Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

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.