“Katarina Romanoff. That is a good name, yes?”
“It should guarantee you a good table in any restaurant in Brighton Beach.”
And that was where she lived now, in the Russian neighborhood at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. She’d stayed on 107th Street at first, but neither she nor Minna was entirely at ease with the arrangement, and after a week it was clear to all of us that she needed a place of her own. When I took her to Brighton Beach for dinner and a walk around the neighborhood, she felt instantly at home.
Our own romance had been very much a creature of circumstance, fueled by shwe le maw and malaria, and we were both ready for her to take a small apartment in a good Russian neighborhood and make a life for herself. Lately she’d been keeping company with a Russian Jewish gangster who was, she assured me, very proud of her heritage. That her forebears had very likely launched pogroms against his forebears evidently didn’t distress him.
Minna was relieved when Katya moved out, and so was I, truth to tell. It was good to have the apartment to ourselves again. I got busy with my correspondence, catching up via letters and faxes and e-mail with some very good people all over the world. I got to work studying Burmese in earnest, and the Shan language too, while I was at it. I didn’t expect to go back to Burma, but I hadn’t expected to go there the first time, either, and if I did return I’d be prepared.
I relaxed, I settled in. I got a job writing a thesis – on Prince Kropotkin, coincidentally enough, and it infuriated me that I couldn’t remember the confidences he’d shared with me while I writhed in the throes of malaria.
Speaking of malaria, I found a doctor who thought he could knock it out permanently. So far I haven’t had any more attacks, but it’s too early to say whether or not the cure is permanent. Maybe it will hang on, making its unholy presence known every once in a while.
Like Harry Spurgeon.
“Hello?”
“Evan Tanner,” a voice said. “Can you believe it? I heard you were dead.”
“But it turned out I was only sleeping.”
“So it would appear, yes. You never did come to tea that afternoon, old boy. I waited and waited.”
“I hope you ate all the sticky buns.”
He laughed. The connection was clear as a bell, but that didn’t mean he was down the block. He could be anyplace with decent phone service, so all that ruled out was Burma.
“I just wanted to pay my respects,” he said, “and to say I’m just as glad it wasn’t your neck that got stretched by a Burmese rope.”
“Just as glad, are you?”
“Indeed. You’re a worthy adversary, Tanner. If that indeed is what we were this time around. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Do you want to know something? I have the certain feeling that we’ll meet again. Have you ever had that sort of feeling about someone?”
“Once or twice.”
“I have it now. Perhaps we will be on the same side next time around. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? You and I, working together.”
“Interesting.”
“Or we might come up against one another, and that would be interesting, too. In another way, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s all I have to say, Tanner. That and to wish you good luck.”
I looked over at the shelf above the fireplace, where the three ivory figures stood in Oriental – sorry, Asian – splendor. Good Luck, Good Health, and Long Life.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’ll be seeing you, Tanner.”
“Yes,” I said. “You probably will.”
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.
The first seven Tanner novels were written and published within a four-or five-year span. The eighth one took twenty-eight years.
Back in the day, I never made a firm conscious decision to discontinue the series. It felt to me as though I was done with it, and as time passed the likelihood of my ever returning to Tanner grew increasingly remote. There had been reason to stop – the lack of great enthusiasm on the part of readers and publishers, for one thing, and the fact that the stories and characters had seemed to me to be repeating themselves. And it struck me that there was further reason to stay stopped, in that all of the lost causes and irredentist movements to which my sleepless knight belonged had somehow transformed themselves; when I started writing about them they seemed richly comedic, and since then they had turned homicidal.
After Black Sunday, what was even vaguely funny about the IRA and the Irish Troubles? After a few ETA bombings and assassinations, what was amusing about Basque nationalism?
And so on.
It’s not unheard of for a writer to stop writing about a series character. Sometimes it’s time to move on.
And, by the same token, sometimes it’s time to return.
In 1977, I published Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, the first of a series about one Bernie Rhodenbarr. Four more books followed in about as many years, and then after a few failed attempts at a sixth volume I stopped trying. I turned to other things, and the years passed, as they always seem to do.