Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

So I manfully ignored the cries of help rising from the near-dead, and heroically resisted the temptation to come to the aid of my fellow man, and didn’t even go back to look for my beer. I don’t think I’d have had much luck anyway; the counter was gone, and the charcoal stove, and the chairs, and most of the people. I got the hell out of there as fast as my legs could carry me, which turned out to be somewhat faster than I had suspected. I raced down the block and around the corner, and I very nearly collided with the man with the spade-shaped black beard.

He stared at me. “You’re alive!”

“You speak English,” I said, cleverly.

“Curse you, Tanner! What does it take to kill you?”

He pulled out the world’s biggest pistol and stuck it in my face. “This time you don’t get away,” he said. “Knives don’t work on you, bombs don’t work on you, it’s impossible to drown you. But with a hole in your damned head perhaps it will be different.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, reasonably. “Do you realize what you’re doing? Do you have any idea?”

He stared at me.

“You’re making a terrible mistake.”

“Talk,” he demanded.

“Well,” I said, and kicked him in the groin.

Nothing succeeds likea kick in the groin.

I suppose it must be at least partly psychological. Even when the kick is wide of the mark, men tend to double up and moan for a few moments before they realize that nothing hurts. The mere suggestion of a kick in the cubes is harrowing, and I gave my bearded friend more than the suggestion. I got him right on target, and I put enough into the kick so that it was unlikely that he would ever sire children. Which, considering the type of genes he’d be likely to pass on and the already crowded state of the world, was just as well.

He fell apart. He dropped the gun, which I picked up and tucked into my robe along with the dagger that was my souvenir of his first visit. He dropped himself, too, sprawling on the ground, clutching his crotch with both hands and making perfectly horrible sounds.

Everyone ignored us.

I’m damned if I know why. Whether it was simply that the bombed-out restaurant was a greater source of interest than an argument between two strangers, or whether the basic sense of privacy of the Afghan led him to choose not to get involved I cannot say, but whatever the cause we were left quite alone. I got my bearded friend to his feet and walked him around the corner and into an alleyway. I doubled his arm up behind him so that we would walk where I wanted to walk. He wasn’t very good at walking, choosing to stagger with his thighs as far apart as he could contrive, but I got him into the alley and propped him against the wall, and he stayed propped for almost five seconds before crumpling into a heap on the ground.

“If you’re going to shoot someone,” I said, reasonably, “you should just go ahead and do it. It serves no point to tell him about it first. It just gives him a chance to try and do something about it.”

“You kicked me,” he said.

“Good thinking. I’m glad you’re in condition to think, because this is important. I want you clowns to stop trying to kill me.”

He set his jaw and glared at me.

“Because there’s really no point to it. You know, I had forgotten all about you morons.” I switched to Russian, remembering that they had been speaking it on the boat. “You and Yaakov and Daly and the rest of you. I forgot all about you. You wouldn’t believe what I went through getting here. Did you ever ride a camel? Or try to convince a Kurd that you aren’t spying for the Baghdad government? Or eat zebra sandwiches in Tel Aviv? Of course I forgot about you. It was a pleasure to forget about you.”

“We thought you died in the water.”

“Not quite.”

“And then Peder saw you last night. He saw you enter the town, and Raffo followed you and tried to kill you as you left the coffeehouse.” He lowered his eyes. “He said it was as if you were guided by demons. You dropped to the ground even as the knife was in the middle of the air.”

“Well, the demons told me to.”

“Now I have tried twice and failed twice.” He looked up at me. “You will kill me now?”

“No.”

“You will not kill me?”

“I’d like nothing better,” I said, “but it would be a waste of time. If I kill you they’ll just put somebody else on the job. Look, I want you to take them a message. You seem to think that I’m a threat to you-”

“You know our plans.”

“Not really.”

“And you have come to Afghanistan to thwart them.”

“No, definitely not. Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

“You are a spy and an assassin.”

“Be that as it may, I couldn’t care less about you and your plans. And I don’t really know what they are, except that you’re going to overthrow the government of Afghanistan -”

“Ha! You know!”

“Well, I didn’t think you were over here to get a concession to breed Afghan hounds. But I don’t know the date or the reason or-”

“You arrive in Kabul on the 14th of November and try to have us believe you do not know the coup is to be on the 25th?”

“The 25th?”

“Ha! You know!”

“Well, you just told me, you cretin.” I turned, glanced at the mouth of the alleyway. We were still quite alone. “Look at it this way,” I said. “If I knew anything, or if I cared at all, I could inform someone. That might make sense. But since you already had a make on me, why would I come into Kabul myself? Why wouldn’t I have my organization send someone you don’t know about?”

“It is said that you are very shrewd.”

I looked at the heavens. The sky had grown dark, and I didn’t blame it a bit. He said, “If you would not sabotage our plot, why are you here in Kabul?”

“I’m looking for a girl.”

“You’ll have to go to a whorehouse. The ordinary girls, they will not even talk to strangers.”

“You don’t understand. I’m looking for a girl I happen to know. She was kidnaped and taken to Afghanistan.”

“And where is she?”

“In a whorehouse.”

“Ha! You will have to go to a whorehouse!” His face lighted up, then clouded over. “You talk in riddles,” he said. “You speak nonsense, you are impossible to understand. You tell me there is something you must say to me, and then you kick me in my poor testicles. You told us on the boat you could not speak Russian, and now at this very moment you and I are speaking Russian fluently.”

“Well, your accent’s not so hot.”

“I am Bulgarian.”

“Make things easy for yourself,” I said in Bulgarian. “Just so you get the message. Speak to me in Bulgarian as well, and we shall be at ease with one another, and you can go back to Yaakov with the message, and-”

“You know of Yaakov.”

“Well, I met the sonofabitch. Of course I know of him.”

“It is all a trick,” he said mournfully. “You said on the boat that a man was overboard, and this was not so, and when we looked you were suddenly overboard. Now you say that you will not kill me, so of course I know that you will.”

“I’d like to.”

“Ha!”

“More and more I’d like to.” I thought of the restaurant where I’d had that fine mutton steak, that cashew-flavored beer. The restaurant and all the hungry people in it were now a thing of the past, all because of this little bastard with his bomb.

“But killing you does me more harm than good,” I said. “Look, let’s try it on one more time. I’m not interested in you. I don’t give a damn about your plot or the government of Afghanistan or anything else except the girl I came to Afghanistan to find. I’m not even sure I give a damn about her either, but I certainly care more about her than any of the rest of you. And I also care about staying alive. I don’t want knives in my turban or poison in my wine or walls that explode when I take a leak on them. Don’t interrupt me. All I want is to be left alone. I’ll let you go, and you’ll go back and tell them that. Right?”