"Tanner’s Tiger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

Chapter 2

Canada .

I hadn’t even wanted to go there in the first place. I had nothing against the country and had enjoyed myself the few times I’d been in Montreal, but the world was full of places I would just as soon be. The Expo was supposed to be a grand thing for Canada, and I was glad it was there; I’m glad the sun’s up there in the sky, but that doesn’t make me anxious to visit it. I had attended the last World’s Fair, in New York. I spent a day standing in various lines and came home with the conviction that the world could have all the fairs it wanted but that it would have to have them without me.

Minna mentioned Expo a couple of times in approximately the tone of voice she used when discussing the Central Park Zoo. I made it obvious to her that we weren’t going, and she gave up. The summer began shaping up nicely. There was a Ukrainian girl named Sonya who was spending a lot of time around the apartment. There was the usual heavy volume of mail to contend with six days a week. There were books and pamphlets and magazines to read, a set of Bantu language records to master, meetings and discussion groups to attend, and, on the business side, a thesis to be written. It was hot as hell outside, but I had an air-conditioner in the apartment and they said the heat would break any day.

Then things began to go to hell.

The first thing to go was the air-conditioner. The heat, as I have mentioned, got worse instead of better, and the forecasters kept being wrong, and the air-conditioner just couldn’t keep up with it all. It dropped dead. It took me two days to get a repairman to look at it, and he collected ten dollars for a house call and took only ten minutes to assure me that the machine was not repairable.

It was an old unit, so that much was only irritating. What was aggravating was the impossibility of replacing the damned thing. The middle of a heat wave is not the best time to order an air-conditioner. The best time, I guess, is in early February, when no one else has the same idea. I called all over town until my fingers had blisters from walking through the Yellow Pages. The best promise I could get was three weeks’ delivery time.

After the air-conditioner died, Sonya moved out, though whether or not there was a direct cause-and-effect relationship, I cannot say. With the thermometer hovering between ninety-five and a hundred, the physical benefits of her companionship were beyond the pale anyway, but it was most unfortunate that our relationship terminated as it did. She put too much chervil in the scrambled eggs, and I was less than diplomatic in calling this fact to her attention. We started shouting at each other. Under more normal circumstances we would have kissed and made up, but the heat made that impossible. It was easier to fight. She threw the scrambled eggs at me, and then she went to the refrigerator and gathered up the other eggs, the raw and as yet unscrambled ones, and began throwing those here and there. One of them wound up in the record player, and I didn’t discover it until the next day when it cooked there while I played a Bantu language record.

Outside, the city was going to screaming hell around me. There was a three-day riot in Brooklyn, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Some broker ran amok on his lunch hour and shot up Wall Street with an air pistol. Some cops had beaten up some hippies in Tompkins Square Park. The cabdrivers were threatening a strike. The social workers were threatening a strike. The garbagemen were threatening a strike.

I drank a lot of iced tea and tried to concentrate on the thesis I was writing, a doctoral bit on the implications of the Methuen Treaty upon the War of the Spanish Succession. It was a particularly interesting theme and I was having a lot of fun with the research, and when I was about three-fourths of the way through it, Roger Carmody called up and told me I might as well forget it because he had failed his oral examinations and had decided to say the hell with it and join the Army.

I had put a price of $1750 on the thesis, which was reasonable enough. And I had collected half the money in advance, mine to keep now that the job was washed out, but Roger Carmody was a pretty nice fellow and I felt bad about the whole deal, so I gave him all his money back and consequently felt even worse about the whole deal. Someday I would finish the thesis for somebody else and get my money out of it. In the meanwhile my bank balance was lower than I like to have it.

It was just one damned thing after another. A batch of things was hanging in the air in an annoying fashion. In Macedonia a girl named Annalya, the mother of my son Todor, was expecting a second child momentarily; I couldn’t find out a thing about her, and some friends of mine who were normally in close contact with Macedonia didn’t know anything. Other good friends had gone over to Africa to assist a secessionist movement in one of the new states and had quietly disappeared from the face of the earth. No one had any idea what had happened to them, and as they had been last seen in cannibal territory, it was quite probable that they had been eaten.

Then I got an eviction notice from my idiot landlord.

It turned out to be a mistake, of course. My landlord had hired a new secretary, and either she was particularly stupid or he had been singularly incompetent in drilling her in standard procedures, because she had sent eviction notices to every tenant in the half dozen buildings he owned. In my case, all that transpired was an apoplectic phone call, but with a great many of his other tenants he wasn’t so lucky. They were behind in their rent, and were used to things like eviction notices, so they moved. Just like that, the poor clown had a third of his apartments vacant and not a chance of collecting all the back rent.

I suppose he fired the girl. I suppose she went home and yelled at her mother or threw a shoe at the cat. I suppose the cat ran off and scratched someone. It was that kind of summer, and each day was worse than the last one.

By then I knew that the heat wave wasn’t going to end. I didn’t care what the weather bureau said, it was going to remain hot until I got a new air-conditioner. I was positive of it. Everything was going wrong; all of civilization was gradually crumbling around me. I sat in my apartment and read the Book of Jeremiah and waited for the world to end.

And then, of course, I got a message from the Chief.

I’ll have to explain about the Chief. I don’t know very much about him, but then neither does anyone else. He heads some sort of ultrasecret government agency. I don’t know its name, nor, for that matter, do I know the Chief’s name. As far as I can tell, his outfit handles the sort of operations that call for individual agents left on their own initiative and operating from deep cover. While the Central Intelligence Agency, for example, uses elaborate courier nets, the Chief’s men don’t even know each other. They don’t file formal reports, are forbidden even to get in touch with their own headquarters, and are generally left to work things out on their own.

The Chief thinks I’m one of his men.

Maybe I am. It’s hard to say. He once sprang me from a CIA dungeon somewhere in darkest Washington and since then he has made contact from time to time to hand me assignments. I’d rather he wouldn’t do this, but the man is convinced I’m one of his most reliable operatives, and I’ve never been able to figure out a way to change his mind. Besides, there’s something to be said for the connection – as it stands. I’m under fairly constant surveillance by the CIA, which is sure I am some kind of secret agent, never mind whose, and by the FBI, which is positive I am six different kinds of subversive. With all of the consequent wiretapping and mail-snooping going on, it’s vaguely reassuring to have at least one government factotum who thinks, right or wrong, that I’m on his side.

The message from the Chief came in my morning mail the Thursday before Minna and I flew to Montreal. I suppose he figured that once the FBI censors had read my mail, anything that got into my mailbox was safe from them. Anyway, when I hauled the mail up to my room, there was one envelope with just my name on it, no address, no stamp, no return address, nothing. In the envelope was a matchbook from something called Hector’s Lounge, in Helena, Montana. I checked to see if anyone had written anything anywhere. No one had.

I knew it had to be him. None of the marginal subversives in any of the groups I belonged to would ever think of anything quite so cute. I turned the matchbook over and over in my hands. It was trying to tell me something, but it had been struck mute.

I left the building and walked through the heat to a drugstore on Broadway. In the phone booth I dialed the area code for Helena, Montana, which, if you care, is 406. Then I dialed the seven digits for Hector’s Lounge. It rang a few times, and then an operator cut in and asked me what number I was calling, please, and I learned that the number I was calling did not exist, and neither did Hector’s Lounge.

I had a Coke at the counter. If someone ever wished me ill, I thought, all he really had to do was gimmick me to death. He could keep leaving cryptic messages for me, all of them quite meaningless, and I would run myself ragged calling nonexistent telephone numbers and otherwise making an ass of myself. Maybe one was supposed to immerse the matchbook in water. I asked the counterman for a glass of water, and immersed the matchbook in it, and tried not to notice the way he was staring at me. All that happened was that the matchbook got predictably soggy, and some of the red gunk at the tips of the matches came off.

I went back to the phone, dialed 202 for Washington, and then the number again. I got somebody in the Bureau of Health, Education, and Welfare. He didn’t know just what I wanted and I didn’t know just who he was, and I wasted my time and his until I established that Hector’s Lounge meant nothing to him.

I looked in the phone book under Hector’s Lounge and found out that there was such a place right in Manhattan, on Sixth Avenue in the Forties. The listed number was not the same as the one on the matchbook. I dialed it and nobody answered the phone.

Then I dialed the number from the matchbook, without bothering with area codes, and that turned out to be what the Chief had had in mind. Maybe I should have done it that way in the first place, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what everyone else would have done. Make things sufficiently complicated and almost anybody can find a way to foul them up.

I dialed the number, and a woman answered it in the middle of the first ring. She said, “Yes?”

I asked if this was Hector’s Lounge.

“It is,” she said.

“May I speak with Hector?”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“ Helena,” I said.

She gave me an address, a second-floor loft on Gansevoort Street in the bowels of the West Village. I took the IRT subway to Sheridan Square and groped around until I found the place. The loft smelled of untanned leather, and hides were stacked in bales all over the place. It was infernally hot in there. A noisy old fan on a tripod blew warm air at me.

My other meetings with him have always taken place in comfortable rooms or suites in good hotels. Now, on a day like this one, he had picked one of the few places in New York (aside from my damned apartment) that was not air-conditioned. He sat in a leather chair, then got to his feet at my approach and crossed the areaway to shake hands. He had already sweated through his shiny gray suit, and he looked as uncomfortable as he had every right to be. “Ah, Tanner,” he said. “Excuse this heat and this mess.”

He sat down. His was the only chair in the room. He nodded vaguely at a bundle of hides and I sat on it. He picked up a bottle and a couple of glasses.

“Scotch?”

“With a lot of ice.”

“I’m afraid there’s no ice,” he said.

We drank our drinks and chatted. I asked him if he happened to know anything about the friends of mine who were lost in Africa, and he said that as far as he knew, they had been eaten. I had already come to that conclusion myself, but it would have been nice to know something more definite, one way or the other. One can resign oneself to a loss, even in such barbaric circumstances, but it’s dreary to have the whole business up in the air. Better the horrible fact than the horrible probability.

“ Cuba,” the Chief said suddenly. “Keep in touch with Cuba, Tanner?”

“Slightly.”

“Refugee groups, that sort of thing?”

“Yes.” Half of Florida belongs to one Cuban refugee group or another, and I know people in most of them. My favorite is the band that runs gunboats in the Caribbean sinking ships en route to Havana. Fidel doesn’t pay too much attention to them, but the U. S. Government makes their life rather difficult, and I think they can use all the support they can get. “Yes,” I said, “I know some men involved in those groups.”

“Thought you might. You were also involved in one of the front organizations, weren’t you? Play Fair with Fidel or something?”

“Fair Play for Cuba.”

“That’s the one.”

“It wasn’t exactly a front organization,” I said. “The Cuban Government supported it, of course, but it was more than a straight propaganda outlet at the time. Leftist-dominated, naturally. An organization composed of people who were concerned that the United States might interfere in the internal affairs of Cuba.”

“Mmmm.”

“An unwarranted assumption, of course. The Bay of Pigs showed as much.”

“It did?” He looked at me oddly, seemed about to say something, then sighed shortly and lifted the Scotch bottle. I was perspiring far too heavily to want anything without ice, especially whiskey. He helped himself to another small drink and tossed it off.

“Where were we?”

“ Cuba.”

“Yes. Not our normal bailiwick, you know. The Boy Scouts generally keep an eye on that part of the hemisphere.”

“Still?”

“Yes, even now. To err is human, that seems to be the official line. And naturally they want to stay with it, you know. I think they hope to improve their track record down there.”

“Shouldn’t be hard.”

“Not at all.” He put down his glass, placed his pudgy hands in his lap, and folded them. I waited for him to tell me that I had to go to Havana, disguised as a worker in the canefields, to shave Fidel in his sleep. Havana would be just the place in August. It was the only city I could think of offhand that was almost certain to be warmer than New York. It was bad enough to be handed an assignment that was dangerous, stupid, and immoral. This one promised to be all of those, and uncomfortable in the bargain.

“I may be sending you on a wild-goose chase, Tanner.”

“Oh.”

“I almost handed the whole thing back myself when I first got wind of it. Almost told them to give it to the Boy Scouts. They’ve got the manpower to spare, they can afford to send people on fool’s errands, and a lot of their personnel aren’t geared for much better than that. Almost gave it back, Tanner, but then I thought of you.”

I did not say any of the things that occurred to me.

“Felt you might be right for it. If there’s anything to it, that is. If there’s any game at all, not to speak of whether or not it’s worth the candle. But your background, your contacts, your languages, your special talents – I thought it might be down your alley.”

“I see,” I lied.

“You can turn it down if you want.”

“It’s like that?”

“Yes.” He sighed, started to lift the Scotch bottle, then set it down again. I’ve never seen him drunk and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him not drinking. Perhaps he’s drunk all the time and it simply doesn’t show. I drew a deep breath and began to think of reasons why I couldn’t possibly go to Havana. My mind wasn’t working well. I think it was the overwhelming smell of leather that was getting to me. I had always liked the smell of leather before.

“I would like you to go-”

“To Havana,” I said.

“ Havana?” He looked confused. “No, not Havana. Why on earth should you go to Havana? I want you to go to Montreal.”

“It’s the Cuban Pavilion,” he was saying. “You know there’s a World’s Fair in Montreal this year. Expo, they call it. Man and His World, that’s the theme of it. Makes things rather simple for the exhibitors, wouldn’t you say? I’d be hard put to think of anything that wouldn’t fit the overall theme of Man and His World. Even Sally Rand, for heaven’s sake.

“ Cuba is one of the participating nations. The theme of the Cuban Pavilion is revolution. Or Man and His Revolution, I don’t know. Quite a shocking display they have, from what I hear. All the other countries offer rather pleasant displays of native crafts and burgeoning industry and dynamic agriculture, and the Cubans confront one with posters and machine guns and the most blatant propaganda in history. One walks past all of these screaming posters, then enters their little restaurant and has a rum drink and a Havana cigar. That’s what they’re selling – rum and cigars and revolution.”

“Is it successful propaganda?”

“Probably not. I suspect that family groups parade through, then say something like, ‘That was nice, now let’s ride on the Minirail.’ It’s hard to measure the effect of such intangibles.”

I was sort of lost. I was still trying to get used to the idea that he was sending me, not to Havana, but to Montreal. Montreal, I kept thinking, was 400 miles north of New York. North. It was almost certain to be cooler in Montreal. And Minna had been badgering me to take her there anyway. And there wouldn’t be any race riots there, or any cab strikes or social worker strikes, and my landlord wouldn’t be there, and-

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “You don’t want me to blow up the Cuban Pavilion-”

“Heavens, no!”

“Or organize demonstrations around it, or anything?”

“No.”

“Then what? I mean, Havana spends three-quarters of its time launching anti-American propaganda of one sort or another. This seems like one of their less effective ways to do it, since ninety-five percent of the people exposed to it will be Americans or Canadians. I don’t-”

“No one’s worried about the propaganda aspect, Tanner.”

“What is it, then?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them and said, “I wish to hell I knew.” He cleared his throat. “I keep losing track of things today. It’s this damned heat. It’s nearly as bad as Washington.”

“It’s this bad in Washington?”

“Worse, far worse.” He cleared his throat again. “The Cuban Pavilion. We’ve been receiving strange reports about their whole operation there. They seem to be using the pavilion as a base for some sort of secret operation. One story has it that they’re using it as an infiltration point for agents who then make their way into the States masquerading as American tourists. Another report suggests that they plan a big push in U. S. Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, some sort of involvement in the riots. It sounds farfetched, doesn’t it? But they’ve blamed the damned riots on everyone else lately, I suppose they ought to charge Fidel with them. The point is this – any single one of these rumbles we’ve received would be worth permanent filing in the wastepaper basket. As it stands, though, we’re receiving too much static. We can’t discount all of it. The Cubans are doing something improper with that pavilion, and we don’t know what the hell it is, and we feel we ought to know.” He closed his eyes again. “Am I making sense to you?”

“Yes.”

“I ask because I myself find it hard to take all of this as seriously as it probably in fact deserves to be taken. You see what the assignment boils down to, Tanner? I’d like you to take a look at the Cuban Pavilion. Stick your nose in, spend a bit of time there, try to get an idea what the hell is going on. Perhaps you can sort of worm your way in, develop some sort of contact with their employees. You speak Spanish-”

“That can’t be much help.”

“Won’t hurt. Your political background might be worthwhile. You might be able to… oh, I don’t want to tell you your job, Lord knows you’re a professional at this sort of thing. If anyone can sort the fact from the fiction, you can. But at the same time, I hate to have you waste your time in what might well be nothing for us at all. Have you got anything of your own on the fire? Anything really promising?”

What a marvelous opportunity to duck an assignment! He was very nearly begging me to cop out.

“Nothing at the moment.”

“Anything that could pop soon?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmmm. Would you like to give it a shot, then?”

Did I care what was happening at the Cuban Pavilion? No. Did I want to see the fair? No. Did I want to go to Montreal? No. Did I want to get out of New York?

“Yes,” I said.

He insisted on advancing me money for plane fare, chuckling as he pointed out that I never seemed to turn in expense requests after a trip. I told him that I usually managed to make expenses on assignments, and he chuckled again and muttered something about resourceful operatives and individual initiative. “But I can’t think you’ll find any personal profit in this trip, Tanner. After all, you’re only going to Canada.”

I told him that I thought I would take my little girl along. He said she would make a good cover, and advanced money for her ticket as well. I hadn’t thought of Minna as part of a cover, somehow. I just thought she’d like to see the damned fair and that it wouldn’t hurt her to get out of the oven that called itself New York.

I left him there with the leather. On 42nd Street I picked up tickets on the first available flight to Montreal, which was Tuesday night. Everything before then was booked solid. The clerk told me to take proof of citizenship. I already had Minna’s passport, having applied for it long before there was any specific place I wanted to take her. Anyone who doesn’t possess a passport in good order is a fool. No man is so secure that the possibility does not exist that someday he will find it necessary to go someplace far away in a hurry.

I took a cab back to my apartment. An air-conditioned cab. I hated to leave it. I climbed four flights of stairs. Warm air rises – the higher I climbed, the warmer it was. I let myself into my place and found Minna listening to the radio and reading a copy of the general orders of the Latvian Army-In-Exile. “Better brush up your French,” I said. “Tuesday night we leave for Montreal.”

“ Montreal!”

“Unless you don’t want to-”

“Oh, Evan! You’re taking me to Expo?”

“I’m taking you to Expo.”

But now it looked as though I weren’t.