Tanner's Virgin (9 page)

By sunset I was hungry. I had started drifting back in the general direction of the Four Sisters, and I stopped along the way at a hut from the central chimney of which wafted the odor of broiling mutton. I went inside and stood at a long counter. A thickset man took a mutton steak off the charcoal fire, sprinkled a mixture of unidentifiable spices over it, and slapped it onto a cast-iron plate, which he placed on the counter before me. There were no knives or forks. When in Rome, I thought, and picked the meat up in my hands and began gnawing at it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed
another man glaring at me. I turned. All of the other diners, I saw, had selected knives and forks from a bin against the far wall. All of the other diners looked at me as if I were a barbarian. Chastened, I went to the bin for knife and fork, returned, and went to work on the food.

While I was eating, the chef spooned a mixture of cracked wheat and rice onto my plate. The mutton was rare on the inside and black on the outside and very tangy. The cracked wheat and rice was a successful combination. I noticed another man drinking some sort of beerish concoction, and when the chef passed my way again I pointed at my fellow diner and made drinking motions. It turned out to be beer, but with an unusual taste to it that I finally identified as cashew nuts. This didn't seem to make sense, as the cashew nut is native to the Western Hemisphere, and world trade would have to advance to an extraordinary degree before South Americans took to shipping cashew nuts to Afghanistan breweries. I found out subsequently that an Afghan nut vaguely similar to the cashew is used to flavor the beer.

I had two liters of the beer and finished my mutton steak. I ordered another beer—it wasn't the best beer I'd ever tasted, but there was something habit-forming about the taste—and I drank a little of this, and then I realized that I would have to get rid of some old beer in order to make room for the rest of the new beer.

There was no lavatory as such, just a trough at the base of the back wall. I went out there and did the sort of thing one does at urinals, and as I was concluding this operation the little hut blew up.

For an insane moment I thought I had done it. The Man Who Pees Dynamite. I suppose that's the feeling a woodpecker gets if he goes to work on a tree just as the lumberman gives it the final chop. After all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience. One minute I was urinating on this building, and the next minute the goddamned building was gone.

The damage was close to total, the destruction approached utter, and the chaos was absolute. There was the sound of the explosion followed by complete silence. This held for maybe ten seconds. Then everybody in Kabul set up a hue and cry.

The blast knocked me flat on my back, which was probably just as well, because most of what was inside the little restaurant was blown outside, and it wouldn't have been wise to be standing in the way. By the time I was back on my feet, neither bloody nor unbowed, the chaos had reached absolute pitch. There were sirens wailing in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was in what might well turn out to be a bad place for a foreigner without papers.

So I manfully ignored the cries of help rising from the near-dead, and heroically resisted the temptation to come to the aid of my fellow man, and didn't even go back to look for my beer. I don't think I'd have had much luck anyway; the counter was gone, and the charcoal stove, and the chairs, and most of the people. I got the hell out of there as fast as my legs could carry me, which turned out to be somewhat faster than I had suspected. I raced down the block and around the corner, and I very nearly collided with the man with the spade-shaped black beard.

He stared at me. “You're alive!”

“You speak English,” I said, cleverly.

“Curse you, Tanner! What does it take to kill you?”

He pulled out the world's biggest pistol and stuck it in my face. “This time you don't get away,” he said. “Knives don't work on you, bombs don't work on you, it's impossible to drown you. But with a hole in your damned head perhaps it will be different.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, reasonably. “Do you realize what you're doing? Do you have any idea?”

He stared at me.

“You're making a terrible mistake.”

“Talk,” he demanded.

“Well,” I said, and kicked him in the groin.

N
othing succeeds like
a kick in the groin.

I suppose it must be at least partly psychological. Even when the kick is wide of the mark, men tend to double up and moan for a few moments before they realize that nothing hurts. The mere suggestion of a kick in the cubes is harrowing, and I gave my bearded friend more than the suggestion. I got him right on target, and I put enough into the kick so that it was unlikely that he would ever sire children. Which, considering the type of genes he'd be likely to pass on and the already crowded state of the world, was just as well.

He fell apart. He dropped the gun, which I picked up and tucked into my robe along with the dagger that was my souvenir of his first visit. He dropped himself, too, sprawling on the ground, clutching his crotch with both hands and making perfectly horrible sounds.

Everyone ignored us.

I'm damned if I know why. Whether it was simply that the bombed-out restaurant was a greater source of interest than an argument between two strangers, or whether the basic sense of privacy of the Afghan led him to choose not to get involved I cannot say, but whatever the cause we were left quite alone. I got
my bearded friend to his feet and walked him around the corner and into an alleyway. I doubled his arm up behind him so that we would walk where I wanted to walk. He wasn't very good at walking, choosing to stagger with his thighs as far apart as he could contrive, but I got him into the alley and propped him against the wall, and he stayed propped for almost five seconds before crumpling into a heap on the ground.

“If you're going to shoot someone,” I said, reasonably, “you should just go ahead and do it. It serves no point to tell him about it first. It just gives him a chance to try and do something about it.”

“You kicked me,” he said.

“Good thinking. I'm glad you're in condition to think, because this is important. I want you clowns to stop trying to kill me.”

He set his jaw and glared at me.

“Because there's really no point to it. You know, I had forgotten all about you morons.” I switched to Russian, remembering that they had been speaking it on the boat. “You and Yaakov and Daly and the rest of you. I forgot all about you. You wouldn't believe what I went through getting here. Did you ever ride a camel? Or try to convince a Kurd that you aren't spying for the Baghdad government? Or eat zebra sandwiches in Tel Aviv? Of course I forgot about you. It was a pleasure to forget about you.”

“We thought you died in the water.”

“Not quite.”

“And then Peder saw you last night. He saw you enter the town, and Raffo followed you and tried to kill you as you left the coffeehouse.” He lowered his
eyes. “He said it was as if you were guided by demons. You dropped to the ground even as the knife was in the middle of the air.”

“Well, the demons told me to.”

“Now I have tried twice and failed twice.” He looked up at me. “You will kill me now?”

“No.”

“You will not kill me?”

“I'd like nothing better,” I said, “but it would be a waste of time. If I kill you they'll just put somebody else on the job. Look, I want you to take them a message. You seem to think that I'm a threat to you—”

“You know our plans.”

“Not really.”

“And you have come to Afghanistan to thwart them.”

“No, definitely not. Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

“You are a spy and an assassin.”

“Be that as it may, I couldn't care less about you and your plans. And I don't really know what they are, except that you're going to overthrow the government of Afghanistan—”

“Ha! You know!”

“Well, I didn't think you were over here to get a concession to breed Afghan hounds. But I don't know the date or the reason or—”

“You arrive in Kabul on the 14th of November and try to have us believe you do not know the coup is to be on the 25th?”

“The 25th?”

“Ha! You know!”

“Well, you just told me, you cretin.” I turned, glanced at the mouth of the alleyway. We were still quite alone. “Look at it this way,” I said. “If I knew anything, or if I cared at all, I could inform someone. That might make sense. But since you already had a make on me, why would I come into Kabul myself? Why wouldn't I have my organization send someone you don't know about?”

“It is said that you are very shrewd.”

I looked at the heavens. The sky had grown dark, and I didn't blame it a bit. He said, “If you would not sabotage our plot, why are you here in Kabul?”

“I'm looking for a girl.”

“You'll have to go to a whorehouse. The ordinary girls, they will not even talk to strangers.”

“You don't understand. I'm looking for a girl I happen to know. She was kidnaped and taken to Afghanistan.”

“And where is she?”

“In a whorehouse.”

“Ha! You
will
have to go to a whorehouse!” His face lighted up, then clouded over. “You talk in riddles,” he said. “You speak nonsense, you are impossible to understand. You tell me there is something you must say to me, and then you kick me in my poor testicles. You told us on the boat you could not speak Russian, and now at this very moment you and I are speaking Russian fluently.”

“Well, your accent's not so hot.”

“I am Bulgarian.”

“Make things easy for yourself,” I said in Bulgarian. “Just so you get the message. Speak to me in Bulgarian as well, and we shall be at ease with one another, and you can go back to Yaakov with the message, and—”

“You know of Yaakov.”

“Well, I met the sonofabitch. Of course I know of him.”

“It is all a trick,” he said mournfully. “You said on the boat that a man was overboard, and this was not so, and when we looked you were suddenly overboard. Now you say that you will not kill me, so of course I know that you will.”

“I'd like to.”

“Ha!”

“More and more I'd like to.” I thought of the restaurant where I'd had that fine mutton steak, that cashew-flavored beer. The restaurant and all the hungry people in it were now a thing of the past, all because of this little bastard with his bomb.

“But killing you does me more harm than good,” I said. “Look, let's try it on one more time. I'm not interested in you. I don't give a damn about your plot or the government of Afghanistan or anything else except the girl I came to Afghanistan to find. I'm not even sure I give a damn about her either, but I certainly care more about her than any of the rest of you. And I also care about staying alive. I don't want knives in my turban or poison in my wine or walls that explode when I take a leak on them. Don't interrupt me. All I want is to be left alone. I'll let you go, and you'll go back and tell them that. Right?”

“You will not kill me?”

“Good thinking.”

His eyes grew crafty. “You are with the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps?”

“So that's what was grabbing you.”

“Who is grabbing me?”

“No, forget it. No, I'm not with the Central Intelligence Agency. As a matter of fact, the Central Intelligence Agency and I don't get along very well.”

“You are an enemy of the CIA?”

“Well, I suppose you could put it that way, if you don't mind stretching a point. You could even say I'm a great friend of Russia if you want. A supporter of the Soviet Union. An ally of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, if it makes you happy.”

“Ha! The Soviet Union!”

“Sure.”

“Ha! Bulgaria!”

“Ha! indeed,” I said. “So you'll tell your boss, okay? Yaakov, the one with all the knees and elbows and teeth. Tell him I'm a good guy and I just came here to get my glasses cleaned. And tell him to for God's sake stop sending people to kill me. I don't like it.”

He nodded.

“And now,” I said, “I am not doing this because I hate you, but simply because I don't trust you. I know it's mean of me to think it, but I've got a feeling that you might try to follow me.”

“I would never do this,” he said.

“Somehow you fail to convince me. I even have a hunch that, given insufficient time for reflection, you might have another try at killing me.”

“I am not such a man.”

I aimed a kick at his groin. I checked it, but the mere thought of it was enough to make him double up, hands at crotch. It was no great trick to grab his head and rap it a couple of times against the wall. Not too hard,
because I wanted my message delivered to Yaakov. Not too soft, either, because I wasn't that crazy about my little bearded friend. If he had a headache when he woke up, that was fine with me.

I slipped out of the mouth of the alleyway. I didn't just walk out, the way I would have done earlier. I found my way to the end of the alley and stuck my head out very carefully and looked to the left and to the right, and then I scurried out and disappeared into the shadows on the other side of the street.

If all of these fools didn't know any better than to waste time killing me, at least I could be on my guard. There was no point in making their work easy for them.

 

A man named Arthur Hook had described him as a great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. A man named Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot added that he had a furious appetite and a belly that would press through his robes if it could. They were both right. Amanullah the son of Ba'aloth the son of Pezran the son of D'hon was all this and more.

He sort of hung. His hair hung straight to his shoulders, white as a Southern jury and limp as a eunuch. His body was appallingly fat all over, and the fat drooped. Someone must have slammed the door while his head was in the oven, because his face had fallen all over the place. His eyes were huge and very blue, contrasting nicely with his brown teeth. His ears were positively gigantic, with huge lobes, and if he could have contrived to flap them he could have flown away like Dumbo the Flying Elephant, whom he probably
outweighed. While I introduced myself he engulfed a salad, a large wedge of cheese, two liters of beer and a chunk of bread the size of a small loaf. He didn't even seem to be eating. He seemed to inhale his food, to breathe it into his belly.

And he was, all of this notwithstanding, an exceedingly charming man. Good will was an aura around him. I sat down across the table from him fully prepared to despise him, and from the onset I found it impossible to do other than like him.

“So you bring greetings from Tarsheen, eh?” He belched rather delicately. “Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. He is, let me see—”

“The husband of the sister of the wife of your brother.”

“Why,
kâzzih,
you understand my family ties better than I do myself! It is as you say. You tasted the sausages of Tarsheen? None better are sold in the streets of Kabul. In this wineshop, though, one may obtain the best food anywhere in the city.”

“I thought there was only wine.”

“For me there is food. For others, no. I eat here constantly, it is my pleasure in life.” He erupted with laughter. “As if I must tell you this, eh?” He slapped his abdomen. “As if my belly does not testify amply to my source of happiness?” He slapped it again. “But I eat and offer nothing, it is not seemly. You wish nourishment?”

“I ate not an hour ago.”

“An hour after eating I am famished. You wish wine?”

“Perhaps beer.”

He ordered it, and another of the ugly sisters brought it. Somewhere along the line I asked him why it tasted of cashews, and he explained about the nut with which they flavored it. When I finished the beer he ordered me another.

“Now,
kâzzih,
” he said eventually, “I suspect you wish to discuss business. Is it not so?”

“It is so.”

“And your business is what?”

“A woman.”

“Only one woman? I see. You buy or you sell?”

“I buy.”

“You have preference as to type? Young or old, tall or short, Eastern or Western? Fat? Slender? Dark or light? Or would you examine my poor stock and determine what strikes your fancy?”

“I want a girl named Phaedra,” I said.

“A name?” He shrugged massively. “But of what importance is a name? To be honest, I never bother learning the names of the girls I handle. But if you wish a girl with such a name—how is it called?”

“Phaedra.”

“A most unusual name in this part of the world. Is it Hindu?”

“It's Greek.”

“How extraordinary! The name, though, what does it matter? You select a girl, you pay her price, she is yours to do with as you wish. If you wish to call her Phaedra, so she is called. If you wish to call her Dunghill, to Dunghill does she answer. Is it not so,
kâzzih?
”

I sighed. I wasn't quite getting my point across. I took it from the top again and explained that I was
looking for a girl whom he had already handled, a girl he had already purchased as a slave.

“A girl brought here to me?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, that is another matter entirely. When did this occur?”

I told him.

“So many months? A problem.” He picked up a roll, broke it in half, sopped up salad oil with it, and gobbled it up. “I bought and sold many girls that month,
kâzzih.
How would I know one from another?”

I told him the seller was an Englishman and that the girl was part of a shipment of half a dozen English girls. I dragged out my picture of Phaedra and gave him a look at it. He studied it for a long time.

“I remember the girl,” he said.

“Thank God.”

“She is Greek? I did not think—”

“She is American.”

“American, but her name is Greek. The world has more questions than answers, is it not so? I remember the girl, the others that she came with. The demand was strong at that time. All of those girls were placed almost immediately. You would do well to forget her,
kâzzih.
”