Tanner’s Virgin

Wait a minute.

“Sonofabitch” wasn’t Pushtu. “Sonofabitch” was English.

I rolled the son of an English bitch over onto his back and got a look at his face. But I was wrong; he was a son of an Irish bitch. It was good old What’s-His-Name from the boat. The one who had signed on with all those bloody Rooshians. The kid from County Mayo. And what in hell was his name, come to think of it?

He opened an eye.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “what’s your name again?”

“I knew you wasn’t Irish,” he said. “Knew it all along, and here you are talking in your natural tones, and it’s sick I am that I let myself be taken in by you.” He opened the other eye. “You tricked me,” he said, accusingly. “Snuck up and caught me by the heel and pulled me down without even a fare-thee-well. Hell of a thing to do, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t ask you,” I said reasonably, I think. “Didn’t sneak up on you, either. You stepped on my hand.”

“I hope I bloody broke it.”

Enough. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” I said, and I hit him over the head again with the gun, and he went night-night. I had no sooner done this than I felt fairly stupid about it. It was a pleasure, certainly, but it didn’t exactly accomplish anything. Now that I had him at a disadvantage, I should either have been giving him a message for his employers or learning information from him. Instead I had knocked him out.

I went into Amanullah’s house and went absolutely crazy looking for something to tie the bastard up with. I didn’t want to cut off a lamp cord or otherwise abuse my host’s hospitality, and I couldn’t find any wire or twine that wasn’t already serving in some important capacity. I gave up and went outside again. Daly was still cold. I frisked him and found an Irish passport in the name of Brian McCarthy, a.22 automatic with a full clip in it, a billfold holding some Afghan notes and a sheaf of English and Irish pounds, a packet of Wood-bines, and a condom made in the state of New Jersey. The latter two items seemed of no possible benefit to me, so I returned them to his pockets.

He still didn’t come to.

I broke open the.22, took the clip out and heaved it into a bed of tiger lilies. I would wait until he woke up, I decided, and then I would impress him with my sincerity. This seemed more necessary than ever, because the bastards just weren’t giving up. Evidently the vulgar Bulgar with the spade-shaped beard had not been convinced that I was no threat to their coup. Or, if I’d made my point with him, he’d had no luck selling it to the rest of them.

Because it was pretty obvious that Daly (or McCarthy, or whoever he really was) had not come to Amanullah’s house to borrow a cup of sugar for his tay. He had come to kill me, and perhaps to kill Amanullah in the bargain.

Which meant that they hadn’t given up. Which meant, too, that they had a hell of an accomplished organization going for them, because somehow they had managed to follow us to Amanullah’s or get word of who I had met or something. Whatever it was, they had done it, all right.

He was still out cold. I looked at him and decided that I had never seen anyone look more unconscious.

“Wake up, you idiot,” I told him, “because I’m going to have to chase around from whorehouse to whorehouse, and it is going to be less than a pleasure to have you idiots trying to kill me. So wake up and I’ll explain it to you all over again.”

I waited. The sky grew lighter and then the sun was suddenly up above the horizon. I splashed cold water on Daly. Nothing happened. I could see all of Kabul waking up and wandering around to see me conferring with an unconscious Irishman on Amanullah’s back lawn.

I turned his head so that the sun was in his eyes. I splashed more cold water on him.

The eyes opened.

“Bejasus,” he said. “You’ve broken my head.”

“You had it coming.”

“I’m dying. Holy Mother-of-Pearl, I’m dying.”

“Not really.”

“I can see the fires of Hell before me.”

“You nitwit,” I said, “you’re staring into the sun.” I turned his head away. “There,” I said, “Hell’s out.”

“Ta

“Good thinking.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“It’s a tempting notion,” I admitted. “But I’m going to prove my good faith to you. Here.”

I held the gun by the barrel, the.22 and handed it to him. He looked at it suspiciously, then at me, then at it again.

“It’s yours,” I said. “I don’t want it, I still have the one I took from your friend yesterday. Here, take it, it’s yours.”

He reached out, took the gun, pointed it at me and squeezed the trigger.

It made the sort of clicking noise that guns make when they’re empty. He looked sadly at it.

“You’re incorrigible,” I told him, and took out the other gun and hit him over the head with it.

Chapter 11

The four Afghanistan whorehouses were scattered about as far and wide as they could be, which, given the size of Afghanistan, was rather far indeed. One was located far to the north in the rugged Hindu Kush town of Rustak, conveniently located just a mile from the shacks where the Rustak gold miners lived. Another, not far from the Pakistan border, was some sixty miles south of Kandahar. There was no town nearby, just a group of mines which removed lignite and chromium from the earth. A third house catered to the iron ore miners in and around Shibarghan and Bâlkh, this in the north central part of the country. Finally, there was yet another house for iron ore miners (and whatever camel herdsmen had gotten out of the mood for camels and into the mood for love) in western Afghanistan, on the outskirts of Anardara.

Afghanistan is just a shade smaller than Texas. If you flattened it out it would be three or four times the size of Texas. And if you flattened it out it would also be several thousand times easier to drive from Kabul to Rustak to Kandahar to Anardara to Shibarghan.

The first leg of the trip was the easiest. When the Russians decided to build Afghanistan a road, they saw no reason to be morons about it. They built it from Kabul to Russia, which made it at least as useful to them as it was to the Afghans. In fact, come the 25th of November, I had the feeling that a lot of Afghans would be very damned sorry they had accepted that particular gift. The Trojans got a better bargain when they accepted the wooden horse.

As far as I was concerned, though, the road was a pleasure. Instead of going around the mountains, it went through them. Instead of curving wildly here and there, it went straight. Instead of bumping up and down, it lay flat. Instead of being as narrow as the alleyways in the old section of Kabul, it was as wide as the Jersey Turnpike. But it did not have nearly so many cars as the Jersey Turnpike. On the contrary, it seemed, as far as I could tell, to have no cars whatsoever except for the one I was driving.

I was driving what I will swear forever was a 1955 Chevrolet.

That morning, after I finally got Daly (or McCarthy) on his way, Amanullah showed me his car. First he gave me a big buildup, explaining he was sure I had never seen its like, that it was the fastest and most luxurious car it had ever been his privilege to own. I was expecting something impressive and was only wondering whether it would be closer in type to a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari. So we walked over to the place where he had the thing garaged, and there was this 1955 Chevy.

“Oh, fine,” I said. “This won’t be any problem. Had one just like it ten years ago. But yours is in really lovely shape. Of course I suppose you don’t ride it that hard, and I guess there’s no salt corrosion from rock salt on the pavements in winter. No. I don’t suppose there would be. How recently did you have it painted? Not long ago, I’ll bet. Beautiful condition. Even the upholstery-”