Tanner's Virgin

“No,” I said, and lowered the gun.



“Oh, Evan. I know it’s immoral to kill, but-”



“Immoral to kill?” I stared at her. “Are you out of your mind? Killing those sons of bitches is the most moral thing I can think of.”



“Then-”



“But if they don’t go back and tell their boss that they accomplished their mission, he’ll know we’re still alive. He’ll know I’m still alive, that is. And he’ll send more clowns after us, and maybe next time we won’t get out of the car in time. But if we let them go home-”



“They’ll tell their boss that they couldn’t get us.”



I shook my head. “Not likely. Nobody likes to run home boasting about a failure. They’ll figure they got us in that ditch. Watch – here they go, up, up and away.”



I was two-thirds right. They went up, and they went up. And then the nose of the Bren gun appeared over the side of the chopper, and a burst of bullets descended, headed for the trunk and gas tank of the 1968 Balalaika sedan.



I grabbed Phaedra and pulled her down flat in the ditch. Filthy water soaked my robes, coursed all over her naked body. She said something, but I never learned what it was, because the sound of the exploding car drowned it out.



“You should have shot them when you had the chance, Evan.”



“I know.”



“Because we’ll never get out of here now.”



“I know.”



“I mean, I’m not very good at walking. And it’s sort of chilly now, and when it gets dark-”



“I know.”



“I don’t mean to complain, Evan.”



“Then shut up,” I explained.



But she was right about one thing. It was silly to keep on walking. All we would accomplish would be to deplete our energy. We were, according to my calculations, something like 375 miles from Kabul. If we walked twelve hours out of twenty-four, and if we managed four miles an hour, it would take us eight days to get to Kabul. This was the mathematical solution, and one of the drawbacks of mathematical analysis is that it doesn’t take everything into consideration. It was possible, for instance, that Phaedra could sustain this pace the first day. It was even possible that she could manage it the second. But while she might be able to travel 48 miles in one day and 96 miles in two, it was quite inconceivable that she could go 375 miles in eight days.



Which meant that walking was a waste of time.



So we sat down. It was twilight, and getting darker fast, and already the air had turned perceptibly colder. We were wearing the same clothing as before, having let the dying sun dry my robe and Phaedra’s silk thing before we left the burned-out Balalaika and struck off down the road. I put an arm around her now, and we huddled together for warmth and comfort, and it was a tender moment, and then I felt a small warm hand insinuate itself beneath my robe.



“No,” I said.



The hand went away and she began to cry. I hugged her and told her that everything would be all right. “I hate myself when I’m like this,” she said between sobs. “But I can’t help it.”



“You’ll be all right.”



“My head gets all strange and I can’t think of anything else. Sometimes I think I never existed before that place. That whorehouse. That I just suddenly happened there one day, that before then I was never even alive.”



“You were alive.”



“I was?”



“Uh-huh. You’ll be alive again.”



“I will?”



“Uh-huh.”



“I’m afraid, Evan.”



“Don’t be afraid.”



“We’ll die on this fucking road. We’ll freeze to death or starve. I’m hungry already.”



“We’ll be all right.”



“How can you be sure?”



So I gave her a little sermon about the earth, and how one defeats oneself by expecting the land to be hostile. It isn’t. There is a modern tendency to suspect that human beings cannot possibly stay alive in any area that is not paved. But one must remember that mankind did not evolve in cities, that cities were a creation of man and not the other way around. There was a time, I told her, when human beings were not terrified at the prospect of breathing air they couldn’t see. There was a time when men and women ate food without first defrosting it. There was a time-



“Evan.”



“What is it?”



“I’m afraid.”



“Lie down. Close your eyes. Sleep.”



“I can’t possibly sleep.”



“Lie down. Close your eyes.”



“I’m wide awake. I can’t-”



While she slept, I took a stick and scratched in the sand. I had left Kabul on the morning of the 15th of November, just midway between Guy Fawkes Day and the scheduled Russian coup. Since then, day and night had had a way of merging together, with too much time passed in a blur on the road, but I was able to work it out a little at a time. As well as I could determine, it was now the evening of the 21st. We had something like four days to get back to Kabul and shake things up.



Because, dammit, they had it coming now. I had given them every chance on earth, every possible chance, and they blew it over and over again. All they had had to do was leave me alone, that was all. I kept catching them and letting them go in munificent gestures of good will, and all they did was go back and organize fresh attempts on my life.



Well, they had gone too far. I was a patient man, but patience has a limit, and my limit had been reached and surpassed. A dagger in my turban, poison in my drink, a gun in my face, a bomb in my restaurant, a foot on my hand – I had contented myself for too great a time with passive resistance. Nonviolence is a marvelous concept, but it can be carried too far.



I’ve always liked Glenn Ford movies. Especially the really lousy ones, where he’s a cop that the crime syndicate is after or a sheepman that the cattlemen are after, and they keep doing mean things to him. They hit him, and they roll him along a piece of barbed wire, and they shove dynamite up his nose, and they throw him in the creek, and they poison his well, and they spill hot coffee on him, and throughout all of this Glenn Ford shows his first expression – irritation.



Then they go too far. They blow up his wife and kids, or they insult his mother, or they step on his blue suede shoes. Whatever it is, it’s the straw, man, and Glenn Ford is the camel’s back, and that does it. At this point he shows his second expression – aggravation.



And he goes berserk and knocks the hell out of every last one of the bastards.



I’d been irritated ever since I swam the English Channel.



I was now aggravated, and they were in trouble.



Chapter 14



We reached Kabul two hours after dawn on the morning of November 24th. We rode trimphantly into town, I with a sash around my neck and a rifle over my shoulder and a pistol on my hip, Phaedra wearing men’s clothing and carrying a British Army canteen and a German pistol. I pulled up on the reins and our horse neighed gratefully and went down to his knees. We dismounted. The horse stayed on his knees. I didn’t really blame him, and I was surprised he hadn’t dropped dead altogether.



We had stolen the horse. According to family legend, a great-great-uncle had done much the same thing in the Wyoming Territory, and had subsequently become, as far as I know, the only Tanner ever hanged in the Western Hemisphere. That sort of skeleton in the ancestral cupboard makes one a bit apprehensive about stealing horses, but the clown to whom the horse had belonged had really left us no choice.



He stopped at our signal, a tall slim Afghan who carried himself with military bearing. His moustache bristled, his eyes bored into mine. I told him I wanted to buy his horse. He said that the animal was not for sale. I told him I would pay its price in gold several times over. He said that he had no use for gold and much use for the horse. I told him I would pay equally for a ride to Kabul. He said that he was going only so far as his village a few miles away. I suggested that I might borrow the horse, and that I would leave it for him to reclaim in Kabul, and that I would pay him enough gold to make his troubles worthwhile. He remarked that, if he wanted my gold, he could simply return for it when my woman and I had perished of thirst.



So I took out the gun and told him to get off the horse or I would shoot him dead. He took told of his rifle, and I squeezed the trigger of the handgun and nicked his earlobe. He touched it with his finger, looked at the bead of blood on his fingertip, and respectfully dismounted from the horse.



“You are a superb marksman, kâzzih,” he said. “My steed is yours.”



So were his rifle and his clothing. I forebore telling him that I was not a superb marksman at all. I had not been aiming for his earlobe. I had been aiming for the center of his forehead, because when someone draws a rifle to shoot me with I want to do more than scare him a little. My rotten shooting was his good fortune.



It turned out that Phaedra had never been on a horse before. I had her ride sidesaddle at first, but after a few miles of jogging along she swung her leg over the horse. I was right behind her and I watched her, and after a few minutes I figured out what she had in mind. She would start to breathe a little faster than normal, and as the horse bounced she would bounce along with it, and muscles worked in her thighs, and she made odd little noises deep in her throat, and then, finally, she would give a little sigh and fall forward, her arms around the horse’s neck.



She kept doing this.



Once we were in the city we got off the poor goddamned horse and sort of abandoned him. I suppose it’s not good policy to abandon horses, and there’s probably a local ordinance against it, but abandoning a horse can’t be any worse than stealing it in the first place, and I had a hunch that whoever took over the horse’s ownership would do at least as good a job as we had done. As far as I was concerned, if I never saw a horse again it would be fine. I had what are probably called saddle sores, except that this particular horse had not had a saddle, so I guess what I had were bareback sores, if there is such a thing. There was such a thing as far as I was concerned. I staggered along, cross-eyed and bowlegged and wholly out of sorts. Phaedra, too, looked a little bowlegged, but I don’t know whether that was caused by the horse or by the way she had spent the past two months in Anardara. Bowleggedness is an occupational disease of maradóosh.



“I’m going to miss that horse,” she told me, on the way to Amanullah’s house.



“I can believe it.”



“I never realized the rapport a human being and a horse can establish.”



“Yeah, rapport.”



“I mean-”



“I know what you mean.”



“Evan, I can’t help it.”



“I know.”



“I just have to-”



“I know.”



“You always wanted me. In New York, in your apartment-”



“Yeah, I remember.”



“I just-”



“Forget it.”



“Maybe I should kill myself.”



“Yeah, kill yourself.”



“Evan, do you mean that?”



“Huh?” I snapped to attention. “No,” I said. “No, my mind must have been wandering. Don’t kill yourself. Everything’ll be all right. Believe me. Everything will be all right.”