Me Tanner, You Jane

Chapter 2

Leaving New York in the middle of February was not exactly like the expulsion from Eden. There was one similarity – I was driven, by third-string devils if not by an angel. And there was one major difference – I was glad to go.

For a lot of reasons.

The weather, for instance. I live in four and a half rooms five flights above sea level on 107th Street west of Broadway, and the weather there is rather nice for about nineteen days in the year, and none of those days come in February. It had been a mild winter up until then, a deceptively mild winter, and it even seemed as though the winter was coming to an end, and then the groundhog did or didn’t see his shadow, whichever is the bad omen. I can never keep it straight. The groundhog supplied the bad news, and the heavens supplied the snow, and the municipal government demonstrated a blend of foresight and preparedness reminiscent of Pearl Harbor Day. The snow came down white, turned gray as it passed my windows, and blackened on the streets and sidewalks, where it lay waiting, like all the rest of us, for warmer times.

“Snow,” Minna called out when it first began falling. “Can I go out and play in it, Evan?”

“Do you really think you want to?”

“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she chirped, and ran down the stairs.

She came back a few minutes later. “It’s all dirty,” she said. “What happened to it?”

“ New York happened to it,” I told her.

“Well, I don’t like it,” she said. “I’ll sit on your lap and we can read Alice, Evan.”

She sat on my lap and I let her do the reading. She picked out a German edition of Through the Looking-Glass, Hans Gebhardt’s translation, and read the chapter about Humpty Dumpty, which works beautifully in German. I couldn’t pay too much attention to the words. She squirmed around a little on my lap, and I kept hearing re-runs of a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old love.

“You’ll have to do something about Minna, Evan.”

“Minna? What’s wrong with Minna?”

“The whole situation. It’s not as if she were your daughter, you know. She’s just a child who lives with you. And she won’t be a child forever.”

“Well, only Peter Pan-”

“She’s growing up already, you know.”

“Huh?”

“She is, Evan. How old is she? Ten?”

“Nine. She’s not exactly eligible for Social Security yet.”

“Nine years old. You know, children are growing up a lot faster these days, Evan.”

“You sound like a Sunday supplement.”

“I mean sexually. Do you know that puberty begins an average of three years earlier than it did a century ago? Do you realize what that means?”

“For a belly dancer, you’ve got a dirty mind.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“You keep her out of school and you teach her languages and you take her to the zoo and drag her around to nut group meetings and it’s all very sweet and cute, and one of these days you’re going to take a good look at her and not be able to decide whether to change her diaper or take her to bed, and when that happens-”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“If you had children of your own-”

“I do. In Macedonia. Two boys. Todor and Benno.”

“Oh, Evan, don’t you see how chaotic this is? Don’t you see-”

“Let’s talk about something else, Kitty.”

And we talked about something else, something more cheerful, like an earthquake or a tidal wave or an epidemic. Now, while Minna read Humpfe Dumpfe’s speech about a word meaning precisely what one wants it to mean, neither more nor less, I thought about Minna and puberty, visualizing the little golden-haired angel against a background montage of Tampax and Clearasil ads.

I had found her three years before in a windowless basement in Lithuania. She was the sole living descendant of Mindaugas, the first and last king of independent Lithuania, and someday, according to her guardians, she would be queen. I took her out of that basement and brought her home with me, and ever since then my life had never been the same.

She would reach puberty at about the same time that I reached forty. Both prospects were unendurably upsetting. I started to put my arm around her, and for the first time I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t put my arm around her, and I winced, and she read about Alice while I thought first of Lewis Carroll and then of Vladimir Nabokov and finally of auto-defenestration.

The next night I trudged to the subway and went down to the New Life restaurant on West 28th, where Katin Bazerian dances, wearing the name Alexandra the Great and comfortingly little else. I caught the last set. When it was over Kitty came to my table and we did in a bottle of rhodytis. We listened to bouzouki music and didn’t talk much.

Eventually I said, “Get your coat and come home with me.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s to know? We’re nice people and we love each other and we should go home together.”

“Oh? We love each other?”

“We always have.”

“You drift from girl to girl, Evan, like a bee from flower to flower. Like a dog from hydrant to hydrant. Evan, I think there are healthier things in this world than our cockamamie relationship.”

It is always bad when girls talk about relationships. They shouldn’t be allowed to use the word.

“I always thought you liked our relationship,” I said.

“Oh, I do. Oh, shit, everything’s rotten.” And she looked at the floor, and I watched the wine evaporate in my glass, and she looked up and said, “He wants to marry me.”

“Who does?”

“A… a fellow. You don’t know him. He’s a nice boy, he works steady. He’s an assistant cook at Gregorio’s on the next block and he plans to be a chef in a few years and he loves me and we talk to each other, you know, and we are good together, you know, I mean bed, we’re good together-”

I wanted something with more authority than rhodytis. Something like heroin, for instance.

“Evan, when a woman is thirty she can frankly forget the whole thing, and I am halfway to being thirty.”

“You’re fifteen?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“That’s halfway to-”

“Between twenty and thirty it’s halfway.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, this life is fine up to a point, but at a certain point a woman is ready to settle down. It’s a human thing, to want to settle down.”

“I know.”

“I’m only human.”

“Uh-huh. What did you tell him?”

“That I didn’t know. That I had to think.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“I’m not sure.” She was silent for a few moments. “You know,” she said, her voice softer, “it’s a funny thing, a proposal of marriage. A very strange thing. I have been proposed to before but it was never something to take very seriously, or at least I didn’t, you know, on account of not being ready to. To be serious, I mean. But it is a funny thing. It makes you feel very good, you know, that someone would ask you to marry him.”

“Sure.”

“I always wondered, you know, if you would someday ask me to, uh, to marry you. And how I would feel. You know.”

“Er.”

“I think about it occasionally, because you’re right, we do love each other. But I know you’ve never wanted to get married so I never pushed anything. But when this fellow asked me, oh, I thought how I had two minds about it, and I asked myself how would I feel if it had been you proposing instead of this fellow, and I knew I would be just of one mind. That I would want to marry you. And make a home with you, with you and Minna, sort of a ready-made family almost, and, oh, this is just what went through my mind and I shouldn’t have said anything to you but I couldn’t help it-”

Her voice just trailed off, as if fading in the distance.

“I’d better get my coat and go home now, Evan,” she said a little later. “To Brooklyn.”

“I’ll take you.”

“No, please, I’ll just get in a cab.”

“I’ll put you in a cab.”

“Well, if you want.”

I flagged a cab on Seventh Avenue. I held the door for her and said, “Look, I don’t want you to marry this cook. But I can’t tell you not to because-”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

“I suddenly find my life completely fragmented, and up until a little while ago it had seemed very together. I have things to think about.”

“I know, Evan.”

I took the subway home. I missed my stop and had to walk all the way back from 116th Street. When I got home I drank a lot, but it didn’t do any good.

That night was followed by two more damp and dreary days, and the best that could be said for them was that they were generally uneventful. I read my mail, I answered my telephone, I grunted at Minna, and now and then I went around the corner to the liquor store. The second day I got a phone call from a girl who was a friend of a friend and who had just gotten into town and needed a place to stay, and ordinarily she would have been a perfectly satisfactory girl, and ordinarily one girl is the world’s best way to get over another girl, but this was not an ordinary time. My dilemma was hornier than I was. I found a place for the girl to stay, and I took her there and left her there. She seemed surprised.

On the morning of the third day I went around the corner for breakfast. I sat at the counter and had scrambled eggs and home fries and as much coffee as possible. There were a few tables of Columbia students in the back, but I was the only diner at the counter, just me and eight empty stools. I was working on a fourth cup of coffee when the door opened and the Sikh came in. He was six and a half feet tall, with the final six inches consisting of turban. He had a full black beard, a bronze face, baggy pantaloons, and bore a scimitar in a tooled brass sheath. I looked at him and decided I was hallucinating. He looked both ways like a conscientious child at a crosswalk, and then he strode to the counter and took the stool next to mine.

The waitress was a solid stolid lady whom nothing surprises. She moved to take his order. The Sikh extended his lower jaw slightly, retrieved it, smiled carefully, and said that he would like an extra dry martini, made with Bombay gin, straight up, with just a twist of lemon peel. The waitress shook her head.

“I am a guest in your nation,” the Sikh said.

I had a fair idea what this was going to be all about. One develops a feel over the years. I turned to the Sikh and told him the place didn’t serve liquor.

“Ah,” he said. “My apologies, good madam. Apple pie and coffee, if you please.”

She brought it, served him, and went away, all without changing expression. I waited. After ingesting the final bite of apple pie and swallowing the final sip of coffee, the Sikh lowered his head and said, “Twelve-fifteen, Hotel Garrand, Room 1304, Mr. Cuttlefish. Godspeed!”

And left.

Of course it was the Chief. Who else sends a costumed Sikh to drink martinis in a Broadway diner? Who else employs couriers who wed the inconspicuousness of the Eiffel Tower to the subtlety of a nuclear warhead?

So I went to the Hotel Garrand, and shortly after twelve I got into the elevator. The Garrand, it turned out, had no thirteenth floor. I went back to the desk and asked about Mr. Cuttlefish, who turned out to be in Room 1403. Well, no one’s perfect.

He opened the door just as I knocked on it. “Tanner,” he said, beaming at me. “Come in, come in. A drink?”

He poured scotch for both of us, gave me a glass, narrowed his eyes, frowned.

“You knew Joe Klausner, didn’t you?” I had. “Then you’ll join me in drinking a toast to his memory.”

“What happened?”

“In Berlin. Stuffed into the engine compartment of his own Volkswagen. The engine had been removed. He’d been onto something and evidently they got onto him. Piano wire around his neck. Eyeballs all popped out of his head. Face all bloody purple. I’m not being British about it. That was the color, bloody purple.”

I made a sound mixing sympathy with nausea. The Chief turned, looked out across the room. Then he turned to face me again. “To Klausner,” he said.

“To Klausner.”

We drank.

I have never been able to decide whether the Chief is particularly intelligent or particularly stupid. Most of the time I suspect he’s merely mediocre, but it’s impossible to be sure. He runs a nameless intelligence agency that is so secret that its own agents don’t know how to get in touch with it. His employees operate on their own initiative, establish their own contacts, pull their own strings, and ultimately cut their own throats. You don’t have to write out reports when you work for him, nor do you have to worry about any of the usual bureaucratic claptrap. You just go out and do the job.

The Chief thinks I’m one of his best men. He got this idea about four years ago and I’ve never seen fit to disabuse him of the notion. Every once in a while he finds some dumb way to get in touch with me and shoves some assignment at me, and every once in a while I can’t find a way to avoid the assignment, so maybe I work for him and maybe I don’t. It’s hard to be certain. The thing of it is that I’m on so many subversive lists as it is, with the FBI tapping my phone and the CIA reading my mail (or else it’s the other way around), that I figure I need all the help I can get.

“Joe Klausner,” he said. “My boys are on their own, Tanner, but I would have helped Joe if I could have. But all at once he was dead. Just like that.” He walked to the window, looked out of it. “I didn’t even know he was in Berlin. I thought he was in St. Paul, Minnesota. Then there was a call from Berlin -”

He filled his glass. “You don’t know Sam Bowman,” he said.

“No.”

“It may be too late. Just as it was too late with Joe. But there’s a chance, you know.”

He drained his glass. He seems to drink all the time but never seems affected by it. Either I have never seen him drunk or I have never seen him sober.

“Ah, Tanner,” he said heavily. “I don’t suppose you’ve so much as heard of Modonoland, now have you?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said. “Most people – you have?”

“Yes.”

He said that was marvelous and would save a great deal of time. I don’t know what time it saved, exactly, because he was primed to deliver a certain speech and he couldn’t alter his programing. “A few thousand square miles in West Africa. A British Protectorate since Versailles. German before that, but a mixed settlement of Germans and Belgians and English and Dutch. Given its independence a couple of years ago. Retained Commonwealth status. Government seesawed for a while. Then a strong man came along.”

“Knanda Ndoro,” I said.

“Kuhnanda Nuhdoro,” he said, adding a couple of syllables. “The Glorious Retriever, he called himself. Sounds like something that might be useful for hunting waterfowl.” He chuckled deeply. “Typical African dictator at first. Went about building grand marble mausoleums and calling them government office buildings and cultural centers and such. Scattered statues of his beautiful self wherever two streets intersected. Which didn’t happen too often, Modonoland being on the primitive side. Did the usual, you know. Had himself a harem, lopped off the heads of the loyal opposition, usual sort of thing.

“And then a couple of years ago the Retriever did something rather extraordinary. The trouble with Modonoland, as with most of these damned countries, is that most of it is just wasted. Just space with jungles and lions and tigers and what-not. And when they try doing something about it, why they only plant some crop that someone else grows better and cheaper, and get touchy if the U.S. doesn’t buy it from them. Ndoro, now, struck off on a new path. You wouldn’t guess what he grew.”

“Opium,” I said heavily.

“Opium,” he said lightly. He didn’t seem to have heard me. “Opium. Planted half of Modonoland with opium, giving himself a big cash crop and cutting the underpinnings from the Red Chinese opium trade in the bargain. A first-class development, you know. We couldn’t have been happier.”

I studied the floor. Stains made a pattern on the carpet, and I wondered if they could be augured, like birds’ entrails.

“And then not too long ago there was an uprising,” he went on. “It was a long while in the wind, and for a time it looked as though some sort of lefties were going to move in. Group called the Movement for Moderation in Modonoland. Batch of political amateurs, but well-financed. Moscow gold, I suspect. Or Peking, more likely.

“They had Ndoro’s government shaking like a leaf, and we were all a bit worried. Unknowns are a danger, you know. Better to stay with the old status quo. At the same time, we determined that Ndoro had to fall. There are times, you know, when it’s strategically unwise to try propping up an unpopular regime. Can’t always be done.”

I murmured something about Saigon. His eyes met mine for an instant, then withdrew.

“But we did have a bit of luck, Tanner. We thought about reinforcing Ndoro, and we rejected that, and then we found out that there were some white men who thought they ought to have a crack at running Modonoland on their own hook. Old line colonialists out of the same mold as the Rhodesians. Oh, I suppose you might call them reactionaries or white supremacists or something of the sort-”

“Or fascists,” I suggested.

“-but there’s no denying that they weren’t the sort to rock the old boat. Kept the opium trade flourishing, for one thing – and the MMM fanatics had intended to put a stop to it. And kept things more or less on an even keel foreign policywise. There’s some trouble with England, some question about the Commonwealth status, but all in all they’re the sort of people we can support. We may not boast about them, but we’re glad to see them around.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Now here’s where it gets a little sticky, Tanner. On the one hand, we gave these white supremacist fellows a little support. Our Boy Scout chums were in on that, and kept it a sight quieter than their usual sort of thing.” He grinned nastily. “They’ve been a little less boisterous since the Bay of Pigs, haven’t they? As I say, they handled that end. But at the same time, we had to do something for this Retriever fellow, this Knanda Ndoro. So I sent a man in to let Ndoro know as much of the score as we wanted to tell him, and to help him get out with his skin intact when the time came. I had a feeling Ndoro wasn’t too keen on white men, what with all the white men trying to chuck him out, so I sent my best black agent.”

“And that was Sam Bowman?”

“Samuel Lonestar Bowman,” he said. “A former burglar, heroin addict, and strong-arm man. Became a Black Muslim in jail. Broke with Elijah Muhammad about the same time Malcolm X did. Organized for the Black Panthers on the West Coast. Shot a policeman in a gun battle, possibly in self-defense, possibly not. Decided to get out of the country. Went to a friend of his, who happened to be a lad of mine. We got him out and added him to the payroll, and he’s been damned good ever since. He went into Modonoland to help Ndoro pack up the royal treasury and get out. Got to him in the nick of time, and the two of them left the back door of the palace while a white mob kicked in the front door. It was about that close, according to the reports I’ve seen.

“Then the two of them headed inland. Two men with a fortune in jewels and hard currencies. They disappeared into the bloody jungle, and they haven’t come out of it yet, and it does not look good, Tanner. Not good at all.”

“There’s been no word?”

“No direct word. Rumors, though.”

“Rumors?”

He hesitated. “A group of bandits, guerrillas, what have you. Operating deep in the Modonoland interior. One never knows what’s to be believed, but they seem to be a band of black religious fanatics led by a… this is slightly fantastic, Tanner.”

I waited.

“Led by a blond-haired white-skinned jungle goddess of some sort.”

“Is that so,” I said.

“Named Sheena.”

“Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” I said.

“You’ve heard of her?”

“No.”

“Then-”

“It’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Er,” he said. “Well, rumors would suggest that this Sheena person has captured Ndoro and Bowman. And while of course she may have had them killed, she doesn’t seem to kill blacks, not as a general rule. So there’s a chance that they’re alive, and that they could be gotten to and brought out alive, and-”

“And I’m elected.”

“I hate to risk you on something this speculative, Evan.” He rarely called me Evan. Only when he was feeling very paternal or when he was conning me. “But this would be a good one to pull off. The situation in Modonoland is troubled. We may yet find a political use for the Retriever. And as for Bowman, well, he’s been a tremendous asset to us. Actually, to get down to cases, he’s our best black operative. In fact-”

“Yes?”

“Well, he’s our only black operative.”

“Oh.”

“Not because of policy. It’s just happened that way. I had been wanting to take on some Negroes for ages. It was still all right to call them Negroes then. In fact when I first wanted to hire one, they preferred to be called colored. I wonder what the word will be after black? I shouldn’t be surprised if things come full circle, don’t you know, and they insist upon calling themselves niggers.” He replenished his scotch, and mine as well. “Hmm,” he said. “Point is, we don’t run recruiting ads, do we? So with one thing and another, well, we never did take one on. Until Sam Bowman came along, and he couldn’t have been better, you know, and now it looks as though I’ve lost him. There are times, Evan, when a black operative has a distinct advantage.”

“At night,” I suggested.

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “In the Modonoland affair, for example. And in other situations as well. God alone knows where I would get another one.” He sipped his drink. “So I’m asking you to go to an unholy haystack and search for a needle that very probably isn’t there. I’d prefer to paint you a rosier picture, but in all conscience – well. What do you say?”

“I’ll go.”

“You will?”

I nodded.

And so I went to the post office and told them to hold my mail and went to Brooklyn and boarded Minna with Kitty and her grandmother and tied my money belt around my waist and put my passport in my pocket and went away. I caught a Sabena flight to Brussels and another Sabena flight to Leopoldville. I flew Central African Airways into Nairobi, where I knew some people. They arranged for the necessary papers, and I got a slot as a deck hand on a Portuguese freighter that got me to Griggstown in five days.

It would have been easier to fly directly to Griggstown. Almost directly, anyway, via either Capetown or Salisbury. But I felt it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the Modonoland officials see my name on an incoming passenger list.

Modonoland and I go back a ways.

The opium, for example. It was largely my fault that it was growing there. Once upon a time I’d been talking to Abel Vaudois, a Swiss who lives in Bangkok, and I guess I gave him the idea of growing opium in Africa, and he subsequently made the deal with Knanda Ndoro.

So I had felt responsible, and when Abel sent me a bank draft as payment for the idea, I gave a large portion of it to the MMM. And if it hadn’t been for the MMM there would have been no white supremacist coup, and if it hadn’t been for me I don’t suppose there would have been much of an MMM, so-

Well, one thing leads to another, doesn’t it? Modonoland bothered the hell out of me. I hated to read news stories from there. They all seemed personally accusing.

All of which did not quite add up to enough of a reason to pursue wild geese in that beleaguered nation. I might feel compelled to send them a check now and then, and write occasional propaganda for the cause, and give aid and comfort to any MMM comrades who came to New York. But to chase all the way over there in search of the Retriever and the black militant who had been sent to retrieve him, that was something else.

Something which would have ordinarily remained undone.

But.

But Kitty wanted to get married, and Minna was growing up, and New York was not a winter festival, and he who turns and runs away lives to run another day. And when it is January in New York it is July in Modonoland. Or, more accurately, when it is January in New York it is also January in Modonoland, since they use the same calendar we do, but January in Modonoland is a far cry from January in New York, Modonoland being in the Southern Hemisphere and their summer occurring during our winter, all of which is childishly simple to understand and maturely difficult to explain.

So I went there.

So they buried me.