The Loo Sanction - Страница 5

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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 developed 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 leapt 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."

"Ah. A pity. I was for many years associated with the entertainment world. And I must admit that I sometimes miss it. The laughter. The happy times."

MacTaint shambled over with the drinks. "Her only dealings with theatre were that she used to stand outside and try to hustle blokes too drunk to care what they got into. Here you go, love. Bottoms up, as they used to say in your trade."

"Don't be crude, love." She tossed back the glass of gin and smacked her lips, a motion that jiggled her pendulous cheeks. Then she clapped a ham-sized hand onto Jonathan's forearm and said, "Of course, I suppose it's all changed now. The old artists have gone, it's all youngsters with long hair and loud songs." She relieved herself of a shuddering sigh.

"It's worse than you think," MacTaint said, drooping into a damask chair and hooking another over with his toe so he could put his feet up on it. "The law doesn't allow you to carry sandwich boards advertising the positions you specialize in. And curb service on rubber mattresses is definitely not in."

"Fuck you, MacTaint!" Lilla said in a new accent that carried the snarl of the streets in it.

MacTaint instantly responded in kind. "Hop it, you ha'penny cunt! I'd kick your arse proper for you, if I wasn't afraid of losing me boot!"

Lilla rose with tottering dignity and offered her hand to Jonathan. "I must leave you gentlemen. I have letters to do before retiring."

Jonathan rose and bowed slightly. "Good night, Lilla."

She made her way to the door at the far end of the room, sweeping up a bottle of gin as she passed the bar. She had to tack twice to gain the center of the door, which then gave her some difficulty in opening. In the end she gave it a hinge-loosening kick that knocked it ajar. She turned and waved her cigarette holder at Jonathan before disappearing.