Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 5

I looked at all those policemen, and I turned around and walked back around the corner. It never occurred to me to wonder why they were there. I certainly hadn’t expected them, but it was patently obvious that they had come for me, and that it was more than illegal entry that had brought them. I walked quietly round the corner and down the street and around another corner, and although it went right on raining I was no longer bothered by it. There but for the grace of coitus interruptus, thought I, go I, down the drain.

I offered a silent prayer of gratitude for Nigel’s early rising and Julia’s modesty. A brief prayer. After all, it was only decent that something went right for a change, and on balance I was still far behind. I was coatless and brollieless and wanted for murder by the most efficient police force in the free world. And I couldn’t turn myself in and try to prove my innocence because I didn’t happen to be innocent.

How much did they know? It was important to find this out before I did anything, and it was also important to get as far from London as possible before they spread the alarm. If they knew no more about me than that I had been a guest of Nigel and Julia Stokes, then I could leave the country more or less as planned. If they knew my name and had a picture of me, then the plans were useless. And new ones called for.

I took a bus to Portsmouth some seventy miles southwest of London. The trip took two hours and I spent them both with my face hidden in a morning newspaper. There was nothing in the paper about me or Mr. Hyphen. In Portsmouth I ate eggs and chips at a horrible café and went to a movie house. I saw the last half of an old Doris Day movie, a short on lobster trapping, a UPA cartoon, a slew of commercials, coming attractions for something, and the first half of the Doris Day movie. I stayed and saw the last half over a second time in the hope that they would change the ending this time through and let Rock Hudson lay her, but they didn’t and he didn’t. After my experiences with Phaedra and Julia, I was left with the feeling that the movie was true to life.

I went to another café and had steak and chips and some very bitter coffee, then found another cinema and saw an Italian thing in which everyone laid everyone else but no one enjoyed it much. Least of all the audience. When it ended I wasn’t hungry, so I went straight on to another theater and saw an English film based on the Great Train Robbery. The police were magnificently efficient in the film and everyone got caught at the end, so this one did even less for my morale than the other two. I was beginning to worry that Portsmouth might run out of movies before I ran out of spare time, but the third movie was the charm; when I left the theater the evening papers were on the street. I bought both of the London dailies, and they both had what I was looking for. One called it MULTILATION AND MURDER IN SOHO SIN FLAT. The other said AMERICAN SOUGHT IN SOHO TORTURE SLAYING. Aside from that, they both told about the same story. They both spelled my name right, and they both used the same photograph over it.

I read them in the lavatory of a side-street pub. They did not make me very happy. It was all my own fault, of course. I had left fingerprints all over the murder flat, mainly because it never occurred to me not to. I didn’t suspect that the English authorities would have my prints on file. Evidently they had obtained them a while back from Washington, because the body of Arthur Hook had not been discovered until shortly after midnight, and they could hardly have run a check through Washington that quickly.

It was fingerprints that put them onto me, but it was the two useless guns that told them where to look for me. The police identified them as theatrical props, routed people out of bed to check out various prop departments, and had them connected to Nigel in no time at all. I was beginning to appreciate why Scotland Yard enjoyed its extraordinary reputation. But not even the best police force on earth can cope with dumb luck, which was why I was in Portsmouth instead of jail.

Someone knocked on the lavatory door. I grunted in-articulately and went on reading. According to both articles, I was a Jacobite fanatic and known terrorist, and a variety of odd theories were advanced as probable explanations of my connection with Arthur Hook (alias Smythe-Carson, alias Wyndham-Jones). He had an interesting criminal record and I’m sure no one much regretted his death, but this didn’t mean they weren’t interested in getting their hands on his killer. All air and sea ports were being watched, all ticket offices had been circularized. Special attention was being paid to the Scottish border in view of my Jacobite connections.

This last bothered me. If I was going to get out of England, I was going to need help, and other members of the Jacobite League seemed like my best chance. They share my hope of chasing Betty Battenberg off the throne and restoring the venerable House of Stuart. There were any number of loyal men in the Scottish Highlands who would have sheltered me, but it looked as though that was precisely where the Yard would look first.

Another knock at the door. I folded the papers, grunted again, gave the loo an unnecessary flush, and sidled out of the door to keep the room’s new occupant from seeing my face. It was wasted effort; he was far more interested in the room than in its previous tenant, and I walked on through the pub and out into the street.

The Jacobites were out, I decided. And now that Nigel had been picked up, the Flat-Earth people might well be under surveillance. Even if this weren’t the case, I couldn’t quite see running to them now. A man has to be something of a nonconformist to uphold the theory that the earth is flat, but this does not imply his readiness to grant sanctuary to a murderer.

I had to find some political extremists, and I had to go somewhere close, and I had to deal with people who were in the habit of traveling from one country to another without going through customs. Of course I could use my passport once I was well out of England, but-

The hell I could. It was in my jacket pocket, and my jacket, when last seen, was in Nigel’s living room.

I found another pub. There were only a few drinkers in it, and none of them had newspapers. I ordered a double scotch and a pint of bitter, remembering to put on an Irish accent. People almost always hear discrepancies between one’s speech and their own, so the trick is to give them an alternative set of discrepancies. If I had tried an approximation of the local speech I would have sounded American. This way I merely sounded Irish, which was unusual enough to be noticed but not likely to be long remembered.

I thought of trying some IRA friends. I knew some names and addresses in Liverpool and one in Manchester, plus any number in Ireland. But Ireland was an ocean away, and the few in England were still a good distance from Portsmouth.

Oh, of course. The CSU.

While auto theft is not as exclusively American a crime as kidnaping, it remains generally rare in England. Even in London few drivers take the trouble to lock their cars, and outside of the major cities it’s common practice to leave keys in the ignition. I hate to lower someone’s high opinion of human nature, but it was that or risk a bus or train, so I wandered through Portsmouth until I found a Morris 1000 with the key in it and no one watching it.

This was less than a miracle. The remarkable thing was that the car had over half a tank of gas, more than enough to get me to Cornwall. After the extravagance of movies and drinks, I had only eight or nine shillings left. My money belt still held a thousand dollars, but the idea of attempting to change an American fifty-dollar bill at a petrol station left me colder than the rain, which was still falling and which the windshield wipers of the Morris were having a tough time with.

Minor problem, that. I kept my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, and the Morris, while not a good car, was a good enough car, and on we went. Cosham, Southampton, Dorchester, Honiton, Exeter, Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin, Fraddon, and Truro. And just past Truro, at the end of a lonely ill-paved road, the thatched cottage where lived Arthur Poldexter, corresponding secretary of the Cornish chapter of the Celtic-Speaking Union.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Celtic-Speaking Union. Not many people have. The organization came into being just a few years ago, spurred largely by the parliamentary success of Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and the concommitant interest in linguistic nationalism. The CSU is a five-branched nationalist movement aimed at joining in a loose political federation those geographical areas where Celtic languages prevailed longest. The five areas are Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the French province of Brittany.

It would probably be infinitely easier to repeal the Law of Gravity than to transform the Celtic-Speaking Union into a political reality. This is nowhere more demonstrably the case than in Cornwall, where the old Celtic language of Cornish ceased to exist well over a century ago. As far as I was concerned, this only made the efforts of Arthur Poldexter and his fellows all the more admirable. Two of them, Ardel Tresillian and George Pollifax, had worked up a painstaking reconstruction of the Cornish language; I own a mimeographed copy of their manual and will study it as soon as I find the time.

I parked the Morris at the end of the lane and walked along a winding flagstone path, wishing as I walked that I had taken the time to learn Cornish properly. I knew just two words, and when the door opened to my knock I used them. “Free Cornwall!” I said.

Arthur Poldexter’s black eyes flashed in his ruddy face. He had no idea who I might be or what I might want, but I was a Cornish speaker and that was all that mattered. He gripped my shoulders, pulled me inside, and launched a flood of words at me.

I didn’t understand any of them.

“You must go to France, Evan. To Brittany – that would be best. The French police cooperate with the British, but there are comrades of ours among the Breton peasantry. I know several, and Pendennis and Trelease know others, and for sure you’ve friends there yourself. We should hide you here as long as you wish, but this evil land’s no sanctuary for you. What we know as an act of political assassination those in power call a murder. It must be Brittany for you, Evan.”

We had switched to English. Poldexter spoke a strongly accented English, but he was an educated man and was thus easier to follow than many of the locals might have been. He had not seen the newspapers yet. I gave him a version of the circumstances that was closer to the official story than the truth, figuring that the Jacobite League would get more of a response from him than some nonsense about white slavery in Afghanistan. He was instantly sympathetic and anxious to provide shelter. He went out to park the car where it would not be seen, and his little birdlike wife dished out a bowl of lamb stew and poured a huge mug of good brown ale for me.

“I’ll be making inquiries,” he assured me. “It’s a smuggler’s coast, this one. We’re few of us in the movement, but every man has friends, and friends in this part of the world know when to ask questions and when to be still. There’s some I know that make night time voyages to the French coast, and what they take across is not what they bring back. Round Dover, now, is where the crossing’s easiest and the smuggling thickest. There ’tis twenty mile across, and here nearer a hundred mile, but then at Dover the officials keep a keener watch. We’ll lay a bed for you now and you’ll sleep the night, and in the morning we will see what’s to be done for you.”

It was easier to let his wife make up a bed beside the fire than to explain why I didn’t need one. I nursed a jar of ale until sunrise. Arthur Poldexter left after breakfast, first furnishing me with his files of correspondence so that I might jot down some contacts in Brittany.

I didn’t bother doing this – once across the Channel I could manage on my own – but I did get involved in the correspondence. The Celtic-Speaking Union seemed to be stronger in Brittany than I had realized. I was still reading when he returned.

He brought good news and bad. The bad was in the morning paper, a copy of the Times with a story which made it obvious that the authorities were extremely interested in capturing me, and that both Nigel and Julia had been taken into custody. I felt bad about involving them and only hoped they would have the sense to throw all the blame upon me.

But the bad news was predictable, and the good news was enough to offset it. A man named Trefallis or something like that knew a man who knew a man who was taking a midnight run to France that very night. The ship would leave Torquay in Devonshire after sunset and would arrive somewhere near Cherbourg before dawn. They would want money, he told me. Perhaps as much as thirty pounds. Had I that sum?

“In American dollars,” I said. “But it might be better if they didn’t know I was American.”

“It would be better if they knew nought of you. I’ve a friend who would change your dollars, but you’d lose some on the exchange.”

Thirty pounds comes to seventy-two dollars. I gave Poldexter two fifties, figuring that even heavy robbery on the exchange wouldn’t net me less than thirty pounds. He came back with forty pounds and ten shillings and an apology, telling me sadly that I should be receiving another pound, three more shillings, and fourpence, or a hot $2.80. You can’t do better than that at a bank.

It was a clear day, with fair weather forecast through the following afternoon. I passed the afternoon walking in the fields. It was beautiful country, rugged and windswept and raw, and at a better time I would have enjoyed myself greatly. But there were too many things on my mind.

After dinner I played at altering my appearance, but there wasn’t very much I could do. The Scotland Yard photo had been taken when my hair was shorter than it was presently, so cutting it was purposeless. Nor was there time to grow a beard or moustache. I confined my efforts to making myself look less American. I lengthened my sideburns a half-inch with charcoal and changed my own clothes for some of yet another friend of my hosts whose name I don’t remember except that it began with Pol or Pen or Tre, as did they all – By Pol and Tre and Pen/Ye may know the Cornish men, as the old rhyme has it. I wound up with a heavy tweed jacket patched at the elbows and a rubberized mackintosh. And I played with my facial expression and worked on my brogue; I would be a Liverpudlian running out on a forgery charge, if anyone wanted to know.

By seven-thirty it was time to leave. A lad named Pensomething was driving me to Torquay in his father’s Vauxhall, and Poldexter had arranged to keep my stolen Morris until someone needed a ride to London, where it could be safely abandoned. We said our good-byes all around, toasted Free Cornwall as an equal partner in the Celtic-Speaking Union, and away I went. The Vauxhall was even worse than the Morris but at least I didn’t have to drive it.

I don’t know much about boats. The one I boarded at Torquay was about twenty feet long and it had a downstairs and an upstairs which I know aren’t called that. I guess you call them “topside” and “below,” but I wouldn’t swear to it. I really don’t know much about boats beyond the fact that it’s better to be on them than in the water. I also know that starboard is the right and port is the left, unless it’s the other way around.

Fortunately I didn’t really have to know much. I bargained with the captain and wound up paying twenty-five pounds for my passage, which was five less than I’d anticipated. Then I got on board and found a nice quiet corner and pretended to go to sleep. More men got aboard, and some of them loaded crates of something into the downstairs part of the ship, call it what you will. I went on pretending to be asleep, and I kept up this pretense until we were well under way, at which point it became impossible to go on because sleeping men do not vomit, and I had to.

One other thing I know about boats – if you have to throw up, you don’t do it into the wind. I threw up correctly and felt quite proud of myself. I was standing at the rail feeling proud of myself when a thin dark man with a spade-shaped beard came over and stood beside me. “You are not so much of a sailor,” he said dolefully.

“I picked the right side,” I said.

“How is this?”

“I didn’t puke into the wind,” I said. “I went to the port side and-”

“But this is the starboard side.”

“Precisely,” I said.

I escaped from him, regained my quiet corner and wrapped my mackintosh around me. It wasn’t raining but it might as well have been, because the Channel was choppy and there was enough of a wind to keep an icy spray zinging over the deck. For this I had left October in New York.

I heard footsteps approaching and forced myself not to look up. The steps ceased. Beside me, a man cleared his throat laboriously. I ignored this, but he was not a man to be ignored. He sat down on the deck beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You,” he said.

I made a pretense of coming groggily awake. I blinked at him. He was a young giant with shaggy blond hair beneath a black beret. His face was a mass of amorphous dough, almost featureless, marked by diagonal scars on both cheeks.

“Ho,” he grunted. “You sick, hah? You want cup soup? Hah?”

I thanked him but explained that I didn’t want a cup of soup just now.

“Tsigarette?”

Not that either, I said. Nothing just now, but thanks all the same.

“Is bad sea. Not to worry that you sick.”

His accent was hard to place. There was a Baltic undertone to it, and if I’d had to guess I’d have labelled him Finnish or Estonian.

“You American?”

“Irish,” I said.

“Irish. Hah.”

He went away. An odd crew, I decided. One expects smugglers to be natives of the port from which they operate. On the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, smuggling has long been a family occupation, with the tricks of the trade passed down from father to son over the centuries. It seemed odd that this particular smuggler would have put together a crew of foreigners. The Baltic giant was no native of Devon, nor was the dark man with the spade-shaped beard, who, now that I thought about it, had a definite flavor of Eastern Europe in his voice.

Time passed slowly. Most of the men were downstairs, and I was torn between a desire to join them – obviously it would be warmer there, with the wind less of a factor – and the stronger desire to stay by myself. The channel crossing was something like eighty miles, and I had no idea how long it was going to take. The boat did seem to be traveling at a good pace, but I had no idea what that might mean in knots – or what knots meant in real miles per hour.

I suppose we were halfway across when the Irishman sat down next to me.

“I’m told you’re a kinsman of mine,” he said. “Where are ye from?”

I looked at him. I couldn’t place his accent. “Then you’re Irish yourself,” I said.

“I am.”

That was no help. I said something about Liverpool.

“And you’re after saying good-day to Mother England, are ye?”

“I am that.”

“Not one of those IRA lunatics, I hope.”

“Oh, hardly that,” I said. “It seems I wrote a check and put some other lad’s name on the bottom of it, do you see?”

He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. He told me his name was John Daly, and that his home was in County Mayo, and he’d spent some good days in Liverpool. Just where did I live in Liverpool? And did I know this chap, and that chap, and-

Someone called him about then, and he slapped me on the back again. “More bloody orders,” he said. “What you get when you take up with foreigners. They won’t keep me long, and I’ve a bit of holy water I’ll bring with me when I can. We’ll have ourselves a few jars and talk about the old place, shall we?”

“Ah, God save ye,” I said, or something like that.

And God help me, I thought. Something rather odd was going on and I seemed to be somewhere in the middle of it, along with being somewhere in the middle of the English Channel. I wondered whether he believed I was Irish or whether he was playing along with me. I wondered if we would ever get to France. I wondered why the crew was composed of so many foreigners. I wondered whatever had prompted me to leave New York.

A little while later I found out. The foreigners weren’t members of the crew.

They were the cargo.

I was feigning sleep again when I got the message. Evidently my act was a good one, because a trio of men in leather jackets passed me without notice and stood talking at the rail. The group did not include any of the men I had previously spoken to. With the steady roar of the wind, I could not at first make out any of what they were saying, but they did not sound English. Then the wind died down a bit, and it became evident that the reason they did not sound English is that they were speaking Russian.

I caught a few words here, a few words there. They were talking about guns and supplies and explosives and revolution. I listened intently while the wind blew up and died down, blew up and died down again. It was extremely frustrating. My Russian is fluent, but with the noise the wind was making I would have had trouble understanding them whatever language they spoke. On top of that they seemed to be speaking a dialect of Russian with which I was not familiar, so that of those words which were intelligible there were some I had trouble understanding.

Still, I got the gist of it. They were on their way to some country where the groundwork was already being laid for a revolution.

They were set to overthrow a government.

When they went away, leaving me with no idea of just what government they were overthrowing, or when, or why, I pulled the mackintosh over my head and thought about frying pans and fires. It occurred to me that all of this was some extraordinarily involved put-on concocted for my benefit. This was a tempting theory, and in a way it made as much sense as anything else. Because why on earth would a batch of Russian agents be sneaking across the English Channel in a smuggler’s boat? And what government were they going to overthrow?

“Ah, there ye are!” It was Daly, my Irish friend, with a leather-covered flask in his hand. He sat cross-legged beside me, opened the flask, and took a long drink. “Bedad, there’s no better remedy for the cold.”

He sighed and passed the flask to me. “Slainte,” I said, and drank. It wasn’t just what my stomach had in mind, but by now I was used to the roll of the sea. Besides, the hell with what my stomach had in mind. A good draught of Irish whiskey was certainly what my mind had in mind, and right now that seemed the most important consideration.

He said, “Bloody Rooshians and Ukrahoonians and God knows what-all.” He took another drink and passed the flask to me again. I drank. “The lads ye have to work with in this bloody business. A couple of fine boys like you and myself, there should be a better place for us than this slogging old tub and this mucking ocean. Sure, and half an hour more and we’ll be in France.”

“A long way from County Mayo,” I said.

“Too far to walk, eh?” We laughed, and he had a drink and I had a drink. “Oh, a good long walk from County Mayo, and more than a hop skip jump from Liverpool, too. But France is still a damn sight closer to home than Afghanistan, I’d say.”

I went numb. I said, “How did you know I was going to Afghanistan?”

He looked at me, and I looked at him, and that went on for longer than was entirely comfortable. “Bejasus,” he said finally. “Then you’re for it, too, are ye?”

“Uh-”

“Those bloody Rooshians. Here we are like McGinnis and McCarthy, two Irishmen in on the same show and neither bloody one knows that the other one’s there. Do ye believe it now? Have ye ever heard its like?”

Oh, I thought, stupidly. He hadn’t meant that Afghanistan was a long ways from Ireland for me to be. He had meant it was a long ways from Ireland for him to be. Which meant that he and the bloody Rooshians were on their way to just that spot, which in turn meant that I suddenly knew what government it was that they intended to overthrow. And which also meant, now that I had opened my idiot mouth, that he thought I was a part of the group, bound for the same destination with the same purpose, and-

Oh.

“And here’s everyone saying you’re only a paying guest the captain was greedy enough to take on, and you not knowing about us or we about you. Why, I’ll let them know how things stand.”

“No, don’t do that.”

“What, and contend with these foreigners meself? Let the bleeders know from the start they’ve two Irish lads to deal with.”

“Have another drink first,” I suggested.

“Have it for me,” he said, passing me the flask. “I won’t be a minute.”

I took a long drink, shuddered, capped the flask. I had made a grave mistake, but now that I thought about it I could see how it might work out for the best. If they were really a crew of spies and saboteurs en route to Afghanistan, and if they were fool enough to accept me as one of their own, things might be infinitely easier. I could forget about the headaches of border-hopping. I’d just tag along with them, and when the whole bunch of us got to Afghanistan I could slip away and find Phaedra while they were busy billing and couping. I didn’t know very much about the government of Afghanistan, but I’ve long felt that most governments are better overthrown, and if they put up with slavery, that makes them even better candidates for a coup d’etat. So if my shipmates would get me into the country, they were then welcome to do as they pleased with it.

I had another drink, a long one, and by the time Daly came back with four of his friends in tow, I was feeling positively giddy.

“So we’re all of us bound for Afghanistan,” I said. “Fancy that.”

“No one tells us of you,” the bearded one said.

“Nor I of you, for that matter. I received my instructions, how to cross the Channel and where to go. I thought I was to meet up with you on the other side.”

“Where?”

“I was to receive further instructions at a drop in Cherbourg.”

They looked at each other. “From whom did you receive orders?”

“A man called Jonquil. I do not know his actual name.”

“Which section are you?”

“Section Eight,” I said.

“You are in Section Eight and you were assigned to this operation?”

“I was requisitioned for it. Through Section Three.”

“Ah, that has more sense to it.” Thank heavens for that, I thought. “But this is most remarkable.” The man with the spade-shaped beard turned to a chunky man with a bald head and cheap false teeth. “Get Yaakov,” he said, in Russian.

“He sleeps.”

“He has slept since he boarded this garbage scow. Wake him.”

“He will be displeased.”

“Tell him such are the penalties of leadership.” He turned to me. I looked blank. In English he asked me if I spoke Russian. I told him I did not, and he told me that Yaakov, the leader of the expedition, would come to have a look at me. While we waited, we chatted pleasantly about the wind and the condition of the sea. The crossing was slower than anticipated, I was told, but in another fifteen minutes we should be reaching shore. I looked for France out ahead of the boat, but I could see nothing but inky blackness.

And then Yaakov made his appearance.

He didn’t look as though he was in charge of anything. What he really looked like was Woody Allen, small and skinny and ineffectual. He peered myopically at me through thick horn-rimmed glasses, while the man with the beard explained in Russian who I was and what I was doing there.

Yaakov asked if I spoke Russian. I looked as blank as ever, and the bearded man said I didn’t. Yaakov nodded, fastened his eyes on me again, and smiled shyly.

I returned the smile.

In Russian he said, “You are all fools. This man is not Irish but American. His name is Evan Tanner, he is an assassin who killed a man in London. He is not one of us at all. He is a spy and an assassin.” He was still smiling the same shy smile, and his voice was very gentle. “I am going below now,” he went on. “I will not be disturbed again until we reach the shore. Have the sense to kill this man and throw him overboard.”

They were all looking at me. My friend Daly had evidently not understood the speech. The others had, however. Their faces showed that they had altered their opinions of me.

So I spun to my right and bellowed, “Man overboard!”

They turned to look. I shrugged my mackintosh off my shoulders and looped it over the head and shoulders of the man immediately to my left. While he was clawing at it I dodged around him and raced for the rail. I had time for another fleeting thought of frying pans and fires, and then I vaulted the rail, and then I was in the water.