Tanner’s Tiger

We moved more slowly with the oars, but it wasn’t too bad; the current, such as it was, was on our side. And, wonder of wonders, I did not get lost at all. I guided us neatly from this cha

We docked. I tied the painter to a concrete pillar, hauled the oars inside, and stood up on the seat in the middle (which probably has a good nautical name, but it’s enough of an accomplishment for me to know about painters and oars and sterns) for a look around. I couldn’t see or hear anyone. I hauled myself up onto the shore – it’s hard to think of it as a shore when it’s paved with asphalt – then leaned down to take the flashlight and the bagful of goodies from Arlette. I helped her up and out, and we hurried through the suddenly deserted streets toward the Cuban Pavilion. For once the more popular pavilions had no line. I was tempted to break into all of them just to see the show.

There was enough light from the streetlamps scattered here and there to make our way, and not enough to show us up readily. In the stillness some sounds of human activity were audible. Motorized sweepers moved through the streets; garbage collectors prepared the concrete bins for tomorrow’s assault.

The front entrance to the Cuban Pavilion was too exposed. We slipped around to the back, and I winked the flashlight at the door, then closed in on it and attacked the lock with the tools I had brought. A strip of plastic finally did the trick. I slipped the catch, then had Arlette hold the hunk of plastic in place so that the lock stayed back while I drew the door open. It opened outward, and there was no handle on the outside, so I had to grip the edge of it with my fingertips and sort of coax it open. It took a while, but we managed it and got inside.

I was absolutely certain somebody would grab us the minute we entered. The events in Emile’s basement came vividly to mind. I expected a blow on the head, or a gun barrel poked between my ribs, or a bright light flashed in our faces. None of these fears materialized. We stood together in utter silence for almost a full minute, then moved away from the door. I played the beam of the flashlight around the interior of the building. No human forms lurked in the stillness, none but our own.

“We have to be absolutely silent,” I whispered. “If they’re kidnaping people, they have to be keeping them somewhere, and they have to have guards. There must be a room here, somewhere. So they must have had the whole thing in mind when they built the damned place, which means they had plenty of time to design something very well hidden.”

“Then where do we look?”

“I don’t really know. Shhh!”

We wandered around foggily on little cat feet. It was one of the easiest buildings in the world to search – large, empty areaways, no thick inside walls – and one of the hardest in which to find anything. We covered the first floor, climbed the stairs, checked out the second floor, descended the stairs again, and stood around stupidly looking at each other.

“Evan?”

“What?”

“Perhaps the restaurant…”

The restaurant was in a separate building. I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “No. More people entered this building than left it. That means they have to be here.”

“But where? There is no place to conceal a secret room. The entire roof is a skylight, the walls-”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Of course.”

“What?”

“The basement.”

“There is a basement? I did not-”

“I didn’t either, but there has to be a basement. When all of the impossibilities are eliminated, only the possible is left. Or something like that.” I was whispering too loudly, and stopped myself. “A hidden basement. It would be no problem to build in something like that. If we look for a seam in the floor-”

“Look at the floor, Evan.”

I did, and abandoned that whole train of thought. The floor was tile, and there were seams every ten inches, one as likely as the next to mask the aperture to the cellar below. We checked the entire floor out anyway, just to make sure, and it was no go.

“Then there’s a switch that opens it,” I went on. “A button, a switch, some way of getting the thing open.”

“Reasonable.”

“So we must find that switch.”

We looked. We went over the whole place, working feverishly now, and all we managed to prove was the invalidity of the hypothesis – there was not a switch. Unless, of course, it lurked behind a secret panel, or was contained in some portable remote-control device.

Or, for that matter, unless it was in the basement. Suppose, when they wanted to open the thing, they signaled their man downstairs, and he pressed a button or threw a switch.

It was possible.

Almost anything was possible.

“It’s no damned use,” I said. “We’ve checked everywhere.”

“It is so. There are only those silly light switches at the entrance, and-”

I hit myself, hard, in the forehead. Arlette looked curiously at me. I tightened my fist and hit myself again in the same spot.

“Oh,” she said, light dawning. “It is one of those, then.”

“It would have to be.”

“But which one?”

We walked to the bank of switches alongside the desk where robot tourists had their Expo Passports stamped. There were seven switches in all. There were also two sets of lights upstairs, three sets downstairs, an air-conditioner – and, if I was right, an electrically operated passageway to the basement below.

But which one?

I switched off our own flashlight. It didn’t help to stare at the seven switches. They were unlabeled, and one looked rather like the next. And I did not care for the idea of throwing all seven to see what happened, or even of flicking them on one at a time. I did not want to illuminate the pavilion. It was about the last thing I wanted to do.

“She could be down there right now,” Arlette whispered. “And we-”

“And we can’t get there.”

“Oh, it is not fair.”

I thought fleetingly of trying to find a way to un-screw all of the bulbs from all of the fixtures. But even that, impossible though it was, would not turn the trick. For all I knew, one of the switches might activate the little recorder that boomed out Castro’s speeches, or the Mickey Mouse display unit that told about all of the revolutions throughout the world in the past five million years.

“What do we do?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess.”

“You guess what?”

“I just guess. I throw a switch and we see what happens.”

“Now?”

“Unless you’d like to pray first.”

She nodded seriously. “An excellent idea.” She knelt and whispered an urgent Paternoster and got to her feet. “Thank you for reminding me, Evan.”

St. Joan and the Hidden Basement. I took a breath, and I reached for the board, and I threw a switch. There was just the briefest flicker of lights upstairs before I managed to throw the switch down again.

Arlette drew in breath sharply. Her nails dug into my arm. “Do you think-”

“Someone may have noticed, yes. But they won’t know where the light came from, or why, and they won’t pay any attention to it.”

“But if you do it again-”

“I’ll wait awhile. Give anyone who saw it time to forget it.”

And I did, and tried the second switch, and it was the fixture on the first floor, and that gave us another five minutes to wait. My third try was a loudspeaker – I’m sure the sound from that did not carry any distance, nor did the brief whirring of the air-conditioner, which was try number four. The fifth thing was some more first floor lighting.

“We are getting close,” Arlette said.

That was the bright way of looking at it. My own feeling, with five out of seven of the switches exhausted, was that we had leaped to another wrong conclusion – either there was no basement, or none of the damned switches would give us access to it. Well, two more tries would show one way or the other. I pulled the sixth switch and another damned light went on, and I switched it off, and Arlette and I stared at each other in the darkness.