Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 16

“Murder in London,” the Chief said. “Rumors of illegal entry in half the capitals of Europe. Riots in Kabul.”

He lowered his eyes. I had managed, miraculously enough, to be back at my apartment for a full two days before one of his messenger boys brought me word from him. Now we were in his room at a midtown Manhattan hotel where he was registered under a nom de guerrefroide. He was drinking a glass of scotch. I had a glass too, but I was letting it evaporate.

“I don’t want much,” he said. “Just a partial explanation. I suspect we can cover for you in Britain. As long as you’re here and they’re there, it shouldn’t be an overwhelming problem. The top men can decide not to attempt extradition, and the underlings will let that sort of irregularity pass without making too much noise. But I would like to know what happened.”

I couldn’t blame him. He did think I was working for him, and if that was the case, it only made sense that I should let him know what sort of work I had done. His men, of whom I may or may not be one, depending upon one’s point of view, enjoy more than the usual amount of autonomy. No written reports in triplicate, no countersigns and passwords, nothing but the maximum use of individual initiative carried out, hopefully, for the good of God and Country, though not necessarily in that particular order. So he never asked for much, but he did have the right to find out what the hell I had done, and why.

So I told him.

Well, I ought to qualify that. The general story, the way you read it (unless you just happened to open the book to this present page out of the blue, in which case close it, please) does not make it look as though everything that happened took place out of deepset motives of sheer patriotism. So I didn’t think it would do my personal image any particular good to let him know just how offhand the whole bloody business had been.

I did tell him that I left the country for personal reasons. But somewhere along the line imagination took over from historical sense, and the story he got began to part company with the truth.

Arthur Hook, I explained, was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. By shipping potential white slaves to Afghanistan, he was helping Russian agents inside that country raise money for subversive purposes while at the same time striking at the roots of the purity of the women of the free world.

I looked at him, and that seemed to go over well enough, so I gritted my teeth and went on with it. After I learned all of this, I told him, I had to kill Hook so he couldn’t inform his confederates. Then I managed to infiltrate myself into the mass of Soviet agents inside England and leave the country with them, although at the last minute they found me out. From them I learned the details of the plot in Afghanistan. Patriot that I was, I realized it wasn’t enough merely to rescue an innocent American girl from the clutches of communist white-slavers. I also had to quell the commie coup.

(It’s embarrassing to write this down. Forgive me.)

With the aid of pro-Western elements in Kabul, I went on, the revolt was nipped in the bud, crushed to a pulp the day before it was scheduled to break out. The Russian Embassy, traditional setting for scheming and subversion, was now a heap of stones bearing no demonstrable relationship each to the other. The leaders of the would-be putsch would lead no more putsches. A typical band of commie cutthroats, including not only sly Russians but the worst sort of European scum, they had literally been torn to pieces by an irate mob of freedom-loving Afghans.

“And so,” I concluded, “I think it turned out fairly well, Chief. I never expected to get involved in anything that elaborate-”

“You never do.”

“-or of course I would have let you know in advance what I was getting into.”

“Mmmm,” he said. He finished his drink and started to refill our glasses, then looked at me in surprise when he noticed that I had not yet finished mine. He glanced accusingly at me, and I drank my drink, and he poured more whiskey for each of us.

“Your track record,” he said, “has always been good.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And I don’t suppose this is actually bad, is it?”

“Well-”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But there is something I ought to tell you, Tanner. Something you ought to know. Something – well, unusual.”

“Oh?”

“Slight miscalculation on your part, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Rather serious, actually.”

“Oh?”

He swung his chair around and looked at the window. I drank a little of my scotch. I was beginning to feel the need for it.

Without turning he said, “Tanner? The coup in Afghanistan. Not theirs, you see.”

“Sir?”

“Ours.”

“Ours?”

“Ours. Oh, not ours ours. Or of course you’d have known about it. No, not our department’s sort of show, not by a long shot. Don’t approve myself, as you well know. No, this was the personal property of the Boy Scouts.”

I almost swallowed my tongue. I swallowed scotch instead. I said, “The CIA.”

“Quite.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Afghan government’s been neutralist, you see. Been accepting a devil of a lot of aid from the Russians. New road, I understand-”

“If you saw the other roads, you’d understand why they accepted it.”

“Don’t doubt it. At any rate, someone at the Agency decided the government was playing it a bit too cozy with the Soviets. As they interpreted it, there would be a Red takeover within the year. They decided to anticipate events by staging a pro-Western takeover before the Russians were in position for a move.”

“And the men in Kabul -”

“Were CIA operatives.”

“But they were Russians. And Eastern Europeans. And-”

He was nodding. “Inherited that whole crew after the last war,” he said. “Ukrainians, White Russians, that whole lot. Every secret agent type in Eastern Europe who was anti-Soviet came into the OSS after the war and then went CIA when the new outfit was formed. Collaborationists, a lot of them. No doubt about it. Pocket Hitlers, that type. But many of them were very valuable to the Agency.”

“Uh,” I said. I remembered assuring the Vulgar Bulgar that I was a devoted Russian myself. And afterward he and his bully boys redoubled their efforts to kill me. This had made little sense to me then. It made more sense now, although it didn’t make me any happier.

“Well, this isn’t good,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I mean, well, I got a lot of men on our side killed. The CIA’s men, that is. And I thought I was crushing a Commie plot, whereas I was actually crushing one of our own plots. An anti-commie plot, that is. Move. Coup. Whatever the hell it is.”

“I think you might safely call it a plot.”

“Er,” I said. I choked back a burst of hysterical laughter. Hysteria seemed called for; laughter did not. I drank the rest of my drink. The Chief turned to look at the window again, then turned around to face me. I looked at his pudgy hands, his round face.

As I looked at him, he slowly began to smile.

The smile widened. The lips parted, and a chuckle came out. The chuckle turned into a laugh.

My jaw fell.

“Tanner,” he said, “I’ll tell you something. I think it’s very goddamned funny.”

“It is?”

“Of course it is.” He began laughing some more. “The Boy Scouts wanted to stop a Russian takeover, didn’t they? Well, the Russians won’t get a foot in the door in that country in the next century. They don’t even have an embassy anymore, the poor bastards. There’s a rumor the Kabul government’s going to ask Moscow to take their road back, for heaven’s sake. How on earth would you go about taking a road back?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Neither do I.” He laughed again. “And the Russians – oh, this is precious – the Russians don’t know how it happened either. They think the dead men were agents of theirs after all. Undoubtedly half of the men on their embassy staff were operatives, and as they died with the rest – well, you may well imagine the confusion in the Kremlin.”

“I may well imagine,” I said.

“Each of the Soviet agencies is accusing the other of prime responsibility for the situation. There will probably be a purge, perhaps several purges. And at least one of the agencies is trumpeting it about that Peking is responsible for what happened. That the Chinese were attempting to discredit Moscow on her own doorstep.” He snorted. “So far everyone’s gotten a bit of the blame except the International Zionist Conspiracy. And the United States.”

“Then it turned out well,” I said, slowly.

“It turned out perfectly. Except for the Boy Scouts, who lost a few reliable men.”

“They weren’t a particularly nice lot,” I said.

“No, I don’t suppose they were.”

“Not at all.”

“Well,” he said. He sighed heavily. “I do think we ought to keep your role in this debacle completely quiet. As far as I can tell, the CIA ops in Kabul never got in touch with headquarters at Langley. They kept them wholly in the dark insofar as your presence was concerned. This is all to the good. As far as the Agency is concerned, their men made a bad error, got themselves knocked over by patriotic Afghans intent upon maintaining their neutrality, and the U.S. lucked out in that Kabul thinks they were Russians. Complicated, isn’t it? All it adds up to is that we should keep quiet about this. I trust you’ll do so?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“And the girl? You did bring her out, didn’t you?”

“She’s a sort of private operative of mine,” I said. “Actually she helped me penetrate the cover of that white-slaving operation to begin with. We won’t have to worry about her.”

“Good, good.” He got to his feet, approached, extended his hand. We shook briefly. “You won’t get a medal for this one,” he said. “One of those exploits that must remain forever untold, as it were. But as far as I’m concerned, Tanner, you’ve done a good job.” He began laughing. “Those Boy Scouts,” he exploded. “I can just imagine the look on their silly faces-”

So when I got back to the apartment the phone was ringing. I made my usual mistake. I answered it.

“Mr. Tanner?”

“Long Numbel,” I said. “This Brue Stahl Hand Raundley.”

“Mr. Tanner, I know this is you. Don’t tell me about laundries. I don’t care from laundries.”

I said, “Hello, Mrs. Horowitz.”

“So I call you to find my Deborah for me and what do you do? A sinful woman you make of her.”

“Uh.”

“So when will you make an honest woman of her, eh, Tanner? Eh? I am alone in the world, Horowitz is dead, I’m alone, I’ve got nobody but Deborah. So I shouldn’t lose a daughter, Tanner. I should gain a son, Tanner. You understand?”

“Deborah’s not here, Mrs. Horowitz.”

“Tanner, to you I’m talking.”

“She went to the zoo, Mrs. Horowitz. I’ll tell her you called.”

“Tanner-”

I hung up; and before she could call back I took the phone off the hook. The door opened. I turned around, and it was Phaedra.

“Hi,” she said. “You’re back from your appointment.”

“No, this is my astral projection. The Manishtana taught me how to do it.”

“You do it very well, then. What’s the matter with the phone?”

“Your mother was on it,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Where’s the kid?”

“Downstairs,” she said. “Playing with the Puerto Rican kid. Mikey.”

“He’s not in school?”

“It’s Chanukah.”

“I should have realized,” I said. I looked at the phone. It was making that whirring noise that it makes so that you’ll know that you didn’t hang it up. The telephone company evidently can’t believe that a person might want his phone off the hook for a reason. The telephone company never had a girlfriend that had a mother.

I looked at Phaedra. She was taking off all her clothes.

I looked at the phone again. It had stopped whirring, and now an operator was shouting at me to hang up the receiver. Then there was some loud clanking, and then the operator started in again.

“Listen to that woman,” I said.

“I think she’s a recording.”

“They all are.”

So I hung up the phone to stop the noise, and I reached for Phaedra, and she giggled and purred, and the phone rang.

The more things change…

At 2:30 one fine December afternoon I ripped the telephone out of the wall.