Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

“Not much of a hand at this sort of thing, sir? If you try to move when he moves, do you see-”

“He bounces,” I said.

“A good gait, he has. You move with him, see.”

I moved with him whether I wanted to or not. We cut west on Ste. Catherine, moving inexorably toward downtown Montreal. I asked where exactly we were going and Rowland gave me the address, but it didn’t do me much good; it was a street I hadn’t heard of before. It didn’t really matter, I decided. Uncomfortable as the ride might be, the next few days or weeks or months promised to be considerably less comfortable.

I couldn’t take the kidnaping charge seriously; Jerzy would withdraw that soon enough, one way or the other. But there was still enough potential doom in the air without it. And Minna’s absence, I decided, was far more sinister than I had at first realized. Perhaps the Cubans had machine-gunned her in the courtyard. Perhaps the Argentinians had kidnaped her for the white slave trade. Perhaps some agents from the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had recognized her as the rightful Queen of Lithuania. Perhaps someone from the Israeli Pavilion wanted to use her blood to make unleavened bread. Perhaps-

Hell. I had accepted the Cuban Pavilion assignment, after having been provided with every possible opportunity to cop out. Now it was impossible to carry it out. Everything had already gone wrong, and once I disappeared inside whatever sort of fortress the Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintained for American kidnapers, I would be completely out of control; even more things could go wrong, and there wouldn’t be anything on earth I could do about them.

There is a sort of situation in which the thinking processes quickly wither utterly away, leaving in their wake an animal who lives wholly in the present and responds automatically and instinctively. And so, though I would rather prefer to say that I planned what happened next, I can honestly make no such claim. It sort of happened.

We were approaching the intersection of Ste. Catherine and Rue de la Something. The light was green. Chevalier and Tom had already crossed the intersection, and we were moving into it, Prince Hal and Rowland and I. I was perched on the horse’s neck and feeling like one, and Sergeant Rowland had one arm over my shoulder, the reins in his hand, and Prince Hal, for his part, was proceeding at what I guess was a brisk trot.

So I grabbed the reins in one hand and tugged back hard, and then I dropped them momentarily to take Rowland’s arm in both hands, one at the elbow and the other back near the shoulder. I couldn’t really get my back into the maneuver, but the sudden cessation of forward movement on Prince Hal’s part made up for what I lacked in leverage, and I supplied a sort of pivotal movement with my shoulders and ducked my head and threw up and out with both arms, and Sergeant William Rowland of the RCMP sailed over first my head and then Prince Hal’s head before landing upon his own.

I sort of bounced backward, aiming for the saddle. This didn’t work as well as it might have – I hadn’t remembered about the saddle horn – but I did wind up in the right place. I snatched up the reins in my right hand. I’m not sure which hand you’re supposed to hold the reins in, if it matters. I aimed my feet at the stirrups and couldn’t reach them. So I pulled Prince Hal’s head around sharply to the right, and I kicked my unstirruped feet into the sides of his rib cage, and the noble beast took off down Rue de la Something as if someone had told him the randiest mare in creation was waiting at the next corner.

I held on for dear life. If I had planned all this, I might have begun praying, but it didn’t occur to me.

One of thefew nice things about a horse is that it is no more likely to ask questions than an automobile and is almost as apt to do what you want it to do. Prince Hal behaved commendably. With the shouts of onlookers echoing around us, with cries of “Halt!” to our rear, and with even an occasional gunshot whistling overhead, Prince Hal put his ears back and galloped for his life. And for mine.

It’s possible, of course, that he just plain felt like a good run. I don’t suppose a Mountie’s mount gets too many chances to run flat out in downtown Montreal. Nevertheless, Prince Hal acted as if he knew just what this was all about. The shouting didn’t bother him, the shots didn’t bother him, the cars and trucks on either side didn’t bother him, and not even the awkward idiot on his back could throw him out of stride. We ran straight for three blocks, at which point I yanked the reins again. By this time I was able to think straight, so of course I did it wrong; I wanted Prince Hal to go to the left, but jerked his head to the right by mistake, and off we went. He executed the turn neatly enough, though. We wound up going the wrong way on a one-way street, but no one gave us a ticket.

I turned around. The still-mounted Mountie, Tom, was in full pursuit, but we seemed to be drawing away from him. Chevalier was no Prince Hal. I could hear an assortment of sirens, but if there were any squad cars actually in view, I didn’t notice them.

If we could just shake loose, then we might have a chance. It was pretty obvious where I would have to hide. With all of Canada looking for me because of my Mouvement National de Québec activities, the only people I could trust to hide me were the MNQ bunch. I knew names and addresses and if I could get to one of them, I was safe.

If. If Prince Hal had had wings, we could have flown. In the meantime every siren in Montreal was baying at me like a pack of fox hounds. They were on all sides, from the sound of it, and I had as much chance of going to ground in some terrorist basement as I had of turning Prince Hal into a reincarnation of Pegasus.

Until suddenly a traffic light went red in front of us, and cars hit their brakes, and everything prepared to go smash. I did the only thing possible under those circumstances. I closed my eyes.

Whereupon Prince Hal showed the full extent of his prowess. Somewhere in his ancestry there must have been a winner of some remote Grand National, for the blood of the steeplechase horse flowed in his veins. Mane flying, ears back, he left the ground with incredible grace, a forefoot ever so neatly staving in the roof of a Ford sedan, a hind hoof just barely poking a hole in the windshield of a Buick convertible. We had no sooner touched the ground than he leaped a second time. This was a capital idea on his part, since our first landing had deposited us in the center of the intersection with any number of cars bearing rapidly down upon us. But Prince Hal made his second leap, sailing right over one of the menacing cars and on past the others, and away we went.

For the first time in my life I understood all those movies that concluded with Randolph Scott kissing his horse. I felt like kissing Prince Hal. He not only had saved us, but he had performed the neat trick of utterly routing our enemies. I looked back, over my shoulder and his tail, at the vehicular carnage behind us; I looked back, and I watched cars hitting other cars, and I was so awed by it all that I very nearly fell off the horse. Prince Hal had directly damaged two cars, and he had scared the hell out of the drivers of any number of other cars, with the result that they had all driven into one another. The squad cars could forget about us now. For one thing, they would have to go around the block to resume the chase. For another, they would have their hands full for the time being quelling a riot in at least two languages.

I leaned forward like a jockey in the stretch. I don’t know what jockeys whisper to horses. I whispered, “Good horse,” which seemed a little bland. If one talks to Prince Hal, I thought, one might as well quote Falstaff. “‘I have peppered two of them,’” I said. “Well, you have, anyway. ‘I tell thee what, Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face; call me horse.’”