Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

Then he said, “That guy following us.”

How had he noticed? The son of a bitch had been tracking me for hours before I got a clue.

“Like in the movies,” he said with satisfaction. His English was much better now that he had Hollywood films on his mind. “Cocksucker. You want, I lose him.”

First, I explained, I needed to know who he was. He thought that one over and hatched a plan. I rolled my window all the way down, held my backpack on my lap. He picked out the place where we would make our move, a narrow and poorly lit alley off a street that wasn’t much to begin with. We were a hundred yards or so into the alley when another car turned in after us and immediately cut its headlights.

“Stupid,” he said. “He think we not see him. But now he don’t see us.” He hit the brake. “Now!” he said. “Go!”

And I went, tossing my backpack out the window, thrusting myself feet first after it. The car was moving again before I hit the ground, and from a hundred yards back it must have looked as though he’d feathered the brake pedal to avoid running over a cat, or to dodge a pothole. My door never opened and the dome light never went on, and he’d picked a nice dark place to do it. I had a reasonably soft landing on a patch of bare earth, and I stayed down and rolled deeper into the shadows.

I wasn’t sure where my backpack had wound up, but I could wait to find out. Right now I wanted to make the most of my chance to spot my shadow. He’d be in the backseat, and he’d probably be leaning forward, his attention concentrated on the car in front of him. It would be a great opportunity for me to get a look at him, except for the very factor that had made it easy for me to give him the slip.

Namely the lack of light. A dark alley was the perfect setting for Act One of our little melodrama, but Act Two ought to be taking place on a main thoroughfare, with dozens of bright lights blazing.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen. In the dark I wouldn’t get much of a look at him. The best I could hope to do was tell if he was a local or a Westerner, and I wasn’t by any means sure I could do that. That was one flaw in the plan. Another was that sooner or later he’d catch up with my cab and see that I wasn’t in it, and he’d know I found some cute way to get away from him, and I’d hoped to keep him from realizing I was on to him.

And the third flaw was that I’d landed on my right shoulder, and I could tell it was going to hurt worse than root canal in a couple of hours.

All this takes longer to tell than it took to happen. Because I crouched there in the dark, waiting, and the pursuit vehicle made its deliberate way through the alley. It seemed to stop for an instant when it was right in front of me, but I think that was just my perception of the moment, as if it were a stopframe, frozen in time.

The guy in the backseat was facing forward, one hand on the back of the seat in front of him. His face was in profile, but the cab’s interior was too dark for me to make out facial features, and far too dark to provide a hint of his skin color. All I saw, really, was a dark face and an even darker head of hair.

And a blaze of white at the temple.

I had amini-flashlight in the Kangaroo strapped around my waist, keeping my Swiss Army knife company. It would have been handy for getting out of the alley, and I opened the zipper of the Kangaroo, groped around until I found the light, and then, reassured by its presence, decided to leave it there. Spurgeon’s cab might well circle the block and make another pass at the alley before I cleared it, and I wanted to be able to disappear into the shadows if I had to.

Meanwhile, I did what I could to avoid falling on my face. The alley was evidently where the citizens of that part of Rangoon stored their spare stumbling blocks, and it’s hard to keep from getting tripped up by objects in your path when you don’t know they’re there. I stubbed my toe a couple of times, and almost fell more than once, but I stayed on my feet. It struck me as a good thing I wasn’t traversing holy ground. The trek would have been murder without shoes.

At the mouth of the alley I looked both ways without knowing exactly what I was looking for. I saw cars passing in both directions, and any of them could have been Harry Spurgeon’s cab. If it had had any distinguishing marks or characteristics, I hadn’t noticed them.

Unlike the man himself, who sported a distinguishing mark on either side of his head. That patch of white hair was as vivid and unmistakable a field mark as the white feathers on a magpie’s wing or the eponymous scarlet of the red-winged blackbird. I hadn’t really given Harry a thought since we’d shared that cab from the airport. Now, suddenly, I could think of nothing else.

And now, of course, it all seemed obvious. The way he’d so neatly picked me up when I cleared Customs, the way he’d suggested our sharing a cab. He was a type, the old Burma hand, knocking around Asia at his employer’s behest, grumbling a little about each country’s less palatable idiosyncracies, and making the best of it all the while. Bluff, open, friendly, especially to another English speaker-

And determined to dog my footsteps all around Rangoon.

But who the hell was he? A player on the other side, I had to assume, but what other side? What were the sides in this particular game without rules? And how many sides were there?

I had a million questions and I couldn’t come up with answers to any of them. When I tried, all I got were more questions.

All I knew was that I didn’t see Harry anywhere right now, and I wasn’t inclined to wait for him to show up. Before I’d spotted him, and long before I knew who he was, I’d been planning to go to ground.

It seemed like a better plan than ever now.

The Char Win Guest House was a four-story frame building on Mahabandoola Street. I liked the name of the street – it had such a nice musical cadence to it I was surprised SLORC hadn’t changed it. And, sipping a beer in the café across the road, I decided I liked the looks of the Char Win as well. What I especially liked was that, while I drank my bottle of Mandalay (and it was watery and tasteless, as Ku Min had said it would be) I saw four couples make their way up the half flight of wooden steps and into the guest house. In two instances the couples were mixed, with the woman Asian and the man a Westerner. All four couples were traveling light, unencumbered by luggage.

My kind of place.

I climbed the stairs myself. The lobby held two wicker chairs and a sad little palm tree. The fellow behind the counter looked as though he’d spent all his life staying away from sunlight and fresh air. He had sunken cheeks and a very tentative mustache, which he worried with a forefinger as he studied me.

“I want room,” I said in what I hoped was basic Burmese.

It was hard to tell if he understood me or not. He peered at me, picked up a cigarette from a glass ashtray, drew deeply on it. In English he said, “You bring girl?”

I shook my head.

“You got girl coming?”

“No.”

“You want girl?”

“I want a room,” I said. “To sleep.”

He nodded, looking neither pleased nor disappointed. He consulted what I suppose was the register, then reached to take a key from a hook. “Twenny dollar,” he said.

“Ten,” I suggested.

“Twenny.”

“Fifteen?”

He shook his head sadly. I found a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to him, and he looked it over carefully. He said, “Passport?”

I just looked at him. He held my glance for a long moment, then shrugged elaborately. The bill went into the breast pocket of his pale green shirt. He handed over the key, pointed at the stairs. “Room Six,” he said. “First floor.”