The Loo Sanction

"Don't worry, Fred. There's nothing going on. It was a false alarm."

Sir Wilfred examined Jonathan's eyes closely. "Well, let's hope so." Then his manner relaxed and brightened. "Well, now I must be off."

"The demands of business?"

"What? Oh. No. The demands of dalliance, actually. Take care."

Jonathan found fforbes-Ffitch sitting rigidly on the front edge of a deep lounge chair in a quiet corner. He was making much of being a busy man kept waiting, frowning and checking his watch. "You might have told me you knew Sir Wilfred," he complained, as Jonathan sat across from him. "Saved me a touch of embarrassment."

"Nonsense. Embarrassment becomes you."

"Oh? Really? No, you're having me on."

"Look, I don't want to take too much of your valuable time."

fforbes-Ffitch appreciated that. "Right. Got another appointment at seventeen thirty hours."

"Roger. Then let's get to it." Jonathan made his case quickly. f-F was obviously committed to gaining credit by persuading Jonathan to undertake the lecture series in Sweden. In fact, he had rather overstated Jonathan's willingness to Sir Wilfred. OK. Jonathan would do the lectures if in return f-F would use his influence as a trustee of the National Gallery to persuade them to display the Marini Horse publicly the day before it was auctioned off.

"Oh, I don't know, Jonathan. A privately owned object in the Nat? Never been done before. Has all the characteristics of a publicity trick. I just don't know if they'll go along with it."

"Oh, I was hoping your influence would be sufficient to swing it." Jonathan's instinct for the jugular proved correct.

"I may be able to, Jonathan. Certainly give it a bash."

"You might mention in your argument that half the art reviewers in England will be mentioning in their papers that the piece will be on display at the Gallery. Your fellow trustees wouldn't want to disappoint the taxpaying public, to say nothing of making fools of the critics, none of whom are too friendly with what they describe as the reactionary practices of that elite group."

"How on earth could the newspapers be saying such a thing?"

Jonathan lifted his palms in an exaggerated shrug. "Who knows where they get their wild ideas?"

fforbes-Ffitch looked long and very slyly at Jonathan. "This is your doing, isn't it?" he accused, shaking a finger.

"You see right through me, don't you? No use trying to con a con."

fforbes-Ffitch nodded conspiratorially. "All right, Jonathan. I think I can assure you that the other trustees will listen to reason. But not without a battle. And in return, you owe me one lecture tour. I know you'll love Stockholm."

True to club routine, the drinks arrived just as they had risen to leave.

Maggie sat on the edge of an oaken bench beside the hearth, unmindful of the glass of port beside her. The focus of her soft unblinking attention was the languets of flame that flickered deep within the log fire, but the attitude of her body and her half-closed eyes indicated that she was looking through the fire into something else. Daydreams, perhaps.

Leaning against a bookcase in the Vicar's study, Jonathan watched the play of light in her fine autumnal hair. The unlit side of her face was toward him, and her profile was modeled by an undulating band of firelight along the forehead and nose. Subtle shifts of color from the flames were amplified in her hair, now accenting the amber, now the copper.

A gust in the stormy night drafted through the chimney, flaring the embers with a bassoon moan, and breaking her fragile concentration. She blinked and inhaled like someone awakening, then she turned and greeted him with a slight smile.

"Boyoboy, it's sure raining cats and dogs," Yank said from across the room where he had been nursing a funk and dealing heavy blows to the Vicar's port supply. He had been set off his feed earlier that evening while they were dining at the Olde Worlde Inn. They had been served lamb couscous, and someone had jokingly mentioned that they owed the feast to governmental indecision. The Feeding Station had been preparing a victim to be found dead in Algiers, but there had been a change in plans. Yank had blanched and left the room. Until this banal meteorological observation, he had been uniquely silent, and the forced energy in his voice indicated that he was not completely over the crisis of disgust.

"Sorry to keep you waiting." The Vicar entered with a drawn and preoccupied air. His gray face and the lifeless hang of his jowls and wattle over his ingrown celluloid dog collar attested to days of tension and strain, as did the intensification of his nervous wink. "At least I see you have found the port. Good." He lowered himself heavily into his reading chair beside the fire. As a passing gust of wind stiffened the tongues of flame and sucked them up the fire step, Jonathan recognized the ironically Dickensian quality of their little grouping.

"Let me say at the outset that I am not very pleased with you, Dr. Hemlock," the Vicar said, winking.

"Oh?"

"No. Not pleased. You have not kept in regular contact with us as you were instructed to do. Indeed, were it not for Miss Coyne's report of this afternoon, we shouldn't even have known that you had gained entrée into The Cloisters."

"I've been busy."

"No doubt. You have also been disobedient. But I shall not dwell on your insubordination."

"That's wonderful of you."

The Vicar stared at Jonathan with heavy reproof. Then he winked. "The situation is grave. Much graver than I could have guessed. As you will recall, we were puzzled over the fact that Maximilian Strange did not seem to be making use of the damaging film for blackmail. Doubts concerning his ultimate motive for collecting the filthy evidence have plagued us almost as much as have the films themselves. And the Loo organization overseas has concentrated all its energies on solving the enigma. Bits and pieces of information have been collected, and they fit together to make a frightening picture. Not to put too fine a point on it, the situation is this: England is for sale." He paused dramatically to allow the significance of this to sink in. "In point of fact, effective control of the British government is to be auctioned off. The power holding those recriminating films will be able to bleed us dry—trade concessions, NATO secrets, North Sea oil—all this will go to the highest bidder."

Jonathan found himself wondering whether it was the fact of the sale or the democratic nature of the bidding that pained him the more deeply.

"At this very moment," the Vicar continued, "representatives of every major power are congregating in London; gold transfers are being arranged in Switzerland; and secret talks are being conducted in embassies. Not excluding your own embassy, Dr. Hemlock," he added with stern emphasis.

"Who knows? You may enjoy working for Yurasis Dragon when CII takes you over."

"Don't be flip, Hemlock!" He winked angrily. "I promise you that long before such a thing is realized, you will be in the dock facing irrefutable charges of murder. Is that clear?"

"Get off my ass, padre."

"Sir?" He winked three times in rapid succession.

"Your threats are empty. You say the entire Loo organization has been working on this?"

"They have."

"Do they know when the sale is to take place?"

"No, not precisely."

"Do they know where?"

"No, they don't."

"Do they know where the films are now?"

"No!"

"I know all three. So get off my ass, and stop making empty threats."

Maggie smiled into her glass, as the Vicar brought his indignation under professional control. He rose heavily and crossed to his desk, where he shuffled some papers around pointlessly, making thinking time. "Dr. Hemlock, you represent everything I detest in the aggressive American personality."

Jonathan checked his watch.

The Vicar's hands closed into fists. Then they relaxed slowly, and he turned back. "But... I have learned in my business to admire efficiency, whatever its source. So!" He pressed his eyes closed and took a deep breath. "I assume you have worked out a way to intercept the films and deliver them to me?"

"I have."

"You realize, of course, that you must accomplish this quite on your own. I won't have the police in on this, or the Secret Service. No one must have the slightest hint of the awkward predicament our leaders have gotten themselves into."

"You've made that abundantly clear."

"Good. Good. Now tell me—where are the films?"

"They're inside a bronze casting by Marini."

"How do you know this?"

"Fairly obvious deduction. Maximilian Strange has engaged me to help him sell a Marini Horse at auction for five million pounds—more than a hundred times its market value. It's obvious that the Marini is not the item for sale. The Horse is only the envelope."

"I see. Yes. Where does this auction take place?"

"At Sotheby's, three days from now. The Horse will be on display at the National Gallery the day before the auction, and that's when I get the films."

"You are going to steal from the National Gallery?"

"Yes. I have a friend who is a regular nocturnal visitor there."

"And you are quite sure you can manage this?"

"I have great faith in my friend's ability to get in and out of the National Gallery at will. I shall be going with him on this occasion."

"He knows about the films?"

"No."

"Good. Good." The Vicar mulled over the information for a time, winking to himself. "Tell me. How did the films get inside the statue in the first place?"

"This particular Marini is known as the Dallas Horse. It was broken by a careless Texan, then brazed together. The story is widely known in art circles. It was a simple matter to cut it open along the braze, deposit the films, then braze it over again."

"I see. And you are absolutely sure the films are there?"

"I'm satisfied they are. Maximilian Strange detests England. It's his only passion. If he were only selling a bronze statue, there would be no reason to do so from London. In fact, the statue was brought over here from the States. Clearly it's the films that are the homegrown product."

The Vicar returned to his reading chair and mused for several minutes, slight noddings of his head accompanying his location of each piece in its place. "Yes, I'm sure you're right," he said at last. "It's so like Strange. An open auction at Sotheby's!" He chuckled. "Brazen and amazing man. A worthy foe."

"You told me earlier that you considered Strange to be the cleverest man in Britain... which might be considered damning with faint praise."

The Vicar looked up. "Did I? Well, now I am sure I was right." He turned to Yank, who had been looking on without participating, still heavy with the wine he had been drinking to excess. "Fill the doctor's glass. It appears we have reason to celebrate."

"I'll take the wine, but you shouldn't delude yourself that we're home and dry. I still have to go back into The Cloisters and deal with Strange. You see, he doesn't know that his Horse is going on display in the National Gallery. He won't know that until he reads the newspapers. And I'm not sure how he will react. He's been keeping the Horse somewhere deep, and he won't be pleased to have it in the open, its gut full of films, for twenty-four hours before the auction."

"What might he do?"

"He might smell a rat. If he does, he'll probably go to ground with the films."

"What then?"

"We lose."

"I shouldn't say that so fliply, if I were you, Dr. Hemlock. Remember the dire consequences to your freedom should you fail at this."

Jonathan closed his eyes wearily and shook his head. "I don't think you see the picture. If Strange doesn't buy my story about putting the Horse on display to allay governmental curiosity over the selling price, then his response to me will be vigorous, probably total. And your threat of trial for murder won't matter much."

"You seem to take that rather calmly."

"Cite my alternatives!"

"Yes, I see. My, you are in a tight spot, aren't you?"

Jonathan's desire to punch that fat face was great, but he tightened his jaw and held on. "I am going to make one demand of you," he said.

"What would that be?" the Vicar asked civilly.

"Miss Coyne's out of this from here on. In fact, she is out of your organization altogether."

The Vicar looked from him to Maggie. "I see. I had been given to understand that you two were romantically involved—well, physically involved at least. So I suppose this request is to be expected. Are you sure this is what the young lady wants? Perhaps she would prefer to see you through this. Lend some support, if need be. Eh?"

"It's not her choice. I want her out."

The Vicar blew out an oral breath, his heavy cheeks fluttering. "Why not? She has served her purpose. Certainly, my dear. You are free to go. And have no fears about your little flap in Belfast. It will be taken care of." He enjoyed playing Lord Bountiful; it was the churchman in him. "However," he continued, turning to Jonathan, "I do think you would do well to take advantage of the Loo organization and bring a couple of our men along with you to the National Gallery."

Jonathan laughed. "The very last thing I need is the burden of your pack of bunglers. Those men from MI-5 who tailed me to the Cellar d'Or almost blew my cover."

"Yes, Yank told me about that. I was most disturbed. I assure you it won't happen again."

"I wasn't able to contact the guys in time to call them off," Yank explained from his corner.

"I don't care about that. Just keep any Loo people away from me."

"I'm afraid our Loo organization doesn't impress you much, Dr. Hemlock. Indeed, I have a feeling that you share with Strange a certain disdain for things British."

"Don't take it to heart. I arrived during an awkward period for your country. The twentieth century."

The Vicar tapped the desk with his fingertips. "You had better succeed, Hemlock," he said, winking furiously.

The split-reed cry of the wind around the corners of the Olde Worlde Inn slid with the force of the storm from a basso hum to a contralto quiver. Jonathan listened to it in the dark, his eyes wandering over the dim features of the ceiling.

They had not spoken for a long time, but he knew from the character of the current between them that she was awake.

"I have to give the papers time to carry the story about the Marini Horse. There's nothing for me to do tomorrow but keep out of sight."

She turned to him and placed her hand on his stomach in response.

"Do you want to spend the day with me?" he asked.

"Here?"

"Christ, no. We could run down to Brighton."

"Brighton?"

"That's not as mad as it seems. Brighton's interesting in the middle of winter. Desolate piers. Storm swept. The Lanes are empty, and the wind flutes through them. Amusement areas boarded up. There's a melancholy charm to resort areas in the off-season. Strumpets all dressed up with no place to go. Circus clowns standing in the snow."

"You're a perverse man."

"Sure. Do you want to come with me?"

"I don't know."

A metallic tympany of sleet rattled against the window, then the stiff wind backed around, and the room was silent.

"Last night, at The Cloisters..." She paused, then decided to press on. "Do you remember what I said?"

Of course he remembered, but he hoped she had been babbling and would forget it all later. "Oh, you were pretty much out of your head with the dope. You were just playing out fantasies."

"Is that what you want to believe?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he patted her arm.

"Don't do that! I'm not a puppy, or a child that's stubbed its toe."

"Sorry."

"I'm sorry too. Sorry the idea of being loved is such a burden to you. I think you're an emotional cripple, Jonathan Hemlock."

"Do you?"

"Yes, I do."

The downward curl of the last vowel made him smile to himself.

"I have a plan," he said after a silence. "When this thing is over, we'll get together and play it out. Gingerly. Week by week. See how it goes."

She had to laugh. "Lord love us, if you haven't found the tertium quid between proposal and proposition."

"Whichever it is, do you accept?"

"Of course I do."

"Good."

"But I don't think I'll go to Brighton with you."

He rose to one elbow and looked down at her face, just visible in the dark. "Why not?"

"There's no point to it. I'm not a masochist. If we went to Brighton together—with its sad piers and rain and... all of that—we'd end up closer together. We'd laugh and share confidences. Make memories. Then if something happened to you..."

"Nothing's going to happen to me! I'm a shooter, not a shootee."

"They're shooters too, darling. And worse. I'm frightened. Not only for you. I'm frightened selfishly for myself. I don't want to get all tangled up in you—my life so tangled up in your life that I can't tell which is which. Because if that were to happen, and then you were killed, I would take it very badly. I wouldn't be brave at all. I'd just roll myself into a ball and make sure I never got hurt again. I'd spend the rest of my life looking out through lace curtains and doing crossword puzzles. Or I might end up in a nunnery."

"You'd make a terrible nun."

"No. Now lie down and listen to me. Stop it. Now, here's what I'm going to do. Tomorrow morning I'm going back to my flat, and I'm going to get right into bed with a hot water bottle and a book. And every once in a while, I'll pad out and make myself some tea. And when night comes, I'll take a bunch of pills and sleep without dreaming. And the next day, I'll do the same. I hope it rains all the time, because Sterne goes best with rain. Then Tuesday night, I'll meet you here at the Vicarage. You'll give over the films, and we'll say good-bye to them, and away we'll go. And if you don't turn up at the Vicarage. If you... well then, maybe I'll go down to Brighton alone. Just to see if you're lying about the wind fluting through The Lanes."

"I'll be there, Maggie. And we'll go off to Stockholm together."

"Stockholm?"

"Yes. I didn't tell you. We've agreed to do a month in Sweden. I know a little hotel on the Gamla Stan that's..."

"Please don't."

"I'm sorry."

"And please don't telephone me before it's all over. I don't think I could stand waiting for the phone to ring every moment."

He felt very proud of her. She was handling this magnificently. He gave her a robust hug. "Oh, Maggie Coyne! If only you could cook!"

She turned over and looked into his eyes with mock seriousness. "I really can't, you know. I can't cook at all."

Jonathan was relieved. This was much easier on him. Play it out with banter and charm. "You... can't... cook!"

"Only cornflakes. Also, I hate Eisenstein, I can't type, and I'm not a virgin. Do you still want me?"

Jonathan gasped. "Not... not a virgin?"

"I suppose I should have told you earlier. Before you gave your heart away."

"No. No. You were right to conceal it until I had a chance to discover your redeeming qualities. It's just that... just give me a little time to get used to the idea. It hurts a little at first. And for God's sake, don't ever tell me his name!"

"His name?" she asked with innocent confusion. "Oh! Oh, you mean their names."

"Oh, God! How can you twist the knife like that?"

"Simple as pie. I just take it by the handle, and—"

"Ouch! You gormless twit!"

Eventually they kissed, then they nestled into what had become their habitual sleeping entwinement. The rain rattled on the window, and the wind exercised the Chinese tonic scale. At last, Jonathan slipped into a deep sleep.

"Jonathan?"

He gasped awake, sitting up, hands defensively before his face. "What?"

"Why do you think I'd make a terrible nun?"

"Good night, Maggie."

"Good night."

Putney

It was midmorning when Jonathan arrived back at the Baker Street penthouse, having driven rapidly up from Brighton with the windows of the Lotus down and the wet wind swirling his hair.

The day spent alone had been good for him. His nerves were settled, and he felt fit and fast. It had rained without letup—a drowning, drenching rain that gushed down drainpipes and frothed into the gutters. He had bought a cap and a scarf and had walked slowly through the deserted Lanes and out onto the blustery piers—his wide raincoat collar the outer boundary of his vision and caring.

It was best that Maggie had not come with him. She was a wise girl.

He had eaten in a cheap cafe, the only customer. The owner had stood by the rain-streaked front window, his hands tucked up under his stained apron, and lamented the high cost of living and the weather, which, he had reason to know, had been changed for the worse by Sputniks and atomic tests.

To keep a low profile, he had stayed at a cheap bed and breakfast place, the energetic, talkative landlady of which recognized his accent and asked if he had ever met Shirley Temple face to face—bless her soul with that good ship Lollypop and that blackie who used to dance up and down the stairs (they can all dance, you have to give them that). Too bad all the picture houses were being made into bingo parlors, but then they don't make movies like that anymore, so maybe it wasn't such a loss. Still... the landlady hummed a bit of "Rainbow on the River" to herself. No. He had never met Bobby Breen either. Pity.

That night he had jolted awake—stark awake so suddenly that ugly fragments of a nightmare were caught in the light of memory before they could scurry into the dark of the unconscious. The Cloisters. Strange had not bought his story and was going to kill him. Two-mouths rode on a bronze horse, both of them grinning. Leonard's drooping eyelids revealed only bloodshot whites. He was choking... gasping in a mute attempt at laughter. Amazing Grace was there—haughty, nude. He was strapped to an exercise table. An altar. Eccyclemic violence.

Then the images had faded, all sucked down into the vortex of the memory hole. He had smiled at himself, wiped the icy sweat off his face, and gone back to sleep.

As soon as he entered his penthouse flat, before unpacking or even removing his overcoat, he telephoned Vanessa Dyke. All morning he had been uneasy about her, fearing that she would return to London early for some reason. The phone double-buzzed again and again, and he felt a sense of relief. Then, just as he was going to hang up, there was a click and a male voice said, "Yes?"

Jonathan thought he recognized the voice. "May I speak to Miss Dyke?" he asked, apprehensively.

"No, you cannot. You certainly cannot do that." The voice was mushy with drink, but he now recognized it.

"What are you doing there, Yank?"

"Oh, yes. Dr. Hemlock, I believe. The man who makes jokes about the Feeding Station."

"Pull yourself together, shithead! What are you doing there? Has anything happened to Van?"

It was a different, an empty and weak Yank who responded. "You'd better come over here."

"What is it?"

"You'd better come over."

Goddamnit!

He angrily snapped open the drawer of his chest. Automatically he checked the load of the two .45 revolvers: five double dumdum bullets in each cylinder and the hammer over an empty. He put the guns in the bottom of an attaché case and covered them with the half-dozen newspapers he had purchased outside his hotel, each one carrying an article on the forthcoming auction of the Marini Horse, and the news that it would be on display at the National Gallery today. The papers would provide an excuse for the attaché case when he brought it to The Cloisters.

But first Vanessa.

He stepped from the cab and paid the driver, then he turned up through the open gate and the shallow garden with its tarnished hydrangeas.

Yank opened the door before he knocked, a vagueness of expression and a toppling rigidity of stance indicating that he had been drinking. "The bad guys beat you to it, Jonathan baby. Come on in and make yourself at home."

Jonathan pushed past him into the sitting room where he and Vanessa had taken tea a few days before. It was cold now, and damp. No one had thought to light the fire. The portable typewriter was still on the spool table by the window, and reference books were open upside down beside it. The Spode from which they had drunk was still laid out, the cozy slumped beside the pot, the evaporated lees of tea a dark stain in the bottom of the cups.

She had never left for Devon.

Jonathan glanced around at the quaintly old-womanish furniture, the lace curtains, the antimacassars. Everything accused him.

"Dead?" he asked perfunctorily.

Yank was standing in the doorway, supporting himself against the frame. "She struck out. Dead as a doornail—or was that Marley?"

"Where is she?"

"Yonder." He waved in the direction of the kitchen beyond a closed door. He picked up a bottle of Vanessa's whiskey and poured some into a glass.

"Cloisters?" Jonathan asked, taking the glass from him and setting it aside.

"Who else, amigo? Their modus operandi is a calling card. It was done in the style of the Parnell-Greene murder. I think I'd best sit down." He dropped into an easy chair and let his head rest on the antimacassar as he breathed orally in the short pants of nausea. "There must have been three or four of them. They..." He wet his lips and swallowed. "They raped her. Repeatedly. And not just with their... with themselves. They used... things. Kitchen utensils. She died of hemorrhage. She's in there. You can take a look if you want. I had to, so it's only just that you should." He stood up too quickly, his balance uncertain. "You know? You know what I was thinking? It was probably the only time she ever made love with a man."

Jonathan turned half away, then spun back, driving the heel of his hand into Yank's jaw. He went down in a boneless heap. It was unfair, but he had to hit somebody.

There was a half-filled suitcase on a chair. She must have been packing when they walked in on her. On the carpet was a long cigarette burn. The cigarette had probably been slapped from the corner of her mouth.

He steeled himself and stepped over Yank to enter the kitchen. She was on the kitchen table, covered from face to knees with a raincoat. Yank's. Only the torso was on the table. The bare, unshaven legs hung over the edge. The feet were long and bony, like the Christ of a Mexican crucifix, and their limp, toed-in dangle spoke death louder even than the sweet, thick stink. Needing to accept his share of the punishment, Jonathan pulled down the coat and looked at the face. It was contorted into a snarl that bared the teeth. He looked away.

There had been no bruises on her face. Apparently they had kept her conscious as long as possible. Two or three of them must have held her onto the table while Leonard raped her, before looking through the kitchen drawers to find things to...

Leonard! Jonathan said the name aloud to himself.

Yank was back on his feet by the time Jonathan returned to the sitting room, but he was unsteady. And he was weeping.

"I'm getting out of this," Yank said to the wall.

"Sit down. Pull yourself together. You're not all that drunk."

"How can people do this kind of thing? And not only The Cloisters people. How can something like the Feeding Station exist? I don't want any of this. I just want a ranch in Nebraska!"

"Sit down! I'm not impressed by your sudden delicacy in the face of violence. Just remember that I wouldn't be involved in this thing—and Vanessa wouldn't have been—if you people hadn't roped me in with that murder setup. So just shut up! Are the police in on this yet?"

"You're a cold-blooded bastard, aren't you? A real professional."

"How hurt do you want to get?"

"Go ahead! Beat me up!"

Jonathan wanted to. He really wanted to.

But he took a breath and asked, "Have the police been informed?"

Yank drooped his head and held it in his hands. "No," he said quietly. "They'll receive an anonymous call later. After we're out of here."

Jonathan looked around the room. He hadn't given her name to Strange, he had only confirmed it as a token of sincerity. So it wasn't really his fault. And immediately he felt contempt for himself for taking refuge in that thought.

Before leaving, he turned back to Yank. "Don't forget your raincoat."

Yank looked up at him with disbelief and disgust swimming in his bleary eyes. "She was your friend."

Jonathan left. For an hour he walked through the zinc-colored streets of Putney, through the gritty fog, past melancholy brick row houses, some of which had tarnished hydrangeas in their pitiful little front gardens.

Then he caught a cab for The Cloisters.

The Cloisters

"...Physical beauty is a worthy goal in its own—unh—right, of course. But there are fringe benefits. The rituals—unh—it entails are almost—unh—as valuable as the ends—unh!" Max Strange rested for a moment at the top of a sit-up. "How many is that?" he asked his masseur.

"Sixty-eight, sir."

Strange blew out a puff of air and began again. "Sixty-nine—unh—seventy—unh. For instance, Dr. Hemlock, I do my best thinking—unh—when I am sunbathing or exercising, or taking steam." He dropped back on the exercise table with a grunt. "That's enough."

As the masseur spread creamy lanolin on Strange's body, Jonathan looked around the exercise room, green and dim through the round glasses that protected his eyes from the ultraviolet rays of the bank of sun lamps surrounding Strange. Leonard and Two-mouths stood near him, and three other of Strange's enforcers leaned against the walls with studied, sassy languor, among them the scowling fellow with yellowish temporary caps on his front teeth. The bulging green glasses made the group look like those man/insect mutants so popular with makers of low budget science fiction films.

Jonathan checked his hate, blanking out the image of Vanessa, closing out Leonard. He had to appear casual and loose.

Strange's face and throat were being massaged with heated lanolin, and his voice was rather constricted as he said, "While I've been taking a little sun and exercise, I've been thinking about you a great deal."

"That's nice," Jonathan said. "I brought along some copies of newspapers. Evidence that I have been busy. After these writeups, no one will question the price the Horse will bring."

"Yes, I've already seen the papers."

"I suppose you're pleased."

"To a degree. But all this about putting the Horse on display at the National Gallery. I don't recall our agreeing on that"

"It was an inspiration of the moment. I told you I would need a certain freedom of movement. After my first couple of contacts, I realized that the critics weren't going to buy my story wholeheartedly without some kind of special kudos. And the idea of lending the authority of the National occurred to me. It cost me most of the ten thousand to arrange it."

"I see." Strange stayed the masseur's hand. "That's enough. You may turn off the lights." He sat up on the edge of the table and took off his protective glasses. "You have a subtle mind, Dr. Hemlock."

"Thank you."

Strange looked at him without expression. "Yes... a subtle mind. Come along. We'll take a little steam together. Do you a world of good."

"Not just now, thanks."

Strange glanced to the floor. "It's a pity, is it not, that most attempts to phrase politely run the risk of rhetorical ambiguity."

They were an unlikely assortment of form and flesh, the four of them sitting in the billowing steam, towels about their waists. Raw material for Daumier. There was the rotisserie-tanned, classically muscled body of Strange—youngest and oldest of them all; Jonathan's lean, sinewy mountain climber's physique; the thin and brittle frame of the two-mouthed weasel—fish-belly white and hairless, a dried chicken carcass, a xylophone of ribs, one mouth grinning from social discomfort, the other pouting for the same reason; and the primate hulk of Leonard with its thick, short neck and stanchion legs—tufts of hair bristling from the sloping shoulders, his head tilted back, his heavy-lidded eyes ever upon Jonathan.

Until Strange spoke, the silence had been accented by the monotonous hiss of entering steam. "I am displeased with you, Dr. Hemlock. You shouldn't have arranged to put the Horse on public display without my permission."

"Well, there's not much we can do about that now."

"True. Any change in your widely publicized plan would attract attention. I have no choice. And that is why I am displeased."

"Don't worry. The security system in the National is among the best in the world."

"That is not the point."

"What the hell is the point?"

Strange turned to the thin-chested man with two mouths. "Darling, go fetch that little leather box, there's a good man."

The weaselly serf rose and left the chamber, swirling eddies of vapor in his wake.

"Darling?" Jonathan couldn't help asking.

"His name. Kenneth Darling. I know, I know. Fate delights in her little ironies. But at this moment I am less interested in the deviousness of Fate than I am in yours."

"Any particular deviousness?" Might as well play it out.

Strange leaned his head back against the sweating tile wall and closed his eyes. "Where have you been for the past two days?"

"Arranging for the auction. Contacting critics and reviewers. Setting up the National Gallery display. Earning my money, really."

"Conscientious man."

"Greedy man. What's troubling you, Max?"

"I had you followed from the time you left here."

"Nu?"

"And again, as before, my man lost you in the maze of streets in Covent Garden."

Jonathan shrugged. "I'm sorry your people are incompetent. If I'd known the idiot was following me, I'd have left a trail of bread crumbs."

"For two days, you did not return to either your Baker Street flat or the one in Mayfair. Where were you?"

Jonathan sighed deeply, then spoke slowly and clearly, as though talking to a backward child or a travel agent. "After making the arrangements for the Horse, I went to ground down in Brighton. Why, you will now ask, did I go to ground? I'll tell you why I went to ground. It seemed wise to maintain as low a profile as possible until the thing was done. What did I do in Brighton? Well, I read a bit. And I took long walks through The Lanes. And one evening, I—"

"Very well!"

"Are you satisfied?"

"Don't talk like one of my employees."

"By the way, where are your employees? When I came in, the place seemed deserted."

"So it is, save for a small staff. The Cloisters is no longer in business."

"That will leave a great gap in the social lives of our betters."

Strange waved off this oblique line of conversation with the back of his hand. "When you returned to London this morning, you went to your Baker Street apartment. From there you took a taxi to Miss Vanessa Dyke's house in Putney."

"Right. Right. The fare was one pound six—one fifty with tip. The driver thought the government ought to ban private cars from the city. Particularly when there is fog—which, by the way, he ascribed to massive ice floes broken off the polar cap in result of recent Apollo moon shots—"

"Please!"

"I don't want you to think I'm holding any details back."

"While in Putney, you undoubtedly discovered the accident that had befallen Miss Dyke."

Jonathan glanced at Leonard. "Accident. Yes."

"It must seem to you," Strange said, stretching his legs over the pine bench until the muscles stood out, "that our treatment of Miss Dyke was overreactive. After all, she was guilty only of setting you on our path at a time when we were actively seeking you out ourselves. But the years have taught me that violence and terror, if they are to be effective deterrents, must be exercised systematically and inexorably. We propose certain rules of conduct, and we have to enforce them without reference to individual motives. In this we operate as governments do. It is our good fortune to have Leonard here to carry out the punishments. I loose him like an ineluctable Fury, and punishment becomes both automatic and profound. The effect of Miss Dyke's action is of no weight in this. She was punished for her intention."

Cold air entered the steam room, and the vapor undulated as Darling returned carrying a small black leather case.

"Ah!" said Strange. "Here we are. Leonard, will you give Darling a hand?"

Leonard rose and threw his thick arms around Jonathan's chest, locking his hands in front and pinning Jonathan's arms to his sides. After the first automatic reaction, resistance to that python grip was pointless. With fumbling haste, Darling opened the case, took out a syringe, and injected its contents into Jonathan's shoulder.

"You may let him go, Leonard. But if he makes the slightest gesture of aggression toward me, I want you to beat him, hurting him rather a lot." Strange looked obliquely at Jonathan. "It's not that I'm a physical coward, Dr. Hemlock. But it would be a great pity if you were to damage my face. Surely, as a lover of beauty, you understand."

Jonathan breathed as shallowly as possible, fighting to bring his pulse rate down and to clear his mind. "What's going on, Strange?"

Strange laughed. "Oh, do come on! The midnight bell has rung. Time to stop the dance and remove our masks. Don't worry about the hypodermic. It won't kill you. In fact, there will be no effect at all for five or ten minutes. And even then, you'll find it quite pleasant. The little girl you toyed with the other evening was under a similar drug. It relaxes you, calms your aggressive impulses, makes you docile and obedient."

Jonathan felt nothing as yet "Why are you doing this?"

"Oh, I think you've served your purpose now, don't you? And you should be pleased to know that your plans will go ahead just as you wanted. In an hour the armored van will arrive to carry the Horse to the National Gallery, where it will be the object of attention by the ogling masses. And tomorrow it will be on the floor of Sotheby's. We've known about you all along, of course. About your friends in Loo. About the pompous old vicar."

Did he know about Maggie? That was Jonathan's primary worry.

"Tell me, Jonathan—I feel I may use your first name now—is your mind still clear enough to reason out why I have let you go so long?"

"It's fairly obvious. You had a real problem in arranging the open auction of the films without alerting the British authorities."

"Precisely. And the good Lord sent you along to do it for us—and with the benediction of the Loo organization, too! Obviously, you intended to intercept the Marini Horse while it was in the National Gallery. But now you won't have to trouble yourself about that. Tomorrow, a little after noon, the gavel falls. The British government, with all its trade concessions, defense secrets, wealth, and problems, becomes the property of the highest bidder. And Amazing Grace and I disappear."

"But if I don't show up with the films..." Jonathan stopped and frowned. That's odd, he thought. He had forgotten what he was going to say.

Strange laughed. "Naturally, I have considered that. Your vicar knows the films are in the Horse, and if you don't bring them, he will be constrained to make other arrangements—loath though he is to bring the police in on this. I have taken that possibility into account, and I have neutralized it. And of course I'm neutralizing you. You won't be going anywhere near the National Gallery."

Jonathan somehow didn't care. The steam felt very good. Caressing. It penetrated his muscles and tingled them pleasantly. There was nothing to be afraid of. Maximilian Strange was a handsome man, a cultured man... what did that have to do with anything? "Do I, ah..." What was he going to say? "Oh, yes! Do I die?"

"Oh, I imagine so," Strange said with warm concern. "But not just now."

"I see," Jonathan said, recognizing the profound meaning in these words. "And if I don't die now," he reasoned, "then I die later. I mean, everyone dies sooner or later, you know." He felt he had them here. No one could deny that.

"We'll keep you around for a while, just in case something goes wrong. You may be of some bargaining value."

That was right, Jonathan thought. He should have thought of that himself. That was a very good idea.

"Help him up to his room," the steam said.

"No, that's all right," Jonathan's voice said. "Thank you, but that's all right. I can..." But he couldn't. He couldn't stand up. And that was amazingly funny.

No, it was not funny. It was really very serious. And dangerous.

But funny.

A helpful man named Darling—that's funny too—helped Jonathan to his feet. Leonard looked on benevolently.

"Don't dress him," the steam said thoughtfully. "Nudity has a great psychological deterrent. No one is brave when he is nude."

That was wise, really. How could you be a hero with your ass hanging out? Poor Leonard. He couldn't talk. But he had killed Vanessa! Don't forget that. And these other goons, they had held her onto the table. Jonathan would teach them.

"Leonard," he said soapily, tapping his knuckle against the tree-trunk chest, "you're dumb. You know that? You are as dumb as a bullet. You are, in fact, a dumdum."

"Come along, mate." Darling led him out of the steam room.

"It's cold out here, Darling. I need my attaché case to keep me warm." Would they see through that?

"Just come along with me, mate. You're drunk with the dope." Darling's voice had an odd echo. Then Jonathan realized why. He had two mouths! Naturally, he echoed.

The stairs were very difficult to climb. It was the undulations, of course. The room they led him to was the one he had been in the other evening. With Maggie.

Mustn't mention her name!

Jonathan was guided to the bed, where he lay down slowly, very slowly, deeply.

"Wait a minute!"

Darling answered from everywhere. "What is it?"

"I don't seem to have my attaché case. I need it... for a pillow."

"Look, mate. Give over, won't you? I've already been through it and took out the guns. Mr. Strange give 'em to me as a present."

Jonathan was deeply disappointed. "That's too bad. I wanted to shoot you all. You know what I mean?"

Darling laughed dryly. "That's hard lines for you, mate. I guess you struck out. Now you just rest there. I'll be back in a couple of hours to shoot you."

"Oh?"

"With more dope. It only lasts four or five hours."

"Oh, I'm sorry about that. But then, all things are mutable. Except change, of course. I mean... change can't be mutable because... well, it's like all generalizations being false... and angels on the point of a pin. You know what I mean?"

But Darling had left, locking the door behind him.

Jonathan lay nude, spread-eagle on his back, watching with awe and admiration the permutations of the ceiling rectangle into parallelograms and trapezoids. Amazing that he had never noticed that before.

He was cold. Sweating and cold. There were no blankets on the bed. Only one sheet. And the chintzy bastards had taken his clothes!

He pulled the corner of the sheet over his chest and gripped it hard as he felt his body rise, up past the images and ideas above him. He tried to focus on those images and ideas, but they vanished under concentration, like the dim stars that can only be seen in peripheral vision.

It seemed that he had to get out of there. Go to a museum with MacTaint. For some reason... for some reason.

It was true what Darling had said. He had well and truly struck out. Struck out. Struck out.

Later—four minutes? four hours?—he tried to get up. Nausea. The floor rippled when he stood on it, so he knelt and put his forehead on the rug, and that was better.

Yes! He had to go with MacTaint to get the films from within the Marini Horse. Of course! But it was cold. His skin was clammy to the touch.

The window.

Then the pattern on the rug caught his attention. Beautiful, brilliant, and in constant subtle motion. Beautiful.

Forget the rug! The window!

He crawled over to it, repeating the word "window" again and again so he wouldn't forget what he was doing. He pulled himself up and looked out.

Fog. Almost evening. He had been out for hours. They would be back soon to shoot him up again.

With both hands he lifted the latch and pushed the window open. He had to wrap his arms around the center post of the casement before he dared to put his head out and look down.

No way. Never. The room was on the top floor. Red tile eaves overhung the window, and below there was a deadfall of three stories to a flagstone terrace. The building was faced with flush-set stone. No cracks, no mortise, no ledges to the window casements.

No way. Even in his prime as a climber, he could not have descended that face without an abseil rope.

Abseil rope. He turned back into the room, almost fainting with the suddenness of the movement.

Nothing. Only the sheet. Too short. That was why they had taken away his bedding.

He was able to walk back to the bed. He reeled, and he had to catch himself on the bedpost, but he had not had to crawl. His mind was clearing. Another half hour, maybe. Then he would be able to move about. He would be able to think. But he didn't have a half hour. They would be back before that.

He lay flat on his back on the bed, shivering with the cold that seemed to come from within his bones. The euphoria had passed, and a dry nausea had replaced it. Now, try to think. How to get rid of the effect quickly when they came back and shot him up again? He had to think it out before they returned, and he again sank into the pleasant, deadly euphoria.

Yes. Burn the dope up! With exercise. As soon as they left next time, he would start exercising. Make the blood flow quickly. Precipitate the effects and burn them off. That might work! That might give him half an hour to move and think before they returned to give him the third dose.

Oh, but he would forget! Once the crap was in him, he would lie there and groove on the ceiling, forgetting to exercise. He would forget his plan.

He looked around the room desperately. There was a narrow mantelpiece over an ornate hearth that had been blocked up. That would do. He would have four or five clear minutes after they put the dope in him and before it got into his bloodstream. During that time, he would exercise furiously to force the onset of the effects. Then, before he started to trip out, he would climb up on the mantel, where he would do isometrics to keep the heart pumping, to get the crap through him and out. And if his mind wandered, if the dope started to float him away, he would fall from the mantel ledge. That would snap him out of it. And if he could, he would climb back and begin exercising again. Somehow he would force the effects to pass off more quickly. He would gain time before the third needle.

Now relax. Empty your head.

There was a sound down the hall. They were returning.

Relax. Make them think you're still out. He produced the image of a still pond on the backs of his eyelids. This time control mattered. He had to get under quickly.

Darling preceded Leonard into the room. He clicked on the lights, and they advanced on the bed with its still form stretched over a wrinkled puddle of sheet.

"Still out," Darling said, as he opened the black leather case. "Gor, what's this? Look at him! The sweat's fair pouring off him! He's cold! Here. Put your hand on his chest. Feel his heart thumping there. What do you think, Leonard? Maybe he's one of them low tolerance blokes. Another dose might do for him."

But Leonard took the syringe from Darling's hand and, snapping Jonathan over by his arm, drove the needle into the shoulder muscle and squirted home the contents, not caring if there was air in the ampul.

"He didn't even flinch," Darling said. "Took the fun out of it for you, didn't I? I told you he was out. If he dies before Mr. Strange wants, remember that I'm not taking the blame."

They left, turning out the lights and locking the door behind them.

Slowly, Jonathan opened his eyes. He allowed his body's demand for oxygen to take control of his breathing rate. He felt all right; weak but in control. But he knew that the delightful killer was in there, mixing with his blood. He rose from bed as hastily as his sketchy balance would allow and brought the small sheet with him to the open window. After some fumbling, he tied one end of it to the center post, allowing the seven feet of slack to dangle outside. Then he lay down on the floor and began exercising. Sit-ups until his stomach muscles quivered, then push-ups.

For more than a minute, he sensed no effect from the dope. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up—and up, and up. He seemed to rise so slowly, so effortlessly. That's it, he told himself. The exercise was working. He was bringing it on quickly. He decided it was time to get on the mantel. He stood up. But the room was telescoping on him—all the lines rushing into the corners in exaggerated foreshortening.

"God," he muttered. "I waited too long! It's coming too fast!"

The gas hearth was there, way over on the other side of the room. He put his arms out and leaned toward it, hoping he would reel and fall in that direction. But the crash came from behind. He had staggered backward and hit the wall behind him. The room seemed filled with the rasp of his breathing. He was afraid they would hear it.

Can't walk to it. Get down on the floor and crawl. Safer. Beautiful. Beautiful rug. Oh, no! He was alone in an endless sea of floor. He didn't know which direction to go. He could see the mantelpiece when he looked up, but it kept changing directions, and it didn't get any nearer.

He sat on the floor, one foot under him, the other leg stretched out before him, his head hanging down and his chin on his chest, his oral breathing shallow and rapid. He felt weightless. And contented. He was comfortable, and it was too funny—this trying to find a mantel.

No! He ground his teeth together and forced himself to think. Keep crawling. Find a wall. Then crawl along it. Must lead to the hearth eventually.

He crawled on. Once he rested with his face in a corner of the room, and the walls felt soft and comfortable against his cheeks. He wanted so much to sleep. But he snapped himself out of it and crawled on. Then his hand touched marble—beautifully grained, somehow luminescent marble. That was the mantelpiece.

Now climb up on the ledge!

Too high. Too hard.

Climb.

Twice he slipped and fell back to the floor, and it took all his mental strength to resist the desire to stay there and enjoy the ceiling.

At last he stood on the narrow ledge of the mantel, his back against the wall, his arms cruciform, fingers trying to hold onto the flowers in the wallpaper. He was frightened and his heart pounded. The floor, rippling and blurring, was so far down there.

Good. The fear was good. It made his pulse race. It would burn off the dope. Now exercise. Isometric tension... release. Tension... release.

He had the impression that he could see by means of darkness as other people saw by means of light. And so much darkness was coming in through the open window that he could see details in the room clearly. There were bursting sacs of light behind his eyes. The rug. Beautiful color. It floated up toward him slowly, seductively.

The pain and shock of the fall brought him briefly to his senses. He was lying face down on the rug. He couldn't breathe through his nose. Blood. It didn't hurt. It made him want to sleep.

The climb back up was cerebral. His sense of balance was gone, along with his sense of direction. He had to tell himself that tops tend to be above bottoms. He had to think out the fact that leaning out would cause a fall. Eventually he was on the mantel ledge, on his knees. He could not stand. Kneeling, his chest now against the wall, he began the isometric exercises. Tension... release. Tension... release.

An infinity of timelessness passed. He needed to sleep. Right now. He rested back on the supporting air.

This time, he slept through the fall and crash.

The cold woke him up. He was sweating and cold. His mouth was dry from oral breathing, and his upper lip was stiff. He touched the stiff lip. It was flaky, gritty. The blood from his nose had congealed. He had been out for some time. But he knew from the nausea and the cold that the hallucinatory effects of the drug had passed. He was weak and dizzy, but he could think and he could move. He got to his hands and knees slowly and looked around the room. Dark shadows, a rectangle of gray city smear at the window. The window. He remembered.

With the help of the bedpost, he got to his feet and reeled to the window. The night air was freezing cold as it flowed over his sweating, naked body. He stood, supporting himself on the casement and sucking in great breaths of damp refreshing air. The sheet was still knotted about the center post.

Looking down, he could just make out the stone terrace three stories below. A mist of light from a room below spilled out over the wet flagstones. He climbed up onto the sill and stood in the frame. Then he gripped the underledge of the eaves and leaned out. And instantly he was overcome by vertigo, drowning in dizziness. Desperately, he scrambled back. Too soon. He would have to wait until the last moment. Just before they came in. Give his mind a chance to get as clear as it would ever be.

Leonard and Darling left their dart game with fellow employees and crossed the deserted Art Deco salon, their reflections following them along the wall of mirrors that hid the Aquarium. They took the long curving stairway two steps at a time because they were a little late for the next scheduled injection. Leonard unlocked the door, and Darling switched on the lights.

"Christ!" Darling ejaculated.

In a rush they checked the closet, the bathroom, and under the bed. Then Leonard noticed the open window and the sheet knotted around the center post. He slammed his fist against the casement in fury.

"The Guv won't half be browned off at this!" Darling said. "He'll have our arses for it!" He looked down to the terrace below. "Can't have got far. That sheet didn't help much. Must of broke both his legs. Come on!"

They ran from the room, Leonard charging down the staircase to examine the grounds, while Darling ran up the corridor to his room, where he snatched up the revolvers he had liberated from Jonathan's attaché case.

Head downward on the steep sloping roof, Jonathan lay tense and still. When he had heard them approaching the door, he had gripped the underedge of the eaves and swung out, tuck-rolling up and over. For a terrible moment, only the lower half of his body was on the slippery roof, his torso and head dangling over. The incline was greater than he had expected, and the sharp overlapping edges of the tiles prevented him from scrambling up. Only his fingertip hold on the underside of the edge prevented him from falling to the terrace below, but the pressure out against his reflexed wrists was agonizing and enervating. He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming with the pain as he pressed against his wrists with all his force, his jaw muscles roped and his head shuddering with the effort as he wriggled up against the sawtoothed set of the rough tile edges, gouging skin from his knees and rib cage and abrading his scrotum. His leverage was spent before he could get his chin past the eaves, and his angle on the roof was such that he could maintain his purchase only by keeping the throbbing wrists locked and by spreading his legs, increasing the area of traction to the maximum. Blood rushed to his head, and his racing pulse thrummed with dry lumps in his ears.

The lights came on in the room below, dimly illuminating the fog around him. He heard Darling say "Christ!," then there was the sound of a search through the room. Would the sheet mislead them? His lungs needed air, and he opened his mouth wide to breathe, so the intake would make less noise. Some of the dope was still in him, making thought slimy and vision uncertain. The strength was leaking out of him, draining from his wrists and shoulders.

He slipped... only a couple of inches, but he couldn't get it back. Now even more weight over the edge. Vertigo. The dim flagstone terrace so far below. No strength. Wrists winced with pain.

Leonard's head appeared just below him. The Mute snatched at the dangling sheet, then peered down. Jonathan squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated with all his force: Don't look up! Don't look up! The cold of the wet tiles against his nude body was numbing. Again he slipped two inches! But at that second Leonard banged his fist against the casement in fury, covering the sound. Darling said something from within.

They ran out of the room.

A strangled, whimpering groan escaped Jonathan. Getting down would be as dangerous as getting up had been. The pitch of the roof was sharp, and there was a thin coat of greasy dirt on the tiles lubricated by the moisture of the fog. Once he pulled in his legs and let the slip start, there would be no stopping it. With those limp and throbbing wrists, he would have to catch the underedge of the eaves as he slid past and swing back in through the window. If he was off by six inches to either side, he would crash against the building and fall to the flagstones below.

No use thinking about it. No time. No strength left.

He let go.

He was an inch or two off, and as he swung into the room backward, he clipped his head on the center post of the window casement. Dizziness and pain made him reel as he got to his feet, but he drove on, head down, running for the open door.

As Darling started back down the hall with the big revolvers, he heard the crash in Jonathan's room and ran toward it. They collided in the doorway and went down in a jumble in the hall. Jonathan fought blindly and desperately, grappling for Darling's throat and getting it, both thumbs against the larynx. He could feel that there was little strength left in his grip, so he closed his eyes and bared his teeth, pressing desperately as Darling struggled to bring either revolver to bear on Jonathan's naked side. He wriggled like a beached fish as Jonathan squeezed for all he was worth, expecting at any moment to hear the roar of a gun and to have his guts blown out by a flattening dumdum. From nowhere, the thought came to Jonathan of Vanessa struggling on her kitchen table. Darling had probably held her down as Leonard had prodded at her. With a final surge of desperate fury, Jonathan drove his thumbs through, and the larynx crumpled like a papier-mâché pin box. Darling gargled and died.

For a second Jonathan lay there gasping, his forehead on Darling's silent chest. He got to his knees and picked up the revolvers. Keep moving, he ordered himself. He blinked away the large spots of blindness in the center of his eyes and stumbled on, down the wide curving staircase and across the sterile Art Deco salon. He burst into the exercise room, dropping to the floor with both guns up before him. It was empty. But he could hear them now, shouting outside the house. He cocked back both hammers with his thumbs and struggled to his feet. Dizzy. Nausea.

He reeled toward the door to the small paneled dining room and kicked it open with the ball of his foot.

The dope swam in his head, and the scene played out like a dream—a slow-motion ballet. Strange and Grace were dining. She turned toward the opening door, her naked breasts wobbling viscously with the motion. Strange floated to his feet and put out one hand, palm forward as though in a Hindu gesture of blessing. Jonathan raised one gun and fired. The roar reverberated in his head, and even the recoil kick seemed to lift his hand slowly. Like magic, the left side of Strange's face disappeared and in its place was a splash of red gelatin. Grace clutched the air, her face contorted into a scream of horror, but no sound came. Strange sank away under the table, and she fainted.

From too slow, things began to go too fast. Jonathan stumbled back into the exercise room, panting and unsteady. He needed to vomit. The sound of running men was closer. He turned on the bank of sun lamps and directed them toward the outer door. "I'm sick!" he whimpered aloud as he fumbled on the round green glasses haphazardly, one eye squeezed closed by the elastic band.

They burst into the room. Three of them. The broken-toothed one in the lead tried to shield his eyes from the blinding glare, holding his automatic before his face. Jonathan's first shot blew his arm off at the shoulder, and he spun and fell, spraying the other two with his blood. The next dumdum took the one closest to the door in the small of the back as he scrambled to retreat. His body was lifted into the air and slammed against the wall of exercise bars. He did not fall because his arm got tangled in the bars, but his body jerked convulsively.

The third man got off a wild shot in the direction of the lights, and one of them imploded above Jonathan's head, showering him with hot glass. Jonathan's return shot blew away the man's leg at the knee. He stood for a second, surprised. Then he fell to the unsupported side.

The silence rang with the absence of gun roars. The man tangled in the exercise rings slid to the floor, his forehead rattling on each rung. Then it was still.

"I'm sick!" Jonathan told them again, the words thick and muffled.

The tide of vertigo rose within him. The back of his throat was bitter with vomit. Mustn't pass out! Leonard is still out there somewhere! Hold on!

He tugged the green glasses off and staggered over to the door to the dressing room. Mirrors. An infinity of naked men with guns. Blood caked on their faces; their knees and chests scuffed and bleeding. He opened the center mirror and went into the Aquarium.

And there was Leonard. He had a Mauser machine pistol and was fitting on the wooden holster/stock, slowly and deliberately, his hooded eyes expressionless. He was on the other side of the one-way glass, standing alone in the empty Art Deco salon, pressed close to the mirrored wall, waiting for Jonathan to emerge through the exercise room door.

Jonathan's heart pulsed in his temples. He was so tired, so sick. He only wanted to sleep. The mist of dope in his brain cleared for a moment. Vanessa. Leonard and Vanessa—and kitchen utensils. He set his teeth and crept soundlessly to the mirrored panel before him. He raised both guns, their barrels almost touching the glass, and he waited as Leonard on his side inched forward, waited until Leonard's huge body had moved directly in front of the barrels. One gun was pointed at Leonard's neck, the other at his ear.

The mirror exploded and Leonard's headless body surfed over the parqueted floor on a hissing tide of shattered glass. It twitched violently, tinkling and grinding in the glass. Then it stopped.

And Jonathan threw up.

Covent Garden

The driver of taxi #68204 threaded through the tangle of narrow lanes above Hampstead High Street in search of a fare. He accepted philosophically the improbability of making a pickup in that quiet district at that time of night, and he decided to return to center city. As he stopped at a deserted intersection, he began to sing "On the Road to Mandalay" under his breath, shifting keys with liberal insouciance. The back door of his cab opened, and a passenger entered.

"Where to, mate?" the driver asked over his shoulder without turning around.

"Covent Garden."

"Right you are." The driver pulled away, humming his inadvertent variations on the theme of "Roses of Picardy." He vaguely wondered what a man with an American accent wanted in Covent Garden at that time of night. "The market?" he asked over his shoulder.

"What? Oh. Yes. The market will do."

The passenger's voice was faint and confused, and the driver feared that he might have picked up a drunk who would soil the back of his cab. He pulled over to the curb and turned around. "Now, listen, mate. If you're drunk... I'll be buggered!" The passenger was nude. "Ere! Wot's all this!"

"Go to the market. I'll give you directions from there."

The driver was prepared to put a stop to all this rubbish, when he noticed two very large revolvers on the seat beside the passenger. "The market, is it?" He released the hand brake and drove on. Not singing.

They stopped at the entrance to a narrow, unlit alley in the heart of the Garden district. "This it, mate?"

"Yes." The passenger sounded as though he had dropped off during the ride. "Listen, driver, I don't seem to have any money on me..."

"Oh, that's all right, mate."

"If you'll just come in with me, I'll—"

"No! No, that's all right. Forget it."

The passenger rubbed the back of his neck and his eyes, as though trying to clear his mind. "I... ah... I know this must seem irregular to you, driver."

"No, sir. Not at all."

"You're sure you don't want to come in for your money?"

"Oh yes, sir. I'm quite sure. Now, if this is the place you want..."

"Right." Jonathan climbed painfully out of the cab, taking his revolvers with him, and the taxi sped off.

The outer workshop of MacTaint's place was empty, save for the gaunt, wild-eyed painter who looked up crossly as Jonathan's entrance brought a gust of cold air with it. He muttered angrily under his breath and returned to the magnum opus he had been working on for eleven years: a huge pointillist rendering of the London docks done with a three-hair brush.

Jonathan strode stiff-legged past him, still unsteady on his feet, and made for the entrance to the back apartment.

The painter returned to his work. Then, after a minute, he raised his emaciated, Christlike face and stared into the distance. There had been something odd about that intruder. Something about his dress.

He steeped sleepily in the deep hot water of the bath, a half-empty tumbler of whiskey dangling loosely from his hand over the edge of the tub. Although the water still stung and located all his abrasions—knees, chest, shoulder, the back of his head where he had cracked it swinging back in through the window—his mind was quite clear. The worst of it was over. All he had to do now was to get the films from within the Marini Horse.

MacTaint entered the bathroom, carrying towels, shuffling along in his shaggy greatcoat, despite the steamy atmosphere of the room. "You didn't half give Lilla a start, coming in like that with blood all over you and your shiny arse hanging out. I thought I was going to have to mop up the floor after her. Got her settled down with a bottle of gin now, though."

"Give her my apologies, as one theatre personage to another."

"I'll do that. Gor, look at you! They gave you a fair bit of stick, didn't they?"

"They got a little stick themselves."

"I'll bet they did." He ogled the bath water with mistrust. "That ain't good for you, Jon. Bathing saps the strength. Dilutes the inner fluids."

"Could I have another pint of milk?"

"Jesus, lad! Is there no end to the harm you're willing to do yourself?" But he went out to fetch the milk, and when he returned he swapped the bottle for the empty glass in Jonathan's hand.

Jonathan pulled off the metal lid and drank half the pint down without taking the bottle from his lips. "Good. I'm feeling a lot better."

"Maybe. But not good enough, my boy. There's no way in the world you could go along with me tonight. Not with your shoulder like that. Say! They got your beak too, did they?"

"No, I did that myself. Falling from a mantel."

"...a mantel?"

"Yes. I climbed up there to keep awake."

"Oh, yes."

"But I fell off again."

"...I see. I'll tell you one thing, Jon. I'm glad I'm not in academics. Too demanding by half."

"Look, Mac. You're sure you can get into the Gallery tonight?"

MacTaint looked at him narrowly. "You ain't in no condition to come along, I tell you. And I ain't having you put sand in my tank."

"I know. I recognize that." Jonathan reached over and poured milk into his tumbler, then he put in a good tot of whiskey. "Tell me how you're going to get the Chardin."

MacTaint looked around for a glass for himself and, not finding one, he dumped the toothbrushes out of a cup on the sink and used that. Then he made himself comfortable on the lid of the toilet seat. "I go right up the outside of the building. They got scaffolding up for steam cleaning the façade. All part of 'Keep London Tidy.' And no chance of being seen, what with the canvas flaps they got hung on the scaffolding to keep the dirt and water from getting on blokes below. The window latch is in position, but it doesn't do nothin'. I've had a lad working on it with a file, bit by bit, for the past two months. I just nip up the scaffolding, in through the window, and do the dirty to the national art treasures."

"Guards?"

"Lazy old arseholes waiting for their pensions to come through. It'll only take a couple of seconds to swap my Chardin for theirs."

Jonathan turned on the hot water with his toes and felt the warmth eddy up under his legs, stinging afresh his scuffs and cuts. "Tell me, Mac. How much do you expect to make from the Chardin?"

"Five, maybe seven thousand quid. Why?"

"There's something I want in there. Just one chamber away. I'll give you five thousand for it."

"You've got that much?"

"A man gave me ten thousand to do something for him. I'll split it with you."

"A painting?"

"No. Several reels of film. They're inside a hollow bronze horse by Marini that's on display in the next chamber."

MacTaint scratched at the top of his head, then studiously regarded a fleck of scruff on his fingernail. "And you were going to get it while you were along with me?"

"Right."

"Even though that might have fucked up my business?"

"That's right."

"You're a proper villain, Jonathan."

"True."

"A bronze horse, you say? How do I get away with it? I mean, I might attract a little attention running through the streets, dragging a bronze horse behind me."

"You'll have to break the horse with a hammer. One big blow will crack it."

"I can't help feeling the guards might hear that."

"I'm sure they will. You'll have to move like hell. That's why I'm offering you so much money."

MacTaint clawed at the flaky whiskers under his chin meditatively. "Five thousand, eh?"

"Five thousand."

"What's on the film?"

Jonathan shook his head.

"Well, I suppose that was a mug's question." He wiped the sweat from his face with the cuff of his overcoat. "It's hot in here."

"Yes, and close too." Jonathan had been trying to breathe only in shallow oral breaths since MacTaint had entered. "Well?"

MacTaint scratched his ear meditatively, then he squished his bulbous, carmine-veined nose about with the palm of his hand. "All right," he said finally. "I'll get your damned film for you."

"That's great, Mac."

"Yes, yes," he growled.

"When will you get back here with it?"

"About an hour and a half. Or, if they catch me, in about eleven years."

"Can you drop the film off at my place in Mayfair?"

"Why not?"

"I'll give you the address. You're a wonderful man, MacTaint."

"A bloody vast fool is what I am." He shuffled off to find some clothes as Jonathan rose to get out of the bath. Jonathan was temporarily arrested by a bolt of pain in his shoulder, but it passed off and he was able to dry himself one-handedly, with some stiff acrobatics.

"Here you go," MacTaint said, returning with a pile of rags. "They're me own. Of course, they ain't my best, and they may not fit so well, but beggars and choosers, you know. And take those frigging cannons with you. I don't want them laying about the place."

Getting into the clothes was an olfactory martyrdom, and Jonathan promised himself another shower directly he got to his apartment.

He got to his apartment later than he would have guessed, having to walk all the way, despite the five pounds MacTaint had given him. A few late-prowling taxis had come within sight, but they had not stopped at his signal; indeed they had accelerated. The clothes.

As he got his key from the ledge over the door, he heard his phone ring within. He fumbled at the lock in his haste because all the way home he had been thinking of calling Maggie to tell her it was all over and he was safe.

"Yes?"

Yank's phony American accent was a great disappointment. "I've been calling everywhere for you. Where have you been?"

"I've been busy."

"Yes, I know." There was a flabby sound to Yank's voice; he had not fully recovered from his booze-up on Vanessa's whiskey during his self-indulgent crisis of disgust. "I'm calling from The Cloisters."

"What are you doing there?"

"We just raided the place, figuring you might be in hot water. You left quite a mess behind you. The place is deserted—that is, there are no living people here."

"I assume Loo is going to cover all that up for me?"

"Oh, sure. Look, I'm on my way out to the Vicarage. Want me to drop by and pick you and the films up?"

"I don't have the films yet."

There was a pause. "You don't have them?"

"Don't panic. I'll have them in an hour, then I'll pick up Miss Coyne and meet you at the Vicarage."

"Miss Coyne's already on her way. I called her to find out if she knew where you were. She didn't, of course, so I told her we'd meet her there."

"I see. Well, don't bother to pick me up. If we drove out together, you'd talk to me. And I don't need that."

"You sure know how to hurt a guy. Okeydoke, I'll meet you at the Vicarage. Don't take any wooden—"

Jonathan hung up.

He had bathed and changed and was resting in the dark of his room when MacTaint banged on the door.

"You wouldn't have a drop of whiskey about the place?" were his first words. "Oh, by the way... here." He handed Jonathan a cylindrical package bound up in black plastic fabric. "You know what you can do with your friggin' films?"

"Trouble?" He passed the bottle.

"I'd say that. Yes. Never mind the glass." He took a long pull. "Tell me, lad. Do you have any idea how much noise is made by busting open a bronze statue in an empty gallery hall?"

"I assume it didn't go unnoticed."

"You'd have thought the buzz bombs were back. Sure you don't want any of this?" He took another long pull, then he tugged the bottle down suddenly, laughing and spilling a little over his lapels. "You should have seen me scarpering my aged arse down the scaffolding, the canvas under my arm, and balancing your damned bundle. All elbows and knees. No grace at all. Bells ringing and people shouting. Oh, it was an event, Jon."

"Let's see it."

MacTaint took the Chardin from where it rested facing the wall and set it up on a chair in good light, then he dropped down onto the sofa beside Jonathan, his motion puffing out eddies of stink from within his clothes. "Ain't it lovely, though."

Jonathan looked at it for several minutes. "You have a buyer yet?"

"No, but..."

"I have five thousand."

MacTaint turned and examined Jonathan, his eyes squinted under the antennal brows. "Welcome back, lad."

"You're an evil old bastard, MacTaint." Jonathan rose and gave him the five thousand pounds he had set aside for the films, then he found the other five Strange had given him for expenses and handed that over as well.

"Ta," Mac said, stuffing the wad of bills into the pocket of his tattered overcoat. "Not a bad night, taken all in all. But I'd best be off. Lilla gets nervy if I'm out too late."

The Vicarage

Patches of mist on the low-lying sections of the road into Wessex were silvered by the full moon that skimmed through a black tracery of treetops, keeping pace with the Lotus as it twisted through back lanes, deserted at this early hour. Jonathan's shoulder was still stiff, and driving one-handed was tiring, so he maintained a moderate speed. It had been a difficult week. His reflex time had been eroded, and to keep himself awake he reviewed the events that had brought him to here and this—driving out to meet Maggie, the black plastic cylinder of amateur sex movies jiggling on the seat beside him.

Because he was deeply tired, people and events, words and coincidences of the past five days rolled through his mind, the connections obeying subtler laws than simple chronology. One event passed through his mind, then as he came around the bend of another occasion... there it was. Obviously! The odd bits of tessera that hadn't fit in anywhere suddenly fell into place.

Maggie...

He pressed down on the accelerator and switched off his driving lights so the plunges into wispy ground mist did not blind him.

He pumped his brakes and broadsided into the rough lane that led from the road to the Vicarage. As the car rocked to a stop, the door of the Vicarage burst open, and Yank rushed toward the car. The broad form of the Vicar filled the yellow frame behind Yank, something bulky in his hand.

Just as Jonathan ducked down, his windscreen shattered into a milky crystal web. A second bullet blew out the wing window and slapped into the back of the bucket seat. He grappled the .45 out of the map compartment, clutched open the door, and rolled out onto the damp grass. On the other side of the steaming undercarriage, Yank's foot skidded to a stop. Jonathan shot it, and it became a knee. He shot that, and it became an unmoving head and shoulder, the face pressed into the gravel.

The roar of the gun reverberating beneath the car covered the stumbling run of the Vicar, who now stood over Yank's inert body, a log of firewood poised ready to strike.

"Are you all right, Dr. Hemlock?" he called, wheezing for breath.

Jonathan got to his knees and leaned his head against the car. "Yes. I'm all right." The cool of the metal dispersed his dizziness. "Is he dead?"

"No. But he's bleeding badly. Seems to be missing a leg."

Jonathan could hear a crisp, pulsing sound, as though someone were finishing up pissing into gravel. "We'd better get a tourniquet on him. I've got to ask him some questions."

"You do have the films with you, I hope."

"Jesus H. Christ, padre!"

They carried Yank into the cozy den with its smell of furniture polish and wood smoke, and the Vicar set about attending to Yank with an efficient display of first-aid knowledge. He applied a tourniquet just above the missing knee, and before long the spurting blood flow was reduced to a soppy ooze.

"Oh dear, oh dear," the Vicar mumbled each time he noticed the damage the blood was doing to the Axminster rug.

Jonathan helped himself to the Vicar's brandy as he stood beside the fireplace, watching the older man work with quick, trained hands. "He's not coming around, is he?"

"I'm afraid not. Not much chance of regaining consciousness after a shock like that." The Vicar looked up and winked, and for the first time Jonathan noticed a purple contusion across his forehead.

"Yank hit you?"

The Vicar rose with effort and touched the spot gingerly. "Yes, I suppose so. I'd forgotten about it. We had a bit of a tussle. When he got here, he was the worse for drink. He said something offensive—I don't recall just what—and when I turned around, he was pointing a gun at me. He began babbling things about Max Strange, and needing the money to buy a ranch in Nebraska, and... oh, all sorts of things. He wasn't quite right in the head, you know. The violence and danger of his double game had been too much for him. He was never the right kind of personality for this business." He winked. "Then your car drove in suddenly and took his attention. I grappled with him. He struck me down with his gun, and out he went. I took up a stick of firewood, but by the time I could come to your aid, it was not necessary. I could do with a drop of that brandy myself."

"Did he say anything about Maggie Coyne? Give you any idea of where she is?"

"I'm afraid not. You feel she's in danger?"

"She's in danger... if she's alive at all. Yank must have told Strange about her. And Strange had a simple formula for dealing with spies and informers."

"You sound as though you knew Yank was in the pay of Strange."

"Only for the last fifteen minutes. The pileup of coincidences finally broke through my stupidity. Strange knew about your Parnell-Greene. He knew about me. He knew I had talked to Vanessa Dyke. Always a couple of steps ahead. He had too much information; there was too much coincidence. It had to come from inside. And Yank was at Van's house after she was murdered—no police, just Yank. He was pretending to be drunker than he was. Later, he wanted to pick me and the films up at my flat. It all fits in. But the coagulating agent was just a phrase—something one of Strange's men said after they had shot me full of dope. He told me I had struck out."

"Meaning what?"

"That's the point. The expression comes from American baseball. Only Yank would have used it."

"I see." The Vicar winked meditatively. "What shall we do about Miss Coyne?"

Jonathan pressed a finger into his temple and massaged it. "She could be anywhere. Her apartment, maybe."

"Oh, I doubt that. I've called several times in the past two days. Never an answer. I was seeking information about you, because Yank had stopped reporting in—and now we know why. Finally, he did call this afternoon to tell me that events had altered your plans. He told me you had gotten the films, but the situation was such that you could not carry them on your person. He said you had mailed them. All of that, I see now, was Strange's plot to neutralize any action of mine. I was supposed to sit here awaiting the cheerful call of the postman, while they made the sale and got away. And, of course, I would have done just that."

Jonathan's concentration was still on Maggie. "I've got to do something. I guess I could start at her apartment, then—wait a minute! Why would Yank want the films?"

"That's obvious, isn't it? Strange will pay heavily for them."

"But Strange's dead. Yank knew that."

"I'm afraid you're mistaken there. Yank described to me the rather gaudy mayhem you wreaked on the staff of The Cloisters. He was proud of that, you see. The virile fury of a fellow American, and all that. And he mentioned that you had inflicted a ghastly facial wound on Strange. A certain Miss Amazing... or was it Miss Grace... well, whoever... she carried Strange away to a sanctuary."

"Did he mention a name? A place?"

From the floor Yank gasped shallowly, then moaned... like a child struggling to awake from a nightmare.

Jonathan knelt beside him. "Yank?" he said softly. Yank was under again. "Hey!" Jonathan slapped the chill cheek.

"That won't get you anywhere," the Vicar said.

But Yank's eyelids fluttered. His eyebrows arched in an attempt to tug open the eyes. But they remained closed.

"Where's Maggie Coyne?" Jonathan demanded.

A moan.

"Where's Strange?"

Yank's voice was distant and mucous. "I... wanted... I only wanted... ranch... Nebraska."

"Where is Strange?"

"Please! Not... Feeding Station." Yank's body stiffened and relaxed. He was unconscious again.

The Vicar stood up with a grunt. "Ironic. He's frightened of the Feeding Station. Ironic."

"What's ironic?"

"He doesn't realize that you have saved him from that grisly fate."

"I have?"

"Oh, yes. There is almost no call at all for one-legged bodies." The Vicar winked.

The Cellar d'Or

After turning over the films, Jonathan retrieved the other .45 from the blinded Lotus. As Yank's car warmed up, he checked the load; there were only two bullets left. Enough.

A soft rain and low clouds blurred the limen between night and dawn as he drove through London streets that were desolate and gravid with despair. He pulled up before the Cellar d'Or. As he descended the narrow stone steps leading to the basement entrance, he could hear the whir of a vacuum cleaner within. The door was unlocked.

A black crone with a red bandanna pushed her vacuum cleaner desultorily back and forth over the black carpet and did not look up as he entered the bar. With the working lights on, the gold and black decor looked tawdry and cheap, and the air was stale with cigarette smoke and the smell of booze. Jonathan waited a moment for his eyes to adapt to the dimmer light.

"Close the door behind you, sir. It is cold this morning."

Jonathan recognized the basso nimble of P'tit Noel's voice. Then he saw him, sitting at the back of the lounge.

"I am sorry, sir, but we have closed. Like ghosts, our customers fade away with the cocorico of the morning rooster."

Jonathan raised the revolver in his hand and walked back slowly toward P'tit Noel.

"It is odd, is it not, sir, that roosters around the world do not speak the same language. In Haiti, they say cocorico, while in Britain they—"

"Where's Strange?"

"Sir?"

"Don't screw around, P'tit Noel. I'm tired."

The Haitian rose languidly and blocked the entrance to the internal stairway, his Roman breastplate muscles tense under the white knit pullover. Without taking his calm eyes from Jonathan's face he spoke in patois to the charwoman. "Vas-toi en, tanta."

The cleaner was clicked off, its whir dying with a Doppler fade, and the crone departed noiselessly.

"The gun is for me?" P'tit Noel asked.

"Not really. But I don't intend to grapple with you."

"Actually, I am a strong man, sir. I could probably absorb the first bullet and still get a hand on your throat."

"Not a bullet from this gun."

P'tit Noel looked into the big bore.

"Are they upstairs?" Jonathan asked.

"They were expecting someone. Not you. Someone with a package."

"He won't be coming. Listen, I don't care about Grace. If she stands between me and Strange, I'll cut her in half. If she stands back, I'll let her go."

P'tit Noel considered this. He nodded slowly. "Mam'selle Grace has a gun. Give me a chance to get her out of the room. If you do not harm her, I shall leave you alone. The man is nothing to me."

He turned and led the way up the stairs and down a corridor. Raising a hand to gesture Jonathan back, he tapped at the door softly.

Amazing Grace's voice was strained. "Yes?"

"It is I, Mam'selle Grace. He is here, the one you await."

Jonathan pressed back against the wall as the lock clicked and the door opened. "Where the hell have you—Hey!"

P'tit Noel's hand snapped in with the speed of a mongoose and snatched Grace out into the hall by her arm. She screamed as her little automatic arced across the corridor and clattered to the floor. "Max!" Then she saw Jonathan, and fury glittered in her eyes. "It's Hemlock, Max!" She threw her diminutive naked body toward him, fingernails spread like talons, her lips drawn back revealing thin sharp teeth. "I'll kill you, you son of a bitch!" P'tit Noel swept her up as though she were weightless. It took all of his strength to hold her as she squirmed and snarled in his arms, her naked body oily with the sudden sweat of rage. "Let me go, you nigger bastard!" He began to walk clumsily toward the stairs, his awkward, savage burden screaming and kicking and clawing at him. But he could not bring himself to strike her, or even to protect himself from the punishment of her impotent, desperate anger. She dug her fingernails into his cheek and tore four deep furrows of red through the brown, but he only looked at her with resigned, unhappy eyes.

"Please, please!" She sobbed and panted promises. "I'll let you screw me if you let me go! Max! Max!"

He made consoling sounds as he continued down the stairs. She clung, pale-knuckled, to the railings, but the steady power of his momentum tore them slowly away.

Even after they disappeared down the stairs, Jonathan could hear her screams and invective. There was one last tormented wail, then the sound of sobbing.

A muffled voice spoke from within the apartment. Jonathan kicked open the door and dashed across the opening to draw fire. But no shot came. The muffled sound again. Incomprehensible words, as though someone were speaking through a gag. He pressed against the wall outside, the revolver before his face.

The words became distinguishable. The voice was a guttural whisper through clenched teeth. "Come... in, Dr. Hemlock."

Jonathan eased the door farther open with his toe and looked through the crack. Strange lay limp on the red velvet sofa, his shirt off and a wet towel covering half his face. He had both hands lifted to show that he had no gun.

Jonathan entered and locked the door behind him. He crossed to the bedroom, checked it out, then returned.

Strange's uncovered eye followed his every movement, hate and pain mixed in its expression. He spoke with great effort, his diction trammeled through clenched teeth. "Finish the job, Hemlock."

"I have."

"No. Not finished. I'm still alive."

"If you want to die, why don't you do it yourself?"

"Can't. No gun. Grace wouldn't help me. Too weak to get to window."

The eye glittered with sudden anger. "Do you know what you did to me?" With a convulsion of effort and a snort of pain, he tore the towel from the side of his face. The cheek was gone, and grinning molars were visible to just below where the ear would have been. The teeth were held in by tapered pink tubes of exposed root. And the eye, lacking support, dangled like a limp mollusk. The bleeding had been staunched, but the flesh oozed with a clear liquid and it had begun to fester.

Jonathan glanced away as Strange replaced the towel. When he looked back, the eye was crying. "Please kill me, Hemlock. Please? My whole life... devoted... beauty." The voice grew faint and the fingertips fluttered. The visible cheek had the subaqueous tint of somatic shock, and Jonathan was afraid he would pass out.

"What have you done with Maggie Coyne?"

The eye was dim and confused. "Who?"

He didn't even know her name. "The girl! The one Yank informed on. Where is she?"

"She... she's—" The eye pressed shut as he tried to clear his mind. "No. I have something to bargain with, haven't I?"

Jonathan considered for a moment. "All right. Tell me where she is, and I'll kill you."

"You give... word..." The head nodded as the tide of shock rose.

"Come on!"

The eye opened again, the lid fluttering with the effort. "Word as a gentleman?"

"Where is she?"

"Dead. She is dead."

Jonathan's insides chilled. He closed his eyes and sucked air in through his lower teeth. He had known it. He had felt it back at the Vicarage. And again as he drove through the sad, deserted city. It had seemed as though some energy out there—some warm force of metaphysical contact had been cut off. But he had conned himself with fragile fables. Maybe they held her hostage. Maybe she had escaped.

Strange's eye grew large with terror as Jonathan turned and walked aimless toward the door. "You promised!"

"Who killed her?" Jonathan asked, not really caring.

"I did!"

"You? Yourself?"

"Yes!" There was a flabby hiss to the word as air escaped through his cheekless teeth.

Jonathan looked down on him dully. "You're lying. You're trying to make me kill you in anger. But I'm not going to. I'm going to call for an ambulance. And I'll warn them you're suicidal. So they'll protect you from yourself. They'll fix you up—more or less. And it will be months before you find a way to kill yourself. All that time they'll be looking at you. Nurses. Doctors. Prison guards. Lawyers. They'll look at you. And remember your face."

Strange's swathed head vibrated with impotent rage. "You son of a bitch!"

Jonathan started toward the door, the revolver dangling in his hand. "See you in the newspapers, Strange."

Strange grasped the back of the sofa for support and pulled himself up. The effort caused the wet towel to fall from his mutilated face. "Leonard killed her!"

Jonathan turned back.

"I told you once, Hemlock, that I had a vice—expensive—subtler than sex. My vice is expensive because it costs lives. I like to watch the kinds of things Leonard does to women. Leonard was in particularly creative form with this girl of yours. And I watched! She didn't disappoint me, either. She had a strong will. It took a long, long time. We had to revive her often, but—"

Strange won.

He got his way after all.

Stockholm, 28 Days Later

"...in fact, the word 'style' has been gutted of meaning. Overused. Misused. It's a critic's word. No painting has 'style.' Come to think of it, few critics do."

The audience tittered politely, and Jonathan bowed his head, losing his balance slightly and catching at the side of the podium. When he continued speaking, he was too close to the microphone, and he set up a feedback squeal. "Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh. Right! It is as meaningless to speak of the style of the Flemish School as it is to babble about the style of this or that painter."

"You miss my point, sir!" objected the young, terribly intelligent instructor who had introduced the subject.

"I don't miss your point at all, young man," Jonathan said, taking a sip from the glass of gin he fondly hoped passed for water. "I anticipate your obscure point, and I choose to ignore it."

At the back of the auditorium, the with-it young American who was responsible for USIS cultural lectures in Sweden cast an anxious glance toward fforbes-Ffitch, who had flown over from London to see how the lectures he had co-sponsored were going.

"Is he always like this?" fforbes-Ffitch asked in a thin whisper.

"I don't think he's been sober since he came," the American said.

fforbes-Ffitch arched his eyebrows and shook his head disapprovingly.

"...but you can't deny that the Flemish School and that of Art Nouveau are stylistically antithetical," the bright Swedish instructor insisted.

"Bullshit!" Jonathan made an angry gesture with his arm and struck the microphone, causing an amplified thunk to punctuate his statement. He shushed the mike with his forefinger across his lips. "Of course, one can cite broad differences between the two movements. The Flemish painters chose in bulk to deal with natural subjects in a vigorous, healthy, if somewhat bovine manner. While the Art Nouveau types dealt with organic, hyper-sophisticated, almost tropically malignant things. But no painter belongs to a school. Critics concoct schools after the fact. For instance, if you want to look at 'typically Art Nouveau' treatments of floral subjects, I refer you to the Flemish painter Jan van Huysum or, to a lesser degree, to Jacob van Walscappelle."

"I'm afraid I don't know the painters to whom you refer, sir," the young Swede said stiffly, giving up all hopes of having his thesis supported by this acrid American critic whose books and articles were just then holding the art world in uncomfortable thrall.

The great majority of the audience was composed of young, shaggy Americans, this USIS center operating, as most of them do, more as a sponsored social club for Americans on the drift than as an effective outlet for American information and propaganda. Jonathan's lectures had broken the usual pattern of boycotting and sparse attendance that resulted from strong feelings against America's failure to grant amnesty to the men who had fled to Sweden to avoid the Vietnam debacle.

"It's a wonder there's a soul here," fforbes-Ffitch whispered, "if he's been drunk and nasty like this every night."

The American diplomat-in-training shrugged. "But it's been the best houses we've ever had. I don't understand it. They eat it up."

"Odd lot, the Swedes. Masochists. National guilt over Nobel and his damned explosives, I shouldn't wonder."

Jonathan's voice boomed over the loudspeakers. "I shall end this last of my lectures, children, by allowing our joint hosts to say a few words to you. They are obviously bursting with a need to communicate, for they have been babbling together at the back of the hall. I have it on good authority that your USIS host will speak to you on the subject: Why has the nation failed to grant amnesty to young men who had the courage to fight war, rather than to fight people." Jonathan stepped from the stage, stumbling a little, and the audience turned expectant faces toward the back of the auditorium.

The young USIS man blushed and tried to fake his way through, raising his voice to the verge of falsetto. "What we really wanted to know was... ah... are there any more questions?"

"Yeah, I got a question!" shouted a black from the middle of the group. "How come all this Watergate shit didn't come out until after Nixon got his ass reelected?"

Another American stood up. "Tell him that if he grants us amnesty and lets us come home, we won't tell anyone about the garbage he's made of the American image abroad."

fforbes-Ffitch took this opportunity to say that none of this had anything to do with him. "I'm English," he told two nearby people who didn't care.

By then Jonathan had walked up the side aisle and had joined the flustered USIS man. He put his arm around the lad's shoulder and confided in a low voice, "Get in there, kid. You can handle them. After all, you're a government-trained communicator." He winked and walked on.

"Well," said the USIS man to the audience, "if there are no further questions for Dr. Hemlock, then I ask—"

The hoots and boos drowned him out, and the audience began to break up, chattering among themselves and laughing.

Jonathan made his way to a display room off the foyer. On exhibition were a lot of clumsy ceramics done by star students and faculty of a well-known California school of design, and brought there to show the Swedes what our young artists could do. One of the pieces had a title calculated to suggest creative angst and personal despair. It was called "The Pot I Broke," and that's what it was. Next to it was a particularly pungent social statement in the form of a beer mug featuring Uncle Sam with black features and bearing the cursive legend "Don't drink from me." But the star piece of the collection was a long cylinder of red tile that had drooped over during the baking, and had subsequently been titled "Reluctant Erection."

Jonathan took a deep breath and leaned his head against the burlap-covered wall. Too much. Too much hooch. He had been drinking for weeks. Weeks and weeks and weeks.

"Is it so bad as that?" asked one of the Swedish girls who had been looking around for him and was standing at the door.

Jonathan pushed himself off the wall and sucked in a big breath to steady the world. "No, it's great stuff. That's our subtle way to win you over. Dazzle you with our young art. A nation that can produce this stuff can't be all bad."

The girl laughed. "At least it shows your young people have a sense of humor."

"Don't I wish. Every time I see a piece of young crap, I try to forgive the artist by assuming it's a put-on—camp—but it won't wash. I'm afraid they're serious. Trivial, of course, and tedious... but serious. I assume there's a party somewhere?"

She laughed. "They're waiting for you."

"Wonderful." He went into the foyer and joined a group of young Swedes exuding energy and good spirits. They invited him to come along with them to dinner, then off on a crawl of bars and parties, as they had done every night. They were attractive youngsters: physically strong, clear-minded, healthy. He had often reflected on how life-embracing the Swedes were on average, forgetting the traveler's adage that the most attractive people in the world are those one first sees after leaving England.

Outside the cold was jagged and the wind penetrating. While the young people waited, blowing into their hands, Jonathan said a very formal good night to the green-coated Beräknings Aktiebolag guard who patrolled the American Culture Center in response to repeated bomb threats. He felt sorry for the poor devil, stiff-faced and tearing in the numbing cold. He even offered to stand his watch for him.

A bar. Then another bar. Then someone's house. There was a heated discussion and a fight. Another bar—which closed on them. Someone had a wonderful idea and telephoned someone who was not home. Jonathan crowded with the four remaining students into a little car, and they drove back to the Gamla Stan to return him to his hotel on Lilla Nygatan, for he had been drinking heavily and had become embarrassingly antisocial.

They dropped him off on the edge of the medieval island, which is closed to private vehicles. Someone asked if he was sure he could find his way, and he told them to drive on—in fact, go to hell. When the red taillights of the car had disappeared into the swirling snow, he turned to find that a Swedish girl had gotten out with him. So. The party was still on! He put his arm around her—girls feel good in thick fur coats, like teddy bears—and they trudged around looking for an open bar or a cave. They found one, an "inne stället for visor, jazz och folkmusik," and they sat drinking whiskey and shouting their conversation against blaring music until the place closed.

They walked unsteadily through deserted narrow streets, holding on to one another, the snow deep on the cobblestones and still falling in large indolent flakes that glittered and spiraled around the gas lamps. Jonathan said he didn't much care for Christmas cards. She didn't understand. So he repeated it, and she still didn't get it, so he said forget it.

A little later he fell.

They were passing through the narrow arched alley of Yxsmedsgränd when he slipped on the ice and fell into a bank of snow. He struggled to get up, and slipped again.

She laughed gaily and offered to help him.

"No! I'm all right. In fact, I'm very comfortable here. I think I'll stay the night. Say, what happened to my overcoat?"

"You must have left it at the party."

"No, that was my youth I left at the party. How do you like that for a bitterer-than-thou tragic romantic riposte? Don't be swayed, honey. It's all hokum designed to get you into bed. You're sure you don't have my overcoat?"

"Come on. We'll go to your hotel." She laughed good-naturedly and helped him up. "Does it embarrass you to do something like that? To slip and fall when you are with a girl?"

"Yes, it does. But that is because I am a male chauvinist swine."

"Pig."

"Pig, then. What are you?"

"I'm an art student. I've read all your books."

"Have you? And now you're going to hop into bed with me. Proof of the adage that success has balls. OK. Let's get to it. Dawn is coming with a red rag among its shoulder blades."

"Pardon?"

"Shakespeare. A modest paraphrase."

There was a great rectangular weight in his forehead, and he tried to bang it away with the back of his fist. "How old are you, honey?"

"Nineteen. How old are you?"

He looked up at her slowly as the drink drained from his head. He was not well; but he was cold sober. "What was that?"

She laughed. "I said, how old are you?" The last vowel had a curl to it—a Scandinavian curl, but not unlike an Irish curl.

He looked at her very closely, glancing from eye to eye. She was a pretty enough little girl, but they were the wrong eyes. Not bottle green.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Are you sick?"

"I'm worse off than that. I'm sober. Say... look. Here's the key to my hotel. The address is on it. You stay there tonight. It's all right. It's comfortable."

"Don't you like me?"

He laughed dryly. "I think you're just great, honey. The hope of the future. Bye-bye."

"Where are you going?"

"For a walk."

The sun rose brilliant and cold over the placid water of Riddarfjärden, a crisp yellow sun that gave light without warmth. A single tugboat dragged a wake of glittering, eye-aching silver through the thick black green water, its chug-a-da the only sound in the windless chill. Jonathan's eyes, teared by the cold and squinting against the light, followed the tug's deliberate progress as he leaned against the fence near the Gamla Stan tube stop. His hands were fisted into his jacket pockets, his collar turned up, his shoulders tense to combat the shivering. The brilliant, crusted white of the snow that blanketed the quay was unmarked, save for a long single line of blue-shadowed footsteps that connected his still form to a narrow alley between the ancient buildings that clustered up the hill behind him.

Fatigue made him sigh, and two jets of vapor flowed over his shoulders.

A girl stepped out into the sunlight from the dank cavern of the Gamla Stan tube station where she had passed the night sheltered from the snow and wind. She looked around disconsolately and pulled her surplus army parka more closely around her. She was burdened with a knapsack and a cheap guitar, and the American flag sewn to the butt of her jeans had come loose and frayed at one corner. Her monumentally plain face was gaunt, and her red-rimmed eyes showed hunger and misery. She looked at Jonathan with mistrust. He examined her with distant indifference. A grinning yellow sun-face sticker on her guitar advised him to "have a nice day."

London and Essex, 1973

Copyright © 1973 by Trevanian

ISBN: 0-345-31738-6