Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

“I have it.”

“What?”

“The boys.”

“Jean and Jacques?” I grinned. “Somehow I don’t think so. Their approach would be to storm the pavilion with fixed bayonets. They’d be very good at it, too, but I doubt that-”

“Not them. Seth and Randolph.”

“I don’t remember them.”

“You do not know them. They are not of the movement. They are Americans, like yourself. They-”

“It might not be a good idea to bring in any Americans, Arlette.”

“But they are different. They are – how do you call it? They run from the cold.”

“Huh?”

“Pardon. From the draft, the conscription.”

“Draft-dodgers?”

“But certainly.” Her face took on a dreamy expression. “They are idealists, but of course, and very young and very sweet.”

“You know them rather well, Arlette.”

“But yes,” she said, and glanced involuntarily at the bed.

“Both of them?”

“They are my very fine friends.”

“Joan of Arc.”

“Ah, but it is only you I love, Evan.” She tucked her arm in mine. “I will call them. They will be perfect, I know they will. They can remain in one spot for hours and no one will pay them the slightest bit of attention. Better than the sellers of ice cream.”

“How?”

“You will see.”

She made a telephone call, telling the boys to come at once and bring their signs. I didn’t know what that meant, but before long they appeared and I found out.

Seth, the taller of the two, had brooding eyes and a full red beard. Randolph had shoulder-length hair and a scraggly mustache. And each wore a sign, sandwich-board affairs that covered them front and back from their shoulders to their knees. Randolph ’s sign said, Hey, hey, LJB, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today? Seth’s read, God Damn, Uncle Sam, Bring The Boys Home From Vietnam!

“I see what you mean,” I told Arlette. “Perfectly inconspicuous. Who would give them a second glance?”

Around nine o’clockthat night Seth and Randolph came to Arlette’s place a second time. They had disposed of the sandwich boards this time, and brought instead a paper sack of smoked meat sandwiches and a large bottle of Alsatian wine. We talked between bites and gulps, and by the time the food and wine was gone, I had the story.

The Cubans were stealing people.

They couldn’t tell me why, and I couldn’t guess, but the fact remained that in a period of some four hours eight more persons had entered the Cuban Pavilion than had left it. The two draft-dodgers had equipped themselves with hand-counters, made sure they started and finished at the same time, and were absolutely certain of their tally. They had no way of knowing who those missing eight persons were, whether they might be male or female, young or old, Canadian or American or whatever. But eight had gone in who had not come out, and that was what I had wanted to find out. Minna was not an isolated case but one of many. The Cubans were stealing people.

And, presumably, tucking them away somewhere inside their blasted pavilion.

“You did good work,” I told the two. “I’m very grateful.”

“No sweat,” Seth said.

“We go out there all the time anyway,” Randolph put in. “With our signs, and like that. You can stand in one spot until the world freezes and nobody makes any waves. We’re like part of the scenery.”

“No one gives you an argument?”

“Sometimes somebody’ll whisper, ‘Keep the faith, baby,’ or something like that. Or officials from some of the pavilions will ask us to move on. I guess they don’t want to jeopardize their country’s share of foreign aid. But Cuba was no problem at all. They don’t get any foreign aid from us.”

“And they’re pretty close to our own line on Vietnam,” Seth added.

I thought they might encounter harassment from American tourists, but they insisted that wasn’t the case. “Some of them agree with us, though they don’t want to get caught saying so. Probably eighty percent of them don’t much care one way or the other, just so their room is air-conditioned and the television set works.”

“The apathetic majority,” Randolph said.

“You know it. And the ones who would just as soon stick bayonets in us, well, they have to cool it, see? Because for all they know, we could be Canadians, in which case they would be starting an international incident and they might get called down at the next Rotary Club meeting for conduct unbecoming a clod. Some of them, the real flag-wavers, they get very uptight about the entire scene. I mean, it’s comical to watch them. They want to say something, or start swinging, and you can like feel their eyes, trying to read whether we’re Americans or Canadians or what the hell we are. My beard and Randy’s hair, that just worries them that much more.”

The two of them did more than parade around wearing signs. Each of them put in several hours a week at the office of a pacifist organization on Front Street, stuffing envelopes, proofreading newsletters, and otherwise campaigning against war in general and the Vietnamese operation in particular. They devoted the greater portion of their time to encouraging American college students to come north to avoid the draft.

“We get accused of copping out,” Seth said. “You know, like we should either join the army and kill a commie for Christ or spend five years in Leavenworth for our principles. I think this is more active, you know. Martyrdom is for masochists.” He shrugged. “But a lot of the time I think, well, why hack the whole thing? Send out newsletters, and the only people you impress are the ones who already agree with you. I mean, if you stop to think things out, what good does any of it do?”

“If everybody stopped to think things out,” I said, “no one would get out of bed in the morning. Ever.”

After the boys went home, I made Arlette go to sleep for a few hours. She kept insisting she wasn’t tired, and began a long speech on the relationship of the American antiwar movement and the MNQ. I don’t think any such relationship really existed, but the Quebec terrorists are apt to fall into temporary alliances with a great variety of types. A couple of years ago some of them joined a Black Nationalist plot to dynamite the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift from France, actually, so I suppose it wasn’t surprising that Arlette had managed to theorize a common bond with the boys. As with most of her alliances, she had sealed the bond in her cozy little bed, loving them either in turn or in tandem; she had not made that clear, and I did not ask, hoping I would never have to know.

All of that, she had assured me, was over and done with. She was capable of loving only one man at a time, and I was her man now, and the past was the past, and, after all, she had already told me she was no maid, either of Orleans or of Montreal. So I couldn’t hold it against her, but neither could I just then develop any tremendous wave of personal enthusiasm for her, so I let her lie in bed by herself instead of keeping her closer company.

She went on talking, and then she stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence, stopped talking without even reaching a comma, and promptly commenced snoring or breathing heavily, as you prefer. I put in twenty minutes on my back on the floor, relaxing. This wasn’t really necessary; I was so relaxed I was afraid my bones would melt. But it was something to pass the time.

I passed more time drinking coffee and reading and thinking things out. Somewhere to the east of us the Expo began concluding its business for another day. I tried to figure out what the Cubans were doing with the eight or ten people they stole every day. Or more – according to Randy and Seth, that many had disappeared in a matter of hours. But at a rate of ten a day, they would be making off with three hundred victims a month, or something like two thousand in the course of the fair.