The Eiger Sanction

Trevanian

The Eiger Sanction

MONTREAL: May 16

Earlier that night, rain had fallen on Boulevard St. Laurent, and there were still triangular pools on the uneven sidewalk. The rain had passed, but it remained cool enough to justify CII operative Wormwood's light tan raincoat. His taste ran more to trench coats, but he dared not wear one, knowing his fellow agents would scoff. Wormwood compromised by turning the collar of his raincoat up and plunging his hands deep into his pockets. One of these hands was clenched around a piece of bubble gum he had received only twenty minutes before from an evil-smelling gnome on the forbidding grounds of Ste. Justine hospital. The gnome had stepped out suddenly from the bushes, giving Wormwood a dreadful start, which he had tried to convert into a gesture of Oriental defense. The image of feline alertness might have been more effective if he had not had the misfortune to back into a rosebush.

Wormwood's step was crisp along the emptying street. He felt uplifted by a sense—not of greatness, to be sure—but of adequacy. For once he had not muddled the job. His reflection rippled along a dark shop window, and he was not displeased with what he saw. The confident glance and determined stride more than compensated for the sloping shoulders and balding head. Wormwood twisted his palms outward to correct his shoulder slump because someone once told him that the best way to achieve manly posture was to walk with the palms forward. It was most uncomfortable, and it made him walk rather like a penguin, but he did it whenever he thought of it. He was painfully reminded of his recent encounter with the rosebush, but he discovered that he could relieve his discomfort by nipping the seam of his pants between thumb and forefinger and tugging it away from his buttocks. And this he did from time to time, ignoring the open curiosity of passersby.

He was content. "It's got to be a matter of confidence," he told himself. "I knew I could pull this off, and I pulled it off!" He treasured a theory that one attracted bad luck by anticipating it, and the results of his last several assignments seemed to lend support to the concept. In general, theories did not hold up for Wormwood. To his problem of balding, he had applied the principle of Keep It Short and You'll Keep It Long, and he always wore a crew cut that made him appear less significant than necessary, but his hair continued to fall. For a while, he had clung to the theory that early balding indicated uncommon virility, but personal experience eventually forced him to abandon this hypothesis.

"This time I'm home free, and no screw-up. Six o'clock tomorrow morning I'll be back in the States!" His fist tightened down on the bubble gum. He could not afford another failure. The men at home base were already referring to him as the "one-man Bay of Pigs."

As he turned left into Lessage Lane, the street seemed empty of sound and people. He took note of this. By the time he had turned south again on St. Dominique, it was so silent that the sound of his footfalls seemed to clip back at him from the facades of unlit, dreary brick buildings. The silence did not disturb him; he whistled as a matter of choice.

"This think-positive bit really scores," he thought jazzily. "Winners win, and that's a fact." Then his round boyish face contracted into concern as he wondered if it was also true that losers lose. He tried to remember his college logic course. "No," he decided at length, "that doesn't necessarily follow. Losers don't always lose. But winners always win!" He felt better for having thought it out.

He was only one block from his third-rate hotel. He could see the damaged sign H TEL in vertical red neon down the street. "Almost home free."

He recalled CII Training Center instructions always to approach your destination from the opposite side of the street, so he crossed over. He had never fully understood the reason for this rule, beyond simple sneakiness, but it would no more occur to him to demand an explanation than it would to disobey. St. Dominique's wrought iron streetlamps had not yet fallen prey to urban uglification in the form of lip-blacking mercury lamps, so Wormwood was able to amuse himself by watching his shadow slip out from beneath his feet and grow long before him, until the next lamp assumed domination and projected his shadow, ever shortening, behind him. He was looking over his shoulder, admiring this photic phenomenon, when he ran into the lamppost. Upon recovery, he glanced angrily up and down the street, mentally daring anyone to have seen.

Someone had seen, but Wormwood did not know this, so he glared at the offending lamppost, straightened his shoulders by twisting his palms forward, and crossed to his hotel.

The hall was reassuringly redolent of that medley of mildew, Lysol, and urine characteristic of rundown hotels. According to subsequent reports, Wormwood must have entered the hotel between 11:55 and 11:57. Whatever the exact time, we may be sure he checked it, delighting as always in the luminosity of his watch's dial. He had heard that the phosphorescent material used on watch dials could cause skin cancer, but he felt that he made up for the risk by not smoking. He had developed the habit of checking the time whenever he found himself in a dark place. Otherwise, what was the use of having a watch with a luminous dial? It was probably the time he spent considering this that made the difference between 11:55 and 11:57.

As he climbed the dimly lit staircase with its damp, scrofulous carpet, he reminded himself that "winners win." His spirits sank, however, when he heard the sound of coughing from the room next to his. It was a racking, gagging, disease-laden cough that went on in spasms throughout the night. He had never seen the old man next door, but he hated the cough that kept him awake.

Standing outside his door, he took the bubble gum from his pocket and examined it. "Probably microfilm. And it's probably between the gum and the paper. Where the funnies usually are."

His key turned the slack lock. As he closed the door behind himself, he breathed with relief. "There's no getting around it," he admitted. "Winners—"

But the thought choked in mid-conception. He was not alone in the room.

With a reaction the Training Center would have applauded, he popped the bubble gum, wrapper and all, into his mouth and swallowed it just as the back of his skull was crushed in. The pain was very sharp indeed, but the sound was more terrible. It was akin to biting into crisp celery with your hands over your ears—but more ultimate.

He heard the sound of the second blow quite clearly—a liquid crunch—but oddly it did not hurt.

Then something did hurt. He could not see, but he knew they were cutting open his throat. The image of it made him shudder, and he hoped he wouldn't be sick Then they began on his stomach. Something cold rippled in and out of his stomach. The old man next door coughed and gagged. Wormwood's mind chased the thought that had been arrested by his first fright.

"Winners win," he thought, then he died.

NEW YORK: June 2

"...and, if nothing else, this semester should have taught you that there is no significant relationship between art and society—despite the ambitious pronunciamentos of the popular mass-culturists and mass-psychologists who are driven to spiteful inclusions when faced by important fields beyond their ken. The very concepts of 'society' and 'art' are mutually foreign, even antagonistic. The regulations and limitations of..."

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, Professor of Art, spun out his closing lecture to the mass class in Art and Society—a course he abhorred to teach, but one which was the bread and butter of his department. His lecture style was broadly ironic, even insulting, but he was vastly popular with the students, each of whom imagined his neighbor was writhing under Dr. Hemlock's superior disdain. They interpreted his cold acidity as an attractive bitterness in the face of the unfeeling bourgeois world, an epitome of that Weltschmerz so precious to the melodramatic soul of the undergraduate.

Hemlock's popularity with students had several unrelated bases. For one, at thirty-seven he was the youngest full professor in the Art faculty. The students assumed therefore that he was a liberal. He was not a liberal, nor was he a conservative, a Tory, a wet, an isolationist or a Fabian. He was interested only in art, and he was indifferent to and bored by such things as politics, student freedom, the war on poverty, the plight of the Negro, war in Indochina, and ecology. But he could not escape his reputation as a "student's professor." For example, when he met classes after an interruption caused by a student revolt, he openly ridiculed the administration for lacking the ability and courage to crush so petty a demonstration. The students read this as a criticism of the establishment, and they admired him more than ever.

"...after all, there are only Art and non-Art. There are no such things as Black Art, Social Art, Young Art, Pop Art, Mass Art. These are merely fictional rubrics designed to grace, through classification, the crap of inferior daubers who..."

Male students who had read of Hemlock's international exploits as a mountain climber were impressed by the image of scholar/athlete, despite the fact that he had not climbed for several years. And young ladies were attracted by his arctic aloofness, which they assumed concealed a passionate and mysterious nature. But he was far from the physical idiom of the romantic type. Slim and of average height, only his precise and wiry movements and his veiled green-gray eyes recommended him to their sexual fantasies.

As one might suspect, Hemlock's popularity did not extend to the faculty. They resented his academic reputation, his refusal to serve on committees, his indifference to their projects and proposals, and his much-publicized student charisma, which term they always inflected so as to make it sound like the opposite of scholarly integrity. His major protection against their snide bile was the rumor that he was independently wealthy and lived in a mansion on Long Island. Typical academic liberals, the faculty were stunned and awkward in the face of wealth, even rumored wealth. There was no way for them to disprove or substantiate these rumors because none of them had ever been invited to his home, nor were they likely to be.

"...the appreciation of art cannot be learned. It requires special gifts—gifts which you naturally assume you possess because you have been brought up on the belief that you were created equal. What you don't realize is that this only means you are equal to one another..."

Speaking automatically, Hemlock allowed his eye to wander over the front row of his amphitheatre classroom. As usual, it was filled with smiling, nodding, mindless girls, their skirts hitched too high and their knees unconsciously apart. It occurred to him that, with their up-turned little smiles and round, empty eyes, they looked like a row of umlaut U's. He never had anything to do with the female students: students, virgins, and drunks he held to be off limits. Opportunities were rife, and he was not enfeebled by free-floating morality; but he was a sporting man, and he ranked the making of these dazzled imbeciles with shining deer and dynamiting fish at the base of the dam.

As always, the bell coincided with the last word of his lecture, so he wrapped up the course by wishing the students a peaceful summer unsullied by creative thought. They applauded, as they always did on last day, and he left quickly.

As he turned the corner of the hall, he encountered a mini-skirted co-ed with long black hair and eyes made up like a ballerina's. With excited catches of breath, she told him how much she had enjoyed the course and how she felt closer to Art than ever before.

"How nice."

"The problem I have, Dr. Hemlock, is that I have to keep a B average, or I lose my scholarship."

He fished in his pocket for his office keys.

"And I'm afraid I'm not going to do well enough in your final. I mean—I have gained a great feeling for Art—but you can't always put feelings down on paper." She looked up at him, gathered her courage, and tried hard to make her eyes terribly meaningful. "So, if there's anything I can do to get a better grade—I mean, I'd be willing to do anything at all. Really."

Hemlock spoke gravely. "You've considered all the implications of that offer?"

She nodded and swallowed, her eyes shining with anticipation.

He lowered his voice confidentially. "Do you have anything planned for tonight?"

She cleared her throat and said no, she didn't.

Hemlock nodded. "Do you live alone?"

"My roommate's gone for the week."

"Good. Then I suggest you break out the books and study your ass off. That's the surest way I know to ensure your grade."

"But..."

"Yes?"

She crumpled. "Thank you."

"A pleasure."

She walked slowly down the hall as Hemlock entered his office, humming to himself. He liked the way he had done that. But his euphoria was transient. On his desk he found notes he had written to himself, reminders of bills soon due and past due. University rumors of private wealth were baseless; the truth was that Hemlock spent each year a little more than three times his income from teaching, books, and commissions for appraisal and evaluation. Most of his money—about forty thousand a year—he earned by moonlighting. Jonathan Hemlock worked for the Search and Sanction Division of CII. He was an assassin.

The telephone buzzed, and he pressed down the flashing button and lifted the receiver. "Yes?"

"Hemlock? Can you talk?" The voice belonged to Clement Pope, Mr. Dragon's first assistant. It was impossible to miss the strained, hushed tone. Pope loved playing spy.

"What can I do for you, Pope?"

"Mr. Dragon wants to see you."

"I assumed as much."

"Can you get over here in twenty minutes?"

"No." Actually, twenty minutes was ample time, but Jonathan loathed the personnel of Search and Sanction. "What about tomorrow?"

"This is top drawer. He wants to see you now."

"In an hour, then."

"Look, pal, if I were you I'd get my ass over here as soon as—" but Jonathan had hung up.

For the next half hour Jonathan puttered around his office. When he was sure he would arrive at Dragon's in something over the predicted hour, he called a taxi and left the campus.

As the grimy, ancient elevator tugged him to the top floor of a nondescript Third Avenue office building, Jonathan automatically noted the familiar details: the scaly gray paint on the walls, the annual inspection stamps slapped haphazardly over one another, the Otis recommendation for load limit, twice scratched out and reduced in deference to the aging machinery. He anticipated everything he would see for the next hour, and the anticipation made him uneasy.

The elevator stopped and swayed slackly while the doors clattered open. He stepped out on the top floor of offices, turned left, and pushed open the heavy NO ADMITTANCE fire door leading to a stairwell. Sitting on the dank cement stairs, his toolbox beside him, was a huge Negro workman in coveralls. Jonathan nodded and stepped past him up the steps. One flight up, the stairs came to an end, and he pressed out through another fire door to what had been the loft of the building before CII had installed a suite of offices there. The smell of hospital, so sharply remembered, filled the hallway where an overblown cleaning woman slowly swung a mop back and forth over the same spot. On a bench to one side of a door bearing: "Yurasis Dragon: Consulting Service," sat a beefy man in a business suit, his briefcase in his lap. The man rose to face Jonathan, who resented being touched by these people. All of them, the Negro worker, the cleaning woman, the businessman, were CII guards; and the toolbox, the mop handle, and the briefcase all contained weapons.

Jonathan stood with his legs apart, his hands against the wall, embarrassed and annoyed with himself for being embarrassed, while the businessman's professional hands frisked part of his body and clothing.

"This is new," the businessman said, taking a pen from Jonathan's pocket. "You usually carry one of French make—dark green and gold."

"I lost it."

"I see. Does this have ink in it?"

"It's a pen."

"I'm sorry. I'll either have to keep it for you until you come out, or I can check it out. If I check it out, you'll lose the ink."

"Why don't you just keep it for me."

The businessman stepped aside and allowed Jonathan to enter the office.

"You are eighteen minutes late, Hemlock," Mrs. Cerberus accused as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

"Thereabouts." Jonathan was assailed by the overwhelming hospital smell of the glistening outer office. Mrs. Cerberus was squat and muscular in her starched white nurse's uniform, her coarse gray hair cropped short, her cold eyes pinched into slits by pouches of fat, her sandpaper skin appearing to have been scrubbed daily with sal soda and a currycomb, her thin upper lip aggressively mustachioed.

"You're looking inviting today, Mrs. Cerberus."

"Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting," she snarled.

"Who among us really does?"

"Are you healthy?" she asked without solicitude.

"Reasonably."

"No cold? No known contact with infection?"

"Just the usual lot: pellagra, syphilis, elephantiasis."

She glared at him. "All right, go in." She pressed a button that unlocked the door behind her, then returned to the papers on her desk, not dealing with Jonathan further.

He stepped into the interlock chamber; the door clanged shut behind him; and he stood in the dim red light Mr. Dragon provided as a mezzo-phase from the glittering white of the outer office to the total dark of his own. Jonathan knew he would adapt to the dark more quickly if he closed his eyes. At the same time, he slipped out of his suit coat. The temperature in the interlock and in Mr. Dragon's office was maintained at a constant 87°. The slightest chill, the briefest contact with cold or flu virus would incapacitate Mr. Dragon for months. He had almost no natural resistance to disease.

The door to Mr. Dragon's office clicked and swung open automatically when the cooler air Jonathan had introduced into the interlock had been heated to 87°.

"Come in, Hemlock," Mr. Dragon's metallic voice invited from the darkness beyond.

Jonathan put out his hands and felt his way forward toward a large leather chair he knew to be opposite Mr. Dragon's desk.

"A little to the left, Hemlock."

As he sat, he could dimly make out the sleeve of his white shirt. His eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark.

"Now then. How have you been these past months?"

"Rhetorical."

Dragon laughed his three dry, precise ha's. "True enough. We have been keeping a protective eye on you. I am informed that there is a painting on the black market that has taken your fancy."

"Yes. A Pissarro."

"And so you need money. Ten thousand dollars, if I am not misinformed. A bit dear for personal titillation."

"The painting is priceless."

"Nothing is priceless, Hemlock. The price of this painting will be the life of a man in Montreal. I have never understood your fascination with canvas and crusted pigment. You must instruct me one day."

"It's not a thing you can learn."

"Either you have it or you haven't, eh?"

"You either got it or you ain't."

Dragon sighed. "I guess one has to be born to the idiom." No accent, only a certain exactitude of diction betrayed Dragon's foreign birth. "Still, I must not deride your passion for collecting paintings. Without it, you would need money less often, and we would be deprived of your services." Very slowly, like a photograph in the bottom of a developing tray, the image of Mr. Dragon began to emerge through the dark as Jonathan's eyes dilated. He anticipated the revulsion he would experience.

"Don't let me waste too much of your time, Mr. Dragon."

"Meaning: let's get to the matter at hand." There was disappointment in Dragon's voice. He had taken a perverse liking to Jonathan and would have enjoyed chatting with someone from outside the closed world of international assassination. "Very well, then. One of our men—code call: Wormwood—was killed in Montreal. There were two assailants. Search Division has located one of them. You will sanction this man."

Jonathan smiled at the cryptic jargon of CII, in which "demote maximally" meant purge by killing, "biographic leverage" meant blackmail, "wet work" meant killing, and "sanction" meant counter-assassination. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and Dragon's face become dimly visible. The hair was white as silk thread, and kinky, like a sheep's. The features, floating in the retreating gloom, were arid alabaster. Dragon was one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena: a total albino. This accounted for his sensitivity to light; his eyes and eyelids lacked protective pigment. He had also been born without the ability to produce white corpuscles in sufficient quantity. As a result, he had to be insulated from contact with people who might carry disease. It was also necessary that his blood be totally replaced by massive transfusions each six months. For the half century of his life, Dragon had lived in the dark, without people, and on the blood of others. This existence had not failed to affect his personality.

Jonathan looked at the face, awaiting the emergence of the most disgusting feature. "You say Search has located only one of the targets?"

"They are working on the second one. It is my hope that they will have identified him by the time you arrive in Montreal."

"I won't take them both. You know that." Jonathan had made a moral bargain with himself to work for CII only when it was fiscally necessary. He had to be on his guard against sanction assignments being forced on him at other times.

"It may be necessary that you take both assignments, Hemlock."

"Forget it." Jonathan felt his hands grip the arms of his chair. Dragon's eyes were becoming visible. Totally without coloration, they were rabbit pink in the iris and blood red in the pupil. Jonathan glanced away in involuntary disgust.

Dragon was hurt. "Well, well, we shall talk about the second sanction when the time comes."

Dragon smiled thinly. "People seldom come to me with good news."

"This sanction is going to cost you twenty thousand."

"Twice your usual fee? Really, Hemlock!"

"I need ten thousand for the Pissarro. And ten for my house."

"I am not interested in your domestic economy. You need twenty thousand dollars. We normally pay ten thousand for a sanction. There are two sanctions involved here. It seems to work out well."

"I told you I don't intend to do both jobs. I want twenty thousand for one."

"And I am telling you that twenty thousand is more than the job is worth."

"Send someone else then!" For an instant, Jonathan's voice lost its flat calm.

Dragon was instantly uneasy. Sanction personnel were particularly prone to emotional pressures from their work and dangers, and he was always alert for signs of what he called "tension rot." In the past year, there had been some indications in Jonathan. "Be reasonable, Hemlock. We have no one else available just now. There has been some... attrition... in the Division."

Jonathan smiled. "I see." After a short silence, "But if you have no one else, you really have no choice. Twenty thousand."

"You are completely without conscience, Hemlock."

"But then, we always knew that." He was alluding to the results of psychological tests taken while serving with Army Intelligence during the Korean War. After re-testing to confirm the unique pattern of response, the chief army psychologist had summarized his findings in singularly unscientific prose:

...Considering that his childhood was marked by extreme poverty and violence (three juvenile convictions for assault, each precipitated by his being tormented by other youngsters who resented his extraordinary intelligence and the praise it received from his teachers), and considering the humiliations he underwent at the hands of indifferent relatives after the death of his mother (there is no father of record), certain of his antisocial, antagonistic, annoyingly superior behaviors are understandable, even predictable.

One pattern stands out saliently. The subject has extremely rigid views on the subject of friendship. There is, for him, no greater morality than loyalty, no greater sin than disloyalty. No punishment would be adequate to the task of repaying the person who took advantage of his friendship. And he holds that others are equally bound to his personal code. An educated guess would suggest that his pattern emerges as an overcompensation for feelings of having been abandoned by his parents.

There is a personality warp, unique to my experience and to that of my associates, that impels us to caution those responsible for the subject. The man lacks normal guilt feelings. He is totally without the nerve of conscience. We have failed to discover any vestige of negative response to sin, crime, sex, or violence. This is not to imply that he is unstable. On the contrary he is, if anything, too stable—too controlled. Abnormally so.

Perhaps he will be viewed as ideal for the purposes of Army Intelligence, but I must report that the subject is, in my view, a personality somehow incomplete. And socially very dangerous.

"So you refuse to take the two sanctions, Hemlock, and you insist on twenty thousand for just one."

"Correct."

For a moment the pink-and-red eyes rested thoughtfully on Jonathan as Dragon rolled a pencil between his palms. Then he laughed his three dry, precise ha's. "All right. You win for now."

Jonathan rose. "I assume I make contact with Search in Montreal?"

"Yes. Search Section Mapleleaf is headed by a Miss Felicity Arce—I assume that is how it is pronounced. She will give you all instructions."

Jonathan slipped on his coat.

"About this second assassin, Hemlock. When Search has located him—"

"I won't need money for another six months."

"But what if we should need you?"

Jonathan did not answer. He opened the door to the interlock, and Dragon winced at the dim red light.

Blinking back the brilliance of the outer office, Jonathan asked Mrs. Cerberus for the address of Search Section Mapleleaf.

"Here." She thrust a small white card before Ms eyes and gave him only five seconds to memorize it before replacing it in her file. "Your contact will be Miss Felicity Arce."

"So that really is how it's pronounced. My, my."

LONG ISLAND: June 2

Now on CII expense account, Jonathan took a cab all the way from Dragon's office to his home on the north shore of Long Island.

A sense of peace and protection descended on him as he closed behind him the heavy oaken door to the vestibule, which he had left unaltered when he converted the church into a dwelling. He passed up through a winding, Gothic-arched stair to the choir loft, now partitioned into a vast bedroom overlooking the body of the house, and a bathroom twenty feet square, in the center of which was a deep Roman pool he used as a bath. While four faucets roared hot water into the pool, filling the room with steam, he undressed, carefully brushed and folded his clothes, and packed his suitcase for Montreal. Then he lowered himself gingerly into the very hot water. He floated about, never allowing himself to think about Montreal. He was without conscience, but he was not without fear. These sanction assignments were accomplished, as difficult mountain climbs once had been, on the high-honed edge of nerve. The luxury of this Roman bath—which had absorbed the profits from a sanction—was more than a sybaritic reaction to the privations of his childhood, it was a necessary adjunct to his uncommon trade.

Dressed in a Japanese robe, he descended from the choir loft and entered through heavy double doors the body of his house. The church had been laid out in classic cruciform, and he had left all the nave as open living space. One arm of the transept had been converted to a greenhouse garden, its stained glass replaced by clear, and a stone pool with a fountain set in the midst of tropical foliage. The other arm of the cross was lined with bookshelves and did service as a library.

He padded barefoot through the stone-floored, high-vaulted nave. The light from clerestories above was adequate to his taste for dun cool interiors and vast unseen space. At night, a switch could be thrown to illuminate the stained glass from without, sketching collages of color on the walls. He was particularly fond of the effect when it rained and the colored light danced and rippled along the walls.

He opened the gate and mounted two steps to his bar, where he made himself a martini and sipped with relish as he rested his elbows back on the bar and surveyed his house with contented pride.

After a time, he had an urge to be with his paintings, so he descended a curving stone stairwell to the basement chamber where he kept them. He had labored evenings for half a year putting in the floor and walling the room with panels from a Renaissance Italian palace that had served interim duty in the grand hall of an oil baron's North Shore mansion. He locked the door behind him and turned on the lights. Along the walls leaped out the color of Monet, Cezanne, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Renoir, and Cassatt. He moved around the room slowly, greeting each of his beloved Impressionists, loving each for its particular charm and power, and remembering in each instance the difficulty—often danger—he had encountered in acquiring it.

The room contained little furniture for its size: a comfortable divan of no period, a leather pouf with strap handles so he could drag it along to sit before one picture or another, an open Franklin stove with a supply of dry cedar logs in an Italian chest beside it, and a Bartolomeo Cristofore pianoforte which he played with great precision, if little soul. On the floor was a 1914 Kashan—the only truly perfect oriental. And in a corner, not far from the Franklin stove, was a small desk where he did most of his work. Above the desk and oddly out of keeping with the decor were a dozen photographs attached haphazardly to the wall. They were candid shots of mountain episodes capturing climbers with awkward or boyishly clowning expressions—brave men who could not face a lens without embarrassment which they hid by ludicrous antics. Most of the photographs were of Jonathan and his lifelong climbing companion, Big Ben Bowman, who, before his accident, had bagged most of the major peaks of the world with characteristic lack of finesse. Ben simply battered them down with brute strength and unconquerable will. They had made an odd but effective team: Jonathan the wily tactician, and Big Ben the mountain-busting animal.

Only one of the photographs was of a lowland man. In memory of his sole friendship with a member of the international espionage clique, Jonathan kept a photo in which the late Henri Baq grinned wryly at the camera. Henri Baq, whose death Jonathan would one day avenge.

He sat at his desk and finished the martini. Then he took a small packet from the drawer and filled the bowl of an ornate hookah which he set up on the rug before his Cassatt. He hunched on the leather pouf and smoked, stroking the surface of the canvas with liberated eyes. Then, from nowhere, as it did from time to time, the thought strayed into his mind that he owed his whole style of life—academics, art, his house—to poor Miss Ophel.

Poor Miss Ophel. Sere, fluttering, fragile spinster. Miss Ophel of the sandpaper crotch. He had always thought of her that way, although he had had the good sense to play it shy and grateful when she had visited him in the juvenile home. Miss Ophel lived alone in a monument to Victorian poor taste on the outskirts of Albany. She was the last of the family that had founded its fortune on fertilizer brought down the Erie Canal. But there would be no more Ophels. Such modest maternity as she possessed was squandered on cats and birds and puppies with saccharine nicknames. One day it occurred to her that social work might be diverting—as well as being useful. But she lacked the temperament for visiting slums that stank of urine and for patting children's heads that well might have had nits, so she asked her lawyer to keep an eye out for a needy case that had some refinement about it. And the lawyer found Jonathan.

Jonathan was in a detention home at the time, paying for attempting to decrease the surplus population of North Pearl Street by two bantering Irish boys who had assumed that, because Jonathan astounded the teachers of P.S. 5 with his knowledge and celerity of mind, he must be a queer. Jonathan was the smaller boy, but he struck while the others were still saying "Oh, yeah?" and he had not overlooked the ballistic advantage of an eighteen-inch lead pipe he had spied lying in the alley. Bystanders had intervened and saved the Irish boys to banter again, but they would never be handsome men.

When Miss Ophel visited Jonathan she found him to be mild and polite, well informed, and oddly attractive with his gentle eyes and delicate face, and definitely worthy. And when she discovered that he was as homeless as her puppies and birds, the thing was settled. Just after his fourteenth birthday, Jonathan took up residence in the Ophel home and, after a series of intelligence and aptitude tests, he faced a parade of tutors who groomed him for university.

Each summer, to broaden his education, she took him to Europe where he discovered a natural aptitude for languages and, most importantly to him, a love for the Alps and for climbing. On the evening of his sixteenth birthday there was a little party, just the two of them and champagne and petits fours. Miss Ophel got a little tipsy, and a little tearful over her empty life, and very affectionate toward Jonathan. She hugged him and kissed him with her dusty lips. Then she hugged him tighter.

By the next morning, she had made up a cute little nickname for it, and almost every evening thereafter she would coyly ask him to do it to her.

The next year, after a battery of tests, Jonathan entered Harvard at the age of seventeen. Shortly before his graduation at nineteen, Miss Ophel died peacefully in her sleep. On the surprisingly small residue of her estate, Jonathan continued his education and took occasional summer trips to Switzerland, where he began to establish his reputation as a climber.

He had taken his undergraduate degree in comparative linguistics cashing in on his logical bent and native gift for language. He might have gone on in that field, but for one of those coincidences that form our lives in spite of our plans.

As a caprice, he took a summer job assisting a professor of Art in the cataloging of artistic orts left over from the confiscation of Nazi troves after the war. The gratin of these re-thefts had gone to an American newspaper baron, and the leavings had been given to the university as a sop to the national conscience—a healthy organ that had recently rebounded from the rape of Hiroshima with no apparent damage.

In the course of the cataloging, Jonathan listed one small oil as "unknown," although the packing slip had assigned it to a minor Italian Renaissance painter. The professor had chided him for the mistake, but Jonathan said it was no error.

"How can you be so sure?" the professor asked, amused.

Jonathan was surprised at the question. He was young and still assumed that teachers knew their fields. "Well, it's obvious. We saw a painting by the same man last week. And this was not painted by the same hand. Just look at it."

The professor was uncomfortable. "How do you know that?"

"Just look at it! Of course, it's possible that the other one was mislabeled. I have no way to know."

An investigation was undertaken, and it developed that Jonathan was correct. One of the paintings had been done by a student of the minor master. The fact had been recorded and had been general knowledge for three hundred years, but it had slipped through the sieve of Art History's memory.

The authorship of a relatively unimportant painting was of less interest to the professor than Jonathan's uncanny ability to detect it. Not even Jonathan could explain the process by which, once he had studied the work of a man, he could recognize any other painting by the same hand. The steps were instant and instinctive, but absolutely sure. He always had trouble with Rubens and his painting factory, and he had to treat Van Gogh as two separate personalities—one before the breakdown and stay at St. Remy, one after—but in the main his judgments were irrefutable, and before long he became indispensable to major museums and serious collectors.

After schooling, he took a post teaching in New York, and he began publishing. The articles rolled off, and the women rolled through his Twelfth Street apartment, and the months rolled by in a pleasant and pointless existence. Then, one week after his first book came off the press, his friends and fellow citizens decided he was particularly well suited to blocking bullets in Korea.

As it turned out, he was not often called upon to block bullets, and the few that came his way were dispatched by fellow Americans. Because he was intelligent, he was put into Army Intelligence: Sphinx Division. For four wasted years, he defended his nation from the aggressions of the leftist imperialism by uncovering attempts of enterprising American soldiers to flesh out their incomes by sharing Army wealth with the black markets of Japan and Germany. His work required that he travel, and he managed to squander a laudable amount of government time and money on climbing mountains and on collecting data to keep his academic reputation shiny with articles.

After the nation had handily taught the North Koreans their lesson, Jonathan was released to civilian activities, and he took up more or less where he had left off. His life was pleasant and directionless. Teaching was easy and automatic; articles seldom needed and never received the benefit of a second draft; and his social life consisted of lazing about his apartment and making the women he happened to meet, if the seduction could be accomplished with limited effort, as usually it could. But this good life was slowly undermined by the growth of his passion for collecting paintings. His Sphinx work in Europe had brought into his hands a half dozen stolen Impressionists. These first acquisitions kindled in him the unquenchable fire of the collector. Viewing and appreciating were not enough—he had to possess. Channels to underground and black market paintings were open to him through Sphinx contacts, and his unequaled eye prevented him from being cheated. But his income was insufficient to his needs.

For the first time in his life, money became important to him. And at that very juncture, another major need for money appeared. He discovered a magnificent abandoned church on Long Island that he instantly recognized as the ideal home for himself and his paintings.

His pressing need for money, his Sphinx training, and his peculiar psychological makeup, devoid of any sense of guilt—these things combined to make him ripe for Mr. Dragon.

Jonathan sat for a while, deciding where he would hang his Pissarro when he purchased it from the pay for the Montreal sanction. Then he rose lazily, cleaned and put away the hookah, sat at his pianoforte and played a little Handel, then he went to bed.

MONTREAL: June 5

The high rise apartment complex was typical of middle-class democratic architecture. All of the dwellers could get a glimpse of La Fontaine Park, but none could see it well, and some only after acrobatic excesses from their cramped, cantilevered balconies. The lobby door was a heavy glass panel that hinged eight inches from the edge; there was red commercial wall-to-wall carpet, plastic ferns, a padded self-service elevator, and meaningless escutcheons scattered along the walls.

Jonathan stood in a sterile hallway, awaiting response to the buzzer and glancing with distaste at an embossed Swiss print of a Cezanne designed to lend luxury to the corridor. The door opened and he turned around.

She was physically competent, even lush; but she was hardly gift wrapped. In her tailored suit of tweed, she seemed wrapped for mailing. Thick blond bangs, cheekbones wide, lips full, bust resisting the constriction of the suit jacket, flat stomach, narrow waist, full hips, long legs, tapered ankles. She wore shoes, but he assumed her toes were adequate as well.

"Miss...?" he raised his eyebrows to force her to fill in the name because he was still unwilling to rely on the pronunciation.

"Felicity Arce," she said, holding out her hand hospitably. "Do come in. I've looked forward to meeting you, Hemlock. You're well thought of in the trade, you know."

She stepped aside and he entered. The apartment was consonant with the building: expensive anticlass. When they shook hands, he noticed that her forearm glistened with an abundance of soft golden hair. He knew that to be a good sign.

"Sherry?" she offered.

"Not at this time of night."

"Whiskey?"

"Please."

"Scotch or bourbon."

"Do you have Laphroaig?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Then it doesn't matter."

"Why don't you sit down while I pour it." She walked away to a built-in bar of antiqued white under which lurked a suspicion of pine. Her movements were strong, but sufficiently liquid about the waist. He sat at one end of a sectional divan and turned toward the other, so that it would be downright impolite of her to sit anywhere else. "You know," he commented, "this apartment is monumentally ugly. But my guess is that you are going to be very good."

"Very good?" she asked over her shoulder, pouring whiskey generously.

"When we make love. A little more water, please."

"Like so?"

"Close enough."

She smiled and shook her head as she returned with the drink. "We have other things to do than make love, Hemlock." But she sat on the divan as he directed her to with a wave of his hand.

He sipped. "We have time for both. But of course it's up to you. Think about it for a while. And meanwhile, tell me what I have to know about this sanction."

Miss Arce looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes for a second, collecting her thoughts. "The man they killed was code call: Wormwood—not much of a record."

"What was he doing in Canada?"

"I have no idea. Something for CII home base. It's really none of our business anyway."

"No, I suppose not." Jonathan held out his hand and she took it with a slight greeting pressure of the fingers. "Go on."

"Well, Wormwood was hit in a small hotel on Casgrain Avenue—hm-m-m, that's nice. Do you know that part of town?"

"No." He continued stroking the inside of her wrist.

"Fortunately, CII home base was covering him with a backup man. He was in the next room, and he overheard the hit. As soon as the two assassins left, he went into Wormwood's room and made a standard strip of the body. Then he contacted Search and Sanction immediately. Mr. Dragon got me right on it."

Jonathan kissed her gently. "You're telling me that this backup man just sat next door and let this Wormwood get it?"

"Another whiskey?"

"No, thank you." He stood up and drew her after him. "Where is it? Through there?"

"The bedroom? Yes." She followed. "You must know how they work, Hemlock. The backup man's assignment is to observe and report, not to interfere. Anyway, it seems they were testing a new device."

"Oh? What kind of device? I'm sorry, dear. These little hooks always confuse me."

"Here, I'll do it. They've always had a problem covering the movements and sound of the backup man when they stake him out in the next room. Now they've hit on the idea of having him make noise, rather than trying to keep him quiet—"

"Good God! Do you keep these sheets in the refrigerator?"

"That's silk for you. What they're experimenting with is a tape recording of the sound of an old man's coughing—playing it day and night, advertising the presence of someone in the next room, but someone no one would imagine is an agent. Oh! I'm very sensitive there. It tickles now, but it won't later. Isn't that clever?"

"The coughing old man? Oh, yes, clever."

"Well, as soon as Mr. Dragon sent me the B-3611 form I got to work. It was pretty easy. The outside is particularly good for me."

"Yes, I sensed that."

"It seems this Wormwood wasn't a total incompetent. He wounded one of the two men. The backup agent saw them leave the hotel, and even from the window he could tell that one of them was limping. The other one—the one who wasn't hurt—must have been panicked. He ran—Oh, that is beautiful!—He ran into a lamppost across from the hotel. When he stopped to recover, the backup man recognized him. The rest was—agh! Agha!—the rest was easy."

"What's the mark's name?"

"Kruger. Garcia Kruger. A very bad type."

"You're kidding about the name."

"I never kid about names. Oh-a-ar! Graggah!"

"What do you mean, he's a bad type?"

"The way he got Wormwood. He—Oh, God! He... He..."

"Press down with the soles of your feet!"

"All right. Wormwood swallowed a pellet he was carrying. Kruger went after it with a knife. Throat and stomach. Oh! Adagrah! Oh, yes... yes..."

"Read much Joyce?"

She forced words out through a tight jaw, small squeaks of air escaping from her contracted throat "No, Agh! Why do you ask?"

"Nothing important. What about the other man?"

"The one who limped? Don't know yet. Not a professional, we're sure of that."

"How do you know he's not a professional?"

"He got sick while Kruger was working on Wormwood. Threw up on the floor. Ogha? Ogah? Arah-ah-agh-ga-gahg!" She arched her strong back and lifted him off the bed. He joined her in release.

For a time there were soft caresses and gentle pelvic adjustments.

"You know, Hemlock," her voice was soft, relaxed, and a little graveled from effort. "You really have magnificent eyes. They're rather tragicomic eyes."

He expected this. They always talked about his eyes afterwards.

Some time later, he sat on the edge of the tub, holding up a rubber sac in an unsuccessful attempt to allow water to seek its own level. Part of his charm lay in these little attentions.

"I've been thinking about your gun, Hemlock."

"What about it?"

"The information sent up by Mr. Dragon indicated you used a large caliber."

"True. I have to. I'm not much of a shot. Finished?"

"Uh-huh."

They dressed and had another whiskey in the sterile living room. In detail, Miss Arce went over the daily habits and routine of Garcia Kruger, answering questions raised by Jonathan. She ended with: "It's all in the tout we amassed. You should study it then destroy it. And here's your gun." She gave him a bulky brown package. "Will I see you again?"

"Would that be wise?"

"I suppose not. May I tell you something? Just as I—well, at the top—can you imagine what ran through my mind?"

"No."

"I remembered that you were a killer."

"And that bothered you?"

"Oh, no! Quite the contrary. Isn't that odd?"

"It's rather common, actually." He collected the tout and the gun and walked to the door. She followed him, anticipating a final kiss, insensitive to his postcoitus frost.

"Thank you," she said softly, "for the advice about pushing down with the feet. It certainly helps."

"I like to leave people a little richer for having known me."

She held out her hand and he took it. "You really have magnificent eyes, Hemlock. I'm very glad you came."

"Good of you to have me."

In the hall, as he waited for the elevator, he felt pleased about the evening. It had been simple, uncomplicated, and temporarily satisfying: like urination. And that was the way he preferred his love-making to be.

In general, his sex life was no more heroic than, say, the daydreams of the average bachelor. But romantic activity tended to peak when he was on sanction assignments. For one thing, opportunities abounded at such times. For another, his sexual appetite was whetted by the danger he faced, perhaps a microcosmic instance of that perverse force of nature that inflates birthrates during wartime.

Once in bed, he was really very good. His mechanical competence was not a matter of plumbing, in which respect he differed little from the mass of men. Nor, as we have seen, was it a result of wooing and careful preparation. It was, instead, a function of his remarkable staying powers and his rich experience.

Of the experience, it suffices to say that his control was seldom betrayed by the tickle of curiosity. After Ankara, and Osaka, and Naples, there were no postures, no ballistic nuances foreign to him. And there were only two kinds of women with whom he had never had experience: Australian Abos and Eskimos. And neither of these ethnic gaps was he eager to fill, for reasons of olfactory sensitivity.

But the more significant contribution to his epic endurance was tactile. Jonathan felt nothing when he made love. That is to say, he had never experienced that local physical ecstasy we associate with climax. To be sure, his biological factory produced semen regularly, and an overabundance disturbed him, interfered with his sleep, distracted him from work. So he knew great relief at the moment of discharge. But his relief was a termination of discomfort, not an achievement of pleasure.

So he was more to be pitied for the basis of his remarkable control than he was to be envied for the competence it granted him.

MONTREAL: June 9

He finished his smoke then flushed the contents of his ashtray down the toilet. He sat fully clothed on his bed and did a calming unit, breathing deeply and regularly, softening in turn every muscle in his body, his fingertips pressed lightly together and his concentration focused on his crossed thumbs. The dim of his hotel room was lacerated by lances of sunlight through the partially closed blinds. Motes of dust hovered in the shafts of light.

He had passed the morning rehearsing Garcia Kruger's daily routine for a final time before he destroyed the Search tout. Then he had visited two art galleries, strolling with deliberate step, pressing his metabolic rate down to prepare himself for the task before him.

When his body and mind were completely ready, he rose slowly from bed and opened the top drawer of a chest to take out a brown bag folded over at the top like a lunch bag, but containing the silenced revolver Miss Arce had given him. He slipped an identical bag, empty and folded flat, into his coat pocket, then he left his room.

Kruger's office was on a narrow, duty street just off St. Jacques, near the Bonaventure Freight Station. "Cuban Import and Export—Garcia Kruger."

An ostentatious name for a company that received and sent no shipments, and a ludicrous name for the man, the product of some random sperm a German sailor had left for safekeeping in the womb of a Latin lady. Just in front of the building some children were playing cache-cache among the stoops. In fleeing from a pursuer, a ragged gamin with a hungry face and aerodynamic ears bumped into Jonathan, who held onto him to keep him from falling. The boy was surprised and embarrassed, so he scowled to conceal his discomfort.

"I'm afraid you've had it, kid," Jonathan said in French. "Running into a Protestant citizen is an act of FLQ terrorism. What's your name?"

The boy read game-playing in Jonathan's mock-tough voice, and he went along with it. "Jacques," he said, with the broad au diphthong of Quebec horsetalk.

Jonathan mimed a notebook in the palm of his hand. "J-a-c-q-u-e-s. Right! If it happens again, I'll turn you over to Elliot."

After an instant of indecision, the boy grinned at Jonathan and ran off to continue his play.

Garcia Kruger shared a second floor with a dentist and a dance instructor. The lower halves of their windows were painted over with advertisements. Just inside the entrance, Jonathan found the cardboard box he had instructed Miss Arce to have left for him. He carried it up the worn wooden stairs, the loose strips of cross-hatched metal squeaking under his foot. The corridor was cool and silent after the brilliant, cacophonous street. Both the dentist and the dance instructor had gone home for the day, but Jonathan knew from the tout that he would find Kruger in.

His knock was answered by, "Who's there?" from an irritated voice within.

"I'm looking for Dr. Fouchet," Jonathan said in a valid imitation of the smiling/stupid voice of a salesman.

The door opened a few inches and Kruger looked out over a latch chain. He was tall, cadaverous and balding, with a day's growth on his cheeks and dots of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. His shirt was crumpled blue and white stripe, wet in irregular crescents under the arms. And on his forehead there was a scabbed-over bruise, doubtless from his contact with the lamppost.

Jonathan looked awkward and incompetent with the cardboard box in his arms and the brown paper bag balanced on top and held under his chin. "Hi. I'm Ed Benson? Arlington Supplies?"

Kruger told him the dentist was gone for the day, and started to close the door. Jonathan quickly explained that he had promised to bring Dr. Fouchet a sample of their new dental floss, but he had been delayed "...and not by business either," he added, winking.

Kruger leered knowingly, and from his teeth it was evident that he was only casually acquainted with the dentist. But his tone was not civil. "I told you he was out."

Jonathan shrugged. "Well, if he's out, he's out." He started to turn away. Then, as though an idea had struck him, "Say! I could leave the sample with you, sir. And you could give it to Dr. Fouchet in the morning." He produced his most disarming smile. "It would sure get my ass out of the sling."

Grudgingly, Kruger said he would take it. Jonathan started to hand him the box, but the latch chain was in the way. Kruger closed the door with an angry snap, undid the chain, and opened it again. As Jonathan entered, he babbled about how hot it was on the street, but how it wasn't so much the heat as the humidity that got you down. Kruger grunted and turned away to look out the window, leaving Jonathan to put the box down wherever he could in the littered office.

Thunt! The sound of a silenced thirty-eight firing through a paper bag.

Kruger was spun around and slammed into the corner between two windows on which "Cuban Imports" was written backward. He stared at Jonathan with total astonishment.

Jonathan watched him narrowly, expecting a movement toward him.

Kruger lifted his hands, palms up, with a touching gesture of "Why?"

Jonathan considered firing again.

For two terribly long seconds, Kruger remained there, as though nailed to the wall.

Jonathan began to smart with discomfort. "Oh, come on!"

And Kruger slid slowly down the wall as death dimmed his eyes and set them in an infinity focus, the repulsive white dots of mucus still visible. Never having met Kruger before today, and not having any apparent motive, Jonathan had no fear of identification. He folded up the ruptured bag and placed it and the gun inside the fresh bag he had brought along.

People never carry guns in brown paper bags.

Outside in the glare of the street, the children still played around the stoops. Little Jacques saw Jonathan emerge from Kruger's building, and he waved from across the street. Jonathan made a gun with his finger and shot at the boy, who threw up his hands and fell to the pavement in a histrionic facsimile of anguish. They both laughed.

MONTREAL/NEW YORK/LONG ISLAND: June 10

While he waited for the plane to taxi off, Jonathan laid out his briefcase and papers on the seat beside him and began taking notes for the long-overdue article on "Toulouse-Lautrec: A Social Conscience." He had promised it to the editors of an art journal with a liberal bent. He could spread out in comfort because it was his practice, when on CII expense account, to purchase two adjacent seats to insulate himself against unwanted conversation. On this occasion, the extravagance may have been unnecessary, as the first-class compartment was nearly empty.

His line of thought was severed by the paternal and plebeian voice of the pilot assuring him that he knew where they were going and at what altitude they would fly. His interest in the Lautrec article was too fragile to survive the interruption, so he began glancing through a book he had promised to review. It was a study of Tilman-Riemanschneider: The Man and His Times. Jonathan was acquainted with the author and he knew the book would be a compromise between academic and general readerships—an alternation between the turgid and the cute. Nevertheless, he intended to give it a handsome review in obedience to his theory that the surest way to maintain position at the top of the field was to advance and support men of clearly inferior capacities.

He sensed the brush of her perfume, a spicy but light fragrance that he recalls to this day, suddenly and when he least wants to.

"Both of these seats are yours?" she asked.

He nodded without looking up from his work. To his great disappointment, he had caught a glimpse of a uniform out of the tail of his eye, and he rejected her, realizing that stewardesses, like nurses, were something a man made do with in strange towns when there was not time to seek women.

"Veblen had a phrase for that." Her voice was like a flow of warm honey.

Surprised by erudition in a stewardess, he closed the book on his lap and looked up into the calm, amused eyes. Soft brown with harlequin flecks of gold. "The phrase would apply equally to Mimi in the last act."

She laughed lightly: strong white teeth and slightly petulant lips. Then she checked his name off a list on a clipboard, and walked aft to deal with other passengers. With unabashed curiosity, he examined her taut bottom with its characteristic African shape that lifts black women to so convenient an angle. Then he sighed and shook his head. He returned to the Riemanschneider study, but his eyes moved over the pages without the words getting to his brain. Later he took notes; then he dozed.

"Shit?" she asked, her lips close to his ear.

He woke and turned his head to look up at her. "Pardon me?" The movement brought her bust to within three inches of his nose, but he kept his eyes on hers.

She laughed—again the harlequin flecks of gold in the brown eyes—and sat back on the armrest.

"You did begin this conversation by saying 'shit,' didn't you? he asked.

"No. I didn't say it. I asked it."

"Does that go along with coffee, tea, and milk?"

"Only on our competitors' lines. I was reading over your shoulder, and I saw the word 'shit' with two exclamation points on your notepad. So I asked."

"Ah. It was a comment on the content of this book I'm reviewing."

"A study of scatology?"

"No. A shoddy piece of research obfuscated by crepuscular logic and involute style."

She grinned. "I can stand crepuscular logic, but involute style really makes my ass tired."

Jonathan enjoyed the raised oriental corners of her eyes in which a hint of derision lurked. "I refuse to believe you're a stewardess."

"As in: What's a girl like you doing in...? Actually, I'm not a stewardess at all. I'm a high-jacker in drag."

"That's reassuring. What's your name?"

"Jemima."

"Stop it."

"I'm not putting you on. That's really my name. Jemima Brown. My mother was hooked on ethnic lore."

"Have it your way. So long as we both admit that it's clearly too much for a black girl to have a name like that."

"I don't know. People don't forget you if your name is Jemima." She adjusted her perch on the armrest, and the skirt slipped up.

Jonathan concentrated on not noticing. "I doubt that men would forget you easily if your name was Fred."

"Goodness me, Dr. Hemlock! Are you the kind of man who tries to pick up stewardesses?"

"Not normally, but I'm coming around to it. How did you know my name?"

She became serious and confidential. "It's this mystic thing I have with names. A gift of sorts. I look at a person carefully. Then I concentrate. Then I check the passenger list. And voila! The name just comes to me."

"All right. What do people call you when they're not hooked on ethnic lore?"

"Jem. Only they spell it like the jewel kind of gem." A soft gong caused her to look up. "We're coming in. You'll have to fasten your safety belt." Then she moved aft to deal with the less interesting passengers.

He would have liked to ask her out to dinner or something. But the moment had been lost, and there is no social sin like poor timing. So he sighed and turned his attention to the tilted and toylike picture of New York beyond the window.

He saw Jemima briefly in JFK terminal. While he was hailing a taxi, she passed with two other stewardesses, the three walking quickly and in step, and he remembered his general dislike of the ilk. It would not be accurate to say that he put her out of his mind during the long drive home to the North Shore, but he was able to tuck her away into a defocused corner of his consciousness. It was oddly comforting to know she existed out there—like having a little something keeping warm on the back of the stove.

Jonathan soaked in the steaming water of his Roman bath, the tension of the past few days slowly dissolving, the cords of his neck unknotting, the tightness behind his eyes and in his jaw muscles melting reluctantly. But the knot of fear remained in his stomach.

A martini at his bar; a pipe in the basement gallery; and he found himself rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat. His search was rewarded with some Danish biscuits, a jar of peanut butter, a small tin of kimchee, and a split of champagne. This gastronomic holocaust he carried to the wing of the transept he had converted into a greenhouse garden, and there he sat beside the plashing pool, lulled by the sound of the water and the brush of warm sunlight.

Little drops of perspiration tingled on his back as he began to doze, the vast peace of his house flowing over him.

Then suddenly he snapped up—an image of surprised eyes with white dots of mucus had chased him out of a dream. He was nauseated.

Getting too old for this, he complained. How did I ever get into it?

Three weeks after the discovery of the abandoned church had added to his need for money, he had found himself in Brussels attending a convention and squandering Ford Foundation money. Late one wet and blustery night, a CII agent dropped into his hotel room and, after beating about the bush, asked him to do a service for his country. Recovering from a good laugh, Jonathan asked for a fuller explanation. The task was fairly simple for a man with Sphinx training: they wanted him to slip an envelope into the briefcase of an Italian delegate to the convention. It is difficult to say why he agreed to the thing. He was bored, to be sure, and the hint of fiscal return came at a time when he had just located his first Monet. But there was also the fact that the Italian had recently had the effrontery to suggest that he knew almost as much about the impressionists as Jonathan.

At all events, he did the thing. He never knew what was in the envelope, but he later heard that the Italian had been picked up by agents of his own government and imprisoned for conspiracy.

When he returned to New York, he found an envelope waiting for him with two thousand dollars in it. For expenses, the note had said.

In the ensuing months, he performed three similar messenger jobs for CII and received the same liberal pay. He was able to buy one painting and several sketches, but the church was still beyond his means. He feared that someone else would buy his home—he already thought of it as his. The danger of this was really rather remote. Most of the Long Island religious groups were abandoning traditional churches in favor of A-frame redwood boxes more suited to their use of God.

The climax of this work—a testing period, he discovered later—came in Paris where he was passing the Christmas vacation advising a Texas museum on purchases—attempting to convince them that small paintings could be as valuable as big ones. CII set up an assignment, a simple matter of introducing damaging material into the notebooks of a French government official. Unfortunately, the mark walked in while Jonathan was at work. The ensuing battle went badly at first. As the pair grappled and wrestled around the room, Jonathan was distracted by his attempt to protect a Limoges shepherdess of rare beauty which was in constant danger of being knocked from its fragile table. Twice he released his hold on the Frenchman to catch it as it toppled, and twice his adversary took the opportunity to belabor his back and shoulders with his walking stick. For many minutes the struggle continued. Then suddenly the Frenchman had the statuette in his hand and he hurled it at Jonathan. With shock and fury at the wanton destruction of a thing of beauty, Jonathan saw it shatter against a marble fireplace. He roared with rage and drove the heel of his hand into the rib cage just below the heart. Death was instantaneous.

Later that night Jonathan sat near the window of a cafe on the Place St. Georges, watching snow swirl around scuttling passersby. He was surprised to recognize that the only thing he felt about the episode—other than the bruises—was a deep regret over the Limoges shepherdess. But one thing he decided irrevocably: he would never again work for CII.

Late one afternoon shortly after the beginning of the second semester, he was interrupted in his office work by a visit from Clement Pope. His dislike for this officious flunkey was immediate and enduring.

After Pope had cautiously closed the office door, checked into the cubicle reserved for Jonathan's assistants, and glanced out the windows to the snow-dappled campus, he said meaningfully, "I'm from CII. SS Division."

Jonathan scarcely glanced up from his papers. "I'm sorry, Mr. Pope. Working for you people no longer amuses me."

"SS stands for Search and Sanction. You've heard of us?"

"No."

Pope was pleased. "Our security is the tightest. That's why nobody has heard of us."

"I'm sure your reputation is deserved. Now, I'm busy."

"You don't have to worry about that Frog, buddy-boy. Our people in Paris covered it up." He sat on the edge of the desk and paged through the first papers he found there.

Jonathan's stomach tightened. "Get out of here."

Pope laughed. "You really expect me to walk out that door, pal?"

Jonathan judged the distance between them. "Either the door or the window. And we're four stories up." His gentle, disarming smile came on automatically.

"Listen, pal—"

"And get your ass off my desk."

"Look, buddy—"

"And don't call me 'buddy' or 'pal.' "

"Man, if I weren't under orders..." Pope flexed his shoulders and considered the situation for a second, then he rose from the desk. "Mr. Dragon wants to talk to you." Then, to save face, he added, "And right now!"

Jonathan walked to the corner of his office and drew himself a cup of coffee from the urn. "Who is this Mr. Dragon?"

"My superior."

"That doesn't narrow the field much, does it."

"He wants to talk to you."

"So you said." Jonathan set the cup down. "All right. I'll make an appointment for him."

"To come here? That's funny!"

"Is it?"

"Yeah." Pope frowned and made a decision. "Here, read this, pal." He drew an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to Jonathan.

Dear Dr. Hemlock:

If you are reading this, my man has already failed to persuade you by sheer force of personality. And I am not surprised. Naturally, I should have come to see you in person, but I don't get about well, and I am most pressed for time.

I have a proposition for you that will demand very little of your time and which can net you upwards of thirty thousand dollars per annum, tax free. I believe a stipend like this would allow you to purchase the church on Long Island you have been yearning for, and it might even permit you to add to your illegal collection of paintings.

Obviously, I am attempting to impress you with my knowledge of your life and secrets, and I do so hope I have succeeded.

If you are interested, please accompany Mr. Pope to my office where you shall meet...

Your Obedient Servant, Yurasis Dragon

Jonathan finished the letter and replaced it thoughtfully in its envelope.

"Well?" Pope asked. "What do you say, pal?"

Jonathan smiled at him as he rose and crossed the room. Pope was smiling in return when the backhand slap knocked him off balance.

"I told you not to call me 'pal.' Dr. Hemlock will do just fine."

Tears of anger and smart stood in Pope's eyes, but he controlled himself. "Are you coming with me?"

Jonathan tossed the letter onto his desk. "Yes, I think I shall."

Before they left, Pope took the letter and put it in his pocket. "Mr. Dragon's name appears on paper nowhere in the United States," he explained. "Matter of fact, I don't remember him writing a letter to anyone before."

"So?"

"That ought to impress you."

"Evidently I impress Mr. Dragon."

Jonathan groaned and woke up. The sunlight had gone, and the greenhouse garden was filled with a gray, inhospitable light. He rose and stretched the stiffness out of his back. Evening was bringing leaden skies from the ocean. Outside, the chartreuse undersides of leaves glowed dimly in the still air. The fore-voice of thunder predicted a heavy rain.

He padded into the kitchen. He always looked forward to rain, and he prepared to receive it. When, some minutes later, the storm rolled over the church, he was enthroned in a huge padded chair, a heavy book in his lap and a pot of chocolate on the table beside him. Beyond the pool of light in which he read, dim patterns of yellow, red, and green rippled over the walls as the rain coursed down the stained glass windows. Occasionally, the forms within the room brightened and danced to flashes of lightning. Hard-bodied rain rattled on the lead roof; and wind screamed around corners.

For the first time, he went through the ritual of the ancient elevator in the Third Avenue office building, of the disguised guards outside Dragon's office, of the ugly and hygienic Miss Cerberus, of the dim red light and superheated interlock chamber.

His eyes slowly irised open, discovering misty forms. And for the first time Dragon's blood-red eyes emerged to shock and sicken him.

"You find my appearance disturbing, Hemlock?" Dragon asked in his atonic, cupric voice. "Personally, I've come to terms with it. The affliction is most rare—something of a distinction. Genetic indispositions like these indicate some rather special circumstances of breeding. I fancy the Hapsburgs took a similar pride in their hemophilia." The dry skin around Dragon's eyes crinkled up in a smile, and he laughed his three arid ha's.

The parched, metallic voice, the unreal surroundings, and the steady gaze of those scarlet eyes made Jonathan want this interview to end. "Do you have anything against coming to the point?"

"I don't mean to draw this chat out unduly, but I have so little opportunity to chat with men of intelligence."

"Yes, I met your Mr. Pope."

"He is loyal and obedient."

"What else can he be?"

Dragon was silent for a moment. "Well, to work. We have made a bid on an abandoned Gothic church on Long Island. You know the one I mean. It is our intention to have it torn down and to convert the grounds into a training area for our personnel. How do you feel about that, Hemlock?"

"Go on."

"If you join us, we shall withdraw our bid, and you will receive a sufficient advance in salary to make a down payment. But before I go on, tell me something. What was your reaction to killing that French fellow who broke the statuette?"

In truth, Jonathan had not even thought about the affair since the morning after it happened. He told Dragon this.

"Grand. Just grand. That confirms the Sphinx psychological report on you. No feelings of guilt whatsoever! You are to be envied."

"How did you know about the statuette?"

"We took telephoto motion pictures from the top of a nearby building."

"Your cameraman just happened to be up there."

Dragon laughed his three dry ha's. "Surely you don't imagine the Frenchman walked in on you by coincidence?"

"I could have been killed."

"True. And that would have been regrettable. But we had to know how you reacted under pressure before we felt free to make this handsome offer."

"What exactly do you want me to do?"

"We call it 'sanctioning.' "

"What do other people call it?"

"Assassination." Dragon was disappointed when the word dropped without rippling Jonathan's exterior. "Actually, Hemlock, it's not so vicious as it sounds to the virgin ear. We kill only those who have killed CII agents in the performance of their duties. Our retribution is the only defense the poor fellows have. Allow me to give you some background on our organization while you are making up your mind to join us. Search and Sanction..."

CII came into being after the Second World War as an anode organization for collecting the many bureaus, agencies, divisions and cells engaged in intelligence and espionage during that conflict. There is no evidence that these groups contributed to the outcome of the war, but it has been claimed that they interfered less than did their German counterparts, principally because they were less efficient and their errors were, therefore, less telling.

The government realized the inadvisability of dumping onto the civilian population the social misfits and psychological mutants that collect in the paramilitary slime of spy and counterspy, but something had to be done with the one hundred and two organizations that had flourished like fungus. The Communists were clearly devoted to the game of steal-the-papers-and-photograph-something; so, with a kind of ambitious me-too-ism, our elected representatives brought into being the bulky administrative golem of the CII.

The news media refer to CII as "Central Intelligence Institute." This is a result of creative back-thinking. Actually, CII is not a set of initials; it is a number, the Roman reading of the 102 smaller organizations out of which the department was formed.

Within two years, CII had become a political fact of alarming proportions. Their networks spread within and without the nation, and the information they collected concerning the sexual peculiarities and financial machinations of many of our major political figures made the organization totally untouchable and autonomous. It became the practice of CII to inform the President after the fact.

Within four years, CII had made our espionage system the laughingstock of Europe, had aggravated the image of the American abroad, had brought us to the brink of war on three occasions, and had amassed so vast a collection of trivial and private information that two computer systems had to be housed in their underground headquarters in Washington—one to retrieve fragments of data, the second to operate the first.

A bureaucratic malignancy out of control, the organization continued to grow in power and personnel. Then the expansion unexpectedly tapered off and stopped. CII computers informed its leaders of a remarkable fact: its losses of personnel abroad were just breaking even with its ambitious recruiting operations at home. A team of analysts from Information Limited was brought in to study the astonishing attrition. They discovered that 36 percent of the losses were due to defection; 27 percent were caused by mishandling of punched computer cards (which losses they advised CII to accept because it was easier to write the men off than to reorganize Payroll and Personnel Division); 4 percent of the losses were attributed to inadequate training in the handling of explosives; and 2 percent were simply "lost"—victims of European railroad schedules.

The remaining 31 percent had been assassinated. Loss through assassination presented very special problems. Because CII men worked in foreign countries without invitation, and often to the detriment of the established governments, they had no recourse to official protection. Organization men to the core, the CII heads decided that another Division must be established to combat the problem. They relied on their computers to find the ideal man to head the new arm, and the card that survived the final sorting bore the name: Yurasis Dragon. In order to bring Mr. Dragon to the United States, it was necessary to absolve him of accusations lodged at the War Crimes Tribunal concerning certain genocidal peccadillos, but CII considered him worth the effort.

The new division was called Search and Sanction, the SS. The in-house slang name, Sweat Shop, is based on the initials and a back formation corruption of "wet shop," in which "wet work"—killing—is the primary function. The Search Division handled the task of discovering those responsible for the assassination of a CII agent. Sanction Division punished the offenders with death.

It was typical of Dragon's sense of the dramatic that the personnel of Sanction all carried code names based on poisons. "Wormwood" had been a Sanction courier. And there was a beautiful Eurasian woman who always made love to the target (of either sex) before killing. Her code name was Belladonna. Dragon never assigned Jonathan a code name. He considered it providential that he already bore a name appropriate to a scholar: Hemlock, the poison of Socrates.

Dragon gave a glossed and romantic version of these facts to Jonathan. "Are you with us, Hemlock?"

"If I refuse?"

"I wouldn't have brought you here had I considered that likely. If you refuse, the church you have set your heart on will be demolished, and your personal freedom will be in jeopardy."

"How so?"

"We know about the paintings you have collected. And duty would demand that we report their existence, unless, of course, doing so would deprive us of a trusted and useful associate." The carmine eyes flickered under cotton puff eyebrows. "Are you with us?"

Jonathan experienced a plunging vertigo as he nodded over the book in his lap. He caught his breath and blinked down at the unremembered page. The chocolate had cooled and a tan skin had formed over it. The thunder and wind had passed over, leaving only the regular, soporific rattle of rain against the stained glass window. He rose, turned off the reading light, and walked with the certainty of custom through the dark nave. Still weary after a day of lazing, he rested for a time in his vast sixteenth-century bed, looking out past the rail of the choir loft to the dimly rippling colored windows, letting his aural attention stray, tuning in and out the sound of the rain.

The Montreal tension was still a knot in his stomach. The first layers of sleep closed over him gently, only to be harshly dissipated when he jolted upright in fear. He tried to hold any image before his mind to cover the white dots of mucus. And he found himself concentrating on harlequin flecks in warm brown eyes.

Suddenly he was awake and sick. He had passively fought it all day, but he could no longer. After vomiting, he lay quite nude on the cold tiles of his bathroom floor for more than an hour, putting his mind back together.

Then he returned to bed, and to the image of the harlequin flecks.

LONG ISLAND: June 11

Jonathan's rise to consciousness was neither crisp nor lucid. He came up through turgid layers of discomfort. Dream remnants were mixed with intruding reality. In either the reality or the dream, someone was trying to take his jewels from him—family jewels, they were. No. No, Gems.

His groin tingled. He brought the room into focus through defensive slits. "Oh, no!" he croaked. "What the hell are you doing, Cherry?"

"Good morning, Jonathan," she said cheerily. "Did that tickle?"

He groaned and turned over on his stomach.

Cherry, dressed only in her tennis shorts, slipped under the sheet with him, her lips touching his ear. "Nibble, nibble, nibble," she said, and did.

"Go away," he muffled into his pillow. "If you don't leave me alone, I'll..." He could think of no appropriate punishment, so he groaned.

"What will you do?" she asked brightly. "Rape me? You know, I've been thinking about rape a lot lately. It's not a good thing because it doesn't give the couple a chance to communicate on an interhuman level. But it has one advantage over masturbation. It isn't so lonely. You know what I mean? Well, if you're bent on raping me, I guess I'll have to take it like a woman." And she spun over and threw her arms and legs out, like St. Andrew crucified.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Cherry! I ought to spank your ass."

She was instantly up on one elbow, speaking with serious concern. "I never suspected you were a sadist, Jonathan. But I guess it's the duty of a woman in love to satisfy the sexual peculiarities of her man."

"You're not a woman in love. You're a woman in heat. But all right! You win! I'm getting up. Why don't you go down and make me a cup of coffee."

"It's right there beside you, impetuous lover. I made it before I came up." There was a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on the bedside table. She arranged his pillows as he pulled himself to a sitting position, then she poured out his coffee and passed him the cup, which he had to struggle to balance when she climbed back into bed and sat beside him, their shoulders and hips touching, her leg over his. Jonathan sensed that the major league sex play was over for the moment, but she was still nude to the navel and her bikini tan gave her white breasts the advantage of contrast against the soft copper of the rest of her.

"Hey, Jonathan?" she said earnestly, as she looked into the bottom of her coffee cup, "let me ask you something. It's true, isn't it, that the early morning would be about the best time for me to get at you. It's true, isn't it, that men often wake up with erections."

"That usually means they have to piss," he growled into his cup.

She digested this bit of information in silence. "Nature is wasteful," she commented sadly. Then her spirits bounced back. "But never mind! Sooner or later, I'll catch you at an unguarded moment. Then bam!"

"Bam?"

"Not very onomatopoetic, I guess."

"Let's hope not."

She was withdrawn for a moment, then she turned to him and asked, "It isn't me, is it? I mean, if I weren't a virgin you'd take me, wouldn't you?"

He locked his fingers behind his head and stretched all the way to his pointed toes. "Certainly. In an instant. Bam."

"Because," she pursued, "I'm really fairly pretty, and I'm filthy rich, and my bod's not bad." She paused for a complimentary comment. "Hey! We were talking about my bod!" Again she paused. "Well, at least my breasts are nice, aren't they?"

He did not look over. "Certainly. They're great."

"Now cut it out! Look at them. They're a little small by current standards, but they're firm and cute, don't you think?"

He cradled one in his palm and inspected it with professional myopia. "Very fine," he vouched. "And two in number, which is especially reassuring."

"Then why don't you break down and make love to me?"

"Because you are self-consciously cute. Furthermore, you are a virgin. I could forgive the cuteness on the assumption that you'll outgrow it. But the virginity—never. Now why don't you put your blouse back on."

"No-o. I don't think so. Who knows? You might suddenly get a normal impulse and—ta-da!"

"Ta-da?"

"It's better than bam. Here, let me give you more coffee." She refilled his cup then carried her own to the edge of the loft, where she leaned against the railing, looking out over the nave musingly.

Cherry was Jonathan's nearest neighbor, occupying with her domestic staff a rambling mansion a quarter of a mile down the road. They shared the cost of maintaining the artificial sand beach that connected their properties. Her late father, the corporation lawyer James Mathew Pitt, had bought the estate shortly before his death, and Cherry enjoyed managing the property. During trips, Jonathan entrusted her with the care of his home and the payment of his local bills. Of necessity, she had a key, and she drifted in and out to use his library and to borrow champagne for her parties. He never attended these parties, not caring to meet the liberated young people of her circle. Needless to say, Cherry knew nothing about him, save that he was a teacher and art critic and that, so far as she knew, he was independently well off. She had never been invited to descend into the private gallery in the basement.

Little by little, their sex play had developed into a pattern of epic enticements and stoic refusals, the whole thing based on their mutual understanding that it was Jonathan's role to fend her off. She would have been at a loss, had he ever failed to do so. The battle was never totally without charm because it was fought with humor on both sides. And there was the spice of distant possibility to keep a tang in their relationship.

After a longish silence, Cherry spoke without turning to him. "Do you realize that I am the only twenty-four-year-old virgin on Long Island—discounting paraplegics and some nuns? And it's all your fault. You owe it to mankind to get me started."

Jonathan swung out of bed. "Avoiding virgins is not only a matter of ethics with me. It's also a matter of mechanics. Virgins are hard on older men."

"O.K. Punish yourself. Deny yourself the delights of the flesh. See if I care." She followed him into the bathroom where she had to raise her voice to be heard over the roar of water into his Roman pool. "I really do care, you know. After all, someone's got to get me started."

He called from the toilet beyond. "Someone's got to collect the garbage too. But not me." He punctuated with a flush.

"Nice analogy!"

He returned to the bathroom and lowered himself into the hot water. "Why don't you get dressed and go make us a little breakfast."

"I want to be your lover, not your wife." But she returned reluctantly to the bedroom.

"And put your shirt on before you go down," he called after her. "You might meet Mr. Monk down there." Mr. Monk was the groundsman.

"I wonder if he'd be willing to relieve me of this disgraceful chastity?"

"Not on what I pay him," Jonathan mumbled to himself.

"I assume you want your eggs raw," she called as she left.

After breakfast, she wandered about in the greenhouse garden while he brought the morning mail into the library, where he intended to do a touch of work. He was surprised and disturbed not to find the usual blue envelope from CII containing his cash payment. By routine, it was always placed by hand in his mailbox during the night after his return from a sanction. He was sure this was no oversight. Dragon was up to something. But there was nothing he could do but wait, so he went over his accounts and discovered that, after he had spent the ten thousand for the new Pissarro and paid his groundsman in advance for the summer, he would have very little left. There would be no lavish living this season, but he would get by. His major concern was that he had promised the underground art dealer in Brooklyn that he would have the money today. He decided to telephone and persuade him to hold the painting for an extra day.

"...so when can you pick it up, Jonathan?" the dealer asked, his voice crisp with the overarticulated consonants of the Near East.

"Tomorrow, I imagine. Or the next day."

"Make it the next day. Tomorrow I take the family to Jones Beach. And you will have the twelve thousand we agreed on?"

"I will have the ten thousand we agreed on."

"It was only ten?" the dealer asked, his voice laden with grief.

"It was only ten."

"Jonathan, what am I doing? I am allowing my friendship for you to threaten the future of my children. But—a deal is a deal. I am philosophic. I can lose with grace. But make sure you bring the money before noon. It is dangerous for me to keep the item here. And also, I have another prospective buyer."

"You're lying, of course."

"I don't lie. I steal. There is another buyer. For twelve thousand. He contacted me today. So, if you don't want to lose the painting, be prompt. You understand?"

"I understand."

"Good. So! How is the family?"

"I'm not married. We go through this every time. You always ask me how the family is, and I always remind you that I am not married."

"Well, I am a forgetful man. Remember how I forgot it was only ten thousand? But seriously, you should get a family. Without children to work for, what is life? Answer me that."

"I'll see you in two days."

"I look forward to it. Be punctual, Jonathan. There is another buyer."

"So you told me."

For several minutes after he hung up, Jonathan sat gloomily at his desk, his spirits dampened by fear of losing the Pissarro. He wondered uneasily what was in Dragon's oblique mind.

"Feel like banging balls?" Cherry called from across the nave.

There was nothing to be gained by moping, so he agreed. The storm had rinsed the sky clear of clouds and the day was brilliant with sunlight. They played tennis for an hour, then they cut their thirsts with splits of champagne. She imitated his sacrilegious habit of drinking the wine from the bottle, like beer. Later they cooled off with a short swim. Cherry swam in her tennis togs, and when she came out, her shorts were nearly transparent.

"I feel like an Italian starlet," she remarked, looking down at the dark ecru outline through her wet shorts.

"So do I," he said, dropping down on the hot sand.

They small-talked while she let handfuls of sand seep from her fist onto his back. She mentioned that she was going to spend the weekend on the Point with some of her friends. She invited him to come along. He refused; her too-young and too-liberal friends bored him with their nomadic affections and catatonic minds.

A cool wind scudded down the beach, an omen that there would be rain again before evening, and Cherry, after proposing without much hope that Jonathan take her into the warmth of his bed, went home.

On his way back to the church, Jonathan caught sight of Mr. Monk, his groundsman. For a moment he considered backtracking to avoid encounter, but embarrassed at being cowed by an employee, he walked bravely onward. Mr. Monk was the best gardener on the Island, but he was not much sought after. Thoroughly paranoiac, he had developed a theory that grass, flowers, and shrubs were his personal enemies, out to get him by means as diabolic as they were devious. It was his practice to rip up weeds, trim hedges, or cut grass with sadistic glee and retributive energy, all the while heaping scatological abuse on the offending flora. As though to spite him, gardens and grounds flourished under his hand, and this he viewed as a calculated insult, and his hatred flowed the more freely.

He was growling to himself as he punished the edge of a flower bed with a spade when Jonathan approached diffidently. "How are things going, Mr. Monk?" he asked tentatively.

"What! Oh, it's you, Dr. Hemlock. Rotten! That's how things are going! These shitty flowers want nothing but water! Water, water, water! A bunch of turd-eating lushes, they are. Water heads! Say, what kind of swimming suit was that neighbor lady wearing? I could see right through to her boobs. A little cross-eyed, they were. You take a look at this spade! Near bent in half! That's how they make them these days! Not worth a tiny pinch of coon shit! I remember the time when a spade..."

Jonathan mumbled apologetically that everything looked fine, and he sneaked off toward his house.

Once under the cool and reassuring expanse of the vaulted nave, he discovered he was hungry. He compiled a lunch of macadamia nuts, Polish sausage, an apple, and a split of champagne. Then he smoked a pipe and relaxed, purposely not harkening for the ring of his telephone. Dragon would contact him when he was ready. Best just to wait for him.

To distract his thoughts, he went down to the gallery and passed some time with his paintings. When he had taken as much from them as he could just then, he sat at his desk and worked desultorily on the overdue Lautrec article, but it was no good. His mind returned to Dragon's intentions, and to the threatened Pissarro. Without putting it into words, he had known for some time that he could not continue working for CII. Conscience, of course, played no part in his growing disaffection. The only pangs he ever felt over killing a member of the scabby subculture of espionage were resentments at being brought into contact with them. Perhaps it was weariness. Tension, maybe. If only there were a way to support his lifestyle, his home, and his paintings without association with the Dragons and the Popes and the Melloughs...

Miles Mellough. His jaw set at the thought of the name. For nearly two years he had been waiting patiently for fate to give him a chance at Miles. He must not leave the cover of CII until that debt was attended to.

He had permitted very few people to penetrate his armor of cool distance. To those who had, he was fiercely loyal, and he insisted that his friends participate in his rigid views of friendship and loyalty. But in the course of his life, only four men had gotten close enough to merit his friendship, and to run the concomitant risk of his wrath. There was Big Ben Bowman, whom he had not seen for three years, but with whom he used to climb mountains and drink beer. And there was Henri Baq, a French espionage agent who had had the gift of finding laughter in everything, and whose gut had been cut open two years ago. And there was Miles Mellough, who had been responsible for Baq's death after having been Henri and Jonathan's closest friend.

The fourth had been The Greek, who had betrayed Jonathan during a sanction job. Only luck, and a desperate four-mile swim through a night sea had saved Jonathan's life. Of course, Jonathan should have been worldly enough to realize that any man who trusts a Cyprian Greek deserves a Trojan fate, but this did not prevent him from biding his time until he ran across him in Ankara. The Greek was not aware that Jonathan knew who had sold him out—perhaps, being Greek, he had even forgotten the incident—so he accepted the gift of his favorite arrack without hesitation. The bottle had been doctored with Datura. The old Turk who did the job used the ancient method of burning the Datura seeds and catching the smoke in an earthen jar into which the arrack was then poured.

The Greek is now, and will always be, in an asylum, where he sits huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth, humming a single note endlessly.

The score with The Greek settled, only Miles Mellough's debt was still outstanding. Jonathan was sure that one day he would happen upon Miles.

The jangle of the telephone jarred him from his morbid stream of free association.

"Hemlock? Reports are in from Montreal. Good job, pal." Clement Pope's brassy, insurance salesman voice was enough to make Jonathan testy.

"My money wasn't in the mailbox this morning, Pope."

"Well, how about that?"

Jonathan took a deep breath to control himself. "Let me talk to Dragon."

"Talk to me. I can handle it."

"I'm not going to waste time with a flunkey. Get Dragon to the phone."

"Maybe if I came out there and we had a good chat...?" Pope was taunting. He knew that Jonathan could not afford to be seen in his company. With Dragon's necessary seclusion, Pope had become the public face of SS Division. Being seen with him was tantamount to having a "Support CII" sticker on your automobile.

"If you want the money, pal, you'd better cooperate. Dragon won't talk to you over the phone, but he will see you."

"When?"

"Right now. He wants you to take a train in as soon as possible."

"All right. But remind him that I am depending on that money."

"I'm just sure he knows that, buddy-o." Pope hung up.

Someday, Jonathan promised himself, I'll be alone in a room with that bastard for just ten minutes...

Upon reconsideration, he settled for five.

NEW YORK: June 11

You're looking especially attractive this afternoon, Mrs. Cerberus."

She did not bother to look up. "Scrub your hands in the sink over there. Use the green soap."

"This is new." Jonathan crossed to the hospital sink with its surgeon's elbow lever instead of the conventional twist tap.

"That elevator is filthy," she said, her voice as scaly as her complexion. "And Mr. Dragon is in a weakened condition. He's near the end of a phase." This meant that he would soon receive his semiannual total replacement transfusion.

"Do you intend to donate?" Jonathan asked, rubbing his hands dry under a jet of hot air.

"We are not the same blood type."

"Do I detect a note of regret?"

"Mr. Dragon's blood type is very rare," she said with evident pride.

"In humans at any rate. May I go in now?"

She fixed a diagnostic glare on him. "Any colds? Flu? Digestive disorder?"

"Only a mild pain in the ass, and that's a recent development."

Mrs. Cerberus pressed the buzzer on her desk, and she waved him into the interlock without further comment.

The usual dim red light was not on, but the rising heat was as stifling as ever. The door to Dragon's office clicked open. "Come in, Hemlock." Dragon's metallic voice had a weak flutter in it. "Please forgive the absence of the red light. I am more than usually fragile, and even that dim light is painful to me."

Jonathan groped forward for the back of the leather chair. "Where is my money?"

"That's my Hemlock. Directly to the point. No time wasted with the conversational amenities. The slums have left their mark."

"I need the money."

"True. Without it you will be unable to meet your house payments—to say nothing of purchasing that Pissarro you covet. By the way, I hear there is another bidder on the painting. Pity if you lost it."

"You intend to hold out on me?"

"Permit me an academic question, Hemlock. What would you do if I were to withhold payment?"

"Light these." Jonathan slipped his fingers into his shut pocket.

"What have you there?" There was no worry in Dragon's voice. He knew how thoroughly his men searched everyone who entered.

"A book of matches. Do you have some idea of the pain it's going to cause you when I strike them one by one?"

Dragon's thin fingers flew automatically to his eyes, but he knew that his colorless skin would afford little protection. With forced bravado he said, "Very good, Hemlock. You confirm my confidence in you. In future, my men will have to search for matches as well."

"My payment?"

"There. On the desk. Actually, I intended to give you the money all the time. I kept it only to assure your coming here to listen to my proposition." He laughed his three arid ha's. "That was a good one with the matches!" The laugh changed into a weak, wheezing cough, and for a time he could not speak. "Sorry. I'm not really well."

"To put you at ease," Jonathan said, slipping the chubby envelope of bills into his coat pocket, "I should tell you that I don't have any matches. I never smoke in public."

"Of course! I had forgotten." There was real praise in his voice. "Very good indeed. Forgive me if I have seemed overly aggressive. I am ill just now, and that makes me tetchy."

Jonathan smiled at the uncommon word. Occasionally Dragon's alien English was betrayed by just such sounds: odd word choices, overpronunciations, mishandlings of idiom. "What's this all about, Dragon?"

"I have an assignment you must take."

"I thought we talked about that. You know I never take jobs unless I need the money. Why don't you use one of your other Sanction people?"

The pink-and-red eyes emerged. "I would if it were possible. Your reluctance is a nuisance. But this assignment requires an experienced mountain climber and, as you might imagine, men of such talents do not abound within our department."

"I haven't climbed for more than three years."

"We have considered that. There is time to bring you back into condition."

"Why do you need a climber?"

"I could discuss details only if you were willing to cooperate on the assignment."

"In which case, forget it."

"I have a further inducement for you, Hemlock."

"Oh?"

"One of our former employees—an erstwhile friend of yours, I believe—is involved in the affair." Dragon paused for effect. "Miles Mellough."

After a moment, Jonathan said, "Miles is none of your business. I'll take care of him in my own way."

"You are a rigid man, Hemlock. I hope you don't break when you are forced to bend."

"Forced how."

"Oh, something will occur to me." There was a heavy flutter in his voice and he pressed his hand against his chest to relieve the pain. "On your way out, would you ask Mrs. Cerberus to come to me, there's a good fellow?"

Jonathan pressed back into the shallow entrance to Dragon's office building, trying to avoid the rain which fell in plump drops that exploded into a haze on the sidewalk. The liquid roar eclipsed the city's babble. An empty taxi came slowly up the street, and Jonathan jumped out to take his place in a line of supplicants who waved and shouted as the cab cruised majestically by, the driver whistling contentedly to himself, doubtless contemplating some intriguing problem of Russian grammar. Jonathan returned to the shelter of his meager cave and looked out glumly on the scene. Streetlights came on, their automatized devices duped into believing it was evening by the darkening storm. Another taxi appeared and Jonathan, knowing better, nevertheless stepped forward to the curb on the outside chance that this driver was not independently wealthy and had some mild interest in profit. Then he saw that the taxi was occupied. As he turned back, the driver sounded his horn. Jonathan stood still, puzzled and getting wetter. The driver beckoned him over. Jonathan pointed at his chest with a foolish "me?" expression on his face. The back door opened and Jemima called out, "Are you going to get in, or do you like it out there?"

Jonathan jumped in, and the cab turned out into traffic, disdainfully ignoring trumpeted protests from the car abreast that was forced into the oncoming stream.

"I don't mean to drip on you," Jonathan said, "but you really do look lovely. Where did you come from? Did I mention you look lovely?" He was boyishly glad to see her again. It seemed that he had thought of her often. But probably not, he decided. Why should he?

"I saw you step out," she explained, "and you looked so funny that I took pity on you."

"Ah. You fell for an ancient ploy. I always try to look funny when I'm drowning in the rain. You never know when some passing stewardess will take pity on you."

The cabby turned and looked over the back of the seat with classic indifference to competing traffic. "That'll be double fare you know, buddy."

Jonathan told him that was just fine.

"Because we ain't supposed to pick up two fares in the rain like that." He deigned to glance briefly at the oncoming traffic.

Jonathan said he would take care of it.

"Hell, everybody and his brother would be picking up the whole damned city if we didn't charge double fare. You know that for yourself."

Jonathan leaned forward and smiled at the driver politely in the rearview mirror. "Why don't we divide up the labor here? You drive, and we'll talk." Then he asked Jemima, "How do you manage to look so calm and lovely when you're starving to death?"

"Am I starving to death?" The harlequin flecks of gold danced with amusement in her warm brown eyes.

"Certainly, you are. Its a wonder you haven't noticed it."

"I take it you're inviting me out to dinner."

"I am that. Yes."

She looked at him quizzically. "Now, you know that when I picked you up in the rain, I didn't pick you up in all the possible senses of that phrase, don't you?"

"Good Lord, we hardly know each other! What are you suggesting? How about dinner?"

She considered it a moment, tempted. Then, "No-o, I think not."

"If you hadn't said no, what would your second choice have been?"

"Steak, red wine, and a small tangy salad."

"Done." Jonathan leaned forward and told the driver to turn south to an address on Fourteenth Street.

"How about making up your mind, buddy?"

"Drive."

When the taxi pulled up in front of the restaurant, Jemima touched Jonathan's sleeve. "I saved you from melting. You are going to buy me a dinner. And that's it, right? After dinner everybody goes home. Each to his own home. OK?"

He took her hand and looked earnestly into her eyes. "Gem, you have very fragile faith in your fellow man." He squeezed the hand. "Tell me about it? Who was he—the man who hurt you so?"

She laughed, and the cab driver asked if they were going to get out or not. As Jemima dashed into the restaurant, Jonathan paid the cabby and told him he had been a real brick. Rain and traffic obscured the last word, so the driver stared at Jonathan for a moment, but he decided it was wiser to drive off in a wheel-squealing miff.

The restaurant was simple and expensive, designed for eating, not for gazing at the decor. Partly because he felt festive, and partly to impress Jemima, Jonathan ordered a bottle of Lafite.

"May I suggest 1959?" the wine steward asked, with the rhetorical assumption that his guidance was impeccable.

"We're not French," Jonathan said, not taking his eyes from Jemima.

"Sir?" The arch of the eyebrow had that blend of huff and martyrdom characteristic of upper echelon servants.

"We're not French. Prenubile wines hold no fascination for us. Bring a '53 if you have it, or a '55 if not."

As the steward departed, Jemima asked, "Is this Lafite something special?"

"You don't know?"

"No."

Jonathan signaled the steward to return. "Forget the Lafite. Bring us an Haut-Brion instead."

Assuming the change was a fiscal reconsideration, the steward made an elaborate production of scratching the Lafite off his pad and scribbling down the Haut-Brion.

"Why did you do that?" Jemima asked.

"Thrift, Miss Brown. Lafite is too expensive to waste."

"How do you know, I might have enjoyed it."

"Oh, you'd have enjoyed it all right. But you wouldn't have appreciated it."

Jemima looked at him narrowly. "You know? I have this feeling you're not a nice person."

"Niceness is an overrated quality. Being nice is how a man pays his way into the party if he hasn't the guts to be tough or the class to be brilliant."

"May I quote you?"

"Oh, you probably will."

"Ah-h—Johnson to Boswell?"

"James Abbott McNeill Whistler to Wilde. But not a bad guess."

"A gentleman would have pretended I was right. I was right about your not being a nice person."

"I'll try to make up for it by being other things. Witty, or poetic perhaps. Or even terribly interested in you, which, by the way, I am." His eyes twinkled.

"You're putting me on."

"I admit it. It's all a facade. I just pretend to be urbane as an armor for my vulnerable hypersensitivity."

"Now I'm getting a put-on within the put-on."

"How do you like being on Flugle Street?"

"Help."

Jonathan laughed and let the con lie where it was.

Jemima sighed and shook her head. "Man, you're really a social buzz saw, aren't you. I like to put people on myself by skipping logical steps in the conversation until they're dizzy. But that sort of thing isn't even in your league, is it?"

"I don't know that you could call it a league. After all, there's only one team and one player."

"Here we go again."

"Let's take time out for dinner."

The salad was crisp, the steaks huge and perfect, and they washed them down with the Haut-Brion. Throughout the meal they chatted lightly, allowing the topic to pivot on a word or a sudden thought, ranging from art to politics to childhood embarrassments to social issues, clinging to a subject only so long as there was amusement in it. They shared a sense of the ridiculous and took neither themselves nor the great names in art and politics too seriously. Often it was unnecessary to finish a sentence—the other predicting the thrust and nodding agreement or laughing. And sometimes they shared brief, relaxed silences, neither feeling a need to keep up conversation as a defense against communication. They sat next to a window. The rain alternately rattled and relented. They made ludicrous guesses about the professions and destinations of the passersby. Without recognizing it, Jonathan was dealing with Gem as though she were a man—an old friend. He drifted with the stream of conversation honestly, forgetting the pre-bed banter that usually constituted the basis of his small talk with women.

"A college teacher?" Gem asked incredulously. "Don't tell me that, Jonathan. You're undermining my stereotypes."

"How about you as a stewardess? How did that ever happen?"

"Oh, I don't know. Came out of college after changing majors every year and tried to find a job as a Renaissance Woman, but there wasn't a heading like that in the want ads. And traveling around seemed like a possible thing to do. It also struck me as kind of fun to be the first black stewardess on the line—I was their public relations Negress." She pronounced the word prissily, ridiculing those who would use it. "How about you? How did you happen to become a college teacher?"

"Oh, I came out of college and tried to find a job as a Renaissance Man, but..."

"All right. Forget it."

In the course of the chat, Jonathan discovered that she would be in New York for a three-day layover, and that pleased him. They drifted into another easy silence.

"What's funny?" she asked in response to his slight smile.

"Nothing," he said. "Me."

"Synonyms?"

"I just..." He smiled gently at her over the table. "It just occurred to me that I am not bothering to be clever with you. I usually make it a point to be clever."

"How about all that Flugle Street business?"

"Hustler talk. Dazzle talk. But I don't think I'd care to dazzle you."

She nodded and looked out the window, giving her attention to the random scatter of light where the rain danced on the puddles. After a while, she said, "That's nice."

He knew what she meant. "Yes, it's nice. But it's a little disconcerting."

She nodded again. And they both knew she meant that it was a little disconcerting for her, too.

A series of non-sequitur pivots brought them to the subject of houses, and Jonathan waxed enthusiastic about his own. For half an hour he described details to her, trying hard to make her see them. She listened actively, letting him know through small movements of her eyes and head that she understood and shared. When he stopped suddenly, realizing that he had been talking steadily and probably boorishly, she said, "It must be nice to feel that way about a house. And it's safe too, of course."

"Safe?"

"A house can't lean on you emotionally. Can't burden you by loving you back. You know what I mean."

He knew exactly, and he experienced a negative twinge at her emotional acumen. It occurred to him that he would enjoy having her at his home—passing a day sitting around and chatting. He told her so.

"It sounds like fun. But we couldn't go now. That wouldn't be good. I pick you up in a cab, we have dinner, then we run off to your house. Technically speaking, that would constitute a 'quickie.' It doesn't sound like our sort of thing."

He agreed that it was not their sort of thing. "We could make some sort of pact. I imagine we're capable of not making love for a day or two."

"You'd cheat."

"Probably."

"And if you didn't, I would."

"I'm glad to hear that."

The restaurant was closing, and their waiter had already made many polite intrusions with offers of unwanted service. Jonathan tipped rather too much, paying for the splendid time he had had, rather than for the service, which he had not noticed.

They decided to walk back to her hotel because it was not too far, and because the streets were empty and cool after the rain. They strolled, sharing swatches of talk and longer periods of silence. Her hand was in the bend of his arm, and she drew his attention to little things she noticed with a slight press of her fingers, which he acknowledged with a gentle return flex.

Surprisingly quickly they found themselves at her hotel. In the lobby they shook hands, then she said, "It is all right if I come out on the tram tomorrow morning? You can meet me at the station, and we'll take a look at this church of yours."

"I think that would be... just fine."

"Good night, Jonathan."

"Good night."

He walked to the train station, noticing along the way that the city seemed less ugly than usual. Probably the rain.

LONG ISLAND: June 12

He padded across the expanse of his choir loft bedroom, concentrating on his coffee cup, but spilling some into the saucer anyway. It was a large, two-handled cafe au lait mug, and for several minutes he leaned against the rail, taking long resuscitating draughts and looking down with pride and pleasure upon the nave where low-angle morning sun pierced the dun space with lances of variegated light. He was only at peace when he had his home around him, like armor. His thoughts strayed back and forth between pleasant anticipation of Jemima and vague discomfort over the tone of his last meeting with Dragon.

Later, down in the gallery, he screwed up his courage and tried again to work on the Lautrec article. He penciled a few notes, then the lead broke. That was it. Fate. He might have plowed on, wading through uninspired, mealy prose—but not if it entailed resharpening his pencil. It wasn't his fault that the pencil had broken.

On his desk top lay the blue pay envelope from Dragon, chubby with tenscore one-hundred-dollar bills. He picked it up and looked around for a safe place to put it. His eye caught none, so he dropped it back on the desk. For a man who went to such extremes to make money, Jonathan had none of the instincts of the miser. Money had no attraction for him. Goods, comforts, and possessions were another matter. It delighted him to remember that by tomorrow afternoon he would own the pointillist Pissarro. He looked around the walls, deciding where to hang it, and his eye fell on the Cezanne that Henri Baq had stolen for him in Budapest as a birthday present. Memories of Henri came to him: the curiously warped Basque wit... their laughter when they described close calls to each other... that staggering drunk in Arles when they had played at bullfighting with their jackets and the angry traffic. And he recalled the day Henri died, trying to hold his guts in with his hands, seeking a witty punch line to go out on, and not being able to come up with one.

Jonathan snapped his head to clear the images out, but no good. He sat at the pianoforte and chorded aimlessly. They had been a team—he and Henri and Miles Mellough. Miles worked for Search, Jonathan for Sanction, and Henri for the French counterpart of CII. They had performed assignments competently and quickly, and they always found time to sit around in bars, talking about art and sex and... whatever.

Then Miles set up Henri's death.

Jonathan slipped into a bit of Handel. Dragon had said that Miles was involved somehow in this sanction he was trying to force on Jonathan. For almost two years, Jonathan had anticipated the day when he could face Miles again.

Don't think about it. Jemima is coming.

He left the chamber, locking the door behind him, and strolled over the grounds to while away the slow-moving time before her arrival. The breeze was fresh, and the leaves of the plane trees lining the drive scintillated in the sun. Overhead, the sky was taut blue, but on the northern horizon over the water hovered a tight bundle of cloud that promised a fresh storm that night. Jonathan loved storms.

He wandered through the formal English garden with its newly clipped box hedges enclosing an involute maze. From the depths of the labyrinth he could hear the angry click! click! click! of Mr. Monk's trimming shears.

"Argh! There!" Click! "That'll teach you, you simpleminded shrub!" Click! Click! "OK, wise ass twig! Stick it out, and I'll cut it off for you! Like that!" Click!

Jonathan tried to locate the sound within the maze so he might avoid an encounter with Mr. Monk. Stealthily, he moved down the alley, rolling the pressure underfoot to reduce the sound.

"You got something against them other branches?" Mr. Monk's voice was honey sweet. "Oh-h-h, you don't like their company. Well, I understand. You're just some kind of loner, keepin' away from the bunch like that." Then suddenly he roared, "Pride! That's your trouble! And I got a cure for pride!" Click! "There!"

Jonathan squatted beside the wall of hedge, not daring to move, uncertain of the direction of Mr. Monk's voice. There was a long silence. Then he. began to picture himself, cringing at the thought of meeting his groundsman. He smiled, shook his head, and stood up.

"What you doin', Dr. Hemlock?" Mr. Monk asked from directly behind him.

"Oh! Well! Hello." Jonathan frowned and dug his toe into the turf. "This—ah—this grass here, Mr. Monk. I've been examining it. Looks funny to me. Don't you think so?"

Mr. Monk had not noticed, but he was always willing to believe the worst of growing things. "Funny in what way, Dr. Hemlock?"

"Well, it's... greener than usual. Greener than it ought to be. You know what I mean."

Mr. Monk examined the area near the shrubbery, then compared it with nearby grass. "Is that right?"

His eyes grew round with rage as he turned on the offending patch.

Jonathan walked down the alley with determined casualness and turned at the first corner. As he paced more quickly to the house, he heard Mr. Monk's voice from within the labyrinth.

"You stupid weeds! Always screwing up! If you ain't brown and scruffy, you're too green! Well, this'll fix you!" Snip!

Jonathan drove along the tree-lined road to the station. The train would probably be late, in the Long Island tradition, but he could not run the risk of keeping Jemima waiting. His automobile was a vintage Avanti—a car consonant with his hedonistic lifestyle. It was in poor condition because he drove it hard and gave it little attention, but its line and grace appealed to him. When it finally broke down for good, he intended to use it as a planter on his front lawn.

He parked close to the platform, his bumper touching the gray, weathered planking. The warming sun liberated a smell of creosote from the wood. Because it was Sunday, the platform and the parking area were deserted. He leaned back in the seat and waited drowsily. He would never consider standing on a train platform to wait because...

...Henri Baq had bought his on the cement arrival dock of the Gare St. Lazare. Jonathan often thought of the steamy clangor of that vast steel-domed station. And of the monstrous grinning clown.

Henri had been off guard. An assignment had just ended, and he was going on his first vacation without his wife and children. Jonathan had promised to see him off, but he had been delayed in the tangle of traffic in the Place de L'Europe.

He caught sight of Henri, and they waved over the heads of the crowd. It must have been just then that the assailant slipped the knife into Henri's stomach. The dispatcher's voice boomed its undecipherable drone into the hiss of steam and rattle of baggage wagons. By the time Jonathan pushed his way through the throng, Henri was leaning against a huge poster for the Winter Circus.

"Qu'as-tu?" Jonathan asked.

Henri's drooping Basque eyes were infinitely sad. He clutched the front of his jacket with one hand, the fist pressed against his stomach. He smiled foolishly and shook his head with an I-don't-believe-it expression, then the smile contorted into a grin of pain, and he slid to a sitting posture, his feet straight out before him like a child's.

When Jonathan stood up after feeling Henri's throat for pulse, he came face to face with the insane grin of the clown on the poster.

Marie Baq had not wept. She thanked Jonathan for coming to tell her, and she gathered the children together in another room for a talk. When they came back, their eyes were red and puffy, but none of them was still crying. The eldest boy—also Henri—assumed his role and asked Jonathan if he would care for an aperitif. He accepted, and later he took them across the street to a cafe for supper. The youngest, who did not really understand what had happened, ate with excellent appetite, but no one else did. And once the eldest girl made a snorting noise as the dike of her control broke, and she ran to the ladies' room.

Jonathan sat up that night over coffee with Marie. They talked of practical and fiscal matters across the kitchen table covered with oilcloth from which daydreaming children had picked flecks of plastic. Then for a long time there was nothing to talk about. Close to dawn she pushed herself out of the chair with a sigh so deep it whimpered. "One must continue to live, Jonathan. For the little ones. Come. Come to bed with me."

There is nothing so life-embracing as lovemaking. Potential suicides almost never do. Jonathan lived with the Baqs for two weeks, and each night Marie used him like medicine. One evening she said calmly, "You should go now, Jonathan. I don't think I need you anymore. And if we continued after I ceased to need you, that would be a different thing."

He nodded.

When the youngest son heard that Jonathan was going away he was disappointed. He had intended to ask Jonathan to take him to the Winter Circus.

Several weeks later, Jonathan learned that Miles Mellough had set up the assassination. Because Miles left CII at the same time, Jonathan had never been sure which side had ordered the sanction.

"Nice job of meeting the train," Jemima said looking in the window from the off-driver side.

He started. "I'm sorry. I didn't notice it come in." He realized how thin that sounded, considering the desolate platform.

As they drove toward his place, she trailed her hand out the window, cupping the wind aerodynamically, as children do. He thought she looked smart and fresh in her white linen dress with its high mandarin collar. She sat deep in the seat, either completely relaxed or totally indifferent.

"Are those the only clothes you brought?" he asked, turning his head toward her, but keeping his eyes on the road.

"Yes, sure. I'll bet you were expecting some night things discreetly carried in a brown paper bag."

"The bag could have been any color. I wouldn't have cared." He braked and turned into a side road, then backed onto the highway again.

"You forgot something?"

"No. We're going back to the village. To buy you some clothes."

"You don't like these?"

"They're fine. But they're not much for working in."

"Working?"

"Certainly. You thought this was a vacation?"

"What kind of work?" she asked warily.

"I thought you might enjoy helping me paint a boat."

"I'm being had."

Jonathan nodded thoughtfully.

They stopped at the only shop in the village open on Sundays, a spurious Cape Cod structure decorated with fishing nets and glass balls calculated to delight weekend tourists from the city. The proprietor was no taciturn Down Easter; he was an intense man in his mid-forties, tending slightly to weight, wearing a tight-fitting Edwardian suit and a flowing pearl gray ascot. When he spoke, he thrust his lower jaw forward and relished the nasal vowels with deliberate sincerity.

While Jemima was in the back of the store picking out some shorts, a shirt, and a pair of canvas shoes, Jonathan selected other things, accepting the proprietors' estimate of size. The advice was not given graciously; there was a tone of peevish disappointment. "Oh, about a ten, I guess," the proprietor said, then compressed his lips and averted his eyes. "Of course, it will change when she's had a few children. Her kind always does." His eyebrows were in constant motion, each independent of the other.

Jonathan and Gem had driven a distance when she said, "That's the first time I've been a victim of prejudice on those grounds."

"I've known and admired a lot of women," Jonathan said in an accurate imitation of the proprietor's voice. "Some of my best friends are women..."

"But you wouldn't want your brother to marry one, right?"

"Well, you know what happens to land values if a woman moves into the neighborhood."

The shadows of trees lining the road rippled in regular cadence over the hood, and sunlight flickered stroboscopically in the corners of their eyes.

She squeezed one of the packages. "Hey, what's this?"

"I'm sorry, but they didn't have any brown paper bags."

She paused a second. "I see."

The car turned into the drive and came around a line of plane trees screening the church from view. He opened the door and let her precede him into the house. She stopped in the midst of the nave and turned around, taking the total in. "This isn't a house, Jonathan. It's a movie set."

He stepped around from his side of the boat to see how she was coming along. With her nose only ten niches from the wood and her tongue between her teeth with concentration, she was daubing at an area about a foot square that constituted the extent of her progress.

"You got the spot," he said, "but you've missed the boat."

"Hush up. Get around and paint your own side."

"All done."

She humphed. "Slapdash careless work, I imagine."

"Any chance of your finishing before winter sets in?"

"Don't worry about me, man. I'm the goal-oriented type. I'll keep at this until it's done. Nothing could lure me away from the dignity of honest labor."

"I was going to suggest lunch."

"Sold." She dropped the brush into the can of thinner and wiped her hands with a rag.

After bathing and changing clothes, she joined him at the bar for a prelunch martini.

"That's some bathtub you've got."

"It pleases me."

They drove across the island to take lunch at The Better 'Ole: seafood and champagne. The place was nearly empty, and it was cool with shadow. They chatted about how it was when they were children, and about Chicago jazz versus San Francisco, and Underground films, and how they both liked chilled melon balls for dessert.

They lay side by side on the warm sand under a sky no longer brittle blue, but bleaching steadily with a high haze that preceded the wall of heavy gray cloud pressing inevitably from the north. They had changed back into work clothes, but had not returned to work.

"That's enough sun and sand for me, sir," Jemima said eventually, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. "And I don't feel much like getting stormed on, so I'm going up and stroll around in the house. OK?"

He hummed drowsy acquiescence.

"Is it all right if I make a phone call? I have to tell the airline where I am."

He did not open his eyes, fearful of damaging the half-doze he was treasuring. "Don't talk more than three minutes," he said, barely moving his mouth.

She kissed him gently on his relaxed lips.

"OK," he said. "But no more than four minutes."

When he returned to the house it was late afternoon and the cloud pack was unbroken from horizon to horizon. He found Jemima lounging in the library, looking through a portfolio of Hokusai prints. He looked over her shoulder for a time, then drifted up to his bar. "It's getting cold. Care for some sherry?" His voice bounced through the nave.

"Sounds fine. I don't like your bar, though."

"Oh?"

She followed him as far as the altar rail. "It's too much nose-thumbing, if you know what I mean."

"As in, 'Oh, grow up'?"

"Yes. As in that." She accepted the chalice of wine and sat on the rail sipping it. He watched her with proprietary pleasure.

"Oh, by the way!" She stopped drinking suddenly. "Do you know that there's a madman on your grounds?"

"Is that so?"

"Yes. I met him on my way up here. He was snarling and digging a hole that looked terribly like a grave."

Jonathan frowned. "I can't imagine who that could be."

"And he was mumbling to himself."

"Was he?"

"Yes. Real vulgar stuff."

He shook his head. "I'll have to look into it."

She did the salad while he broiled steaks. The fruit had been chilling since they got home, and the purple grapes mauved over with a haze of frost when they met the humid air of the garden where places had been set at a wrought iron table, despite the probability of rain. He opened a bottle of Pichon-Longue-ville-Baron, and they ate while the onset of night smoothly transferred the source of light from the treetops of the flickering hurricane lamps on the table. The flicker stopped, the air grew dense and unmoving, and occasional flashes along the storm line glittered to the north. They watched the scudding sky grow darker while little breaths of cool wind leading the storm reanimated the lamps and fluttered the black-and-silver foliage around them. For long afterwards, Jonathan was to remember the meteor trail of Jemima's glowing cigarette when she lifted it to smoke.

He spoke out of a longish silence. "Come with me. I want to show you something."

She followed him back into the house. "There's a certain spookiness about this, you know," she said as he got the key from the back of the kitchen drawer and led her down the half-turn stone steps. "Into the catacombs? Probably a lime pit in the cellar. What do I really know about you? Maybe I should drop bits of bread so I can find my way back out."

Jonathan turned on the lights and stepped aside. She walked past him, drawn in by the paintings that radiated from the walls. "Oh, my! Oh, Jonathan!"

He sat at his desk chair, watching her as she moved from canvas to canvas with an uneven pulsing flow, attracted by the next painting, unwilling to leave the last. She made little humming sounds of pleasure and admiration, rather as a contented child does when eating breakfast alone.

Her eyes full, she sat on the carved piano bench and looked down at the Kashan for some time. "You're a singular man, Jonathan Hemlock."

He nodded.

"All this just for you. This megalomaniac house; these..." she made a sweeping gesture with her hand and eyes. "You keep all this to yourself."

"I'm a singularly selfish man. Like some champagne?"

"No."

She looked down and shook her head sadly. "All this matters to you a great deal. Even more than Mr. Dragon led me to believe."

"Yes, it matters, but..."

...For some minutes they said nothing. She did not look up, and he, after the first shocked glance, tried to calm his confusion and anger by forcing his eye to roam over the paintings.

Finally he sighed and pushed himself out of the chair. "Well, lady, I'd better be getting you to the depot. Last train for the city..." His voice trailed off.

She followed him obediently up the stone steps. While they had been in the gallery, the storm had broken violently above without their hearing it. Now they climbed up through layers of quickening, muffled sound—the metallic rattle of rain on glass, the fluting and flap of wind, the thick, distant rumblings of thunder.

In the kitchen she asked, "Do we have time for that glass of champagne you offered me?"

He protected his hurt by the dry freeze of politeness. "Certainly. In the library?"

He knew she was distressed, and he wielded his artificial social charm like a bludgeon, chatting lightly about the paucity of transportation to his corner of Long Island, and of the particular difficulties the rain imposed. They sat facing each other in heavy leather chairs while the rain rattled horizontally against the stained glass, and the walls and floor rippled with reds and greens and blues. Jemima cut into the flow of anticommunicative chat.

"I guess I shouldn't have just dropped it on you like that, Jonathan."

"Oh? How should you have dropped it, Jemima?"

"I couldn't let it go on—I mean, I couldn't let us go on without your knowing. And I couldn't think of a more gentle way to tell you."

"You might have hit me with a brick," he suggested. Then he laughed. "I must have been dazzled. You're a real dazzler. I should have recognized the anti-chance of coincidence. You on the plane from Montreal. You just happened to pass by Dragon's office in that taxi. How was it supposed to work, Jemima? Were you supposed to bring me to a white heat of desire, then deny your body unless I agreed to do this sanction for Dragon? Or were you going to whisper insidious persuasions into my ear as I lay in the euphoria of postcoitus vulnerability."

"Nothing so cool. I was told to steal your payment for the last assignment."

"That's certainly direct."

"I saw it lying on your desk downstairs. Mr. Dragon says you need the money badly."

"He's right. Why you? Why not one of his other flunkeys?"

"He thought I would be able to get close to you quickly."

"I see. How long have you worked for Dragon?"

"I don't really work for him. I'm CII, but I'm not Search and Sanction. They chose someone out of your department to avoid recognition."

"Very sensible. What do you do?"

"I'm a courier. The stewardess front is good for that."

He nodded. "Have you had many assignments like this? Using your body to get at someone?"

She considered, then rejected the easy lie. "A couple."

He was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. "Aren't we the pair? A selfish killer and a patriotic whore. We should mate just to see what the offspring would be. I have nothing against selfish whores, but patriotic killers are the worst kind."

"Jonathan." She leaned forward, suddenly angry. "Do you have any idea how important this assignment Mr. Dragon wants you to take is?"

He regarded her with bland silence; he had no intention of making anything easier.

"I know he didn't give you the details. He couldn't unless he was sure you would take the job. But if you knew what is at stake, you would cooperate."

"I doubt that."

"I wish I could tell you. But my instructions—"

"I understand."

After a pause, she said, "I tried to get out of it"

"Oh? Did you?"

"This afternoon, while we were lying on the beach, I realized what a rotten thing it would be to do, now that we were..."

"Now that we were what?" He arched his eyebrows in cool curiosity.

Her eyes winced. "Anyway, I left you and came up here to call Dragon and ask him to let me out."

"I assume he refused."

"He couldn't speak to me. He was undergoing a transfusion or something. But his man refused—whatshisname."

"Pope." He finished his wine and placed the glass on a table deliberately. "It's a little hard for me to buy, you know. You've been on this thing for some time—since Montreal. And you seem convinced that I ought to take this assignment—"

"You must, Jonathan!"

"...and despite all that, you expect me to believe that one gentle afternoon has changed your mind. I can't help feeling you're making the mistake of trying to con a con."

"I haven't changed my mind. It's only that I didn't want to do the thing myself. And you know perfectly well that this has been more than just a gentle afternoon."

He looked at her, his eyes moving from one of hers to the other. Then he nodded, "Yes, it's been more than that."

"For me, it wasn't just this afternoon. I've spent days going over your records—which, by the way, are embarrassingly complete. I know what your boyhood was like. I know how CII roped you into your job in the first place. I know about the killing of your friend in France. And even before this assignment, I'd seen you on educational television." She grinned. "Lecturing about art in your superior, sassy way. Oh, I was ninety percent hooked before I met you. Then, down in your room—I was really pleased when you invited me down there. I couldn't help babbling. I knew from the files that you never bring anyone there. Anyway, down in the room, with you sitting there so happy, and all those beautiful paintings, and that blue envelope with your money sitting so unprotected on your desk... I had to tell you that's all."

"You have anything else to say?"

"No."

"You don't want to talk about shoes, or ships, or sealing wax?"

"No."

"In that case," he crossed to her and drew her out of the chair by her hands. "I'll race you up the stairs."

"You're on."

A rain-shimmered shaft of light lay across her eyes, revealing at surprising moments the harlequin flecks of gold. He lowered his forehead to hers, closed his eyes, and hummed a raspy note of satisfaction and pleasure. Then he drew back so he could see her better. "I'm going to tell you something," he said, "and you mustn't laugh."

"Tell me."

"You have the most beautiful eyes."

She looked up at him with eternal feminine calm. "That's very sweet. Why should I laugh?"

"Someday I'll tell you." He kissed her gently. "On second thought, I probably won't tell you. But that warning about laughing still goes."

"Why?"

"Because if you laugh, you'll lose me."

The image amused her, so she laughed, and she lost him.

"I warned you, right? Although it really doesn't matter, for all the good I was doing you."

"Don't talk about it."

He laughed in his turn. "You know something? This is going to come at you as a big surprise. Endurance is my forte. I'm not conning. That's normally what I have to recommend me. Endurance. How's that for yaks?"

"We have all kinds of time. At least you didn't reach for a cigarette."

He rolled over onto his back and spoke quietly into the common dark above them. "All things taken into consideration, Nature's really a capricious bitch. I've never cared much about the women I was with—I usually don't feel much of anything. And so I'm a paragon of control. And they do very well indeed. But with you—when I cared and it mattered, and because I cared and it mattered—I suddenly became the fastest gun in the east. Like I said, Nature's a bitch."

Gem turned to him. "Hey, what is all this? You're talking like it was afterwards. And here all the time I've been hoping it was between times."

He swung out of bed. "You're right! It's between times. You just wait there while I get us a resuscitating split of champagne."

"No, wait." She sat up in bed, her body outlined with silver backlight and splendid. "Come back here and let me talk to you."

He lay across the bottom of the bed and put his cheek against her feet. "You sound serious and portentous and all."

"I am. It's about this job for Mr. Dragon—"

"Please, Gem."

"No. No, now just keep quiet for a second. It has to do with a biological device that the other side is working on. It's a very ugly thing. If they come up with it before we do... That could be terrible, Jonathan."

He hugged her feet to him. "Gem, it doesn't matter who's ahead in this kind of race. It's like two frightened boys dueling with hand grenades at three feet. It really doesn't matter who pulls the pin first."

"What does matter is that we aren't so likely to pull the pin!"

"If you're saying that the average shopkeeper in Seattle is a humane guy, that's perfectly true. But so is the average shopkeeper in Petropavlovsk. The fact is that the pin is in the hands of men like Dragon or, even worse, at the mercy of a short circuit in some underground computer."

"But, Jonathan—"

"I'm not going to take the job, Gem. I never do sanctions when I have enough money to get along. And I don't want to talk about it anymore. All right?"

She was silent. Then she made her decision. "All right."

Jonathan kissed her feet and stood up. "Now how about that champagne?"

Her voice arrested him at the top of the loft stairs. "Jonathan?"

"Madam?"

"Am I your first black?"

He turned back. "Does that matter?"

"Of course it matters. I know you're a collector of paintings, and I wondered..."

He sat on the edge of the bed. "I ought to smack your bottom."

"I'm sorry."

"You still want some champagne?"

She opened her arms and beckoned with her fingers. "Afterwards."

LONG ISLAND: June 13

Jonathan simply opened his eyes, and he was awake. Calm and happy. For the first time in years there was no blurred and viscous interphase between sleeping and waking. He stretched luxuriously, arching his. back and extending his limbs until every muscle danced with strain. He felt like shouting, like making a living noise. His leg touched a damp place on the sheet, and he smiled. Jemima was not in bed, but her place was still warm and her pillow was scented lightly with her perfume, and with the perfume of her.

Nude, he swung out of bed and leaned over the choir loft rail. The steep angle of the tinted shafts of sunlight across the nave indicated late morning. He called for Jemima, his voice booming back satisfactorily from the arches.

She appeared at the door to the vestry-kitchen. "You roared, sir?"

"Good morning!"

"Good morning." She wore the trim linen suit she had arrived in, and she seemed to glow white in the shadow. "I'll have coffee ready by the time you've bathed." And she disappeared through the vestry door.

He splashed about in the Roman bath and sang, loudly but not well. What would they do today? Go into the city? Or just loaf around? It did not matter.

He toweled himself down and put on a robe. It had been years since he had slept so late. It must be nearly—Jesus Christ! The Pissarro! He had promised the dealer he would pick it up by noon!

He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting impatiently for the phone on the other end of the line to be picked up.

"Hello? Yes?" The dealers' voice had the curving note of artificial interest.

"Jonathan Hemlock."

"Oh, yes. Where are you? Why are you calling?"

"I'm at my home."

"I don't understand, Jonathan. It is after eleven. How can you be here by noon?"

"I can't. Look, I want you to hold the painting for me a couple of hours. I'm on my way now."

"There is no need to rush. I cannot hold the painting. I told you I had another buyer. He is with me at this moment. It is tragic, but I warned you to be here on time. A deal is a deal."

"Give me one hour."

"My hands are tied."

"You said the other buyer had offered twelve thousand. I'll match it."

"If only I could, my good friend. But a deal is—"

"Name a price."

"I am sorry, Jonathan. The other buyer says he will top any price you make. But, since you have offered fifteen thousand, I will ask him." There was a mumble off-phone. "He says sixteen, Jonathan. What can I do?"

"Who is the other bidder?"

"Jonathan!" The voice was filled with righteous shock.

"I'll pay an extra thousand just to know."

"How can I tell you, Jonathan? I am bound by my ethics. And furthermore, he is right here in the same room with me."

"I see. All right, I'll give you a description. Just say yes if it fits. That's a thousand dollars for one syllable."

"At that rate, think what the Megilloth would bring."

"He's blond, crew-cut, chunky, small eyes—close set, face heavy and flat, probably wearing a sport jacket, his tie and socks will be in bad taste, he is probably wearing his hat in your home—"

"To a T, Jonathan. T as in thousand."

It was Clement Pope. "I know the man. He must have a top price. His employer would never trust him with unlimited funds. I offer eighteen thousand."

The dealer's voice was filled with respect. "You have that much in cash, Jonathan?"

"I have."

There was another prolonged and angry mumble off-phone. "Jonathan! I have wonderful news for you. He says he can top your offer, but he does not have the cash with him. It will be several hours before he can get it. Therefore, my good friend, if you are here by one o'clock with the nineteen thousand, the painting is yours along with my blessing."

"Nineteen thousand?"

"You have forgotten the fee for information?"

The painting would cost almost everything Jonathan had, and he would have to find some way to face his debts and Mr. Monk's wages. But at least he would have the Pissarro. "All right. I'll be there by one."

"Wonderful, Jonathan. My wife will have a glass of tea for you. So now tell me, how are you feeling? And how are the children?"

Jonathan repeated the terms of the arrangement so there would be no mistake, then he hung up.

For several minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes fixed in space, his hatred for Dragon and Pope collecting into an adamantine lump. Then he caught the smell of coffee and remembered Jemima.

She was gone. And the blue envelope, chubby with its hundred-dollar bills, was gone with her.

In a brace of rapid telephone calls designed to salvage at least the painting, Jonathan discovered that Dragon, weak after his semiannual transfusion, would not speak to him, and that the art dealer, although sympathetic to his problem and solicitous of his family's health, was firm in his intent to sell the Pissarro to Pope as soon as the money was produced.

Jonathan sat alone down in the gallery, his gaze fixed on the space he had reserved for the Pissarro. Beside him on the desk was an untouched cafe au lait cup. And next to the cup was a note from Jemima:

Jonathan:

I tried to make you understand last night how important this assignment

Darling, I would give anything if

Yesterday and last night meant more to me than I can ever tell you, but there are things that

I had to guess. I hope you take sugar in your coffee.

Love (really) Jemima

She had taken nothing but the money. He found the clothes he had bought neatly folded on the kitchen table. Even their dishes from last night's supper were washed and put away.

He sat. Hours passed. Above him, unseen in the empty nave, shafts of colored light and blocks of shadow swung imperceptibly on silent hinges, and evening came.

The bitterest part of his anger was turned inward.

He was ashamed at being so gullible. Her warmth and radiance had blinded him, a self-inflicted abacination.

In his mental list of those who had used friendship as a weapon against him, he inscribed Jemima's name under Miles Mellough's.

"The moving finger writes," he mused to himself, "and having writ, gestures."

He closed the door to the gallery and locked it—for the last time that summer.

NEW YORK: June 14

"...the burdens of the flesh, eh, Hemlock?" Dragon's voice quivered fragilely. His body was thin and weightless under the black silk sheets; his brittle-boned head scarcely dented the ebony pillow upon which his ovine hair crumpled damply. Jonathan watched the long albescent hands flutter weakly at the hems of the turned-back bedding. A certain dim light was necessary to those who attended to his medical needs, and against the pain of this light, his eyes were covered with a thick, padded black mask.

Mrs. Cerberus bent over him, her lepidote face creased with concern as she withdrew a large needle from his hip. Dragon winced, but quickly converted the expression into a thin smile.

It was the first time Jonathan had been in the bedroom behind Dragon's office. The chamber was small and draped entirely in black, and the hospital stench was overpowering. Jonathan sat unmoving on a wooden bedside chair.

"They feed me intravenously for a few days after each transfusion. Sugar and salt solution. Not a gourmet's menu, you will agree." Dragon turned his head on the pillow, directing the black eyepads toward Jonathan. "I take it by your arctic silence that you are not overwhelmed by my stoicism and brave good humor?"

Jonathan did not respond.

With a wave so feeble that gravity tugged the hand down, Dragon dismissed Mrs. Cerberus, who brushed past Jonathan with a swish of starched clothes.

"I normally enjoy our chats, Hemlock. They have an exhilarating spice of dislike about them." He spoke in aspirate breaths, stopping midphrase when necessary, allowing his labored exhalation to group the words arbitrarily. "But in this condition I am not an adequate intellectual rival. So forgive me for coming directly to the point. Where is Miss Brown?"

"Oh? Is that really her name?"

"As it happens, yes. Where is she?"

"You're telling me you don't know?"

"She turned the money over to Mr. Pope yesterday. After which she quite disappeared. You'll forgive me if I suspect you."

"I don't know where she is. But I'm interested. If you find out, please tell me."

"I see. Remember, Hemlock, she is one of ours. And you are in an ideal position to know what happens to those who harm our people."

"Let's talk about the assignment."

"Nothing must happen to Miss Brown, Hemlock."

"Let's talk about the assignment."

"Very well." Dragon sighed, shuddering with the effort. "But I regret your loss of sportsmanship. How does the Americanism go? Win a few...?"

"Did you used to pull the wings off flies when you were young, Dragon?"

"Certainly not! Not flies."

Jonathan chose not to pursue the subject. "I assume the sanction has to do with the second man in Montreal. The one who was wounded in the struggle with whoeveritwas?"

"Agent Wormwood. Yes. At the time we sent you to Montreal, Search knew almost nothing about this second man. Since that time, they have been piecing together fragments of information—rumors, second sheets from note pads, statements from informers, swatches of taped telephone conversations—all the usual bits from which guilt is constructed. To be truthful, we still have less information than we have ever worked with before. But it is absolutely vital that the man be sanctioned. And quickly."

"Why? It wouldn't be the first time your people pulled a blank. What's so important about this man?"

Dragon's phosphorescent brow wrinkled as he balanced a problem for a moment, then he said, "Very well, I'll tell you. Perhaps then you will understand why we have behaved so harshly with you. And perhaps you will share our anxiety over this man." He paused, seeking a place to begin. "Tell me, Hemlock. From your Army Intelligence experience, how would you describe the ideal biological weapon?"

"Is this small talk?"

"Most pertinent."

Jonathan's voice took on the pendulum rhythm of recitation. "The disease should kill, but not quickly. The infected should require hospitalization and care, so that each case pulls one or two attendants out of action along with the victim. It should spread of itself by contact and contagion so that it will expand beyond the perimeters of the attack zone, carrying panic with it. And it must be something against which our own forces can be protected."

"Exactly. In short, Hemlock, certain virulent forms of bubonic would be ideal. Now, for years the other side has been working to develop a biological weapon based on bubonic. They have come a long way. They have perfected the delivery device; they have isolated a strain of virus with ideal characteristics; and they have injections that render their forces immune."

"I guess we'd better not piss them off."

Dragon winced with semantic pain. "Ah, the slums. Never far from the surface with you, are they? Fortunately, our own people have not been idle. We have made considerable strides in similar directions."

"Defensively, of course."

"A retaliatory weapon."

"Certainly. After all, we wear the white hats."

"I'm afraid I do not understand."

"An Americanism."

"I see. Now, both sides have reached impasses. Our people lack the ability to immunize against the virus. The other side lacks a satisfactory culture medium that will keep the virus alive through the extremes of temperature and shock involved in intercontinental missile delivery. We are working on discovering their process of immunization, and they would like very much to know the composition of our culture medium."

"Have you considered direct barter?"

"Please don't feel called upon to lighten my illness with little jokes, Hemlock."

"How does all this fascinating business affect me?"

"CII was given the assignment of delaying the other side's progress."

"The task was entrusted to CII? The CII of the Cuban Invasion? The CII of the Gaza incident? The CII of the Spy Ships? It would seem our government enjoys playing Russian roulette with an automatic."

Dragon's voice was crisp. "In point of fact, Dr. Hemlock, we have gone a long way toward effectively negating their entire biological warfare program."

"And how was this wonder accomplished?"

"By allowing them to intercept our formula for the culture medium." There was a certain pride in Dragon's tone.

"But not the real one," Jonathan assumed.

"But not the real one."

"And they are so stupid that they will not discover this."

"It is not a matter of stupidity. The medium passes every laboratory test. When our people stumbled upon it—"

"Sounds like our people."

"...when our people came upon the medium, they believed they had the answer to keeping the virus alive under ail conditions. We gave it exhaustive tests. If we had not chanced to test it under combat conditions, we would never have discovered its flaw."

"Under combat conditions?"

"This is none of your affair." Dragon was angry at himself for the slip.

"It's about those white hats."

Dragon seemed to slump with fatigue, although he made no movement. He appeared to collapse from within, to become smaller in the chest and thinner in the face. He drew several shallow breaths, blowing each out through slack lips and puffing cheeks.

"So then, Hemlock," he continued after recovery, "you can understand our urgency."

"Frankly, I don't. If we're so far out ahead in this criminal competition..." he shrugged.

"We recently suffered a great setback. Three of our most important scientists have died within the last month."

"Assassination?"

"No-o." Dragon was palpably uncomfortable. "I told you that we had not yet developed an effective immunization, and... This is not a laughing matter, Hemlock!"

"I'm sorry." Jonathan wiped the tears from his eyes and attempted to control himself. "But the poetic justice..." He laughed afresh.

"You are easily moved to risibility." Dragon's voice was icy. "May I go on?"

Jonathan waved a permissive hand and chuckled again to himself.

"The method we used to allow the medium to fall into enemy hands was not without brilliance. We had it transferred to one of our agents, this Wormwood, in Montreal."

"And you let the fact of the transfer leak to the other side."

"More subtle than that, Hemlock. We did everything in our power to prevent them from intercepting—with one exception. We used an incompetent agent for the job."

"You just pushed this ass out in the traffic and let them run over him?"

"Wormwood was a man of dangerously limited abilities. Sooner or later..." He made a gesture of inevitability. "At this point, you enter the picture. For our little ploy to be successful, the assassination of Wormwood had to be avenged just as though we were seriously chagrined at his loss. Indeed, considering the importance of the information, the other side would expect us to sanction with more than usual vigor. And we must not disappoint them. CII considers it vital to the national defense that we pursue and liquidate both of the men involved in the assassination. And—for certain reasons—you are the only man who can accomplish the second sanction." Dragon paused, his mathematical mind scanning over the conversation to judge if he had left any vital matter out. He decided he had not. "Do you understand now why we brought such uncommon pressure to bear on you?"

"Why am I the only man who can accomplish the sanction?"

"First. Do you accept this assignment?"

"I accept."

The cotton tuft eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. "Just like that? No further aggression?"

"You'll pay for it."

"I expect to. But not too much, of course."

"We'll see. Tell me about the target."

Dragon paused to collect his strength. "Allow me to begin with the details of Wormwood's murder. There were two men involved. The active role was played by Garcia Kruger, now no longer with us. It was probably he who delivered the first blow; it was almost certainly he who cut open Wormwood's throat and stomach with a pocket knife to retrieve the pellet he had swallowed. The second man was evidently not prepared for violence on this level. He was sickened by the operation; he vomited on the floor. I tell you this to acquaint you with the kind of man you will be dealing with. From his actions in the room and after, Search estimates that he is not a professional from the other side. The chances are that he was involved in the business for the money—a motive you must be sympathetic with."

"What's my target's name?"

"We don't know."

"Where is he now?"

"We don't know."

With growing doubt, Jonathan asked, "You have a description, haven't you?"

"Only the vaguest, I'm afraid. The target is male, not a Canadian citizen, and he is evidently an accomplished mountain climber. We were able to put that much together from one letter delivered to his hotel several days after his departure."

"That's lovely. You want me to kill every climber who hasn't the good fortune to be Canadian."

"Not quite. Our man will be involved in a climb in the Alps this summer."

"That narrows it to maybe three or four thousand men."

"Fewer than that, Hemlock. We know which mountain he will attempt."

"Well?"

"The Eiger." Dragon waited for the effect.

After a pause filled with images of the most terrifying moments in his climbing career, Jonathan asked with fatalistic assurance, "North Face, of course."

"That is correct." Dragon enjoyed the concern evident in Jonathan's voice. He knew of the two disastrous attempts Jonathan had made on that treacherous face, each of which had failed to claim his life by only the narrowest margin.

"If this man is taking a shot at the Eigerwand, the chances are good that my work will be done for me." Jonathan admired the target, whoever he was.

"I am not a pantheist, Hemlock. God is acknowledgedly on our side, but we are less sure of Nature. After all, you twice attempted the face, and yet you are alive." Dragon took pleasure in reminding him that: "Of course, both of your attempts were unsuccessful."

"I got back off the face alive both times. For Eigerwand, that's a kind of success." Jonathan turned back to business. "Tell me, how many teams are now training for a go at the North Face?"

"Two. One is an Italian team—"

"Forget that one. After the '57 affair, no sane man would go on the hill with an Italian team."

"So my researchers have informed me. The other attempt is scheduled for six weeks from now. The International Alpine Association is sponsoring a goodwill climb to be made by representative climbers from Germany, Austria, France, and the United States."

"I've read about it."

"The American representative was to have been a Mr. Lawrence Scott."

Jonathan laughed. "I know Scotty well; we've climbed together. You're insane if you imagine he had anything to do with the Montreal business."

"I am not insane. My disability is acroma, not acromania. We share your belief in Mr. Scott's innocence. Recall that I said he was to have been the American representative. Unfortunately, he had an automotive accident yesterday, and he will not climb for many years, if ever."

Jonathan recalled Scotty's free-swinging, ballet-cum-mathematics style. "You really are a shit, you know."

"Be that as it may, the American Alpine Association will contact you soon to replace Mr. Scott. There will be no objection from the international association. Your fame as a climber precedes you."

"The AAA wouldn't contact me. I haven't climbed for years. They know that. They know I'm not up to a go at the Eiger."

"Nevertheless, they will contact you. The State Department has brought certain pressure to bear on them. So, Hemlock," Dragon said with a tone of wrapping the business up, "your target is either the Frenchman, the German, or the Austrian. We have worked out a way to discover which one before the climb starts. But, to lend verisimilitude to your cover, you will train as though you were actually going to make the climb. And there is always the possibility that the sanction will be made on the face itself. By the way, an old friend of yours will be in Switzerland with you: Mr. Benjamin Bowman."

"Big Ben?" Despite the circumstances, the thought of drinking beer and joking with Big Ben again pleased Jonathan. "But Ben can't make that climb. He's too old for Eiger. So, for that matter, am I."

"The Alpine Association did not select him as a climber. He will be arranging equipment and transportation for the team and managing things. There's a term for it."

"Ground man."

"Ground man, then. We were rather hoping that Mr. Bowman knew about your work with us. Does he?"

"Certainly not."

"Pity. It might be useful to have a devoted associate with you, should it turn out that we cannot nominate the target for you before the climb begins. It might be wise for you to take him into your confidence."

Jonathan rejected the idea out of hand. With his simple and robust sense of ethics, Big Ben would never understand killing for profit. Risking one's life for sport was a different matter. That made excellent sense to Ben.

Dragon's mention that Jonathan would meet a former acquaintance flashed the image of Miles Mellough through his mind. He recalled Dragon's allusion to him during their last conversation. "What part does Mellough play in all this?"

"I assumed you would ask. Frankly, we are not sure. He arrived in Montreal two days before Wormwood's assassination, and he departed the day after. We both know Mr. Mellough too well to imagine a coincidence. It is my assumption that he acted as courier for the culture formula. Naturally, we did not interfere with him until he had passed on the information. Now that that's done, I have no objection to his falling victim to your epic sense of loyalty and honor—like that Greek fellow did. Indeed, we offer you Mr. Mellough as a kind of fringe benefit."

"Six weeks," Jonathan mused. "I'll have to work very hard at conditioning."

"That is your affair."

"Big Ben runs a training school in Arizona. I want to go there for a month."

"If you wish."

"At your expense."

Dragon's voice was heavy with the sarcasm he reserved for the mercenary instincts of his agents. "Naturally, Hemlock." He groped above him for a buzzer to summon Mrs. Cerberus. For his part, the conversation was ended. Jonathan observed his fumbling efforts without offering assistance. "Now that you know the background, Hemlock, you can appreciate why we need you—and only you—to undertake this sanction. You used to climb mountains, and there seem to be so many people of your acquaintance somehow involved in this matter. You appear to be tangled in the skein of fate."

Mrs. Cerberus entered with an officious rustle of crisp clothing. She brushed past Jonathan, knocking against his chair with her formidable hip. He wondered if this ghastly pair copulated. Who else would be available for Dragon? He looked at them and decided that, if they had offspring, they would produce something that could model for Hieronymus Bosch.

In dismissal Dragon said, "I will keep you informed to whatever extent I consider necessary."

"Doesn't it strike you that we have passed over the matter of payment?"

"Oh, of course. We intend to be particularly generous, considering the rigors of the assignment and the emotional difficulties concomitant to our little combat of wills. You will receive thirty thousand dollars upon completion of the sanction. Of course, the stolen twenty thousand dollars is on its way back to you. And as for the Pissarro, Miss Brown made it clear on the telephone the other day that she would not perform her task unless we promised to present it to you as a gift. And that we do. I am sure that is more than you expected."

"Frankly, it is more than I expected you to offer. But it's much less than I shall receive."

"Oh?" Mrs. Cerberus placed a restraining hand on Dragon's arm, solicitous of his blood pressure.

"Yes," Jonathan continued easily. "I shall receive the Pissarro right now, and a hundred thousand dollars when I finish the job. Plus expenses, of course."

"You recognize that this is outrageous."

"Yes. But I view it as retirement pay. This is the last assignment I am going to take for your people."

"That, of course, is your own decision. Unlike those on the other side, we have no desire to keep you after your affection for us had fled. But we do not intend to support you for life."

"A hundred thousand will only support me for four years."

"After which?"

"I'll think of something by then."

"I have no doubt of it. But a hundred thousand dollars is out of the question."

"Oh, no, it isn't. I have listened patiently while you described the pressing need for the sanction, and your need for me—and no one else—to handle it. You have no choice but to pay what I ask."

Dragon was pensive. "You are punishing us for Miss Brown. Is that it?"

Jonathan flashed angrily. "Just pay the money."

"I have been expecting your withdrawal from our organization for some time, Hemlock. Mr. Pope and I were discussing the possibility just this morning."

"That's another thing. If you want to keep Pope intact, keep him out of my way."

"You are striking to the right and left in your rage, aren't you." Dragon considered for a moment. "You have something more on your mind. You know perfectly well that I could promise the money now, then either fail to pay or get it back from you by some means."

"That will never happen again," Jonathan said coldly. "I shall receive the money now—a cashier's check sent to my bank with instructions that it will be paid to me on my appearance or your further instructions, not before seven weeks from now. If I fail to make the sanction, I'll probably be dead, and the check will go uncashed. If I make it, I take the money and retire. If I don't, you can instruct the bank to pay the money to you, on proof of my death."

Dragon pressed the thick pads against his eyes and searched the blackness for a flaw in Jonathan's case. Then his hands dropped to the black sheets. He laughed his three ha's. "Do you know, Hemlock? I think you have us." There was a mixture of wonder and admiration in his voice. "The check will be sent to your bank as you have directed; the painting will be in your home when you return."

"Good."

"I imagine this is the last time I shall have the pleasure of your company. I shall miss you, Hemlock."

"You always have Mrs. Cerberus here."

There was a flat sadness in the response. "True."

Jonathan rose to leave, but he was restrained by Dragon's last question. "You are quite sure that you had nothing to do with the disappearance of Miss Brown?"

"Quite sure. But I suspect she'll turn up sooner or later."

LONG ISLAND: That Evening

Mauve and pewter skies at sunset; the leaden skin of the ocean undulated in low furrows, alive only at the thin froth edge that the tide had languidly carried up close to his feet.

He had sat on the hard sand of the lower beach for hours, since his return from the city. Feeling heavy and tired, he rose with a grunt and batted the sand from his trousers. He had not yet been in the house, having chosen instead, after a moment of indecision at the door, to roam the grounds.

In the vestibule he discovered a large rectangle wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. He assumed it was the Pissarro, but he did not bother to examine it; indeed, he did not even touch it. As a matter of principle, he had insisted on its return from Dragon, but he no longer had a taste for it.

The nave was cool and thick with shadow. He walked its length and mounted the steps to his bar. He splashed half a glass of Laphroaig into a tumbler and drank it off, then he refilled his glass and turned to face the nave, leaning his elbows on the bar.

A dim arc of light caught the tail of his eye—the firefly trail of a cigarette.

"Gem?"

Jonathan crossed rapidly to the dun female figure sitting in the greenhouse garden.

"What are you doing here?"

"Making myself available, as usual," Cherry answered. "It that for me?" She indicated the glass of Scotch.

"No. Go home." Jonathan sat in a wicker chair opposite her, not so displeased with the idea of company as he seemed, but feeling the sick adrenalin collapse of vast disappointment.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Dr. Hemlock," Cherry rose to get the drink he had refused her. "You're always trying to butter me up," she said over her shoulder as she walked up to the bar. "I know what you're after with all that sweet talk about 'No! Go home.' You're just trying to get into my pants. Maybe the only way to get rid of you is to finally give in." She paused to allow him to respond. He did not. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," she continued, still covering her initial sting with a balm of words, "I guess that's the only way I'll get any peace. Hey! Is there such a thing as a Freudian pun?" Her next pause drew no response either. By now she had returned with her drink, and she slumped petulantly into her chair. "All right. How do you feel about the films of Marcel Carne? Do you believe the advantages of nonstick cooking with Teflon justify the expense of the space program? Or what are your views on the tactical problems of mass retreat should there ever be a war between the Italians and the Arabs?" Then she paused. "Who's Gem?"

"Go home,"

"By which I infer she is a woman. She must be something else, considering how fast you got over here, from the bar just now."

Jonathan's voice was paternal. "Look, dear. I'm not up to it tonight."

"The evening sparkles with puns. Can I get you another drink?"

"Please."

"You don't want me to go home really," she said as she went again to the bar. "You're feeling bad, and you want to talk about it."

"You couldn't be more wrong."

"About your feeling bad?"

"About my wanting to talk about it."

"This Gem person must really have come at you. I hate her without even knowing her. Here." She gave him the tumbler. "I'm going to get you all liquored up, and I'm going to make you on the rebound." She produced her best imitation of a witch's cackle.

Jonathan was angry, therefore embarrassed. "For Christ's sake, I'm not on the rebound!"

"Liar, liar, your pants are on fire. Say, I'll bet they really are."

"Go home."

"Was she pretty good in bed?"

Jonathan's voice chilled instantly. "Now you'd better really go home."

Cherry was cowed. "I'm sorry, Jonathan. That was a stupid thing to say. But gee-golly, pal, how do you think it affects a girl's ego when she's been trying to make a man for ever and ever, then some other woman with an unlikely name just takes him—like that." She tried several times to snap her fingers, but produced no sound. "I never could do that."

Jonathan smiled in spite of himself. "Listen, dear. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning."

"For how long?"

"Most of the summer."

"Because of this girl?"

"No! I'm going to do a little climbing."

"You just happen to suddenly decide on that after you meet this woman, right?"

"She has nothing to do with it."

"I really have to doubt that. All right. When are you leaving?"

"Dawnish."

"Well, great! We have the whole night. What do you say, mister. Huh? Huh? What do you say? You going to set me loose before you go? Remember, it's going to be a long summer for us virgins."

"Will you look after the place while I'm away?"

"Gladly. Now, let's talk about return favors."

"Drink up and go home. I have to get some sleep."

Cherry nodded resignedly. "OK. That woman must really have come at you. I hate her."

"Me too," he said quietly.

"Oh, bullshit, Jonathan!"

"There's a new facet of your vocabulary."

"I think I'd better go home."

He walked her to the door and kissed her on the forehead. "I'll see you when I get back."

"Hey, what do you say to a mountain climber? You tell an actor to break a leg, but that sounds kind of ominous for a mountain climber."

"You say you hope it's a go."

"I hope it's a go."

"Thank you. Good night."

"Great. Thanks a lot for that 'good night.' I'll just cling to that all night long."

ARIZONA: June 15

Standing between his suitcases at the grassy edge of a modest airfield, Jonathan watched the CII cabin jet from which he had just deplaned turn and, with a majestic conversion of power into pollution, taxi to the leeward end of the strip. The wave of heat behind its engine rippled the landscape; its atonic roar was painful.

From across the strip, a new but battered Land-Rover darted out between two corrugated metal hangars, skidded in a right-angle turn that sprayed dust over complaining mechanics, bounced with all four wheels off the ground over a mound of gravel, narrowly missed a Piper that was warming up, triggering a vigorous exchange of abuse between driver and pilot, then bore down on Jonathan with a maximum acceleration until, at the last possible moment, the four-wheel brakes were locked and the Rover screeched to a side-slipping stop, its bumper only inches from Jonathan's knee.

Big Ben Bowman was out before the Land-Rover stopped rocking. "Jon! Goddam my eyes, how are you?" He ripped one suitcase from Jonathan's grasp and tossed it into the back of the vehicle with scant concern for the contents. "I'll tell you one thing, ol' buddy. We're going to drink a bunch of beer before you get out of here. Hey!" His broad hairy paws closed down on Jonathan's upper arms, and after an awkward crushing hug, Jonathan was held out at arm's length for inspection. "You're looking good, ol' buddy. A little soft, maybe. But goddam my ass if it ain't good to see you! Wait till you see the ol' place. It's got..." The scream of the CII jet taxiing to take off eclipsed all sound, but Big Ben talked on insouciantly as he loaded Jonathan's second bag and grappled its owner into the Rover. Ben hopped around to jump in behind the wheel, slapped into gear, and they jumped off, bouncing over the drain ditch beside the field as they described a wide skidding turn. Jonathan gripped the seat and shouted as he caught sight of the CII jet roaring down on them from the left. Big Ben laughed and made a sharp cut to the right, and for a moment they raced parallel to the jet, under the shadow of its wing. "No chance!" Ben shouted over the combined din, and he turned left, passing so close behind the jet that Jonathan felt the hot, gritty blast of its engine.

"For Christ's sake, Ben!"

"Can't help it! Can't beat a jet!" Then he roared with laughter and jammed down on the gas pedal. They cut around the random scatter of airport buildings without using the designed roads, leaped the curbing to the main highway, and knifed through traffic with a U-turn that made brakes squeal and horns bleat angrily. Ben gestured classically to the offended drivers.

About a mile out of town they skidded off the highway onto a dirt road. "Just a piece down this way, ol' buddy," Ben shouted. "You remember?"

"About twenty miles, isn't it?"

"Yeah, about. Takes eighteen minutes, unless I'm in a hurry."

Jonathan gripped the "chicken bar" and said as casually as he could, "I don't see any special reason to hurry, Ben."

"You won't recognize the old place!"

"I hope I get a chance to see it"

"What?"

"Nothing!"

As they raced along, bouncing over chuckholes, Ben described some of the improvements he had made. Evidently the whole character of his climbing school had changed to some kind of resort ranch. He looked at Jonathan while he talked, only glancing at the road to make corrections when he felt the wheels go into the soft shoulder. Jonathan had forgotten Ben's crisis-style of driving. On a sheer face with nothing but rotten rock to cling to, there was no man he would rather have beside him, but in the driver's seat...

"Oh-oh! Hang on!"

They were suddenly in a cut-back turn and going too fast to make it. The Rover bounced over the shoulder, and the wheels on Jonathan's side dug into the soft sand. For an interminable moment they balanced on those wheels, then Ben whipped to the right, slamming the wheels back to the sand and beginning a fishtail skid. He steered into the skid and pressed down on the gas, converting the skid into a power slide that spun them back up onto the road. "Goddam my ass if I don't forget that turn every time!"

"Ben, I think I'd rather walk."

"OK, OK." He laughed and slowed down for a time, but by inevitable degrees their speed increased, and it was not long before Jonathan's hands were white-knuckled on the chicken bar again. He decided there was nothing to be gained by wearing himself out trying to guide the Land-Rover by positive concentration, so he relaxed fatalistically and tried to empty his mind of thought.

Big Ben chuckled.

"What is it?" Jonathan asked.

"I was thinking about the Aconcagua. Remember what I did to that old bitch?"

"I remember."

They had met in the Alps. The gulf between their temperaments suggested that they would be an unlikely team, and neither had been pleased when they were thrown together because their partners were unavailable for climbs they had set their hearts on. So with formidable misgivings they decided to make the climbs together, and they treated each other with that politeness that substitutes for friendship. Slowly and reluctantly they discovered that their polar talents as climbers meshed to create a powerful team. Jonathan attacked a mountain like a mathematical problem, picking routes, evaluating supplies against energy, against time; Big Ben pounded the face into submission with his uncommon strength and indomitable will. Fanciful fellow climbers came to refer to them as The Rapier and The Mace, which nicknames caught the fancy of writers who contributed articles on their achievements to Alpine journals. Jonathan was particularly suited to rock work where the minute tactics of leverage and purchase fitted his intellectual style. Big Ben took over when they were on ice and snow where he would pant and bull through the drifts, breasting an upward path like an inevitable machine of fate.

In bivouac, their differences of personality again operated as a lubricant for the social friction these cramped and sometimes dangerous quarters induce. Ben was older by ten years, loquacious, loudly appreciative of humor. So divergent were their backgrounds and values that they were never in social competition. Even in the lodge after a victory they celebrated in their different ways with different people, and they rewarded themselves that night with different lands of girls.

For six years they passed the climbing seasons together, bagging peaks: Walker, Dru, the Canadian Rockies. And their international reputations were in no way diminished by Jonathan's contributions to mountaineering publications in which their accomplishments were recorded with calculated phlegmatic understatement that eventually became the stylistic standard for such journals.

It was quite natural, therefore, that when a team of young Germans determined to assail Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, they contacted Jonathan and Ben to accompany them. Ben was particularly enthusiastic; it was his kind of climb, a grinding, man-eroding ascent requiring little in the way of surface tactics, but much in the way of endurance and supply strategy.

Jonathan's response was cooler. As was just, considering that they had conceived the plan, the Germans were to be the primary assault pair. Jonathan and Ben working in support and going after the peak only if something untoward happened to the Germans. It was fair that it should be so, but it was not Jonathan's way. Unlike Ben, who loved each step of a climb, Jonathan climbed for the victory. The great expense involved also dampened Jonathan's exuberance, as did the fact that his particular talents would be of secondary importance on a climb like this.

But Ben was not to be denied. The financial problems he solved by selling the small ranch that was his livelihood; and in a long telephone call he persuaded Jonathan by admitting that, considering his age, this would probably be the last major climb he would ever make.

As it turned out, he was right.

From the sea, Aconcagua seems to rise up just behind Valparaiso, a regular and, from that distance, gentle cone. But getting there is half the hell. Its base is tucked in among a tangle of lower mountains, and the team spent a week alternating between the antithetical torments of miasmic jungle and dusty ravines as they followed the old Fitz-Gerald route to the foot.

There is in this world no more demoralizing climb than that vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Parbat, but by eroding a man's nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac. No single stretch of the hill is particularly difficult, or even interesting in the Alpine sense. It is no exaggeration to say that any athletic layman could handle any given thousand feet of it, if properly equipped and conditioned to the thin air. But Aconcagua rises thousands upon thousands of feet, and one climbs hour after hour up through shale and ragged rock, through moraine and crevassed glacier, day upon day, with no sense of accomplishment, with no feeling that the summit is nearing. And time and again, the flash storms that twist around the peaks pin the climbers down for who knows how long. Maybe forever. And still that pile of garbage left from the Creation goes on and upward.

Within three thousand feet of the summit, one of the Germans gave in, demoralized with mountain sickness and the bone-deep cold. "What's the use?" he asked. "It really doesn't matter." They all knew what he meant. So slight is the technical challenge of the Aconcagua that it is less a cachet to a climber's career than an avowal of the latent death wish that drives so many of them up.

But no bitch-kitty of a hill was going to stop Big Ben! And it was unthinkable that Jonathan could let him go it alone. It was decided that the Germans would stay where they were and try to improve the camp to receive the new summit team when they staggered back.

The next fifteen hundred feet cost Ben and Jonathan an entire day, and they lost half of their provisions in a near fall.

The next day they were pinned down by a flash storm. Saint Elmo's fire sparkled from the tips of their ice axes. With wooden fingers they clung to the edges of the strip of canvas that was their only protection from the screaming wind. The fabric bellied and flapped with pistol-shot reports; it twisted and contorted in their numb hands like a maddened wounded thing seeking vengeance.

With the coming of night, the storm passed, and they had to kick the canvas from hands that had lost the power to relax. Jonathan had had it. He told Ben they must go back the next morning.

Ben's teeth were clenched and tears of frustration flowed from the corners of his eyes and froze on the stubble of his beard. "Goddam it!" he sobbed. "Goddam this frigging hill!" Then his temper ruptured and he went after the mountain with his ice axe, beating it and tearing at it until the thin air and fatigue left him panting on the snow. Jonathan pulled him up and helped him back to their scant cover. By full dark they were dug in as comfortably as possible. The wind moaned, but the storm remained lurking in ambuscade, so they were able to get a little rest.

"You know what it is, ol' buddy?" Ben asked in the close dark. He was calm again, but his teeth were chattering with the cold, and that lent a frighteningly unstable sound to his voice. "I'm getting old, Jon. This has got to be my last hill. And goddam my ass if this old bitch is going to bust me. You know what I mean?"

Jonathan reached out in the dark and gripped his hand.

A quarter of an hour later Ben's voice was calm and flat. "We'll try tomorrow, right?"

"All right," Jonathan said. But he did not believe it.

The dawn brought ugly weather with it, and Jonathan surrendered his last feeble hope of making the summit. His concern now was getting down alive.

About noon, the weather healed up and they dug themselves out. Before Jonathan could phrase his reasons for turning back, Ben had started determinedly upward. There was nothing to do but follow.

Six hours later they were on the summit. Jonathan's memory of the last etape is foggy. Step after step, breaking through the wind crust and sinking up to the crotch in the unstable snow, they pressed blindly on, stumbling, slipping, reason reduced to concentration on the task of one more step.

But they were on the summit. They could not see a rope's length out into the swirling spindrift.

"Not even a goddamed view!" Ben complained. Then he fumbled with the drawstring of his plastic outer pants and dropped them away. After a struggle with his wool ski pants, he stood up free and expressed his contempt for the Aconcagua in ancient and eloquent style.

As they plunged and picked their way back down, eager to make time, but fearful of setting off an avalanche, Jonathan noticed that Ben was clumsy and unsteady.

"What's wrong?"

"Ain't got no feet down there, ol' buddy."

"How long since you felt them?"

"Couple of hours, I guess."

Jonathan dug a shallow shelter in the snow and fumbled Ben's boots off. The toes were white and hard as ivory. For a quarter of an hour Jonathan held the frigid feet against his bare chest inside his coat. Ben howled with vituperation as feeling returned to one foot, replacing numbness with surges of pain. But the other foot remained rigid and white, and Jonathan knew there was nothing to be gained by continuing first aid. But there was great danger of a fresh storm catching them in the open. They pushed on.

The Germans were magnificent. When the two came staggering into camp, they took Ben from Jonathan and all but carried him down. It was all Jonathan could do to stumble along behind, broken-winded and half snow-blind.

Ben looked uncomfortable and out of place sitting up against a pile of pillows in the Valparaiso hospital. By way of small talk, Jonathan accused him of malingering there because he was making the nurses every night.

"I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, ol' buddy. Anyway who would take a man's toes when he ain't looking would take just about anything."

That was the last mention of the amputated toes. They both knew Big Ben would never make a major climb again.

They felt neither elation nor accomplishment as they watched the mountain slip into the sea beyond the stern of their ship. They did not feel proud of having made it, nor did the Germans feel shame for having failed. That is the way it is with that pile of fossilized shit.

Back in the States, Ben set about establishing his little school for climbing in a corner of Arizona where many kinds of natural face problems abound. So few people wanted the kind of advanced training he offered that Jonathan wondered how he kept his head above water. To be sure, he and twenty or so other skilled climbers made it a practice to patronize Ben's school, but that is just what it was—patronizing. The repeated struggles to force Ben to accept payment for lodging and training embarrassed Jonathan, and he stopped coming. Soon after, he stopped climbing altogether as his new home and his collection of paintings absorbed all his interest.

"Yeah," Ben shouted as they landed back in the seat after a bad bump, "I sure paid that old bitch back, didn't I?"

"You ever consider what would have happened if you had gotten local frostbite?"

Ben laughed. "Oh, my! There'd have been wailing and moaning on the reservation, and lots of Indian girls dripping tears, ol' buddy."

They broke over a little rise and started winding down into Ben's valley, leaving a rising trail of dust in their wake. Jonathan was surprised as he looked down on Ben's spread. It certainly had changed. Gone was the modest grouping of cabins around a cookhouse. There was a large swimming pool flashing emerald and surrounded on three sides by the body and wings of a pseudo-Indian lodge, and what appeared to be a patio lounge was dotted with the white blobs of people in swimming suits who looked nothing at all like climbers. There was no comparison between this and the Spartan training school he remembered.

"How long has all this been here?" he asked as they slithered down the steep road.

"About two years. Like it?"

"Impressive."

They sped across the gravel parking area and banged into a retaining log before rocking to a stop. Jonathan climbed out slowly and stretched his back to regroup his bones. The unmoving earth underfoot was a pleasure.