My jaw fell.
“Tanner,” he said, “I’ll tell you something. I think it’s very goddamned funny.”
“It is?”
“Of course it is.” He began laughing some more. “The Boy Scouts wanted to stop a Russian takeover, didn’t they? Well, the Russians won’t get a foot in the door in that country in the next century. They don’t even have an embassy anymore, the poor bastards. There’s a rumor the Kabul government’s going to ask Moscow to take their road back, for heaven’s sake. How on earth would you go about taking a road back?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Neither do I.” He laughed again. “And the Russians – oh, this is precious – the Russians don’t know how it happened either. They think the dead men were agents of theirs after all. Undoubtedly half of the men on their embassy staff were operatives, and as they died with the rest – well, you may well imagine the confusion in the Kremlin.”
“I may well imagine,” I said.
“Each of the Soviet agencies is accusing the other of prime responsibility for the situation. There will probably be a purge, perhaps several purges. And at least one of the agencies is trumpeting it about that Peking is responsible for what happened. That the Chinese were attempting to discredit Moscow on her own doorstep.” He snorted. “So far everyone’s gotten a bit of the blame except the International Zionist Conspiracy. And the United States.”
“Then it turned out well,” I said, slowly.
“It turned out perfectly. Except for the Boy Scouts, who lost a few reliable men.”
“They weren’t a particularly nice lot,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose they were.”
“Not at all.”
“Well,” he said. He sighed heavily. “I do think we ought to keep your role in this debacle completely quiet. As far as I can tell, the CIA ops in Kabul never got in touch with headquarters at Langley. They kept them wholly in the dark insofar as your presence was concerned. This is all to the good. As far as the Agency is concerned, their men made a bad error, got themselves knocked over by patriotic Afghans intent upon maintaining their neutrality, and the U.S. lucked out in that Kabul thinks they were Russians. Complicated, isn’t it? All it adds up to is that we should keep quiet about this. I trust you’ll do so?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“And the girl? You did bring her out, didn’t you?”
“She’s a sort of private operative of mine,” I said. “Actually she helped me penetrate the cover of that white-slaving operation to begin with. We won’t have to worry about her.”
“Good, good.” He got to his feet, approached, extended his hand. We shook briefly. “You won’t get a medal for this one,” he said. “One of those exploits that must remain forever untold, as it were. But as far as I’m concerned, Tanner, you’ve done a good job.” He began laughing. “Those Boy Scouts,” he exploded. “I can just imagine the look on their silly faces-”
So when I got back to the apartment the phone was ringing. I made my usual mistake. I answered it.
“Mr. Tanner?”
“Long Numbel,” I said. “This Brue Stahl Hand Raundley.”
“Mr. Tanner, I know this is you. Don’t tell me about laundries. I don’t care from laundries.”
I said, “Hello, Mrs. Horowitz.”
“So I call you to find my Deborah for me and what do you do? A sinful woman you make of her.”
“Uh.”
“So when will you make an honest woman of her, eh, Tanner? Eh? I am alone in the world, Horowitz is dead, I’m alone, I’ve got nobody but Deborah. So I shouldn’t lose a daughter, Tanner. I should gain a son, Tanner. You understand?”
“Deborah’s not here, Mrs. Horowitz.”
“Tanner, to you I’m talking.”
“She went to the zoo, Mrs. Horowitz. I’ll tell her you called.”
“Tanner-”
I hung up; and before she could call back I took the phone off the hook. The door opened. I turned around, and it was Phaedra.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re back from your appointment.”
“No, this is my astral projection. The Manishtana taught me how to do it.”
“You do it very well, then. What’s the matter with the phone?”
“Your mother was on it,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Where’s the kid?”
“Downstairs,” she said. “Playing with the Puerto Rican kid. Mikey.”
“He’s not in school?”
“It’s Chanukah.”
“I should have realized,” I said. I looked at the phone. It was making that whirring noise that it makes so that you’ll know that you didn’t hang it up. The telephone company evidently can’t believe that a person might want his phone off the hook for a reason. The telephone company never had a girlfriend that had a mother.
I looked at Phaedra. She was taking off all her clothes.
I looked at the phone again. It had stopped whirring, and now an operator was shouting at me to hang up the receiver. Then there was some loud clanking, and then the operator started in again.
“Listen to that woman,” I said.
“I think she’s a recording.”
“They all are.”
So I hung up the phone to stop the noise, and I reached for Phaedra, and she giggled and purred, and the phone rang.
The more things change…
At 2:30 one fine December afternoon I ripped the telephone out of the wall.
Afterword
Evan Michael Tanner was conceived in the summer of 1956, in New York ’s Washington Square Park. But his gestation period ran to a decade.
That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.
What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)
But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.
Where’s Tanner in all this?
Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.
Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.
Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen Anne, the last reigning monarch of the House of Stuart, there was still (in the unlikely person of a German princeling) a Stuart pretender to the English throne.
I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Britannica. They seemed to go together, and I found myself thinking of a character whose sleep center had been destroyed, and who consequently had an extra eight hours in the day to contend with. What would he do with the extra time? Well, he could learn languages. And what passion would drive him? Why, he’d be plotting and scheming to oust Betty Battenberg, the Hanoverian usurper, and restore the Stuarts to their rightful place on the throne of England.
I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Tanner was ready to be born. By then a Stuart restoration was just one of his disparate passions. He was to be a champion of lost causes and irredentist movements, and I was to write eight books about him.
Tanner’s Virgin, which you’ve just finished reading (unless you’re one of those unaccountable mavericks who read the afterword first), bore a different title when first it saw the light of day back in 1968. I had several editors over the years at Fawcett Gold Medal, including Knox Burger, Walter Fultz, and Joe Elder, but the capo di tutti capi was a man named Ralph Daigh, whom I never met, but who seems to have found a certain satisfaction in changing his authors’ titles.
My first book for Fawcett was a noir suspense novel. We were going to call it Grifter’s Game. I’m not sure what my original working title had been, although I think it may have been A Little Off the Top; I know it wasn’t Mona, which is the title Daigh slapped on it. And why, pray tell? Because he’d recently bought some cover art consisting of a sketch of a woman, so he wanted to call the book by the name of the femme fatale, in order to make the cover appropriate.
The book has since gone through many editions as Mona, and one as Sweet Slow Death (don’t ask), and has now finally been reprinted as Grifter’s Game.
After Daigh changed The Scoreless Thai to Two for Tanner, I pretty much quit trying to ring the titular bell. I can’t swear to it, but I believe the present volume was submitted as Tanner #6. When it was published, the title it bore was Here Comes a Hero.
Tanner #6 would have been better.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe nobody came up with Tanner’s Virgin back in the day. After all, it was Daigh who’d come up with Tanner’s Tiger as a title for the book immediately preceding this one. (And had me rewrite a scene so that Tanner’s love interest was wearing a tigerskin coat, to justify the title, and so that such a coat could appear on the cover.) Tanner’s Virgin would seem to be of a piece, so to speak, with Tanner’s Tiger, and there’d be no rewriting required, as there was already a perfectly good virgin in the book.
Well, nobody thought of it. And if somebody did, would anything have come of it? Probably not, not with Here Comes a Hero just crying out to be used.
Sheesh.
The storylines of Tanner’s adventures, as you may have noticed, generally range somewhere between farfetched and absurd. Nevertheless, there’s occasionally a grain of genuine grit at the core of Tanner’s pearls.
And so it was with Tanner’s Virgin.
A friend of a friend came back from London with a story. It seems someone asked this rather shady character what had happened to a young woman of their acquaintance. “Well, what do you think happened?” snapped the shady character. “I sold her. I told her that’s what would happen, but she would insist on coming along, so I sold her.”