Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

“Yes.”

“I will get Minna, we can’t leave her behind, and tonight the three of us will leave Riga.”

“Impossible.”

“First, to prevent disclosure of the fact, I shall personally strangle those twelve idiot girls.”

“You are a man of peace, Milan.”

“I have never been so provoked. Evan, this is an utterly impossible situation.”

“I know.”

“You made arrangements in Tallinn?”

I nodded. “For a party of five,” I said. “We now seem to be fifteen.”

“I propose we once again become a party of three. What sort of arrangements did you make?”

I gave him a quick account of the bargain I had struck with Anders. Milan was surprised to learn that I had a thousand dollars in my possession and a little nervous at the thought of buying our way across. I told him I thought Anders was reasonably safe.

“But fifteen instead of five. Will he take such a party?”

“If not, we can leave the extra girls behind at the last moment. But we have to keep them with us until we go so that no one talks. If he has room for the extras, they can provide some extra money. If not, they can come back to Riga.”

“How will we get them there?”

“They said they can get access to cars. Men will lend them cars. We could make the trip in three cars, five to a car.”

“I don’t like it. I could drive, and you could drive. Can the girls drive?”

“They say they can.”

“I still do not like it.”

“Neither do I, Milan.”

“We will have to think about it.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There is only one difficulty with this Lettish language. I do not know the word for manure, and it is not the sort of word I can ask Minna to teach me.”

“Prens,” I said.

“And horse?”

“Zirgs.”

“Zirgs-prens,” said Milan. “Forty-eight hours before we may leave, in a cramped apartment with a dozen women. Zirgs-prens! ”

The next day I asked one of the girls – her name may have been Lenja; there were two Lenjas, a Marija, a Natalja, two Katerinas, and a variety of others – about the prospect of acquiring cars. She assured me that it would be no problem at all to get hold of three of them.

I still didn’t like the idea of splitting up the group that way. I had considered bundling the ten girls into two cars and sending them scampering off in the wrong direction, a notion that had Milan dancing with glee when I mentioned it to him. The more I thought of it, though, the less I liked it. They were almost certain to get into trouble, at which point they would talk, at which point Russian agents in Finland would know we were coming.

Besides, I couldn’t avoid feeling a vague and pointless responsibility for the lot of them. They were, as Zenta had assured me, good, decent Lettish girls. And they did want desperately to get out of Latvia and into America. We were so overburdened anyway that another ten girls couldn’t make things too much more difficult. Even if it did, there was something in the idea of liberating an entire gymnastic troupe that appealed to my sense of comedy.

“It could have been worse,” I assured Milan. “Suppose Sofija had belonged to the Bolshoi Ballet.”

He hadn’t thought it was funny.

Now I asked Lenja, or whoever she was, just how the troupe traveled from one engagement to another. There was a private bus reserved especially for their use, she assured me. A driver was provided whenever they had occasion to travel anywhere.

That made it simple. Sunday afternoon Milan and I left the girls with strict instructions to go nowhere and say nothing. Then we went to the garage, knocked the attendant over the head, tied him up, gagged him, locked him in an office, and stole the bus.

We loaded Minna and the Lettish girls into the bus an hour after sunset. I had managed to find a driver’s cap and jacket that fit me and I sat in front over the huge steering wheel and piloted the bus through narrow streets to the road to Tallinn. Milan sat directly behind me with Minna at his side. The back of the bus was filled with singing girls, the majority of whom knew only half the words to each song and sang them off-key. A merry group were we.

The bus was an old crate, and I was no bus driver. At first I found myself taking curves at the speed I’d have taken them in an ordinary automobile. This was a mistake – each time it happened, the singing in the rear of the bus was interrupted as the girls were tumbled unceremoniously from their seats. After a few miles I adjusted my driving to the vehicle, and we took it slow and steady into Tallinn. It was almost eleven o’clock when we entered the city. By ten minutes after eleven the bus was parked in a quiet lane just half a mile from the rendezvous point.

“Keep everyone here,” I told Milan. “I’ll check with Anders and make sure nothing has gone sour. And I’ll find out if he has room for fifteen.”

“And if not?”

“I think he will. But stay here and keep the girls quiet.”

“Of course.”

I touched Minna’s cheek. “You stay with Milan,” I told her. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I can. Be a good girl.”

“Yes,” she said.

I left the bus and walked quickly toward the rendezvous site. I approached from the east, skirting the side of the huge fenced industrial complex, dark and deserted now. I stayed close to the fence and moved quietly down toward the waters of the gulf.

It was hard to see in the darkness. But when I was close enough, I saw a sleek ship anchored at the water’s edge and I sighed heavily and relaxed.

And I crept a little closer and saw another larger ship alongside the first vessel, and a group of men in uniforms, and heard Anders’s voice, whining, and heard the crisp orders of the harbor police.

He had not betrayed us. But he had been betrayed himself, or else the harbor police had been after him for some time. It scarcely mattered. As I crouched there watching, Anders was marched off under guard and taken aboard the police vessel. The ship pulled away from the shore, and Anders’s own ship, manned by police, followed immediately after it. The two of them disappeared in the blackness of the night, bound for Tallinn Harbor.

Well, that tore it. For a long moment I did not move, did not even breathe. I had fourteen unsafe people sitting in a stolen bus with no place to go. We couldn’t return to Riga, we couldn’t possibly get through any borders in the bus – we were in trouble. The boat that should have carried us to Finland was gone. The sailor who should have captained that freedom ship was on his way to prison.

And we were going to hell in a haywagon.

We could just drive around in the bus, I thought. One bus, after all, looked rather like another. Or we could send the ten girls back to Riga – they might be safe there – and the rest of us could try to get out of the country in a stolen car. I didn’t see how it could work, but I didn’t see how anything else could work, either, and the longer I stayed where I was, the worse things were going to get. Sooner or later some bright-eyed cop would wonder why a bus was parked on a side street. I had to get back to the bus. I had to do something, anything.

So I retraced my steps, but not slowly now, not slowly at all, but hurriedly, scampering alongside the high wire fence, stumbling, regaining my balance, rushing onward, stumbling once more, brushing this time against the fence…

At which point all the sirens in the world began to wail hysterically.

Then everything happened. Searchlights mounted within the industrial complex suddenly sprang to life and focused upon me. Gates swung open, and a handful of armed men streamed forth from within, fanned out in a semicircle, then drew the semicircle close around me. Guns pointed at me. Flashlights flared in my face.