Tanner’s Tiger

“Oh,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“That man spoke with an unusual accent.”

“Yes.”

“A Corsican accent, wasn’t it?”

She thought it over. “It is possible. I could not say.”

“I think it was. It sounded a little like French spoken by an Italian, didn’t it? A Corsican accent.”

“Napoleon was a Corsican.”

“Yes.”

“So the man was a Bonapartiste, Evan. It is simple, no? I did not think the Cause had much activity in this hemisphere, but-”

I shook my head. “I do not think the man was a Bonapartiste.”

“But of course! You yourself said he was a Corsican, and he recited the oath, the begi

“I think he used the oath as a password. A fairly natural password for a Corsican, I guess.”

“Then-”

“A Corsican coming to Montreal to exchange a parcel for some money.”

“But we gave him sandwiches and tools,” she said. “And my cigarettes. Damn, I want a cigarette!”

“You’ll have to wait. He didn’t know we gave him sandwiches and tools. He thought we gave him money.”

“I see.”

I don’t know whether she did or not, but I did. The Corsican had come to meet someone, someone who was carrying a consignment of cash. The man with the money was ambushed and shot, and had left his blood all over the plastic lawn at the Man In The Home Pavilion. His murderers took the cash, and Arlette and I went on to meet the Corsican.

And gave him lunch. And took, in return, what?

I had a fair idea.

They grow it in Turkey, in huge fields where the workers earn fifteen or twenty cents a day. They ship it to France, where the men of the Union Corse, the Corsican Mafia, refine it carefully in hidden laboratories. Then they ship it to Canada, and there French Canadians buy it and cut it and parcel it out and ship it once more to New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and Detroit.

Uh-huh.

I managed to sail us back to where Arlette’s friend had left the boat for us. I tied up the boat, and Arlette and I returned to her apartment. Dawn was breaking by the time we got back. Arlette tore open a pack of Gauloise and lit a cigarette. I sat down on the bed and opened the attaché case, and inside were three cylindrical tins. I managed to open one of them, wet a finger, dipped it into the white powder, and licked it.

Uh-huh.

“What is it, Evan?”

I capped the tin, returned it to the case. I sat with the case open on my lap and looked down at the three tins. The Union Corse was not going to be happy about this, I thought. Neither, for that matter, were the men who were supposed to be on the receiving end of the shipment. Nor the ultimate consumers, who would start walking up the walls when the supply ran thin.

“Evan?”

“It’s heroin,” I said quietly. “Three kilos of it, I guess. Enough heroin to turn on half the world.”

She had dozens of questions. She wanted to know why we had it and whose it was and what I proposed to do with it. I couldn’t answer the last question and didn’t have the strength to answer the others. I just sat there and looked at the three tins and thought about Mounties and Cubans and French Canadians and Corsicans and wondered, without particularly caring, which of them would kill me first.

Arlette finished her cigarette, then got undressed and into bed. She was quite surprised, and perhaps a little bit hurt, when I did not want to make love. She found it difficult to understand. I sat with her until she fell asleep, and then I found the brandy bottle and communed with it until it was empty.

The sun came up, hot as ever. I prowled through Arlette’s cupboards until I found an old bottle of cooking sherry, and I drank that, too. On the seven o’clock newscast I learned that a body had been discovered at the Expo site, and that foul play was feared. At eight o’clock I discovered that De Gaulle had made a forceful speech at Lyon, coming out foursquare for the independence of Quebec. At eight thirty Arlette’s radio assured me that a spokesman for Mrs. Battenberg had denied that Free Quebec sentiment would affect plans for a royal visit to the fair.

At nine o’clock fingerprints on the murder gun were positively identified as belonging to Evan Michael Ta

I looked at the heroin and wished I had a hypodermic needle.

Chapter 12

“Of course you realize that it is suicide.”

“I know this,” Emile said. “Utter suicide. You would not have a chance.”

“I do not expect a chance. I am not a fool, Evan.”

I doubted this. I looked at Emile, then glanced at the bed where Arlette was still sleeping. It was somewhere around noon and she was still asleep and I envied her. Insomnia, I decided, was more curse than blessing. Arlette managed to escape the slipstream of human madness for eight hours out of every twenty-four. God, how I envied her.

I looked again at Emile. He was seated, with Jean and Jacques Berton crouching at his right like couchant lions while Claude hulked grimly at his left. He didn’t look mad, I thought. And when he spoke, he seemed quite calm and rational. Until one happened to pay attention to his words.

“I am not afraid to die, Evan.”

“It is not a question of personal fear. The movement-”

“The movement needs our deaths more than our lives.” The sentence has at least as grand a ring to it in French as in English. “The movement cries out for martyrs, Evan. The MNQ is – admit it – in many quarters no more than a joke. A majority of those who sympathize with us nevertheless regard us as cranks, as unworldly fanatics. Is it not so?”

“All extremist movements begin in that fashion, Emile-”

“And how is public opinion changed?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer that one. “By fire and blood,” Claude cut in. He coughed and spat for emphasis. “By the grand act, by sacrifice.”

“Exactly,” said Emile. “Exactly. The grand act, bold and daring and dramatic. The act need not be logical. It may be senseless, it may be foredoomed to failure. This does not matter. But it must be an act that brings counteraction, an act that yields a crop of martyrs for the cause. The soil of liberty is fertilized by the blood of martyrs. You know this is true, Evan. You know full well that nothing rallies the public to a cause like the demonstrated willingness of patriots to die for it.”

I might have argued more forcefully if I hadn’t happened to know that he was absolutely correct. My mind could do nothing more than summon up examples that proved his point. The 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin took place with half the country opposed to republicanism and the other half profoundly apathetic. The rising was squashed, as its leaders knew it would be; the British executed the leaders, as everyone had assumed they would – and two years later Si

The situation in Quebec was much further from fulfillment, of course. But the basic pattern remained the same. Martyrs, sacrificing themselves heroically for an ideal, would do more than reams of propaganda to change the Quebec nationalists from a laughingstock to a political force.

I closed my eyes. Claude was talking. On the bed Arlette moaned in her sleep; perhaps his rough voice was giving her bad dreams. I myself was not paying any attention to what he was saying. If Emile was right (and I had to admit that he was) and if I truly supported the cause of the MNQ (and I certainly did), then I ought to be backing him and Claude and the Berton Boys all the way.

But I wasn’t.

Because they had decided, all of them, that they were going to abandon the kidnaping plans entirely. And they had decided, all of them, that they were going to put into effect the public assassination of the Queen of England.