Then, using drugs, they interrogated their prisoners to see which fish were keepers and which ones they had to throw back. If a person had a family who would miss him, back he went. If his health was such as to make him useless to them, he too was returned to the world outside. Only a small proportion wound up permanently installed in the concrete block building. The rest were released within a day of their capture. Since they had been in a constant stupor, they had virtually no memory of what had gone on during the captive period, and probably lost the memory of the few hours preceding capture as well. Short-term amnesia, not much different from an alcoholic blackout, was certainly no great cause for alarm.
How did Minna get into the act? She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, standing on the sliding panel just as a guard maneuvered a Negro onto it. This was by no means the first time this had happened. They caught quite a few Caucasians this way, kept them unconscious for a few hours, and released them unharmed. They would have done just this with Minna if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hadn’t contrived to make a front-page figure out of me. Once I had achieved total notoriety, they were in a quandary. Minna was now important, and if they released her and she turned up, a lot of people would be very intent on finding out where she had been. Then, too, the Cubans knew me as a member of several militant refugee organizations, and may have planned to use her to put pressure on me. Whatever they had in mind, they found it more expedient to keep her drugged than to let her go. Then, when Arlette sent them into a state of pure panic, they wanted to get her out of the country along with everyone else.
Thanks to Corrigan, they didn’t make it.
And the Cubans wound up, all things considered, in almost as bad shape as they deserved. On our plane alone there were sixty-seven American Negroes ranging in hue from blue-black to stratospheric-yellow, in age from eleven to forty-eight, and in politics from conservative pillars of the black bourgeoisie to the most rabid of black nationalists, and every last one of them was positive of one thing – that Cuba was no friend of theirs.
There were other planes that had not taken the famous Corrigan detour, other Negroes who had gone to Havana already. They didn’t stay there long. Some of our passengers made phone calls to the States and some civil rights organizations sent discreet letters to the Cuban Embassy requesting the immediate return of the abductees. There was no public uproar. The threat was enough, and back they all came, slipped quietly into Mexico and smuggled carefully across the Rio Grande.
What else? That covers half my list – Minna and Assassination. The other two items will have to wait awhile.
Heroin? It’s still in that jacket. If I destroy it, the supply of heroin on the U.S. market will be stretched thin, and the price on the street will skyrocket, and the crime rate will soar, and a lot of poor junkies who have trouble enough already will be more up tight than ever.
Besides, the Union Corse knows how to hold a grudge. So it will have to go back to its wrongful owners. Still, it seems it ought to cost them a little. So when I get around to it, I’ll send a note to a friend of mine on Corsica, and he’ll set up a deal to sell the stuff back for a fraction of its value. Fraction or no, there should be enough money involved to make it interesting.
I’m in no hurry, though. Let ’em sweat a little.
Cops? I’m in even less of a hurry to clear that last point off the list. With the passage of time, Canadians and Americans alike should forget what an archcriminal I’ve been. I’ll have Jerzy Pryzeshweski withdraw his kidnap nonsense, and that should clear the situation in the States. If the Chief pulls a string or two, Canada won’t try to extradite me. They may never let me into the country. That’s fine.
So here we all are, Arlette and Minna and I, very comfortably ensconced in a couple of rooms in Lord Edward Street, in Dublin. It is so deliciously cold here that we light a coal fire on the hearth every night. It rains every day, a light, clean powdery rain. And the air is clean, and nobody is on strike, and there aren’t any riots, and no one ever comes to the door, and we don’t have a phone.
Arlette misses the tigerskin. It and the beret remain at her apartment, and it’s doubtful whether we’ll ever be able to recover them. Such skins, it seems, are extraordinarily expensive. Once we get the ransom money for the heroin, I’ll see what I can do.
In the meantime, she has purchased a blonde wig. I haven’t yet managed to turn up a Frankenstein mask, but we have hopes. Minna now speaks with the suggestion of a Dublin accent. She is learning Quebecois French from Arlette and wants to learn to speak Irish, but so far we haven’t run into anyone who knows how. She gets taken to the Dublin Zoo as often as she can manage it. Usually we get her to settle for a walk down to the River Liffey and a view of the gulls. I told her that if we stay here much longer, she will have to get a starched blue uniform and go to school every day. She didn’t even have the courtesy to pretend I was serious.
We see Seth and Randy now and then. They drop in for meals. Most of their time is spent haunting the campuses at Trinity College and the National University, convinced that there must be some way to obtain marijuana in Ireland. If there is, they’ll find it.
Corrigan flew home a week ago but as a passenger this time. The day he left, every Dublin newspaper covered the event and expressed the hope that he would return soon. I think he will; he enjoyed the city as much as it enjoyed him, which was considerably. The pubs hadn’t been so lively since Behan died.
I guess we’ll have to go back sooner or later. I must have a metric ton of mail at the Post Office by now. I’ll have to find out whether Annalya has presented me with a brother or a sister for Todor, and what name it has been given. I’ll also have to determine whether or not my friends in Africa have been eaten, and if so, by whom. And I will have to report to the Chief. I’d report to him right now, if I could. But that would contravene a key rule – I am never to attempt to make contact with him. Nor could I if I wanted to. I don’t know his name, or where he lives, or where he works, or much of anything about him.
And he can’t get in touch with me, because he doesn’t know where I am.
I hope nobody tells him.
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.