Tanner's Virgin

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.”



“Tanner.”



“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-”



“Kâzzih, you talk but I cannot understand you.”



“A fine car,” I said.



“You understand its operation?”



“I do. I owned one like it ten years ago, Amanullah.”



“But that is impossible. This car was made not four months ago.”



I looked at him. “But that’s why they called them 1955 Chevrolets,” I said. “Because they were made by the Chevrolet people. In 1955. It explains the name.”



“This car was made this year.”



“Huh?”



“And not by these Chevrolet people, whoever they may be. This car is a Balalaika.”



“Don’t be absurd. A balalaika has a triangular box and three strings, and… oh. A Russian car.”



“A triumph of Soviet technology, we are told.”



“A Russian Chevy. They went and built a 1955 Chevy.”



“I do not understand.”



He didn’t understand, eh? Well, I didn’t understand what I was doing zipping through the Hindu Kush at speeds in excess of 90 kilometers an hour – which sounds more impressive than 57 miles per hour, even if it amounts to the same thing. Zipping through the Hindu Kush, that is, in a 1955 Chevrolet. Here it was, thirteen lucky years later, and the crazy Russians had invented the ’55 Chevy.



It certainly does make you think. I remember a few years back shaking my head sadly when Nixon wagged his finger at Khrushchev and told him we were ahead of them in color television. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the Russians do have a sort of cavalier attitude toward the whole question of consumer goods.



Though I don’t suppose there’s anything specifically wrong with the ’55 Chevy. I had always liked mine, until the neighborhood juvenile delinquents had stolen so much of it that there was not enough left to drive. I suppose, actually, there was something I ought to be grateful for. After all, the Russians could have stolen the Tucker.



The first whorehouse was a compound of mud huts clustered together at the side of a mountain near Rustak. It took me a hard day’s driving to reach it, and of course it wasn’t the right one. That would have been too much to expect.



The madam was a gaunt hollow-eyed crone with a bald spot on the top of her ancient head. I showed her the letter from Amanullah, a letter addressed to her personally and requesting that she assist me in locating a particular girl. I was to be given the girl outright, and he would reimburse her at a later date for the girl’s price. Amanullah had given me four letters, one for each of the madams. This one read the letter through several times, then wrinkled her brow at me.



“It does not say how much he pays for the girl,” she pointed out.



“He pays what you ask.”



This delighted her, and I was offered food and drink while she paraded her stable of whores past me. There were fourteen or fifteen of them. There were Oriental girls and Arab girls and Negro girls and European girls, and despite their infinite variety they all looked alike.



“They all look alike,” I said.



“Only if you turn them upside-down,” the madam said, and giggled lewdly.



I didn’t want to turn them upside-down, or inside-out, or anything. I only wanted to turn them down and myself away. I had never seen such a sad-looking bunch of women in my life. They shuffled their feet as they walked, and their eyes stared vacantly ahead, and their faces were utterly expressionless. They looked like zombies, like the living dead. No, they looked even worse than that; they looked like a Tuesday afternoon Mah-Jongg group in Massapequa.



“She is not here?” The hag fastened a hand to my arm. “You show me picture again, kâzzih.” I showed her the picture again. “She is pretty, but other girls pretty too. You pick one out, you buy her.”



I started to tell her to forget it. Then I stopped and thought it over. Amanullah had given me four individual letters to the madams. They would not know that I was only authorized to liberate one girl, Phaedra Harrow by name. I could, if I chose, free a girl at each of the whorehouses. The liberation of four whores is admittedly a far cry from the abolition of slavery, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or, as an Afghan proverb of Amanullah’s would put it, ‘No sooner shear a camel than ride a sheep.’



So I looked at the girls again. With my luck, I thought, I would select the one girl who enjoyed being a whore. And what, I wondered, would I do with three liberated prostitutes? The conventional answer, the obvious answer, somehow did not appeal to me. Nor did it entirely answer the question. What would I do with them afterward? If I simply released them in Kabul, they would either starve to death or get shipped back to the cathouses and sold all over again. If I took them to their original homes – well, maybe I could do that, but it sounded like a lot of trouble, and there was no way to be certain that they wanted to return to their original homes. If, as Amanullah had suggested, they were the daughters of slaves, they probably had no original homes in the real sense of the term. And if they had been sold into slavery by their parents, well, home was probably not the wisest place in the world to take them.



What really made up my mind, though, was that I would be sticking Amanullah for a debt he had no reason to pay. True, he was a rich man and could well afford it. True, too, that he had made money in the less than wholesome world of white-slaving and could thus be legitimately shafted by this sort of stratagem. The fact remained that Amanullah was a man of the highest ethical and moral standards, a man with a rich sense of hospitality and friendship. When I must choose between my friends, however corrupt and disreputable they may be, and strangers, however pure and innocent, I choose my friends.