Tanner's Twelve Swingers

Page 5

And, in the course of all of this, I ate my usual five meals a day, sorted and read my mail, went to various meetings and lectures, listened to a set of Siamese language records – a difficult tongue, by the way, and a positively mind-freezing alphabet – and generally went about the business of life. Part of the business of life was the careful task of ignoring Karlis Mielovicius and his true love in Latvia.

This would have been easier if Karlis had not kept reminding me of my promise. He wasn’t an absolute pest. On the contrary, he was so patient and understanding that I was soon consumed with guilt. But he filled my mailbox with little reminders – a picture of the girl, a letter he had received from someone who knew her, a variety of news clippings referring to Latvia, that sort of thing.

I suppose, with all of this gentle prodding, I would eventually have gone to Latvia anyway. It was senseless, certainly, but pure logic and reason make a bad foundation for a human life. One has to do idiot things from time to time, if only to assure oneself that one is a human being and not a robot.

So I probably would have gone anyway. But a couple of months after the encampment the Chief got in touch with me and ordered me to go to Colombia, and the next thing I knew I was on my way to Latvia.

I was heading home from an anarchist forum when the first contact was made. I left the subway at 103rd Street and walked north on Broadway, and at the corner of 106th a clean-cut young fellow tapped me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I think you dropped this.”

He handed me a crumpled piece of paper. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“I’m sure I saw you drop it,” he said. “It might be important.” And he pressed the piece of paper into my hand. Before I could say anything else he scurried off into the night.

I unfolded the scrap of paper. It was the wrapper from a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. I never chew gum and if I did I don’t think I would chew anything called Juicy Fruit and if I did I’m sure I wouldn’t save the wrappers. I dropped it in a little basket and went home.

I didn’t leave the apartment until noon the next day, at which time I decided the restaurant down the block could outperform my own little kitchen. I left my building and walked to the corner of Broadway, and the clean-cut young fellow came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I think you dropped this.”

And handed me a crumpled piece of paper.

“It might be important,” he said once again, a hint of steel in his mellow voice. And off he went again. I went to the restaurant and ordered a plate of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. I hadn’t thrown away the scrap of paper this time. I felt it was definitely important. Either I was quietly losing my mind or someone was attempting to make contact with me, and the piece of paper seemed likely to hold a clue.

I uncrumpled it while I waited for them to scramble the eggs and fry the potatoes. It was a Juicy Fruit gum wrapper (the same one? a different one? who knows? who cares?). This time I turned it over and found that someone had written something on the back.

Like this:

T:

Sp r-ints.

Soonest.

The scrambled eggs and fried potatoes came. I ate them. I drank several cups of coffee. I read the message over and over again. I would have to destroy it, I decided. It wouldn’t do to leave it lying about where anyone could find it. Someone might glean information from it. Just because I couldn’t get anything out of it didn’t mean that some keen-eyed, quick-brained lad couldn’t get a kernel of meaning out of it.

Sprints. No, correct that: SP r-ints.

Uh-huh.

The T seemed likely to mean Tanner. The soonest probably meant that I was supposed to do something right away. And the fundamental insanity of this particular method of delivering a message suggested the message’s source. Only the undercover agencies of the United States Government operate habitually in this fashion.

Which meant that this gum wrapper was a message from the Chief. A certain amount of his cuteness is dictated by circumstances. Since I’m a subversive a couple thousand times over, my privacy is limited in certain ways. The FBI taps my phone and reads my mail before I do, and the CIA has bugged my apartment. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I’m not entirely sure which is which and I don’t entirely care.

SP r-ints?

I tucked the gum wrapper into my shirt pocket and took it back to my apartment. I puzzled over it for a while, then hauled over the telephone and looked at the dial. Then I got it. SP r-ints was a telephone number. Just substitute the appropriate numbers for the last five letters and one came up with SPring 7-4687.

Which I did not dial just then, since either the CIA or the FBI was tapping my phone. Instead I left the building again and found a pay phone and invested a dime and dialed the number.

A girl said, “Good afternoon, Omicron Employment.”

I said, “Tanner.”

The girl said, “Room Two-one-oh-four, Hotel Crichton.”

I said, “Soonest?”

The girl said, “At once.”

I said, “How Mickey Mouse can you get?” but before saying that, I broke the connection.

And then I looked in the phone book and found out that the Hotel Crichton is on East 36th Street between Lexington and Third, and I took a cab to it and went all the way up to the twenty-first floor and found Room 2104 and knocked on the door and opened it when a voice suggested I do so and went inside.

And there he was.