The Loo Sanction Read online

  “I was just asking . . . oh, never mind.”

  “You seem to be taking my condition rather lightheartedly.”

  “No. No.”

  “People die of exposure, you know.”

  “I’ll fetch you a towel.”

  “Exposure to the elements. Do you still think this is funny?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why have you turned your back to me? Can’t you look me in the face and tell me you don’t think this is funny?”

  She shook her head again.

  “All right, lady. You have a count of five, at the end of which in you come to join me.”

  “I’m all dressed!”

  “Two.”

  “What happened to one?”

  “Four.”

  “You wouldn’t . . . !”

  The sere, middle-aged cleaning woman looked up from her sweeping and gasped. Approaching her down the hall were Jonathan and Maggie, wrapped in towels, she with her dripping clothes over her arm, and he his torn and muddy ones. For the benefit of their round-eyed spectator, he shook Maggie’s hand and thanked her for a delightful time. She asked if he would care to drop into her room for a while before lunch, and he said yes, he thought that might be fun. Then he turned to the chambermaid. “Would you care to join us?”

  Horrified, speechless, she backed against the wall and held the broom handle protectively before her chest. It was perfectly adequate coverage. He shrugged, said something about ships passing in the night, and followed Maggie to her room.

  “How are you going to dress?” Maggie asked as soon as the door was closed.

  “I’ll go to my own room as soon as I think the maid has left. I wouldn’t want to spoil her orgy of outrage.” He lay on her bed and stretched his body to get the kinks out. “Were you able to find out anything about the Feeding Station?”

  “Hm-m, yes. Rather more than I’d care to know, really. It’s a ghastly business.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well . . . that man—the one in your bathroom the other night? He was a product of the Feeding Station. Yank told me all about it. He didn’t want to at first, but once he started, it came gushing out, like something he needed to be rid of.”

  He leaned up on one elbow. Her tone told him she was finding it difficult to talk about it.

  She slipped into a bathrobe and sat on the bed beside him. “Evidently the concept of the Feeding Station is a result of two problems faced by MI–5 and – 6 and Loo. The first is the problem of defection and treachery within their ranks. These aren’t very common, but they are dealt with vigorously. In fact, the defectors are assassinated. You do the same in the United States, I believe.”

  “Yes. The assassinations are called ‘sanctions’ if the target is someone outside the CII, and ‘maximum demotes’ if the target is one of their own men.”

  “Well, it seems that these assassinations were often difficult and awkward. There were bodies to dispose of; the police nosing about; and the Loo man who performed the assassination had to surface to award the punishment, maybe thereby stripping his cover for some more important task. So this was the first problem: the difficulty of performing assassinations.”

  “The second problem?”

  “Corpses. Recently dead bodies are at a premium. They are used by the various branches of intelligence for setups, like the one you were victim of. And it seems they also use them as the ultimate deep cover for an active who has to go underground. Rather than simply disappear, the agent dies, or seems to. And there is no better cover than being dead and buried. They also use corpses to leak misguiding information to the other side—whoever that may be at the moment.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “Evidently, a man is found in his hotel room dead of a heart attack, or perhaps he dies in a fatal traffic accident. And he has certain information on him that identifies him as a courier, together with some false data Loo wants implanted. In Lisbon or Athens—wherever the police are for sale—the other side ends up with the false information. They never imagine that a man would give his life just to fob off a bit of rot on them, so they always take it at face value.”

  “I see. So the Vicar put one and one together and decided to use the bodies of men written off for assassination to fulfill the Loo’s need for fresh corpses. I assume they kidnap them and bring them to the Feeding Station to hold until they’re needed.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so. I do know that bodies from the Feeding Station are always in short supply in relation to the needs of the services. The fact that the Vicar used one to rope you in gives you some idea of the importance of this affair, and of your importance to its success.”

  “I’m flattered. But why is the establishment called the ‘Feeding Station’?”

  “Well . . .” She rose and lit a cigarette. “That’s the really grisly part of the matter—the part that upsets Yank so. It seems they are kept all doped up at a small farm back in the country near here. And they are fed . . . oh, Lord.”

  “Go on.”

  “. . . and they are fed on special diets. You see, Loo discovered that the first thing the Russians do when they have a corpse in want of identification is to pump its stomach and check the contents. And it wouldn’t do for a supposed Greek to produce the remnants of steak-and-kidney pie. So, along with matters of proper clothing, the right dust in the trouser cuffs, and all that sort of business, they have to be sure the right food is . . .” She shrugged.

  “Thus: the Feeding Station. They’re quite a bunch, these Loo people.”

  “I feel sorry for Yank, though. His reaction to the whole thing is so violent, you forget for a moment that he’s part of it.”

  “Yeah, he’s an odd one to find in this business. Of course, they’re all odd ones in this business, come to think of it.”

  “But we’re involved in this. We’re not odd.”

  “No! Christ, no. Come over here.”

  Jonathan was resting in his room after lunch when Yank knocked and entered. “Greetings, Gate. I’ve just come from the Guv. He laid everything out for me. How do you feel about our working together on this gig?” He sat in the overstuffed chair and put his feet up on the dresser.

  Jonathan had been shielding his eyes from the light, his arm thrown across his face, and Yank’s potpourri of slang gleaned from a span of thirty years evoked the image of a bearded and sandaled man wearing a zoot suit and a porkpie hat. Jonathan lifted his arm and squinted at Yank. “I can dig it,” he said, getting into the spirit of the thing.

  “First thing, of course, you’ll need a gun.” Yank’s tone was heavily serious. He’d been around. He knew about these things.

  Jonathan dropped his arm back over his eyes and sighed. It was just like working again for CII. A kind of inefficient, rural CII. Each event had a lived-in feeling. “Right. Of course. The gun. I don’t want to carry it. But it should be in my flat when I return.”

  “Gotcha. The Mayfair flat, or the one on Baker Street?”

  “Baker Street. And I’ll need two guns. One in the bottom of my shirt drawer, covered by three or four shirts and surrounded by rolled-up socks. The second above it, covered by only one shirt.”

  “Whatever you say, man. You snap the whip; we’ll make the trip. But why two guns hidden in the same place?” Then it dawned. “Oh, I get it! If they search the room, they’ll find the top gun and not look further for the other one. Now, that is what cool is all about!”

  Jonathan lifted his arm and looked at Yank to ascertain if he was real.

  “What kind of guns will you be wanting? Our MI–6 lads run to Italian automatics.”

  “I know they do. They’re deadly as far as you can throw them. I want American-made .45 revolvers—five cartridges in, and the hammer down on an empty.”

  “Not an automatic?”

  “No. If there’s a misfire, I want something coming up.”

  “They’re awfully bulky, you know.” Yank blushed involuntarily. “But then, of course
you know.”

  Jonathan sighed and sat up. “Listen, when I bring the guns along, I won’t be going to a party. And I won’t care if the handles match my cummerbund. I am not MI–6.”

  “Yes. Of course. Sorry.” The American accent had disappeared again.

  Jonathan lay back and rubbed his temples. “Another thing. Have someone who knows his business dumdum the bullets.”

  Yank’s sporting sense was offended.

  “Tell whoever does it that I want to be able to spin a man around if I only hit him in the hand. Lead slugs without jackets. Points both scooped out and crosshatched.”

  “Yes,” Yank said coldly. “I quite understand.”

  Jonathan smiled to himself. Yank really had no stomach for his job. The romance and peekaboo of being a government agent doubtless appealed to him, but, as his reaction to the Feeding Station had shown, the grisly “wet work” of the business upset him.

  But he recovered quickly. “When you get back to your pad, you’ll find everything A-okay. I suppose you’ll want a box of cartridges? Taped under the toilet top, maybe,” he added helpfully.

  Jonathan laughed aloud. If he couldn’t do it with ten shots, it would be because he was too dead.

  “OK. So much for the gun. After tea, you’ll be having a little brushup with The Sergeant. He’s a top man in both judo and karate. Marine champion in his day. You could learn a lot from him.”

  Jonathan nodded absently.

  Yank swung his feet down from the dresser. “Right. See you later, alligator.”

  As he left, Jonathan returned to rubbing his temples. “After a while . . . ,” he mumbled.

  Jonathan and Maggie took tea together in a corner of the phony Tudor dining room, beneath a window. She was quiet and distant, and he assumed she was thinking about her role as an inside person at The Cloisters. He was willing to let the silence lie over them. They no longer needed to touch or to talk.

  Briefly, a warm sun penetrated the hanging clouds and touched her cupric hair. The light was vagrant and indirect, seeming to come from within the hair, as gloamings seem to rise from the ground. She was looking down, and her eyes were half hidden by her soft lashes.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Maggie Coyne,” he said matter-of-factly.

  She looked up at him, the bottle green eyes caught in a triangle of sunlight.

  The light dimmed out as the sun disappeared into a wrap of misty clouds.

  Then Yank arrived. “We gotta get to gettin’,” he said brightly. “The Sergeant’s waiting on you in the exercise room.”

  Jonathan smiled good-bye to Maggie and followed Yank out of the dining room. As they passed through the lounge, he picked up a back copy of Punch and started thumbing through it idly as they mounted the stairs.

  From within the exercise room came the sound of guttural grunts, a shouted open vowel, then, as they entered, the splatting thud of a man being slammed down on the mats.

  The room was a converted library with its paneled walls incongruously covered with hanging tumbling mats, as was the parqueted floor. It was directly above the pub, and there was a faint odor of stale beer rising from the floor and mixing with the saline smell of sweat. Henry was just rising from the mats slowly and painfully, while another Loo man was kicking at a mat-wrapped beam, his toes curled to take the impact on the balls of his feet. He shouted with each blow as he shifted his practice from a front attack to a lateral one.

  In the center of the room, large and hulking in his loosely bound judo jacket, was The Sergeant, his heavy frame oddly graceful as he shuffled toward Henry, who was crouched in a defensive posture. Jonathan knew that The Sergeant had seen them enter and would do something to impress him, and he mildly pitied Henry.

  Yank leaned against the padded wall and watched in silent admiration as The Sergeant stalked his prey, not bothering to feint and grunt. He carried his hands a bit too high. Bait for the trap, Jonathan thought. Henry feinted at The Sergeant, then went in to take advantage of the high guard. A clutch at the jacket, a sweeping kick, and Henry was in the air. He was not able to lay out fully and achieve the flat, wide distribution fall that would absorb most of the impact, and he came down on one shoulder with a liquid nasal grunt.

  Stepping over Henry, and pretending to see them for the first time, The Sergeant said, “Well, bless me if it isn’t the American doctor.” He was confident and at his ease, for this was his ground.

  Jonathan’s face was bland. “That was amazing,” he said, and The Sergeant thought he detected a hint of nervousness in the way he fingered the magazine.

  “Just training, mate. Well, let’s get to it. What’s your pleasure? Judo? Karate?”

  Jonathan looked around helplessly at the other men in the room, who were watching him with much interest and some amusement. The Sergeant had been talking about this encounter all day. “Well, actually, neither one. I suppose you’ve read my records from CII.” He laughed hollowly. “Everyone else seems to have.”

  The Sergeant closed the distance between them and stood looking down at Jonathan from a three-inch-height advantage, his thumbs hooked in his loosely tied black belt. “I looked over the part the Guv give me. But I couldn’t make no sense of it. Where it should read ‘level of competence,’ it said something odd.”

  “Yes.” Jonathan walked past The Sergeant and sat down at a little library table in a protected alcove, set back out of the way of the combatants. The chair he selected left the only vacant one in the corner of the room. “I believe the records said ‘not qualified, but passed.’”

  “Right. That was it. Now, what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Jonathan shrugged and looked up at him with diffident, wide eyes. “Well, it’s a peculiar thing. It means that I’ve never qualified myself in any hand-to-hand sport. Boxing, judo, karate—none of them. But the instructors—men like you—saw fit to pass me anyway.”

  The Sergeant crossed and stood over him. “Well, you’ll not find anything slipshod like that in Loo. If I pass you, you’re damned right qualified.”

  “I suppose you know what’s best. But I’d like to explain something to you.” Jonathan searched hard for the right words, and as he did so, he stared absentmindedly at The Sergeant’s crotch. Growing uncomfortable, The Sergeant shuffled for a moment, then sat down in the corner chair opposite Jonathan.

  Jonathan’s demeanor was uncertain. “Well, if I explain this weird thing to you, perhaps you can give me some pointers that will help me improve my tactics.”

  “That’s what I’m here for, mate.”

  “You see, although I have never learned much about formal methods of fighting, I almost always win. Isn’t that odd?”

  The Sergeant regarded the slim body across from him. “I’d say you were bloody jammy.”

  “Perhaps,” Jonathan admitted openly. “But there’s more to it than that. You see, when I was a boy, I knocked around on the streets. And I was fairly lightweight then too. But I had to find some way to stay in one piece when it came to Fist City.” He smiled wanly. “As it did from time to time.”

  Yank made mental note of the term “Fist City.” He would use it someday.

  “And how did you manage that?” The Sergeant asked, obviously bored with this talk and eager to get on with it.

  “Well, for one thing, I seem to be able to lull the other man into a sense of security. Then, too, I learned that no fight has to last more than five seconds, and the man who lands the first two blows inevitably wins, if he is not bound to conventions of sportsmanship, or to the effete nonsense of any given technique.”

  The Sergeant wasn’t sure, but he felt that there was a knock at his trade in that somewhere. His shoulders squared perceptibly.

  Jonathan treated him to the gentle clouded smile that other men had recalled in retrospect. “You see, there’s a period of warming up in any fight. The bowing and shuffling of judo; the angry words before a barroom brawl. And I learned that I could do best by attacking with whatever weapo
n was handy while the other fellow was still pumping himself up for the fight.”

  The Sergeant snorted, “That’s all very well and good, if there’s a weapon handy.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Oh, there’s always a weapon handy. A brick, a belt, a pencil—”

  “A pencil!” The Sergeant roared with laughter, then addressed the small audience. “You ’ear this? The yank here toughs up his opponents by tappin’ ’em on the head with a pencil! Must take a while!”

  Jonathan recalled an incident in Yokohama in which his assailant had ended with a Ticonderoga #3 driven in four inches between his ribs. But he grinned sheepishly at The Sergeant’s derision.

  For his part, The Sergeant no longer felt anger toward Jonathan. It was now scorn. He had seen this kind before. All lip and sass until it came down to the mats.

  “No, now really, Sergeant. There must be a dozen useful weapons in this room,” Jonathan protested through the light laughter of the lookers-on.

  “Like what, for instance?”

  Jonathan looked around almost helplessly. “Well, like . . . I don’t know . . . like this magazine, for instance.”

  The Sergeant looked disdainfully at the Punch on the table between them. “And what would you do with that? Read him the jokes and make him laugh himself to death?” He was pleased with himself for getting off a good one.

  “Well, you could . . . well, look. If I rolled it up tight, like this. See? Now, wait. You have to get it tight. And when it’s compact it weighs more than a stick of wood of the same size. And you know how sharp the edges of paper are. The end here could really cut a fellow up.”

  “Could it just? Well—”

  Eight seconds later he was on his back in a litter of table and chairs, and Jonathan stood over him, the back of an inverted chair crushing hard against his larynx. Blood oozed from The Sergeant’s eye socket, where the end of the magazine had been jabbed home with a cutting, twisting motion. The thrust into his stomach had brought The Sergeant’s hands down and had left his nose undefended for the crunching upward smash of the magazine that broke it with pain that eddied to his gut and the back of his throat. The flat-handed cymbals slap on his ears had punctured the eardrums with air implosion, so he could barely hear what Jonathan growled at him from between clenched teeth.