Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

“So now you know how old I am,” she said.

Katya’s childhood in Sri Lanka was a pleasant one. They lived in a large house in the hills overlooking Columbo, with a whole retinue of Tamil servants. Katya had a Russian nanny, herself the granddaughter of an exiled countess, and grew up speaking the language. She went to a school run by French-speaking nuns, and was fluent in that language as well, along with Sinhalese.

Then there was a change of political fortune. Her father, who had thus far led a charmed if ill-starred life, had run out of luck. He was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, tried, convicted, and executed. All of the family holdings were confiscated, and Katya and her mother, accompanied by the servants, fled to the Indian mainland. There her mother formed an alliance with a Portuguese expatriate who had been the deputy governor-general of Goa until India took over the Portuguese colony.

The story got hazy at that point – or I did, or Katya did. The ayet piu may have had something to do with the haze. I was beginning to like it, but she had a true thirst for the stuff, and was doing a good job of killing the bottle.

“Evan,” she said. “In Russian that is Ivan. I could call you Vanya.”

“You could,” I agreed.

“Kiss me, Vanya.”

I suppose she must have tasted of ayet piu, which is a hell of a thing to say about a person. But you couldn’t prove it by me. I had enough of the stuff on my own breath to keep me from detecting it on hers. I took her in my arms and kissed her, and felt the soft womanly warmth of her against me. I felt a stirring, and wondered if it might not be a good time to end the Noble Experiment of celibacy. She was drunk, and to have it off with a woman in such a condition was ethically questionable. In Victorian times they called it gallantry, in my own youth it was considered caddish if expedient, and nowadays a lot of people labeled it rape. I didn’t think Katya would call it that, I think it was what she had in mind when she brought me to her room, but I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

“My little Vanya,” she said, and smiled lazily. And then she solved my ethical dilemma by passing out.

That did make it easier. I might have been able to rationalize the seduction of a drunken Katya, but an unconscious Katya was something else entirely.

There was a little of the clear liquid left in the bottle, and I left it in case she needed it first thing in the morning. I unbuttoned her blouse and took it off, untied her longyi and eased it down over her hips. I’d read somewhere that men were as naked under their longyis as Scotsmen are under their kilts, but that source had had nothing to say about female undergarments or the absence thereof. I could now state authoritatively that Russian-Chinese-French-Vietnamese women residing in Rangoon didn’t let anything come between them and their long skirts.

She lay on her back, her blond hair spread on the pillow, and I drank in the sight of her. I kissed her gently on the mouth, and what worked with Sleeping Beauty had no discernible effect upon Katya. She didn’t move a muscle.

I drew the sheet over her and covered her to the throat. I switched off the little lamp – the overhead light was already off – and, not without reluctance, let myself out of her room.

I left her door unlocked. Halfway down the stairs it occurred to me that I could have tried locking it with my key. There was a good chance that most of the keys at the Char Win fit most of the locks. But if that was so, why bother locking the door in the first place?

I’d left my own door unlocked again, I saw, although I could have sworn I’d taken a moment to lock up before I went up to Katya’s room. But when I gave the knob a turn and the door a push it opened inward. Maybe the key had turned without engaging the tumbler. Something wasn’t working right, either the lock or my memory, but I couldn’t see that it mattered.

I slipped inside and reached for the light switch. And stopped when I saw that there was somebody sleeping in my bed.

Classy hotel, I thought. It was a variation on an old Henny Youngman joke – you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when you get back there’s another guest in your room.

How had it happened? Well, maybe they put him in Room 9 and he held the key upside down. Maybe the clerk, on his rounds, checked my room and found it empty and thought he could fit in an extra off-the-books rental. Maybe Katya, with a nod and a wink, had told him during her ayet piu run that I’d be upstairs in her room.

Didn’t matter. He was there, and the bed was far too narrow for two people, even if they loved each other. The night was almost over – there had been a lot of rich detail in Katya’s story, and the hours had flown during the telling of it. It was almost dawn, and time for me to get busy doing… well, whatever I was going to be doing. I could leave now, or, if I wanted to wait another hour or two, I could go back upstairs and perch on a chair in Katya’s room.

I opened the door to let myself out. Then I remembered the backpack. I’d put it on the chair, but Katya had moved it so that she could sit down. And there it was, on the floor where she’d placed it.

So I slipped inside again and went over to get the pack. And that brought me close enough to the bed so that, with only what little light filtered in through the window, I could have a look at the someone who’d been sleeping in my bed.

It wasn’t Goldilocks. This sleeper’s hair was dark. All except the patch of white at the temple.

Spurgeon! Harry Spurgeon, asleep in my bed!

Well, not exactly. Staring hard at him, I realized he didn’t seem to be breathing. I leaned in, listening, and still couldn’t hear anything. I reached out a hand and touched him. His forehead was still warm – it takes a while for a body to lose heat, especially in the tropics – but I could tell I was touching a dead man.

He was lying on his stomach, the side of his face pressed to the pillow. I rolled him over to get a look at his face and found I was wrong on a second count as well. Not only wasn’t he sleeping, but he also wasn’t Harry Spurgeon.

I got my little flashlight from my Kangaroo and made sure. He wasn’t Spurgeon, and he didn’t even come close. This man was Asian, for openers, and he was shorter and slimmer and darker than the hearty fellow who’d picked me up at the airport. In fact, the only similarity between the two men was the white hair at the temple.

And that was a fake. A close look with the help of the flashlight showed the hair had been bleached, with the effect heightened by the application of what looked like white shoe polish.

Who was this faux Spurgeon? And what was he doing here? And how had he died?

The last question was the easiest to answer. Whoever had stuck the knife in him had left it there, wedged between his ribs. The wound must have been instantly fatal, as there was hardly any blood.

I patted him down, looking for ID. His pockets were empty except for a single well-worn forty-five-kyat note. Something made me roll him over again, onto his face, and when I ran my hands over him I felt a bulge in the small of his back. I tugged his shirt free from his pants – he was wearing dark Western trousers, this Spurgeon imitator – and found an oilskin packet fastened to his skin with plastic-coated tape.

I ripped it free, stuffed it into my own pocket. And heard a car draw up somewhere outside, brakes squealing. And more noise in the pre-dawn stillness – men shouting, their boots slapping on wooden stairs, their voices loud and angry in the lobby.

Time to get the hell out.

I heard them on the stairs and beat them to the door, turning the key and sliding the brass bolt across as well. While they hammered at the door I rushed to the window, flung it all the way open, and tossed my backpack out. More hammering at the door, and they were fiddling with the lock, trying to get a key in while the key I’d left there blocked the way. In a minute or two they’d lose patience, I knew, and they’d kick the door in, and that would be about as difficult as shoving in the side of a cardboard box.