Tanner’s Tiger

Chapter 10

“The flashlight worries me,” Arlette said.

“We are coming closer now. It would not do to be seen.”

“A boat without a light would be even more conspicuous.”

“Perhaps.”

“And wildly unsafe,” I added. “When we cut the engines, then we can try running without a light. But not now.”

I piloted our little ship down one of the St. Lawrence channels, hopefully in the direction of Ile de Notre Dame. Arlette crouched in the stern, playing the flashlight over my shoulder at the water ahead of us. The cloud cover had not blown away. The night remained quite black, with only the lights of downtown Montreal shining behind us.

The boat was what we needed and little more, a flat-bottomed rowboat equipped with a small outboard motor. There were a pair of oars as well, and I was glad for them; the motor didn’t make all that much noise, but sounds carry on water and I wanted the last leg of our approach to be reasonably silent.

Arlette had arranged for the boat with a simple telephone call to an unspecified friend. It had been left for us, and we hoped to return it to the same spot where we had found it. Without it we might have had a difficult time; none of the conventional modes of transport at the fair operated at this hour, and, while there were roads and bridges, we could not have used them inconspicuously.

We moved onward, until I could see the shapes of the pavilions not too far in the distance. There was some light there as well but not very much. I cut the engine and told Arlette to put out the flashlight. She asked if she ought to get rid of her cigarette as well. That sounded a little melodramatic to me, but I felt there was no sense crushing the poor girl’s sense of theater. I told her we wanted a complete blackout, and she arced the cigarette over the side and into the river.

We moved more slowly with the oars, but it wasn’t too bad; the current, such as it was, was on our side. And, wonder of wonders, I did not get lost at all. I guided us neatly from this channel to that channel, placed the blades of the oars smoothly in the water to avoid splashing, and got us right where I wanted to. I didn’t have the official Expo map along, which is, no doubt, how I avoided getting lost.

We docked. I tied the painter to a concrete pillar, hauled the oars inside, and stood up on the seat in the middle (which probably has a good nautical name, but it’s enough of an accomplishment for me to know about painters and oars and sterns) for a look around. I couldn’t see or hear anyone. I hauled myself up onto the shore – it’s hard to think of it as a shore when it’s paved with asphalt – then leaned down to take the flashlight and the bagful of goodies from Arlette. I helped her up and out, and we hurried through the suddenly deserted streets toward the Cuban Pavilion. For once the more popular pavilions had no line. I was tempted to break into all of them just to see the show.

There was enough light from the streetlamps scattered here and there to make our way, and not enough to show us up readily. In the stillness some sounds of human activity were audible. Motorized sweepers moved through the streets; garbage collectors prepared the concrete bins for tomorrow’s assault.

The front entrance to the Cuban Pavilion was too exposed. We slipped around to the back, and I winked the flashlight at the door, then closed in on it and attacked the lock with the tools I had brought. A strip of plastic finally did the trick. I slipped the catch, then had Arlette hold the hunk of plastic in place so that the lock stayed back while I drew the door open. It opened outward, and there was no handle on the outside, so I had to grip the edge of it with my fingertips and sort of coax it open. It took a while, but we managed it and got inside.

I was absolutely certain somebody would grab us the minute we entered. The events in Emile’s basement came vividly to mind. I expected a blow on the head, or a gun barrel poked between my ribs, or a bright light flashed in our faces. None of these fears materialized. We stood together in utter silence for almost a full minute, then moved away from the door. I played the beam of the flashlight around the interior of the building. No human forms lurked in the stillness, none but our own.

“We have to be absolutely silent,” I whispered. “If they’re kidnaping people, they have to be keeping them somewhere, and they have to have guards. There must be a room here, somewhere. So they must have had the whole thing in mind when they built the damned place, which means they had plenty of time to design something very well hidden.”

“Then where do we look?”

“I don’t really know. Shhh!”

We wandered around foggily on little cat feet. It was one of the easiest buildings in the world to search – large, empty areaways, no thick inside walls – and one of the hardest in which to find anything. We covered the first floor, climbed the stairs, checked out the second floor, descended the stairs again, and stood around stupidly looking at each other.

“Evan?”

“What?”

“Perhaps the restaurant…”

The restaurant was in a separate building. I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “No. More people entered this building than left it. That means they have to be here.”

“But where? There is no place to conceal a secret room. The entire roof is a skylight, the walls-”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Of course.”

“What?”

“The basement.”

“There is a basement? I did not-”

“I didn’t either, but there has to be a basement. When all of the impossibilities are eliminated, only the possible is left. Or something like that.” I was whispering too loudly, and stopped myself. “A hidden basement. It would be no problem to build in something like that. If we look for a seam in the floor-”

“Look at the floor, Evan.”

I did, and abandoned that whole train of thought. The floor was tile, and there were seams every ten inches, one as likely as the next to mask the aperture to the cellar below. We checked the entire floor out anyway, just to make sure, and it was no go.

“Then there’s a switch that opens it,” I went on. “A button, a switch, some way of getting the thing open.”

“Reasonable.”

“So we must find that switch.”

We looked. We went over the whole place, working feverishly now, and all we managed to prove was the invalidity of the hypothesis – there was not a switch. Unless, of course, it lurked behind a secret panel, or was contained in some portable remote-control device.

Or, for that matter, unless it was in the basement. Suppose, when they wanted to open the thing, they signaled their man downstairs, and he pressed a button or threw a switch.

It was possible.

Almost anything was possible.

“It’s no damned use,” I said. “We’ve checked everywhere.”

“It is so. There are only those silly light switches at the entrance, and-”

I hit myself, hard, in the forehead. Arlette looked curiously at me. I tightened my fist and hit myself again in the same spot.

“Oh,” she said, light dawning. “It is one of those, then.”

“It would have to be.”

“But which one?”

We walked to the bank of switches alongside the desk where robot tourists had their Expo Passports stamped. There were seven switches in all. There were also two sets of lights upstairs, three sets downstairs, an air-conditioner – and, if I was right, an electrically operated passageway to the basement below.

But which one?

I switched off our own flashlight. It didn’t help to stare at the seven switches. They were unlabeled, and one looked rather like the next. And I did not care for the idea of throwing all seven to see what happened, or even of flicking them on one at a time. I did not want to illuminate the pavilion. It was about the last thing I wanted to do.

“She could be down there right now,” Arlette whispered. “And we-”

“And we can’t get there.”

“Oh, it is not fair.”

I thought fleetingly of trying to find a way to un-screw all of the bulbs from all of the fixtures. But even that, impossible though it was, would not turn the trick. For all I knew, one of the switches might activate the little recorder that boomed out Castro’s speeches, or the Mickey Mouse display unit that told about all of the revolutions throughout the world in the past five million years.

“What do we do?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess.”

“You guess what?”

“I just guess. I throw a switch and we see what happens.”

“Now?”

“Unless you’d like to pray first.”

She nodded seriously. “An excellent idea.” She knelt and whispered an urgent Paternoster and got to her feet. “Thank you for reminding me, Evan.”

St. Joan and the Hidden Basement. I took a breath, and I reached for the board, and I threw a switch. There was just the briefest flicker of lights upstairs before I managed to throw the switch down again.

Arlette drew in breath sharply. Her nails dug into my arm. “Do you think-”

“Someone may have noticed, yes. But they won’t know where the light came from, or why, and they won’t pay any attention to it.”

“But if you do it again-”

“I’ll wait awhile. Give anyone who saw it time to forget it.”

And I did, and tried the second switch, and it was the fixture on the first floor, and that gave us another five minutes to wait. My third try was a loudspeaker – I’m sure the sound from that did not carry any distance, nor did the brief whirring of the air-conditioner, which was try number four. The fifth thing was some more first floor lighting.

“We are getting close,” Arlette said.

That was the bright way of looking at it. My own feeling, with five out of seven of the switches exhausted, was that we had leaped to another wrong conclusion – either there was no basement, or none of the damned switches would give us access to it. Well, two more tries would show one way or the other. I pulled the sixth switch and another damned light went on, and I switched it off, and Arlette and I stared at each other in the darkness.

“I don’t think your prayers were answered.”

“One cannot expect miracles, Evan.”

She stood close to me, her head nestled against my shoulder, clutching the paper bag in one hand and the flashlight in the other. I put an arm possessively around her, and I rested the index finger of my free hand upon the sole remaining switch.

“Maybe you ought to pray again,” I suggested.

“Oh, Evan-”

“Away we go,” I said, and pressed the switch.

And the floor opened up under us.

It was not at all like Alice going down the rabbit hole. Alice, you may remember, seemed to be eternally falling, thinking like mad all the way down. This was nothing like that. One moment I was standing there, joking in the face of adversity like an English soldier in a war movie, and an instant later I was flat on my ass in the darkness. None of that down down down went Alice. Just an instantaneous transference from frying pan to fire.

The truly amazing thing, now that I think about it, is how utterly noiseless the whole business was. They must have oiled the mechanism that opened the floor at least a dozen times a day. It opened silently, and we fell silently. And the floor was cushioned, perhaps to prevent harm to whoever got bounced down there during the day, as there were no stairs for anyone to descend. So we landed on the cushioned floor after falling through the easy-opening aperture, and we fell in silence and landed in silence and sat there in silence. I didn’t make any noise because I didn’t really think of it. Arlette might have screamed, or cried, or moaned or gasped or shrieked, but she didn’t. She had fainted, a reaction every bit as dramatic as the others but infinitely safer.

Of course at first I didn’t realize she had fainted. At first I thought she had died, and I fumbled around for the flashlight and tried to examine her with it, but it was a casualty of the fall. She wasn’t, however, as I found out by taking hold of her wrist, where a pulse gently pounded.

I sat there for a moment, trying to think. Then I located the paper bag and pawed through it. Arlette’s cigarettes were there, in a clear plastic case, and tucked alongside the blue and white pack was a folder of matches. I scratched one and examined our dungeon.

Which is precisely what it was.

It was deserted, of course. Otherwise we would have been in rather desperate trouble. But, populated or not, the purpose of the subterranean room was instantly obvious. There were no lights about, just unlit candle stubs. There was only one chair, placed there undoubtedly for the convenience of the guard. There were walls and a floor and a ceiling, and everything was dark and bare, and the walls were dotted with chains.

Yes, chains. Chains that hung from the walls, with heavy iron manacles at their end. Manacles to hold the hands and the feet of prisoners.

It was a setting for a sadomasochist film on the evils of the Spanish Inquisition. It was a stage that cried for whips and rods and fiery tongs, for naked maidens writhing and shrieking, for masked villains flogging them joyously to death. I had done nothing but throw a simple switch, and here I was in the apartment of the Marquis de Sade.

The match warmed my fingertips. I shook it out and lit another one. Beside me Arlette stirred and opened her eyes.

A hideous gurgle found its way forth from her throat. “We have died,” she said.

“Arlette-”

“This is hell.”

“Arlette.”

“We died without a priest, and we are here, and this is hell.”

“You’re right on the last point,” I said. “But we aren’t dead. Not yet, at least. This is the basement of the Cuban Pavilion.”

“You are lying to me.”

“No, I am not. I-”

“We are dead.”

“Damn it, we’re not!”

“This is hell.”

“Not literally.”

She was on her feet now, moving inanely around the horrible room. The match went out and she cried out at the sudden darkness. I lit another match and walked alongside her, and she took hold of a pair of manacles and gasped.

“To restrain prisoners,” I explained. “They use them to-”

“The tortures of hell,” she said, stepping back.

“No.”

“Whips and chains,” she said, removing her blouse.

“Arlette-”

“Horrible struggles. Pain,” she said, wriggling out of her slacks.

“Good grief-”

“Agony,” she moaned, kicking off shoes, squirming out of pants. “Agony, agony, cherished one, darling, agony, agony, take me!”

Some Jeanne d’Arc.

“It was not hell after all,” I heard her say.

“I tried to tell you.”

“Just now it was rather like heaven.” She stretched and sighed. “I must say that I am sorry, Evan. I do not know what came over me.”

“I think I did.”

“But yes.”

I used one of her matches to light her cigarette, then cupped my hand around it and carried it over to light a candle. The glow illuminated most of the dungeon without carrying to the opening in the ceiling.

“This room,” she said, thoughtfully. “It is horrid. Also, it excites me.”

“I noticed.”

“So bold, so-”

“Like tigers,” I suggested.

“But of course!” She seized my arm. “You understand, do you not? Precisely like tigers.”

“He who rides the tiger,” I said, “must pay the piper.”

“Pardon?”

“An old saying, but I seem to have gotten it wrong.” I began to recite the limerick about the young lady from Niger, but it didn’t work at all well in French. I explained that it was about a young lady who rode upon and subsequently nourished a tiger.

“To be eaten by a tiger,” Arlette said. There was an odd light in her eyes. “To be eaten by-”

I felt it was time to change the subject.

“They must empty the place every night,” I said. “They fill it up during the day with whoever they intend to kidnap, and then after the fair closes down, they take them all away somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I do not know. Minna was here, Arlette. Right in this crazy room. If I could have found this place sooner-”

“How, Evan?”

“I know. There was no way. They must have moved her out of here the first night. Last night.” I turned to look at her. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “Nobody can kidnap a dozen people a day and still manage to keep the whole operation secret. People don’t vanish that way, not without making waves. I just don’t get it.”

“What shall we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“If we stay here-”

“No.” I went over to her and took a sandwich from the paper bag. I sat down and gnawed at it but couldn’t develop enough of an appetite to finish it. I wrapped it again in waxed paper and returned it to the bag. Arlette took a last drag from her cigarette, stubbed it out on the heel of her shoe, and put it in the paper bag along with our sandwiches and burglar tools.

“Perhaps I could conceal myself here,” Arlette suggested.

“How?”

“I do not know. It is so bare, so desolate. Perhaps you could shackle me to the wall and leave me, and when they return in a few hours, they will think I was left behind by error.”

“I don’t think that would work.”

“Nor do I. Nevertheless…”

I tried to think it through on my own. Minna, along with any number of other persons, had been confined in the basement dungeon. She was not here now. Thus, I reasoned, either she and her fellow prisoners had been removed to other quarters, or else their captors had-

I didn’t want to think about it. It was inconceivable, I told myself, that the Cubans would have murdered them all. But it was equally inconceivable that Minna could have been kidnaped in the first place. I got up and paced the floor, back and forth and back and forth, pushing things around in my mind in an attempt to force them into some sort of order.

“Evan, it is late.”

“I know.”

“If we do not leave soon-”

“I know.”

“For soon the dawn will break, and without the cover of darkness-”

“Dammit, I know.”

We could try keeping them under surveillance, I thought. Seth and Randy would cooperate. We could post a guard around the pavilion and see what happened tomorrow night when the crowds left.

Better yet, I thought, we could bug the place. The MNQ might be composed of a bunch of half-mad fanatics, but there was considerable technological ability to draw upon. It shouldn’t be too difficult to return to the dungeon and plant a microphone or two in the walls. If nothing else, that would clear up some of the mystery surrounding the whole affair. If we could overhear what went on inside the dungeon during the day, when it was packed to capacity with prisoners and guards, we would at least have some sort of idea what we were up against.

In the meantime, though, there was next to nothing to do.

“Evan-”

“You’re right,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

“If anything were to be gained by staying-”

“No, you’re right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We tried to clean up all traces of our visit. We added the broken flashlight to the collection of useless articles in the paper bag and tossed it carefully through the aperture to the floor above. I blew out the candle as soon as I had collected all of the burnt matches from the floor. Then we moved to directly below the opening, and I crouched down so that Arlette could climb onto my shoulders. I straightened up, and she got her arms over the edge and pulled herself through.

There were a few bad moments during which it seemed as though I would have to stay in the dungeon forever. I couldn’t quite jump high enough to get a purchase on the rim of the aperture, and I knew that Arlette was not strong enough to haul me up. I kept jumping and not quite making it, and Arlette was becoming quietly hysterical.

Ultimately I dragged over the single chair and stood on it. I jumped again, and caught the rim but couldn’t hold onto it, and came down heavily to the left of the chair. I tried again, and this time I caught hold of the rim and didn’t let go. Arlette gave me what help she could. I started slipping at the last minute, but then I managed to get one leg up and sort of spilled myself out onto the tiled floor. I didn’t move at first, and Arlette asked me if I was all right, and I said I was.

“How do the Cubans get out, Evan?”

I said I didn’t know. Perhaps they lowered a rope ladder, or perhaps they used a step stool and dragged it up after them. “It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “We’ll come back tomorrow night and plant a couple of microphones. I’m sure someone from the movement will be able to help us-”

“Claude, if he will help. Or others.”

“Good.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “At least we know the physical plant here. We won’t be working blind anymore.” I looked at my watch. “We were down there too long. We’d better get the hell out of here.”

“The chair, Evan. Will they not notice it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is there no way to return it to its place?”

“None I can think of. Maybe they’ll ignore it. The hell with it.”

“I could go down and return it, and then you could try to pull me out, and-”

“And then we’d be back where we started from.”

“Yes.”

We got ready to go, and I threw the switch to close the aperture in the floor. It slid shut as silently as it had opened. Once it was closed, I dropped to my hands and knees to try to locate the seams in the floor. Even now, knowing where it was, I couldn’t distinguish any seams. The trapdoor was superbly engineered.

But why go to the trouble?

“Come on,” I said, taking Arlette’s hand. “I realize it’s hard for you to tear yourself away from such an enchanting place-”

“It is evil here. Satanic.”

We didn’t have to jimmy the door this time. The lock served only to keep people out. The door swung open easily, and I stuck my head out and looked and listened. I heard a car approaching and drew back inside. The car passed perhaps a hundred feet from us and kept on going. We waited until the sound of the engine died in the distance. Then I stuck my head out again, and looked and listened again, and the coast was as clear as it seemed likely to get. We slipped out into the night and headed for our boat. I held the paper bag in one hand and Arlette’s hand in the other. We walked quickly, less frightened of shadows now, less worried about the possibility of discovery.

Where would they take the prisoners? I thought it over and decided that the answer depended upon the motive. If they wanted ransom, for example, there would be no particular point in spiriting them out of the country; they would do better to keep them on some hidden estate in the Canadian countryside. If, on the other hand, they had some other use planned for them, they might want to get them out of Canada and into Cuba as quickly as possible.

The second line of reasoning seemed more logical. You couldn’t attempt to ransom a wholesale lot of prisoners without attracting attention. For that matter, you couldn’t invest that kind of money in a kidnaping for financial gain. The costs of building the pavilion, the costs of the entire arrangement-

Of course they might intend a wholesale exchange, I thought. They had traded prisoners for drugs once before, hadn’t they? And maybe the ransom demands would be directed against the United States Government. “If you want the victims back, vacate Guantanamo Bay ” – something like that.

I got fairly involved with thoughts like this. I held Arlette’s hand and hurried her along. And, because we had already been to the Cuban Pavilion and had left it undiscovered, I didn’t really worry much about someone’s spotting us.

I suppose the same thing happens to cat burglars and others of that ilk. Creep about long enough in silence and in darkness, and eventually one becomes sufficiently comfortable in that environment to dispense with fear. This happened to us. All we had to do was get to the boat and go home, and that’s what we were going to do. As far as I was concerned, the party was over.

My mistake.

I saw the man, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of us on the right. He was running toward us, and I grabbed Arlette and slapped a hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out. We dropped down to the ground at the side of the path.

Then the man stopped, abruptly. Forms had materialized out of the shadows, three of them. Someone cried out, but I could not make out what was said.

“Evan-”

“Shhh!”

Something metallic glinted in the darkness. There was sudden movement, and then a crisp volley of shots rang out, and the man who had been running let out a brief cry and clutched himself. Then, in slow motion, he crumpled up and fell gently to the ground.

More movement. A man rushed to him, dropped to the ground, picked something up, straightened up and ran. Two other men were with him. Together they bolted from the man who had been shot and tore up the path toward us. I held onto Arlette and kept her close beside me in the darkness. The trio of assassins passed within a few yards of us without stopping. They ran on down the path behind us, and we stayed absolutely motionless until their footsteps had disappeared in the night.

When the sound of footfalls ceased, Arlette started to move. I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and held my finger to her lips. She subsided. For five hour-like minutes we remained where we were, silent, still. I waited for the sound of a siren, waited for one of the wandering guards to happen on the scene. The sound of the gunshots had been extraordinarily loud in the silence of the night, and it seemed impossible that no one would come.

If someone did, I didn’t want to be moving around.

But no one came. I looked at my watch and decided that no one was going to come now. I stood up, and Arlette rose to her feet beside me.

She said, “Who was-”

“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

The man, tall and thin and dark and dead, lay sprawled in the middle of the carpet of plastic grass fronting the Man In The Home Pavilion. He had bled all over that artificial lawn, and soon the world would discover if it was in fact as wondrously washable as its promoters claimed. I went through the formality of looking for a pulse. There was none.

I patted his pockets, found nothing. I picked up the murder gun from the grass beside his body, sniffed the barrel, threw it down again. I wondered if the dead man was a Cuban – he did not look particularly Cuban – or if he had been killed by Cuban agents. I wondered how he fit into everything, if at all.

“Do you know him, Evan?”

“No.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know that either.” I was suddenly dizzy, and I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to steady myself. We were in over our heads, I thought. We were playing a fool’s game with people who knew the rules far better than we.

“I think we should get out of here,” I said.

“I agree.”

This time we walked onward with caution. This time we moved in absolute silence, our ears attuned to the night sounds around us. This time, as we walked down the path to the waterway, we did not make the mistake of assuming we were alone.

But we still weren’t quite prepared. We reached the water’s edge, and I saw our little boat right where we had left it. And, alongside it, I saw another larger boat, empty.

Arlette’s hand tightened on my arm. And from the shadows a man emerged. There was a gun in his hand. He was smiling slightly, and he went on smiling as he placed the muzzle of the gun within three inches of my chest, directly over the heart.

Then he said, in highly accented French, “The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.”