Lawrence Block: The Scoreless Thai (aka Two For Tanner)

I wondered if the Land Rover still worked. It had been at about the end of its tether anyway; the path that had brought me the last little bit of the way to the guerrilla encampment was barely wide enough to admit the car, and was so overgrown in spots that a less rugged vehicle would have given up miles earlier. So even if the Land Rover were still operable, which was doubtful, I couldn’t count on it to take me anywhere.

Was there anything of value in the car? Nothing much, really. The extra clothing I had brought would have been appropriated by the guerrillas, just as they had taken what I was wearing. They probably would have left the butterfly-collecting equipment alone. The spreading board, the killing jar, the butterfly net, all the little accoutrements designed to cover my presence in the jungles and rubber plantations of Thailand, and all quite wasted now. These guerrillas did not seem to care whether I was a bona fide lepidopterist or a sneaky spy. All they wanted to do was kill me.

I closed my eyes and cursed. I cursed Tuppence’s father for going back to Africa and conceiving Tuppence in the first place. I cursed Tuppence for coming first from Nairobi to New York, and then from New York to Bangkok. I cursed the King of Thailand for being a modern jazz enthusiast and I cursed Tuppence for being a thief, and over and above it all I cursed myself for being several different kinds of a damned fool.

Then I stopped cursing and started thinking, and of the two thinking turned out to be the more productive, because by the time night had fallen once and for all and my little Thai friend had crept soundlessly to my cage and whispered his presence, I had it all figured out.

“The automobile,” I said. “Is it still where I left it?”

“The automobile?”

“The motor car.”

“The motor car?”

“The automobile, the motor car, the horse of metal with rubber feet-”

“Ah, the automobile! It is on the path in the clearing to the south.”

“And has anything been taken from it?”

“Your clothing was taken, and the rubber feet were removed.”

I wondered why. “But the other objects in the back seat?”

“They are where they were.”

“And could you gain access to the automobile?”

“I could.”

“And bring me certain articles from the back seat?”

“I could.”

“Then, I think we may have a chance for freedom. You will have many tasks to perform between now and the rising of the sun, but if you work very hard and if luck is with us, I think there is a fair chance that we may succeed.”

“And I will have a woman?”

“You will have a woman.”

“Then, it is worth whatever risks must be taken.”

“It certainly is.”

“And you will be saved, and we will run away, and they will not lead you to the chopping block and sever your head by driving the blade of the ax through your neck.”

I swallowed. “Is that what they had planned?”

“It is how executions are performed here.”

“A sort of neck-Thai party,” I said. But I said it in English because of course it wouldn’t work in Siamese, and in English it made no sense to my little friend. “An old saying of my forefathers,” I explained. “Nothing at all. We need not concern ourselves with it. We have much work ahead of us.”

“Tell me what I must do.”

“Go to the automobile and remove the battery-”

“What is a battery?”

“You raise the hood and-”

“The hood?”

“We have much work ahead of us,” I said.

My first meetingwith Miss T’pani Ngawa took place at a PAUL meeting held on a rainy Thursday night in a storefront church on Lenox Avenue at 138th Street. I lived several blocks and a few light-years away on 107th Street near Broadway, and so I walked to the meeting through the cold, impartial rain, which fell alike on black and white, and through the cries of Hey, Whitey! and What you doin’ up here, Mr. Charlie?

PAUL is the Pan-African Unity League, and what I was doin’ up there, Mr. Charlie, was going to a meeting of it. The climate at the meeting itself was drier and warmer in every respect. There was a brief report on the slaughter of Ibos in Nigeria, a somewhat more extended lecture on conditions in the Congo, and, finally, a report by Miss Ngawa on social and economic progress in Kenya.

When the meeting ended, she and I went out for coffee. We had an immediate common bond. I was the only Caucasian at the meeting, and she was the only African. All the others in attendance were American Negroes.

“The Back-To-Africa bit,” she said. “Bwana and simba and the bloody drums in the bloody jungle. Sheeit, baby, like it is all something else, you dig?”

As a man is, so does he speak. Tuppence, being a highly unorthodox combination of things, spoke an English all her own. She was the only child of a Kenyan mother and an American father. Her father, one Willie Jackson, had been a follower of Marcus Garvey and an African Nationalist. The Army sent him to North Africa during the Second World War, where he rather promptly deserted and headed south. He changed his name to Willie Ngawa, married Tuppence’s mother, and conceived Tuppence.

Later, during the Mau Mau uprising, Willie Ngawa was sentenced to death for miscegenation. Like most American Negroes, he had a certain amount of Caucasian blood in his veins and arteries and capillaries; thus an extremist wing of the Mau Mau felt that it was criminal for him to marry a full-blooded Negress. He was accordingly taken from his hut one night when Tuppence was very small and he was bound hand and foot and carried off into the jungle, where his captors broke both his arms and legs and introduced a regiment of army ants into his rectum. The ants promptly began to devour Willie Ngawa’s bowels, somewhere in the course of which Willie Ngawa had the good sense to expire.

Tuppence and her mother subsequently moved to Nairobi and lived in that city while Kenya transformed itself from British Crown Colony to independent republic. She grew up learning English and Swahili and sang the folk songs of Kenya. She went to college in London, began singing with a jazz group there, and ultimately came to New York, where she took an apartment on the Lower East Side, got a more or less steady gig with a local jazz quartet, and concurrently developed a reputation as an African folk singer at Harlem rent parties and East Village loft sessions.

Her speech reflected all of these influences. The prevailing accent was upper-class English, spoken with the special precision that the language receives only when it issues from the lips of a citizen of one of the Commonwealth countries. No Englishman ever born speaks as pure a strain of English as a well-educated Kenyan or Pakistani or Nigerian. Intermingled with this accent was a strong undercurrent of Harlem diction liberally salted with bop slang and peppered with bits and pieces of Swahili. The result was as profoundly individualistic a speech pattern as I have ever heard, singularly Tuppence.

I received Tuppence’s history a little at a time over a period of several hours after leaving the PAUL meeting. We drank several cups of coffee in a chrome-and-formica diner on 125th Street, ate sweet and pungent almond duck at the Great Shanghai, and wound up, happily enough, at my apartment on 107th Street. We sat on my couch drinking a Yugoslav white wine, which, though not particularly good, is not particularly bad either, and which is extremely cheap; the recent devaluation of the dinar had brought the price down to around 79¢ a bottle. We finished one bottle and got most of the way through a second, by which time we were assuring each other that the wine was really very good after all, wasn’t it, and that it seemed to improve with each glass.