The Loo Sanction

Trevanian

The Loo Sanction

St. Martin's-In-The-Fields

His pain was vast. But at least it was finite. Sharp-edged waves of agony climaxed in intensity until his body convulsed and his mind was awash. Then, just before madness, the crests broke and swirled over his limen of consciousness, and he escaped into oblivion.

But always he emerged again from the delirium, cold and perspiring, weaker than before, and more frightened.

A crisp wind fluted through the arches of the belfry in which he was prisoner and drove his tears horizontally back to his temples. During troughs of awareness between crises of pain, his mind cleared, and he was bewildered by his reactions to impending death. Matthew Parnell-Greene ("Uranus" in the planet-code of the counterespionage agency that employed him) had always known that violent death was a very real alternative to retirement in his line of work. He was not physically brave—his imagination was too active for that—so he had sought to mute his fear by callusing that imagination. He had forced himself to rehearse being shot, being knifed, taking a faceful of cyanide gas from a tube concealed in a folded newspaper, being poisoned—his urbane flair always insisting upon the poison being in exotic foods consumed at really good restaurants. And he had attempted to toughen his tender imagination by abrading it with anticipations of the more disgusting alternatives. He had been drowned in a bathtub; he had been suffocated, his face blue and his eyes bulging within a polyethylene bag; air had been injected into his heart. Always he had died well, with a certain dignity, not struggling dumbly against impossible odds. He had imagined pain, but the end had always come quickly. He had long ago realized that he could not withstand torture and had decided he would cooperate fully with his questioners, should it come to that.

Fear, pain, anger, even self-pity had been anticipated so often that they held no more dread than he could stand. But his anxious fantasies had not prepared him for the emotion that now overwhelmed his mind: disgust. Disgust was bitter in the back of his throat. Disgust curled the corners of his mouth and dilated his nostrils. When they found him, he would be unsightly, revolting. The thought of it embarrassed him intensely.

In the two hours since a watery dawn had made London visible below him, Parnell-Greene's eyes had dimmed many times, with each fresh crisis of pain that carried him over the brink of unconsciousness as some membrane inside him ripped through, sending waves of shock through his body.

How long had he been there? Six hours? Half his life? His existence seemed divided into two parts, one containing forty-seven active, colorful years; the other, six hours of pain. And it was the second half that really mattered.

He remembered them bringing him to St. Martin's. Although he had been heavily drugged, it was all perfectly lucid. The drugs had been pleasant, euphoric; they had sapped his will, but he remembered everything. Two of them had brought him. They had stood on either side of him because he was unsteady on his feet. He had sat for a time with one of them—The Mute—in a back pew, while the other went up to the belfry to see that the apparatus was in place. He remembered the oaken contribution box with its notice:

Contributions to keep

this church always open

and to maintain its services

They had led him up the winding metal staircase and out onto the dark windy platform of the belfry. And then they had... and then they... Parnell-Greene wept at the sadness of it.

He sobbed, and that was a mistake. The convulsion ruptured something inside, pain clawed through his body and throbbed in his head. He fainted.

The streets below the church streamed with people. Hundreds gushed up Villiers Street and poured from Charing Cross Station, all hurrying toward work or standing with turgid obedience in queues, waiting to crowd into red double-decker buses, bodies touching, eyes assiduously averted. Escalators spewed anonymities from the undergrounds: young office men, bareheaded and red-eyed; cloth-capped laborers, sullen and stunned with lives of monotony; shopgirls and secretaries, miniskirted despite the season, their hands, faces, and legs ruddy and chapped; older women on the prowl for bargains, waddling through the press, heavy objects in their dangling string bags a threat to passing shins.

Any one of them might have seen Parnell-Greene's huddled silhouette in the arch of the belfry, but no one looked up. In the automaton way of British workers, their chins were sunk in their collars, their minds involute.

Perspiration was cold on his forehead when he returned to consciousness. He breathed carefully, his mouth wide open so as not to make a movement. At last, his tightly bound arms were numb, and that was a blessing. For the first hour or so, the loss of circulation had caused a regular dull ache that was somehow more wearing than the irregular ecstasies of agony when something tore within him.

He did not shout for help. He had tried that at first, but no one could hear his feeble voice from the height of the belfry, and each attempt had been rewarded with a bursting sac of liquid pain.

Slowly, the numbing of his overloaded nerves came into balance with this new level of agony, and neutralized it. He knew that more exquisite levels of pain would come, but it was no longer an animate enemy he might get by the throat and crush, and crush! His pain and his life had welded into one. They would always be together now. When there was no longer pain, there would no longer be life.

He felt very cold, and very sad.

He looked out, across the river, over the bulk of the Charing Cross Hotel. There were the elements of new London. The inarticulate, utilitarian bulk of the Royal Festival Hall. The addled architecture of Queen Elizabeth's Hall, a compromise between a penal institution and a space station. New London. Economical and unmerciful architecture. And beyond, cubes of aluminum and glass persuaded the skyline of London to imitate Chicago. Some of the bloodless hulks stood unfinished, victims of continual strikes. Above these ugly heaps, giant construction cranes lurked, dinosaur skeletons poised to feed on huge blocks of salt.

Distressed, he turned his eyes away. So much of it was going! Even the façades temporarily spared from Progress were masked by scaffolding and canvas as they were being steamed and scrubbed to rid them of the character of patina.

It was all going.

He felt liquid dripping down his legs. And not only blood, he realized with despair. Revolting. Disgusting.

A bit of sun broke through the low layers of zinc cloud. He began to feel warm. Light. As though he were floating. It would be good to be weightless. Merciful numbness began to spread upward. His throat thickened. He was so tired.

The whir and clatter of machinery tugged him back to consciousness. The clapper of the great bell was grinding back against its spring, and it hovered for a second before it shot forward. The belfry roared and vibrated! The apparatus shook violently. The pain was pyrotechnic as everything within him burst!

Now Parnell-Greene screamed.

Unheard.

That evening the facts were carried by the London newspapers, each reflecting the taste of its readership:

MAN IMPALED IN ST. MARTIN'S-IN-THE-FIELDS

OPPOSITION QUESTIONS SECURITY OF NATIONAL BELFRIES

BELL RINGER INVESTIGATES THUD!

EARLY CHURCHGOER GETS THE POINT!

BBC 2 interrupted its year-long series on the development of the viola da gamba for a special broadcast in which three university dons outlined the uses of torture in general and impalement in particular in the Western world. Then a panel of experts discussed the implications of this latest impalement on the eve of Britain's entry into the Common Market. Finally, a woman Labour MP made the point that this literal impalement had shocked and sickened the nation, while it remained perfectly indifferent to the figurative impalement of womanhood on the phallus of male chauvinism over the years, which, after all, was...

Bloomsbury

"You!" the singer accused, pointing over the heads of the crowd with an arched forefinger, the other fist on his hip, his eyes wild and round in their pits of green mascara, his gold-tinsel wig glittering under the spotlight.

"You! ...you're driving me crazy.

What can I do? What can I do?

My love for you makes everything hazy..." *

* from the song "You're Driving Me Crazy" by Walter Donaldson copyright 1930, 1957 by Donaldson Publishing Co. Used by permission of Mrs. Walter Donaldson.

His thin metallic alto blended with the muted instruments as his stiff torso dipped in tempo to the song, his knees flexing mechanically. He stood on a raised platform, and his eyebrowless clown-white face bobbed rhythmically over the heads of the chit-chatting crowd. The showrooms of Tomlinson's Galleries buzzed with conversation: intimate talk, meaningful and intense; significant talk about art and life; witty talk designed to be overheard and repeated.

"...so I simply put myself into his hands. He designs all my clothes and even selects the shirts and ties. In effect, he does me as he sees me..."

"...for God's sake, Midge, he's not only your husband, he's my friend. Do you think I want to hurt him?..."

"...it would be a challenge to paint you. I would like to try and capture your—ah—depth and to express it in—well, frankly—in sexual terms..."

"...well, if you ask me, it was a blatant act of defiance—a challenge to the police. To impale a man on a wooden stake right in the belfry of St Martin's-In-The-Fields! Have you had your martini, love?"

The minute Jonathan Hemlock stepped into the crowded reception room, he was sorry he had come. He looked over heads, but he didn't find the woman he was supposed to meet, so he began slowly to ease toward the door, juggling his glass adroitly and nodding to the empty-eyed models who hung impatiently on the arms of older men, and who smiled at him as he passed. But just as he made the door, David Tomlinson caught him by the arm, directed him to the center of the room, and jumped up on a pouf.

"Listen, everybody! Everybody?" (Silence rippled reluctantly from the center outward.) "I have the very great honor to introduce you to Dr. Jonathan Hemlock who's come all the way from America to set us all straight on art and all that." (Titters and one "hear-hear.") "All sorts of people have consorted to get him over here: the Guggenheim, the Arts Council—all that benevolent lot. And we must make good use of him. No comments from you, Andrew!" (Titters.) "Now you'll all have to watch yourselves because Dr. Hemlock actually knows something about art." (Groans and one giggle.) "I'm sure you've all read his books, and now he's here in the flesh, as it were. And remember this! You saw him first at Tomlinson's." (Laughter and light applause.)

Tomlinson stepped down from the pouf and spoke with such sincerity that he appeared to be in pain. "I am truly delighted that Van was able to persuade you to come. You've made the evening. May I call you Jonathan?"

"No. Look, you haven't seen Van, have you?"

"In point of fact, I haven't"

Jonathan grunted and slipped away to the bar where he ordered a double Laphroaig. He didn't notice fforbes-Ffitch's approach in time to avoid it.

"Heard you were going to be here, Jon. Thought I'd drop around for the event." fforbes-Ffitch spoke with the crisp, busier-than-thou accents of the academic hustler. He had taken his doctorate in the United States, where apparently he had majored in grantsmanship, which training he applied with such industry that he became the youngest head of department at the Royal College of Art and had recently been made a trustee of the National Gallery.

"Say, Jon. Tell me, did you receive my memo?"

Jonathan never used fforbes-Ffitch's first name. He didn't even know what it was. "What memo?"

fforbes-Ffitch preened his drooping moustache by pressing it down with his thumb and cleared his throat to speak importantly. "That one about your doing a lecture series for us in Scandinavia."

Jonathan had received it weeks before and had dismissed it as an attempt by f-F to brighten his reputation as a man who knows important people and gets things done. "No, I never received it."

"How does the idea sound to you?"

"Terrible."

"Oh? Oh? I see. Well, that is too bad. Ah—quite a gathering here this evening, don't you think?"

"No."

"Well, yes. I agree with you. Not real scholars, of course. But... important people. Well! I have to be going. Desk piled with work crying out to be done."

"You'd better get to it."

"Right. Cheers."

Jonathan felt great social fatigue as he watched f-F depart through the crowd, shaking hands with all the "names," studiously ignoring the others. No doubting it, f-F was a man on his way to a knighthood.

Jonathan had just finished his whiskey and was ready to get out when Vanessa Dyke appeared at his side.

"Having fun, love?" she asked evilly.

He smiled blandly out onto the throng and spoke to her out of the side of his mouth. "Where have you been? You told me it wouldn't be another of these."

She waved at someone across the room. "The truth is, I lied. Simple as that."

"One of these days, Van..."

"I look forward to it." She tapped out a Gauloise on her thumbnail and lit it, cupping the match like a sailor on a windy deck, then she squinted through the curling acrid smoke to find a handy ashtray, failing which, she tossed the match onto the thick carpeting. One fist on her hip, she looked disdainfully over the party, the pungent French cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, the hard, intelligent eyes examining and dismissing the guests. An expatriate American, Vanessa wrote the leanest, most penetrating art criticism current in England under the name of Van Dyke, which the uninitiated took to be an alias. Jonathan had known her for years and had always admired and liked her, even during the flamboyant stage of her life when she had turned up at parties with a young whore on either arm, flaunting her homosexuality with defensive vigor. They disagreed totally about art, and had great battles in private, but should someone less informed join in, they united to destroy him.

Jonathan looked at her profile and noticed with surprise that age was making rapid inroads on her. Still thin as a reed under the black slacks and turtlenecked sweater that were her trademark, she had short tousled hair shot with gray, and the alert, nervous movements of her expressive hands revealed nails bitten to the quick.

"Have you met the Struggling Young Person?" she asked, leaning against the bar with her elbows and surveying the gathering without sympathy.

"No. Why did you ask me to come here?"

Vanessa avoided the question. "Have you seen his shit?"

"I glanced around when I came in."

"That's him over there." She gestured with her pointed chin.

Jonathan looked through the milling bodies to a dour young man with a shaggy beard and a corduroy hunting jacket, flaunting his nonclass by drinking beer. He was surrounded by people so eager to be seen in his company that they were willing to pay the price of listening to him. Hovering in the background was a sere, uncertain girl in a long dress of madras, her nose sharp between falls of long oily hair. She had the intense look of a graduate student's wife concerned with social injustice, and Jonathan took her to be the painter's mistress.

Christ, they all look alike!

Knowing that the tenor of his thoughts would be identical to her own, Vanessa shrugged, saying, "Well, at least he's fairly unassuming."

Jonathan looked again over the modern daubs on the carpeted walls. "What are his options?"

A couple were pushing their way through the crowd toward Jonathan. "Oh, Christ," he said from between teeth clenched in a smile.

"Come on," Vanessa said, drawing her arm through his and guiding him away, leaning against him in a masque of romantic conversation. But as they turned the first corner they ran smack into a conversational group of three that blocked their passage.

"Van, you harlot!" greeted a young man in a pale blue suede jacket with metal-tipped fringe. "You've just taken our much-touted art expert here all for yourself and you're gobbling him all up!" He looked at Jonathan, his eyebrows arched in anticipation of an introduction.

Vanessa ignored him, turning to a middle-aged man wearing heavy clothes and an open, eager expression that had a canine flavor. "Sir Wilfred Pyles, Jonathan Hemlock. I believe your commission had something to do with getting him here."

"Good to see you here, Jon."

"You mean at this party, Fred?"

"Well, no. I meant in the country actually."

"Ah-ha!" Vanessa said. "I had no idea you two knew one another."

"Yes indeed," Sir Wilfred explained. "I've been an admirer of Jon's for years. But not as an art critic. I'm afraid I'm only one of those chaps who know what they like. No, my acquaintance with Jonathan Hemlock was under rather a different heading. I used to be an enthusiastic amateur mountaineer, don't you know. Just puffing about and hill bashing, really. But I read all the journals and became familiar with this fellow's exploits. And, when I had a chance to meet him, I grabbed it. That was—how long ago was it, Jon?"

Jonathan smiled, uncomfortable as he always was when talking about climbing. "I haven't climbed for years."

"Well, I shouldn't wonder. I mean—that must have been a nasty business on the Eiger. Three men, wasn't it?"

Jonathan cleared his throat "I don't climb seriously anymore."

"Not only that," Vanessa said, squeezing his arm, realizing that he wanted to change the subject, "he's given up serious criticism as well. Or haven't you read his latest bag of garbage?" She turned to the crisp, beautiful woman of uncertain years who stood beside Sir Wilfred. "And you are...?"

"Oh, yes. Sorry," Sir Wilfred said. "Mrs. Amelia Farquahar. A friend of mine, actually."

"No one's introduced me yet," the suede jacket said.

Vanessa patted his cheek. "That's because no one's noticed you yet, darling boy."

"Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that." But his peeve lasted only a second. "Actually, we were having a lively conversation when you broke in. Lively and a little naughty."

"Oh?" Vanessa asked Mrs. Farquahar.

"Yes. We were, in fact, discussing the myth of vaginal climax." Mrs. Farquahar turned to Jonathan. "What are your opinions on that, Dr. Hemlock?"

"As an art critic?"

"As a mountain climber, if you'd rather."

Sir Wilfred grunted. "All part of women's liberation, I shouldn't wonder. I hear you've been having quite a lot of that in your country."

"Mostly among the losers," Jonathan said, smiling.

Vanessa smiled back. "You turd."

"And you, Miss Dyke?" Mrs. Farquahar asked. "Do you have an opinion on that?"

Vanessa dropped her cigarette butt in suede jacket's wineglass. "I don't think it's a myth at all. The misconception is that it takes a penis to achieve it."

"How interesting," said Mrs. Farquahar.

"I say!" injected suede jacket, feeling somehow he had been left out of the conversation. "Did you read about that man found impaled in St. Martin's-In-The-Fields?"

"Oh, ghastly business," Sir Wilfred said.

"Oh, I don't know. If you have to go..." He wriggled a shoulder and took a sip of wine.

While he was coping with the mouthful of tobacco, Vanessa said to Mrs. Farquahar, "Come, let me introduce you to the young man who has drawn this sparkling company together."

"Yes. I'd like that."

They pushed off through the crowd, Vanessa leading the way and prowing through the congested sea of people. Suede jacket stood on tiptoe and waved extravagantly to someone who had just entered, then struggled off after a word of apology.

Jonathan and Sir Wilfred stood side by side against the wall. "What's all this about climbing, Fred?" Jonathan asked without looking at him. "You get a nosebleed from standing on a thick carpet."

"Just the first thing that came to my mind, Jon." The flappy tones of the bungling British civil servant dropped away from his speech.

"I see. Are you still in the service?"

"No, no. I've been on the shelf for several years now. The extent of my counterespionage activities now is trying to find out how much my chauffeur tells my wife."

"When I saw your name on my appointment to come over here, I assumed MI-5 had found you an elastic cover."

"I'm afraid not. I am well and truly out to pasture. The electronic age has caught up with me. One has to be a damned engineer these days to stay in the game. No, I serve my country by chairing committees devoted to the task of bringing cultural enrichment to our shores. You constitute a cultural enrichment." He laughed. "Who would have thought in the old days when we were flogging about Europe, now on the same team, now in opposition, that we would be brought so low."

"You do know that I'm out of it totally now?" Jonathan wanted to be sure.

"Oh, certainly. First thing I checked upon when your name came up. The chaps at the old office said you were—to use their uncomplimentary compliment—politically subpotent. By which I take it that you and CII have parted company."

"That we have. By the way, congratulations on your knighthood."

"Not so much of an achievement as you might imagine. These days few people escape that distinction. When you leave the Service they automatically lumber you with a K.B.E. They've found it's cheaper than a gold watch, I suspect. Ah, the ladies return."

As she approached, Vanessa said to Jonathan, "I didn't lure you here just to punish you with my acquaintances. There's something I want to show you." She turned to Mrs. Farquahar. "Jon and I have to run off for a moment."

Mrs. Farquahar smiled and inclined her head.

In the hall where it was relatively quiet Jonathan asked, "What's this all about, Van?"

"You'll see. A chance for you to pick up some pocket money. But look, don't get uptight, and for God's sake, don't cause any trouble. That could be very bad for me." She led the way down a corridor, past the table at which the maids and caterer's assistants were flirting, to the door of a small private display room. "Come on."

Jonathan entered, then stopped short. A bronze Horse and Rider by Marino Marini stood in the center of a darkened room, its ragged modeling accented by the acute angle of a shaft of dramatically placed light. About forty inches high, a sand-colored forced patina, the modeling seemed to combine those primitive, lumpy Etrurian characteristics typical of Marini with an almost oriental twist of the heads of both horse and rider that was most uncharacteristic. But the fat rider's stubbed cigar of a penis was a Marini signature. Jonathan walked slowly around the casting, pausing occasionally to take in some detail, his concentration totally committed. So absorbed was he that it was a while before he noticed a man leaning against the far wall, posed under a dim light that had been arranged with almost as much care as that given to the Horse. He wore an extremely trendy suit of dusty gold velvet, and a ruffle of starched lace stood at his throat. His arms were folded across his chest, his stance poised and practiced, but an inner tension prevented his posture from appearing relaxed. He watched Jonathan steadily, following him with gray eyes so pale they seemed colorless.

Jonathan examined the man with frank curiosity. It was the most beautiful male bust he had ever seen—an unearthly, bloodless beauty such as masters of the Early Renaissance sometimes touched upon. Intuitively, he knew the man was aware of the effect of his cold beauty, and he had stationed himself in that particular light to heighten it.

"Well, Jonathan?" Vanessa had been standing back out of the light. Her voice was hushed most uncharacteristically.

Jonathan glanced again at the Renaissance man. Something in his demeanor made it clear that he did not intend to speak and did not wish to be spoken to. Jonathan decided to let him play out his silly game.

"Well what?" he asked Van.

"Is it genuine?"

Jonathan was surprised at the question, forgetting as often he did that his gift was quite unique. As some people have perfect pitch, Jonathan had a perfect eye. Once he had seen a man's work, he never mistook it. It was, in fact, upon that gift that his reputation had been founded and not, as he preferred others to believe, on his scholarship. "Of course it's genuine. Marini cast three of these and later broke one. No one knows why. Some defect probably. But only two now exist. This is the Dallas Horse. I didn't know it was in England."

"Ah—" Vanessa fumbled for a Gauloise to cover her tension, then she asked offhandedly, "What price do you think it would bring?"

Jonathan looked at her, startled. "It's for sale?"

She took a deep drag and blew smoke up at the ceiling. "Yes."

Jonathan looked across at the Renaissance man who had not moved a muscle and who still watched him, the colorless eyes picked out by a shaft of light just under the dark eyebrows.

"Stolen?" Jonathan asked.

"No," Vanessa answered.

"Doesn't he talk?"

"Please, Jonathan." She touched his arm.

"What the hell's going on? Is he selling this?"

"Yes. But he wanted you to have a look at it first."

"Why? You don't need me to authenticate it. Its provenances are impeccable. Even a British expert could have certified it." He addressed this to the man standing on the opposite side of the bar of light illuminating the Horse. When the man spoke, his tessitura was just as one would have predicted: precise, carefully modulated, colorless.

"How did you know it was the Dallas Horse, Dr. Hemlock?"

"Ah, you speak. I thought you just posed."

"How did you know it was the Dallas Horse?"

As curtly as possible, Jonathan explained that everyone who knew anything at all about the Marini Horses knew the story of the one purchased by the young Dallas millionaire who subsequently picked it up at the plane himself, loaded it into the back of his pickup, then brought it to his ranch. In unloading, it was dropped and broken. Subsequently it was brazed together by an auto mechanic and, because it was imperfect, it was relegated to adorning the barbecue pit. "Any novice would recognize it," he said, pointing to the rough brazing.

The Renaissance man nodded. "I knew the story, of course."

"Then why did you ask?"

"Testing. Tell me. What do you suppose it will bring in an open sale?"

"I'm a professional. I get paid for making evaluations."

Vanessa cleared her throat. "Ah, Jon, he gave me an envelope for you. I'm sure it will be all right."

Neither the voice nor the words were in character for the gruff, hard-drinking Vanessa Dyke, and Jonathan's distaste for this whole theatrical setup grew. He answered crisply. "Impossible to say. Whatever the buyer can afford. It depends on how much he wants it, or how much he wants others to know he owns it. If my memory serves me, the Texan you got it from gave something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million for it."

"What would it bring now?" Vanessa asked.

Jonathan shrugged. "I told you. I can't say."

The Renaissance man spoke without moving even a fold in the fabric of his suit. "Let me ask you an easier question. Something you can answer."

Jonathan's slum boyhood toned his response. "Listen, art lover. Keep your fee. Or better yet, shove it up your ass." He turned to leave, but Vanessa stood in his way.

"Please, Jon? A favor to me?"

"What's this yahoo to you?"

She frowned and shook her head, not wanting to go into it now. He didn't understand, and he was angry, but Vanessa was a friend. He turned back. "What do you want to know?"

The Renaissance man nodded, accepting Jonathan's capitulation. "The Horse will be offered for sale soon. It will bring a very high price. At what point would people in the art world find the price unbelievable? At what point would the newspapers make something of it?"

Jonathan assumed there was a tax dodge on. "There would be talk, but no one would be unduly astonished at, say, half a million. If it came from the right sources."

"Half a million? Dollars?"

"Yes, dollars."

"I paid more than that for it myself. What if the price were well beyond that?"

"How much beyond?"

"Say... five million... pounds."

Jonathan laughed. "Never. The other privately held one could be loosened for a tenth of that And that one's never been broken."

"Perhaps the buyer wouldn't want the other one. Perhaps he has a fondness for flawed statues."

"Five million pounds is a lot to pay for a perverted taste for things flawed."

"Such a price, then, would cause talk."

"It would cause talk, yes."

"I see." The Renaissance man looked down to the floor. "Thank you for your opinion, Dr. Hemlock."

"I think we'd better get back now, Jon," Vanessa said, touching his arm.

Jonathan stopped in the hall and collected his coat from the porter. "Well? Are you going to tell me what that was all about?"

"What's to tell? A mutual friend asked me to arrange a contract between you two. I was paid for it. Oh, here." She gave him a broad envelope, which contained a thick padding of bills.

"But who is that guy?"

She shrugged. "Never saw him before in my life, lover. Come on. I'll buy you a drink."

"I'm not going back in there. Anyway, I have an appointment tonight."

Vanessa looked over his shoulder in the direction of Mrs. Farquahar. "I think I have too."

As he slipped into his overcoat, he looked back toward the door to the private showroom. "You have some weird friends, lady."

"Do you really think so?" She laughed and butted her cigarette in the salver meant to receive tips, then she walked into the crowded reception room where the singer with the gold-tinsel wig and the green mascara was bobbing over the heads of the company, chanting in thin falsetto something about a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and you.

The Renaissance man settled into the passenger seat of his Jensen Interceptor and adjusted his suit coat to prevent its wrinkling. "Has he left?"

The Mute nodded.

"And he's being followed?"

The Mute nodded again.

The Renaissance man clicked on the tape deck and settled to listen to a little Bach as the car crunched along the driveway, its lights out.

A young man with a checked sports coat and a camera depended from his neck stood in a red telephone kiosk beneath a corner streetlamp. While the phone on the other end of the line double-buzzed, he clamped the receiver under his chin awkwardly as he scrawled in a notebook. He had been holding the license number on the rim of his memory by chanting it over and over to himself. Hearing an answering click and hum, he pressed in his twopence piece and said in a hard "r" American accent, "Hi, there."

A cultured voice responded, "Yes? What is it, Yank?"

"How did you know it was me?"

"That hermaphroditic accent of yours."

"Oh. I see." Crestfallen, the young man abandoned his phony American sound and continued with the nasal drawl of public school. "He has left the party, sir. Took a cab."

"Yes?"

"Well, I thought you would like to know. He was followed."

"Good. Good."

"Shall I tag along?"

"No, that wouldn't be wise." The cultured voice was silent for a moment. "Very well. I suppose you have the Baker Street ploy set up?"

"Right, sir. By the way, just in case you want to know, I took note of the time of his departure. He left at exactly... Good Lord."

"What is it?"

"My watch has stopped."

The man on the other end of the line sighed heavily. "Good night, Yank."

"Good night, sir."

Covent Garden

Jonathan sat deep in the back of the taxi, attending only vaguely to the hissing pass of traffic over wet streets. He experienced his usual social nausea after public gatherings of reviewers, teachers, gallery owners, patrons—the paracreative slugs who burden art with their attention—the parasites who pretend to be symbions and who support, with their groveling leadership, the teratogenetic license of democratic art.

"Fucking grex venalium," he muttered to himself, displaying both aspects of his background—the slums and the university halls.

Forget it, he told himself. Don't let them get to you. He looked forward this evening to a pleasant hour or two with MacTaint, his favorite person in London. A thief, a rogue, and a con with a fine sense of scatology and a haughty disdain for such social imperatives as cleanliness, MacTaint seemed to be visiting modern London from the pages of Dickens or the chorus of Threepenny Opera. But he knew painting as did few people in Europe, and he was England's most active dealer in the gray market of stolen art. Although Jonathan had never before been to MacTaint's home, they had often met in little pubs around Covent Garden to drink and joke and talk about painting.

He smiled to himself as he recalled their first meeting three months earlier. He had returned to his flat after a day marred by lectures to serious, ungifted students; meetings with committees whose keen senses of parliamentary procedure obscured their purposes; and gatherings of academic people and art critics, all fencing for position in their miniature arena. He was fed up, and he needed to pass some resuscitating time with his paintings, the eleven Impressionists that were all that remained from the four years he had worked for the Search and Sanction Division of CII. These paintings were the most important things in his life. After all, he had killed for them. Under the protection and blessing of the government, he had performed a half-dozen counter-assassinations ("sanctions," in the crepuscular bureaucratese of CII).

Tired and depressed, he had pushed open the door to his flat, and walked in on a party in progress. Every light was on, his whiskey had been broken out, Haydn played on the phonograph, and the furniture had been moved about to facilitate examination of the eleven Impressionists lining the walls.

But it was a party for only one person. An old man sat alone in a deep wing chair, glass in hand, his tattered overcoat still on, its collar up to his ears revealing only tousled gray hair and a bulbous, new-potato nose.

"Come in. Come in," the old man invited.

"Thank you," Jonathan said, hoping the irony had not been too heavy.

"Have some whiskey?"

"Yes, I think I will." Jonathan poured out a good tot of Laphroaig. "Could I freshen up yours?"

"Oh, that's good of you, son. But I've had sufficient."

Jonathan tugged off his raincoat. "In that case, get the hell out of here."

"In a while. In a while. Relax, lad. I'm feasting my tired eyes on that bit of crusted pigment there. Manet. Good for the soul."

Jonathan smiled, intrigued by this old leprechaun who looked like a cross between a provincial professor emeritus and a dirty dustman. "Yes, it's a first-quality copy."

"Pig shit."

"Sir?"

The visitor leaned forward, dandruff falling from his matted hair, and enunciated carefully. "Pig shit. If that's a copy, I'm a glob of whore's spit."

"Have it your own way. Now get out." As he approached the gnomish housebreaker, Jonathan was deterred by a barrier of odor: ancient sweat, body dirt, mildewed clothing.

The old man raised his hand. "Before you set to bashing me about, I'd best introduce myself. I'm MacTaint."

After a stunned moment, Jonathan laughed and shook MacTaint's hand. Then, for several hours, they drank and talked about painting. At no time did MacTaint take off the tattered, heel-length overcoat, and Jonathan was to learn that he never did.

MacTaint downed the last of the whiskey, set the bottle on the floor beside his chair, and regarded Jonathan with an evaluative squint from beneath shaggy white eyebrows, the salient characteristic of which was maverick hairs that hooked out like antennae over the glittering eyes. "So! You are Jonathan Hemlock." He chuckled. "I can tell you, lad, that your appearance on the scene scared the piss out of a lot of us. You could have been a vast nuisance, you know, with that phenomenal eye of yours. My colleagues in the business of reproducing masters might have found it difficult to pursue their vocations with you about. There was even talk of relieving you of the burden of your bleeding life. But then! Then came the happy news that you, like all worthy men, were at heart a larcenous and acquisitive son of a bitch."

"I'm not very acquisitive anymore."

"That's true, come to think of it. You haven't made a purchase for—how long is it?"

"Four years."

"And why is that?"

"I parted company with my source of money."

"Oh, yes. There was rumor of some kind of government association. As I recall, it was the kind of thing no one wanted to know about. Still. You haven't done half badly. You own these grand paintings, two of which, if I may remind you, came through my own good offices."

"I've never been sure, Mac. What are you? A thief or a handler."

"A thief, by preference. But I'll flog another man's work when times are hard. And you? What are you—other than a frigging enigma?"

"Frigging enigma?"

MacTaint scratched the scruff on his scalp. "You know perfectly well what I mean. My comrades on the continent shared my curiosity about you at first, and we pooled our fragments of information. Bits and pieces that never seemed to form a whole picture. You had this gift, this eye that made it possible for you to spot a fake at a glance. But the rest didn't make much sense. University professor. Critic and writer. Collector of black market paintings. Mountain climber. Employed in some kind of nasty government business. Frigging enigma, that's what you are..."

The taxi driver swore under his breath and jerked back the hand brake. They were frozen in a tangle of traffic around Trafalgar Square. Jonathan decided to walk the rest of the way. His eagerness to be away from the people at Tomlinson's had made him an hour early for his appointment with MacTaint anyway, and he could use the exercise.

To get away from the crowds and the noise for a second, he turned down Craven Street, past the Monk's Tavern, to Craven Passage and The Arches where destitute old women were settling in to pass the night on the paving stones, scraps of cardboard beneath them to absorb the damp, their backs against the brick walls, bits of fabric tugged about them for warmth. They drowsed with the help of gin, but never so deep into sleep that they missed the odd passerby whom they begged for coins or fags with droning, liturgical voices.

Swinging London.

He held to the back streets as long as possible. His mind kept returning to the Renaissance man he had met at Tomlinson's. Five million pounds for a Marini Horse? Impossible. And yet the man had seemed so confident. The event had made Jonathan uncomfortable. It had those qualities of the deadly absurd, of melodramatic hokum and very real threat that he associated with the lethal game players of international espionage, that group of social mutants he had despised when he worked for CII, and whom he had driven from his memory.

He turned back up into the lights and noise of center city. The rain had developed into a dirty, hanging mist that blurred and blended the stew of neon and noise through which crowds of fun-seekers jostled their way.

Modern young girls took long steps with bony legs under ankle-length skirts, their thin shoulders stooped with poor posture, some with frizzly hair, others with lank. They were the kind who abjured cosmetic artifice and insisted upon being accepted for what they were—antiwar, socially committed, sexually liberated, dull, dull, dull.

Working-class girls clopped along in the thick-soled plastic shoes Picasso's kid had inflicted on mass fashion, their stride already displaying hints of the characteristic gait of adult British women: feet splayed, knees bent, backs rigid—seeming to suffer from some chronic rectal ailment. Substantial legs revealed to the crotch by miniskirts, vast liquid breasts sloshing about within stiff brassieres, chattering voices ravaged by the North London glottal gasp, complexions the victims of the Anglo-Saxon penchant for vitamin-free diets. Doughy bodies, doughy minds. Gastronomic anomalies. Dumpling tarts.

Swinging London.

Jonathan walked close to the buildings where passage was clearest.

"Penny for the Guy, mister?"

The voice had come from behind. He turned to find three leering hooligans in their early twenties, jeans and thick steel-toed boots. One of them pushed a wheelchair in which reclined a Guy Fawkes effigy composed of stuffed old clothes and a comic mask beneath a bowler.

"What do you say, mister?" The biggest hooligan held his sleeve. "A penny for the Guy?"

"Sorry." Jonathan pulled away. He walked on with the sense of their presence etching his spine, but they didn't follow.

He turned into New Row with its gaslights, shuttered greengrocers, and bakeries. His pace carried him slowly away from the Mazurka Clubs, Nosh Bars, and Continuous Continental Revues of Piccadilly, and deeper into Covent Garden with its odd mélange of market and theatrical activities. Italian wholesale fruit companies, seedy talent agencies, imported olive oil, and a school of modern dance and ballet—tap a specialty.

Near a streetlamp, a solitary hustler carnivorously watched him approach. She was plump and fortyish, her legs chubby above thick white knee socks. She wore a short dress and a school blazer with emblem, and her stiff platinum hair was done in two long braids that fell on either side of her full cheeks. Obedient to recent police regulations, she did not solicit verbally, but she put one thumb into her mouth and rocked her thick body from side to side, making her eyes round and little girllike. As he passed, Jonathan noticed the scaly cake of her makeup, patched over, but not redone each time she sweated some off in the course of her work.

As he got deeper into the market, the acrid smell of traffic gave way to the high sweet smell of spoiled fruit, and the litter of paper was replaced by a litter of lettuce leaves, slimy and dangerous underfoot.

Down a dark side street, an out-of-tune piano thumped ragged chords as the silhouettes of tired dancers leapt over drawn window shades. Young girls sweating and panting in their damp exercise costumes. Stars in the making.

"Penny for the Guy, mister?"

He spun around, his back against the brick wall, both hands open before his chest.

The two children yelped and ran down the street, abandoning the old pram and its pitiful, floppy effigy wearing a Sneezy the Dwarf mask.

Jonathan called after them, but his shout served only to speed them on. When the street was quiet again, he laughed at himself and tucked a pound note into the Guy's pocket, hoping the children might sneak back later to retrieve it.

He walked on through the gaggle of lanes, then turned off into a cul-de-sac where there were no streetlamps. The end of a dilapidated court was blocked off by heavy double doors of weathered, splintery wood that swung silently on oiled hinges. The black within was absolute, but he knew he had found his way because of the rancid, cumin smell of ancient sweat.

"Ah, there you are, lad. I'd just decided to come looking for you. It's easy enough to get lost if you've never been here before. Here, follow me."

Jonathan stood still until MacTaint had opened the inner door, flooding the inky court with pale yellow light. They entered a large open space that had once been a fruit merchant's warehouse. Odd litter was piled in the corners, and two potbellied coal stoves radiated cheerful heat, their long chimney pipes stretching up into the shadows of the corrugated steel roof some twenty-five feet overhead. Well spaced from one another, three painters stood in pools of light created by bulbs with flat steel shades suspended on long wires from above. Two of them continued working at their easels, oblivious to the intrusion; the third, a tall cadaverous man with an unkempt beard and wild eyes, turned and stared with fury at the source of the draft.

Jonathan followed MacTaint through the warehouse to a door at the far end, and they passed into a totally different cosmos. The inner room was done in lush Victoriana: crystal chandeliers hung from an ornate ceiling; blue-flocked wallpaper stood above eggshell wainscoting; a good wood fire flickered in a wide marble fireplace; mirrors and sconces on all the walls made an even distribution of low intensity light; and comfortable deep divans and wing chairs in soft blue damask were in cozy constellations around carved and inlaid tables. A full-blown woman in her mid-fifties sat on one of the divans, her flabby arm dangling over the back. The bright orange of her hair contested with the blood red of her pasty lipstick, and festoons of bold jewelry clattered as she screwed a cigarette into a rhinestone holder.

"Here we are," MacTaint said as he shuffled in his ragged greatcoat over to the crystal bar. "He wasn't lost after all. This, good my love, is Jonathan Hemlock, about whom you have heard me say nothing. And this vast cow, Jon, is Lilla—my personal purgatory. Laphroaig, I suppose?"

Lilla twirled her cigarette holder into the air in greeting. "How good of you to pay us a visit. Mr. MacTaint has never mentioned you. While you're at it, my dear, you might bring me a little drop of gin."

"Friggin' lush," MacTaint muttered under his breath.

"Come. Sit here, Dr. Hemlock." Lilla thumped dust out of the divan seat beside her. "I take it you're connected with the theatre?"

Jonathan smiled politely into the drooping, overly made-up eyes. "No. No, I'm not."

"Ah. A pity. I was for many years associated with the entertainment world. And I must admit that I sometimes miss it. The laughter. The happy times."

MacTaint shambled over with the drinks. "Her only dealings with theatre were that she used to stand outside and try to hustle blokes too drunk to care what they got into. Here you go, love. Bottoms up, as they used to say in your trade."

"Don't be crude, love." She tossed back the glass of gin and smacked her lips, a motion that jiggled her pendulous cheeks. Then she clapped a ham-sized hand onto Jonathan's forearm and said, "Of course, I suppose it's all changed now. The old artists have gone, it's all youngsters with long hair and loud songs." She relieved herself of a shuddering sigh.

"It's worse than you think," MacTaint said, drooping into a damask chair and hooking another over with his toe so he could put his feet up on it. "The law doesn't allow you to carry sandwich boards advertising the positions you specialize in. And curb service on rubber mattresses is definitely not in."

"Fuck you, MacTaint!" Lilla said in a new accent that carried the snarl of the streets in it.

MacTaint instantly responded in kind. "Hop it, you ha'penny cunt! I'd kick your arse proper for you, if I wasn't afraid of losing me boot!"

Lilla rose with tottering dignity and offered her hand to Jonathan. "I must leave you gentlemen. I have letters to do before retiring."

Jonathan rose and bowed slightly. "Good night, Lilla."

She made her way to the door at the far end of the room, sweeping up a bottle of gin as she passed the bar. She had to tack twice to gain the center of the door, which then gave her some difficulty in opening. In the end she gave it a hinge-loosening kick that knocked it ajar. She turned and waved her cigarette holder at Jonathan before disappearing.

Jonathan looked questioningly at MacTaint, who bared his lower teeth in a grimace of pleasure as he dug his fingernails into the ingrown stubble under his chin. "She drinks, you know," he said.

"Does she?"

"Oh, yes. I found her out there in the yard fifteen years ago," he explained, shifting the scratching to under an arm. "Somebody'd beat her up pretty badly."

"So you took her in?"

"To my eternal regret. Still! An occasional spat is good for the glands. She's a good old hole, really."

"What was this number she was doing for me?"

MacTaint shrugged. "Bits of old roles she's done, I suppose. She's more than a little mental, you know."

"She's not the only one. Cheers." Jonathan drank off half his whiskey and looked around the room with genuine appreciation. "You live well."

MacTaint nodded agreement. "I don't move many paintings anymore. Only one or two a year. But what with no income tax, I do well enough."

"Who are those painters outside?"

"Damned if I know. They come and they go. I keep the place warm and light, and there's always tea and bread and cheese about for them. Sometimes there's only one or two of them, sometimes half a dozen. That tall one who gave you the evil eye, he's been around for years and years. Still working on the same canvas. Feels he owns the place—by squatter's right, I shouldn't wonder. Complains sometimes if the cheese isn't to his liking. The others come and go. I suppose they hear about the place from one another."

"You're a good man, MacTaint."

"Ain't that the bleeding truth. Did I ever tell you that I was once a painter myself?"

"No, never."

"Oh, yes! More than forty years ago I came down to The Smoke to study art. Full of theories I was, about art and socialism. You didn't look at my paintings, you read them. Essays, they were. Hungry children, strikers being bashed up by police, that sort of business. Trash. Then finally I discovered that my calling lay in stealing and flogging paintings. It's fun to do what you're good at."

They fell silent for a time, watching the fire loop yellow and blue in the hearth. It settled with a hiss of sparks, and the sound pulled MacTaint from his musings. "Jon? I asked you to drop over this evening for a reason."

"Not just to drink up your whiskey?"

"No. I've got something I want you to see." He grunted out of his chair and crossed to a painting that had been standing in an ornate old frame, its face to the wall. He carried it back tenderly and set it up on a chair. "What do you think of that?"

Jonathan scanned it and nodded. Then he leaned forward to examine it in detail. After five minutes, he sat back and finished off his Laphroaig. "You're not thinking of selling it, are you?"

MacTaint's eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "And why not?"

"I was thinking of your reputation. You've never peddled a fake before."

"Goddamn your eye!" MacTaint cackled and scratched his scruffy head. "That would pass muster anywhere in the world."

"I'm not saying it's not a good copy—in fact it's extraordinary. But it is a forgery, and you don't flog fakes."

"Don't bother your head about that. I've never sold a piece of shoddy goods before, and I never shall. But slake my curiosity, lad. How can you tell it's phony?"

Jonathan shrugged. It was difficult to explain the almost automatic processes of mind and eye that constituted his gift. "Oh, a thousand things," he said.

"For instance?"

He sat back and closed his eyes, dredging up the original of J.-B.-S. Chardin's House of Cards from the lagan of his memory and holding it in focus as he studied the mental image. Then he opened his eyes slowly and examined the painting before him. "All right. This was done in Holland. At least, the Van M. technique was used. A relatively valueless painting of the proper age and size was sanded down, and the surface crackle was brought up by successive bakings of layers of paint."

MacTaint nodded.

"But the crackle was not perfect here." He touched the white areas around the face of the young man in a three-cornered hat. "And when the crackle didn't bake through perfectly, your forger rolled the canvas to force it. Basically a good job, too. But in these areas it ought to be deeper and more widely spaced. Your man seems to have forgotten that white dries more slowly than other pigments."

"And that's the only flaw? Crackle?"

"No, no. Dozens of other errors. Most of them are excessive precision. Forgers tend to be more exact in their draftsmanship than the artist was. Look here, for instance, at the perspective on the boy's left eye."

"Looks all right to me."

"Precisely. On the original, Chardin made a slight error—probably caused by two sittings during the drawing. And look here at the coin. It's as carefully drawn as the marker there. In the genuine painting, the coin has blurred outlines, as though it were in a different field of focus from the marker."

MacTaint shook his head in admiration, and a fall of dandruff floated to his lap. "Goddamn those eyes of yours."

"Even forgetting my eyes, this thing would bounce the minute it hit the market. The original hangs in the National Gallery."

"Oh, get along with you!"

They laughed, knowing that many forgeries hang bravely and unchallenged in the major galleries of the world, while the originals hang in clandestine splendor in private collections. This was, in fact, the case with all but one of Jonathan's own Impressionists.

"Would this pass inspection, Jon?"

They both knew that the real skills of major curators were limited to the documentation of ownership patterns, despite their tendencies to report in terms of genuine knowledge. "With what provenance?" Jonathan asked.

"Oh... let's say it was hanging in the National Gallery in place of the real one."

Jonathan raised his eyebrows, his turn to feel admiration. "No question at all," he pronounced with confidence. "But how would you get at the real Chardin, Mac? Since the '57 thing, they've stiffened their security and there hasn't been a successful theft."

"What makes you think that?" MacTaint's eyes were round with feigned surprise, and he looked more than ever like a mischievous leprechaun.

"But there's a weight alarm system. You couldn't possibly get one off the wall without being detected."

"Of course it would be detected. It's always detected."

"Always? Tell me, Mac. How many paintings have you nicked from the National Gallery?"

"All told?" MacTaint squinted sideways in concentration. "Over the years? Ah—h, let's see... seven."

"Seven!" Jonathan stared at the old man. "I'll take that drink now," he said quietly.

"Here you go."

"Ta."

"Cheers."

They drank in silence. Jonathan shook his head. "I'm trying to see this in my mind, Mac. First, you walk to the gallery."

"I do that. Yes. In I walk."

"Then you take the painting from the wall. The alarms go off."

"Dreadful noise."

"You hang up a reasonably good forgery in its place, and you stroll out. Is that it?"

"Well, I don't stroll, exactly. More like running arse over teakettle. But in broad terms, yes, that's it."

"Now the alarm system tells them which picture has been tampered with, right?"

"Correct."

"And yet it never occurs to them to give the painting a professional scrutiny."

"They give it a great deal of attention. But not scrutiny." MacTaint was enjoying Jonathan's confusion immensely. "You're dying to know how I do it, aren't you?"

"I am."

"Well, I'm not going to tell you. Give that mind of yours something to chew on. You'll figure it out easily enough when you read about it in the newspapers."

"When will that be?"

"Exactly one week from tonight."

"You're a crafty and secretive son of a bitch."

"Part of my charm."

"MacTaint..." Jonathan didn't pursue it. He had no doubt at all but that the old fox would get the painting.

"All right," MacTaint relented, "I'll give you a little hint." He fished up a penknife from the depths of his overcoat pocket and pulled open one of the blades with a broken crusty thumbnail. Then he leaned over the painting for a second before slashing it twice, making a broad × through the face of the boy. "There. How's that?"

"You are a nut, MacTaint. I'm getting out of here."

MacTaint chuckled to himself as he showed Jonathan to the door. "Haven't you ever wanted to do something like that, lad? Slash a painting? Or break a raw egg in your hand? Or kiss a strange lady in an elevator?"

"You're a nut. Give my love to Lilla."

"I have enough trouble trying to give her my own."

"Good night"

"Yes."

The warehouse-cum-studio was in darkness, save for a single light hanging from the corrugated roof and the reddish glow of banked coal fires through the mica windows of the pot-bellied stoves. Only one painter was still at work, alone in absorbed concentration within the single circle of light. Jonathan walked silently across the cement floor and stood at the edge of the light, watching. His attention was so taken by the alert, feline motions of the painter attacking the canvas, then drawing back to judge effect, that it was some moments before he realized she was a woman. Seemingly oblivious to his presence, she squeezed off the excess paint from her brush between her thumb and forefinger and wiped them on the seat of her jeans, then she put the brush between her teeth sideways and took up a finer one to correct some detail. Her cavalier method of cleaning brushes was evidently habitual, because her bottom was a chaos of pigment, and Jonathan found this more interesting than the modernistic daub on the easel.

"What do you think of it?" she asked between her teeth, without turning around.

"It's certainly colorful. And attractively taut. But I think its potential for motion is its most appealing feature."

She stepped back and scrutinized the canvas critically. "Taut?"

"Well, I don't mean rigid. More lean and compact."

"And interesting?"

"Most interesting."

"That's the kiss of death. When people don't like what you've done, but they don't want to hurt your feelings, they always fall back on "interesting."

Jonathan laughed. "Yes, I suppose that's true." He was delighted by her voice. It had the curling vowels of Irish, and the range was a dry contralto.

"No, now tell me true. What do you honestly think of it?"

"You really want to know?"

"Probably not." With a quick movement she brushed a wisp of amber hair away with the back of her hand. "But go ahead."

"Like most modern painting, I think it's undisciplined, self-indulgent crap."

She took the brush from her mouth and stood for a moment, her arms crossed over her chest. "Well now. No one could accuse you of trying to chat a girl up just to get into her knickers."

"But I am chatting you up," he protested, "and probably for that reason."

She looked at him for the first time, her eyes narrowed appraisingly. "Does that work very often—just saying it out boldly like that?"

"No, not very often. But it saves me a hell of a lot of wasted energy."

She laughed. "Do you really know anything about art?"

"I'm afraid so."

"I see." She thoughtfully replaced her brushes in a soup tin filled with turpentine. "Well. That's it, I guess." She turned to him and smiled. "Are you in a mood to celebrate?"

"Celebrate what?"

"The end of my career."

"Oh, come now!"

"No, no. Don't flatter yourself that it's just your opinion, informed though you assure me it is. As it happens, I agree with you totally. I suppose I'm a better critic than painter. Still, I've made one great contribution to Art. I've taken myself out of it."

He smiled. "All right. How would you like to celebrate?"

"I think dinner might be a good idea for starts. I haven't eaten since morning."

"You're broke?"

"Stoney."

"The only thing open this time of night would be one of the more fashionable restaurants." He glanced involuntarily at her clothes.

"Don't worry. I shan't embarrass you. I'll just clean up and change before we go."

"You have your clothes here?"

She nodded her head toward two suitcases standing against the wall. "My rent came due this morning, you see. And the landlady never cared for the stink of turps in the halls anyway." She began scrubbing the paint from her hands with a cloth dipped in turpentine.

"You intended to sleep here?"

"Just for the night. The old geezer won't mind. Other painters have done it from time to time. I used the last of my money to send an SOS telegram to relatives in Ireland. They'll be sending something down in the morning, I suspect. You can turn your back if the female nude disturbs you—not that I'll be all that nude."

"No, no. Go ahead. I've passed some of my happiest moments in the presence of the nude figure."

She wriggled out of her close-fitting jeans and kicked them up into her hands. "Of course, as a nude, I wouldn't have been much to Rubens's taste. I'm quite the opposite of ample, as you can see. In fact, I'm damned near two-dimensional."

"They're two of my favorite dimensions."

She was just pulling her jumper over her head, and she stopped in mid-motion, looking out through the head opening. "You've a glib and shallow way of talking. I suppose the girls find that dishy."

"But you do not."

"No, not especially. But I don't hold it against you, for I suppose it's just a habit. Will this do, do you think?" She drew up from the open suitcase a long green paisley gown that set off the cupric tones of her hair.

"That will do perfectly."

She tossed it on over her head, then patted down her short fine hair. "I'm ready."

He gave her her choice of restaurants, and she selected an expensive French one near Regent's Park on the basis that she had never had the money to go there and it was fun to be both beggar and chooser. Nothing about the meal was right. The butter in the scampi meunière tasted of char, the salade niçoise was more acid than bracing, and the only wine available at temperature was a Pouilly-Fuissé, that atonic white that occupies so large a sector of British taste. But Jonathan enjoyed the evening immensely. She was a charmer, this one, and the quality of the food did not matter, save as another subject for laughter. The lilt and color of her accent was contagious, and he had to prevent himself from slipping into an imitation of it.

She ate with healthy appetite, both her portions and his, while he watched her with pleasure. Her face intrigued him. The mouth was too wide. The jawline was too square. The nose undistinguished. The amber hair so fine that it seemed constantly stirred by unfelt breezes. It was a boyish face with the mischievous flexibility of a street gamine. Her most arresting feature was her eyes, bottle green and too large for the face, and thick lashes like sable brushes. Their special quality came from the rapid eddies of expression of which they were capable. Laughter could squeeze them from below; another moment they would flatten to a look of vulnerable surprise; then instantly they were narrow with incredulity; then intense and shining with intelligence; but at rest, they were nothing special. In fact, no single element of her face was remarkable, but the total he found fascinating.

"Do you find me pretty?" she asked, glancing up and finding his eyes on her.

"Not pretty."

"I know what you mean. But it's a good old face. I enjoy doing self-portraits. But I have to suppress this mad desire I have to add to my measuring thumb. Your face is not so bad, you know."

"I'm glad."

She turned to her salad. "Yes, it's an interesting face. Bony and craggy and all that. But the eyes are a bother."

"Oh?"

"Are you sure you're not hungry?"

"Positive."

"Actually, they're smashing. But they're not very comfortable eyes." She glanced up and looked at them professionally. "It's difficult to say if they're green or gray. And even though you smile and laugh and all that, they never change. You know what I mean?"

"No." Of course he knew, but he liked having her talk about him.

"Well, most people's eyes seem to be connected to their thoughts. Windows to the soul and all. But not yours. You can't read a thing by looking into them."

"And that's bad?"

"No. Just uncomfortable. If you're not going to eat that salad, I'll just keep it from going to waste."

Over coffee, over cognac, over more coffee, they talked without design.

"Do you know what I've always wished?"

"No. What?"

"I've always wished I was a tall, terribly handsome black woman. With long legs and a chilling, disdainful sideways glance."

He laughed. "Why have you wished that?"

"Oh, I don't know really. But think of the clothes I could get away with wearing!"

"...oh, it was a typical middle-class Irish childhood, I suspect. Cooed over and spoiled as a baby; ignored as a child. Taught how to pass tests and how to stand with good posture. My father was a rabid Irish nationalist, but like most he had suspicions of inferiority. He sent me off to university in London—to get a really good education. And they were delighted when I came back with an English accent. I hated school as a girl. Sports and gymnastics particularly. I remember that we had a very, very modern physical culture teacher. A great bony woman, she was, with a prissy voice and a faint moustache. She tried to introduce the girls to the joys of eurythmics. You should have seen us! A gaggle of awkward girls—some with stick legs and knobby knees, others placid and fat—all trying to follow instructions 'to writhe with an inner passion and reach up expressively for the Sun God and let him penetrate your body.' We'd giggle about inner passions and penetrations, and the teacher would call us shallow, silly girls and dirty-minded. Then she'd writhe for us to show how it should be done. And we'd giggle some more. Cigarette?"

"I don't smoke."

She didn't seem to realize that she had stopped her story midway and had turned her thoughts inward.

He allowed the silence to run its course, and when she focused again on him with a slight start, he said, "So you won't be going back to Ireland?"

She butted her cigarette out deliberately. "No. Not ever." She lit another and stared at the gold lighter as though she were seeing it for the first time. "I should never have gone to the North. But I did and... too much happened there. Too much hatred. And death." She sighed and shook her head briskly. "No. I'll never go back to Ireland."

"Say, do you like Sterne?" she said.

"Ah... funny you should mention him."

"Why?"

"I haven't the slightest idea who you're talking about."

"Sterne," she said, "the writer."

"Oh. That Sterne."

"I've always had this deep intuition that I would get on well with any man who had a fondness for Sterne, Trollope, and Galsworthy."

"Has it worked out like that?"

"I don't know. I've never met anyone who liked Sterne."

"More coffee?"

"Please."

"...and you took up painting?"

"Oh, little by little. Not with much courage at first. Then I took the plunge and decided I would do nothing but paint until my money ran out. The family was dead against it, especially as they had wasted so much money sending me over here to school. I suppose they would have been happier if I had gone into prostitution. At least they would have understood the profit motive. Well, I painted and painted, and nobody at all noticed. Then I ran out of money and sold everything I had of any value. But the first thing I knew, I was stoney broke and didn't even have rent money."

"And that was that."

"And that was that." She looked up and smiled "And here I am."

"I have a confession to make," he said seriously.

"You're a typhoid carrier?"

"No."

"You're designed to self-destruct in seven minutes?"

"No."

"You're a boy."

"No. You'll never guess."

"In which case I give up."

"I have never liked the films of Eisenstein. They bore me to screaming."

"That is serious. What do you do for espresso talk?"

"Oh, I'm not excusing myself. I recognize it to be a great flaw in my character."

"...oh, I love to drive! Fast, at night, in back lanes, with the lights off. Don't you?"

"No."

"Most men do, I think. British men especially. They use fast cars sexually, if you know what I mean."

"Like Italians."

"I suppose."

"Maybe that's why both countries produce so many competent grand prix drivers. They get practice on public roads."

"But you don't like to drive fast?"

"I don't need it."

She smiled. "Good." The vowel was drawn out and had an Irish curl.

"...Philosophy of life?" he asked, smiling to himself at the idea. "No, I've never had one. When I was a kid, we were too poor to afford them, and later on they had gone out of fashion."

"No, now, don't send me up. I know the words sound pompous, but everyone has some kind of philosophy of life—some way of sorting out the good things from the bad... or the potentially dangerous."

"Perhaps. The closest I've come to that is my rigid adherence to the principle of leave-a-little."

"Leave a little what?"

"Leave-a-little everything. Leave a party before it becomes dull. Leave a meal before you're cloyed. Leave a city before you feel that you know it."

"And I suppose that includes human relationships?"

"Most especially human relationships. Get out while they're still on the upswing. Leave before they become predictable or, what is worse, meaningful. Be willing to lose a few events to protect the memory."

"I think that's a terrible philosophy."

"I'm sorry. It's the only one I've got"

"It's a coward's philosophy."

"It's a survivor's philosophy. Shall we have the cheese board?"

He half stood in greeting as she returned to the table. "A last brandy?" he asked.

"Yes, please." She was pensive for a second. "You know, it just now occurred to me that one might make a useful barometer of national traits by studying national toilet tissues."

"Toilet tissues?"

"Yes. Has that ever occurred to you?"

"Ah... no. Never."

"Well, for instance. I was just noticing that some English papers are medicated. You'd never find that in Ireland."

"The English are a careful race."

"I suppose. But I've heard that American papers are soft and scented and are advertised on telly by being caressed and squeezed—right along with adverts for suppository preparations and foods that are finger-licking good: That says something about decadence and soft living in a nation with affluence beyond its inner resources, doesn't it?"

"What do you make of the waxed paper the French are devoted to?"

"I don't know. More interest in speed and flourish than efficiency?"

"And the crisp Italian papers with the tensile strength of a communion wafer?"

She shrugged. It was obvious that one could make something of that too, but she was tired of the game.

She took his arm as they walked along the wet street to a corner more likely to produce taxis.

"I'll drop you off at Mac's. It's more or less on my way."

"Where do you live?"

"Right here." They were indeed passing the entrance to the hotel in which he had a penthouse apartment.

"But you said—"

"I thought I'd give you a way out."

She walked along in silence for a while, then she squeezed his arm. "That was a nice gesture. Truly gentle."

"I'm like that," he said, and laughed.

"But it is a bit odd that you just happen to live two doors from the restaurant."

"Now wait a minute, madam. You picked the restaurant."

She frowned. "That's true, isn't it. Still, it's a troubling coincidence."

He stopped and placed his hands on her shoulders, searching her face with mock sincerity. "Could it be... fate?"

"I think it's more likely a coincidence."

He agreed and they started off again, but back toward the hotel.

The phone double-buzzed several times before an angry voice answered. "Yes? Yes?"

"Good evening, sir."

"Good Lord! Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes, sir. Sorry. I just thought you'd like to know that they just went into his hotel on Baker Street."

"Is there any trouble? Is everything prepared?"

"No trouble, sir."

"Then why are you calling?"

"Well, I just thought you would want to be kept in the picture. They entered the hotel at exactly... oh, my. I must get this watch seen to."

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

Then, "Good night, Yank."

"Good night, sir."

Baker Street

"Lord love us!" she said. "This is ghastly!"

Jonathan laughed as he passed on ahead, turning on lights as he went. She followed him through two rooms.

"Is there no end to it?" she asked.

"There are eleven rooms. Including six bedrooms, but only one bath."

"That must cause some awkward traffic problems."

"No. I live here alone."

She dropped into the spongy pink velvet upholstery of an oversized chaise longue carved with conchs, serpentine sea dragons, and bosomy mermaids painted in antique white enamel and picked out in metallic gold. "I'm afraid to touch this rubbish. Afraid I'll catch something."

"Not an unfounded fear. Nothing is more communicable than bad taste, as Ortega y Gasset has warned us. Look at pop art or the novels of Robbe-Grillet."

She looked at him quizzically. "You really are an academic, aren't you?" She scanned the pink marble fireplace, the harlequin wallpaper, the Danish modern furniture, the yellow shag rug, the burgundy-tinted glass sconces, the wrought-iron wall plaques. The saccharine profusion caused her nostrils to dilate and her throat to constrict. "How can you stand to live here?"

He shrugged. "It's free. And I have a little flat in Mayfair. I only stay here when I'm in this end of town."

"Goodness me. Impressive, sir. Two flats in the midst of a housing shortage. And he reads Ortega y... whoever. What more could a beggar girl ask?"

"She could ask for a drink." He poured from a hammered aluminum decanter in the form of a wading bird. "The single advantage of this place is that it makes going out into the street a pleasure. And you need something like that in London. Cheers."

"Cheers. You don't find London attractive?"

"Well, it's made me reevaluate my aesthetic ranking of Gary, Indiana."

She took her drink and wandered into the next room, which was less tastefully appointed. "How did you come by this place? Do you have enemies in real estate?"

"No. It belongs to a film producer who took a twenty-year lease on it years ago to soak up some of the 'funny money' he had made in England, but couldn't take out of the country. He uses it as a pied-à-terre when in London, and he gives keys to friends who might be passing through. When I told him I'd be spending a year in England, he offered to lend it to me."

"Did he decorate it himself?"

"He used furniture and props from his films. The Doris Day/Rock Hudson sort of things."

"I see. Where do you stay to get away from the noise?"

"Come along." He led her through two rooms to one that had been left unfurnished. He had dragged in some of the quieter pieces and had hung his collection of Impressionists around the slate gray walls. It was in this room that he had first found MacTaint drinking his whiskey and admiring his paintings.

The canvases arrested her. She set down her glass and stood before a pointillist Pissarro in silence.

"I have a hobby of collecting the best copies I can find," he told her.

"Beautiful."

"Oh, yes. Even copies, they're capable of putting modern painting in its place."

"All right, sir," she said in a heavy brogue, "that will be enough of that altogether." She crossed to the tall windows and looked out on the pattern of lamplights in the park below. "Six bedrooms, is it? Choice of room must be an interesting cachet for the women you bring up here."

"Don't fish."

"Sorry. You're quite right."

"In point of fact, it occurs to me that I have never invited a woman up here."

She looked at him over the top of her glass, her green eyes round with a masque of ingenuousness. "And I am the very, very first one?"

"You're the first one I've invited." He told her about waking one morning to find a woman staggering about in his bathroom. Despite her sunken eyes and greenish look of recent dissipation, he had recognized her as a film actress whom cosmetic surgery and breast injections kept employed past her time. She had evidently gotten a key from the producer years before, and had come there drunk after a night on the town with a brace of Greek boys. They had dropped her off after taking what money she had in her purse. She hadn't remembered anything of the night and after Jonathan had given her a breakfast bland enough to keep down, she had tucked a straying breast back into her gown, bestowed a snickering leer upon him through bloodshot eyes, and asked him how they had done.

"And what did you tell her?"

Jonathan shrugged. "What could I tell her? I said she had been fantastic and it had been a night I would never forget. Then I got her a cab."

"And she left?"

"After giving me her autograph. It's over there."

She went to the mantel and unfolded a sheet of paper. "But it's blank."

"Yes. The pen was out of ink, but she didn't notice."

She folded the paper carefully and replaced it "Poor old dear."

"She doesn't know that. She thinks she's having a ball."

"Still, it makes me want to cry."

"If she ever found that out, she'd leave blank autographs behind her everywhere."

She returned to the window and looked out in silence, her cheek against the drapery. After a time she said, "It was nice of you."

"Just the easiest way out."

"I suppose so." She turned and looked at him thoughtfully. "What's your name?"

"Jonathan Hemlock. And yours?"

"Maggie. Maggie Coyne."

"Shall we go to bed, Maggie?"

She nodded and hummed. "Yes, I'd like that. But..." Her eyes crinkled impishly. "But I'm afraid I have some rather bad news for you."

He was silent for several seconds.

"You're kidding. This doesn't happen to good guys."

"I wish I were kidding. I really didn't mean to cheat you. But I didn't have a place to stay, don't you see?"

"I'll be goddamned."

"Pity we didn't meet a day or two later."

"Only a day or two?"

"Yes."

Jonathan rose. "Madam! It has always been my contention that the more subtle pleasures of lovemaking are reserved for those with daring and abandon. How do you feel about that?"

She grinned. "I have always felt the same way, sir."

"Then we're of a mind."

"We are that"

"En route."

At the first light of morning he woke hazily and turned to her, fitting her bottom into his lap. She snuggled against him slightly in response, and he wrapped her up in his arms.

"Good morning." His voice was husky as a result of little sleep and much exercise.

"Good morning," she whispered.

He rested his forehead against the back of her head and buried his face in her hair. "Maggie."

"What?"

"Nothing. Saying your name."

"Oh. That's nice. It isn't much of a name, though. Not romantic. No vowels to sing. Like Diane, or Alexandra, or Thomasyn. Maggie is a substantial name. Beefy. You may not waste away dreaming of a Maggie, but you can always trust a good old Maggie."

He smiled at the curling sound of her vowels. Proximity and body heat began to work their effect, apparent almost at once to her because of their postures. "I think I'll just make a little trip to your WC first, if you can stand the wait."

He released her. "Don't come back cold."

She slipped out of bed, and he slipped back toward sleep.

"Jonathan?"

He was fully awake immediately. She had spoken softly, but there was a brittle tension in her voice that set off alarms in him. He sat up.

"What is it?"

She stood in the doorway, an unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers. With only her brief panties on, she looked frail and vulnerable.

"What is it, Maggie?"

"The bathroom." Her voice was thin.

"Yes?"

"Jonathan?" Tight terror in her voice.

As he swung out of bed, he took up his robe and handed it to her, then he went quickly down the hall to the open door of the bathroom.

A man sat on the toilet seat, huddled over with his arms wrapped around his stomach. He was dressed in a black suit, and his graying hair was perfectly combed. The scene was denied dark humor by the terrible stench that filled the room and by the thick amoeba of blood that spread over the tile floor, fed by drips from his saturated trousers.

Jonathan's experience with CII told him exactly what had happened. The man had been gut shot, and as always in such cases, a convulsion of the sphincter had caused him to defecate. The mixed smells of blood and excrement were potent.

Jonathan stepped to him, carefully avoiding the thickening blood on the floor. He placed his fingertips against the throat. The man was not dead, but the pulse was faint and fluttery. The man lifted his head and looked blearily at Jonathan. There was no chance for him. The eyes had that wall-eyed spread that attends death. The pupils were contracted. There was dope in him.

Jonathan's attention was attracted to a slight pulsing motion in the man's lap. He was holding his guts in with his hands. He tried to speak, but only a glottal whisper came out. Jonathan put his ear close to the mouth, resisting the revulsion caused by the stink of human feces.

"I... I'm awfully... sorry. Disgraceful thing... I..."

"Who are you?"

"Shameful..."

"Who are you?"

Out of the tail of his eye, Jonathan saw Maggie standing at the bathroom door. Her face was a plane of disgust and horror. She was trying to calm herself by lighting her cigarette, but in her nervousness she couldn't operate the lighter.

"Get out."

"What?" She was confused.

"Get out. He's ashamed."

She disappeared.

"Oh, God... Oh, good God..." The man's body tensed. He stared up at Jonathan with anguish and disbelief, his teeth clenched, his head shuddering with his vein-bursting effort to cling to life. "Oh! God!"

Then he let it go. He slumped and let life go.

He made one last sound. A name.

Then he slipped off the toilet seat almost gracefully, and his cheek came to rest in his own blood. His hands fell away, and the gray green guts protruded. The seat of his trousers was wet and stained with excrement.

Jonathan stood up and stepped back. For the first time he noticed something crammed in behind the toilet bowl. It was a Halloween mask—Casper the ghost. He stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind him.

Maggie was standing down the hall, her back pressed against the wall defensively, her face pale with terror. He put his arm around her for support and conducted her to the bedroom.

"Here. Lie down. Put your feet up."

"I think I'm going to be sick," she said faintly.

"It's shock. Go ahead, be sick. Put your finger down your throat."

She tried, and gagged. "I can't!"

"Listen to me, Maggie! I don't mean to be cruel or unfeeling, but you've got to pull yourself together. We've got to get out of here. That man in there... This is a setup. I've seen them before. For your own good, do exactly what I tell you. If you're going to be sick, do it. If not, get dressed. Then lie down and rest until I've done a couple of things. OK?"

She stared at him, confused and frightened by his cool efficiency. "What is this? What's happening?"

"Just do what I told you. Here. Give me that. I'll light it for you."

"Thank you."

"There. Now, move over."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing." Jonathan lay full length on his back beside her and closed his eyes. He put his palms together in a prayerlike gesture and brought them to his face, the thumbs under his chin and the forefingers touching his lips. Then he regulated his breathing, taking very shallow breaths deep in the stomach. He focused his mind on the image of an unrippled pond, calm in a chill dawn light. Tension drained from him; the adrenaline seeped away; his mind grew peaceful and clear.

In three minutes he opened his eyes slowly and brought the room back into focus. He was all right.

He rose and moved around the room quickly, getting dressed and emptying pockets and drawers in search of money.

Maggie finished her cigarette, her eyes never leaving him; something in his adroit, professional movements fascinated her. And frightened her.

He looked over the room to see that everything was done, then he knelt on the bed and brushed the hair away from her forehead. "Come on, now. Get dressed, dear." He nuzzled into the closure of her dressing gown and kissed each of her breasts lightly. Then he left to collect money from the other bedrooms.

Typical of poor boys who have finally become financially comfortable, he was ostentatiously careless with money and kept a fair amount around in cash. By the time he had come back to their bedroom, combed and shaved, he had gathered almost three hundred pounds, largely in crumpled forgotten notes.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed, but still dazed.

He sipped his third café crème. Maggie had desultorily stirred hers when it arrived, but had not drunk it; a tan scum had formed on its surface. She stared into the glass unseeing, her thoughts focused within her. From their table deep within a coffee shop across the street, Jonathan watched the entrance of his Baker Street residence carefully. They had not spoken since ordering.

She broke the silence without looking up from her glass. "Are we safe here? Right across the street?"

He nodded, his eyes not leaving the hotel's revolving door. "Fairly safe, yes. They'll expect us to try to make distance."

"They? Who are they?"

"I don't know."

"But you have some idea?"

"It could be CII. An American intelligence organization I used to work for. Years ago."

"Doing what?"

He glanced at her. How could he tell her he had been an assassin? Or even, to split moral hairs, a counterassassin? He returned to watching the doorway across the street.

"But why would they want to implicate you in... in that terrible business back there?"

"They have devious, perverted minds. Impossible to know what they're up to. Chances are they want me to work for them again."

"I don't understand."

"Drink your coffee."

"I don't want it."

They returned to silence and to their own thoughts. And after a time the impulse to speak came to both at once.

"Do you know what was the worst... Pardon? You were saying?"

"Look, Maggie, I'm very sorry... Excuse me... The worst what?"

"Sorry... No, you go ahead."

"Sorry... I was just going to say the obvious, love. I'm terribly sorry you're implicated in this."

"Am I? Really implicated, Jonathan?"

He shook his head. "No, no. Not really. I'll get you clear of it. Don't worry."

"And what about you?"

"I can take care of myself."

"True." She searched his eyes. "Too well, really."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Well, that's what I was going to say before. When I think about it, the worst part of the whole thing was your reaction. So brisk. Professional. As though you were used to this sort of business. You were terribly calm."

"Not really. I was scared and confused. That's why I had to take that unit of light meditation."

"On the bed?"

"Yes."

"And you can sort yourself out just like that? In a few minutes?"

"I can now. After years of practice."

She considered that for a moment. "There must have been some terrible things in your life, for you to have to develop—"

"There! There they are!"

She followed his eyes to the hotel entrance. Through gaps in the traffic, she saw two men emerge and stand on the pavement, looking up and down the street. One of them was dressed oddly in flared trendy trousers, cowboy boots, and a longish, tight plaid sports jacket. The collar of his aloha shirt was folded over the jacket collar in the style of twenty-five years ago, and a bulky camera dangled from around his neck. The other man was tall and powerfully built. His bullet-shaped head was shaved, and there were deep folds of skin halfway up the back of his neck. He wore a thick turtleneck sweater under a tweed jacket, and gave the impression of a prizefighter, save for his large, mirror-faced sunglasses.

Aloha Shirt said something to Bullet Head. From his expression, he was angry. Bullet Head barked back, clearly not willing to take the blame. They looked again up and down the street, then Aloha made a signal with his hand, and a dark Bentley pulled up to the curb. They got in, Bullet in front, Aloha alone in back. The Bentley pulled into the traffic, bullying its way into the flow on the strength of its prestige.

Maggie looked at Jonathan, who was studying the faces of the other passersby in front of the hotel. "That's all," he said to himself. "Just the two."

"How do you know—"

He held up his hand. "Just a moment." He watched the street narrowly until, in about three minutes, the Bentley passed again, slowing down as it went by the hotel entrance, the men within leaning forward to examine it carefully. Then the car sought the center lane and drove off.

"OK. They won't be back. Not for a few hours, anyway. But they've undoubtedly left someone inside."

"How do you know they were the ones?"

"Instinct. They have the look of the weird types you find in espionage. And their subsequent behavior nailed it."

"Espionage? What on earth is going on, Jonathan?"

He shook his head slowly. "I honestly don't know."

"Have you done something?"

"No." He felt anger and bitterness rise inside him. "I think it's something they want me to do."

"What sort of thing?"

He changed the subject curtly. "Tell me, how would you describe the boss one? The one with the camera and the gaudy shirt?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. An American, I suppose. A tourist?"

"Not a tourist. Even in his excitement, he checked the traffic from right to left. As though he were used to driving on the left. Americans check it from left to right."

"But the cowboy boots?"

"Yes. But the trousers were of British cut."

"He did look odd, come to think of it. Like an American. But like an American in old movies."

"Exactly my impression."

"What does that tell you?" She leaned forward conspiratorially.

Jonathan smiled at her, suddenly amused by the tone of their conversation. "Nothing, really. Drink your coffee."

She shook her head.

He withdrew into himself for several minutes, his brow furrowed, his eyes focused through the patterned wall he was staring at. Unit by unit he put together the flow of his necessary actions for the rest of the day. Then he took a deep breath and resettled his attention on Maggie. "OK, listen." He drew his wallet from his jacket pocket. Folded in it were his checkbook, several sheets of writing paper, stamps, and envelopes, all of which he had collected in his tour of the penthouse flat. "I'll be damned!" He had also drawn out the envelope containing money the Renaissance man had given him for his ad hoc appraisal of the Marini Horse. He had completely forgotten about it. So he wasn't working all that lucidly after all. His reactions had rusted in the years since he had quit this kind of business forever. He opened the envelope and counted the money: ten fifty-pound notes. Good. He wouldn't have to use a check after all. "Here," he said, passing two hundred pounds over the table, "take this."

She moved her hand away from the notes, as though to avoid contaminating contact. "I don't need it"

"Of course you need it. You don't have a room. You don't have any money. And you can't go back to MacTaint's."

"Why not?"

"They'll have someone watching it. This thing is pretty carefully put together. They must have been on me most of the night. I don't too often sleep up there. I usually stay in my Mayfair flat."

"If you hadn't met me..."

"Nonsense. If they really wanted to get to me, they'd have done it sooner or later."

"Something occurs to me, Jonathan. How did they get in?"

"Oh, any number of ways. Picked the lock. Used a key. And there are a lot of keys around. I told you about that drunk actress."

"Still, it must have been difficult. Carrying that poor man."

"He was alive when they brought him in. They shot him there in the bathroom. No blood in the hall. He was heavily doped up."

"But still, how did they get him up to your flat?"

He shook his head. While they had waited for the elevator to bring them down from his apartment, he had noticed a folding wheelchair against the wall. That, together with the Casper mask stuffed behind his toilet, told him that they'd brought the poor son of a bitch there as a Guy Fawkes dummy. Jonathan saw no reason to share this grisly detail with Maggie.

"Here, take the money."

"No, really..."

"Take it."

Her hand shook as she accepted the folded notes.

"I know, dear. And I'm sorry. It's really a piece of bad luck that you got mixed up in this. But you'll be all right. They're not after you."

Tears appeared in her eyes, as much in reaction to the stress and fear as anything else. She didn't apologize for them, nor did she try to blink them away. "But they are after you. And I'm afraid for you." She pulled herself together by the technique of assuming a broad Irish accent. "I've grown rather fond of you, don't you know?"

"I've grown fond of you too, madam. Maybe after I've sorted this thing out..."

"Yes. Let's do try."

"Will you have some coffee now?"

She nodded and sniffed back the last of the tears.

He ordered more coffee and some croissants, and they didn't speak until after the waiter had brought them and departed. She drank her coffee and broke up a croissant, but she didn't eat it. She pushed her plate aside and asked, "Will you be able to let me know how you're getting on?"

"That wouldn't be wise. For you, Maggie. Anyway, I won't know where you're staying. And I don't want to."

"Oh, but I'd feel dreadful not knowing if you were all right."

"All right. Look, tomorrow afternoon I will be giving a lecture at the Royal Institute of Art. You can attend. That way you'll be able to see me and you'll know I'm all right. If it looks as though we can meet afterward, I'll end the discussion by saying that I hope to have the opportunity to pursue some of these matters with interested individuals in private. And about an hour later, I'll meet you right here. OK?"

She frowned, confused. "You intend to go ahead with this lecture?"

"Oh yes. With all my social engagements. In this sort of game, they win if they can completely disrupt my life. That would force me either to come to terms with them, or to go on hiding forever. I'm reasonably safe in the open, in public places. You notice that they didn't bring the police with them just now. The big trick will be getting to and from the lecture, and keeping out of sight in the meanwhile. But I've been trained in this sort of game. So don't worry."

"What kind of advice is that?"

He smiled. "Well, don't worry too much anyway."

"Do you really think you can avoid them forever?"

"No. Not forever. But I'll get a chance to think. And I'll try to pick my own ground for meeting them."

"What are you going to do now? After I leave you?"

"I have to arrange some mechanical things. I don't have clothes. I don't have a place to stay. Once I've settled that, I suppose I'll go to the movies."

"Go to the movies?"

"Best place to lose yourself for a few hours. One of those porno houses where you can rent a raincoat."

"Rent a raincoat?"

"Never mind."

"What are you going to do about that man... we found? You can't just leave him there."

"I can't do anything else. Anyway, unless I miss my guess, he won't be there in an hour. They don't want the police in on this if they can help it. I wouldn't be much use to them in prison. No, they were supposed to walk in on me and get hard evidence. A photograph or something. Then they'd have the leverage to force me to work for them. But something went wrong—what, I don't know. Maybe we woke up too early and got out too fast. They'll have to drop back and think up something else. And I'm hoping that will take them a little while."

She shuddered. "I'm sorry. I try not to think of him... the man in your loo... but every once in a while the image of him—"

Jonathan looked up at her suddenly. "In my loo?"

"Yes. In your bathroom. What is it?"

"The man said a word just before he died. A name, I thought. I thought he said Lew, as in Lewis. Or Lou as in Louise. But he could have meant loo as in bathroom."

"What would that mean?"

Jonathan shook his head. "I haven't the slightest idea."

Just before they parted, after they had gone back over the arrangements for meeting after the Royal Institute lecture, Maggie made an observation that had occurred to Jonathan as well. "It's an odd feeling. The change of tone between this morning and the bantering in the restaurant last night. I can't help this curious sensation that we have known one another for years and years. In just a few hours we've been through laughter, and love, and all this trouble. It's an odd feeling."

"I admire the way you've braced up under this."

"Ah, well, you see, I've had practice. The troubles in Belfast got very close to me. The soul develops calluses very quickly. That's the real terror of violence: a body gets used to it."

"True." Indeed, he had surprised himself with the speed with which he had swung into the patterns and routines of a kind of existence he had thought was far behind him. "I'll see you soon, Maggie."

"Yes. Soon."

He stood in the red public telephone box and memorized the numbers of two railroad hotels.

"Great Eastern Hotel?" The operator's voice had the singsong of rote.

He pushed the twopence in. "Reservations, please."

At the Great Eastern, he reserved a room under the name Greg Eastman. Then he called the Charing Cross Hotel and reserved a room under the name Charles Crosley. Railroad hotels were the kind he needed. Quiet, middle class, very large, and used to transients. He would actually stay at the Great Eastern where a lift could bring him directly from the Underground station into the lobby, making it unnecessary to go onto the open street. His reservation at the Charing Cross was only for a pickup of clothes.

Next he called his tailor on Conduit Street.

"Ah, yes. Dr. Hemlock. May we be of service?"

"I need two suits, Matthew."

"Of course, sir. Shall we make an appointment for a fitting?"

"I haven't time for that You have my paper there."

"Quite so, sir."

"I need the suits this evening."

"This evening? Impossible, Dr. Hemlock."

"No, it isn't. You carry Bruno Piattellis, don't you? Pull a couple off the racks, and have one of your tailors alter them to my paper. Conservative in color, not too trendy in cut. You could do it in three or four hours, if you put two men on it."

"We do have other commitments, sir."

"Double the price of the suit. And twenty quid for you."

The clerk sighed histrionically. "Very well, sir. I'll see what can be done."

"Good man. Have them delivered to the Charing Cross Hotel, to Mr. (he had to think for a second of the mnemonic device he had used for names) Mr. Charles Crosley."

The next call was to his shirtmaker in Jermyn Street. A little more pot-sweetening was necessary there because he despised ready-made shirts, and they would have to be cut from his patterns on file. But eventually he received their commitment to have six shirts delivered by five o'clock, together with stockings and linen.

Jonathan's last call was to MacTaint.

"Ah, is that you, lad? Just a minute." (The hiss of a phone being cupped over with a hand.) "Lilla! I'm on the phone. Shut your bleeding cob!" (An angry babble from off phone.) "Put a sock in it!... now, what can I do for you, Jonathan?"

"I'm going to mail off three hundred quid to you this afternoon."

"That's nice. Why?"

"I'm in a little trouble. I want a source of money that's not on my person."

"Police?"

"No."

"Ah. I see. Real trouble. What do I do with the money?"

"Keep two fifty handy to send to me if I contact you. I'll probably be at the Great Eastern. My name will be Greg Eastman."

"The remaining fifty's for my trouble?"

"Right."

"Done. Keep well, lad."

Jonathan rang off. He appreciated MacTaint's professionalism. It was right that he accept the fee without whimpering protestations of friendship, and it was right that he ask no questions.

The telephone box was near an Underground entrance, and Jonathan took the long escalator into the tube. Until this trouble was sorted out, he would travel primarily through the anonymous means of the Underground.

He reemerged into the sunlight near Soho, and he made his way to a double-feature skin flick: Working Her Way through the Turkish Army and Au Pair Girls in the Vatican. For four hours he was invisible in the company of the lost, the lonely, the ill, and the warped, who pass their afternoons in torn seats that smell of mildew, candy-wrapper litter under their feet, staring with frozen pupils at Swedish "starlets" moaning in bored mock ecstasy as they make coy orificial use of members and gadgets.

London

Jonathan stayed in the cover of the crowds around Charing Cross Monument, keeping the façade of the Charing Cross Hotel under observation. It was nearly five, and the go-home traffic had thickened. Queues for buses coiled and re-coiled: in a few minutes vehicular and human traffic would nearly coagulate. He was relying on that, in case the people who were after him had had the experience or intelligence to think of checking with his tailor.

He looked up to the belfry clock of St. Martin's-In-The-Fields for the time, and he recalled the newspaper reports of the unfortunate fellow who had been found impaled there. A delivery van bearing the name of his shirtmaker had already arrived at the front entrance of the hotel, but he had seen nothing of the bullet-headed boxer in sunglasses or of the 1950 vintage American tourist. Still the suits hadn't arrived from his tailor; that was disconcerting because everything depended on his being able to pick up his clothes during the rush hours.

At five o'clock straight up, a taxi pulled into the bustle of the rank outside the hotel, and a young man alighted. He breasted his way through the press of people, a large white box carried high. That would be the suits. Jonathan strolled across the street and stood against the façade of the hotel. No sunglasses, no Aloha Shirt, no Bentley. He waited until a taxi stopped to discharge passengers, then approached the driver.

"Wait for me here, will you? Five minutes."

"Can't do that, mate. Rush hour, you know."

Jonathan took a ten-pound note from his pocket and ripped it in half. "Here. The other half when I get back in five minutes."

The driver was undecided for a second. "Right." He glanced through the rearview mirror at the growing queue of taxis behind. "Make it quick."

Jonathan entered the lobby through the restaurant and glanced around before picking up a house phone.

"This is Charles Crosley in 536. There will be some parcels for me. Would you ask the porter to have them sent up?"

Through the glass of the telephone cabinet he watched the receptionist, hoping she would not check to see if his key had been picked up. In the rush of guests and inquiries at this hour, she did not. A bellboy responded to a summons and went to the parcels room where he collected a small and a large box. As he carried them toward the lifts, Jonathan stepped out from the telephone booth and fell in behind him. Just as the lift doors closed, Jonathan caught the bustle of two men entering the main lobby hurriedly. Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head.

So they had thought to check with his tailor after all. But just a little too late, if everything worked out well.

"You must be bringing those to me."

"Sir?"

"Crosley? Room 536?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

Jonathan pushed the fourth-floor button. "Here, I'll take them." He passed the bellboy a pound note.

"But you're on five, sir."

"That's true. But my secretary is on four." He winked, and the lad winked back.

Waiting for the elevator car to bring him back to the lobby, he watched the indicator for the next car count its way to five, then stop. He had a minute on them. Time enough, provided his taxi driver had been able to resist the anger and impatience of men behind him in the rank.

The Bentley was parked at the entrance, and the driver, a beefy lad with longish hair, recognized Jonathan as he passed. He clambered out of the car and took a step or two toward Jonathan, changed his mind and turned toward the hotel entrance to alert his comrades, then thought better of it and decided that he must not lose sight of Jonathan. He ran back to the Bentley and, not knowing what to do, leaned in the driver's window and pressed his horn. Startled taxi drivers in the rank sounded their horns in retribution. Confused by the blare of horns, a car stopped at the intersection, and a lorry behind him slammed on its brakes and barked irritation with its two-toned air horn. Passing cars swerved aside and blasted their horns angrily. Bus drivers slammed their fists onto their horn buttons. Traffic around the Circus joined in.

Jonathan shouted to his taxi driver over the din, "Charing Cross Underground!"

"But that's only a block away, mate!"

Jonathan passed forward the other half of the torn note. "Then you've made out, haven't you?"

The driver added his horn to the cacophony and pulled away from the curb. "Bleeding Americans," he muttered. "Bloody well mental they are."

Just as the taxi turned the corner, Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head burst through the revolving doors, flinging out before them a bewildered old woman who spun around twice before sitting on the steps, dizzy. The Bentley was only half a block behind as Jonathan jumped out at the Underground entrance. Holding his bulky packages over his head, he ran down the long double escalator, passing those who obediently kept to the right. The passageways were crowded with commuters, and the parcels were both a burden and a weapon. Instantly he came out on the waiting platform, he walked along to the "Way Out" end, so he had an avenue of escape should the train not come in time.

And he waited. No train. Girls babbled to one another, and old men stared ahead sightlessly, in the coma of routine. The train did not come. An advertising placard requested readers to attend a benefit concert for Bangladesh, and a scrawled message beside it enjoined them to "Fuck the Irish" and another said "Super Spurs." No train.

There was a flutter in the crowd at the far end of the tunnel, and Bullet Head and Aloha Shirt rushed out to the platform. The former's head was glistening with sweat as he looked up and down, scanning the faces of the throng. Jonathan pressed against the wall, but no good. They spotted him, and the two of them were breasting through protesting commuters in his direction.

Jonathan slipped out the exit and up a tiled passageway toward the double escalators. A train had pulled in at another dock, and just behind him came a flood of people, rushing to make connections. At the head of this mob, he was able to trot up the long escalator two steps at a time. At the top he looked back. Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head were crowded into the center of the human ice jam, slowly oozing up the escalator. Jonathan U-turned and stepped onto the nearby empty down escalator. His pursuers watched with helpless rage as he passed them, not five yards away. They struggled to push ahead, but sharp words and threats of physical retribution from men in cloth caps forced them to accept the inevitable, if not philosophically. As they drew abreast, Jonathan nodded in sassy greeting and slipped his middle finger along the side of the box in his arms. They did not react to the taunting gesture, and Jonathan realized he had used the one-finger American version, rather than the two-finger British orthography for the universal symbol.

No sooner had he stepped back out onto the platform than he felt the rush of stale air that signaled the arrival of a train. It stopped with a clatter of opening doors, there was a gush and countergush of people, the doors slammed shut, and it pulled out with a squeal. Bullet Head, outstripping his panting companion, ran along just outside the window, shouting his rage and frustration. Jonathan leaned over and communicated with him in sign language, this time in British. As they plunged into the black tunnel, Jonathan glanced up to see a look of frozen indignation on the face of a prim old lady on the seat opposite. He had inadvertently made the gesture within inches of her nose.

"Well, tipped up this way, it could mean Victory, you know. Or Peace? I'll bet you don't want to talk about it, right?"

Jonathan took breakfast in the Victorian abundance of the grand dining room of the Great Eastern. The railroad hotel was a perfect cover. With his native panache, he would have been conspicuous in a bed and breakfast place, and they—whoever they were—would already have checked the ranking hotels.

The night before, he had taken a long, very hot bath in a bathroom so cool that it rapidly filled with thick swirling steam. He had lain soaking in the deep tub, the open hot tap keeping the temperature of the water high, until the stresses and fatigues of the day had seeped out of his body. His skin glowing from the bath, he had gotten into bed naked between stiffly starched sheets. He would need rest when the business began again tomorrow, so he emptied his mind and set his breathing pace low as he folded his hands together and brought on sleep through shallow meditation. Each stray thought that eddied into his mind he pushed aside, gently, so as not to disturb the unrippled surface of the pond in his imagination. The last conscious image—Maggie's imperfect but pleasing face—he allowed to linger before his eyes before easing it aside.

Whatever happened, he had to keep her to the lee of trouble.

Luncheon at the Embassy was, as always, both vigorously animated and abysmally dull. Jonathan considered his attendance at such functions the price he had to pay for their lavish support of his stay in England, but he made it a practice to be dull company, talking to as few people as possible. It was in this mood that he carried his glass of American champagne away toward the social paregoric of an untrafficked corner. But it was not sufficiently insulated.

"Ah! There you are, Jonathan!"

It was fforbes-Ffitch, whom Jonathan seemed fated to encounter at every function.

"Listen, Jonathan. I've just been in a corner with the Cultural Attaché, and he gives his support to this idea of mine to send you off for a few lectures in Sweden. The American image isn't particularly bright there just now, what with the Southeast Asia business and all. Could be an excellent thing, jointly sponsored by the USIS and the Royal College. Sound enticing?"

"No."

"Oh. Oh, I see."

"I told you the other evening I wasn't interested."

"Well, I thought you might just be playing hard to get."

Jonathan looked at him with fatigue in his eyes. "Don't rush at it, f-F. You'll make it. With your hustle and ambition, I have no doubt you'll be Minister of Education before you're through. But don't climb on my back."

fforbes-Ffitch smiled wanly. "Always straight from the shoulder, aren't you? Well, you can't blame a fellow for trying."

Jonathan looked at him with heavy-lidded silence.

"Quite," f-F said perkily. "But you will honor your commitment to lecture for us at the Royal College this afternoon, I hope."

"Certainly. But your people have been remiss in their communications."

"Oh? How so?"

"No one has told me the topic of my lecture. But don't rush. It's still an hour away."

fforbes-Ffitch frowned heavily and importantly. "I am sorry, Jonathan. My staff has been undergoing a shake-up. Heads rolling left and right. But I've not put together a trim ship yet. In any department I run, this kind of incompetence is simply not on." He touched Jonathan's shoulder with a finger. "I'll make a call and sort it out. Right now."

Jonathan nodded and winked. "Good show."

fforbes-Ffitch turned and left the reception room with an efficient bustle, and Jonathan was in the act of retreating into another low traffic corner when he was intercepted by the host, the Senior Man Present. He was typical of American Embassy leadership—a central casting type with wavy gray hair, a hearty handshake, and an ability to say the obvious with a tone of trembling sincerity. Like most of his ilk, his qualifications for statesmanship were based upon an ability to get the vote out of some Spokane or other, or to contribute lavishly to campaign funds.

"Well, how's it been going, Dr. Hemlock?" the Senior Man Present asked, pulling Jonathan's hand. "We don't see enough of you at these affairs."

"That's odd. I have quite the opposite impression."

"Yes," the Senior Man Present laughed, not quite understanding, "yes, I imagine that's true. It's always like that though, really. Even when it doesn't appear to be. That's one of the things you learn in my line of work."

Jonathan agreed that it probably was.

"Say," the SMP asked with a show of offhandedness, "you're out in the wind of public opinion. What kind of ground swells do you get concerning the American elections?"

"None. People don't talk to me about it because they know I wouldn't be interested."

"Yes." The SMP nodded with profound understanding. "No—ah—no comments about the Watergate bugging business?"

"None."

"Good. Good. Nothing to it, really. Just an attempt to implicate the President in some kind of messy affair. Between you and me, I think the whole thing was cooked up either by the other party or by the Communists. I imagine it will blow over. This sort of thing always does. That's one thing you learn in my line of work."

"Good Lord, Jonathan, there's been a ballup." fforbes-Ffitch was back. "Ah!" He smiled profuse greetings to the SMP. "Did I catch you two chatting about my plans for a lecture series in Sweden?"

"Yes, you did," the SMP lied with practiced insouciance. "And I'm all for it. If there's anything my office can do to move things ahead..."

"That's awfully good of you, sir."

After shaking hands with warm cordiality, both his hands cupped around Jonathan's, the SMP returned to his hostly duty of pressing a drink on a visiting Moslem.

"You say there's been a ballup?" Jonathan asked.

"Yes. I am sorry. Our fault entirely. I'll cancel, if you want."

Jonathan had been looking forward to seeing Maggie in the audience during this lecture, perhaps even meeting her in the café afterward.

"What's the trouble?" he asked.

"They've advertised that you're going to lecture on cinema. I've got the title here: 'Criticism in Cinema: Use and Abuse.'"

Jonathan laughed. "No problem. Not to worry, I'll vamp it."

"But... cinema? You're in painting, aren't you?"

"I'm in just about everything. And, despite Godard, cinema is still essentially a visual art. Do you have a car here?"

"Why, yes." fforbes-Ffitch was surprised and pleased. "Could I run you over to the college?"

"If you would." f-F's lickspittle conversation would be fair pay for the cover of traveling with him, in case Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head should be hanging about outside the post office bulk of the Embassy.

"...which rhythms are established by cutting rate and cutting tone. While the intensity of the visual beat is a function of what Whitaker, in his lean description of film linguistics, has called 'cutting volume.' Does that answer your question?"

Jonathan scanned the packed audience for a glimpse of Maggie while he responded automatically to the questions. The hall was filled, and a few people were standing at the back of the house. Because of the overcrowding, a policeman was present. In his tall hat and stiff uniform, he was in sharp contrast to the earthy-arty appearance of the audience.

Someone with a thin nasal voice in the back of the hall was proposing a question when Jonathan caught sight of Maggie against the back wall. She stood under one of the conical light fixtures set in the ceiling of the overhanging balcony, and the soft narrow beam isolated her from the mass and mixed with the amber of her soft hair. He was pleased she was there.

"...and therefore ineluctably interrelated with it?"

He had not caught the whole of the question, but he recognized the style of inquiry: another involute question asked by a bright young person, not to learn, but to demonstrate the level of his recent reading.

Jonathan faked his way out. "That's a sinewy and complicated question with ramifications that would take more time than we have to explore adequately. Suppose you break off the fragment that most puzzles you and phrase that concisely."

The thin voice hemmed and hawed, then restated his question in full, adding additional fragments of erudition that occurred to him.

But Jonathan's attention was even slighter than it had been before. At the back of the hall, leaning against the wall, was Bullet Head. Jonathan scanned around. Aloha Shirt was making his way down the right aisle. Jonathan looked for Maggie. She still stood in her beam of light, evidently unaware of them.

A pause and a cough. The question had been posed, and they awaited an answer. A couple of remembered key words in the question gave Jonathan adequate cue to form an answer: "That shifts us from the discussion of film qua film to a look at the state of film study and criticism in the world. But I'm willing to make the shift if you are. In broad, it is safe to say that current film study and criticism are both a chaos and a desert. First, we must acknowledge that, with the exception of Mitry and perhaps Bazin, there are no film critics of substance."

Where the hell was that bobby?

"All we really have are reviewers on varying altitudes of diction. The French school—if one can call that colloidal suspension of spatting personalities a school—works from the principle that cinema is a Gallic invention, the subtleties of which can never properly be mastered by peoples of less fortunate nativity."

Bullet Head was making his way down the left aisle. Maggie still stood alone in the cone of light.

"Their most insidious export since the French pox has been their capricious insistence that American cinema is greatest at its most common denominator. They have seduced spineless American and British scholars into giving the benediction of serious study to such thin beer as the films of Capra, Hawks, and Jerry Lewis."

The young driver of the Bentley was moving across the back of the hall toward Maggie! Where in hell was that policeman?

"The situation is no healthier in the United States, where the ranking reviewers operate as petulant social starlets. Snide infighting, phrasemaking, and pantheon building are the symptoms of their critical affliction. Then, of course, you have the Village Blat types pandering to their young readers' assumption that befuddlement is Obscurantism and that technical incompetence denotes social concern. But the greatest burden to American film criticism is that it is resident in the universities and therefore blighted by the do-nots."

Aloha Shirt stood at the foot of the stage steps on one side, Bullet Head on the other. The young driver had slipped to Maggie's side.

"The East Coast universities devote their attention to obscure films, sequences, and film makers that require the beacon of critical analysis to rescue them from the limbo of deserved obscurity. This symbiotic affair between film maker and critic has entangled them in studies of Vertov and Antonioni that delight small coteries of wide-eyed apostles, but contribute nothing to the mainstream of cinema. The West Coast schools are little better. All hardware and hustle, they produce students in whom the technical proficiency of Greenwich Village is blended with the sensitivity of 'I Love Lucy.' "

The driver leaned over and said something to Maggie. She looked at Jonathan, her eyes wide. He shook his head in answer. The driver took her arm and guided her out the back door. Where the fuck was that bobby?

"And in the center of the continent, insulated by landmass and disposition from contradictory thought, is what might be called the Chicago School of Criticism. Here we find bitter, envious young men who, lacking the spark of creativity, attempt to deny its existence in others by focusing their attention on filmic genres. As though films made themselves, and the men who direct them are no more artists than are they, the leveling critics."

A question came from the hall. Jonathan glanced into the wings and was relieved to see the dependable bulk of the policeman, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the lights in the grid, stoic and bored. A rock in the storm.

"As a guest in your country, I should say nothing about the state of British film study other than it's well financed and the government seems particularly patient with the several institutions who have been sorting themselves out for years now. I feel sure they will get around to making a contribution to film study by the end of the century."

Ignoring the applause, Jonathan made quickly for the wings, where he addressed the police officer, who appeared to be surprised at being approached by him. "There are three men out there, officer."

"Is that a fact, sir?"

"They've got a girl with them."

"Have they, sir?"

"I haven't time to explain. Come with me."

"Right you go, sir."

A quick glance over his shoulder told Jonathan that Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head had not come onto the stage. The bobby following along, he pushed through the exit doors from the wings and ran down a deserted outer corridor. Echoing footfalls advanced toward them from around the far corner. Jonathan stopped, the policeman beside him. The footsteps continued to near. Then the four of them came around the corner, Bullet Head and Aloha Shirt in front, the driver with Maggie behind. They stopped at their end of the hall.

Jonathan and the bobby walked slowly toward them. "Let her go," Jonathan said, his voice unexpectedly loud in the empty corridor.

The policeman spoke. "Is this the man, sir?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

Jonathan and Aloha Shirt had spoken at the same time.

"Right you are then!" The big bobby took Jonathan by the arm with a grip like metal.

"What the hell is going on?" Jonathan protested.

"Our car is just outside, officer," Aloha Shirt said. "Bring him along, won't you?"

"Come on now, sir." The officer spoke with condescending paternalism. "Let's not have any trouble."

Bullet Head closed the distance between them with a menacing swagger. "Maybe I should take him. He wouldn't give me no trouble." He brought his porcine face close to Jonathan's. "Would you, mate?"

Jonathan looked past the ape to Alpha Shirt, who seemed to be in charge. "The girl isn't in this thing."

"Isn't she?"

"Let her go."

"Can it, buddy," Aloha Shirt said. The sound was odd: American words with a British accent.

"If you let her go, I'll come with you without trouble."

Bullet Head sucked his teeth and thrust out his head. "You're coming along with us no matter what, mate."

Jonathan smiled at him. "You'd love me to make a run for it, wouldn't you?"

"You got it right there, chum. I'm sick of chasing your arse around London."

"But you're not carrying a gun. Fat though you are, I can see you're not carrying a gun."

"Here, none of that," the policeman warned.

"I got these, mate." Bullet Head held out his hands, blunt and vast.

Jonathan turned to the bobby. "Officer?"

The policeman's politeness was automatic. "Sir?"

That was it! At that instant Jonathan had it!

For a fraction of a second everything was right—the position of Jonathan's body relative to Bullet Head's, the slight relaxing of the policeman's grip as he answered—at that instant Jonathan could have made it. The heel of his hand into the tip of Bullet Head's nose would have disabled him, possibly killed him if a bone splinter were driven into the brain. He could have been away from the officer with one jerk, and he'd have had Aloha Shirt by the larynx before the driver could react. That would have given him the life of one man between his thumb and forefinger as hostage. Once on the street, he knew he would be an odds-on favorite in any game of hide-and-seek.

But he let it go. Maggie was three strides too far away. The driver would have had her before Jonathan had Aloha Shirt.

Damn it!

"Sir?" the bobby asked again.

Jonathan's shoulders slumped. "Ah... did you enjoy my lecture?"

"Oh yes, sir. Not that I followed all of it. It's your accent, you know."

"Come on!" Bullet Head growled, "let's get it moving!"

The Bentley was parked outside, and behind it was another dark sedan with a driver. As they descended the long sweep of shallow granite steps, Jonathan felt the Kafkaesque anomaly of the situation. They were being abducted with the help of a policeman, in the middle of the afternoon, with people all around.

Maggie was deposited in the back seat of the sedan with a young man who had seemed to be loitering against a postbox, while Jonathan was conducted into the back of the Bentley. Aloha Shirt got in back with him; Bullet Head and the driver in front; and they pulled away from the curb, the two cars staying close together until they got onto a motorway. They picked up speed and started off toward Wessex.

"Care for a coffin nail?" Aloha Shirt asked, producing a pack of American cigarettes.

"No, thanks."

Aloha Shirt smiled affably. "No need to get uptight, Dr. Hemlock. You struck out, but everything's going to be A-okay."

"What about the girl?"

"She's fine and dandy. No sweat." Aloha Shirt smiled again. "I should make introductions. The driver there is Henry."

The driver stretched to seek Jonathan's reflection in the rearview mirror and grinned in greeting. "Good to meet you, sir."

"Hello, Henry."

"And my burly sidekick there is The Sergeant."

"Not 'Bullet Head'?"

The Sergeant scowled and turned to stare out the windscreen, his jaw set tight.

"And I'm called Yank." He grinned. "It's kind of a weird moniker, but they call me that because I dig American things. Clothes. Slang. Everything. For my money, you guys are where it's at."

In the space of a few minutes, Yank had used slang sampling a thirty-year span of American argot, and Jonathan assumed he got it from late night movies. "Where are we going, Yank?"

"You'll see when we get there. But don't worry. Everything's cool. We're from Loo." He said this last with some pride.

"From where?"

"Loo."

The Olde Worlde Inn

As they rushed along the motorway, Yank sketched in the history and function of the Loo organization. Though his instructions allowed him to impart no information beyond this, he said they would meet a man at their destination who would clarify everything.

Following the typical pattern of development for espionage organizations in democratic countries, England's earliest felt need was for a domestic agency to ferret out and control enemy espionage and sabotage within its borders. Building up its information files on real and imagined enemies, and occasionally stumbling onto a genuine spy cell while groping about for a fictive one, this bureaucratic organism grew steadily in size and power, justifying each new expansion on the basis of the last. From a single cluttered desk in the Military Intelligence building, it swelled to occupy an entire office: Room #5. And by the simplistic codes of the service, it became known as MI-5.

It eventually occurred to the intelligence specialists that they might do well to assume an active as well as passive role in the game of spy-spy, so they set up a sister organization to control British agents operating abroad. The traditional British penchant for independence dictated that these two agencies be fully autonomous, and the rivalry between them extended to refusal to admit of the existence of the other. But this resulted in a certain erosion of manpower, inasmuch as the agents of each organization spent much of their time spying on, thwarting, and occasionally killing the agents of the other. In a master stroke of organizational insight, it was decided to open communications between the two agencies, and the international branch was installed in the next office down the corridor, becoming known in official circles as MI-6.

In harness, they muddled their way through the Second World War, relying largely on the French organizational concept, "système D." Their agents earned reputations for bravery and enterprise, which qualities were vital to survival, considering the blunderers who insisted on parachuting French-speaking agents into Yugoslavia. No energy was spared in the rounding up of Irish nationalists on the basis of the rumor that Ireland was a secret signatory of the Axis Pact.

At home, their operatives uncovered spy rings that were passing information by means of cryptic keys in the knitting patterns of balaclavas that women's institutes were supplying to troops in Africa. And they captured no fewer than seven hundred German parachute spies, nearly all of whom had been trained with such insidious thoroughness that they spoke no German at all and pretended to be innocently pushing their bicycles to work in munitions plants. It was obvious that these were agents of the highest importance, because their controls had gone to the trouble of giving them covers that included homes hit by the blitz and county clerk records supplying them with generations of British ancestors.

In Europe, MI-6 agents blew up bridges in the path of the advancing Allied armies, thus preventing hasty and ill-considered thrusts. It was they who uncovered Switzerland's intention to declare war on Sweden as a last resort. And on three separate occasions only bad luck prevented them from capturing General Patton and his entire staff.

When the war was over, each agent was required to write a book on his adventures, then he was permitted to enter trade. But the romance surrounding MI-5 and MI-6 was tarnished somewhat by a pattern of defections and information leaks that embarrassed British Intelligence almost as much as the existence of that agency was an embarrassment to British intelligence. Clearly, something had to be done to prevent these defections and leakages and to maintain the honor and reputation of the organization. Following the fashion of the day, the government turned to the United States for its model.

At about the same time in America, the 102 splinter spy groups that had sprung up in the Army, Navy, State Department, Treasury, and Bureau of Indian Affairs were merged into a vast bureaucratic malignancy, the CII. This organization, like its British opposite number, was having its share of defections and its share of witch-hunting self-examination spawned by the McCarthy panic. In reaction, it organized an internal cell designed to police and control its own personnel and to protect them from assassination abroad. This last was achieved by the sanction threat of counterassassination, and the cell that performed these internal and external sanctions was known as the Search and Sanction Division—popularly known as the SS Squad. It was for SS that Jonathan had worked, before he managed to release himself from their coils.

Emulating the American structure, the British developed an elite inner cell which they installed in the next room up the corridor, which room happened to be a toilet. Despite the fact that they refurbished the space to accommodate its new function, wags immediately gave the assassination group the nickname: The Loo.

"...and that ought pretty much put you into the big picture," Yank concluded. "At least you know who we are. Any questions?"

Jonathan had been listening with only half an ear as he watched the countryside flow past his window, a grimy twilight beginning to soften the line of the background hills. They had left the motorway and were threading through country lanes. When they passed through a village, Jonathan noticed the arms over a public house: vert, three blades of grass proper, a bend of the first. Obviously they were still in Wessex and had been weaving through back roads without making much linear progress. He glanced out the back window to make sure the car carrying Maggie was still following close behind.

"No sweat," said Yank, "they know where they're going. Everything's real George."

"That's wonderful. Now, why don't you tell me what this is all about?"

"No can do. The Guv will lay it on you when we get there. You'll like the Guv. He's old school and all that, but he's no square from Delaware. He's hip to the scene."

The Bentley turned in at a roadside inn called the Olde Worlde and crunched over a gravel drive to the back where it stopped against a retaining log. The car carrying Maggie followed and parked twenty yards away. Two young men conducted her to the back door of the inn.

"Well, what do you think of it?" Yank asked as Jonathan stepped out and was flanked by The Sergeant and Henry. "Nice pad, eh?"

Jonathan scanned the sprawling warren. It was phony Tudor, built at the end of the last century by the look of it, and certainly not originally designed to be an inn. Dozens of details had that inorganic appliqué quality of a style imitated. But where taste and constraint had been lacking, funds had not, for the glass, the wood, the brick were of the best quality available in the 1880s—that last moment before craftsmanship fell victim to the machine and the union.

"This way, sir." Henry's accent had the chewed diphthongs of the working class. They conducted Jonathan around to the front of the inn where, at the reception desk, they were greeted by a healthy, overly made-up young lady wearing a tight sweater and a mini so short that the double stitching of her panty hose showed. Her accent, clothes, and makeup clubbed her with Henry's class, and by the looks they exchanged, it was evident that Henry and she had something going.

"Is this the 'special' you've got with you?" she asked, giving Jonathan a head-to-toe look meant to be sultry.

"That's right," Yank said. "He's to see the Guv straight off."

"The Guv's down to the church. Evening service. Will he be staying long?"

Jonathan resented being spoken of in the third person. "No, I won't be staying long, duck."

"A few days," Yank said.

"Then I'll put him in 14," the bird said. "You and The Sergeant can have the rooms on either side. How's that?"

Yank took the key and led the way as they climbed a narrow, ornately carved staircase to the second floor where, after passing through a maze of dark broken corridors with irregular floors that squeaked under carpeting, they stopped before a door. The Sergeant opened it and gestured Jonathan in with a flick of the thumb.

The room was large, uncomfortable, and cold, as befitted its period. The first thing that caught Jonathan's eye was the open wardrobe in which the clothes he had had brought to the hotel were hung.

"We were expecting you," Yank said, openly proud of his organization's efficiency.

Jonathan crossed the room and looked out over the vista. Beneath his window was a neat garden, scruffy now with autumn brownness, in the center of which was a formal quatrefoil pond, the water green with algae and rippling in the brisk wind. Beyond the garden rolled the gentle hills of Wessex, sucked empty of color by the metallic overcast. The prospect was marred by the thick bars on the window.

"The bars help to keep out the draft," The Sergeant said with a heavy chuckle.

Jonathan glanced at him wearily, then spoke to Yank. "They're all your people, I suppose. Hotel personnel and all?"

"That's right. Loo owns the whole shooting match. By the way," he said with a knowing ogle, "what did you think of the girl at the desk? Slick chick, eh? Lucky bugger!"

Jonathan wasn't sure, but he assumed the bird did tricks for the special guests. "When do I meet the head crapper?"

"Who?"

"Mr. Loo. The Guv."

"Soon," Yank said, obviously annoyed at Jonathan's irreverence. "I think you'll be comfortable here. There'll be one inconvenience, though. You'll be locked in until the Guv says otherwise, and the WC's down the hall, so..." Yank shrugged, embarrassed that British inns lacked the convenience of American ones.

The Sergeant broke in. "So if you have to go potty, mate, just rap on the wall, and I'll take you down by the hand. Got it?"

Jonathan regarded The Sergeant languidly as he asked Yank, "Does he have to stay around? Don't you have a kennel?"

The Sergeant rankled. "I hope I'm not going to have any trouble from you, mate!"

"Hope's cheap, anus. Indulge yourself." He turned to Yank. "What about Miss Coyne, the young lady you picked up with me? There's no reason to hold her. She's nothing to me."

"Don't worry about her. She'll be all right. Now why don't you wash up and grab a few Zs before your chat with the Guv."

Left alone in the room, Jonathan stood by the window, feeling off-balance and angry. His sense of déjà vu was total. These people with their ornately staged machinations, this feeling of the ring closing in on him, the vulgar Sergeant for whom murder and mayhem would be an exercise, the veneered Americanism of Yank—everything here was a British analogue of the CII. And if this "Guv" was true to form, he would be urbane, hale, friendly, and ruthless.

He lay back on the bed, his fingers pressed lightly together and his eyes set in infinity focus on the wall before him, and he began deliberately to empty his mind, image by image, until he had achieved a state of neutrality and balance. The muscles of his body softened and relaxed, last of all his stomach and forehead.

When they knocked at his door twenty minutes later, he was ready. The machinery of his mind and body was running calmly and smoothly. He had reviewed the events of the past two days and had come to one distasteful realization: it was possible, it was likely even, that Maggie had set him up for the Loo people.

With the threatening presence of The Sergeant close behind him, Yank and Jonathan walked some two hundred yards down the road from the Olde Worlde Inn before turning off into a yew-lined lane that led through an arched gateway to a curious church.

As they stepped into the vestibule, the teetering tonal imbalance of amateur singers making a joyful noise unto the Lord announced that evening service was in progress. The Sergeant remained outside, while Yank and Jonathan advanced into the church. It amused Jonathan to see Yank tiptoe across to a back pew and kneel briefly in rushed and mumbled prayer before sitting up and staring at the serving priest with an expression of bland and dour piety. Jonathan glanced around at the decor of the church and was surprised to find it was Art Nouveau: a style unique in his experience for religious architecture. He examined it with open curiosity as the vicar began his sermon to the handful of faithful scattered sparsely among the pews.

"No doubt you will recall," the voice was a rumbling bass with the nasal and lazy vowels of the well-educated Englishman, "we have begun to examine the meaning of the sacraments. And this evening I should like to take a look at baptism—the one sacrament that, for most of us, is an involuntary act."

The decor of the church fascinated Jonathan without pleasing him. Mother-of-pearl and pewter were inlaid into the ornate floral carving; tubercular angels, their long-waisted bodies curved in limp S-forms, their fragile-fingered hands pressed lightly together in prayer, looked down on the congregation with large, heavy-lidded eyes; exotic, short-lived flowers drooped from slender stems up the stained glass windows; and above the altar a glistening effeminate Christ in polished pewter trampled the head of a snake with ruby eyes.

The service continued through communion, and everyone but Jonathan went up to receive the Host Jonathan watched Yank return from the rail, his palms pressed together, his eyes lowered, Christ melting in his mouth.

At a signal from Yank, Jonathan remained seated as the rest of the faithful filed out after a last vigorous attack on Song. Then Yank conducted him to the vestry where the Vicar was finishing off the last of the communion bread.

"Sir?" Yank's voice was diffident. "May I introduce Dr. Hemlock?"

The Vicar turned and with an open gracious smile of greeting took Jonathan's hand between his large hirsute paws. "This is a pleasure," he said, winking. "So good of you to come." His mellow basso wanned with practiced civility. "Just allow me to finish and we'll have a good natter." He drank off the last of the communion wine and wiped out the chalice carefully, while Jonathan studied his full puffy face with its tracery of red capillaries over the cheekbones and in ruddy abundance on the substantial amorphic nose. His hair had retreated beyond the horizon line of his broad forehead, but was long on the sides and blended with his full muttonchop sideburns.

"Odd ritual, this," the Vicar said, replacing the utensils. "The last morsels of consecrated bread and wine must be consumed by the priest. I suppose it arose out of some fear of contamination and sacrilege, should the body and blood of Christ find its way into the alimentary canal of an unbeliever." He winked.

"What is missionary work but the effort to introduce Christ to the uninitiated?" Jonathan commented.

The Vicar laughed robustly. "Precisely! Precisely! You, I dare to assume, do not avail yourself of the sacrament often."

"No form of cannibalism appeals to me."

"Oh. I see. Yes." The Vicar folded the last of his vestments carefully and set them aside. From behind, his formidable bulk seemed to fill the black flowing garment. "Shall we take a turn around the churchyard, Dr. Hemlock. It's quite lovely in the last light. We shall not be needing you, Yank. I'm sure you can find something to amuse yourself with for a few minutes."

Yank made a gesture akin to a salute and left the vestry. The Vicar looked after him with paternal warmth. "There's a very bright young man for you, Dr. Hemlock. Energetic. Zealous. We pulled him away from another project and made him your liaison with our organization because we thought you might be more comfortable working with someone who was au courant with things American." He put his heavy arm around Jonathan's shoulders and conducted him on a leisurely stroll down the nave of the Art Nouveau church. "Beautiful, isn't it? Quite unique."

"Is it yours?"

"God's, actually. But if you are asking if I am the regular vicar, the answer is no. I am standing in for him for a fortnight while he is on honeymoon in Spain. But the less said of that the better." He made a wide gesture with his arm. "When would you guess this church was built?"

Jonathan stepped away from the encircling arm and glanced around. "About 1905."

The Vicar stopped short, his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows arched high. "Amazing! Within a year!" Then he laughed. "Ah, but of course! Art is your province, isn't it." He glanced quickly at Jonathan. "That is, it is one of your occupations."

"It is my only occupation," Jonathan said with mild stress.

The Vicar clasped his hands behind his back and studied the parquet floor. "Yes, yes. Your Mr. Dragon informed me that you had left CII in some disgust after that nasty business in the Alps." He winked.

Jonathan leaned against the side of a pew and folded his arms. This vicar evidently knew a great deal about him. He even knew the name of Yurasis Dragon, head of Search and Sanction Division of CII: a name known to fewer than a dozen people in the States. Obviously, the Vicar would prefer to approach whatever dirty business he had in mind through the gentle back alleys of trivial polite conversation, but Jonathan decided not to cooperate.

"Yes," the Vicar continued after an uncomfortable pause, "that must have been a nasty affair for you. As I recall the details, you had to kill all three of the men you were climbing with, because your SS Division had been unable to specify which one was your target."

Jonathan watched him steadily, but did not respond.

"I suppose it takes a rather special kind of man to do that sort of thing," the Vicar said, winking. "After all, a certain camaraderie must grow up amongst men making so dangerous a climb as the Eiger. Isn't that so?"

No answer.

The Vicar broke the ensuing silence with artificial heartiness. "Well, well! At all events, the little project we have in mind for you will not be so grisly as that. At least, it need not be. You have that much to be grateful for, eh?"

Nothing.

"Yes. Well. Mr. Dragon warned me that you could be recalcitrant." The tone of robust friendliness dropped from his voice, and he continued speaking with the mechanical crispness of a man accustomed to giving orders. "All right then, let's get to it. How much did Yank tell you about us?"

"Only as much as you instructed him to. I take it that your Loo organization is a rough analogue of our Search and Sanction, and is occupied with matters of counterassassination."

"That is correct. However, what we have on for you is a little out of that line. What else do you know?"

Jonathan began walking down the nave toward the vestibule. "Nothing, really. But I have made certain assumptions."

The Vicar followed. "May I hear them?"

"Well, you, of course, are Mister Loo. But I haven't decided whether this church business is simply a front."

"No, no. Not at all. I am first and always a man of the Church. I served as chaplain during the Hitlerian War and afterward found myself still involved in government affairs. We are, after all, a state church." He winked.

"I see." Jonathan passed out through the vestibule and turned up a path that led through the churchyard, cool and iridescent in the gloaming. Yank and The Sergeant were standing at some distance, watching them as the Vicar fell into step alongside.

"It is not uncommon, Dr. Hemlock, for C. of E. churchmen to have some hobby to occupy their minds. Particularly if their livings are of the more modest sort. Nature study claims a great number; and some of the younger men toy about with social reform and that sort of thing. Circumstance and personal inclination directed me along other paths."

"Killing, to be specific."

The Vicar's response was measured and cool. "I have certain organizational talents that I have placed at the service of my country, if that's what you mean."

"Yes, that's what I meant."

"And, tell me, what else have you assumed?"

"That this young lady—Maggie Coyne, if that is her real name—"

"As it happens, it is."

"...that this Miss Coyne is one of your operatives. That she set me up in that little affair of the man in my bathroom."

"My, my. You are perceptive. What brought you to this conclusion?"

Jonathan sat on a headstone. "In retrospect, the thing was too neat, too circumstantial. I seldom use the Baker Street penthouse. But your men knew I would be there that particular night. And it was Miss Coyne who proposed the restaurant a half block away."

"Ah, yes."

"And along with a rack of trumped-up circumstantial evidence linking me with the poor bastard, there must be some hard evidence—probably photographic. Right?"

"I blush at our being so transparent."

Jonathan rose and they continued their stroll.

"How did you get the photographs?"

"The young woman took them."

"When? With what?"

"The cigarette—"

"...The cigarette lighter!" Jonathan shook his head at his stupidity. A gold cigarette lighter in the possession of a girl who didn't know where her next meal was coming from. A camera, of course. And she had fumbled with it, unable to light her cigarette, as she stood there at the bathroom door.

He snatched a twig from a shrub, stripped the leaves with an angry gesture, and crushed them in his hand. "And the gun, of course, would be found in my apartment."

"Very well hidden. It would be found only after an extensive search. But it would be found." The Vicar winked.

Jonathan walked on slowly, rolling the leaf pulp between his palms. "I'm curious, padre..."

"The sign of a healthy intellect."

"After hitting that man in my john, your men left. They didn't try to put the hand on me then, presumably because they didn't yet have the photographs."

"Just so."

"Why did they come back later?"

"To pick up the cigarette lighter and develop the film. Miss Coyne was supposed to leave it behind."

"But she didn't."

"No, she did not. And that threw my chaps into some confusion."

"Why do you suppose she broke the plan?"

"Ah." The Vicar lifted his hands and let them fall in a gesture of helplessness. "Who can probe the human heart with only the brutish tools of logic, eh, Dr. Hemlock? She was shocked perhaps by the sight of that poor fellow in your bathroom? It is even possible that some affection for you misdirected her loyalties."

"In that case, why didn't she destroy the films?"

"Ah, there you go. Asking for sequential logic in the workings of emotion. Man is nothing if not labyrinthine. And when I say 'man' I include, of course, woman. For in this context, as in the romantic one, man embraces woman. I shall never understand why Americans doubt the Briton's sense of humor."

Jonathan could. "So your men were running around London looking for both Miss Coyne and me."

"You gave us a few difficult hours. But all that is behind us now. But come now! Let's not look on the gloomy side. Provided you lend your skills to our little project, the police will be allowed to remain in that state of blissful ignorance so characteristic of them." The Vicar stopped beside a fresh grave that did not yet have a headstone. "That's poor Parnell-Greene," he said, sighing deeply, "unfortunate fellow."

"Who's Parnell-Greene?"

"Our most recent casualty. You'll learn more about him later." He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. "All of them here," he said, his voice resonant and wavering, "they're all ours. All Loo people."

Jonathan glanced at the inscriptions on nearby stones, just legible in the fading light. Passed into the greater life. Went to sleep. Returned home. Found everlasting glory.

"Didn't any of them die?" he asked.

"Pardon me?"

"Nothing."

"The names and dates on the stones are false, of course. But they're all our brave lads." He sighed stentoriously. "Good youngsters, every one."

"No shit?"

The Vicar stared at him with reproof, then he laughed. "Ah, yes! Mr. Dragon warned me of your tendency to revert to the social atavism of your boyhood. It used to pain him, or so he said."

"You seem to be on good terms with Dragon."

"We correspond regularly, share information and personnel, that sort of thing. Does that surprise you? We also have arrangements with our Russian and French counterparts. After all, every game must be played by certain rules. But I must admit that Mr. Dragon was not of much help in the matter now before us, occupied as he is with the dire events on his own doorstep. No doubt you have heard about this Watergate business?"

"Oddly enough, it was mentioned just today at the Embassy. It seems to me to be a lot of fuss over a trivial and incompetent bit of spy-spy."

"One would think so, but it can't be all that trivial if CII has been brought in on it. The affair evidently requires fairly heavy hushing up, and Mr. Dragon is involved in that side of it. I shouldn't be surprised if the statistics on death by accident showed an unaccountable rise over the next month or so. But I take it from your distant expression that you are not overly concerned with this election."

"It's difficult to get excited when the choice is between a fool and a villain."

"Personally, I prefer villains. They are more predictable." The Vicar winked vigorously.

"So it was Dragon who put you onto me?"

"Yes. We knew, of course, that you were in the country, but we had been informed that you had retired from our line of work, so we did not interfere with your visit. At that time we had no intention of using you. There is nothing more dangerous than an unwilling and uncooperative active. But. This business came along and..." The Vicar blew out his broad cheeks and shrugged fatalistically. "...we had no other option, really."

"But why me? Why not one of your own people?"

"You will learn that in due course. Lovely evening, isn't it? That precious moment when day and night are in delicate balance."

Jonathan knew he was hooked. If he refused to cooperate, Loo would certainly hang him for the murder of that poor bastard on the toilet, even though it would make his services unavailable. Like CII, Loo realized that threats and blackmail were effective only if the mark was sure that the threat would be carried out at all cost.

"All right," Jonathan said, sitting on a grave marker, "let's talk about it."

"Not just now. I'm awaiting some last odd bits of information from London. Once I have them, I shall be able to put you totally into the picture. Shall I see you at the rectory tomorrow? Say, midmorning?"

The Vicar made a simple gesture with his fingertips and Yank, who had been keeping them under close surveillance, straining his eyes in the gloom, came trotting over. Literally trotting.

As he ascended the narrow stairs to the second floor of the inn, Jonathan stepped aside to allow Maggie to pass on her way down. She paused and looked at him with troubled eyes. "I suppose it would sound a little foolish to say I'm sorry?"

"Foolish certainly. And inadequate."

She brushed back a wisp of amber hair and forced herself to maintain eye contact with him. "I'll run the risk, then, of being foolish."

"Come on," The Sergeant growled from behind, "I don't have all night to stand about!"

Jonathan turned to him and smiled his gentle combat smile. He beckoned him closer and spoke softly into the bland moon face with its shaved head and crisp military moustache. "You know something? I am becoming very annoyed with everything that's happening here. And I have this conviction that my annoyance is eventually going to purge itself on you. And when it does..." Jonathan grinned and nodded. "...and when it does..." He patted The Sergeant's cheek. Then he turned away and went up to his room.

The Sergeant, not sure what had just happened, scratched the patted cheek angrily and mumbled after the retreating figure, "Anytime, yank. Anytime!"

Yank had come to fetch him down to supper in the low-ceilinged, pseudo-Tudor dining room, a recent addition featuring stucco with capricious finger-swirl patterns and pressed plastic wooden beams placed in positions that could not possibly bear weight. There were fewer than a dozen diners served by a Portuguese waiter in an ill-fitting tuxedo who went about his task with great style and flourish that interfered with his efficiency.

Jonathan and Yank occupied a corner table, while The Sergeant sat alone three tables away and occupied himself, when he was not pushing great forkloads of food into his mouth, by glowering at Jonathan with a menacing intensity that was almost comic. Henry, the driver, sat in close conversation with the bird from the reception desk, who often giggled and pressed her knee against his. The rest of the guests were young men stamped from Henry's mold: longish hair, beefy faces, dark suits with flared jackets, and belled trousers.

"I see that Miss Coyne hasn't come down to supper," Jonathan said.

"No," Yank said. "She's eating in her room. Not feeling too well."

"A girl of delicate sensitivities."

"I reckon so."

It was a classically English meal: meat boiled until it was stringy, waterlogged potatoes, and the ubiquitous peas and carrots, tasteless and mushy. Directly the edge of his hunger was dulled, Jonathan pushed his plate away.

Although he had been eating with great appetite, Yank imitated Jonathan's gesture. "This English chow's a crime, isn't it?" he said. "Give me hamburgers and French fries any old time."

"Who are all these young men?" Jonathan asked.

"Guards, mostly," Yank said. "Shall I order some Java?"

"Please. All these guards for me? I'm flattered."

"No, they don't work here. They work..." He was visibly uncomfortable. "...up the road."

"At the church?"

Yank shook his head. "No-o. We have another establishment. Back in the fields."

"What kind of establishment?"

"Ah! I think I caught the waiter's eye." Yank held his coffee cup in the air and pointed to it. The Portuguese waiter was at first confused, then with a dawn of understanding, he help up a cup from an empty table and pointed to it, raising his eyebrows high in question. Yank nodded and mouthed the word: C-o-f-f-e-e, with exaggerated lip movement.

When the tea arrived, Jonathan's curiosity made him ask, "This other establishment you mentioned. What goes on there?"

Yank's discomfort returned. "Oh. It's nothing. Say!" He changed the subject without subtlety. "I really envy you, you know."

"Oh? Always had a secret desire to be kidnapped?"

"No, not that. I guess I envy every American. Can't understand why you came to live among us limeys. If I ever get to the old forty-eight, you can bet your bottom dollar I'll hang in there. And I'm going to do it some day. I'm going to the States and get a ranch in Nebraska or somewhere and settle down."

"That's just wonderful, Yank."

"It's not just a dream, either. I'm going to do it. As soon as I get the loot together."

Back in his room Jonathan lay in the dark and stared up toward the ceiling. His deep anger at being used, boxed in, manifested itself as pressure behind his eyes that built up and began to throb. He was rubbing his temples to relieve the pressure when he heard the sound of a key turning in his lock. He opened his eyes and, without moving his head, watched the bird from the reception desk enter and approach his bed.

"You asleep?"

"No."

She sat on the edge of his bed and put her hand on him. "Feel like having a go?"

He smiled to himself and examined her face in the gloom. She was pretty enough in the plastic way of English girls of her class and age. "I had the impression that you had something going with the young man who drove me here."

"Who, Henry? Well, I do, of course. We're thinking about getting married one of these days. But that's my private life, and this is my work. The blokes who come here are always tensed up, and I help them to relax. It's all part of the service, you might say."

"A civil service trollop."

"It's a job. Good pension. Henry and me have decided that I should go on working after we're married. Until we have kids, that is. We're saving our money, and we got fifteen books of green stamps. One of these days, we're going to get a little off license in Dagenham. He's got a level head on him, Henry has. Well, then. If you won't be wanting me, I'll get back to the telly. Wouldn't want to miss 'It's a Knockout' if I could help it."

"No, I won't be needing you. You're a cute little girl, but this is a bit clinical for me."

She shrugged and left. There was no understanding some men.

He was in a deep layer of sleep when the visceral throb of the discotheque snapped him into consciousness—sticky-minded and stiff-boned. He could not believe it! The volume was so high that the thump of the back-beat bass was a physical thing vibrating the floor and rattling the drinking glass on the washstand. The singsong, hyperthyroid patter of the disc jockey introduced the next selection in a rapid, garbled East End imitation of American fast patter deejays, and the room began to vibrate again. He swung out of bed and pounded on the wall to be let out. There was no response, so he rattled the door, and it opened in his hand. So. He was no longer locked in. The Vicar must have told them that he was firmly hooked and would not try to escape.

After splashing his face and changing shirts, he went down to the foyer to find it and the adjacent pub packed with young people, shouting at each other, pushing through, beer mugs held high, and brandishing cigarettes. He pressed through the crowd in the saloon bar, trying to find a way out of the din, and instead found himself in a discotheque, surrounded by youngsters who hopped and sweated to the deafening throb of amplifiers in a murky darkness broken occasionally by a flash of color from a jury-rigged strobe light. The noise was brutal, particularly the amplified bass, which vibrated in his sinuses.

A form approached him through the smoky dark. "Did the noise wake you up?" Yank asked.

"What?"

"Did the noise wake you up?"

Jonathan shouted into Yank's ear. "Let's not do that number. Show me how to get out of here."

"Follow me!"

They threaded through bodies gyrating in a miasma of smoke and stale beer, and out a back door to the parking area, now filled with cars and small knots of young men, talking together and erupting into jolts of forced laughter whenever one of them said something bawdy.

Well beyond the car park, in the garden Jonathan could look down on from his window, the noise was low enough to permit speaking. They stopped and Yank lit up a cigarette.

"What is going on here?" Jonathan asked.

"We have discotheque five nights a week. Kids come all the way from London. It's the Guv's idea. It provides cover for our operation here, and a little extra income."

Jonathan shook his head in disbelief. "When does it come to an end?"

"Closing time. About ten thirty."

"And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?"

"Don't you dig music?"

Jonathan glanced at him. "My door is no longer locked. I take it I'm free to wander about now?"

"Within limits. Perhaps it would be better if I came along."

They strolled through the garden and up a footpath that led away from the inn. Yank babbled on about the virtues of America, things American, places he was going to go and things he was going to do when he saved up enough money to emigrate. "I guess it sounds as though I had it in for old Blighty. Not true, really. There are a lot of British things—ways of life, traditions—that I admire and that I'll miss. But they're really gone anyway. Gone, or on their way out. England has become a sort of low-budget United States. And if you have to live in the United States, you might as well live in the real one. Right?"

Jonathan, who had not been listening, indicated a fork in the path. "What's up this way?"

"Oh... nothing really." Yank started to take the lower fork.

"No. Let's go on along here."

"Well... you can't go very far up that way anyway. Fenced off, you know."

"What's up there?"

"Another branch of our operation. The guards you saw come from there. I don't have anything to do with it."

"What is it?"

"It's... ah... it's called the Feeding Station."

"A farm?"

"Sort of. Let's be getting back."

"You go back. I can't take the noise."

"OK. But don't go too far up this path. The dogs are loose at night."

"Dogs? To keep people out of the Feeding Station?"

"No." Yank took a long drag on his cigarette. "To keep people in."

Jonathan sat in the darkness on a stone bench beside the quatrefoil pool. A light mist was settling in the windless air, and his skin tingled with cold. There was a crimson smear in the northern sky, the last burning off of the stubble fields; and the air carried the autumn smell of leaf smoke. The discotheque had closed down, and the crowds had poured out to their cars, laughing and hooting in the car park. Horns had sounded and gravel had been sprayed, and one last drunk, alone and stumbling in the dark, had called for "Alf" several times with growing desperation before staggering onto the road to hitchhike.

There was a period of deep silence before the night creatures felt safe; then began the chirp of insects, the rustle of field mice, the plop of frogs.

Jonathan sat alone and depressed. He had been so sure his break with CII was permanent. He had repressed all the nasty memories. And here he was. They had him again. But what bothered him most was not the irony of it, or the loss of freedom of choice. It was the discovery that he had not left this business as far behind as he had thought. Already, the high-honed, aggressive mental set necessary to survive in this class of action had returned to him, quite naturally, as though it had always been there buried under a thin cover of distaste.

He heard her approach from fifty yards away. He didn't bother to turn his head. There was no stealth in the footfalls, no urgent energy, no danger signals.

"Do you have a light?" she asked, after she had stood beside him for some time without attracting the least recognition of her existence.

"What happened? Your cigarette lighter run out of film?"

She made a pass at laughter. "It doesn't matter really. I don't have a cigarette anyway."

"Just this deep desire to communicate. I know the feeling."

"Jonathan, I hope you don't feel too badly toward me, because—"

"Yes, this lack of communication is the major problem in the world as we know and love it around us in everyday life. All people are essentially good and loving and peace-seeking, but they have trouble communicating that fact to one another. Right? Perhaps it's because they raise barriers of mistrust. People ought to learn to trust one another more. The only people you can really trust are women named Maggie. Someone once told me that the name Maggie, while not melodious, was at least substantial. You could always trust good old Maggie."

"All right. I give up."

"Good." He rose and started back toward the inn.

She followed. "There is one thing, though."

"Let me guess. You'd give anything in the world if you hadn't had to set me up. You could almost weep when you think of me, lying there in the deep sleep of the sexually exercised and satisfied—probably a boyish smile on my face—while you slipped out of bed and opened the door to let the Loo men in and gutshoot that poor bastard on my crapper."

"Really, I didn't know—"

"Certainly! After all, I was just a cipher to you at first. But later, it was different. Right? After we'd exchanged trivial confidences and fucked a bit, you discovered deeper feelings. But by then it was too late to back out. Maggie!..." He reined his anger and lowered his voice. "Maggie, your actions lack even the charm of new experience for me. I was nailed once before by a lady. The only difference is that she was in the major leagues."

Her eyes had not left his, and she had not flinched through his tirade. "I know, Jonathan."

He realized that he had reached out and was grasping her upper arms tightly. He released her, snapping his hands open. "How do you know?"

"Your records. CII sent us your entire file, and I was required to study it carefully before..."

"Before setting me up."

"All right! Before setting you up!"

He believed the shame in her sudden rush of anger. Suddenly he felt very tired. And he regretted his loss of control. He looked away from her and forced his breathing to assume a lower rhythm.

She spoke without temper and without pleading. "I want to tell you this."

"I don't need it."

"I need it. I didn't know what they had in mind. I thought they were going to set you up with a drug plant or something. When they appeared at the door with that poor man, I... I..."

"He was alive at that time."

She swallowed and looked past him, down the road gleaming faintly in the ghost light of moon above fog. Talking about it required that she pick at the painful scab of memory. "Yes. He was badly doped up. He couldn't even stand without help. And he was wearing that horrid grinning mask. They had to carry him in and put him onto the... But he was aware of what was happening. I could see it in his eyes—just the eyes behind the cutouts in the mask. He looked at me with such..." She blinked back the tears. "There was such sadness in his eyes! He was begging me to help him. I felt that. But I... Lord God above, it's a terrible business we're in, Jonathan."

He drew her head against his chest. It seemed the only reasonable thing to do.

"Why didn't they kill him cleanly?"

She couldn't speak for a while, and he heard the squeaking sound of tears being swallowed. "They were supposed to. The Vicar was very angry with them for bungling it. They went into the bathroom while I waited outside. Then you turned over in your sleep and made a sound. I was frightened you might wake up, so I tapped at the door, and at the same moment I heard a popping sound."

"A silencer."

"Yes, I suppose. They rushed out immediately, but one of them was swearing under his breath. My knock had startled him and spoiled his aim."

He rocked her gently.

"I crept back into bed, trying not to wake you. I didn't know what to do. I just lay there, staring into the dark, concentrating as hard as possible, trying to keep dawn from coming."

"But no luck."

"No luck at all. Morning came. You woke up. Then... I just couldn't make love when you wanted."

He nodded. That was to her credit. "Come on. Let's take a walk around the inn before turning in."

She sniffed and pulled herself together. "Yes, I'd like that."

They strolled slowly, arm about and arm about, each accommodating for their difference in stride. "Tell me," he said, "why didn't you throw the cigarette case away?"

"You know about that? Well, I suppose the real question is why didn't I leave it behind in your room, as I was supposed to do. I don't know. At the moment, I thought I might be protecting you by denying them the films. But directly I had time to think it out, I realized that they were determined to get you. There was no point in denying them the films. They'd only have set something else up, and you would have had to go through that."

"I see." He looked down, watching their shoes step out in rhythm. "Who were the men who came to my flat?"

"The two you rode here with in the Bentley. Not Yank, the other two.

"And who did the shooting?"

"The Sergeant."

"Figures." He added another line to the bill The Sergeant was running up with him. The payoff became inevitable.

They walked without speaking for a time, breathing in the moist freshness of the night air.

"It may be silly," she said at last, "but I'm glad you didn't take Sylvia up on it."

"Who is Silvia?"

"The girl who works here. You know, Henry's friend."

"Oh, her. Well, she isn't my type."

They were at the door again. She turned to him and asked, "Am I your type?"

He looked at her for several seconds. "I'm afraid so."

They went in.

"I'm sorry about that," she said out of a long silence. She was sitting up, braced against the carved oaken headboard, and she had just lit another cigarette.

He hugged her around the hips and put his cheek into the curve of her waist. They had made love, and slept, and made love again, and now his voice was ragged with sleepiness. "Sorry about what?"

"About that last bit—those internal contractions when I climax. I can't help them. They're beyond my control."

He growled and mumbled, "By all means, do let's talk about it."

She laughed at him. "Don't you like to talk about it afterward? It's supposed to be very healthy and modern and all."

"I suppose. But I'm old-fashioned enough to be sentimental about the operation. For the first few minutes anyway."

"Hm-m." She took a drag on her cigarette, her face briefly illuminated in the glow. "Your kind of people are like that."

He turned over. "My kind of people?"

"The violent ones. They tend to be sentimental. I guess sentiment is their substitute for compassion. Kind of a surrogate for genuine feelings. I read somewhere that ranking Nazis used to weep over Wagner."

"Wagner makes me weep too. But not from sentiment. Go to sleep."

"All right." But after a moment of silence: "Still, I am sorry if my little spasms ruined any plans you had for epic control."

"Sorry for me? Or sorry for yourself?"

"Oh, you are feeling a bit bristly, aren't you? Do you always suffer from postcoitus aggression?"

He rose to one elbow. "Listen, madam. It doesn't seem to me that I started any of this. The only thing I'm feeling at this moment is postcoitus fatigue. Now good night." He dropped back on his pillow.

"Good night." But he could tell from the tension of her body that she was not prepared to sleep. "Do you know what I wish you suffered from?" she asked after a short silence.

He didn't answer.

"Intracoitus camaraderie, that's what," she said, and laughed.

"OK. You win." He pulled himself up and rested against the headboard. "Let's talk."

She scooted down under the covers. "Oh, I don't know. I'm kind of tired."

"You're going to get popped right in the eye."

"I'm sorry. But you are fun to tease. You rise to the bait so eagerly. What do you want to talk about, now that you've got me wide awake?"

"Let's talk about you, for lack of more interesting things. Tell me, how did a nice girl like you, et cetera..."

"Why am I working for Loo?"

"Yes. We both know why I am."

She knew that taunt was not completely in jest, but she decided he had a right to some bitterness. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to share the truth with him. After all, the truth did mitigate her complicity. "Well, most of what I told you about myself the other night was true. I was born in Ireland. Went to university over here, then returned. I was young and silly and politically committed—looking for a cause, I suppose. Or bored maybe. I used to meet my brother and some of his friends at a coffee shop, and we would talk about a united Ireland. Angry speeches. Plans and plots. You know the sort of thing. Then one day my brother was gone. I discovered that he had gotten into Ulster. He had always said he wanted to take an active part in the thing, but I had written that off as romantic game-playing. He was a poet, you see. Flashing eyes and floating hair and all that. I don't imagine you would have liked him."

"He died?"

He felt her nod. "Yes. He was found in his car." Her voice became very soft. "They shot him through the ear. And I... I..."

He hugged her head to his side. "Don't talk about it."

"No, I want to. It's good for me. For months the image of him being shot in that car haunted me. I used to have nightmares. And do you know what image used to shock me awake, all sweating and panting?"

He patted her.

"The noise of it! Can you imagine the terrible noise of it?"

Jonathan felt helpless and stupid. He was sorry for her, but he knew the emptiness of saying so. "Who did it?" he asked. "UDA? IRA?"

She shrugged. "It doesn't really matter, does it? They're all the same."

"I'm surprised you realize that. Good for you."

"Oh, I didn't know it then, of course. I wanted revenge. More for myself than for my brother, I suppose. I went to Belfast and joined a cell of activists. And..."

"You got your revenge?"

"I don't know. We set bombs. People got hurt—probably the wrong people. After a while, I came to my senses and realized how stupid the whole business was, and I decided to return to Dublin. And that's when I was picked up and arrested. Things always happen that way."

"You were sentenced?"

"No. They were taking me from one prison to another in an army vehicle, when they were run off the road by armed hijackers. The soldiers were all shot. The hijackers took me with them. Only me. They left the other prisoners."

"I assume the hijackers were Loo people."

"Yes."

"How long ago was this?"

"Only a month. They brought me here for a week of briefing on your background file from CII. Then they placed me at Mr. MacTaint's where we met. And that's it."

Jonathan slid down beside her, and they lay for a time staring into the dark above them. "Why you, I wonder," he said at length. "Not that I'm complaining."

She took a deep breath. "I don't know. I could paint—well, in a way. And there was no question about my being cooperative. All the Vicar has to do is lift a telephone, and I'm back in Belfast facing charges. And this time I'll have to answer for those dead soldiers as well."

Jonathan's fists clenched and unclenched. "He's quite a number, that vicar. No messing around with fluctuating loyalties for him. When he wants you, he ties you up properly."

"True. He's got both of us. And he does the whole thing with a hearty handshake and polite small talk."

"And a wink."

"Oh, yes. And a wink. I suppose that winking is just a nervous tic, but it's a nuisance. It's infectious when you're talking to him. You have this urge to wink back, and that wouldn't do at all."

Jonathan was relieved that the talk was taking this lighter tone. The last thing in the world he needed was the burden of this girl's problems or, worse yet, her affection. Lovemaking was no threat to his precious insulation. Two people meet on the neutral ground of lust, they scratch their itches, then they go back into themselves. Nothing shared, nothing lost. But this sort of thing—this sharing of ideas and problems, this quiet talk into the common dark—this could be dangerous. Sapping.

Maggie leaned across him and butted her cigarette out in the bedside ashtray. Then she resettled herself against him and ran her fingers over his stomach idly. "This is kind of old hat for you, isn't it? I read in your file about that Eiger affair—about that girl who roped you into it." She felt his stomach tighten, but she plunged ahead with that well-intentioned instinct for the emotional jugular that characterizes good women grimly determined to understand and help. "Her name was Jemima Brown, wasn't it?"

There was no inflection in Jonathan's voice when he said, "Yes."

"Was she at all like me?"

"No. Not at all."

"Oh." She removed her hand from him. "Did you love her?"

Jonathan got up and sat on the edge of the bed. Beyond the window, the night horizon was still smudged by a reddish glow of burning stubble out in the fields, but this false dawn was not so distant from the real one, for the birds were beginning to sound the odd chirp in expectation.

Maggie sat up and patted the bed beside her. "I'll make you a bargain," she said in comic broad brogue. "Bring your fine body back here, and I'll not plague you with me queries into your emotional life. Which is not to say that I won't be making any demands upon you at all, at all."

He rejoined her, stretching out flat on his back and feeling that he had been childishly touchy. She scooted down beside him and pressed her forehead against his. He looked into her impish green eye—one only and large at this distance. "You have a way of coming out one up, haven't you?" he said.

"Instinct for emotional survival. Do you realize that we've made sexual pigs of ourselves in the little time we've had together?"

"Shameful."

"Isn't it just. Physically prodigal, I'd call it."

"I think it's only fair to warn you that I'm an aging man. I may not be up to it."

"Lord, I hate double entendre."

Breakfast, the only meal English cooks feel comfortable with, was interrupted by The Sergeant bursting into the dining room, his face flushed and steaming with sweat. "Where the 'ell 'ave you been!" he shouted at Jonathan, who was finishing a last cup of tea with Yank and Maggie at a corner table somewhat out of the draft. "I've been runnin' me arse off around these bleedin' 'ills!"

Jonathan set down his napkin and looked out the window on the countryside, where the corn stubble was pastel under the lowering gray sky.

The Sergeant crossed to their table in three angry strides, and his bulk hovered over Jonathan.

"More tea?" Jonathan asked Maggie.

"No, thank you."

"I'm talking to you, mate!" The Sergeant put his heavy hand on Jonathan's shoulder. Jonathan glanced down at the thick fingers as though they had dropped from a passing bird, then he looked across at Yank with raised eyebrows.

Yank intervened nervously. "Come on, now. No need to get your dander up. He's just been sitting here having breakfast with us. Cool it, man."

"When I went into his room this morning, the bleedin' bed 'adn't been slept in. Looked like he'd scarpered. The lads and me's been all over the grounds lookin' for 'im!"

"You must have worked up quite an appetite," Jonathan commented softly. "And it's obvious that you needed the exercise."

"I'm fitter than you'll ever be, mate."

"In which case you don't need my support to stand up." Jonathan glanced again at the hand, which was removed from his shoulder with an angry snap.

"Let's drop it," Yank told The Sergeant. "After all, the Guv has given Dr. Hemlock the run of the place."

"You know he don't want 'im up... there." The Sergeant jerked his head in the direction of the path leading to the Feeding Station. "And anyway, nobody told me nothin' about 'im having the run of the place."

"I am telling you now," Yank said distinctly, clarifying for Jonathan the chain of command from the Vicar. "Now be a good lad and sit down to your breakfast."

The Sergeant glowered at Jonathan, then left, grumbling.

Yank leaned forward and spoke confidentially to Jonathan. "I wouldn't put him on, if I were you. He's no quiz kid, but he's got a temper, and he's a master of hand-to-hand combat."

"I am forewarned."

"By the way. Just out of curiosity, where did you pass the night?"

Maggie smiled into her plate.

Jonathan answered offhandedly, timing his response to catch Yank with a forkful of eggs on the way to his mouth. "At the Feeding Station."

The fork hovered, then returned to the plate still laden. The color had drained from Yank's face. "That's a good deal less funny than you fancy, Dr. Hemlock."

It amused Jonathan to note that all traces of American accent fled from Yank's voice under pressure, just as multilingual people always return to their native language when they swear, count, or pray.

Unable to eat, Yank excused himself and left.

"That was cruel," Maggie said.

"Uh-huh. What do you know about this Feeding Station?"

"Nothing really. It's up the path there. Guards and dogs and all. Sometimes the guards come down here to the bar or to take lunch, but they never talk about it."

"Can you find out about it for me?"

"I can try."

"Do that."

It had turned wet and blustery by the time Jonathan was allowed to walk to the vicarage with only the light guard of Yank, who kept up a running conversation of trivia, quite recovered from his crisis of distrust over the mention of the Feeding Station. When they reached the gate, Yank joined two other young men dressed in the flared dark suits and wide bright ties that were almost a Loo uniform. Jonathan could not help noticing how much like East End hoods they looked.

He found the Vicar in his garden, dressed in a stout hunting jacket and twill breeches tucked into thick stockings. His shoes were heavy, boat-toed brogans. The costume contrasted sharply with Jonathan's close-fitting city clothes and custom-made light shoes. The Vicar did not seem to be aware of Jonathan's presence as he muttered angrily to himself while scattering fish food to the carp in his pond. Then he looked up. "Ah, Dr. Hemlock! Good of you to come."

"You seem distressed."

"What? Oh. Well, I am a bit. Nothing to do with your affair. It's that damned Boggs! Will you take something? Coffee, perhaps, or tea?"

"Thank you, no."

"Just as good. I was hoping we might take a little walk through the fields as we chatted. No place like the open country for privacy. There are insects in the hedgerows, but no bugs—if you have my meaning there."

Jonathan looked up at the threatening, gusting sky.

"No worry about the weather," the Vicar assured him. "Forecast predicts only occasional rain." He winked.

Jonathan shrugged and followed him to the bottom of the garden where the path became a narrow foot trail through a tangled coppice. "How did this Boggs get damned?" he asked the back of the figure trudging out briskly before him.

"Pardon? Oh, I see. Well, Boggs owns the land next to the church. A farmer, you know. Been ripping out hedgerows again. Do you know that more than five thousand miles of hedgerows are ripped up annually in England?"

"Pity they didn't get this one," Jonathan mumbled after stumbling over a root.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Five thousand miles of homes for small creatures and nestings for birds torn out every year! And some of our hedgerows were planted in Saxon times! But the farmers say they get in the way of modern machinery. They are sacrificing the inheritance of centuries for a few pounds profit. No sense of responsibility to nature. No sense of history. Oh, I am sorry! Did that branch catch you as I let it go? And do you know what Boggs has done now?"

Jonathan didn't care.

"He sold off the tract next to the church to construction speculators. Think of it! In a year's time there may be an estate of retirement homes abutting the churchyard. Thin-shelled boxes with names like 'End O' The Line,' and 'Dunroam Inn'!"

"Does all this really matter to you? Or is this a little show for my benefit?"

The Vicar stopped and turned. "Dr. Hemlock, the Church is my life. And I take a special interest in preserving the living monuments of its architecture. Every penny I make from my avocation with the government goes to that end." He winked.

"And is that how you justify the ugly things your organization does?"

"It might be. If patriotism required justification."

"I see. You picture yourself as a kind of whore for Christ. Presumably Magdalen was your college."

The Vicar's expression frosted over, his face seemed to flatten, and he spoke with crisper tones. "It occurs to me that we might do better to confine our communication to the problem before us." He turned and continued his walk, pushing through the brush to a field of stubble.

"Let's do that."

"It goes without saying," the Vicar spoke over his shoulder, "that everything you learn in the course of your work with us is absolutely confidential. My young assistant—the man you know as Yank—has told you in outline the function of the Loo organization. Rather like the Search and Sanction Division of your CII, Loo is assigned the thankless task of providing protection for MI-5 and MI-6 operatives by technique of counterassassination. For good or for ill, our position as most secret of the secret and most efficient of the efficient brings extraordinary tasks to my doorstep. The affair at hand is one such. It is not in essence what your people would call a sanction. There is no specific assignment to kill a given person. To state it better: The affair does not absolutely require assassination. But the chances are you will be pressed to that extreme in an effort to remain alive yourself. Oh, my goodness! I should have warned you about that boggy spot. Here, give me your hand. There! Ah, you seem to have left a shoe behind. Never mind, I'll fetch it out for you. There. Good as new!"

The Vicar pressed on, inhaling deeply the brisk breeze that carried needles of rain with it. "I think it would be clearer if I presented the situation to you in terms of morals, for modern trends in turpitude lie at the core of the issue. Sexual license, to be specific. The New Morality—which is neither true morality nor particularly new, as a casual reference to the social lives of the Claudian emperors will affirm—has infected every stratum of society, from the universities to the coal pits—not that that is such a great gulf fixed, what with the democratization of the schools. Perhaps it is only natural that a generation that has passed the greater part of its life under the covert threat of atomic annihilation, that has seen the traditional bulwarks of family and class crumble under the pressures of enforced egalitarianism and liberalism gone to seed, that has experienced the decline of formal literature and art and the rise of television, pop art, folk masses, thriller novels, happenings, and the rest of it—all of which appeal to the nerve ends rather than to the mind, and to immediate reaction rather than to tranquil contemplation—perhaps it is only natural that such a generation would seek the sexual narcotic. Although as a churchman I cannot condone such activities, as a humanitarian I can grant the existence of powerful stimuli prompting people toward burying their minds in the mire of flesh and orgasm. Wish we had a flask of tea with us. That would warm you up. Come, let's press on and get the blood circulating.