The Loo Sanction (15 page)

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 weapon 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.

“What are you going to do now, Sergeant?”

The Sergeant couldn't answer. He was gagging under the pressure of the chair in his throat, and his temples throbbed with the pulse of blocked blood.

“What are you going to do now?” Jonathan's voice was guttural and subhuman. He was in the white fury necessary to key himself to put bigger men away so totally that they never thought of coming back after him.

The Sergeant managed a strangled sound. He couldn't see well through the blood, but he caught a terrifying glimpse of Jonathan's glassy, gray green eyes.

Jonathan closed his eyes for a second and breathed deeply, calming himself from within. The adrenaline rush was still a lump in his stomach.

He spoke quietly. “I could have done that with half the punishment. But I figured the apologetic little man in my bathroom owed you something.”

He released the pressure and set the chair aside. As he pulled down his cuffs so that the proper one-half inch protruded from his jacket, he said, “I'll bet I know the words you're looking for, Sergeant: not qualified, but passed. Right?”

         

Jonathan was sitting alone in the hotel bar, sipping a double Laphroaig when Yank joined him.

“Oh, brother! You really whipped his pudding for him. Had it coming, I reckon.”

Jonathan finished his drink. “You reckon that, do you?”

Yank slid onto the barstool next to him. “I guess you'll be going back to London in the morning. When you get to your flat, you'll find a list of telephone numbers there—one for each day. You can use them to keep me informed of your progress, and I'll pass the good word on to the Guv. Any questions?”

None small enough for Yank to handle.

“Oh, yeah,” Yank said. “About this Vanessa Dyke. I suppose you'll be getting in contact with her to get an angle on entrée into The Cloisters. Do you want me to have her watched until you get there?”

“Christ, no.”

“But the Guv said that she—”

“She probably met your Parnell-Greene by coincidence.”

“Maybe. But she was the last person he reported having met before we found him dead. Of course, you could be right. Maybe it was just a case of two queers getting together to compare notes. Right?”

Jonathan tilted his head back and looked at him coldly. “Miss Dyke is an old friend.”

“Sure, but—”

“Get out of here.”

“Now, wait a minute. I have—”

“Out. Out.”

Yank shuffled nervously for a moment, then he cleared his throat and tried to make an exit without loss of face. “OK, then. I'll be getting back to the city.” He made a slow fanning gesture with the fingers of one hand. “Later, sweet patater.”

         

Yank had gone back to London, and Henry had taken The Sergeant to a doctor in the village to attend to his nose and eye, and to see if anything could be done about his hearing, so Jonathan and Maggie had the dining room to themselves. A heavy rain had descended with the evening, enveloping the inn in the white noise of frying bacon. A draft fluttered the candle between them, and she rubbed her upper arms as though she were cold. She wore the muted green paisley gown she had worn on their first evening together—only three nights ago, was it?

Despite moments of laughter and animation, their contact was uncertain and frail, and several times he realized that they had been silent for rather a long time, each in his own thoughts. With a little effort he would pick it up again, but the chat invariably thinned into silence again.

“. . . they tend to be blue this time of year, don't they?”

He had been staring at the rain streaks on the window. “What? Pardon me?”

“Tangerines.”

“Oh. Yes.” He looked out the window again, then he frowned and looked back to her. “Blue?”

She laughed. “You were miles away.”

“True. I'm sorry.”

“You're leaving in the morning?”

“Hm-m.”

“Going to take up this line of contact through your friend . . . ah?”

“Vanessa Dyke. Yes, I suppose so. It seems the only angle we've got on getting me into The Cloisters. I can't believe she really has anything to do with all this, though.”

“I hope not. I mean, if she's a friend of yours, I hope not.”

“Me too.” He tilted back his head and looked at her for a moment. “The Vicar told me you were to be placed inside The Cloisters.”

She nodded, then she examined the cheese board with sudden discretionary interest. He realized that she was trying to pass over the thing, make it seem less important than it was. “Yes,” she said. “They've found a way to locate me inside by tomorrow night. Would you like a little of this Brie? It's Brie de Meaux, I think.”

“Brie de Melun, actually. It'll be dangerous inside there, you know.”

“You know, I'm as bad at cheese as I am at wine.”

“The Vicar said you volunteered to work inside.”

“Did he?” Her arched eyebrows and playful green eyes slowly dissolved to a calmer, less protected gaze, then she lowered her lashes and looked at the cheese knife, which she aimlessly pushed back and forth with her finger. “I guess I lack great moral strength. I can't carry such burdens as guilt and shame very far. By helping you now, I hope I'll be able to convince myself that I've made up for getting you into this thing. Because . . .” She looked up at him and smiled. “Because . . . I've grown a little fond of you, sir.” The saccharinity of this last was diluted by her broad, comic brogue.

Her hand was available for pressing, but that was hardly the kind of thing Jonathan would do.

They got through coffee and cognac without any need for conversation. The rain had stopped, and the enveloping sound that had gone unnoticed was palpable in its absence. The new, denser silence contributed to the emptiness of the drafty dining room and the dimming of candle flames drowning in melted wax to produce a voided, autumnal ambience.

“They've put a car at my disposal,” Jonathan said, voicing the last step of a thought pattern. “I suppose I could go into London tonight. Get my mind sorted out against tomorrow.”

“Yes. You could.”

“Then I'd be able to call on Vanessa first thing in the morning.”

“Shall I come help you pack?”

“Do you think that's wise?”

“No.”

“Come help me pack.”

         

It was early dawn when he loaded his suitcase into the yellow Lotus, pressing the boot closed so as not to disturb the misty silence. His hands came up wet from the coating of dew that smoked the car. A bird sounded a tentative note, as though seeking avian support for his suspicion that this grudging gray might be morning. No confirmation was forthcoming. There was no sky.

“Yes,” he muttered to himself, “but what about the early worm?”

The interior of the car was coldly humid, and it smelled new. He turned on the wipers to clear the windscreen of condensation, then he looked up toward the window of her room before pressing the stiff gearbox into reverse and easing back over the crunching gravel.