Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

“So we’ll enter the vineyards of Canaan,” I told Arlette. “You and me, cherished one, and the grapes of wrath. And to think you slept through it all.”

“I wish I had been awake.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“But why? You regret that you may not join them?” Her eyes searched mine and she frowned slightly. “Evan, is it that you do not approve of the assassination?”

“It is just that.”

“You think it is unwise? But why?”

I got up and walked around. “Because it’s hare-brained,” I said. “Because it’s misplaced violence, because it’s stupid, because it’s dangerous, because it’s moronic-”

“You feel it will hurt the cause?”

“It will exterminate the cause. I just don’t understand Emile. He’s got the wrong slant entirely on the way public opinion operates. He and the rest of them expect to die, but that won’t be the end of it. Twenty-four hours after the Queen dies, every member of the MNQ will be in jail. All of the other separatist groups will be rounded up. I don’t suppose there will be a war-”

“A war!”

“It’s not impossible, but I’d tend to rule it out. France and Canada will probably break off diplomatic relations. France and England will almost certainly do so – they haven’t been getting along well anyway, and this should do it once and for all. France may have a revolution. Quebec will be pure hell for a long time, and in the other provinces French Canadians won’t have it very easy. A batch of peasants will get beaten to death.” I sighed. “Maybe the world will come to an end. That will clear up all the problems, at least, and I can’t think of any other way out.”

“But this is horrible!”

“That’s the general idea.”

“But we must do something!”

“Oh?”

“If it is as bad as you said-”

“It’s probably worse than I said. My mind isn’t working that well today. I’m not up to imagining just how bad it is.”

“Then we must act! We must stop them!”

I got some coffee and poured the last of the brandy into it. I thought of the planning session Emile and Claude and the Bertons and I had conducted while lucky Arlette had slept. They were all good at conspiracy and their plan was a solid one. Stop them? That was a good idea, all right. But how?

I said, “Would you want to betray them, Arlette?”

“To be a traitor? Oh, that is a bad thought!”

“We could do that, you see. All we have to do is make a phone call to the authorities. We tell them just what’s going to happen and where, and they’ll pick up our four heroes before a single chunk of plastique gets detonated. The good lady will be safe and four Quebecois patriots will spend the rest of their lives in prison. And you and I will be traitors.”

“We cannot do that.”

“I agree. What else can we do?”

She stubbed out a cigarette. She looked up at me, little Joan of Arc, wet-eyed and lost. “I do not know,” she said.

“Neither do I. I can’t even think straight.”

“But we will think, both of us. Of course you cannot put your mind to it, not when you are so worried about Minna. The poor little girl! Those chains, that dungeon-”

“Well, she’s not in there now, anyway.”

“And we shall discover where she is, Evan. Tonight we shall plant the microphone, as you said. We shall go to the Cuban place and hide the microphone, and tomorrow we shall go to where the poor little angel is hidden, and we shall free her, and when that is done, we shall be able to find some way to keep the Queen from being killed.”

“No.”

“No? But why?”

“Because your timetable is a little off,” I said. “I guess you missed the best part of all. What time is it?”

“Time?”

“Now. What time is it now?”

“Seventeen minutes after four, but this clock is perhaps two or three minutes, slow, so-”

“That’s close enough. Four seventeen P.M. Saturday. Which means that we have, let me see, just short of twenty-eight hours-”

“Twenty-eight hours!”

I nodded. “Twenty-eight hours to pull off the whole operation. Because, according to present plans, Mrs. Battenberg is going to be blown to bits at eight tomorrow night. There will be a fireworks display on La Ronde to celebrate the centennial of the Canadian Confederation, and the Queen will sail down the Saint Lawrence to see it, and that’s where they’re going to get her. Twenty-eight goddam hours.”

I spent one of the twenty-eight hours with a pencil and a notebook. I sent Arlette out hunting for some sort of listening device that would enable us to bug the Cuban dungeon, and while she was gone I sat around the apartment making lists.

All of those books that tell you how to make a million dollars and win friends and manipulate people and become head of your company and be the richest kid on your block, all of those terrible books seem to contain the same little formula for solving problems. When you’ve got a hundred impossible things to do, what you do is write them all down. Then you number them in order of importance, and then you drop everything and concentrate on problem number one, and you break your neck until it’s done, and then you go on to problem number two, and you persevere in this fashion, problem by problem, until you either solve all of your problems or die of a coronary, which actually does tend to wipe the slate clean.

I had made lists of this sort before out of the same general sort of multifaceted desperation. I couldn’t remember that they had ever done any demonstrable good, but maybe that was due to my failure to follow through all the way. What usually happened was this – I got everything listed, and I read through the list a few times to see just how many impossible and unpleasant things I had to do, and then I tore up the list and went out and got drunk. Then the next day I would just do whatever I could, in whatever order suggested itself, and in my usual haphazard fashion I would somehow blunder through.

Maybe the present situation demanded closer allegiance to the formula. I wasn’t sure. In any case, I opened a notebook and picked up a pencil and wrote Minna.

I looked at her name for a while and pondered worlds of unanswerable questions. Where was she? How had she gotten there? What did they intend to do with her?

Then I wrote down Assassination. And, on the same line, Sunday 8 P.M. Maybe there was a way after all, I thought I could tip off the authorities anonymously, and then I could get word to Emile that the authorities knew about it, and he and the others from MNQ would be able to abort the entire operation. If the police were already on the spot-

Of course Claude and the Bertons might be hot-headed enough to try going ahead with it anyway. But at least it would save the Queen and might even keep everybody in the clear. I beamed momentarily; maybe the list-making had something to be said for it after all.

Of course De Gaulle’s remark had been a godsend, and of course it was time for martyrdom, for the grand act, and if only there were some way short of assassination-

I turned my mind back to my list. I was by no means through with it. On the next line down I wrote Heroin.

Now there was another one to conjure with. What the hell was I going to do with the heroin? I didn’t even want to think about its value, but it had to be truly enormous. There seemed no question but that the world would be considerably better off if I flushed it all down the toilet, but I wasn’t entirely certain that I would be. Even if possession were nine points of the law, the heroin remained one-tenth the property of the Union Corse, and I had the feeling they would consider that tenth the most important part of the question.