Free Tanner's Virgin by Lawrence Block Page A

There were only a few drinkers in it, and none of them had newspapers. I ordered a double scotch and a pint of bitter, remembering to put on an Irish accent. People almost always hear discrepancies between one’s speech and their own, so the trick is to give them an alternative set of discrepancies. If I had tried an approximation of the local speech I would have sounded American. This way I merely sounded Irish, which was unusual enough to be noticed but not likely to be long remembered.
    I thought of trying some IRA friends. I knew some names and addresses in Liverpool and one in Manchester, plus any number in Ireland. But Ireland was an ocean away, and the few in England were still a good distance from Portsmouth.
    Oh, of course. The CSU.
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    While auto theft is not as exclusively American a crime as kidnaping, it remains generally rare in England. Even in London few drivers take the trouble to lock their cars, and outside of the major cities it’s common practice to leave keys in the ignition. I hate to lower someone’s high opinion of human nature, but it was that or risk a bus or train, so I wandered through Portsmouth until I found a Morris 1000 with the key in it and no one watching it.
    This was less than a miracle. The remarkable thing was that the car had over half a tank of gas, more than enough to get me to Cornwall. After the extravagance of movies and drinks, I had only eight or nine shillingsleft. My money belt still held a thousand dollars, but the idea of attempting to change an American fifty-dollar bill at a petrol station left me colder than the rain, which was still falling and which the windshield wipers of the Morris were having a tough time with.
    Minor problem, that. I kept my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, and the Morris, while not a good car, was a good enough car, and on we went. Cosham, Southampton, Dorchester, Honiton, Exeter, Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin, Fraddon, and Truro. And just past Truro, at the end of a lonely ill-paved road, the thatched cottage where lived Arthur Poldexter, corresponding secretary of the Cornish chapter of the Celtic-Speaking Union.
    I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Celtic-Speaking Union. Not many people have. The organization came into being just a few years ago, spurred largely by the parliamentary success of Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and the concommitant interest in linguistic nationalism. The CSU is a five-branched nationalist movement aimed at joining in a loose political federation those geographical areas where Celtic languages prevailed longest. The five areas are Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the French province of Brittany.
    It would probably be infinitely easier to repeal the Law of Gravity than to transform the Celtic-Speaking Union into a political reality. This is nowhere more demonstrably the case than in Cornwall, where the old Celtic language of Cornish ceased to exist well over a century ago. As far as I was concerned, this only made the efforts of Arthur Poldexter and his fellowsall the more admirable. Two of them, Ardel Tresillian and George Pollifax, had worked up a painstaking reconstruction of the Cornish language; I own a mimeographed copy of their manual and will study it as soon as I find the time.
    I parked the Morris at the end of the lane and walked along a winding flagstone path, wishing as I walked that I had taken the time to learn Cornish properly. I knew just two words, and when the door opened to my knock I used them. “Free Cornwall!” I said.
    Arthur Poldexter’s black eyes flashed in his ruddy face. He had no idea who I might be or what I might want, but I was a Cornish speaker and that was all that mattered. He gripped my shoulders, pulled me inside, and launched a flood of words at me.
    I didn’t understand any of them.
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    â€œYou must go to France, Evan. To Brittany—that would be best. The French police cooperate with the British, but there