“He’s not. He-”

“I didn’t see Tad since, oh, I don’t know how long. He went back to the old country, huh?”

“I saw him last year in Cracow.”

“No kidding. Still drinking the booze, huh? Still chasing the girls?”

I closed my eyes. “Same as ever,” I said.

“Same old Tad!”

“Same old Tad.”

“Well, what do you know. Wha’d you say your name was?”

“Tanner,” I said, “Evan Tanner.”

“Well, what’s it all about, huh?”

“I have to see you. I can’t talk on the phone.”

“No kidding?”

I closed my eyes again. There were, I thought, over a hundred thousand Poles in the city of Buffalo, still more in the surrounding suburbs. With such a large subculture to draw from, it was inconceivable that the Society for a Free Poland didn’t have a more efficient operative in the area. SFP had dozens of activists in and around Buffalo, but the others whose names I was able to remember had not been home.

I thought of hanging up and trying to find someone else or simply going ahead under my own steam. I couldn’t avoid the feeling that Jerzy Pryzeshweski would bungle any task assigned to him.

Still, though, he did seem to know Taddeusz, who was as fond of women and vodka as Jerzy said he was, and who combined a true patriot’s zeal for Polish freedom with irreverent contempt for the Polish people. Taddeusz had saved me from arrest and execution in Cracow and sent me on my way to Lithuania; maybe his chum Jerzy could handle the less burdensome chore of smuggling me into Canada.

So what I said was, “I need your help. Can I come to your home?”

“You in town?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, come by my house. You know how to get here? Where are you, the bus? You got a car?”

“I’ll be right over,” I said.

He lived in a little ranch house in a neat little suburb called Cheektowaga. It was not far from the airport and the cabdriver found it easily. Jerzy was sitting on the front porch when we got there. He was wearing a pair of heavy brown shoes, khaki trousers, and a shiny yellow-green shirt that said Bowl-a-Lot Lanes on the back, Kleinman’s Bakery Products on the front, and Jerry Press on the pocket. He was sitting in an aluminum frame chair with green and yellow webbing, and he was drinking a can of beer, and he weighed close to three hundred pounds.