Tanner's Virgin by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

in—”
    â€œAfghanistan.”
    â€œRight you are, Afghanistan. Never heard of the bloody country before me china put me onto this fiddle, let alone Ka-bloody-bul. Just drive straight on into it. There’s some desperate roads on the way, and this last time I was carrying extra water the whole trip, what with the radiator boiling over, but that’s the only problem there is. Crossing the borders is safe as houses, what with me own passport in order and all of the birds’ too. You have to make sure of that ahead of time, that the birds have their passports right, and the visas and all. Customs is no problem. There’s no smuggling, see, just the lot of birds.”
    â€œAnd then what?”
    â€œAnd then there you are in Kabul.”
    I looked at him. I had the feeling I was missing a fairly obvious point. He wasn’t lying now. Somehow my act of dedigitation had elevated me to the level of a man he could respect, and he seemed to be telling me the details of his fiddle with a pride akin to Courtney Bede’s delight in showing off his stacks of old newspapers.
    â€œI don’t understand,” I said. “Do you have sex with the girls?”
    â€œWith the birds?” He frowned, thinking. “I suppose a chap could if he wanted. You’ll get some who are proper dying for it, but I never fool with any birds that way.”
    â€œThen what in hell do you do with them?”
    â€œOh, come on now,” he said. “You’re not half thick, are you? Now you can work it out. Here you are in bloody Kabul with six or seven girls, and what do you do?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhy, you sell ’em, don’t you see? What the hell else would you do with them?”
    I said, “You sell them.”
    â€œAnd to think you couldn’t guess it! White slaves is what they call it. And a thousand nicker each is what they pay. That’s six or seven thousand a trip, and add a bit of profit on selling the Land Rover and take away the cost of flying ’em to Turkey and you’re still five or six thousand quid ahead of the game. Just play it out four times a year, say, and—”
    â€œWait a minute. You sell them. Who buys them?”
    â€œChap named Amanullah. A great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. Never an argument on price, not once.”
    â€œWhat happens to the girls?”
    â€œThey make brasses of them. Tarts. They’ve a shortage of them over there, do you know?” He gave a short laugh. “Fancy bringing a boatload of tarts to Sohoand trying to sell ’em. Be coals to Newcastle all over again.”
    â€œThey work in Kabul, then?”
    He shrugged. “Got me there. I’d say they don’t, now that I think on it. I’d say they ship ’em out where birds are scarce. For them that work in the mines and such. You know what? I never gave it much thought. Once I sell ’em they’re nothing to me, and it’s hop a plane and Hello, Picadilly! with a purse full of the ready.”
    I sat beside him, my mind quite numb, while he added details. I nodded at the right places, put in the right questions, and tried to convince myself that all of this was really happening. I glanced from time to time at his index finger on the floor. It looked like one of those plastic things they sell in novelty shops along with rubber dog shit and dribble glasses. It wasn’t real, and neither was anything else.
    He’d never had trouble with the girls until this last trip, he told me. Then two of them got wind of something, Phaedra and a farm girl from the Midlands, and in Baghdad he caught them trying to escape to the British Embassy. “Had to drug them and keep them in a fog the rest of the way. Told the others they were sick with a fever. Cost me a few quid that way, bribing the hacks at the borders. But the rest never did catch on.”
    I pumped him for more details about Amanullah and how