"Tanner’s Virgin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)Chapter 9Nothing succeeds like a kick in the groin. I suppose it must be at least partly psychological. Even when the kick is wide of the mark, men tend to double up and moan for a few moments before they realize that nothing hurts. The mere suggestion of a kick in the cubes is harrowing, and I gave my bearded friend more than the suggestion. I got him right on target, and I put enough into the kick so that it was unlikely that he would ever sire children. Which, considering the type of genes he’d be likely to pass on and the already crowded state of the world, was just as well. He fell apart. He dropped the gun, which I picked up and tucked into my robe along with the dagger that was my souvenir of his first visit. He dropped himself, too, sprawling on the ground, clutching his crotch with both hands and making perfectly horrible sounds. Everyone ignored us. I’m damned if I know why. Whether it was simply that the bombed-out restaurant was a greater source of interest than an argument between two strangers, or whether the basic sense of privacy of the Afghan led him to choose not to get involved I cannot say, but whatever the cause we were left quite alone. I got my bearded friend to his feet and walked him around the corner and into an alleyway. I doubled his arm up behind him so that we would walk where I wanted to walk. He wasn’t very good at walking, choosing to stagger with his thighs as far apart as he could contrive, but I got him into the alley and propped him against the wall, and he stayed propped for almost five seconds before crumpling into a heap on the ground. “If you’re going to shoot someone,” I said, reasonably, “you should just go ahead and do it. It serves no point to tell him about it first. It just gives him a chance to try and do something about it.” “You kicked me,” he said. “Good thinking. I’m glad you’re in condition to think, because this is important. I want you clowns to stop trying to kill me.” He set his jaw and glared at me. “Because there’s really no point to it. You know, I had forgotten all about you morons.” I switched to Russian, remembering that they had been speaking it on the boat. “You and Yaakov and Daly and the rest of you. I forgot all about you. You wouldn’t believe what I went through getting here. Did you ever ride a camel? Or try to convince a Kurd that you aren’t spying for the Baghdad government? Or eat zebra sandwiches in Tel Aviv? Of course I forgot about you. It was a pleasure to forget about you.” “We thought you died in the water.” “Not quite.” “And then Peder saw you last night. He saw you enter the town, and Raffo followed you and tried to kill you as you left the coffeehouse.” He lowered his eyes. “He said it was as if you were guided by demons. You dropped to the ground even as the knife was in the middle of the air.” “Well, the demons told me to.” “Now I have tried twice and failed twice.” He looked up at me. “You will kill me now?” “No.” “You will not kill me?” “I’d like nothing better,” I said, “but it would be a waste of time. If I kill you they’ll just put somebody else on the job. Look, I want you to take them a message. You seem to think that I’m a threat to you-” “You know our plans.” “Not really.” “And you have come to Afghanistan to thwart them.” “No, definitely not. Why would I want to do a thing like that?” “You are a spy and an assassin.” “Be that as it may, I couldn’t care less about you and your plans. And I don’t really know what they are, except that you’re going to overthrow the government of Afghanistan -” “Ha! You know!” “Well, I didn’t think you were over here to get a concession to breed Afghan hounds. But I don’t know the date or the reason or-” “You arrive in Kabul on the 14th of November and try to have us believe you do not know the coup is to be on the 25th?” “The 25th?” “Ha! You know!” “Well, you just told me, you cretin.” I turned, glanced at the mouth of the alleyway. We were still quite alone. “Look at it this way,” I said. “If I knew anything, or if I cared at all, I could inform someone. That might make sense. But since you already had a make on me, why would I come into Kabul myself? Why wouldn’t I have my organization send someone you don’t know about?” “It is said that you are very shrewd.” I looked at the heavens. The sky had grown dark, and I didn’t blame it a bit. He said, “If you would not sabotage our plot, why are you here in Kabul?” “I’m looking for a girl.” “You’ll have to go to a whorehouse. The ordinary girls, they will not even talk to strangers.” “You don’t understand. I’m looking for a girl I happen to know. She was kidnaped and taken to Afghanistan.” “And where is she?” “In a whorehouse.” “Ha! You “Well, your accent’s not so hot.” “I am Bulgarian.” “Make things easy for yourself,” I said in Bulgarian. “Just so you get the message. Speak to me in Bulgarian as well, and we shall be at ease with one another, and you can go back to Yaakov with the message, and-” “You know of Yaakov.” “Well, I met the sonofabitch. Of course I know of him.” “It is all a trick,” he said mournfully. “You said on the boat that a man was overboard, and this was not so, and when we looked you were suddenly overboard. Now you say that you will not kill me, so of course I know that you will.” “I’d like to.” “Ha!” “More and more I’d like to.” I thought of the restaurant where I’d had that fine mutton steak, that cashew-flavored beer. The restaurant and all the hungry people in it were now a thing of the past, all because of this little bastard with his bomb. “But killing you does me more harm than good,” I said. “Look, let’s try it on one more time. I’m not interested in you. I don’t give a damn about your plot or the government of Afghanistan or anything else except the girl I came to Afghanistan to find. I’m not even sure I give a damn about her either, but I certainly care more about her than any of the rest of you. And I also care about staying alive. I don’t want knives in my turban or poison in my wine or walls that explode when I take a leak on them. Don’t interrupt me. All I want is to be left alone. I’ll let you go, and you’ll go back and tell them that. Right?” “You will not kill me?” “Good thinking.” His eyes grew crafty. “You are with the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps?” “So that’s what was grabbing you.” “Who is grabbing me?” “No, forget it. No, I’m not with the Central Intelligence Agency. As a matter of fact, the Central Intelligence Agency and I don’t get along very well.” “You are an enemy of the CIA?” “Well, I suppose you could put it that way, if you don’t mind stretching a point. You could even say I’m a great friend of Russia if you want. A supporter of the Soviet Union. An ally of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, if it makes you happy.” “Ha! The Soviet Union!” “Sure.” “Ha! Bulgaria!” “Ha! indeed,” I said. “So you’ll tell your boss, okay? Yaakov, the one with all the knees and elbows and teeth. Tell him I’m a good guy and I just came here to get my glasses cleaned. And tell him to for God’s sake stop sending people to kill me. I don’t like it.” He nodded. “And now,” I said, “I am not doing this because I hate you, but simply because I don’t trust you. I know it’s mean of me to think it, but I’ve got a feeling that you might try to follow me.” “I would never do this,” he said. “Somehow you fail to convince me. I even have a hunch that, given insufficient time for reflection, you might have another try at killing me.” “I am not such a man.” I aimed a kick at his groin. I checked it, but the mere thought of it was enough to make him double up, hands at crotch. It was no great trick to grab his head and rap it a couple of times against the wall. Not too hard, because I wanted my message delivered to Yaakov. Not too soft, either, because I wasn’t that crazy about my little bearded friend. If he had a headache when he woke up, that was fine with me. I slipped out of the mouth of the alleyway. I didn’t just walk out, the way I would have done earlier. I found my way to the end of the alley and stuck my head out very carefully and looked to the left and to the right, and then I scurried out and disappeared into the shadows on the other side of the street. If all of these fools didn’t know any better than to waste time killing me, at least I could be on my guard. There was no point in making their work easy for them. A man named Arthur Hook had described him as a great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. A man named Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot added that he had a furious appetite and a belly that would press through his robes if it could. They were both right. Amanullah the son of Ba’aloth the son of Pezran the son of D’hon was all this and more. He sort of hung. His hair hung straight to his shoulders, white as a Southern jury and limp as a eunuch. His body was appallingly fat all over, and the fat drooped. Someone must have slammed the door while his head was in the oven, because his face had fallen all over the place. His eyes were huge and very blue, contrasting nicely with his brown teeth. His ears were positively gigantic, with huge lobes, and if he could have contrived to flap them he could have flown away like Dumbo the Flying Elephant, whom he probably outweighed. While I introduced myself he engulfed a salad, a large wedge of cheese, two liters of beer and a chunk of bread the size of a small loaf. He didn’t even seem to be eating. He seemed to inhale his food, to breathe it into his belly. And he was, all of this notwithstanding, an exceedingly charming man. Good will was an aura around him. I sat down across the table from him fully prepared to despise him, and from the onset I found it impossible to do other than like him. “So you bring greetings from Tarsheen, eh?” He belched rather delicately. “Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. He is, let me see-” “The husband of the sister of the wife of your brother.” “Why, “I thought there was only wine.” “For me there is food. For others, no. I eat here constantly, it is my pleasure in life.” He erupted with laughter. “As if I must tell you this, eh?” He slapped his abdomen. “As if my belly does not testify amply to my source of happiness?” He slapped it again. “But I eat and offer nothing, it is not seemly. You wish nourishment?” “I ate not an hour ago.” “An hour after eating I am famished. You wish wine?” “Perhaps beer.” He ordered it, and another of the ugly sisters brought it. Somewhere along the line I asked him why it tasted of cashews, and he explained about the nut with which they flavored it. When I finished the beer he ordered me another. “Now, “It is so.” “And your business is what?” “A woman.” “Only one woman? I see. You buy or you sell?” “I buy.” “You have preference as to type? Young or old, tall or short, Eastern or Western? Fat? Slender? Dark or light? Or would you examine my poor stock and determine what strikes your fancy?” “I want a girl named Phaedra,” I said. “A name?” He shrugged massively. “But of what importance is a name? To be honest, I never bother learning the names of the girls I handle. But if you wish a girl with such a name – how is it called?” “Phaedra.” “A most unusual name in this part of the world. Is it Hindu?” “It’s Greek.” “How extraordinary! The name, though, what does it matter? You select a girl, you pay her price, she is yours to do with as you wish. If you wish to call her Phaedra, so she is called. If you wish to call her Dunghill, to Dunghill does she answer. Is it not so, I sighed. I wasn’t quite getting my point across. I took it from the top again and explained that I was looking for a girl whom he had already handled, a girl he had already purchased as a slave. “A girl brought here to me?” “Yes.” “Ah, that is another matter entirely. When did this occur?” I told him. “So many months? A problem.” He picked up a roll, broke it in half, sopped up salad oil with it, and gobbled it up. “I bought and sold many girls that month, I told him the seller was an Englishman and that the girl was part of a shipment of half a dozen English girls. I dragged out my picture of Phaedra and gave him a look at it. He studied it for a long time. “I remember the girl,” he said. “Thank God.” “She is Greek? I did not think-” “She is American.” “American, but her name is Greek. The world has more questions than answers, is it not so? I remember the girl, the others that she came with. The demand was strong at that time. All of those girls were placed almost immediately. You would do well to forget her, I stared. “Why?” “It is sad.” He rolled his huge blue eyes. “ “Why is it too late?” “Ah, “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, “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 “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, “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?” “ “Oh,” I said. “Oh, I see. I’ll be damned. You didn’t know.” 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, Sleepy, no. Stupid? Perhaps. “You like my city, “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, “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, “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 “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. “-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, “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.” |
||
|