Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

“One tires of game.”

“One cannot afford to tire of the game.”

It was an elaborate sequence and, I felt, rather a foolish one. It brought to mind the pudgy man from Washington and cryptic scribbles on Juicy Fruit gum wrappers. And what good did the password do? All the woman could really be sure of, after we’d gone through this silly bit of business, was that if I were a government agent, I was an exceedingly well-informed one and thus most dangerous.

She was not that deep a thinker. She opened the door wider, and I entered with Milan close behind me. She led us through one darkened room and into another. There were half a dozen tables, all of them empty. A candle glowed on one of them at the rear. She pointed us toward that table, and we took seats.

“You wish to eat?”

“Please.”

“Chlodnik? Kolduny? Tea?”

“Please.”

Chlodnik is a cold beet soup not unlike borscht. Kolduny is dumplings stuffed with ground mutton. Tea is tea. She brought food to us, and we ate.

From time to time a face would peer at us through a darkened window a few yards away. I had the feeling we were being studied by a variety of persons. Eventually the old woman returned to clear the table. She asked if we wanted anyone.

I took a pencil and wrote out a brief note. “Since there is no partridge,” I said, “you might have this given to the sparrow hawk.”

Sparrow Hawk was not exactly a code name for Orlowicz; more a nickname. She seemed to know whom I meant and to be unsurprised by the request. She went away and a while later she returned with another pot of tea.

Through all of this Milan had been nicely silent. But by now I suspect he was getting echoes of the bit of idiocy we’d undergone in Hungary. He said softly in Serbo-Croat, “If we are bundled again into the underpart of some slimy truck-”

“Do not worry,” I said in Polish.

“I am not worried, I am simply determined. At this very moment there are guns trained on us. Did you know that?”

“No, but I’m not surprised.”

“Nor am I. In their place I would do the same. Still, it is tiresome. I have told you how guns play upon my nerves. From where I am sitting, I can see a blackened gun barrel at the mouth of a knothole in the wall behind you. Do not turn, the idiot might shoot. I wish I were in Savnik.”

We nursed that pot of tepid tea for three quarters of an hour. Then the woman came out and led us into yet another back room and down a flight of stairs to a dank basement. There she turned us over to a very young man wearing a very false beard. “You will come with me,” he said, and an accurate prediction it was, for we did.

He led us through a maze of subterranean tunnels that led me to conclude that the word “underground,” in Krakow, was taken very literally. We emerged either half a mile away or right back where we started – it was impossible to guess, with all the twists and turns the tunnels had taken. We went up a short flight of steps, down a hallway, up two more flights of steps, and paused in front of a door upon which our false-bearded escort duly knocked.

The door opened, and there was Tadeusz.

In good, clear American he said, “Evan, you son of a bitch, it’s really you, isn’t it?” and pulled me inside, and motioned Milan in after me, and nodded reassuringly to our escort, and closed the door, and punched playfully at my shoulder, and without further preliminaries filled three small glasses with clear Polish vodka.

“To Poland,” he said, “citadel of culture, home of Chopin and Paderewski and Copernicus, land of beautiful lakes and forests, and to all the stupid Polacks all over the world, long may they wave.”

We drank.

He was a most unusual man. He was, in appearance, the sort of tall, gaunt, blond, dreamy-eyed young Pole who plays upon the piano in a Swiss mountain resort while quietly dying of tuberculosis. Appearances could hardly be more deceiving. I had met him in New York, where he appeared occasionally on fund-raising and propaganda missions that took him to Polish communities throughout the world. For three weeks he lived in my apartment, sleeping in my bed, sometimes alone, more often with any of several Negro and Puerto Rican girls with whom he would fall hopelessly in love for two or three days, after which time his love would burn out and the girls would return to the streets from whence they had come.

He was a fervent Polish Nationalist who despised the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. He was a Christian who hated churches and clergymen, a Socialist who loathed Russia and China, a devout pacifist with an astonishing capacity for ruthless violence. He smoked several packs of cigarettes a day, drank enormous quantities of vodka, and fornicated whenever given the opportunity.

He said, “Evan, how many Polacks does it take to change a light bulb? Five – one to hold the bulb and four to turn the ladder. Evan, how do you tell the groom at a Polish wedding? He’s the one in the clean bowling shirt. Evan, how do you keep a Polish girl from screwing? Marry her!”

He roared, I laughed, and Milan stood around looking politely puzzled. Tadeusz told half a dozen more Polish jokes, then came abruptly to a halt. “But you have been traveling and need refreshment. Are you hungry?”

“We ate at the cafe. But we need to bathe and shave, and I will also need fresh clothing for both of us and a roll of adhesive tape.”

“Of course,” Tadeusz said.

After the bath and the shave, after I’d used fresh tape to affix the silly packets once again to various portions of myself, after I had dressed again in clean clothing, I felt, if not like a new man, at least like a much-improved version of the old one. While Milan bathed I sat in the front room with Tadeusz and we talked about friends in America.

“So,” he said at length, “you have come to Krakow. Business in Poland, or is this merely a way station?”

“Precisely that.”

“You will want transportation, eh? Where do you go next? West Germany, perhaps?”

“No. Lithuania.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You are taking Milan Butec to Lithuania?”

“How… how-”

“Evan, please. Even a dumb Polack can count past ten without taking off his shoes. I know the man has left Yugoslavia. I know what he looks like. I know a wig when I see one, especially so crude a wig. It’s as obvious as the beard on that young moron who fetched you here. You don’t have to worry about me. Why, he was one of my boyhood heroes! And I respect him now more than ever. But Lithuania! Polacks are stupid enough, but you would take him among the crazy Litvaks?”

He poured another vodka while I gave him the briefest possible explanation of my trip to Latvia. Tadeusz, as it happened, was just the right sort of person for this story. It made perfect sense to him that someone would go to all this trouble just to reunite two lovers. Politics was politics, and a good cigar was a smoke, but love, after all, made the world go round. His words, not mine.

He drank his vodka down, lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old, flipped the old into the fireplace, poured himself more vodka, and sighed the languid sigh of the tubercular pianist he wasn’t.

“I understand and sympathize,” he assured me. “But.”

“But what?”

“But it would suit my avowedly selfish purposes more if you were going directly to the West.”

“It is difficult to enter Lithuania?”

“No, that I can readily arrange. And in return, if you please, you will do me a favor. A great favor.”

“What?”

He dug his hands into his jacket pockets. He drew them out again, and in each hand he held a flat black cylinder about half an inch thick and three inches in diameter.

“Two of them,” he said. “One for New York, one for Chicago. Microfilm. Vital that it gets there. You know the people and you know how to get around. I’ll get you to Lithuania, you’ll get this crud back to the States. Fair enough?”