Tanner’s Tiger

I tried the door. It was locked. I told her to come out and she a

When she emerged finally, her pretty face washed free of tears, she came to me and patted my cheek sympathetically. “Jean d’Arc,” she said. “My chaste hero, my knight in shiny armor. Your mind is on other things, you burn with devotion to the cause, of course you must not make love to Arlette.”

She seemed convinced. I’m not sure I was. I thought of the list of things I couldn’t do and realized I had one more thing to add to it. When impotence strikes, it hits you everywhere.

We sat around for a while, waiting for the fair to close up shop, and then it occurred to me to test the mi-crophone and the receiving gadget, and the thing didn’t work. Arlette remembered that someone had dropped the mike recently. I took it apart with a screwdriver and found a broken thing in it. I don’t know what the broken thing was, or what it was supposed to do. But without it we seemed to be up a tree.

She got us out of that one. She told me she had an idea and left without an explanation. I wasn’t sorry to see her go – we’d been getting on each other’s nerves – but I didn’t really expect her to come up with anything. She did, though, returning with Seth and Randy in tow. Seth handed me a microphone and asked me if it would work.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s the receiver?”

“Probably in police headquarters. It’s one of the bugs they put in our office. Somebody fastened it to the underside of the mimeo machine.”

“We thought you could rob it of the broken part and repair ours,” Arlette said.

“This is a live mike,” I said.

Somebody nodded.

“They can pick up what we’re saying right now, at police headquarters or wherever.”

“Yes, but-”

“Be quiet,” I said.

I took the bug apart. It was a completely different model from ours, but it had a piece like the piece that was broken in our unit, and I studied the way it was co

The next few hours were deadly. The four of us sat around listening to the radio. I kept changing stations to avoid listening to a newscast. They weren’t going to tell me anything I wanted to hear.

I finally got out of there. Arlette wanted to come along, perhaps in the hope that the dungeon would once again unlock my libido. Seth and Randy also volunteered to join me. I insisted on going alone. It would be easy this time. I merely had to get into the building, press the switch (I knew which one it was, for a change), hide the bug somewhere, close up shop, and leave.

I found the boat and had no trouble following last night’s course to Ile de Notre Dame. I docked at precisely the same spot. I left the boat and carried the bug with me to the Cuban Pavilion, and then a bad day turned worse.

They had guards posted. Four of them, two in front and two at the rear. Four armed guards who stood rigidly at attention and who gave every appearance of being wholly alert.

For a long time I sat in the shadows and watched them from a distance. They didn’t fall asleep or go away or die or anything of the sort. They stayed right where they were and seemed likely to stay there until the fair reopened in the morning.

I went back to my boat and began rowing. I half hoped it would sink, but it didn’t. Boats never sink when you want them to.

Chapter 13

They were all at the apartment when I got back. I knocked on the door and Arlette opened it, and I walked in flipping the microphone up in the air and catching it, flipping and catching, like George Raft’s half dollar bit. I ignored their questions and went on playing with the microphone. It was about the size of a plum but less useful.

“Guards all over the place,” I explained eventually. “We must have left something behind in the dungeon the other night. I don’t know what – a cigarette butt, maybe. Or maybe they always have guards except on Saturdays. That doesn’t make much sense, but neither does anything else lately. It doesn’t matter. The place is guarded and there’s no way to plant the bug and I think I’ve just about had it. Is there anything to drink?”

“No.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

Seth mentioned that there was a little wine back at their place. I told him not to bother. “Or we could turn on,” he suggested.

I looked at Arlette. “I thought I told you to keep quiet about that.”

“About what, Evan?”

“You holding, Evan?”

“But I said nothing,” Arlette said. “I never mentioned the heroin.”

“Heroin?” Randy looked carefully at me. “You’re no junkie, it can’t be that. What’s the bit?”

“What did you mean about turning on?”

There’s something to be said for answering a question with a question. Randy forgot his and answered mine. “Well,” he said, “like pot.”

“You have some with you?”

“Well, actually, yes.”

I turned to Arlette. “You’ve been this route, Joan of Arc?”

“Sometimes the boys come up and we all smoke.”

Seth said, “No offense, Evan, but if you happen to dig smoking-”

I just started laughing. I’m not sure why. Arlette, Seth, Randy, Emile, Claude, Jean, Jacques, the Chief, the helicopter pilot, the woman with the lost kids, the Cuban dungeon, my landlord, my air-conditioner, Sonya, Mi

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, gasping. “Why not?”

I hadn’t smoked anything in ages. I had smoked cigarettes for about three years up before I was wounded in Korea. Shortly thereafter I discovered that when you were awake around the clock, you smoked around the clock, and with my body deprived of eight hours’ abstinence from tobacco, I rapidly developed a chronic cough and sore throat. When cutting down didn’t work, I quit cold. That turned out to be infinitely easier than I had suspected, and I discovered that not smoking was better than smoking, and that was that.

Then about seven or eight years ago a girl turned me on to marijuana, and I smoked now and then for a period of about a year and a half. Toward the end I found that I was no longer getting the pleasant giggling highs that I’d had in the begi

Since that time the closest I ever came to any kind of habit was on a trek through Thailand and Laos, in the course of which I found myself becoming mildly addicted to betel nut. If betel nut were available in the States, I might have stayed hooked, but it isn’t.

I am not entirely certain why I decided to smoke marijuana that night in Montreal. If the Chief were the sort of bore who demanded written reports of his agents’ activities, that would have to be one of many items I would neglect to mention. The determining factors, I suppose, were the great load of frustration I had built up cruising back from the Cuban Pavilion and the air of lunacy that overhung Arlette’s apartment. Add to that my usual list-making pattern – write everything down, read it over, get drunk – and the idea of turning on made its own sort of sense.