Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

I shook my head, not in answer but to clear it of cobwebs. I had thought she meant I should buy one of her girls, but she was more interested in renting than selling.

I turned to look at those sheep-eyed, sad-faced girls. Most of them had left, returning to the long line of men waiting for service, but a few still dawdled about.

“I do not think so,” I said.

“When did you last have a woman? You have not had a woman since you left Kabul.”

“Well-”

“Not since Kabul,” she repeated, her words an accusation. “Know you what happens when a man waits too long between women?”

She began to tell me and I tried not to listen. She was as disheartening as an army training film on the ravages of venereal disease, and the fact that I knew she was crazy didn’t help. It was one thing to know that you were hearing an old madam’s tale; it was another thing to dismiss out of hand the urgent warning that one’s thing would turn green and grow pimples and get smaller and smaller and then drop off entirely. I may not have believed it, but that certainly didn’t mean I wanted to hear about it.

Not since Kabul?

Hell. Not since New York, I thought. There was a beginning with Julia Stokes, but a beginning, you will recall, was all it was; I had been forced to depart before I could arrive. Since then such opportunities as may have existed somehow never seemed worth the trouble. In France, in Tel Aviv, in Iraq and Iran – well, there were girls, certainly; but that’s never reason enough in and of itself to get involved. Not unless one happens to be particularly in the mood. Which, what with all the worry and aggravation and all, I hadn’t happened to be.

And still wasn’t.

“I must go,” I told the fat madam.

“You are less than a man,” she taunted.

“Perhaps.”

“You are a farradóon who would mince as a girl.”

“You are a fat old lady with a face that would cause a clock to cease ticking.”

“Fat!”

I raced for the car.

I drove back to Kandahar and managed to find a petrol pump. I filled the tank and the five-gallon cans once again, and I stopped at a grocery story to fill the rest of the car with food. Anardara was three hundred hard miles from Kandahar, and I had no idea how long the trip would take or what my chances might be of getting food or drink along the way. I bought hunks of flat bread and a large round cheese, and for drinking I took two dozen bottles of Coca-Cola.

Well, that was what they had. They have it everywhere. In parts of the world where the natives have never heard of America, everybody drinks Coca-Cola. Little kids in Asia and Africa start drinking the stuff before they’re old enough to have their second teeth, and so it has a chance at their baby teeth first. In villages throughout the world, the first two words of English everyone learns – often the only words of English – are Coca and Cola.

So far the Russians haven’t been able to invent it. Their finest spies have been unable to penetrate the iron-clad security system in Atlanta, where the Coca-Cola formula is guarded more carefully than the most precious of atomic secrets. All efforts to break it down chemically have met with utter failure. Nobody really knows what’s in it.

I had some bread, I had some cheese, I drank a warm Coke.

I hit the road.

The Wicked Witch of the Westhad lost an eye to some loathsome disease. She had never bothered to replace it with a glass eye and did not wear a patch, either. Nor was she wearing a Hathaway shirt, which was just as well, because she would have set their image back immeasurably. Aside from the gaping, red-rimmed eye socket that glared at one, she wasn’t particularly bad looking. Her body was well proportioned and her face would have been attractive.

She compensated for her relative shortage of deformities by reeking. She was the rankest-smelling female in the world, and it was not necessary for me to smell every woman on earth to make this statement. She stank; her breath was enough to curdle Coca-Cola and her flatulence suggested a lifelong diet of nothing but baked beans. I don’t think she ever bathed; if she did, the Farah Rud River would have a water pollution problem.

“You come from Amanullah!” She slapped me on the back, put her mouth to my ear for a confidential whisper. I tried to do something about my nostrils. “He is my good friend,” she hissed. (You couldn’t hiss this in English, but the Afghan for it is full of sibilants. Don’t quibble.) “My very good friend,” she went on, still hissing. “Always he brings me my very best girls. So many of the maradóosh, they are not lovely, they do not please men, they bleed, they get sick, they die. Often they are diseased, and men complain later that their members have been set afire and immersed in acid. But from Amanullah I obtain always only the very finest, the milk of the milk. The best girl in this house is a girl Amanullah sold me.”

“One of them,” I said, “is a girl he should not have sold you. I must repurchase her.”

“I do not sell my girls, kâzzih. ”

“Amanullah wishes to buy her himself. I am his agent.”

“Oh?”

I showed her the letter. “You see? He will pay your price for the girl, whatever you declare your price to be. And of course you know that Amanullah is a man of his word, that his word is to be trusted.”

“It is so.”

“The girl is called Phaedra Harrow,” I said. “Or perhaps she is called Deborah Horowitz.”

“You do not know her name?”

“It is one of the two.”

“But I know neither name,” she said, punctuating the remark flatulently. I took an involuntary step backwards. “I give them new names when they come into my house, and they learn their new names even as they learn their new lives. The old names cease to have any importance for them. They are even buried under their new names.”

“I see.”

“So these names mean nothing.”

I took out the photograph and showed it to her. She leaned forward expectantly and her black hair brushed at my nose. The odor that rose from it was absolutely incredible. It staggered the mind, to say nothing of the nostrils. My olfactory nerves were utterly unnerved. I winced at the stench, and the madam recoiled at the photo.

“She who is alive,” she said.

One hears not merely words but the thoughts they comprise; otherwise none of us could speak nearly as quickly as we do and hope to be understood. And so what I heard her say was “She who is not alive,” because it made more sense. One doesn’t expect a person to look at a picture and recoil in horror at the thought that the pictured individual is alive. Our necrophilic culture may be headed in that direction, but so far it hasn’t quite arrived.

So I thought she meant that Phaedra was dead.

Over a period of time people become their images, become their role in one’s life. It takes a shock to remind one how one really regards various individuals. My mother, I remember, used to say in jest that I would not really appreciate her until she was gone. She was not serious; I guess the maudlin mush of this particular cliché appealed to her as a sort of verbal camp. And I had appreciated her, of course; we were quite close. But one day one of my aunts called, broken-voiced, to tell me that Mother had somehow died, and it turned out that she had been right all along. I hadn’t really appreciated her before, not as I did then.

I said, “The girl is dead?”

A moment’s hesitation. Then, with a rush of words packaged in foul air, “Ah, yes, yes, you speak the truth, kâzzih. The girl is dead.”

“The hell she is.”

“Eh?”