The Loo Sanction Read online

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

  “I don’t know. More interest in speed and flourish than efficiency?”

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

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

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

  “I’ll drop you off at Mac’s. It’s more or less on my way.”

  “Where do you live?”

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

  “But you said—”

  “I thought I’d give you a way out.”

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

  “I’m like that,” he said, and laughed.

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

  “Now wait a minute, madam. You picked the restaurant.”

  She frowned. “That’s true, isn’t it. Still, it’s a troubling coincidence.”

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

  “I think it’s more likely a coincidence.”

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

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

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Good Lord! Do you know what time it is?”

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

  “Is there any trouble? Is everything prepared?”

  “No trouble, sir.”

  “Then why are you calling?”

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

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

  Then, “Good night, Yank.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  Baker Street

  “Lord love us!” she said. “This is ghastly!”

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

  “Is there no end to it?” she asked.

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

  “That must cause some awkward traffic problems.”

  “No. I live here alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cheers. You don’t find London attractive?”

  “Well, it’s made me reevaluate my aesthetic ranking of Gary, Indiana.”

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

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

  “Did he decorate it himself?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Beautiful.”

  “Oh, yes. Even copies, they’re capable of putting modern painting in its place.”

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

  “Don’t fish.”

  “Sorry. You’re quite right.”

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

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

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

  “And what did you tell her?”

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

  “And she left?”

  “After giving me her autograph. It’s over there.”

  She went to the mantel and unfolded a sheet of paper. “But it’s blank.”

  “Yes. The pen was out of ink, but she didn’t notice.”

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

  “She doesn’t know that. She thinks she’s having a ball.”

  “Still, it makes me want to cry.”

  “If she ever found that out, she’d leave blank autographs behind her everywhere.”

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

  “Just the easiest way out.”

  “I suppose so.” She turned and looked at him thoughtfully. “What’s your name?”

  “Jonathan Hemlock. And yours?”

  “Maggie. Maggie Coyne.”

  “Shall we go to bed, Maggie?”

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

  He was silent for several seconds.

  “You’re kidding. This doesn’t happen to good guys.”

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

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Pity we didn’t meet a day or two later.”

  “Only a day or two?”

  “Yes.”

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

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

  “Then we’re of a mind.”

  “We are that.”

  “En route.”

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

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

  “Good morning,” she whispered.

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

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Saying your name.”

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

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

  He released her. “Don’t come back cold.”

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

  “Jonathan?”

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

  “What is it?”

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

  “What is it, Maggie?”

  “The bathroom.” Her voice was thin.

  “Yes?”

  “Jonathan?” Tight terror in her voice.

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

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

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

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

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

  “I . . . I’m awfully . . . sorry. Disgraceful thing . . . I . . .”

  “Who are you?”

  “Shameful . . .”

  “Who are you?”

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

  “Get out.”

  “What?” She was confused.

  “Get out. He’s ashamed.”

  She disappeared.

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

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

  He made one last sound. A name.

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

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

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

  “Here. Lie down. Put your feet up.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said faintly.

  “It’s shock. Go ahead, be sick. Put your finger down your throat.”

  She tried, and gagged. “I can’t!”

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

  She stared at him, confused and frightened by his cool efficiency. “What is this? What’s happening?”

  “Just do what I told you. Here. Give me that. I’ll light it for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There. Now, move over.”

  “What are you going to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “They? Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have some idea?”

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

  “Doing what?”

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

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

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

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Drink your coffee.”

  “I don’t want it.”

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

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

  “Look, Maggie, I’m very sorry . . . Excuse me . . . The worst what?”

  “Sorry . . . No, you go ahead.”

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

  “Am I? Really implicated, Jonathan?”

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

  “And what about you?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “True.” She searched his eyes. “Too well, really.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

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

  “Not really. I was scared and confused. That’s why I had to take that unit of light meditation.”

  “On the bed?”

  “Yes.”