Tanner’s Tiger

I practiced drawing maple leaves on some scrap paper, and they all came out looking more like palm trees. So I let that go until Arlette came back with a description of the boat, an estimate of its time of arrival at her mythical residence, and a seemingly endless story about the truly charming men she had met at Link-Wright Shipping.

I figured out the probable time differential between her fabled home and Point X and came up with a half-educated guess that it would reach the target area around twenty to eight. I couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad. It meant that it would be in position quite a few minutes before Emile and his friends expected to get the game started, which was bad, but it also meant that we had a little margin for error, and that Seth and Randy wouldn’t have to delay the Queen quite so long. I decided that the good outweighed the bad, and then I decided that we were going to play it the same way no matter what, so the hell with it. I showed her my little paper creation and she stared at it, read it, turned it over, studied its back, turned it over again, peered closely at the Westley signature, and asked me what it was.

“Your identification.”

“I do not understand. Who is this Westley? And this Suza

“She’s you,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll explain it later. I want you to practice writing Suza

She wrote it a few times and I looked it over. I just wanted to make sure she could do it without misspelling it. Then I had her sign the card. I had pressed down harder with the pen when I wrote Westley’s name, so it looked as though two different pens had been used.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now I’ll need a very tiny photo of you. Do you have one?”

She found some snapshots, but they all had scenery in the background. I sent her on her way again, telling her to get her picture taken at one of the 4-Poses-For-25¢ booths at the Dorchester Boulevard bus terminal. She brought back four ghastly poses that looked enough unlike her to be official, along with the things I had told her to buy – a stamp pad, a rubber stamp that would print any number from 0000001 to 9999999, a tube of rubber cement, a packet of razor blades, and a large red leatherette photo album.

“Perfect,” I said. “Perfect.”

She didn’t say a word, bless her heart. She watched in silence as I trimmed one of the photos to the size of the space on the card and glued it carefully in place. I set the rubber stamp at 8839970 and stamped the card twice, once below the Suza

The stamp pad also served to get Arlette’s fingerprint impressed in the proper square. Her right thumbprint, to be precise. We tried it four times on scrap paper before I got the hang of it. It seemed to work best if I held her thumb and pressed it to the paper myself, and that was how we finally did it.

Then I looted the photo album. I removed the insides and cut the cover open. The leatherette was wrapped around a sheet of very thick cardboard. I cut out a pair of 5 by 7 cardboard rectangles, then cut out a large piece of leatherette and glued the cardboard chunks to it, one above the other. Then I glued the card in place on the lower section of cardboard.

It looked phony as hell to me. The typing was the main problem – it gave the whole thing a homemade look. My Croat Nationalist friend in New York would have been disgusted with it. The Armenian genius in Athens would have thrown up either his hands or his di

I moistened my hands and smudged it a little in strategic spots. Then I cut out a piece of acetate from the leaves of the photo album and cemented it into place over the card. At least I tried to; the rubber cement wouldn’t bond the plastic. I had to send Arlette out for some plastic cement before I could get it to work.

By the time I had trimmed the leatherette and performed the final gluing operations, it really didn’t look so bad after all. The final product was a purse-sized red leather case that opened up to reveal an ID card complete with photo and thumbprint and signature. It did look like credentials of some sort, and there was no fear that some clown would compare it with the genuine article. Because as far as I knew, there was no Department of Public Security, no Foreign National Section, no Dominion Secrets Act (1954), no J. B. Westley, Int. Director, and no Suza

“I think it’ll do,” I said. “How does it look to you?”

“Formidable. I do not understand.”

“You’ll understand when the time comes.”

“But how is this to prevent the assassination? I ca

“You are a true patriot. You are doing what is best for the movement.”

“It is so. It must be so.” She touched my arm. “But you have not explained! How is this, this false identification, this Lafitte, how is it to prevent the assassination?”

“That’s not what it’s for. It’s to rescue Mi

“I do not understand.” She furrowed her brow, trying desperately to think. “How is it possible to do everything at once?”

I thought of my Mickey Mouse list. Mi

“How?” she still wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you later,” I lied. I looked at the clock; it was past noon already. “There’s no time now, cherished one. There are things that must be done at once. There is a man at the fairgrounds, you will have to seek him out and make contact with him. And I will need some preparations to disguise myself, some cosmetics, a variety of articles. I will be going outside while it is still light out, and it would not be good if I were arrested-”

“It would be a disaster!”

“I agree. Put the ID down, that’s a good girl. Now let me see what you ought to do first…”

What she did first was make the rounds of the neighborhood tobacconists, buying three or four plastic roll-up tobacco pouches at each shop. (This was not done for the sake of subtlety; I didn’t really care what some tobacconist might think if she bought twenty pouches from him. She bought only three or four in each shop because nobody had more than that on hand.) She came right back with them, and while she was off on another errand I parceled out the three cans of heroin into the twenty pouches. When I was all done, I had about a tablespoonful left over, and I spent longer than I care to admit brooding about it before realizing that the world could live without it. I flushed it down the toilet. Junkies are crawling up walls in Harlem, said a voice deep within my brain, and you flush heroin down the toilet. Children are starving in India and you didn’t finish your Brussels sprouts. Families are starving in Brussels and you didn’t finish your Indian summer. Old people are starving in Sumatra and you didn’t finish your winter wheat. Arlette is starving for affection and you didn’t make love to her in the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of Yorktown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah –