens if you really drown. I broke the surface and breathed out and in a few times, and then I heard shouts and saw a spotlight swing laboriously around toward me. I drew a last breath and went under again just as the first bullets began slapping at the water's surface.

I tried swimming underwater, which is something I don't do awfully well under optimum conditions, which these clearly weren't. I surfaced and dove again before they could bring the guns around. Movement was very difficult, and at last I realized that it was my clothes which were causing the difficulty. But I'll be cold without them, I thought. Then it occurred to me that they were doing nothing to keep me warm underwater.

Years ago, when I took a lifeguard course, they taught us to strip completely before entering the water. It only takes a few seconds on land and you more than make up for it in improved swimming speed. But I hadn't had the time to spare when I left the ship. Now I worked my way out of jacket and shirt, kicked off shoes and socks, ripped open a stuck zipper and squirmed out of trousers. I would have left my undershorts on—they can't slow one down much, certainly—but I hadn't had them on to begin with. As far as I knew they remained in Julia's room in London. So I swam on without them and worried about sharks.

The sharks in the boat were a more immediate source of danger. They must have circled for half an hour, playing that damned spotlight over the water and popping away with their guns in my approximate direction. As far as I know, none of their shots came particularly close. It was pitch dark out, I was underwater more often than not, and the sea was sufficiently choppy to make observation tricky, not to mention marksmanship. After maybe thirty minutes of this I guess they decided that if I hadn't drowned already I would sooner or later. They stopped circling and went rapidly away. I treaded water for awhile until I couldn't hear their engines any longer. Then I closed my eyes, and some of the more recent moments in my life passed before me, and drowning, now that I thought about it, seemed like a pretty good idea.

Virgins, white-slavers, smugglers, spies. I sighed heavily. The waves rolled on, as waves are apt to do. I remembered which way the boat had gone and pointed myself in that general direction and set out to swim the English Channel.

 

It took forever. I used to swim a lot years ago, and they do say it's one thing you never forget, and evidently I hadn't. Even so I kept expecting my strength to give out, and I figured that sooner or later a wave would spill me under the surface and I wouldn't have anything left to pull myself back up again with. But I kept on going. The water didn't get any warmer, but I stopped feeling it before long.

Until finally there was a point when I knew I was going to make it. The waves were going the same way I was, which helped immeasurably. Whenever I got sufficiently exhausted I could roll over on my back and float for a while. It wasn't quite as restful as a few hours in a hammock, but it helped.

I went off course, which was predictable but less than helpful. I missed the little peninsula that Cherbourg is at the tip of, and I suppose that must have cost me a couple of extra hours in the water. And when I did wash up on shore a few hours after sunrise there were some people on the beach. I staggered onto dry land, calling to them in French, and a woman shrieked, “Howard, he's naked as a jaybird!” and Howard aimed his Instamatic at me and took my picture.

Howard, it turned out, had washed up on this very spot almost twenty-five years ago in June of 1944. He was part of the Normandy invasion, and my channel swim had somehow deposited me on Omaha Beach. He said he wanted to bring the wife and have a look at the spot and to hell with what the President said about the gold shortage. His wife, eyes averted, said I would catch my death of cold, a possibility which had already occurred to me.

My skin was more blue than not and my teeth were doing their castanet number. Worse than that, I was lightheaded almost to the point of delirium. If they had asked me anything at all I would have told them some thoughtless approximation of the truth, and I suppose they would have either run away from me or turned me in.

But they never asked. Only American tourists could have been capable of such a feat. It was not reserve that prevented them from asking. I've thought about it for some time, and I can only conclude that they didn't ask because they didn't care. Howard wanted to talk about the Normandy invasion and the way the French girls welcomed them at the liberation of Paris. Howard's wife—I've forgotten her name—babbled intermittently about their wisdom in bringing rolls of American toilet paper with them.

Not that they ignored me. Howard found a terry cloth bathrobe in the trunk of the car that they were buying in Europe at a great savings, and I dried myself with it, thinking it was a towel, and then, realizing my mistake, put it on. This enabled Howard's wife to look at me. Before I had been somewhat less naked than a jaybird—I was still wearing my moneybelt around my middle—but I'd still been distinctly exposed.

They made coffee for me. They had a thermos of hot water, and Howard's wife had brought not only toilet paper but a small jar of genuine American instant coffee. They offered me a ride back to Paris, but I just couldn't believe that I could spend that much time with them without something going wildly wrong. It also occurred to me that this might be a trap, that they
would take me to Paris only to turn me in at the American Embassy. This, I told myself, was nonsense. But if my mind was capable of such fantasies it only proved that I needed a few hours of rest before making any major decisions. I rode as far as Caen, with Howard continuing his monologue on the fundamental superiority of the American fighting man. Howard's wife said “yes, dear” a lot, and when Howard ran out of gas—figuratively, not literally, thank the saints—she told me that they were from Centralia, Illinois. I said that I had an aunt in Centralia, Washington. I don't know why I said this. It isn't true. Howard's wife said that the two cities were often confused, and that on occasion their mail had been sent to Centralia, Washington by mistake. I said that my aunt had often spoken of the same problem.

I left them on the outskirts of Caen. “Now I'm not about to take that robe away from you,” Howard said. “Can't go doing that, even if this is France and all.”

Howard's wife said, “Oh, Howie!” and giggled.

“So I'll just give you my card,” he went on, “and you send the robe back when you're done with it.”

 

I wonder if he ever got the robe back. I left it in one of the outbuildings of an apple orchard outside of Caen. The hired men lived in the building, and they were all out picking apples when I got there, so I went from bed to bed until I found a set of clothes my size—corduroy button-fly trousers, a thick flannel shirt. From beneath another bunk I liberated two heavy white wool socks and a pair of ankle-length cordovan boots with steel-reinforced toes. I gave them the terry cloth robe in
return and left Howard's card in the pocket just in case they wanted to send it back to him.

It was nice to be wearing underwear again.

Under an apple tree in a neighboring orchard I stretched out on my back and let the world calm down. It was a clear and warm day, and gradually the heat baked the chill out of me. I had come as close as I ever would to an old boyhood dream of swimming the English Channel. I was alive, I was dry, and I was almost warm. I had clothes on my back and boots on my feet and nine hundred dollars around my waist.

So much for assets. I didn't even want to think about the other side of the ledger. I just wanted to get back to the States.

Yeah.

Well, what the hell else could I do? I couldn't fly to Kabul as planned, because those clowns who were planning to overthrow the government of Afghanistan would welcome me with open guns. I couldn't fly anywhere because I didn't have a passport. If the police picked me up, they would send me to England, and the English would put a rope around my neck. And—

Phaedra, I told myself. Sweet innocent Phaedra Harrow. Or Debbie Horowitz, as you prefer. Think about Phaedra.

Oh, the hell with her. I did what I could, and—

But I had killed a man on her account, hadn't I? Not that it had done her worlds of good, because the poor kid was chained up in some sort of Afghan whorehouse getting raped twenty or thirty times a day, and—

Good, I thought wickedly. She deserves it.

I sat up, clambered to my feet. I can't take too much
credit for the decision to press onward. I'd like to attribute it entirely to concern for Phaedra and strength of moral fiber, but I've got to admit that there was more to it than that. Because, after all, it couldn't be too much harder for me to get to Afghanistan than back to New York. Either way I didn't have a passport. Either way I was wanted by the British for murder, and the U.S. would be more likely to extradite me. Either way I was in all kinds of trouble, and it's no great trick to be a hero when it doesn't cost you anything.

I hitchhiked to Paris. Everyone has friends in Paris, and I have some particularly useful ones. A family of Algerian colons fed me and wined me, and a friend of theirs drove me through town in a dented Citroen to the home of his old OAS comrade who lived in the attic of a decrepit tenement off the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse. The old comrade was in no shape to win a beauty contest—he'd lost a hand and most of his face when some
plastique
went off ahead of schedule. But he took five of my hundred-dollar bills and disappeared into the night, and when he'd been gone almost three hours I looked accusingly at the Citroen's driver.

“It is said by all that Léon is a trustworthy man,” he said.

I said nothing.

“And yet five hundred U.S. is a great sum of money. Twenty-five hundred francs, is it not?”

I admitted that it was.

“One should not leave one's lambs in the care of too hungry a dog.”

I agreed that one probably shouldn't.

“So we shall wait,” my driver said, “and we shall see.”

Léon was back before sunrise with a Belgian passport in the name of Paul Mornay. M. Mornay was fifty-three years old, stood five feet five inches tall, and weighed 214 pounds. They didn't even come right out and say this, either. It was all in centimeters and kilograms and such and I had to work it out in order to see just how far apart were M. Mornay and I. His picture was as far off the mark as his vital statistics. He had a round face and a baldish head and a cute little moustache, and he looked more like Porky Pig than Evan Tanner.

“It is genuine,” Léon said.

“And M. Mornay?”

“M. Mornay has taken to bed one of the most energetic tarts in Montmartre.”

“From his picture,” I said, “one would think it would kill him.”

“And so it did,” Léon agreed. “At the critical moment, zut! The little death becomes the great one. Thus did his passport come upon the market, and thus one may rest assured that M. Mornay will not report its loss.”

My driver said, “If one must die, no way is sweeter.” And, in the car, he said, “I must apologize for Léon. I thought he was a trustworthy man.”

“He brought the passport.”

“If he paid more than a thousand francs for that passport then I am the bastard son of Enzo Ferrari and Queen Marie of Rumania. For twenty-five hundred francs one should obtain a U.S. or British passport in good order, not a shabby Belgian thing that requires
further attention. One expects that Léon shall make a profit, but this is larcenous.”

“I didn't think he would come back at all.”

“Ah,” said my driver. “But did I not assure you he was a trustworthy man?”

My barber was also a trustworthy man. He was one of the few White Russians in Paris who didn't insist he had been a prince before the revolution. He said he had been a barber, and he was a barber still. His craft was only slightly impaired by the tremor which age had put in his fingers. He agreed that it was sensible to doctor me rather than the passport insofar as possible. He shaved me, leaving a moustache to match M. Mornay's and he showed me how to fill this in with eyebrow pencil so that it did not look as sparse as it was. He dyed my hair black and toyed with the idea of shaving some of it, but we decided that a shaved head rarely looks authentically bald, so instead of subtracting hair from my own head I added hair to the photo of M. Mornay.

There was not very much else I could do. Good passport artists, with proper tools and years of experience, can perform extraordinary tricks. I know two such men, one in Athens and one in Manhattan, but I didn't know of anyone in Paris and had no time to find one. It would have been child's play for such an artist to alter Mornay's height and weight so that they corresponded to my own. As things stood, I had to rely on the fact that the average immigration officer is far too harried to spend too much time looking at a passport.

I left Paris late that afternoon. A different colon in the same Citroen drove me to the airport at Orly. I was wearing a medium-priced ready-made suit, and the
cut of it showed me why Europeans have their clothes made to measure. Still, it fit my new role better than the applepicker's work clothes. I had them with me in a small imitation-leather suitcase.

I flew to Geneva and Zurich. The following morning I went to the Bank Leu in Zurich, where I have a signature-and-number account for money that can't conveniently accompany me into the States. I checked the balance and found that it stood at fifteen thousand Swiss francs, which is just under thirty-five hundred U.S. dollars.