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Tanner's Virgin (Evan Tanner Suspense Thrillers) PDF

219 Pages·2007·0.5 MB·English
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Preview Tanner's Virgin (Evan Tanner Suspense Thrillers)

TANNER’S VIRGIN AN EVAN TANNER NOVEL LAWRENCE BLOCK Contents Chapter 1 At 2:30 one fine October afternoon I ripped the telephone… 1 Chapter 2 On my fourth day in London it rained. It had… 16 Chapter 3 Old Compton Street is no place to stand around waiting… 33 Chapter 4 Afghanistan consists of a quarter of a million square miles… 51 Chapter 5 I looked at all those policemen, and I turned around… 64 Chapter 6 The water permanently dispelled thoughts of frying pans and fires. 84 Chapter 7 Tourists entering Israel had their passports checked at length. Their… 95 Chapter 8 In the seventeenth century an Afghan nobleman named Ali Mardan… 102 Chapter 9 Nothing succeeds like a kick in the groin. 115 Chapter 10 After Amanullah turned in for the night, I sat around… 134 Chapter 11 The four Afghanistan whorehouses were scattered about as far and… 143 Chapter 12 The Wicked Witch of the West had lost an eye… 155 Chapter 13 At first I didn’t know what the hell it was. 169 Chapter 14 We reached Kabul two hours after dawn on the morning… 178 Chapter 15 I sat cross-legged on the ground. I was wearing a… 184 Chapter 16 “Murder in London,” the Chief said. “Rumors of illegal entry… 193 Afterword 202 About the Author Praise Other Books by Lawrence Block Cover Copyright About the Publisher C hapter 1 A t 2:30 one fine October afternoon I ripped the telephone out of the wall. Minna said, “Evan, you have ripped the telephone out of the wall.” I looked at her. Minna is seven years old and looks like a Lithuanian edition of Alice in Wonderland, all blond and big-eyed, and it is generally a pleasure to look at her. Now, though, something in my glance told her that coexistence was temporarily impossible. “I think I shall go to the park,” she said carefully. “With Mikey.” “Mikey is in school.” “He stayed home today, Evan. It is a Jewish holiday.” Mikey, né Miguel, belonged to no church in particu- lar and was thus free to become an ex-officio member of whatever religious group was staying home from school on any given day. I said something caustic about Mikey and the many paths to divine enlightenment. Minna asked if we had any stale bread, and I told her I couldn’t be expected to keep track of that sort of thing, that kitchen inventories were her problem. She reap- peared with three slices of bread for the pigeons. They didn’t look especially stale. “Good afternoon,” she said in Lithuanian. “I forgive 2 LAWRENCE BLOCK you for the intemperance of your mood, and trust you will be better suited to discourse upon my return.” She ducked out the door before I could chuck a shoe at her. Minna always speaks Lithuanian when she does her queen shtik. She has the right, after all. As the sole surviving descendant of Mindaugas, the first and only king of independent Lithuania, she is unquestionably a royal person. She has vowed to make me her prime minister upon the restoration of the Lithuanian monar- chy, and I keep her promise in a drawer with my Czar- ist bonds and Confederate money. So I sighed heavily, and Minna went off to poi- son the pigeons in the park, and I sighed again and got a screwdriver and opened up the little telephone thing on the wall and put the phone together again. There’s much to be said for venting one’s anger upon inanimate objects, especially when they are so readily repaired. It took perhaps ten minutes to rewire the telephone, just a fraction of the time the little black monster had already cost me that day. It had been ringing intermit- tently since five in the morning. Since I do not sleep, friends and enemies feel free to call me at all hours, and this was one of those days when they had been doing precisely that. I was devoting the day to working on a thesis on color symbolism in the nature poems of William Word- sworth, and if you think that sounds slightly dull you don’t know the half of it. It was not at all the sort of thesis topic I would have selected, but for unknowable reasons it was precisely the sort of thesis topic Karen Dietrich had selected. Miss Dietrich was a school-

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The CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Interpol—not one of the world's premier intelligence organizations knows quite what to make of Evan Michael Tanner. Is he a spy, a mercenary, a footloose adventurer, or simply a screwball sucker for hopeless causes? (Actually he's a little bit of all of the above. Plus h
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