The Eiger Sanction (3 page)

Jonathan stood in a sterile hallway, awaiting response to the buzzer and glancing with distaste at an embossed Swiss print of a Cezanne designed to lend luxury to the corridor. The door opened and he turned around.

She was physically competent, even lush; but she was hardly gift wrapped. In her tailored suit of tweed, she seemed wrapped for mailing. Thick blond bangs, cheekbones wide, lips full, bust resisting the constriction of the suit jacket, flat stomach, narrow waist, full hips, long legs, tapered ankles. She wore shoes, but he assumed her toes were adequate as well.

“Miss...?” he raised his eyebrows to force her to fill in the name because he was still unwilling to rely on the pronunciation.

“Felicity Arce,” she said, holding out her hand hospitably. “Do come in. I've looked forward to meeting you, Hemlock. You're well thought of in the trade, you know.”

She stepped aside and he entered. The apartment was consonant with the building: expensive anticlass. When they shook hands, he noticed that her forearm glistened with an abundance of soft golden hair. He knew that to be a good sign.

“Sherry?” she offered.

“Not at this time of night.”

“Whiskey?”

“Please.”

“Scotch or bourbon.”

“Do you have Laphroaig?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Then it doesn't matter.”

“Why don't you sit down while I pour it.” She walked away to a built-in bar of antiqued white under which lurked a suspicion of pine. Her movements were strong, but sufficiently liquid about the waist. He sat at one end of a sectional divan and turned toward the other, so that it would be downright impolite of her to sit anywhere else. “You know,” he commented, “this apartment is monumentally ugly. But my guess is that you are going to be very good.”

“Very good?” she asked over her shoulder, pouring whiskey generously.

“When we make love. A little more water, please.”

“Like so?”

“Close enough.”

She smiled and shook her head as she returned with the drink. “We have other things to do than make love, Hemlock.” But she sat on the divan as he directed her to with a wave of his hand.

He sipped. “We have time for both. But of course it's up to you. Think about it for a while. And meanwhile, tell me what I have to know about this sanction.”

Miss Arce looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes for a second, collecting her thoughts. “The man they killed was code call: Wormwood—not much of a record.”

“What was he doing in Canada?”

“I have no idea. Something for CII home base. It's really none of our business anyway.”

“No, I suppose not.” Jonathan held out his hand and she took it with a slight greeting pressure of the fingers. “Go on.”

“Well, Wormwood was hit in a small hotel on Casgrain Avenue—hm-m-m, that's nice. Do you know that part of town?”

“No.” He continued stroking the inside of her wrist.

“Fortunately, CII home base was covering him with a backup man. He was in the next room, and he overheard the hit. As soon as the two assassins left, he went into Wormwood's room and made a standard strip of the body. Then he contacted Search and Sanction immediately. Mr. Dragon got me right on it.”

Jonathan kissed her gently. “You're telling me that this backup man just sat next door and let this Wormwood get it?”

“Another whiskey?”

“No, thank you.” He stood up and drew her after him. “Where is it? Through there?”

“The bedroom? Yes.” She followed. “You must know how they work, Hemlock. The backup man's assignment is to observe and report, not to interfere. Anyway, it seems they were testing a new device.”

“Oh? What kind of device? I'm sorry, dear. These little hooks always confuse me.”

“Here, I'll do it. They've always had a problem covering the movements and sound of the backup man when they stake him out in the next room. Now they've hit on the idea of having himmake noise, rather than trying to keep him quiet—”

“Good God! Do you keep these sheets in the refrigerator?”

“That's silk for you. What they're experimenting with is a tape recording of the sound of an old man's coughing—playing it day and night, advertising the presence of someone in the next room, but someone no one would imagine is an agent. Oh! I'm very sensitive there. It tickles now, but it won't later. Isn't that clever?”

“The coughing old man? Oh, yes, clever.”

“Well, as soon as Mr. Dragon sent me the B-3611 form I got to work. It was pretty easy. The outside is particularly good for me.”

“Yes, I sensed that.”

“It seems this Wormwood wasn't a total incompetent. He wounded one of the two men. The backup agent saw them leave the hotel, and even from the window he could tell that one of them was limping. The other one—the one who wasn't hurt—must have been panicked. He ran—Oh, that is beautiful!—He ran into a lamppost across from the hotel. When he stopped to recover, the backup man recognized him. The rest was—agh! Agha!—the rest was easy.”

“What's the mark's name?”

“Kruger. Garcia Kruger. A very bad type.”

“You're kidding about the name.”

“I never kid about names. Oh-a-ar! Graggah!”

“What do you mean, he's a bad type?”

“The way he got Wormwood. He—Oh, God! He... He...”

“Press down with the soles of your feet!”

“All right. Wormwood swallowed a pellet he was carrying. Kruger went after it with a knife. Throat and stomach. Oh! Adagrah! Oh, yes... yes...”

“Read much Joyce?”

She forced words out through a tight jaw, small squeaks of air escaping from her contracted throat “No, Agh! Why do you ask?”

“Nothing important. What about the other man?”

“The one who limped? Don't know yet. Not a professional, we're sure of that.”

“How do you know he's not a professional?”

“He got sick while Kruger was working on Wormwood. Threw up on the floor. Ogha? Ogah? Arah-ah-agh-ga-gahg!” She arched her strong back and lifted him off the bed. He joined her in release.

For a time there were soft caresses and gentle pelvic adjustments.

“You know, Hemlock,” her voice was soft, relaxed, and a little graveled from effort. “You really have magnificent eyes. They're rather tragicomic eyes.”

He expected this. They always talked about his eyes afterwards.

Some time later, he sat on the edge of the tub, holding up a rubber sac in an unsuccessful attempt to allow water to seek its own level. Part of his charm lay in these little attentions.

“I've been thinking about your gun, Hemlock.”

“What about it?”

“The information sent up by Mr. Dragon indicated you used a large caliber.”

“True. I have to. I'm not much of a shot. Finished?”

“Uh-huh.”

They dressed and had another whiskey in the sterile living room. In detail, Miss Arce went over the daily habits and routine of Garcia Kruger, answering questions raised by Jonathan. She ended with: “It's all in the tout we amassed. You should study it then destroy it. And here's your gun.” She gave him a bulky brown package. “Will I see you again?”

“Would that be wise?”

“I suppose not. May I tell you something? Just as I—well, at the top—can you imagine what ran through my mind?”

“No.”

“I remembered that you were a killer.”

“And that bothered you?”

“Oh, no! Quite the contrary. Isn't that odd?”

“It's rather common, actually.” He collected the tout and the gun and walked to the door. She followed him, anticipating a final kiss, insensitive to his postcoitus frost.

“Thank you,” she said softly, “for the advice about pushing down with the feet. It certainly helps.”

“I like to leave people a little richer for having known me.”

She held out her hand and he took it. “You really have magnificent eyes, Hemlock. I'm very glad you came.”

“Good of you to have me.”

In the hall, as he waited for the elevator, he felt pleased about the evening. It had been simple, uncomplicated, and temporarily satisfying: like urination. And that was the way he preferred his love-making to be.

In general, his sex life was no more heroic than, say, the daydreams of the average bachelor. But romantic activity tended to peak when he was on sanction assignments. For one thing, opportunities abounded at such times. For another, his sexual appetite was whetted by the danger he faced, perhaps a microcosmic instance of that perverse force of nature that inflates birthrates during wartime.

Once in bed, he was really very good. His mechanical competence was not a matter of plumbing, in which respect he differed little from the mass of men. Nor, as we have seen, was it a result of wooing and careful preparation. It was, instead, a function of his remarkable staying powers and his rich experience.

Of the experience, it suffices to say that his control was seldom betrayed by the tickle of curiosity. After Ankara, and Osaka, and Naples, there were no postures, no ballistic nuances foreign to him. And there were only two kinds of women with whom he had never had experience: Australian Abos and Eskimos. And neither of these ethnic gaps was he eager to fill, for reasons of olfactory sensitivity.

But the more significant contribution to his epic endurance was tactile. Jonathan felt nothing when he made love. That is to say, he had never experienced that local physical ecstasy we associate with climax. To be sure, his biological factory produced semen regularly, and an overabundance disturbed him, interfered with his sleep, distracted him from work. So he knew great relief at the moment of discharge. But his relief was a termination of discomfort, not an achievement of pleasure.

So he was more to be pitied for the basis of his remarkable control than he was to be envied for the competence it granted him.

He had passed the morning rehearsing Garcia Kruger's daily routine for a final time before he destroyed the Search tout. Then he had visited two art galleries, strolling with deliberate step, pressing his metabolic rate down to prepare himself for the task before him.

When his body and mind were completely ready, he rose slowly from bed and opened the top drawer of a chest to take out a brown bag folded over at the top like a lunch bag, but containing the silenced revolver Miss Arce had given him. He slipped an identical bag, empty and folded flat, into his coat pocket, then he left his room.

Kruger's office was on a narrow, duty street just off St. Jacques, near the Bonaventure Freight Station. “Cuban Import and Export—Garcia Kruger.”

An ostentatious name for a company that received and sent no shipments, and a ludicrous name for the man, the product of some random sperm a German sailor had left for safekeeping in the womb of a Latin lady. Just in front of the building some children were playingcache-cache among the stoops. In fleeing from a pursuer, a ragged gamin with a hungry face and aerodynamic ears bumped into Jonathan, who held onto him to keep him from falling. The boy was surprised and embarrassed, so he scowled to conceal his discomfort.

“I'm afraid you've had it, kid,” Jonathan said in French. “Running into a Protestant citizen is an act of FLQ terrorism. What's your name?”

The boy read game-playing in Jonathan's mock-tough voice, and he went along with it. “Jacques,” he said, with the broadau diphthong of Quebec horsetalk.

Jonathan mimed a notebook in the palm of his hand. “J-a-c-q-u-e-s. Right! If it happens again, I'll turn you over to Elliot.”

After an instant of indecision, the boy grinned at Jonathan and ran off to continue his play.

Garcia Kruger shared a second floor with a dentist and a dance instructor. The lower halves of their windows were painted over with advertisements. Just inside the entrance, Jonathan found the cardboard box he had instructed Miss Arce to have left for him. He carried it up the worn wooden stairs, the loose strips of cross-hatched metal squeaking under his foot. The corridor was cool and silent after the brilliant, cacophonous street. Both the dentist and the dance instructor had gone home for the day, but Jonathan knew from the tout that he would find Kruger in.

His knock was answered by, “Who's there?” from an irritated voice within.

“I'm looking for Dr. Fouchet,” Jonathan said in a valid imitation of the smiling/stupid voice of a salesman.

The door opened a few inches and Kruger looked out over a latch chain. He was tall, cadaverous and balding, with a day's growth on his cheeks and dots of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. His shirt was crumpled blue and white stripe, wet in irregular crescents under the arms. And on his forehead there was a scabbed-over bruise, doubtless from his contact with the lamppost.

Jonathan looked awkward and incompetent with the cardboard box in his arms and the brown paper bag balanced on top and held under his chin. “Hi. I'm Ed Benson? Arlington Supplies?”

Kruger told him the dentist was gone for the day, and started to close the door. Jonathan quickly explained that he had promised to bring Dr. Fouchet a sample of their new dental floss, but he had been delayed “...and not by business either,” he added, winking.

Kruger leered knowingly, and from his teeth it was evident that he was only casually acquainted with the dentist. But his tone was not civil. “I told you he was out.”

Jonathan shrugged. “Well, if he's out, he's out.” He started to turn away. Then, as though an idea had struck him, “Say! I could leave the sample with you, sir. And you could give it to Dr. Fouchet in the morning.” He produced his most disarming smile. “It would sure get my ass out of the sling.”

Grudgingly, Kruger said he would take it. Jonathan started to hand him the box, but the latch chain was in the way. Kruger closed the door with an angry snap, undid the chain, and opened it again. As Jonathan entered, he babbled about how hot it was on the street, but how it wasn't so much the heat as the humidity that got you down. Kruger grunted and turned away to look out the window, leaving Jonathan to put the box down wherever he could in the littered office.

Thunt! The sound of a silenced thirty-eight firing through a paper bag.

Kruger was spun around and slammed into the corner between two windows on which “Cuban Imports” was written backward. He stared at Jonathan with total astonishment.

Jonathan watched him narrowly, expecting a movement toward him.

Kruger lifted his hands, palms up, with a touching gesture of “Why?”

Jonathan considered firing again.

For two terribly long seconds, Kruger remained there, as though nailed to the wall.

Jonathan began to smart with discomfort. “Oh, come on!”

And Kruger slid slowly down the wall as death dimmed his eyes and set them in an infinity focus, the repulsive white dots of mucus still visible. Never having met Kruger before today, and not having any apparent motive, Jonathan had no fear of identification. He folded up the ruptured bag and placed it and the gun inside the fresh bag he had brought along.

People never carry guns in brown paper bags.

Outside in the glare of the street, the children still played around the stoops. Little Jacques saw Jonathan emerge from Kruger's building, and he waved from across the street. Jonathan made a gun with his finger and shot at the boy, who threw up his hands and fell to the pavement in a histrionic facsimile of anguish. They both laughed.

MONTREAL/NEW YORK/LONG ISLAND: June 10

While he waited for the plane to taxi off, Jonathan laid out his briefcase and papers on the seat beside him and began taking notes for the long-overdue article on “Toulouse-Lautrec: A Social Conscience.” He had promised it to the editors of an art journal with a liberal bent. He could spread out in comfort because it was his practice, when on CII expense account, to purchase two adjacent seats to insulate himself against unwanted conversation. On this occasion, the extravagance may have been unnecessary, as the first-class compartment was nearly empty.

His line of thought was severed by the paternal and plebeian voice of the pilot assuring him that he knew where they were going and at what altitude they would fly. His interest in the Lautrec article was too fragile to survive the interruption, so he began glancing through a book he had promised to review. It was a study ofTilman-Riemanschneider: The Man and His Times. Jonathan was acquainted with the author and he knew the book would be a compromise between academic and general readerships—an alternation between the turgid and the cute. Nevertheless, he intended to give it a handsome review in obedience to his theory that the surest way to maintain position at the top of the field was to advance and support men of clearly inferior capacities.

He sensed the brush of her perfume, a spicy but light fragrance that he recalls to this day, suddenly and when he least wants to.

“Both of these seats are yours?” she asked.

He nodded without looking up from his work. To his great disappointment, he had caught a glimpse of a uniform out of the tail of his eye, and he rejected her, realizing that stewardesses, like nurses, were something a man made do with in strange towns when there was not time to seek women.

“Veblen had a phrase for that.” Her voice was like a flow of warm honey.

Surprised by erudition in a stewardess, he closed the book on his lap and looked up into the calm, amused eyes. Soft brown with harlequin flecks of gold. “The phrase would apply equally to Mimi in the last act.”

She laughed lightly: strong white teeth and slightly petulant lips. Then she checked his name off a list on a clipboard, and walked aft to deal with other passengers. With unabashed curiosity, he examined her taut bottom with its characteristic African shape that lifts black women to so convenient an angle. Then he sighed and shook his head. He returned to the Riemanschneider study, but his eyes moved over the pages without the words getting to his brain. Later he took notes; then he dozed.

“Shit?” she asked, her lips close to his ear.

He woke and turned his head to look up at her. “Pardon me?” The movement brought her bust to within three inches of his nose, but he kept his eyes on hers.

She laughed—again the harlequin flecks of gold in the brown eyes—and sat back on the armrest.

"Youdid begin this conversation by saying 'shit,' didn't you? he asked.

“No. I didn't say it. I asked it.”

“Does that go along with coffee, tea, and milk?”

“Only on our competitors' lines. I was reading over your shoulder, and I saw the word 'shit' with two exclamation points on your notepad. So I asked.”

“Ah. It was a comment on the content of this book I'm reviewing.”

“A study of scatology?”

“No. A shoddy piece of research obfuscated by crepuscular logic and involute style.”

She grinned. “I can stand crepuscular logic, but involute style really makes my ass tired.”

Jonathan enjoyed the raised oriental corners of her eyes in which a hint of derision lurked. “I refuse to believe you're a stewardess.”

“As in: What's a girl like you doing in...? Actually, I'm not a stewardess at all. I'm a high-jacker in drag.”

“That's reassuring. What's your name?”

“Jemima.”

“Stop it.”

“I'm not putting you on. That's really my name. Jemima Brown. My mother was hooked on ethnic lore.”

“Have it your way. So long as we both admit that it's clearly too much for a black girl to have a name like that.”

“I don't know. People don't forget you if your name is Jemima.” She adjusted her perch on the armrest, and the skirt slipped up.

Jonathan concentrated on not noticing. “I doubt that men would forget you easily if your name was Fred.”

“Goodness me, Dr. Hemlock! Are you the kind of man who tries to pick up stewardesses?”

“Not normally, but I'm coming around to it. How did you know my name?”

She became serious and confidential. “It's this mystic thing I have with names. A gift of sorts. I look at a person carefully. Then I concentrate. Then I check the passenger list. Andvoila ! The name just comes to me.”

“All right. What do people call you when they're not hooked on ethnic lore?”

“Jem. Only they spell it like the jewel kind of gem.” A soft gong caused her to look up. “We're coming in. You'll have to fasten your safety belt.” Then she moved aft to deal with the less interesting passengers.

He would have liked to ask her out to dinner or something. But the moment had been lost, and there is no social sin like poor timing. So he sighed and turned his attention to the tilted and toylike picture of New York beyond the window.

He saw Jemima briefly in JFK terminal. While he was hailing a taxi, she passed with two other stewardesses, the three walking quickly and in step, and he remembered his general dislike of the ilk. It would not be accurate to say that he put her out of his mind during the long drive home to the North Shore, but he was able to tuck her away into a defocused corner of his consciousness. It was oddly comforting to know she existed out there—like having a little something keeping warm on the back of the stove.

Jonathan soaked in the steaming water of his Roman bath, the tension of the past few days slowly dissolving, the cords of his neck unknotting, the tightness behind his eyes and in his jaw muscles melting reluctantly. But the knot of fear remained in his stomach.

A martini at his bar; a pipe in the basement gallery; and he found himself rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat. His search was rewarded with some Danish biscuits, a jar of peanut butter, a small tin of kimchee, and a split of champagne. This gastronomic holocaust he carried to the wing of the transept he had converted into a greenhouse garden, and there he sat beside the plashing pool, lulled by the sound of the water and the brush of warm sunlight.

Little drops of perspiration tingled on his back as he began to doze, the vast peace of his house flowing over him.

Then suddenly he snapped up—an image of surprised eyes with white dots of mucus had chased him out of a dream. He was nauseated.

Getting too old for this, he complained. How did I ever get into it?

Three weeks after the discovery of the abandoned church had added to his need for money, he had found himself in Brussels attending a convention and squandering Ford Foundation money. Late one wet and blustery night, a CII agent dropped into his hotel room and, after beating about the bush, asked him to do a service for his country. Recovering from a good laugh, Jonathan asked for a fuller explanation. The task was fairly simple for a man with Sphinx training: they wanted him to slip an envelope into the briefcase of an Italian delegate to the convention. It is difficult to say why he agreed to the thing. He was bored, to be sure, and the hint of fiscal return came at a time when he had just located his first Monet. But there was also the fact that the Italian had recently had the effrontery to suggest that he knew almost as much about the impressionists as Jonathan.