Tanner’s Tiger

“We have some bread.”

“Take it anyway. You might have to rent boats. Don’t cut corners, don’t try to save money. Just stop that barge.”

“Right.”

They left. Gutless wonders, I thought. Hippies. Cultural dropouts. Draft-dodgers. Pot-smokers.

Sure.

“They’re going to be good,” I told Arlette.

“They are good boys, cherished one.” And then I guess she must have considered some of the ways in which they were good, because she blushed. “Evan,” she said, “I disgust you, is it not so? Ah, what you must think of me! But my cherished Evan…”

If she was going to be any good at all in the next ten hours, we had to get this out of the way once and for all. I said, “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Pardon?”

“In bed, while everyone was high. It was nice and warm and gentle and friendly, right? It was fun. It felt good.”

“I am the name of a pig.”

“Just answer the question.”

“But of course it felt good. It was… I ca

“Then don’t.”

“You do not hate me?”

“Of course not.”

“You do not find me despicable?”

“I find you delightful. You are being silly. Is a woman to be despised because she has had a lover, because she is not a virgin?”

“No, but-”

“Is she to be despised because in the course of her life she has had more than one lover?”

“No, but-”

“She could have ten, twenty, thirty lovers, is it not so?”

“Yes, but-”

“So if she should happen to be with two of those lovers at the same time, is this reason for despising her? A mere temporal coincidence? Certainly not!”

“Once even there were three,” she said dreamily. “Oh, Evan! Then you do not detest me? You still love me?”

“I still love you,” I said. I took a very deep breath. “Now let’s forget all that, shall we? We’ve got a lot to do, you and I.”

Chapter 15

I tried to go over the whole operation with Arlette. This didn’t work out very well. She didn’t have the right kind of mind for it, and kept interrupting with idiot questions about things I had already explained to her. Other times she tried to rush ahead and asked about points that I was saving for later on. When I blew up she insisted that I did not love her and that I despised her for making love with Seth and Randy. It was hard going for a while, until I realized that Arlette was not the type to cope with a long-range plan. She had to deal with one specific task at a time, and it only complicated matters to explain to her why she was supposed to do thus and so. You don’t tell a horse why you want to turn right, you just pull the reins in that direction (or in the other direction; I still don’t remember which is right).

It was thus with Arlette. If she had to think about something, she was very likely to foul it up. Once I’d figured this out, things went a whole lot smoother.

“I need a pistol,” I said.

“Must we shoot someone?”

“Forget it. I need a pistol. Do you have one?”

“No. Emile-”

“I don’t think we should ask Emile for a pistol.”

“But perhaps-”

She was making a beeline for another tangent. I held up my hand. “Stop. We need a pistol. Not from Emile. Can you purchase one?”

“No. One must-”

“Forget it. Can you obtain one from someone who is not in the MNQ?”

“No.”

“Can you get one from some member besides the four who are in on the assassination? Someone who has some guns tucked away for an eventual rising?”

“Henri has a great stock of weapons. Did you meet him? He was-”

“Then, he won’t miss one pistol. That’s good. Get one from him, preferably forty-five or thirty-eight caliber, preferably an automatic, but take what you can get. Just one gun should do.”

“He will ask why I want it.”

“Tell him you were ordered to get it. If he asks more questions, tell him that is all you are allowed to tell him. The simplest lies are best. Henri doesn’t know about the assassination? Forget the question, it doesn’t matter. Just get the gun.”

“Yes.”

“And make sure it’s loaded,” I called after her.

As I said, she was fine once you knew how to handle her. She was back in twenty minutes with a fully loaded Marley automatic plus an extra seven-shot clip for insurance. It was a.32, which was lighter than I would have liked but still heavy enough to do most jobs. The gun was made in Japan, like everything else. I wondered if I would be able to hit anything with it and hoped I would never have to try.

I hefted the gun in my hand. “Perfect,” I said. “I made a few phone calls while you were out. What I want you to do now is go down to the Link-Wright Shipping Company. Look lost and helpless and beautiful. You have to find out what the barge will look like and when it’s going to reach Point X.”

“The royal barge?”

“God, no. We already know that. The other one, the target.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, here’s a thought. Your kid brother has some horrible disease. Something crippling. Make it muscular dystrophy. Anyone who can’t sympathize with a dystrophic kid is beyond redemption. He can’t get to the fair because he’s crippled. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“So he wants to see the boat. You can see the river from your house, and he’ll be watching tonight, and he wants to know when the boat will pass by and what it will look like, so he’ll know when he sees it. Got that?”

“I think so. I shall tell him we live at Point X-”

“Don’t do that. Forget Point X, please.” I stabbed a finger at the map. “Tell him you live about here, figure out something that fits. You know the city better than I do. But find out those two things, what the boat will look like and when to expect it. If we know when it will get here, we can figure out the rest of the timing pretty well.”

“All right. My crippled brother has musical atrophy and ca

We went through the story until she had it as well as she ever would, and then I wrote out the address of Link-Wright Shipping and sent her on her way. The story hadn’t struck me as particularly brilliant when I thought of it, and the more I heard it, the less I liked it, but I felt she could probably pull it off. I made her fix her makeup and splash on a little perfume before she left. With all of that sex going for her, I didn’t think she would have much trouble. They would probably give her an 8-by-10 glossy of the boat and an invitation to dine at the captain’s table.

While she was off charming them at Link-Wright I worked on her phony ID. I still had that silly Expo passport, and one of the pages for visa stamps was still blank. It was just the right sort of paper, with all of those swirly lines in it that suggest all the trappings of bureaucracy. I removed the page and cut out a neat rectangle about 2½" by 4" and popped it into Arlette’s portable typewriter. Then I checked the page I’d practiced on earlier. It’s not easy to make a typewriter produce something that looks as though it were printed. A varitype machine will do a good job, and an electric is fair, but all she had was a rickety portable. At least I had fixed things so that the lines more or less came out the same length. I certainly wasn’t going to create something equal to my beautiful forged passport (which I could probably forget forever now, its having been left behind in our hotel room); but if things went well, the ID would get little more than a quick glance in a dark room, and it might stand up under those conditions.

What I typed was:

I shifted the slip so that it was slightly off-center and, using a lighter touch, typed in Suza