Tanner’s Tiger

She said, “Who was-”

“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

The man, tall and thin and dark and dead, lay sprawled in the middle of the carpet of plastic grass fronting the Man In The Home Pavilion. He had bled all over that artificial lawn, and soon the world would discover if it was in fact as wondrously washable as its promoters claimed. I went through the formality of looking for a pulse. There was none.

I patted his pockets, found nothing. I picked up the murder gun from the grass beside his body, sniffed the barrel, threw it down again. I wondered if the dead man was a Cuban – he did not look particularly Cuban – or if he had been killed by Cuban agents. I wondered how he fit into everything, if at all.

“Do you know him, Evan?”

“No.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know that either.” I was suddenly dizzy, and I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to steady myself. We were in over our heads, I thought. We were playing a fool’s game with people who knew the rules far better than we.

“I think we should get out of here,” I said.

“I agree.”

This time we walked onward with caution. This time we moved in absolute silence, our ears attuned to the night sounds around us. This time, as we walked down the path to the waterway, we did not make the mistake of assuming we were alone.

But we still weren’t quite prepared. We reached the water’s edge, and I saw our little boat right where we had left it. And, alongside it, I saw another larger boat, empty.

Arlette’s hand tightened on my arm. And from the shadows a man emerged. There was a gun in his hand. He was smiling slightly, and he went on smiling as he placed the muzzle of the gun within three inches of my chest, directly over the heart.

Then he said, in highly accented French, “The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.”

Chapter 11

The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.

How interesting, I thought. It was a claim I myself would have liked to make, but one that if made would soon prove to be demonstrably false. Because I had the unassailable feeling that the bullet that would kill me had been cast, and that it reposed at that very moment in the cylinder of the revolver that was pointing at my heart.

“The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast,” the man repeated, a touch of malice in his voice. I looked at the gun and tried to estimate my chances against it. I could make some sort of grab for it, try to knock it aside and beat the idiot’s brains out. I readied myself, and then I took careful note of the way the index finger was curled tautly around the trigger. He wasn’t just pointing the gun at me. He was getting ready to fire it.

“Nor is the bullet yet cast, nor shall it ever be cast, that can put to death a grand idea. Nor is the bullet cast that will slay France.”

The same accent, the same vaguely familiar yet quietly meaningless sort of rhetoric. But the speaker was not the man now. It was Arlette, her voice ringing with conviction, her hand still firm in its grip upon my arm.

“And so I pledge myself,” she went on, “and my honor, and my life and soul, to the overthrow of the Bourbon yoke and the prompt restoration of the seed of empire-”

“Enough,” the man was saying now. “Enough, more than enough.” He lowered the gun and pocketed it. “You will understand that I have as little use for such passwords as you yourself, but at such times one ca

“Of course.”

“You have the money?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering idly what money he meant, and who he was, and what Arlette had said to him, and what, for that matter, we were all of us doing here. “Yes,” I said, “I have it.”

“Very good. You will want this, of course.”

He handed me a flat black attaché case. I took it by the handle and ran my hand over the side of it. Fine leather, soft, smooth.

“And I will want – the paper sack? Yes?”

“But certainly,” I said, and handed him our sandwiches and burglar tools.

He patted it lovingly, then turned from us and tossed the sack into his own boat. He turned to face us again. “You might tell the man that we can undertake to ship more frequently if the market position holds up. You will tell him that?”

“Certainly.”

“I myself am only a courier. I speak messages as they are given to me, just as I relay parcels as I receive them. No offense?”

“None at all.”

“I am glad,” he said. He smiled again, like a wolf baring its teeth, vaulted into his boat, and turned a key in the ignition. His engines roared into life and his boat dashed off to the east.

Without a word, Arlette and I got into our own little boat. I bent over the little outboard motor and cranked it.

“The sound of the engine,” she began.

“The hell with it,” I said. “I want to get out of here in a hurry.”

The engine caught. I spun the boat around and headed back in the direction from which we had come; the opposite direction the larger vessel had taken. I wanted to get as far away from him as possible. I did not ever want to see that man again.

“Evan?”

“Yes?”

“This satchel.”

“Yes?”

“Do you know what is in it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. Why did he take our sandwiches?”

“Perhaps he was hungry.”

She lapsed into a hurt silence. I piloted our little boat through the dark waters. Everything had gone quietly mad. I felt as though we were playing out parts in a script based upon a painting by Salvador Dali. Who was the dead man? Who killed him and why? Where did the other man come from, and why had he given us the satchel, and what was he talking about, babbling that the bullet that would kill him had not been cast? And Arlette-

“You knew the answer,” I said suddenly.

“Pardon?”

“You knew the rest of the password.”

“What password?”

“The bullet that would kill him.”

“Evan, are you feeling well?”

“No,” I said, “but that has nothing to do with it. Look, he pointed a gun at us. At me, actually. And he said something about a bullet-”

“‘The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.’”

“Right.”

“Was that a password?”

“It seems so. And you answered him. Didn’t you know it was a password?”

“But no.”

“Then how in hell-”

“It was a saying of Napoleon,” she said.

I thought for a moment. She was right, I thought – it was a saying of Napoleon, uttered in 1814 at Montereau. It was the sort of smart-ass remark military leaders are apt to make, especially when they’re sitting in tents a few miles behind the front lines.

So Napoleon said it. Wonderful. And the man with the gun might easily have been nutty enough to think he was Napoleon. But-

“You answered him,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Are you Josephine or something?”

She frowned. “Evan, you must be very tired. You had no sleep tonight and I doubt that you slept much last night either. As soon as we return to the apartment-”

“You answered him.”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I continued the oath.”

“The oath?” I looked at her. “What oath?”

“The Bonapartiste oath.”

“Oh.”

“He seemed to be waiting for an answer, and-”

“Yes, of course.”

“So I continued the oath.” She hesitated for a moment. “It would perhaps be better if you did not tell the others, but I am a Bonapartiste. I do not believe that it is incompatible with the movement for the liberation of Quebec, although there are those who would disagree with me. But should not French Canada and France herself be united under a strong leader, a single leader who is a descendant of the great Napoleon himself and who will again restore French glory and French empire throughout the world and who will-”