Tanner's Virgin (10 page)

I stared. “Why?”

“It is sad.” He rolled his huge blue eyes. “
Kâzzih,
if you loved her, you should have purchased her freedom before ever she came to Afghanistan. A man falls in love with a slave girl, and he does not think she is ever taken from him. He does not anticipate this. And then she is sold, and sold again, and only then does he regret waiting so long. And by that time it is too late.”

“Why is it too late?”

“Ah,
kâzzih,
drink your beer. These are sad times.”

“Is she alive?”

“Do I know? When I have sold a woman my interest in her ceases. She is no longer my property. It would be immoral for me to maintain concern in her. She lives, she dies, I do not know. Nor does it matter.”

“But if she is alive I will purchase her freedom—”

“I knew you would say this,
kâzzih.
You are young, eh? You have few years and no white hairs. The young speak too quickly. There is a proverb in my country, a saying of the ancients, that the old lizard sleeps in the sun and the young lizard chases his tail. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“Ah, the sorrow of it! But this slave girl, this Phaedra, she has been two months in one of the houses, she has served for two months as
maradóon.
Do you not know what two months as maradóon does to a girl? You can use her no longer, my young friend. Let her remain with the rest of the maradóosh. Whatever you paid for her would be too much.”

“But that's horrible!”

“The life of a slave is horrible. It is true. The whole system of humans owning humans, you might call me a firebrand to say so,
kâzzih,
but the entire institution of slavery should be brought to an end.”

“And yet you deal in slaves.”

“A man must eat,” he said, decimating the cheese. “A man must eat. If there are to be slaves bought and sold, it is as well that I profit by their purchase and sale as another.”

“But,” I said, and stopped. America is too full of
socialists who work on Wall Street and humanitarians who sell guns; I had met Amanullah in sufficient other guises as to know the foolishness of arguing with him on this point.

“But,” I said, starting over, “you said that I neglected to purchase Phaedra when I might have done so.”

“Yes.”

“Before coming here, she was not a slave.”

“But this cannot be. The man who brought her, she was his slave.”

“No.”

“But of course she was!” He lifted his mug and was less than thrilled to find it empty. He roared for beer, and the ugly sister came running with full mugs for both of us.

“Of course she was a slave,” he repeated. “All of those girls, all the girls I buy are slaves. If they were not slaves, how could they be sold?”

“You do not know?”

“
Kâzzih,
what are you talking about?”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I see. I'll be damned. You didn't know.”

“Kâzzih!”

So I went over it for him, the whole thing. I told him how Arthur Hook had worked his little gambit in London, conning a covey of quail into thinking they were taking the Grand Tour and then selling them before they knew what was happening.

Amanullah was horrified.

“But that cannot be,” he said. “One does not become maradóon in such a manner.”

“These girls did.”

“One cannot be sold into slavery for no good reason. Not even in my grandfather's time did such barbarism occur. It is unthinkable. There is an Afghan proverb, perhaps you know it. ‘The lamb finds its mother in tall grass.' Is it not so?”

“No question about it.”

“Unthinkable. A girl is sold into slavery by her parents, as with the girls of China and Japan. Or she is captured as booty in tribal warfare. Or she is the daughter of a slave and thus enslaved from birth. Or she chooses slavery as an alternative to death or imprisonment for her crimes. Or she is given in slavery by her husband when she proves barren, although I must say that this barbarism occurs only among several tribes to the west of us and I could no more strongly condemn it. But these methods which I mention, they are the ways in which a slave is brought to me, these are the elements of her background. ‘Neither sow in autumn nor harvest in the spring,' it is a saying of ours, a saying of great antiquity. That someone should sell me a girl who was not already enslaved—and he has done this before, you say? This Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“He offends me and wrongs me. He makes me party to his evil. You must draw his likeness for me, and when he returns to Kabul I shall have him put to death.”

“That would be impossible.”

“I am not without influence in high places.”

“You'd really need it,” I said. “He's already dead.”

“He was executed by his government?”

“He was executed by me.”

The eyes widened, the jaw dropped. Astonishment
registered on Amanullah's pendulous face. Radiance slowly replaced it and the fat Afghan slave trader beamed at me.

“You have done me a great favor,” he said. “The man did me a great wrong. Ah, you might say, but he did not cheat me! And this is true. I made a fine profit on every girl purchased from him. But he made me a partner in his sinfulness. He made me a criminal, a corrupt one. May the flames torture him throughout eternity, may the worms that eat his flesh grow sick from the taste of him, may his image fade from human memory, may it be as if he had never been.”

“Amen.”

“More beer!”

 

After more beer, after an infinity of more beer, after a veritable tidal wave of more beer, Amanullah and I had repaired to his house, a brick and stone edifice on the northeast outskirts of the city. There he made me a small pot of coffee and poured himself—guess what?—another beer.

“But coffee for you,
kâzzih.
You have no head for beer, eh? It makes you sleepy and stupid.”

Sleepy, no. Stupid? Perhaps.

“You like my city,
kâzzih?
You enjoy Kabul?”

“It's very pleasant.”

“A peaceful city. A city of great wealth and beauty, although there are yet the poor with us. Great beauty. The mountains, sheltering Kabul from the winds and rain. The freshness of the air, the purity of the waters.”

The only problem, I thought, was that a person could get killed around here.

“And in recent years there is so much development, so many roads being constructed, so much progress being made. For years we Afghans wished only to be left to ourselves. We asked nothing else. Merely that the British leave us alone. And the others who dominated us, but largely the British. And so at last the British were gone, and we lived under our own power, and it was good.

“But now the Russians give us money to build a road, and so we take the money and dig up a perfectly good road and replace it with a new one built with the Russian money. And the Americans come to us and say, ‘You took aid from the Russians, now you must take aid from us or we will be insulted and offended.' Who would offend such a powerful nation? And so we permit the Americans to come into our country and construct a hydroelectric power station. And the Russians see the hydroelectric power station and force upon us a canning factory. The Americans retaliate by shipping bad-smelling chemicals to be plowed into the soils of our farms. And so it goes. So it goes.”

He hoisted his beer, drank deeply. “But I talk to excess. I am a man of excess. I feel that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. You will have some cheese? Some cold meat? Ah. Everything worth doing is worth doing to excess. There is a saying—”

“A hand in the bush is worth two on the bird,” I suggested.

“I have never heard this before. I am not entirely certain I understand it in its entirety, but I can tell that there is wisdom in it.”

“Thank you.”

“I myself was thinking of yet another adage, but it does not matter now. I am in your debt,
kâzzih.
You have purged the world of the man who most dishonored me. Only tell me what I might do to liquidate the debt I owe you.”

“Phaedra.”

“Your woman.”

“Yes.”

“But that is less than a favor,” he said. “That is merely another debt I owe. If the girl was not a slave, she was never that man's to sell. So although I may have purchased her, she was never mine to sell when I sold her, for I could not acquire a true and honest title. Do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

“Thus although she may have been sold to a house of maradóosh, they cannot own her. But, because I must do business with these people, and because it was proper for them to trust me and foolish for me to trust this Englishman, the burden must fall upon me. Do you see?”

“I'm not sure.”

He sighed. “But it is elementary,
kâzzih.
I shall buy the girl's freedom. If.”

“Pardon.”

A shadow darkened his face. “If she is alive. If you find her…worth taking. The men who work in the mines live in grim villages devoid of women. There are no women anywhere about except for the houses of the maradóosh. And when they receive their pay, the mine workers rush to these houses and stand in long lines to wait their turns with the slave girls. They are men of no
culture, these miners. In Kabul it is a joke to call them
Yâ'ahâddashún.
But you are a foreigner, you would not understand. It is remarkable enough that you speak our language as well as you do.”

“Thank you.”

“Often I can understand almost all the words you say.”

“Oh.”

“But these mine workers, they are crude. Rough boorish men. They use women cruelly.” He lowered his head, and a tear trembled in the corner of one big blue eye. “I could not say with assurance that your woman, your girl, is alive today.”

“I must find her.”

“Or that you would want her. So many women, the experience ruins them. Some have in their lifetimes known only a handful of men, and then to embrace thirty or forty or fifty a day—”

“Thirty or forty or fifty!”

“Life is hard for a maradóon,” Amanullah said. “There is a labor shortage.”

“No wonder.”

“Ah. If you will permit a delicate question, had this Phaedra considerable experience before she was brought here?”

I burned my mouth on my coffee. I barely felt the pain. I remembered a taxi racing through garbage-laden streets, a head on my shoulder, a voice at my ear.
I have things to tell you. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I'm not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don't want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time but it's not what
I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out. I want to grow. I am a virgin. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am a virgin. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I am a virgin. I am—

“—a virgin,” I said.

“Eh?”

“She is eighteen years old,” I said. “She was never with a man in all her life.”

“Extraordinary!”

“A virgin.”

“Eighteen years without knowing a man!”

“Yes.”

“And the likeness you showed me—she is a beauty, is it not so?”

“It may not be so now,” I said. “It was so then. A beauty.” I thought for a moment. “A beautiful face and body, and a beautiful spirit, my friend Amanullah.”

“It is rare, this beauty of the spirit.”

“Yes.”

“Beauty and purity.”

“Yes.”

“You go to find her,” he sobbed. “You take my car. My driver returns in a week's time and he drives you to look for her, to search for her.”

“Search?”

“Ah, there are four houses where she might be,
kâzzih.
Four houses scattered far apart in the vastness of Afghanistan. And I do not know to which house I sold which girls.”

“Oh.”

“But my driver returns in a week, and he and my car are at your disposal.”

“A week,” I said.

“And until then my house is your house and my refrigerator is your refrigerator.”

“A week is a long time,” I said. A week in Kabul, I thought, could turn out to be an exceedingly long time. That meant I wouldn't get out of the city until the 21st of the month, and the coup was scheduled for the 25th, which meant the city would be in Russian hands before I got back to it. And I would have to get back to it if I had Amanullah's car and driver along. And—

“—an excellent driver,” he was saying. “A Pakistani, and when his mother lay on her deathbed, of course I told him to go to her. In a week's time he flies home from Karachi.”

“He flies?”

“We have an airport in Kabul. It is most modern.”

“Then the car is here.”

“Of course.”

“I could take it myself.”

He stared at me. “You do not mean to say that you are familiar with automobiles?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“You know how to drive them?”

“Certainly.”

“It is extraordinary. To think that you are able to drive automobiles. Quite extraordinary.”

“Well,” I said.

“Then there is no question,” said Amanullah. “You leave in the morning. Now we drink beer.”

A
fter Amanullah turned in
for the night, I sat around for a couple of hours drinking fresh coffee and trying to read a local newspaper. I didn't do very well at it. An hour or so before dawn I wandered out to his garden and browsed around out there. I had suspected that a man oriented as was Amanullah would grow nothing that he couldn't eat, but I turned out to be completely wrong. The moonlight was bright enough for me to make out bed after bed of rather spectacular flowers. Some were easy enough to identify, even for a New Yorker. Others were unlike anything I had ever seen in the states.

He certainly did well for himself, I thought. The house was modern and well appointed, the garden obviously received at least one employee's full-time attention. In the Café of the Four Sisters I had not thought of him as a particularly wealthy man, but it seemed evident that he went there because he liked the cooking. Slave trading seemed highly profitable. Arthur Hook had said that he received a thousand pounds apiece for the girls, and there was no reason to doubt the figure. If Amanullah paid that sort of money, he would be likely to ask at least double that figure from the houses of maradóosh.

(This bit with the Afghan words isn't entirely to impress you with my erudition. If I wanted to do that I'd pick a language that I was better at. But maradóon is hard to translate into English. It doesn't exactly mean whore, nor does it exactly mean slave. Sort of a combination of the two, with overtones of sluttish abandon. And as for
kâzzih,
I offer that in Afghan because I have no idea what the English for it might be. Everybody says it, but it's not in any of the dictionaries—not that there are that many English-Pushtu dictionaries to begin with.
Kâzzih
seems to be something one says to people for whom one has at least a moderately favorable regard. It is applied indiscriminately to males and females with no change in pronunciation. I do not know whether or not you address an elder as
kâzzih
; I rather think not, but I'd hate to bet money one way or the other. It might mean dear little friend, or it might mean fella, or it might mean trusted comrade. Then again, it might just as easily mean motherfucker. Work it all out for yourself,
kâzzih.
)

Well. I wandered around his garden, meditating upon the inhumanity of man to man and vice versa, and contemplating the possible profits in white slavery, and trying to think of rhymes for
maradóosh
and
Kâzzih,
and trying, in short, everything I knew of that would keep my mind off Phaedra. Nothing worked particularly well. Aside from Minna, who was really too young to count, Phaedra Harrow had been the only virgin I knew. And the thought of that frightened little child of nature being enjoyed and abused by thirty or forty or fifty men a day—

She had to be dead, I thought. Death before dis
honor—no doubt that had been her credo, and my heart tore at the picture of her fighting valiantly to preserve her chastity until first that and then her very life was torn away from her.

A dreadful picture.

And yet, I thought, it was no worse than the picture of her surviving the initial assault. Because if she had to take on thirty or forty or fifty men a day, then it still amounted to the same thing. Either way she was doomed to get herself screwed to death. It was only a question of time; it might take a night or it might take a year, but the outcome, God help her, seemed preordained.

I stretched out in dewy grass. I had been on my feet for what seemed rather like forever, and it was time to let the muscles roll out and the brain go blank. The muscles weren't that much trouble. They rarely are. You take one part of your body at a time and tighten it as hard as you can, and then you let it relax all the way. You sort of work your way around your body until everything is limp, and when you tune in on yourself you can feel your muscles sort of pulsing with the coolness of it all. Some of the less voluntary muscles in the eyes and inside the head are the most common trouble spots, but if you get the technique down pat you can develop more than the usual amount of control over those muscles. This won't let you show off at parties, since the whole process is invisible, but it does mean that you can get rid of most headaches just by rearranging your head. It's easier than swallowing all that aspirin.

Blanking the mind was something else again. My mind was all knotted up and I couldn't get it to let go
and relax. I found myself wondering if maybe someday I shouldn't try getting into the whole process a little deeper. Pay a visit to one of the Indian ashrams and let some guru teach me the higher path to meditation upon the verities of the cosmos. I could even take Phaedra along, for that matter. Her name, after all, had originally been Deborah Horowitz.

Still, she didn't look guruish.

I thought about that pun, and I generalized upon the confusion attendant upon the whole business of punning mentally in one language while holding a conversation in another. And I thought, too, that if I couldn't think of anything better to think about, I really ought to blank my mind, because no mind needed to be burdened with this sort of garbage. And I thought of this, and I thought of that, and I thought of the other thing, and then I thought of other other things.

And then the clown stepped on my hand.

It was a pretty strange feeling, let me tell you. I may not have blanked my mind, admittedly, but I had relaxed myself to the point where I was not overwhelmingly involved with my surroundings. So while I suppose he was walking softly on tippy-toes, I'm sure he was making some noise, however slight. But I was sufficiently out of it not to notice, and he returned the favor by not seeing me. I don't suppose he expected that there would be someone lying out on the lawn at four-thirty in the morning. That again made us even. I for my part hadn't expected that some joker would step on my hand at that hour.

What happened next happened quickly. I gave a yell and a yank, and he gave a yell and a stumble, and he fell
down even as I was coming up. We spent awhile hitting each other, with him doing somewhat better at that than I was doing, until I remembered that I had a gun in my robe. I fumbled around and found it and dragged it out and started flailing away with it. I guess I hit a few non-vital parts of him first, arms and legs, because he made a lot of unhappy noises and suggested that my mother was the sort who walked around on four legs and said
woof
a lot. Then I got him on the head, which was what I had in mind all along, and the gun butt made a satisfying noise as it bounced off his thick skull, and he made a satisfying noise and he grunted and flopped to the ground, and I gave a satisfied sigh as I rolled out from under him and ran my hands over myself to find out what was broken. It turned out that nothing was, which struck me as worth another satisfied sigh, which I proceeded to utter.

Prowlers, burglars and sneak thieves. I supposed that a wealthy man like Amanullah would be often troubled by them, even in a city he had characterized as peaceful. And evidently this sneak thief had been scared witless by trodding upon my hand, because instead of running like a rabbit he had stood his ground like—well, like a cornered rabbit. And he'd fought dirty, the sonofabitch. And he had nerve calling me a sonofabitch, the sonofabitch, because it was he who was a—

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.”

“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.