Tanner’s Tiger

Chapter 12

“Of course you realize that it is suicide.”

“I know this,” Emile said. “Utter suicide. You would not have a chance.”

“I do not expect a chance. I am not a fool, Evan.”

I doubted this. I looked at Emile, then glanced at the bed where Arlette was still sleeping. It was somewhere around noon and she was still asleep and I envied her. Insomnia, I decided, was more curse than blessing. Arlette managed to escape the slipstream of human madness for eight hours out of every twenty-four. God, how I envied her.

I looked again at Emile. He was seated, with Jean and Jacques Berton crouching at his right like couchant lions while Claude hulked grimly at his left. He didn’t look mad, I thought. And when he spoke, he seemed quite calm and rational. Until one happened to pay attention to his words.

“I am not afraid to die, Evan.”

“It is not a question of personal fear. The movement-”

“The movement needs our deaths more than our lives.” The sentence has at least as grand a ring to it in French as in English. “The movement cries out for martyrs, Evan. The MNQ is – admit it – in many quarters no more than a joke. A majority of those who sympathize with us nevertheless regard us as cranks, as unworldly fanatics. Is it not so?”

“All extremist movements begin in that fashion, Emile-”

“And how is public opinion changed?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer that one. “By fire and blood,” Claude cut in. He coughed and spat for emphasis. “By the grand act, by sacrifice.”

“Exactly,” said Emile. “Exactly. The grand act, bold and daring and dramatic. The act need not be logical. It may be senseless, it may be foredoomed to failure. This does not matter. But it must be an act that brings counteraction, an act that yields a crop of martyrs for the cause. The soil of liberty is fertilized by the blood of martyrs. You know this is true, Evan. You know full well that nothing rallies the public to a cause like the demonstrated willingness of patriots to die for it.”

I might have argued more forcefully if I hadn’t happened to know that he was absolutely correct. My mind could do nothing more than summon up examples that proved his point. The 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin took place with half the country opposed to republicanism and the other half profoundly apathetic. The rising was squashed, as its leaders knew it would be; the British executed the leaders, as everyone had assumed they would – and two years later Sinn Fein swept the national elections in a landslide.

The situation in Quebec was much further from fulfillment, of course. But the basic pattern remained the same. Martyrs, sacrificing themselves heroically for an ideal, would do more than reams of propaganda to change the Quebec nationalists from a laughingstock to a political force.

I closed my eyes. Claude was talking. On the bed Arlette moaned in her sleep; perhaps his rough voice was giving her bad dreams. I myself was not paying any attention to what he was saying. If Emile was right (and I had to admit that he was) and if I truly supported the cause of the MNQ (and I certainly did), then I ought to be backing him and Claude and the Berton Boys all the way.

But I wasn’t.

Because they had decided, all of them, that they were going to abandon the kidnaping plans entirely. And they had decided, all of them, that they were going to put into effect the public assassination of the Queen of England.

And no matter how I looked at it, this just didn’t seem like a good idea.

“I don’t understand one thing,” I cut in. “Yesterday you opposed assassination, Emile. Yesterday you said-”

“Yesterday was a thousand years ago.”

It seemed that way to me, all right. “But what has changed your mind?”

“You heard the General’s speech? You heard the words of the grand Charles?”

“I caught a newscast, yes. But-”

“You must hear the entire speech, Evan. Then perhaps you will realize what has changed my mind, as you put it.” He smiled gently at me, a wise old teacher being patient with a slow but willing pupil. “The General is very highly respected throughout French Canada, Evan. By publicly endorsing our cause, he has advanced the timetable of rebellion by years. Years! It is not merely that he has focused attention upon us. He has done more than this. He has lent us the support of his worldwide prestige. He has told the world that the cause of Quebec is the cause of France. Yesterday it would have been good strategy to kidnap the Queen. It would have generated publicity that we were greatly in need of. Today all has changed. Our position is stronger, Evan, and our needs are different.”

“It has always been that way. The bitch must die.” This from Claude.

“Let us not quarrel.” Emile spread his hands. “To kidnap the Queen now would merely draw everyone’s sympathy to her. Is it not so, Evan? The public identifies with those who suffer. The long, drawn-out suffering, the man trapped in a cave-in, the child in a well, the kidnaped baby – everyone sheds tears for them. So it would be with her.”

“People sort of sympathize with victims of assassination, too.”

“It is not the same. Then the act is quick, terrible, perhaps brutal, but it is over. And the martyrdom of the Queen – innocent, yes, but who is not innocent? – her martyrdom blends with and is overshadowed by our own. The crowd seizes us, we are torn to pieces, our names are on the lips of the multitude. The Queen becomes, not our victim, but the victim of history-”

“The bitch must die.” Claude again.

“And we must die with her. You talk, Evan, of my personal value to the movement. It is true that I have been something of an organizer. But I am old, you know, and my value in this respect is approaching its end. The future belongs to youth, and it is they who will continue my organizational work. My supreme value will lie in martyrdom.”

“So you’ll be in on the killing?”

“Yes. And Claude, and both Jean and Jacques. Just we four.”

“I see.”

He lowered his eyes. “I had intended to invite you to join us, Evan, but I was voted down. And the others, I suspect, are correct, your own devotion notwithstanding. They felt that as an American citizen, as someone neither French nor Canadian, it would not do to have you publicly identified with the act of assassination. I hope you will not feel slighted…”

Not in the least, I thought.

“We know your work is important to us, and it will continue to aid our cause in years to come.” The gentle smile again. “Of course you must envy those of us who are privileged to die as heroes. But in a way you too are to be envied. For it is you, Evan, who will see the fruits of what we begin. While we, like Moses, lead our children to the gates of the Promised Land, you, like Joshua, will actually enter the vineyards of Canaan.”

“So we’ll enter the vineyards of Canaan,” I told Arlette. “You and me, cherished one, and the grapes of wrath. And to think you slept through it all.”

“I wish I had been awake.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“But why? You regret that you may not join them?” Her eyes searched mine and she frowned slightly. “Evan, is it that you do not approve of the assassination?”

“It is just that.”

“You think it is unwise? But why?”

I got up and walked around. “Because it’s hare-brained,” I said. “Because it’s misplaced violence, because it’s stupid, because it’s dangerous, because it’s moronic-”

“You feel it will hurt the cause?”

“It will exterminate the cause. I just don’t understand Emile. He’s got the wrong slant entirely on the way public opinion operates. He and the rest of them expect to die, but that won’t be the end of it. Twenty-four hours after the Queen dies, every member of the MNQ will be in jail. All of the other separatist groups will be rounded up. I don’t suppose there will be a war-”

“A war!”

“It’s not impossible, but I’d tend to rule it out. France and Canada will probably break off diplomatic relations. France and England will almost certainly do so – they haven’t been getting along well anyway, and this should do it once and for all. France may have a revolution. Quebec will be pure hell for a long time, and in the other provinces French Canadians won’t have it very easy. A batch of peasants will get beaten to death.” I sighed. “Maybe the world will come to an end. That will clear up all the problems, at least, and I can’t think of any other way out.”

“But this is horrible!”

“That’s the general idea.”

“But we must do something!”

“Oh?”

“If it is as bad as you said-”

“It’s probably worse than I said. My mind isn’t working that well today. I’m not up to imagining just how bad it is.”

“Then we must act! We must stop them!”

I got some coffee and poured the last of the brandy into it. I thought of the planning session Emile and Claude and the Bertons and I had conducted while lucky Arlette had slept. They were all good at conspiracy and their plan was a solid one. Stop them? That was a good idea, all right. But how?

I said, “Would you want to betray them, Arlette?”

“To be a traitor? Oh, that is a bad thought!”

“We could do that, you see. All we have to do is make a phone call to the authorities. We tell them just what’s going to happen and where, and they’ll pick up our four heroes before a single chunk of plastique gets detonated. The good lady will be safe and four Quebecois patriots will spend the rest of their lives in prison. And you and I will be traitors.”

“We cannot do that.”

“I agree. What else can we do?”

She stubbed out a cigarette. She looked up at me, little Joan of Arc, wet-eyed and lost. “I do not know,” she said.

“Neither do I. I can’t even think straight.”

“But we will think, both of us. Of course you cannot put your mind to it, not when you are so worried about Minna. The poor little girl! Those chains, that dungeon-”

“Well, she’s not in there now, anyway.”

“And we shall discover where she is, Evan. Tonight we shall plant the microphone, as you said. We shall go to the Cuban place and hide the microphone, and tomorrow we shall go to where the poor little angel is hidden, and we shall free her, and when that is done, we shall be able to find some way to keep the Queen from being killed.”

“No.”

“No? But why?”

“Because your timetable is a little off,” I said. “I guess you missed the best part of all. What time is it?”

“Time?”

“Now. What time is it now?”

“Seventeen minutes after four, but this clock is perhaps two or three minutes, slow, so-”

“That’s close enough. Four seventeen P.M. Saturday. Which means that we have, let me see, just short of twenty-eight hours-”

“Twenty-eight hours!”

I nodded. “Twenty-eight hours to pull off the whole operation. Because, according to present plans, Mrs. Battenberg is going to be blown to bits at eight tomorrow night. There will be a fireworks display on La Ronde to celebrate the centennial of the Canadian Confederation, and the Queen will sail down the Saint Lawrence to see it, and that’s where they’re going to get her. Twenty-eight goddam hours.”

I spent one of the twenty-eight hours with a pencil and a notebook. I sent Arlette out hunting for some sort of listening device that would enable us to bug the Cuban dungeon, and while she was gone I sat around the apartment making lists.

All of those books that tell you how to make a million dollars and win friends and manipulate people and become head of your company and be the richest kid on your block, all of those terrible books seem to contain the same little formula for solving problems. When you’ve got a hundred impossible things to do, what you do is write them all down. Then you number them in order of importance, and then you drop everything and concentrate on problem number one, and you break your neck until it’s done, and then you go on to problem number two, and you persevere in this fashion, problem by problem, until you either solve all of your problems or die of a coronary, which actually does tend to wipe the slate clean.

I had made lists of this sort before out of the same general sort of multifaceted desperation. I couldn’t remember that they had ever done any demonstrable good, but maybe that was due to my failure to follow through all the way. What usually happened was this – I got everything listed, and I read through the list a few times to see just how many impossible and unpleasant things I had to do, and then I tore up the list and went out and got drunk. Then the next day I would just do whatever I could, in whatever order suggested itself, and in my usual haphazard fashion I would somehow blunder through.

Maybe the present situation demanded closer allegiance to the formula. I wasn’t sure. In any case, I opened a notebook and picked up a pencil and wrote Minna.

I looked at her name for a while and pondered worlds of unanswerable questions. Where was she? How had she gotten there? What did they intend to do with her?

Then I wrote down Assassination. And, on the same line, Sunday 8 P.M. Maybe there was a way after all, I thought I could tip off the authorities anonymously, and then I could get word to Emile that the authorities knew about it, and he and the others from MNQ would be able to abort the entire operation. If the police were already on the spot-

Of course Claude and the Bertons might be hot-headed enough to try going ahead with it anyway. But at least it would save the Queen and might even keep everybody in the clear. I beamed momentarily; maybe the list-making had something to be said for it after all.

Of course De Gaulle’s remark had been a godsend, and of course it was time for martyrdom, for the grand act, and if only there were some way short of assassination-

I turned my mind back to my list. I was by no means through with it. On the next line down I wrote Heroin.

Now there was another one to conjure with. What the hell was I going to do with the heroin? I didn’t even want to think about its value, but it had to be truly enormous. There seemed no question but that the world would be considerably better off if I flushed it all down the toilet, but I wasn’t entirely certain that I would be. Even if possession were nine points of the law, the heroin remained one-tenth the property of the Union Corse, and I had the feeling they would consider that tenth the most important part of the question.

If they knew I had the heroin – and my fingerprints on the damned murder gun would surely put that unpleasant idea in their heads – then they would want it back and would feel unkindly toward me for having it. It is not inordinately wise to have someone like the Union Corse mad at you.

So I would have gladly given it back to them, no questions asked. But how was I to go about doing that? I looked at my list, and I stared myopically at the word Heroin, and then I took a breath and moved on to the next line and licked the tip of my pencil and wrote Cops.

Because it did look as though I had established myself now and forever as Public Enemy Number One on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. The murder charge was the final straw. Sooner or later someone was going to catch me, and when that happened, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. The Chief might decide to come to my aid, and then again he might not; meanwhile, there was no way for me to get in touch with him. I didn’t even know the bastard’s name. And even if he did try to help, he would have to fight the police of two countries for me, and I was by no means certain that he swung enough weight. As things stood, I could not remain in Canada, nor could I go back to the States.

I looked at the list, drawing some comfort from the fact that the word Cops was at the bottom of it. That meant I wasn’t supposed to worry about it for the time being. I was supposed to put it clear out of my mind, along with Heroin and Assassination. Meanwhile, I would devote one hundred percent of my time and effort to Item One: Minna.

Which meant-

Which meant, I decided, that I was precisely back where I had started. If I had made any progress, I was damned if I could see what it was. I had a few words written in a notebook, and I had let the clock go ticking onward, and that was about the size of it. It looked as though I were never going to make a million dollars or win friends or manipulate people or become head of my firm or be the richest kid on my block. Or rescue Minna, or thwart the assassination, or unload the heroin, or clear myself with the police.

This was as far as I had ever gotten with the list-making process. Now, according to the rules, it was time for me to go out and get drunk. I would have liked to, but I didn’t dare go out, for one thing, and I couldn’t dismiss the feeling that getting drunk right about now might be a bad idea.

And so, on the theory that action is better than inaction, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I tore up the list.

By the time Arlette came back with the microphone and receiver, our twenty-eight hours were down to twenty-seven. By the time I left her apartment and headed for the Cuban dungeon, they had been further reduced to seventeen. The intervening ten hours were awful.

For openers, Arlette’s mood was one of incautious optimism, a mood I found myself wholly incapable of sharing. I suppose she felt better in part because she had gone out and done something while I sat making idiot lists. Whatever the explanation, she was bubbling like a percolator. We had the microphone, therefore we were on the right track, therefore we would save Minna and the Queen and liberate Quebec and discover a cure for cancer and live happily ever after.

She wanted to celebrate horizontally.

Well, I didn’t.

I’m perfectly aware that this was the wrong attitude for me to take. It wasn’t as though I were busy doing something else, because I couldn’t do anything until the fair closed for the day. So we certainly had time to make love, and she certainly had the inclination, and I didn’t, and that’s not the way red-blooded men are supposed to act. James Bond, for example, would have unhesitatingly bounced her into bed the moment she came through the door. He would not even have waited for the triumphal presentation of microphone and receiver. If he had been given to list-making, Ball Arlette would have been right up there at the top, and until it was done and done well, he would not even have given a thought to the other dilemmas.

In case you have not yet doped it out, I am not in his league.

Nor, however, am I an utter cad. When Arlette began hinting at the idea of bed, I tried to pretend that I was just too thickheaded to follow her lead. She responded by throwing subtlety to the winds and her clothes to the floor, and I joined her on the bed and kissed her and cuddled her, quietly determined to play out my part properly whether I felt like it or not.

My heart was in the right place, but that was the only thing that was. Arlette did everything she could think of, along with a few things that I don’t suppose I could have thought of. She worked desperately to demonstrate her loyalty to French culture, but nothing worked. When she realized that nothing would do any good, she dashed from the bed to the bathroom and stood inside crying her eyes out. The little room must have acted as an echo chamber; I think they could have heard her crying ten miles away.

I tried the door. It was locked. I told her to come out and she announced that she was going to slash her wrists and kill herself. I told her that it was certainly not her fault, and that if anyone deserved slashing it was me, and that I could think of something other than wrists to attack.

When she emerged finally, her pretty face washed free of tears, she came to me and patted my cheek sympathetically. “Jean d’Arc,” she said. “My chaste hero, my knight in shiny armor. Your mind is on other things, you burn with devotion to the cause, of course you must not make love to Arlette.”

She seemed convinced. I’m not sure I was. I thought of the list of things I couldn’t do and realized I had one more thing to add to it. When impotence strikes, it hits you everywhere.

We sat around for a while, waiting for the fair to close up shop, and then it occurred to me to test the mi-crophone and the receiving gadget, and the thing didn’t work. Arlette remembered that someone had dropped the mike recently. I took it apart with a screwdriver and found a broken thing in it. I don’t know what the broken thing was, or what it was supposed to do. But without it we seemed to be up a tree.

She got us out of that one. She told me she had an idea and left without an explanation. I wasn’t sorry to see her go – we’d been getting on each other’s nerves – but I didn’t really expect her to come up with anything. She did, though, returning with Seth and Randy in tow. Seth handed me a microphone and asked me if it would work.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s the receiver?”

“Probably in police headquarters. It’s one of the bugs they put in our office. Somebody fastened it to the underside of the mimeo machine.”

“We thought you could rob it of the broken part and repair ours,” Arlette said.

“This is a live mike,” I said.

Somebody nodded.

“They can pick up what we’re saying right now, at police headquarters or wherever.”

“Yes, but-”

“Be quiet,” I said.

I took the bug apart. It was a completely different model from ours, but it had a piece like the piece that was broken in our unit, and I studied the way it was connected and took it out and put it in our mike. When we tested it again, it worked. I demolished the rest of the draft-dodgers’ bug with my shoe. It seemed faintly possible that our mike would now send signals to our receiver and to the police unit as well, but I decided that this was another possibility to be added to the long unwritten list of things that ought not to be thought about.

The next few hours were deadly. The four of us sat around listening to the radio. I kept changing stations to avoid listening to a newscast. They weren’t going to tell me anything I wanted to hear.

I finally got out of there. Arlette wanted to come along, perhaps in the hope that the dungeon would once again unlock my libido. Seth and Randy also volunteered to join me. I insisted on going alone. It would be easy this time. I merely had to get into the building, press the switch (I knew which one it was, for a change), hide the bug somewhere, close up shop, and leave.

I found the boat and had no trouble following last night’s course to Ile de Notre Dame. I docked at precisely the same spot. I left the boat and carried the bug with me to the Cuban Pavilion, and then a bad day turned worse.

They had guards posted. Four of them, two in front and two at the rear. Four armed guards who stood rigidly at attention and who gave every appearance of being wholly alert.

For a long time I sat in the shadows and watched them from a distance. They didn’t fall asleep or go away or die or anything of the sort. They stayed right where they were and seemed likely to stay there until the fair reopened in the morning.

I went back to my boat and began rowing. I half hoped it would sink, but it didn’t. Boats never sink when you want them to.