The Loo Sanction (2 page)

Mrs. Farquahar smiled and inclined her head.

In the hall where it was relatively quiet Jonathan asked, “What's this all about, Van?”

“You'll see. A chance for you to pick up some pocket money. But look, don't get uptight, and for God's sake, don't cause any trouble. That could be very bad for me.” She led the way down a corridor, past the table at which the maids and caterer's assistants were flirting, to the door of a small private display room. “Come on.”

Jonathan entered, then stopped short. A bronze
Horse and Rider
by Marino Marini stood in the center of a darkened room, its ragged modeling accented by the acute angle of a shaft of dramatically placed light. About forty inches high, a sand-colored forced patina, the modeling seemed to combine those primitive, lumpy Etrurian characteristics typical of Marini with an almost oriental twist of the heads of both horse and rider that was most uncharacteristic. But the fat rider's stubbed cigar of a penis was a Marini signature. Jonathan walked slowly around the casting, pausing occasionally to take in some detail, his concentration totally committed. So absorbed was he that it was a while before he noticed a man leaning against the far wall, posed under a dim light that had been arranged with almost as much care as that given to the
Horse.
He wore an extremely trendy suit of dusty gold velvet, and a ruffle of starched lace stood at his throat. His arms were folded across his chest, his stance poised and practiced, but an inner tension prevented his posture from appearing relaxed. He watched Jonathan steadily, following him with gray eyes so pale they seemed colorless.

Jonathan examined the man with frank curiosity. It was the most beautiful male bust he had ever seen—an unearthly, bloodless beauty such as masters of the Early Renaissance sometimes touched upon. Intuitively, he knew the man was aware of the effect of his cold beauty, and he had stationed himself in that particular light to heighten it.

“Well, Jonathan?” Vanessa had been standing back out of the light. Her voice was hushed most uncharacteristically.

Jonathan glanced again at the Renaissance man. Something in his demeanor made it clear that he did not intend to speak and did not wish to be spoken to. Jonathan decided to let him play out his silly game.

“Well what?” he asked Van.

“Is it genuine?”

Jonathan was surprised at the question, forgetting as often he did that his gift was quite unique. As some people have perfect pitch, Jonathan had a perfect eye. Once he had seen a man's work, he never mistook it. It was, in fact, upon that gift that his reputation had been founded and not, as he preferred others to believe, on his scholarship. “Of course it's genuine. Marini cast three of these and later broke one. No one knows why. Some defect probably. But only two now exist. This is the Dallas
Horse.
I didn't know it was in England.”

“Ah—” Vanessa fumbled for a Gauloise to cover her tension, then she asked offhandedly, “What price do you think it would bring?”

Jonathan looked at her, startled. “It's for sale?”

She took a deep drag and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “Yes.”

Jonathan looked across at the Renaissance man, who had not moved a muscle and who still watched him, the colorless eyes picked out by a shaft of light just under the dark eyebrows.

“Stolen?” Jonathan asked.

“No,” Vanessa answered.

“Doesn't he talk?”

“Please, Jonathan.” She touched his arm.

“What the hell's going on? Is he selling this?”

“Yes. But he wanted you to have a look at it first.”

“Why? You don't need me to authenticate it. Its provenances are impeccable. Even a British expert could have certified it.” He addressed this to the man standing on the opposite side of the bar of light illuminating the
Horse.
When the man spoke, his tessitura was just as one would have predicted: precise, carefully modulated, colorless.

“How did you know it was the Dallas
Horse,
Dr. Hemlock?”

“Ah, you speak. I thought you just posed.”

“How did you know it was the Dallas
Horse
?”

As curtly as possible, Jonathan explained that everyone who knew anything at all about the Marini
Horse
s knew the story of the one purchased by the young Dallas millionaire who subsequently picked it up at the plane himself, loaded it into the back of his pickup, then brought it to his ranch. In unloading, it was dropped and broken. Subsequently it was brazed together by an auto mechanic and, because it was imperfect, it was relegated to adorning the barbecue pit. “Any novice would recognize it,” he said, pointing to the rough brazing.

The Renaissance man nodded. “I knew the story, of course.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Testing. Tell me. What do you suppose it will bring in an open sale?”

“I'm a professional. I get paid for making evaluations.”

Vanessa cleared her throat. “Ah, Jon, he gave me an envelope for you. I'm sure it will be all right.”

Neither the voice nor the words were in character for the gruff, hard-drinking Vanessa Dyke, and Jonathan's distaste for this whole theatrical setup grew. He answered crisply. “Impossible to say. Whatever the buyer can afford. It depends on how much he wants it, or how much he wants others to know he owns it. If my memory serves me, the Texan you got it from gave something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million for it.”

“What would it bring now?” Vanessa asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “I told you. I can't say.”

The Renaissance man spoke without moving even a fold in the fabric of his suit. “Let me ask you an easier question. Something you
can
answer.”

Jonathan's slum boyhood toned his response. “Listen, art lover. Keep your fee. Or better yet, shove it up your ass.” He turned to leave, but Vanessa stood in his way.

“Please, Jon? A favor to me?”

“What's this yahoo to you?”

She frowned and shook her head, not wanting to go into it now. He didn't understand, and he was angry, but Vanessa was a friend. He turned back. “What do you want to know?”

The Renaissance man nodded, accepting Jonathan's capitulation. “The
Horse
will be offered for sale soon. It will bring a very high price. At what point would people in the art world find the price unbelievable? At what point would the newspapers make something of it?”

Jonathan assumed there was a tax dodge on. “There would be talk, but no one would be unduly astonished at, say, half a million. If it came from the right sources.”

“Half a million? Dollars?”

“Yes, dollars.”

“I paid more than that for it myself. What if the price were well beyond that?”

“How much beyond?”

“Say . . . five million . . .
pounds
.”

Jonathan laughed. “Never. The other privately held one could be loosened for a tenth of that. And that one's never been broken.”

“Perhaps the buyer wouldn't want the other one. Perhaps he has a fondness for flawed statues.”

“Five million pounds is a lot to pay for a perverted taste for things flawed.”

“Such a price, then, would cause talk.”

“It would cause talk, yes.”

“I see.” The Renaissance man looked down to the floor. “Thank you for your opinion, Dr. Hemlock.”

“I think we'd better get back now, Jon,” Vanessa said, touching his arm.

Jonathan stopped in the hall and collected his coat from the porter. “Well? Are you going to tell me what that was all about?”

“What's to tell? A mutual friend asked me to arrange a contact between you two. I was paid for it. Oh, here.” She gave him a broad envelope, which contained a thick padding of bills.

“But who is that guy?”

She shrugged. “Never saw him before in my life, lover. Come on. I'll buy you a drink.”

“I'm not going back in there. Anyway, I have an appointment tonight.”

Vanessa looked over his shoulder in the direction of Mrs. Farquahar. “I think I have too.”

As he slipped into his overcoat, he looked back toward the door to the private showroom. “You have some weird friends, lady.”

“Do you really think so?” She laughed and butted her cigarette in the salver meant to receive tips, then she walked into the crowded reception room where the singer with the gold-tinsel wig and the green mascara was bobbing over the heads of the company, chanting in thin falsetto something about a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and you.

         

The Renaissance man settled into the passenger seat of his Jensen Interceptor and adjusted his suit coat to prevent its wrinkling. “Has he left?”

The Mute nodded.

“And he's being followed?”

The Mute nodded again.

The Renaissance man clicked on the tape deck and settled to listen to a little Bach as the car crunched along the driveway, its lights out.

         

A young man with a checked sports coat and a camera depended from his neck stood in a red telephone kiosk beneath a corner streetlamp. While the phone on the other end of the line double-buzzed, he clamped the receiver under his chin awkwardly as he scrawled in a notebook. He had been holding the license number on the rim of his memory by chanting it over and over to himself. Hearing an answering click and hum, he pressed in his twopence piece and said in a hard “r” American accent, “Hi, there.”

A cultured voice responded, “Yes? What is it, Yank?”

“How did you know it was me?”

“That hermaphroditic accent of yours.”

“Oh. I see.” Crestfallen, the young man abandoned his phony American sound and continued with the nasal drawl of public school. “He has left the party, sir. Took a cab.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I thought you would like to know. He was followed.”

“Good. Good.”

“Shall I tag along?”

“No, that wouldn't be wise.” The cultured voice was silent for a moment. “Very well. I suppose you have the Baker Street ploy set up?”

“Right, sir. By the way, just in case you want to know, I took note of the time of his departure. He left at exactly . . . Good Lord.”

“What is it?”

“My watch has stopped.”

The man on the other end of the line sighed heavily. “Good night, Yank.”

“Good night, sir.”

Covent Garden

J
onathan sat deep in the back of the taxi, attending only vaguely to the hissing pass of traffic over wet streets. He experienced his usual social nausea after public gatherings of reviewers, teachers, gallery owners, patrons—the paracreative slugs who burden art with their attention—the parasites who pretend to be symbions and who support, with their groveling leadership, the teratogenetic license of democratic art.

“Fucking grex venalium,” he muttered to himself, displaying both aspects of his background—the slums and the university halls.

Forget it, he told himself. Don't let them get to you. He looked forward this evening to a pleasant hour or two with MacTaint, his favorite person in London. A thief, a rogue, and a con with a fine sense of scatology and a haughty disdain for such social imperatives as cleanliness, MacTaint seemed to be visiting modern London from the pages of Dickens or the chorus of
Threepenny Opera
. But he knew painting as did few people in Europe, and he was England's most active dealer in the gray market of stolen art. Although Jonathan had never before been to MacTaint's home, they had often met in little pubs around Covent Garden to drink and joke and talk about painting.

He smiled to himself as he recalled their first meeting three months earlier. He had returned to his flat after a day marred by lectures to serious, ungifted students; meetings with committees whose keen senses of parliamentary procedure obscured their purposes; and gatherings of academic people and art critics, all fencing for position in their miniature arena. He was fed up, and he needed to pass some resuscitating time with his paintings, the eleven Impressionists that were all that remained from the four years he had worked for the Search and Sanction Division of CII. These paintings were the most important things in his life. After all, he had killed for them. Under the protection and blessing of the government, he had performed a half-dozen counterassassinations (“sanctions,” in the crepuscular bureaucratese of CII).

Tired and depressed, he had pushed open the door to his flat, and walked in on a party in progress. Every light was on, his whiskey had been broken out, Haydn played on the phonograph, and the furniture had been moved about to facilitate examination of the eleven Impressionists lining the walls.

But it was a party for only one person. An old man sat alone in a deep wing chair, glass in hand, his tattered overcoat still on, its collar up to his ears revealing only tousled gray hair and a bulbous, new-potato nose.

“Come in. Come in,” the old man invited.

“Thank you,” Jonathan said, hoping the irony had not been too heavy.

“Have some whiskey?”

“Yes, I think I will.” Jonathan poured out a good tot of Laphroaig. “Could I freshen up yours?”

“Oh, that's good of you, son. But I've had sufficient.”

Jonathan tugged off his raincoat. “In that case, get the hell out of here.”

“In a while. In a while. Relax, lad. I'm feasting my tired eyes on that bit of crusted pigment there. Manet. Good for the soul.”

Jonathan smiled, intrigued by this old leprechaun who looked like a cross between a provincial professor emeritus and a dirty dustman. “Yes, it's a first-quality copy.”

“Pig shit.”

“Sir?”

The visitor leaned forward, dandruff falling from his matted hair, and enunciated carefully. “Pig shit. If that's a copy, I'm a glob of whore's spit.”

“Have it your own way. Now get out.” As he approached the gnomish housebreaker, Jonathan was deterred by a barrier of odor: ancient sweat, body dirt, mildewed clothing.

The old man raised his hand. “Before you set to bashing me about, I'd best introduce myself. I'm MacTaint.”

After a stunned moment, Jonathan laughed and shook MacTaint's hand. Then, for several hours, they drank and talked about painting. At no time did MacTaint take off the tattered, heel-length overcoat, and Jonathan was to learn that he never did.

MacTaint downed the last of the whiskey, set the bottle on the floor beside his chair, and regarded Jonathan with an evaluative squint from beneath shaggy white eyebrows, the salient characteristic of which was maverick hairs that hooked out like antennae over the glittering eyes. “So! You are Jonathan Hemlock.” He chuckled. “I can tell you, lad, that your appearance on the scene scared the piss out of a lot of us. You could have been a vast nuisance, you know, with that phenomenal eye of yours. My colleagues in the business of reproducing masters might have found it difficult to pursue their vocations with you about. There was even talk of relieving you of the burden of your bleeding life. But then! Then came the happy news that you, like all worthy men, were at heart a larcenous and acquisitive son of a bitch.”

“I'm not very acquisitive anymore.”

“That's true, come to think of it. You haven't made a purchase for—how long is it?”

“Four years.”

“And why is that?”

“I parted company with my source of money.”

“Oh, yes. There was rumor of some kind of government association. As I recall, it was the kind of thing no one wanted to know about. Still. You haven't done half badly. You own these grand paintings, two of which, if I may remind you, came through my own good offices.”

“I've never been sure, Mac. What are you? A thief or a handler.”

“A thief, by preference. But I'll flog another man's work when times are hard. And you? What are you—other than a frigging enigma?”

“Frigging enigma?”

MacTaint scratched the scruff on his scalp. “You know perfectly well what I mean. My comrades on the Continent shared my curiosity about you at first, and we pooled our fragments of information. Bits and pieces that never seemed to form a whole picture. You had this gift, this eye that made it possible for you to spot a fake at a glance. But the rest didn't make much sense. University professor. Critic and writer. Collector of black market paintings. Mountain climber. Employed in some kind of nasty government business. Frigging enigma, that's what you are . . .”

         

The taxi driver swore under his breath and jerked back the hand brake. They were frozen in a tangle of traffic around Trafalgar Square. Jonathan decided to walk the rest of the way. His eagerness to be away from the people at Tomlinson's had made him an hour early for his appointment with MacTaint anyway, and he could use the exercise.

To get away from the crowds and the noise for a second, he turned down Craven Street, past the Monk's Tavern, to Craven Passage and The Arches, where destitute old women were settling in to pass the night on the paving stones, scraps of cardboard beneath them to absorb the damp, their backs against the brick walls, bits of fabric tugged about them for warmth. They drowsed with the help of gin, but never so deep into sleep that they missed the odd passerby whom they begged for coins or fags with droning, liturgical voices.

Swinging London.

He held to the back streets as long as possible. His mind kept returning to the Renaissance man he had met at Tomlinson's. Five million pounds for a Marini
Horse
? Impossible. And yet the man had seemed so confident. The event had made Jonathan uncomfortable. It had those qualities of the deadly absurd, of melodramatic hokum and very real threat that he associated with the lethal game players of international espionage, that group of social mutants he had despised when he worked for CII, and whom he had driven from his memory.

He turned back up into the lights and noise of center city. The rain had devolved into a dirty, hanging mist that blurred and blended the stew of neon and noise through which crowds of fun-seekers jostled their way.

Modern young girls took long steps with bony legs under ankle-length skirts, their thin shoulders stooped with poor posture, some with frizzly hair, others with lank. They were the kind who abjured cosmetic artifice and insisted upon being accepted for what they were—antiwar, socially committed, sexually liberated, dull, dull, dull.

Working-class girls clopped along in the thick-soled plastic shoes Picasso's kid had inflicted on mass fashion, their stride already displaying hints of the characteristic gait of adult British women: feet splayed, knees bent, backs rigid—seeming to suffer from some chronic rectal ailment. Substantial legs revealed to the crotch by miniskirts, vast liquid breasts sloshing about within stiff brassieres, chattering voices ravaged by the North London glottal gasp, complexions the victims of the Anglo-Saxon penchant for vitamin-free diets. Doughy bodies, doughy minds. Gastronomic anomalies. Dumpling tarts.

Swinging London.

Jonathan walked close to the buildings where passage was clearest.

“Penny for the Guy, mister?”

The voice had come from behind. He turned to find three leering hooligans in their early twenties, jeans and thick steel-toed boots. One of them pushed a wheelchair in which reclined a Guy Fawkes effigy composed of stuffed old clothes and a comic mask beneath a bowler.

“What do you say, mister?” The biggest hooligan held his sleeve. “A penny for the Guy?”

“Sorry.” Jonathan pulled away. He walked on with the sense of their presence etching his spine, but they didn't follow.

He turned into New Row with its gaslights, shuttered greengrocers, and bakeries. His pace carried him slowly away from the Mazurka Clubs, Nosh Bars, and Continuous Continental Revues of Piccadilly, and deeper into Covent Garden with its odd mélange of market and theatrical activities. Italian wholesale fruit companies, seedy talent agencies, imported olive oil, and a school of modern dance and ballet—tap a specialty.

Near a streetlamp, a solitary hustler carnivorously watched him approach. She was plump and fortyish, her legs chubby above thick white knee socks. She wore a short dress and a school blazer with emblem, and her stiff platinum hair was done in two long braids that fell on either side of her full cheeks. Obedient to recent police regulations, she did not solicit verbally, but she put one thumb into her mouth and rocked her thick body from side to side, making her eyes round and little girllike. As he passed, Jonathan noticed the scaly cake of her makeup, patched over, but not redone each time she sweated some off in the course of her work.

As he got deeper into the market, the acrid smell of traffic gave way to the high sweet smell of spoiled fruit, and the litter of paper was replaced by a litter of lettuce leaves, slimy and dangerous underfoot.

Down a dark side street, an out-of-tune piano thumped ragged chords as the silhouettes of tired dancers leaped over drawn window shades. Young girls sweating and panting in their damp exercise costumes. Stars in the making.

“Penny for the Guy, mister?”

He spun around, his back against the brick wall, both hands open before his chest.

The two children yelped and ran down the street, abandoning the old pram and its pitiful, floppy effigy wearing a Sneezy the Dwarf mask.

Jonathan called after them, but his shout served only to speed them on. When the street was quiet again, he laughed at himself and tucked a pound note into the Guy's pocket, hoping the children might sneak back later to retrieve it.

He walked on through the gaggle of lanes, then turned off into a cul-de-sac where there were no streetlamps. The end of a dilapidated court was blocked off by heavy double doors of weathered, splintery wood that swung silently on oiled hinges. The black within was absolute, but he knew he had found his way because of the rancid, cumin smell of ancient sweat.

“Ah, there you are, lad. I'd just decided to come looking for you. It's easy enough to get lost if you've never been here before. Here, follow me.”

Jonathan stood still until MacTaint had opened the inner door, flooding the inky court with pale yellow light. They entered a large open space that had once been a fruit merchant's warehouse. Odd litter was piled in the corners, and two potbellied coal stoves radiated cheerful heat, their long chimney pipes stretching up into the shadows of the corrugated steel roof some twenty-five feet overhead. Well spaced from one another, three painters stood in pools of light created by bulbs with flat steel shades suspended on long wires from above. Two of them continued working at their easels, oblivious to the intrusion; the third, a tall cadaverous man with an unkempt beard and wild eyes, turned and stared with fury at the source of the draft.

Jonathan followed MacTaint through the warehouse to a door at the far end, and they passed into a totally different cosmos. The inner room was done in lush Victoriana: crystal chandeliers hung from an ornate ceiling; blue-flocked wallpaper stood above eggshell wainscoting; a good wood fire flickered in a wide marble fireplace; mirrors and sconces on all the walls made an even distribution of low-intensity light; and comfortable deep divans and wing chairs in soft blue damask were in cozy constellations around carved and inlaid tables. A full-blown woman in her mid-fifties sat on one of the divans, her flabby arm dangling over the back. The bright orange of her hair contested with the blood-red of her pasty lipstick, and festoons of bold jewelry clattered as she screwed a cigarette into a rhinestone holder.

“Here we are,” MacTaint said as he shuffled in his ragged greatcoat over to the crystal bar. “He wasn't lost after all. This, good my love, is Jonathan Hemlock, about whom you have heard me say nothing. And this vast cow, Jon, is Lilla—my personal purgatory. Laphroaig, I suppose?”

Lilla twirled her cigarette holder into the air in greeting. “How good of you to pay us a visit. Mr. MacTaint has never mentioned you. While you're at it, my dear, you might bring me a little drop of gin.”

“Friggin' lush,” MacTaint muttered under his breath.

“Come. Sit here, Dr. Hemlock.” Lilla thumped dust out of the divan seat beside her. “I take it you're connected with the theatre?”

Jonathan smiled politely into the drooping, overly made-up eyes. “No. No, I'm not.”