Tanner’s Tiger

Chapter 15

I tried to go over the whole operation with Arlette. This didn’t work out very well. She didn’t have the right kind of mind for it, and kept interrupting with idiot questions about things I had already explained to her. Other times she tried to rush ahead and asked about points that I was saving for later on. When I blew up she insisted that I did not love her and that I despised her for making love with Seth and Randy. It was hard going for a while, until I realized that Arlette was not the type to cope with a long-range plan. She had to deal with one specific task at a time, and it only complicated matters to explain to her why she was supposed to do thus and so. You don’t tell a horse why you want to turn right, you just pull the reins in that direction (or in the other direction; I still don’t remember which is right).

It was thus with Arlette. If she had to think about something, she was very likely to foul it up. Once I’d figured this out, things went a whole lot smoother.

“I need a pistol,” I said.

“Must we shoot someone?”

“Forget it. I need a pistol. Do you have one?”

“No. Emile-”

“I don’t think we should ask Emile for a pistol.”

“But perhaps-”

She was making a beeline for another tangent. I held up my hand. “Stop. We need a pistol. Not from Emile. Can you purchase one?”

“No. One must-”

“Forget it. Can you obtain one from someone who is not in the MNQ?”

“No.”

“Can you get one from some member besides the four who are in on the assassination? Someone who has some guns tucked away for an eventual rising?”

“Henri has a great stock of weapons. Did you meet him? He was-”

“Then, he won’t miss one pistol. That’s good. Get one from him, preferably forty-five or thirty-eight caliber, preferably an automatic, but take what you can get. Just one gun should do.”

“He will ask why I want it.”

“Tell him you were ordered to get it. If he asks more questions, tell him that is all you are allowed to tell him. The simplest lies are best. Henri doesn’t know about the assassination? Forget the question, it doesn’t matter. Just get the gun.”

“Yes.”

“And make sure it’s loaded,” I called after her.

As I said, she was fine once you knew how to handle her. She was back in twenty minutes with a fully loaded Marley automatic plus an extra seven-shot clip for insurance. It was a.32, which was lighter than I would have liked but still heavy enough to do most jobs. The gun was made in Japan, like everything else. I wondered if I would be able to hit anything with it and hoped I would never have to try.

I hefted the gun in my hand. “Perfect,” I said. “I made a few phone calls while you were out. What I want you to do now is go down to the Link-Wright Shipping Company. Look lost and helpless and beautiful. You have to find out what the barge will look like and when it’s going to reach Point X.”

“The royal barge?”

“God, no. We already know that. The other one, the target.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, here’s a thought. Your kid brother has some horrible disease. Something crippling. Make it muscular dystrophy. Anyone who can’t sympathize with a dystrophic kid is beyond redemption. He can’t get to the fair because he’s crippled. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“So he wants to see the boat. You can see the river from your house, and he’ll be watching tonight, and he wants to know when the boat will pass by and what it will look like, so he’ll know when he sees it. Got that?”

“I think so. I shall tell him we live at Point X-”

“Don’t do that. Forget Point X, please.” I stabbed a finger at the map. “Tell him you live about here, figure out something that fits. You know the city better than I do. But find out those two things, what the boat will look like and when to expect it. If we know when it will get here, we can figure out the rest of the timing pretty well.”

“All right. My crippled brother has musical atrophy and cannot go to Expo, and he wishes to see the boat, and…”

We went through the story until she had it as well as she ever would, and then I wrote out the address of Link-Wright Shipping and sent her on her way. The story hadn’t struck me as particularly brilliant when I thought of it, and the more I heard it, the less I liked it, but I felt she could probably pull it off. I made her fix her makeup and splash on a little perfume before she left. With all of that sex going for her, I didn’t think she would have much trouble. They would probably give her an 8-by-10 glossy of the boat and an invitation to dine at the captain’s table.

While she was off charming them at Link-Wright I worked on her phony ID. I still had that silly Expo passport, and one of the pages for visa stamps was still blank. It was just the right sort of paper, with all of those swirly lines in it that suggest all the trappings of bureaucracy. I removed the page and cut out a neat rectangle about 2½" by 4" and popped it into Arlette’s portable typewriter. Then I checked the page I’d practiced on earlier. It’s not easy to make a typewriter produce something that looks as though it were printed. A varitype machine will do a good job, and an electric is fair, but all she had was a rickety portable. At least I had fixed things so that the lines more or less came out the same length. I certainly wasn’t going to create something equal to my beautiful forged passport (which I could probably forget forever now, its having been left behind in our hotel room); but if things went well, the ID would get little more than a quick glance in a dark room, and it might stand up under those conditions.

What I typed was:

I shifted the slip so that it was slightly off-center and, using a lighter touch, typed in Suzanne Lafitte on the proper line. I used a ball-point pen to sign J. B. Westley’s name on yet another line. I studied the result and decided that it lacked something. Maybe a little sketch of a maple leaf in one corner…

I practiced drawing maple leaves on some scrap paper, and they all came out looking more like palm trees. So I let that go until Arlette came back with a description of the boat, an estimate of its time of arrival at her mythical residence, and a seemingly endless story about the truly charming men she had met at Link-Wright Shipping.

I figured out the probable time differential between her fabled home and Point X and came up with a half-educated guess that it would reach the target area around twenty to eight. I couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad. It meant that it would be in position quite a few minutes before Emile and his friends expected to get the game started, which was bad, but it also meant that we had a little margin for error, and that Seth and Randy wouldn’t have to delay the Queen quite so long. I decided that the good outweighed the bad, and then I decided that we were going to play it the same way no matter what, so the hell with it. I showed her my little paper creation and she stared at it, read it, turned it over, studied its back, turned it over again, peered closely at the Westley signature, and asked me what it was.

“Your identification.”

“I do not understand. Who is this Westley? And this Suzanne, this Mademoiselle Lafitte, who is she?”

“She’s you,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll explain it later. I want you to practice writing Suzanne Lafitte. Go ahead.”

She wrote it a few times and I looked it over. I just wanted to make sure she could do it without misspelling it. Then I had her sign the card. I had pressed down harder with the pen when I wrote Westley’s name, so it looked as though two different pens had been used.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now I’ll need a very tiny photo of you. Do you have one?”

She found some snapshots, but they all had scenery in the background. I sent her on her way again, telling her to get her picture taken at one of the 4-Poses-For-25¢ booths at the Dorchester Boulevard bus terminal. She brought back four ghastly poses that looked enough unlike her to be official, along with the things I had told her to buy – a stamp pad, a rubber stamp that would print any number from 0000001 to 9999999, a tube of rubber cement, a packet of razor blades, and a large red leatherette photo album.

“Perfect,” I said. “Perfect.”

She didn’t say a word, bless her heart. She watched in silence as I trimmed one of the photos to the size of the space on the card and glued it carefully in place. I set the rubber stamp at 8839970 and stamped the card twice, once below the Suzanne Lafitte signature and once along the left-hand edge. (The number was one I selected apparently at random, but I happen to remember it now because I later realized that it was the number of “Hector’s Lounge,” which started all of this mess. Make of this what you will.)

The stamp pad also served to get Arlette’s fingerprint impressed in the proper square. Her right thumbprint, to be precise. We tried it four times on scrap paper before I got the hang of it. It seemed to work best if I held her thumb and pressed it to the paper myself, and that was how we finally did it.

Then I looted the photo album. I removed the insides and cut the cover open. The leatherette was wrapped around a sheet of very thick cardboard. I cut out a pair of 5 by 7 cardboard rectangles, then cut out a large piece of leatherette and glued the cardboard chunks to it, one above the other. Then I glued the card in place on the lower section of cardboard.

It looked phony as hell to me. The typing was the main problem – it gave the whole thing a homemade look. My Croat Nationalist friend in New York would have been disgusted with it. The Armenian genius in Athens would have thrown up either his hands or his dinner at the sight of it. I almost said this aloud, then decided against it. Arlette was going to have to use the damned thing, and it was pointless to destroy her confidence in it.

I moistened my hands and smudged it a little in strategic spots. Then I cut out a piece of acetate from the leaves of the photo album and cemented it into place over the card. At least I tried to; the rubber cement wouldn’t bond the plastic. I had to send Arlette out for some plastic cement before I could get it to work.

By the time I had trimmed the leatherette and performed the final gluing operations, it really didn’t look so bad after all. The final product was a purse-sized red leather case that opened up to reveal an ID card complete with photo and thumbprint and signature. It did look like credentials of some sort, and there was no fear that some clown would compare it with the genuine article. Because as far as I knew, there was no Department of Public Security, no Foreign National Section, no Dominion Secrets Act (1954), no J. B. Westley, Int. Director, and no Suzanne Lafitte.

“I think it’ll do,” I said. “How does it look to you?”

“Formidable. I do not understand.”

“You’ll understand when the time comes.”

“But how is this to prevent the assassination? I cannot show this to Claude or Jean or Jacques or Emile. They have known me for too long, Evan. They would never believe that I am this Mademoiselle Lafitte. They know that I am Arlette Sazerac, they know that I am a faithful allegiant of the Mouvement National de Québec.” She frowned suddenly. “I was a faithful allegiant. Now suddenly I am a traitor.”

“You are a true patriot. You are doing what is best for the movement.”

“It is so. It must be so.” She touched my arm. “But you have not explained! How is this, this false identification, this Lafitte, how is it to prevent the assassination?”

“That’s not what it’s for. It’s to rescue Minna from the Cubans.”

“I do not understand.” She furrowed her brow, trying desperately to think. “How is it possible to do everything at once?”

I thought of my Mickey Mouse list. Minna, assas-sination, heroin, cops. I had a variation on the time-tested formula. You listed all your chores in order, and then you killed some time and smoked some pot, and then you took a deep breath and a giant step and did everything at once.

“How?” she still wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you later,” I lied. I looked at the clock; it was past noon already. “There’s no time now, cherished one. There are things that must be done at once. There is a man at the fairgrounds, you will have to seek him out and make contact with him. And I will need some preparations to disguise myself, some cosmetics, a variety of articles. I will be going outside while it is still light out, and it would not be good if I were arrested-”

“It would be a disaster!”

“I agree. Put the ID down, that’s a good girl. Now let me see what you ought to do first…”

What she did first was make the rounds of the neighborhood tobacconists, buying three or four plastic roll-up tobacco pouches at each shop. (This was not done for the sake of subtlety; I didn’t really care what some tobacconist might think if she bought twenty pouches from him. She bought only three or four in each shop because nobody had more than that on hand.) She came right back with them, and while she was off on another errand I parceled out the three cans of heroin into the twenty pouches. When I was all done, I had about a tablespoonful left over, and I spent longer than I care to admit brooding about it before realizing that the world could live without it. I flushed it down the toilet. Junkies are crawling up walls in Harlem, said a voice deep within my brain, and you flush heroin down the toilet. Children are starving in India and you didn’t finish your Brussels sprouts. Families are starving in Brussels and you didn’t finish your Indian summer. Old people are starving in Sumatra and you didn’t finish your winter wheat. Arlette is starving for affection and you didn’t make love to her in the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of Yorktown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah –

I raced into the bathroom and stood under the shower. Doo dah, doo dah. I let the cold water pound down on my head until the little voice in there stopped yammering. I wondered how much the heroin I had flushed away was worth, and I wondered why I was wondering about something that irrelevant, and I decided I hadn’t spent enough time under the shower. I soaked my head a little longer and let everything calm down. Just a spoonful of powder makes the Madison go round, the moccasin go brown, the Mattachine go down, just a spoonful – More cold water and a brisk rub with a towel.

My disguise was a major problem. Ideally I needed one that I could switch on and off at will, so that I could avoid being recognized while I was out in the open without looking like a stranger when I joined the assassination party at Point X. I kept getting ideas toward this end, and they kept not working. I would send Arlette out for something new – now a wig, now a monster Halloween mask, now this and now that – but the conveniently removable disguises all had one thing in common. They looked like disguises, and policemen are apt to take an interest in people who look disguised.

The time wasn’t completely wasted. Arlette’s wild-goose chases at least kept her out of my hair while I taped up the pouches of heroin and sewed them into my clothing. The jacket got the greater portion of them. I took up the lining, flattened the pouches and sewed them here and there inside it, then replaced the lining. The end product of all this effort was nothing geared to win hysterical applause from a tailors’ convention – I wound up with a pretty lumpy jacket. Still, it was a way to transport the junk with some degree of secrecy, and it left my hands free.

It took the Frankenstein mask to convince me that a removable disguise was an unrealistic goal. I put it on and Arlette went into a laughing fit. I couldn’t see the expression on her face – I couldn’t see anything because my eyes didn’t happen to be placed as close together as Frankenstein’s – but the laughter came through the mask. The air didn’t; I was sweating furiously in less than ten seconds. I took off the mask and told Arlette I didn’t think it would do.

“But it is lovely,” she insisted. “You must someday wear such a mask when we make love.”

I sent her out again – it was that or hit her – and she came back with a long list of things and helped me use them to remake my face. We started off with my hair, cutting off quite a bit of it, raising the sideburns three-eighths of an inch, and working black dye into what hair remained. I thought I looked pretty terrible, but Arlette insisted that it wasn’t that bad.

“I myself could become a blonde,” she said.

“No.”

“But otherwise they will recognize me.”

“Arlette, they’re not looking for you. That’s the whole point.”

“But they will not recognize you at Point X, and they will recognize me.”

“They’re supposed to.”

“They will see us together and wonder who I am with. They will-”

I shifted gears. “Arlette, the picture on your identification card is of a girl with dark hair. It wouldn’t do to-”

“I could wear a wig, then-”

“Arlette-”

“-or we could have a new photograph taken. Evan, is something wrong? You feel I would appear unattractive as a blonde? You do not think I would have more fun?”

Fool, I told myself, you’ve been trying to reason with her! I said, “We shall someday find out, my apple of love. We will taste the fruits of love together, you with blonde hair and I in my Frankenstein mask.” I swallowed. “But you must help me now. I am not finished with my disguise, and you must help me.”

I didn’t need her help. I just needed her to shut the hell up. I sat in front of her mirror and played with all the nice toys she had brought me. I used theatrical putty on my nose and ears. I had once read somewhere that ears are the most difficult feature to disguise, and that trained law-enforcement officers always pay close attention to people’s ears. They’re way ahead of me on that score. I hardly ever notice ears unless they stick out or one of them is missing, or something like that.

So I puttied my ears. I didn’t want to do anything too extreme. I figured that funny-looking ears would attract attention almost as well as the Frankenstein mask, but on second thought I decided that all ears are funny-looking to a greater or lesser degree. I enlarged the lobes of mine, and built things up here and there, and gave the tops a slight peak. The hard part was making them both come out the same, which, now that I think about it, was probably unnecessary, as few people see both of one’s ears at the same time. I did a good job, though, and when I was through, Arlette told me I looked different. I didn’t see it myself. “You mean my ears look different,” I said.

“So it must be, but I do not recall how they looked before. No, your face has changed.”

I guess the police know what they’re doing, at least insofar as ears are concerned.

I fixed my nose, too, making it a little longer and straightening out the slight bump just below the bridge. I preferred my ears as they had been before, but I had to admit that the new nose was more becoming than the original model.

“Your eyebrows, Evan.”

I had forgotten to dye them. I did this, getting only a little bit of hair dye in my eye and swearing only for a few minutes. I tried on the clear glass spectacles Arlette had bought me. The only trouble with them was that they looked fake. The light reflected oddly off the flat surface of the glass. The sunglasses were much better and hid my eyes in the bargain but might look odd after dark, assuming I still wanted to be disguised by then.

I put my new cap on my head. It was similar to the wino’s cap but infinitely cleaner. Too clean, I decided. It looked as if it had been hatched that morning. I threw it on the floor and stepped on it while Arlette looked at me as though I had gone suddenly mad.

The phone rang. I grabbed it, and it was Seth. “Oh, no,” I said. “It can’t be six yet. It’s impossible.”

“It isn’t. You okay, man?”

It was three thirty and once I found that out, I was okay and said so. I asked him if anything had gone wrong.

“Nothing serious. We’ve got twenty-three bodies for sure and a batch of maybes. From past experience, I’d say one out of three maybes will show. That’s in the States, in a typical antiwar march. It could be different with Canadians for a Modonoland protest, but I don’t know whether it would be more or less.”

“You’ll know in a couple of hours.”

“I’m hip. The reason I called-”

“How are you doing on boats?”

“Not too bad. Randy’s out on a lead now, and there’s a chick from Nova Scotia who’s getting in touch with a friend who’s supposed to know somebody. You know how it goes. I don’t honestly know how many we have lined up, but I think we’ll make it. I’ll know better at six o’clock.”

“Good.”

“Uh, the reason I called-”

“How about money? Are you running low?”

“No, that’s no problem. Evan, why I called-”

“I’m sorry.” I was turning into Arlette. “Go ahead.”

“Well, this is ridiculous, but how the hell do you spell Modonoland? We’re lettering some signs now and nobody knows how it’s spelled, hardly anybody ever heard of it. It’s not in any of the reference books around here. Or on any maps.”

I spelled it for him.

“Good,” he said. “There’s this one sign I’m proud of. Where Do You Stand On The Modonoland Question? I love it. Randy’s personal answer is On My Head. Mine is Abashed.”

“I like that.”

“I thought you might. I’m sorry to call you with such a stupid question, but I figured it might be uncool to spell the country wrong. You’re positive there really is such a place?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll take your word for it. People keep asking me where it is. So far I’ve been dodging the question.”

“That’s a good policy.”

“You don’t know either?”

“I used to, but I can never remember.” Arlette brought over a fresh cup of coffee and I swallowed half of it. “Tell them it’s near Kenya,” I suggested. “Most of Africa is near Kenya.”

“It is?”

“Isn’t it?”

“To be honest with you, I’m not entirely certain where Kenya is.”

“Well, we don’t want to get hung up on geography.”

“I’m hip. I’m sorry I had to call-”

“It’s all right. I was wondering how you were doing. Call at six.”

“Right.”

I cradled the phone. The hand that phones the cradle rules the waves. Britannia waives the rules. The hand that cradles the rock – I couldn’t even take a shower or I’d wash the dye out of my hair and the putty off my ears. Cradle, cradle. Children are starving in Hungary and you didn’t finish your cradles and bream cheese. Children are hungry in Starvaring and you didn’t finish your curds and whey. Little Miss Muffet was told to go stuffet –

“Arlette!”

“Something is wrong? Evan, what is the matter?”

I inhaled and exhaled, very slowly, very solemnly. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m on edge, that’s all it is.” Inhale, exhale. “I have to send you out again. This time you’ll have to go to the fairgrounds.”

“I will go.”

“You will have to find a certain man and make arrangements for later this evening.”

“Who is this man?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to arrange to meet with him in a certain place-”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. In a certain place and at a certain time.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. This is terrible. Is there any more coffee?”

She peered into my eyes. I don’t guess she saw much. I was still wearing the sunglasses. She said, “Evan, I think you should sleep for an hour.”

“No.”

“You have had very little sleep, Evan, and-”

“I’m all right. Coffee.” She brought it. I drank it. “Okay,” I said, ignoring the busy little rumble in the back of my head. “Okay, just let me think for a moment. All right. This is what you’ll do.”

I explained it to her. I guess it registered, because she repeated it all back to me, and it sounded all right when she said it. She was a little leery of leaving me all alone, though.

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

“At least take a nap.”

“If I can. I have things to do.” She went away. And I have promises to keep, said the rotten little voice, and miles to go before I sleep. And I have promises to break and miles to go before I wake. And I have Thomases to peep and smiles to look before I leap. And I have –

I went to the mirror and glowered at it. “You are probably going mad,” I told my reflection aloud. “Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re having verbal hallucinations. That’s what you’re doing. Do you realize that this may mean your mind is going? And if so, the competence of your whole brilliant plan is called to question. And since you haven’t told anyone what your plan is, nobody can check it to make sure it makes sense. Maybe this is an aftereffect of the pot. Maybe you’re actually still lying on the floor stoned out of your bird and it’s only six in the morning and none of this has happened yet. Maybe it never will. Why do you just stand there, you schmuck in the mirror? Why don’t you say something? Oh, Jesus God, what would I do if you did?”

I returned to the other room, sat on the floor, and folded up my legs in the full lotus posture. I began chanting the multiplication tables, first in English, then in French, then in Spanish and Portuguese and German and Dutch and Serbo-Croat and on and on, switching from language to language, babbling inanely onward and waiting for whatever was happening to either improve or deteriorate.

Very weird it was, believe me. I was in several minds at once, one of them chanting polylingual gibberish, one punning endlessly, one terrified that I was going crazy, one not giving a damn, and one little spark of sense somewhere in the background shaking its head at all the others. If I can just get control, it was saying, everything will be all right again. Let all the other fellows burn themselves out. I’m still here, fellow. I’ll take care of you.