Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

I finally got out of there. Arlette wanted to come along, perhaps in the hope that the dungeon would once again unlock my libido. Seth and Randy also volunteered to join me. I insisted on going alone. It would be easy this time. I merely had to get into the building, press the switch (I knew which one it was, for a change), hide the bug somewhere, close up shop, and leave.

I found the boat and had no trouble following last night’s course to Ile de Notre Dame. I docked at precisely the same spot. I left the boat and carried the bug with me to the Cuban Pavilion, and then a bad day turned worse.

They had guards posted. Four of them, two in front and two at the rear. Four armed guards who stood rigidly at attention and who gave every appearance of being wholly alert.

For a long time I sat in the shadows and watched them from a distance. They didn’t fall asleep or go away or die or anything of the sort. They stayed right where they were and seemed likely to stay there until the fair reopened in the morning.

I went back to my boat and began rowing. I half hoped it would sink, but it didn’t. Boats never sink when you want them to.

They were allat the apartment when I got back. I knocked on the door and Arlette opened it, and I walked in flipping the microphone up in the air and catching it, flipping and catching, like George Raft’s half dollar bit. I ignored their questions and went on playing with the microphone. It was about the size of a plum but less useful.

“Guards all over the place,” I explained eventually. “We must have left something behind in the dungeon the other night. I don’t know what – a cigarette butt, maybe. Or maybe they always have guards except on Saturdays. That doesn’t make much sense, but neither does anything else lately. It doesn’t matter. The place is guarded and there’s no way to plant the bug and I think I’ve just about had it. Is there anything to drink?”

“No.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

Seth mentioned that there was a little wine back at their place. I told him not to bother. “Or we could turn on,” he suggested.

I looked at Arlette. “I thought I told you to keep quiet about that.”

“About what, Evan?”

“You holding, Evan?”

“But I said nothing,” Arlette said. “I never mentioned the heroin.”

“Heroin?” Randy looked carefully at me. “You’re no junkie, it can’t be that. What’s the bit?”

“What did you mean about turning on?”

There’s something to be said for answering a question with a question. Randy forgot his and answered mine. “Well,” he said, “like pot.”

“You have some with you?”

“Well, actually, yes.”

I turned to Arlette. “You’ve been this route, Joan of Arc?”

“Sometimes the boys come up and we all smoke.”

Seth said, “No offense, Evan, but if you happen to dig smoking-”

I just started laughing. I’m not sure why. Arlette, Seth, Randy, Emile, Claude, Jean, Jacques, the Chief, the helicopter pilot, the woman with the lost kids, the Cuban dungeon, my landlord, my air-conditioner, Sonya, Minna, the heat, the humidity, I don’t know.

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, gasping. “Why not?”

I hadn’t smoked anything in ages. I had smoked cigarettes for about three years up before I was wounded in Korea. Shortly thereafter I discovered that when you were awake around the clock, you smoked around the clock, and with my body deprived of eight hours’ abstinence from tobacco, I rapidly developed a chronic cough and sore throat. When cutting down didn’t work, I quit cold. That turned out to be infinitely easier than I had suspected, and I discovered that not smoking was better than smoking, and that was that.

Then about seven or eight years ago a girl turned me on to marijuana, and I smoked now and then for a period of about a year and a half. Toward the end I found that I was no longer getting the pleasant giggling highs that I’d had in the beginning, but that I was more and more frequently ending up with deep, moody, brooding highs, long sieges of introspection and philosophical self-analysis that were as often as not rather depressing. I decided that I didn’t have to smoke to get depressed, and that was the end of that experiment.

Since that time the closest I ever came to any kind of habit was on a trek through Thailand and Laos, in the course of which I found myself becoming mildly addicted to betel nut. If betel nut were available in the States, I might have stayed hooked, but it isn’t.

I am not entirely certain why I decided to smoke marijuana that night in Montreal. If the Chief were the sort of bore who demanded written reports of his agents’ activities, that would have to be one of many items I would neglect to mention. The determining factors, I suppose, were the great load of frustration I had built up cruising back from the Cuban Pavilion and the air of lunacy that overhung Arlette’s apartment. Add to that my usual list-making pattern – write everything down, read it over, get drunk – and the idea of turning on made its own sort of sense.

I might add, too, that I hoped I would hit on a deep, thoughtful high, and that my mind, liberated from its usual patterns of thought, might chance upon something that would put everything right, some mental philosopher’s stone to translate all the madness of the world into something meaningful. I might add that, but it wouldn’t be true. There were only a few hours left before Betty Battenberg turned into hamburger, and Minna had probably already been sold into white slavery in Afghanistan, and the Union Corse would get me if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police didn’t, and to tell you the truth, I just didn’t care anymore about anything.

This happens. Tighten a muscle long enough, and eventually it will relax of its own accord and remain utterly flaccid. Emotional muscles adhere to the same law. I had worried too much about too many things for a little too long, and the worry muscle had simply ceased to function. I no longer gave a damn. If pot would turn the next two or three hours into a restful groove, I was all for it.

Seth rolled the stuff. He kept the grass and a packet of Zig-Zag cigarette papers in a plastic bag in his pocket, the same sort of plastic bag housewives use for leftovers and teen-agers for condoms. He used two papers for each cigarette so that the resulting product would smoke slowly, and he rolled them thin and tight. During my own viper period I had never learned to do this, and used to buy packs of cigarettes and shake the tobacco out of the paper tubes, replacing it with the grass. I watched Seth roll the pot, and Arlette found some music on the radio that, if not psychedelic, was at least bearable, and we turned off most of the lights and lit up, smoking the joints one at a time, passing them from hand to hand, going through all the happy ritual of the pot mystique. The years, I noted, had added a few variations; the boys had a way of cupping both hands over the cigarette end and inhaling simultaneously through nose and mouth that I had never come across before. I suppose that was to prevent any smoke from getting wasted.

I had enough trouble smoking as I had in the past. The grass burned hot despite its double wrapper. Randy said he thought someone must have cut it slightly with green tea, which doesn’t change the taste but scorches your throat. The back of my throat was raw by the third drag, and a pulse went on, beating there for a long time.

There was no sudden moment when I went from straight to high, but a variety of sensations that began very gradually and increased steadily. I became intensely aware of things – I followed several different musical instruments simultaneously on the radio, I concentrated on various portions of my own body and became keenly interested in such bits of excitement as the play of warm air on my hand, the expansion and contraction of my rib cage as I breathed, the relentless movement of gases in my intestinal tract.