Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 3

Old Compton Street is no place to stand around waiting for something. It’s in that part of Soho that’s a cross between Greenwich Village and Tijuana – narrow streets jammed with Italian restaurants and strip clubs and pornography shops and prostitutes. I stood in front of a grim pub just across the street from the building where our hyphenated friend lived. I’d already determined that his apartment was in the front of the building on either the third or fourth floor, depending upon whether you looked at it from an English or American point of view. You had to climb three flights of stairs to get to it, anyway.

An urgent little man in a houndstooth jacket buttonholed me and at once provided me with a good reason for standing on the sidewalk. I stood waiting for Julia’s taxi while he ran through his catalog of vice. “Looking for a girl, are you now, mate? Soho ’s full of girls, but you got to find the right sort, you know. Nice clean girl, young, white, just started in the business not two months ago. It’s no good if you get one what ain’t clean, but this is a choice bit of brass, very young and pretty-”

I put my hands in my pockets. I had a gun in each pocket and neither one could do much damage. The smaller one fired blanks, while the other, somewhat more realistic in appearance, was a single piece of cast iron. Nigel had offered me my choice and I’d taken both of them.

“Care to see a blue film, mate? Just five nicker for a full show. A Yank, aren’t you? That’s twelve of your dollars. Used to be fourteen, but you get a break with the devaluation. Bargain day, isn’t it? There’s a full hour of films, new ones, some in color. A man and a woman, two men and a woman, a man and two women, two women together, a woman and a dog, a woman and-”

A taxi drew to a stop in front of the building I was watching. Julia got out of it and passed some coins to the driver. She went into the building and the cab stayed where it was. If Hyphen was by himself she would signal the driver, tipping me in the process.

“Sell you any bloody thing you want. French postcards, French ticklers, Spanish fly. Drugs I don’t handle, but I know them what does. See a live show? Not strippers, but me and a girl, fucking and sucking and all, and then you can have her yourself or not, your choice, and all it costs-”

A shade went up in the Hyphen apartment. I saw Julia wave to her driver, who, as it happened, had already driven off with another fare. Then she lowered the shade again.

“And hoping you won’t take offense, mate, but to each his own as they say, and would you fancy a young boy? You don’t look the sort, but I always ask, and-”

I tucked my chin into my coat collar, pitched my voice low, and changed my American accent for an English one. “Special Branch,” I murmured. “We don’t bother with touts and ponces as a rule, but unless you bugger off quick I might make an exception in your case.”

I kept my eyes on the ground as I said this, and when I looked up he was gone. I walked to the far corner, crossed the street, walked back to the doorway Julia had entered a few minutes earlier. No one seemed to be paying any particular attention to me. I went inside. The foyer wall displayed half a dozen three-by-five file cards – Model, French Model, Spanish Model, with names and apartment numbers. I wondered what real models called themselves.

The apartments on the first two floors housed models exclusively. There were two apartments on the third floor, our friend’s and one belonging to a model named Suzette. I suppose she had as much right to the name Suzette as he did to Wyndham-Jones. I put an ear to his door. I could hear voices, his and hers, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. I stepped back, and the door of Suzette’s apartment opened behind me and a man emerged. Suzette was close behind him, urging him to return soon. I turned to look at him, and he couldn’t have been more anxious to avoid me if I had been his father-in-law the vicar. He plunged madly down the stairs. I turned to look at Suzette. Her bright red lips curled in a smile and she dropped one eyelid in a wink.

“Hope you weren’t waiting long, love,” she said. “The time he took, I ought to charge him by the hour.” She had a little trouble with h’s. “Now don’t be a shy one. Come inside and we’ll get acquainted.”

She was wearing a shiny wrapper the color of her lipstick, and she had so much pancake on her face that it was impossible to guess what she might look like without it. She couldn’t have looked much worse.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” I said.

“Are you now?” Again the wink. “Come inside and we’ll wait together.” She minced across the hallway at me. “Suzie’ll show you a good time, ducks. You’ve no call to be bashful.”

I had the awful feeling that as soon as she got close enough she would make a grab at my fly. I reached into my inside pocket and came up with my U.S. passport, flipped it open, and flashed it at her.

“Cor,” she said. One hand flew to her throat. “I’m just a bleeding model, it’s a respectable occupation-”

“Fifth Squad,” I said. I have no idea what that is, or if there is one. “I’m backing up my partner, he’s upstairs. Might be wise of you to stay inside.”

Her eyes widened. “What’s on?”

“Spies.”

“Russians?”

I shrugged.

“Bleeding Communists,” she said. She opened her door, ducked inside, then out again. “When you’ve done,” she said, “you might stop in for a cuppa.” Then she mercifully drew her door shut, and I put my passport away.

I stood there for another five minutes. At one point a midget passed me on his way downstairs. I tried not to guess where he had been or what he had been doing. Then I heard steps approaching Mr. Hyphen’s door. I put both hands in my pockets, drew out both guns, and decided on the one with the blanks. I stood close to the wall alongside the door.

There was the sound of the bolt being drawn. Then the knob turned, and he opened the door and held it for Julia. I walked in as she came out, digging the nose of the pistol into his middle.

“All right,” I said. “Back up now. Close the door, Julia. Now back off, friend, and turn around nice and slow, and keep your hands in the air.”

He backed off, and he put his hands in the air, but he didn’t turn around. He was my height, eight or ten years younger, and many pounds heavier. I saw at once what Julia meant about his eyes. They were cold, opaque, utterly lacking in depth. In my part of New York boys with eyes like that are very good with knives.

Slowly, his hands came down again. “Not bloody likely,” he said. “You aren’t about to shoot, are you, china?” Rhyming slang, I thought stupidly; china, china plate, mate. “Not a peeler, and there’s not a pin here for stealing, so just who in bleeding hell are you?” He took a step toward me. “Better let me take that toy before you hurt yourself.”

So I pointed the gun at his gut and fired.

It didn’t sound much like a truck backfiring. What it sounded like was a.38-caliber automatic. For an instant it must have felt like that, too, because he fell back as if shot and stared down in horror at the spot in his middle where the bullet would have gone had the gun contained one.

His face had just begun to register the fact that he hadn’t been shot when I took the other fake pistol, the cast-iron one, and bounced it off the side of his head.

I turned to Julia. She stood motionless and open-mouthed, a bronze casting entitled “Astonishment.” “Get into the hall,” I said. “You want to know where the shot came from; it sounded as though it came from upstairs. Remember what a fine actress you are. Hurry!”

She did a good job. I locked the door behind her and listened to the hubbub outside while I got Mr. Hyphen properly trussed up. There was a substantial stuffed chair with molded wooden arms. I wrestled him into it and used a roll of picture-hanging wire to fasten him in place, his arms to the chair’s arms, his feet to its legs, and the rest of him to the back and seat of it. I was in a hurry, and that sort of work isn’t my favorite diversion anyway – I can’t wrap a Christmas present properly, let alone a person. So I don’t suppose I did the sort of job that would have left Houdini hamstrung, but that wasn’t the idea. I just wanted this clown to stay in one place while I asked him questions.

Outside, the turmoil gradually peaked and died down. No police showed up, and the crowd was comprised chiefly of whores and clients, none of whom were too keen on interfering in anything. I heard Suzette say something about filthy bleeding Russians, but I don’t think anyone paid very much attention to her. When it all died down, Julia knocked softly on the door and I let her in.

“There were blanks in the gun,” she said.

“You didn’t know?”

“How would I have known? Lord, that was a wrench, wasn’t it? Has my hair suddenly turned gray?”

“No.”

“That’s remarkable. I think he’s coming awake, Evan.”

He was indeed. His eyes went in turn to his bonds, to me, to Julia. He tried unsuccessfully to rock the chair. He looked at Julia again. “Effing little bitch,” he said. “I thought you were too bloody good to be true.”

I told Julia to take a taxi home. She told me not to be silly, that she was as anxious as I to hear what he had to say. I said that Nigel would worry about her, and she said that Nigel was at the theater.

“You may not enjoy this,” I said.

“Oh, but I will, Evan.”

What’s-his-name looked up at me. “Evans, eh? And a good day to you, Mr. Evans.” He didn’t sound much upset. “Wha’d you shoot me with?”

“A blank.”

“An effing blank.” He laughed. “That’s a good one. I’ll remember that one, I will.”

I pulled a card chair up and sat down in front of him. “You’ll have to remember quite a few things. Your name, to start with.”

“Wyndham-Jones, Mr. Evans.”

“Not Smythe-Carson?”

“Who’s he, Mr. Evans?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I said, “There are some things you’ll have to tell me. I’m not interested in you at all, just in your information. There was an American girl named Phaedra Harrow. You may have known her as Deborah Horowitz.” I showed him her picture. “I want to know where she is and what’s happened to her.”

“Glad to oblige,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s have another look at the picture.” His eyes narrowed in concentration. Then he smiled. “Don’t know as I can help you, Mr. Evans. Never saw her before in me life, not the least bit familiar. Names don’t ring a bell either, sorry to say.”

I let him have the gun butt on his left cheekbone. His head flew to the side. I heard Julia suck in her breath, but He Who Got Slapped didn’t make a sound. The smile came back and the same flat cold light glinted in his eyes. He said, “Two or three hours, I’ll have a ruddy great bruise there. All blue and purple it’ll be.”

“The girl.”

“Still don’t know her, Mr. Evans. Me memory’s no better.”

I swung the gun backhand and caught him on the right cheekbone. I knew he’d ride with it, so I made it harder. “Now they’ll match,” I said.

“Oh, I’ll be the pretty one.”

“I can stand this longer than you can.”

“Oh, can you now?” His lips tightened and his voice turned harder. “You effing bastard, I’ve taken dumpings from professionals. You haven’t the stuff to kill me, and you’d have to do that to learn the first bloody thing about your little American twist. I’ll sit here and take it while you puke at the horror of it all.”

I hefted the gun. He didn’t even wince. I stood up, turned to Julia. She was standing near the door and looked vulnerable. It was senseless. We had the son of a bitch tied up, and he was in control of the situation while Julia looked vulnerable and I felt impotent. I took a few deep breaths and concentrated on visions of a naked Phaedra being tortured and burned at the stake. I was trying to work up some genuine fury, and it just didn’t come off. That sort of reaction either happens or it doesn’t. You can’t think it into existence.

So to Julia I said, “You see the problem? You pinpointed it earlier. I’m just not the menacing type. I don’t ooze brutality. I’ve got a bad image.”

“Evan-”

“Now if it was me in the chair and this clown asking the questions, he wouldn’t have to lay a hand on me. One good glower from Hyphen here and I’d sing like a goddamned roomful of castrati.” I thought for a moment. “Go home,” I told her. “You don’t want to see this.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Go home. Now.”

She shook her head.

“Horrible image,” I mused. I left the room and wandered through the rest of the flat. I had wondered what sort of person would live in a whorehouse, and the other rooms answered the question for me. A whore lived there, and Hyphen had borrowed her place for the evening. There was female clothing in the closets, messy cosmetic tubes and jars and bottles scattered in the bedroom and bathroom. In the kitchen I fumbled through drawers until I found something that was a sort of cross between a regular knife and a meat cleaver. I think it’s used for chopping up heads of lettuce.

I got a roll of adhesive tape from the bathroom cabinet and tore off eight or ten six-inch strips, fastening them together to make a square patch. I returned to the front room. He was as I had left him.

“Last chance,” I said. He told me what to do to myself, and I fastened the patch of tape over his mouth.

“What’s that, Evan?”

“A gag. So he won’t scream.”

I bent a loose end of picture wire back and forth until it frayed. The piece was long enough to wrap around the index finger of his right hand five times, and while I was doing that Julia asked me what it was.

“A tourniquet,” I said.

“What is it for?”

“So he won’t bleed when I cut off his finger. Go in the other room, Julia. You don’t have to go home if you don’t want to, but please get the hell out of here.”

She went. I caught a glimpse of her face on the way out. She looked slightly nauseous. I picked up the cleaver and looked at Hyphen. For the first time his eyes had lost that maddening assurance.

I said, “You think I’m bluffing but you’re not certain. You can gamble, but if you’re wrong it’ll cost you a finger. Ready to talk?”

He nodded. I yanked the gag off. “Last chance,” I said. “Make it good.”

“You’d cut off a bloke’s finger.”

“Yes.”

“Undo that wire, mate. Me whole finger’s throbbing.”

“Talk.”

He sighed heavily. “It’s a fiddle I’ve got. A smuggling fiddle, the birds do the smuggling. A perfect blanket, six lonely birds looking at bleeding tombs.”

“Go on.”

“I could do with a cigarette, mate.”

“You could do without one. You took the girl along. Then what happened?”

His face clouded. “Bloody thing went bad. The peelers landed on us with both feet. All six girls wound up in the moan-and-wail.”

“And you?”

“Bought me way out. Would have bought them out, but I hadn’t enough of the ready.”

“Where did this happen?”

“ Turkey. Ankara. We brought guns in and would have brought gold out, but the bloody-”

I never found out what the last bloody was intended to modify, because I cut off the flow of words by slapping the tape back in place. I said, “You’re very stupid. You don’t know how much I know, so it’s a bad time to try lying to me. You’re a dreadful liar to begin with. It’s just not your bag, and from now on you’ll have to avoid it. This one particular lie just cost you a finger.”

He struggled. His whole body went rigid, and for a moment I thought he might be strong enough to snap the wire. He wasn’t.

I cut through the finger just above the second joint, about half an inch below the wire tourniquet. There was hardly any bleeding at all.

He did not turn his eyes aside. He watched his finger until I had succeeded in separating it from his hand, his face growing steadily paler, and then he quietly passed out.

“Just never expected it of you. The way you talk and all, and how you handle your face, and especially you being a Yank.” His tone was soft and marveling, as if he had just witnessed something extraordinary on the telly. “You’re all at once Lee Marvin in the bloody movies. An effing butcher working on a side of beef.

“I told you.”

“Don’t say you didn’t, but Jesus effing Christ, you could have told me forever and I’d have gone on sending you up. You know what? Me finger hurts. Now why in hell should it do that? I mean it hurts where it was. Like the air hurts where me finger would be if you hadn’t sliced it off. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t such an important finger. The little one on the left hand, say.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Did you cosh me afterwards or did I do a faint?”

“You fainted.”

“What I thought. Never did that before in me life. And you just sat there cool as ice.”

“No. I went into the other room and was sick to my stomach.”

“Did you? And if I don’t talk now, or don’t tell it straight, you’d do it again?”

“I’d do the thumb next.”

He sighed again. “Not half hard, are you? And then?”

“Use your imagination. An eye, an ear, I don’t know.”

“Holy Bloody Mary. Imagine if the peelers bought your line. They’d never bring a lad in but he’d tell ’em anything they wanted to know. Be no staying out of jail then, would there? And imagine the poor bloody pickpockets with their hooks trimmed down like this. Be the end of crime, wouldn’t it?”

He clucked at the wonder of it. Oh, it would be quite an innovation, I thought. It would return English criminal procedure to the days of the sixteenth century.

I said, “The girl.”

“Oh, you’ll get the whole of it now, mate. The fiddle’s a sweet one. I worked it twice last year and once in the spring, and then in August with your bird. How it works, see, you try to attract the type of bird who’s all alone in the world. They all of ’em come to London, you know. Maybe they’ve got a mother in Ireland that they don’t even write to, or a maiden aunt up in Geordie country, or nobody at all. The others you send away, tell ’em the position’s filled. You do the same with the dogs. They don’t have to be beauties, you know, but they won’t do if they’re too fat or too thin or too old.”

“Go on.”

“Well, you get six or seven, see, just enough but not too many, and then you feed ’em a tale. The first time I made it that we were off to rob a tomb and everybody’d have a share in the plunder. Didn’t go down as well as it might have. Oh, I filled my boat, you know, but some right ones shied away from it.” He smiled suddenly. “Got the tale from the only other man who ever worked this fiddle, him that told me about it when we did a spell at Broadmoor together. And since then somebody put a flick in him, so I’m the only chap who knows it. Made up a better tale since then. I sort of worked in this espionage angle, James Bond and all, and-”

“I know the story.”

“Oh, right, your bird told you. Well. I check ’em all out, see, and then I swear them all to secrecy. Nothing a bird likes better than being trusted with a secret, especially the lost and lonely ones that wouldn’t know who to tell it to anyway. Once they’re sworn to secrecy and once you’ve got the right crew, then you fly the lot of them to Istanbul. That’s in Turkey.”

“I know.”

“Pack the lot of ’em into a Land Rover and just keep driving east. It’s a grand time for them. You get girls who’ve never been out of London in their lives, or spent thirty years in a cottage in Cornwall, and here they’re getting the grand tour. Turkey, Iraq, Persia. I don’t rush ’em, I let ’em have their bit of sightseeing. And you just keep heading east until you get to Kabul. That’s in-”

“ Afghanistan.”

“Right you are, Afghanistan. Never heard of the bloody country before me china put me onto this fiddle, let alone Ka-bloody-bul. Just drive straight on into it. There’s some desperate roads on the way, and this last time I was carrying extra water the whole trip, what with the radiator boiling over, but that’s the only problem there is. Crossing the borders is safe as houses, what with me own passport in order and all of the birds’ too. You have to make sure of that ahead of time, that the birds have their passports right, and the visas and all. Customs is no problem. There’s no smuggling, see, just the lot of birds.”

“And then what?”

“And then there you are in Kabul.”

I looked at him. I had the feeling I was missing a fairly obvious point. He wasn’t lying now. Somehow my act of dedigitation had elevated me to the level of a man he could respect, and he seemed to be telling me the details of his fiddle with a pride akin to Courtney Bede’s delight in showing off his stacks of old newspapers.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you have sex with the girls?”

“With the birds?” He frowned, thinking. “I suppose a chap could if he wanted. You’ll get some who are proper dying for it, but I never fool with any birds that way.”

“Then what in hell do you do with them?”

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “You’re not half thick, are you? Now you can work it out. Here you are in bloody Kabul with six or seven girls, and what do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why, you sell ’em, don’t you see? What the hell else would you do with them?”

I said, “You sell them.”

“And to think you couldn’t guess it! White slaves is what they call it. And a thousand nicker each is what they pay. That’s six or seven thousand a trip, and add a bit of profit on selling the Land Rover and take away the cost of flying ’ em to Turkey and you’re still five or six thousand quid ahead of the game. Just play it out four times a year, say, and-”

“Wait a minute. You sell them. Who buys them?”

“Chap named Amanullah. A great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. Never an argument on price, not once.”

“What happens to the girls?”

“They make brasses of them. Tarts. They’ve a shortage of them over there, do you know?” He gave a short laugh. “Fancy bringing a boatload of tarts to Soho and trying to sell ’em. Be coals to Newcastle all over again.”

“They work in Kabul, then?”

He shrugged. “Got me there. I’d say they don’t, now that I think on it. I’d say they ship ’em out where birds are scarce. For them that work in the mines and such. You know what? I never gave it much thought. Once I sell ’em they’re nothing to me, and it’s hop a plane and Hello, Picadilly! with a purse full of the ready.”

I sat beside him, my mind quite numb, while he added details. I nodded at the right places, put in the right questions, and tried to convince myself that all of this was really happening. I glanced from time to time at his index finger on the floor. It looked like one of those plastic things they sell in novelty shops along with rubber dog shit and dribble glasses. It wasn’t real, and neither was anything else.

He’d never had trouble with the girls until this last trip, he told me. Then two of them got wind of something, Phaedra and a farm girl from the Midlands, and in Baghdad he caught them trying to escape to the British Embassy. “Had to drug them and keep them in a fog the rest of the way. Told the others they were sick with a fever. Cost me a few quid that way, bribing the hacks at the borders. But the rest never did catch on.”

I pumped him for more details about Amanullah and how he could be located. Finally it got through to him that I actually wanted to go to Afghanistan and get Phaedra back. I think this shocked him more than the loss of the finger. All along he had thought that I wanted to muscle in on his racket.

“You must be crackers,” he said. “You’d never find her, and they’d never let you have her. She’s been sold, don’t you see? Oh, you might buy her back, but after a few months of that life, why, what would she be good for? They don’t last long there, you see. That’s why they’ve got a steady need for fresh birds-”

I thought of Phaedra, my little Phaedra, Mama Horowitz’s Deborah. Sweet, virginal Phaedra, who lived with me for a month and emerged intact. It’s not logical just to save yourself, I had told her once. You have to be saving yourself for something.

And what had my Phaedra saved herself for? A whorehouse in Afghanistan?

I stood up. Hyphen – I still didn’t know his name, or much care – was saying something. I had stopped listening. I found the square of adhesive tape and slapped it in place across his horrible mouth.

Julia was in the bedroom. She was pressed up against the far wall, her arms across her chest, hugging herself and silently shaking. She looked like certain pictures of Anne Frank.

“Did you hear any of that?”

She nodded.

“I want you to go into the hallway now. I want to be certain that there’s no one around when I walk out of here. Go out and close the door. I’ll be ready in a moment or two, and I’ll knock on the door. If it’s all clear, return the knock and I’ll come out.”

She nodded again, rigidly, then grabbed up her purse and walked straight to the front room and out the door without looking at him. I went over to him and picked up the cleaver, but it was no good. I took it to the kitchen and exchanged it for a more pointed knife.

He didn’t like the looks of it at all.

I spent a few unintentionally brutal seconds standing there trying to think of something to say, but there was no way to say it and no reason to try. So I put the knife in his heart, and took it out, and put it back a second time and left it there.