Tanner’s Virgin

I said, “The girl.”

“Oh, you’ll get the whole of it now, mate. The fiddle’s a sweet one. I worked it twice last year and once in the spring, and then in August with your bird. How it works, see, you try to attract the type of bird who’s all alone in the world. They all of ’em come to London, you know. Maybe they’ve got a mother in Ireland that they don’t even write to, or a maiden aunt up in Geordie country, or nobody at all. The others you send away, tell ’em the position’s filled. You do the same with the dogs. They don’t have to be beauties, you know, but they won’t do if they’re too fat or too thin or too old.”

“Go on.”

“Well, you get six or seven, see, just enough but not too many, and then you feed ’em a tale. The first time I made it that we were off to rob a tomb and everybody’d have a share in the plunder. Didn’t go down as well as it might have. Oh, I filled my boat, you know, but some right ones shied away from it.” He smiled suddenly. “Got the tale from the only other man who ever worked this fiddle, him that told me about it when we did a spell at Broadmoor together. And since then somebody put a flick in him, so I’m the only chap who knows it. Made up a better tale since then. I sort of worked in this espionage angle, James Bond and all, and-”

“I know the story.”

“Oh, right, your bird told you. Well. I check ’em all out, see, and then I swear them all to secrecy. Nothing a bird likes better than being trusted with a secret, especially the lost and lonely ones that wouldn’t know who to tell it to anyway. Once they’re sworn to secrecy and once you’ve got the right crew, then you fly the lot of them to Istanbul. That’s in Turkey.”

“I know.”

“Pack the lot of ’em into a Land Rover and just keep driving east. It’s a grand time for them. You get girls who’ve never been out of London in their lives, or spent thirty years in a cottage in Cornwall, and here they’re getting the grand tour. Turkey, Iraq, Persia. I don’t rush ’em, I let ’em have their bit of sightseeing. And you just keep heading east until you get to Kabul. That’s in-”

“ Afghanistan.”

“Right you are, Afghanistan. Never heard of the bloody country before me china put me onto this fiddle, let alone Ka-bloody-bul. Just drive straight on into it. There’s some desperate roads on the way, and this last time I was carrying extra water the whole trip, what with the radiator boiling over, but that’s the only problem there is. Crossing the borders is safe as houses, what with me own passport in order and all of the birds’ too. You have to make sure of that ahead of time, that the birds have their passports right, and the visas and all. Customs is no problem. There’s no smuggling, see, just the lot of birds.”

“And then what?”

“And then there you are in Kabul.”

I looked at him. I had the feeling I was missing a fairly obvious point. He wasn’t lying now. Somehow my act of dedigitation had elevated me to the level of a man he could respect, and he seemed to be telling me the details of his fiddle with a pride akin to Courtney Bede’s delight in showing off his stacks of old newspapers.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you have sex with the girls?”

“With the birds?” He frowned, thinking. “I suppose a chap could if he wanted. You’ll get some who are proper dying for it, but I never fool with any birds that way.”

“Then what in hell do you do with them?”

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “You’re not half thick, are you? Now you can work it out. Here you are in bloody Kabul with six or seven girls, and what do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why, you sell ’em, don’t you see? What the hell else would you do with them?”

I said, “You sell them.”

“And to think you couldn’t guess it! White slaves is what they call it. And a thousand nicker each is what they pay. That’s six or seven thousand a trip, and add a bit of profit on selling the Land Rover and take away the cost of flying ’ em to Turkey and you’re still five or six thousand quid ahead of the game. Just play it out four times a year, say, and-”

“Wait a minute. You sell them. Who buys them?”

“Chap named Amanullah. A great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. Never an argument on price, not once.”

“What happens to the girls?”

“They make brasses of them. Tarts. They’ve a shortage of them over there, do you know?” He gave a short laugh. “Fancy bringing a boatload of tarts to Soho and trying to sell ’em. Be coals to Newcastle all over again.”

“They work in Kabul, then?”

He shrugged. “Got me there. I’d say they don’t, now that I think on it. I’d say they ship ’em out where birds are scarce. For them that work in the mines and such. You know what? I never gave it much thought. Once I sell ’em they’re nothing to me, and it’s hop a plane and Hello, Picadilly! with a purse full of the ready.”

I sat beside him, my mind quite numb, while he added details. I nodded at the right places, put in the right questions, and tried to convince myself that all of this was really happening. I glanced from time to time at his index finger on the floor. It looked like one of those plastic things they sell in novelty shops along with rubber dog shit and dribble glasses. It wasn’t real, and neither was anything else.

He’d never had trouble with the girls until this last trip, he told me. Then two of them got wind of something, Phaedra and a farm girl from the Midlands, and in Baghdad he caught them trying to escape to the British Embassy. “Had to drug them and keep them in a fog the rest of the way. Told the others they were sick with a fever. Cost me a few quid that way, bribing the hacks at the borders. But the rest never did catch on.”

I pumped him for more details about Amanullah and how he could be located. Finally it got through to him that I actually wanted to go to Afghanistan and get Phaedra back. I think this shocked him more than the loss of the finger. All along he had thought that I wanted to muscle in on his racket.

“You must be crackers,” he said. “You’d never find her, and they’d never let you have her. She’s been sold, don’t you see? Oh, you might buy her back, but after a few months of that life, why, what would she be good for? They don’t last long there, you see. That’s why they’ve got a steady need for fresh birds-”

I thought of Phaedra, my little Phaedra, Mama Horowitz’s Deborah. Sweet, virginal Phaedra, who lived with me for a month and emerged intact. It’s not logical just to save yourself, I had told her once. You have to be saving yourself for something.

And what had my Phaedra saved herself for? A whorehouse in Afghanistan?

I stood up. Hyphen – I still didn’t know his name, or much care – was saying something. I had stopped listening. I found the square of adhesive tape and slapped it in place across his horrible mouth.

Julia was in the bedroom. She was pressed up against the far wall, her arms across her chest, hugging herself and silently shaking. She looked like certain pictures of A

“Did you hear any of that?”

She nodded.

“I want you to go into the hallway now. I want to be certain that there’s no one around when I walk out of here. Go out and close the door. I’ll be ready in a moment or two, and I’ll knock on the door. If it’s all clear, return the knock and I’ll come out.”

She nodded again, rigidly, then grabbed up her purse and walked straight to the front room and out the door without looking at him. I went over to him and picked up the cleaver, but it was no good. I took it to the kitchen and exchanged it for a more pointed knife.

He didn’t like the looks of it at all.

I spent a few unintentionally brutal seconds standing there trying to think of something to say, but there was no way to say it and no reason to try. So I put the knife in his heart, and took it out, and put it back a second time and left it there.