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

“It can’t be real,” she said. “When they’re that size, they’re never real.”

“It’s real,” I told her. “But don’t wear it in Bangkok. It’s hot.”

A few days later I peddled the three other emeralds I had taken. A jeweler on 47th Street gave me more than I had expected for them. I didn’t think the king of Siam would miss a few stones; if he did, he could blame the Pathet Lao or the CIA, whichever he chose. And it was only sensible that I cover expenses. I had lost a load of cash at the guerrilla camp in Thailand and a flashlight battery full of gold in Tao Dan, not to mention all the pounds of me that had gone down the drain in the course of things. A couple of emeralds and a jade kitten seemed reasonable compensation.

Tuppence, for her part, had appropriated a ruby the size of a robin’s egg, which she wore back to the States in her navel.

What else? The Chief saw me, summoning me to the meeting by having some kid pass a note to Minna. I didn’t much care for that. It was bad enough that he bothered me all the time; I didn’t want him involving the child. She handed the note on to me and told me, in Armenian, that all Turks are the swine-loving spawn of the devil. I told her not to believe everything that Kitty’s grandmother told her, and then I went to meet the pudgy man from Washington.

“You continue to amaze me,” he said. “Everybody goes on a mission equipped with a cover story, Tanner. It’s standard procedure. But only you could come out of a mission with still another cover story. You must have handled the opium job in nothing flat.”

“Oh,” I said. I had wholly forgotten that nonsense about the opium.

“We’re starting to get word already. Whoever your connections are, they don’t fool around, do they? Preliminary operations for the cultivation of opium are already underway in extensive stretches of Modonoland. I hadn’t even heard of the damned country until this came up. It was part of either Nigeria or Tanzania until a couple of months ago, when it seceded. The growers have the full cooperation of the Modonoland government, and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t pull the rug out from under the Red Chinese opium trade.” He winked. “Of course, we’d hate to be officially involved. Can’t subsidize the opium trade with one hand and lock up a lot of poor little junkies with the other. That’s why it’s so perfect that you kept the whole thing under wraps with the cover story of the Siamese jewels.” He beamed. “Everybody’s happy about this one, Tanner. Right straight up to the top. I mean everybody.”

But everybody wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy, for one. I went back to my apartment, and I looked at the heroin addicts in the streets, and I walked upstairs and sat down and wasn’t happy at all. I tried telling myself it was a coincidence, and that lasted about three days. Then a letter arrived with a Macao postmark, and inside it was a check for one hundred thousand Swiss francs drawn on the Bank Leu in Zurich. A note from Abel said, “One good turn merits another. Autonomy for the Jura!”

So I had done the world a bad turn, and I had in return a piece of paper worth roughly twenty-three thousand American dollars. It bothered me for a long time. I didn’t know what in hell to do with it. Finally I wound up donating half of it to Synanon – they’ve had exceptionally good results treating heroin addicts. And with the remainder I founded an organization aimed at overthrowing the government of Modonoland and burning the opium fields to the ground.

Evan Michael Tannerwas conceived in the summer of 1956, in New York ’s Washington Square Park. But his gestation period ran to a decade.

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Tanner in all this?

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen Anne, the last reigning monarch of the House of Stuart, there was still (in the unlikely person of a German princeling) a Stuart pretender to the English throne.

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They seemed to go together, and I found myself thinking of a character whose sleep center had been destroyed, and who consequently had an extra eight hours in the day to contend with. What would he do with the extra time? Well, he could learn languages. And what passion would drive him? Why, he’d be plotting and scheming to oust Betty Battenberg, the Hanoverian usurper, and restore the Stuarts to their rightful place on the throne of England.

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple of more years before Tanner was ready to be born. By then a Stuart restoration was just one of his disparate passions. He was to be a champion of lost causes and irredentist movements, and I was to write eight books about him.

If you’ve been picking up these splendid new editions of the Tanner books as they appear, and if you’ve been reading not only the books themselves but these self-indulgent afterwords of mine, and if (finally) you’ve the sort of old-trunk-in-the-attic memory that retains trivial information, then you may recall that the book immediately preceding this one, Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, was begun in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and completed in Dublin.

When it was finished, I sent it off to my agent and returned the typewriter to the firm around the corner from whom I’d rented it. I’d landed in Dublin in mid-January, and it was the middle of February when I set out to see the country.

I’d been to Ireland once before, and had felt a strong immediate connection to the country. I thought I might like to live there, and knew that one thing I didn’t want to do, not for a while, was go back to the States. So I bundled up my things and hit the road.

I didn’t have all that much to bundle up, having arrived with a change of socks and underwear and a manuscript. But of course I’d bought some clothing since I’d arrived, so I purchased a knapsack and took a bus south of Dublin to a town called Bray. From there I figured I could hitchhike.