Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

A dreadful picture.

And yet, I thought, it was no worse than the picture of her surviving the initial assault. Because if she had to take on thirty or forty or fifty men a day, then it still amounted to the same thing. Either way she was doomed to get herself screwed to death. It was only a question of time; it might take a night or it might take a year, but the outcome, God help her, seemed preordained.

I stretched out in dewy grass. I had been on my feet for what seemed rather like forever, and it was time to let the muscles roll out and the brain go blank. The muscles weren’t that much trouble. They rarely are. You take one part of your body at a time and tighten it as hard as you can, and then you let it relax all the way. You sort of work your way around your body until everything is limp, and when you tune in on yourself you can feel your muscles sort of pulsing with the coolness of it all. Some of the less voluntary muscles in the eyes and inside the head are the most common trouble spots, but if you get the technique down pat you can develop more than the usual amount of control over those muscles. This won’t let you show off at parties, since the whole process is invisible, but it does mean that you can get rid of most headaches just by rearranging your head. It’s easier than swallowing all that aspirin.

Blanking the mind was something else again. My mind was all knotted up and I couldn’t get it to let go and relax. I found myself wondering if maybe someday I shouldn’t try getting into the whole process a little deeper. Pay a visit to one of the Indian ashrams and let some guru teach me the higher path to meditation upon the verities of the cosmos. I could even take Phaedra along, for that matter. Her name, after all, had originally been Deborah Horowitz.

Still, she didn’t look guruish.

I thought about that pun, and I generalized upon the confusion attendant upon the whole business of punning mentally in one language while holding a conversation in another. And I thought, too, that if I couldn’t think of anything better to think about, I really ought to blank my mind, because no mind needed to be burdened with this sort of garbage. And I thought of this, and I thought of that, and I thought of the other thing, and then I thought of other other things.

And then the clown stepped on my hand.

It was a pretty strange feeling, let me tell you. I may not have blanked my mind, admittedly, but I had relaxed myself to the point where I was not overwhelmingly involved with my surroundings. So while I suppose he was walking softly on tippy-toes, I’m sure he was making some noise, however slight. But I was sufficiently out of it not to notice, and he returned the favor by not seeing me. I don’t suppose he expected that there would be someone lying out on the lawn at four-thirty in the morning. That again made us even. I for my part hadn’t expected that some joker would step on my hand at that hour.

What happened next happened quickly. I gave a yell and a yank, and he gave a yell and a stumble, and he fell down even as I was coming up. We spent awhile hitting each other, with him doing somewhat better at that than I was doing, until I remembered that I had a gun in my robe. I fumbled around and found it and dragged it out and started flailing away with it. I guess I hit a few non-vital parts of him first, arms and legs, because he made a lot of unhappy noises and suggested that my mother was the sort who walked around on four legs and said woof a lot. Then I got him on the head, which was what I had in mind all along, and the gun butt made a satisfying noise as it bounced off his thick skull, and he made a satisfying noise and he grunted and flopped to the ground, and I gave a satisfied sigh as I rolled out from under him and ran my hands over myself to find out what was broken. It turned out that nothing was, which struck me as worth another satisfied sigh, which I proceeded to utter.

Prowlers, burglars and sneak thieves. I supposed that a wealthy man like Amanullah would be often troubled by them, even in a city he had characterized as peaceful. And evidently this sneak thief had been scared witless by trodding upon my hand, because instead of running like a rabbit he had stood his ground like – well, like a cornered rabbit. And he’d fought dirty, the sonofabitch. And he had nerve calling me a sonofabitch, the sonofabitch, because it was he who was a-

Wait a minute.

“Sonofabitch” wasn’t Pushtu. “Sonofabitch” was English.

I rolled the son of an English bitch over onto his back and got a look at his face. But I was wrong; he was a son of an Irish bitch. It was good old What’s-His-Name from the boat. The one who had signed on with all those bloody Rooshians. The kid from County Mayo. And what in hell was his name, come to think of it?

He opened an eye.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “what’s your name again?”

“I knew you wasn’t Irish,” he said. “Knew it all along, and here you are talking in your natural tones, and it’s sick I am that I let myself be taken in by you.” He opened the other eye. “You tricked me,” he said, accusingly. “Snuck up and caught me by the heel and pulled me down without even a fare-thee-well. Hell of a thing to do, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t ask you,” I said reasonably, I think. “Didn’t sneak up on you, either. You stepped on my hand.”

“I hope I bloody broke it.”

Enough. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” I said, and I hit him over the head again with the gun, and he went night-night. I had no sooner done this than I felt fairly stupid about it. It was a pleasure, certainly, but it didn’t exactly accomplish anything. Now that I had him at a disadvantage, I should either have been giving him a message for his employers or learning information from him. Instead I had knocked him out.

I went into Amanullah’s house and went absolutely crazy looking for something to tie the bastard up with. I didn’t want to cut off a lamp cord or otherwise abuse my host’s hospitality, and I couldn’t find any wire or twine that wasn’t already serving in some important capacity. I gave up and went outside again. Daly was still cold. I frisked him and found an Irish passport in the name of Brian McCarthy, a.22 automatic with a full clip in it, a billfold holding some Afghan notes and a sheaf of English and Irish pounds, a packet of Wood-bines, and a condom made in the state of New Jersey. The latter two items seemed of no possible benefit to me, so I returned them to his pockets.

He still didn’t come to.

I broke open the.22, took the clip out and heaved it into a bed of tiger lilies. I would wait until he woke up, I decided, and then I would impress him with my sincerity. This seemed more necessary than ever, because the bastards just weren’t giving up. Evidently the vulgar Bulgar with the spade-shaped beard had not been convinced that I was no threat to their coup. Or, if I’d made my point with him, he’d had no luck selling it to the rest of them.

Because it was pretty obvious that Daly (or McCarthy, or whoever he really was) had not come to Amanullah’s house to borrow a cup of sugar for his tay. He had come to kill me, and perhaps to kill Amanullah in the bargain.

Which meant that they hadn’t given up. Which meant, too, that they had a hell of an accomplished organization going for them, because somehow they had managed to follow us to Amanullah’s or get word of who I had met or something. Whatever it was, they had done it, all right.

He was still out cold. I looked at him and decided that I had never seen anyone look more unconscious.

“Wake up, you idiot,” I told him, “because I’m going to have to chase around from whorehouse to whorehouse, and it is going to be less than a pleasure to have you idiots trying to kill me. So wake up and I’ll explain it to you all over again.”