Lawrence Block - Me Tanner, You Jane

I made a sound mixing sympathy with nausea. The Chief turned, looked out across the room. Then he turned to face me again. “To Klausner,” he said.

“To Klausner.”

We drank.

I have never been able to decide whether the Chief is particularly intelligent or particularly stupid. Most of the time I suspect he’s merely mediocre, but it’s impossible to be sure. He runs a nameless intelligence agency that is so secret that its own agents don’t know how to get in touch with it. His employees operate on their own initiative, establish their own contacts, pull their own strings, and ultimately cut their own throats. You don’t have to write out reports when you work for him, nor do you have to worry about any of the usual bureaucratic claptrap. You just go out and do the job.

The Chief thinks I’m one of his best men. He got this idea about four years ago and I’ve never seen fit to disabuse him of the notion. Every once in a while he finds some dumb way to get in touch with me and shoves some assignment at me, and every once in a while I can’t find a way to avoid the assignment, so maybe I work for him and maybe I don’t. It’s hard to be certain. The thing of it is that I’m on so many subversive lists as it is, with the FBI tapping my phone and the CIA reading my mail (or else it’s the other way around), that I figure I need all the help I can get.

“Joe Klausner,” he said. “My boys are on their own, Tanner, but I would have helped Joe if I could have. But all at once he was dead. Just like that.” He walked to the window, looked out of it. “I didn’t even know he was in Berlin. I thought he was in St. Paul, Minnesota. Then there was a call from Berlin -”

He filled his glass. “You don’t know Sam Bowman,” he said.

“No.”

“It may be too late. Just as it was too late with Joe. But there’s a chance, you know.”

He drained his glass. He seems to drink all the time but never seems affected by it. Either I have never seen him drunk or I have never seen him sober.

“Ah, Tanner,” he said heavily. “I don’t suppose you’ve so much as heard of Modonoland, now have you?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said. “Most people – you have?”

“Yes.”

He said that was marvelous and would save a great deal of time. I don’t know what time it saved, exactly, because he was primed to deliver a certain speech and he couldn’t alter his programing. “A few thousand square miles in West Africa. A British Protectorate since Versailles. German before that, but a mixed settlement of Germans and Belgians and English and Dutch. Given its independence a couple of years ago. Retained Commonwealth status. Government seesawed for a while. Then a strong man came along.”

“Knanda Ndoro,” I said.

“Kuhnanda Nuhdoro,” he said, adding a couple of syllables. “The Glorious Retriever, he called himself. Sounds like something that might be useful for hunting waterfowl.” He chuckled deeply. “Typical African dictator at first. Went about building grand marble mausoleums and calling them government office buildings and cultural centers and such. Scattered statues of his beautiful self wherever two streets intersected. Which didn’t happen too often, Modonoland being on the primitive side. Did the usual, you know. Had himself a harem, lopped off the heads of the loyal opposition, usual sort of thing.

“And then a couple of years ago the Retriever did something rather extraordinary. The trouble with Modonoland, as with most of these damned countries, is that most of it is just wasted. Just space with jungles and lions and tigers and what-not. And when they try doing something about it, why they only plant some crop that someone else grows better and cheaper, and get touchy if the U.S. doesn’t buy it from them. Ndoro, now, struck off on a new path. You wouldn’t guess what he grew.”

“Opium,” I said heavily.

“Opium,” he said lightly. He didn’t seem to have heard me. “Opium. Planted half of Modonoland with opium, giving himself a big cash crop and cutting the underpinnings from the Red Chinese opium trade in the bargain. A first-class development, you know. We couldn’t have been happier.”

I studied the floor. Stains made a pattern on the carpet, and I wondered if they could be augured, like birds’ entrails.

“And then not too long ago there was an uprising,” he went on. “It was a long while in the wind, and for a time it looked as though some sort of lefties were going to move in. Group called the Movement for Moderation in Modonoland. Batch of political amateurs, but well-financed. Moscow gold, I suspect. Or Peking, more likely.

“They had Ndoro’s government shaking like a leaf, and we were all a bit worried. Unknowns are a danger, you know. Better to stay with the old status quo. At the same time, we determined that Ndoro had to fall. There are times, you know, when it’s strategically unwise to try propping up an unpopular regime. Can’t always be done.”

I murmured something about Saigon. His eyes met mine for an instant, then withdrew.

“But we did have a bit of luck, Tanner. We thought about reinforcing Ndoro, and we rejected that, and then we found out that there were some white men who thought they ought to have a crack at running Modonoland on their own hook. Old line colonialists out of the same mold as the Rhodesians. Oh, I suppose you might call them reactionaries or white supremacists or something of the sort-”

“Or fascists,” I suggested.

“-but there’s no denying that they weren’t the sort to rock the old boat. Kept the opium trade flourishing, for one thing – and the MMM fanatics had intended to put a stop to it. And kept things more or less on an even keel foreign policywise. There’s some trouble with England, some question about the Commonwealth status, but all in all they’re the sort of people we can support. We may not boast about them, but we’re glad to see them around.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Now here’s where it gets a little sticky, Tanner. On the one hand, we gave these white supremacist fellows a little support. Our Boy Scout chums were in on that, and kept it a sight quieter than their usual sort of thing.” He grinned nastily. “They’ve been a little less boisterous since the Bay of Pigs, haven’t they? As I say, they handled that end. But at the same time, we had to do something for this Retriever fellow, this Knanda Ndoro. So I sent a man in to let Ndoro know as much of the score as we wanted to tell him, and to help him get out with his skin intact when the time came. I had a feeling Ndoro wasn’t too keen on white men, what with all the white men trying to chuck him out, so I sent my best black agent.”

“And that was Sam Bowman?”

“Samuel Lonestar Bowman,” he said. “A former burglar, heroin addict, and strong-arm man. Became a Black Muslim in jail. Broke with Elijah Muhammad about the same time Malcolm X did. Organized for the Black Panthers on the West Coast. Shot a policeman in a gun battle, possibly in self-defense, possibly not. Decided to get out of the country. Went to a friend of his, who happened to be a lad of mine. We got him out and added him to the payroll, and he’s been damned good ever since. He went into Modonoland to help Ndoro pack up the royal treasury and get out. Got to him in the nick of time, and the two of them left the back door of the palace while a white mob kicked in the front door. It was about that close, according to the reports I’ve seen.

“Then the two of them headed inland. Two men with a fortune in jewels and hard currencies. They disappeared into the bloody jungle, and they haven’t come out of it yet, and it does not look good, Tanner. Not good at all.”

“There’s been no word?”