The Loo Sanction (10 page)

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

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

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

“A girl of delicate sensitivities.”

“I reckon so.”

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

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

“Who are all these young men?” Jonathan asked.

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

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

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

“At the church?”

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

“What kind of establishment?”

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

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

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

“Oh? Always had a secret desire to be kidnapped?”

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

“That's just wonderful, Yank.”

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

         

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

“You asleep?”

“No.”

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

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

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

“A civil service trollop.”

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

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

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

         

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

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

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

“What?”

“Did the noise wake you up?”

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

“Follow me!”

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

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

“What is going on here?” Jonathan asked.

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

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

“Closing time. About ten-thirty.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Don't you dig music?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh . . . nothing, really.” Yank started to take the lower fork.

“No. Let's go on along here.”

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

“What's up there?”

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

“What is it?”

“It's . . . ah . . . it's called the Feeding Station.”

“A farm?”

“Sort of. Let's be getting back.”

“You go back. I can't take the noise.”

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

“Dogs? To keep people out of the Feeding Station?”

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

         

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened? Your cigarette lighter run out of film?”

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

“Just this deep desire to communicate. I know the feeling.”

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

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

“All right. I give up.”

“Good.” He rose and started back toward the inn.

She followed. “There is one thing, though.”

“Let me guess. You'd give anything in the world if you hadn't had to set me up. You could almost weep when you think of me, lying there in the deep sleep of the sexually exercised and satisfied—probably a boyish smile on my face—while you slipped out of bed and opened the door to let the Loo men in and gut-shoot that poor bastard on my crapper.”

“Really, I didn't know—”

“Certainly! After all, I was just a cipher to you at first. But later, it was different. Right? After we'd exchanged trivial confidences and fucked a bit, you discovered deeper feelings. But by then it was too late to back out. Maggie! . . .” He reined his anger and lowered his voice. “Maggie, your actions lack even the charm of new experience for me. I was nailed once before by a lady. The only difference is that she was in the major leagues.”

Her eyes had not left his, and she had not flinched through his tirade. “I know, Jonathan.”

He realized that he had reached out and was grasping her upper arms tightly. He released her, snapping his hands open. “How do you know?”

“Your records. CII sent us your entire file, and I was required to study it carefully before . . .”

“Before setting me up.”

“All right! Before setting you up!”

He believed the shame in her sudden rush of anger. Suddenly he felt very tired. And he regretted his loss of control. He looked away from her and forced his breathing to assume a lower rhythm.

She spoke without temper and without pleading. “I want to tell you this.”

“I don't need it.”

“
I
need it. I didn't know what they had in mind. I thought they were going to set you up with a drug plant or something. When they appeared at the door with that poor man, I . . . I . . .”

“He was alive at that time.”

She swallowed and looked past him, down the road gleaming faintly in the ghost light of moon above fog. Talking about it required that she pick at the painful scab of memory. “Yes. He was badly doped up. He couldn't even stand without help. And he was wearing that horrid grinning mask. They had to carry him in and put him onto the . . . But he was aware of what was happening. I could see it in his eyes—just the eyes behind the cutouts in the mask. He looked at me with such . . .” She blinked back the tears. “There was such sadness in his eyes! He was begging me to help him. I felt that. But I . . . Lord God above, it's a terrible business we're in, Jonathan.”

He drew her head against his chest. It seemed the only reasonable thing to do.

“Why didn't they kill him cleanly?”

She couldn't speak for a while, and he heard the squeaking sound of tears being swallowed. “They were supposed to. The Vicar was very angry with them for bungling it. They went into the bathroom while I waited outside. Then you turned over in your sleep and made a sound. I was frightened you might wake up, so I tapped at the door, and at the same moment I heard a popping sound.”