by Trevanian
The Cellar d’Or
After turning over the films, Jonathan retrieved the other .45 from the blinded Lotus. As Yank’s car warmed up, he checked the load; there were only two bullets left. Enough.
A soft rain and low clouds blurred the limen between night and dawn as he drove through London streets that were desolate and gravid with despair. He pulled up before the Cellar d’Or. As he descended the narrow stone steps leading to the basement entrance, he could hear the whir of a vacuum cleaner within. The door was unlocked.
A black crone with a red bandanna pushed her vacuum cleaner desultorily back and forth over the black carpet and did not look up as he entered the bar. With the working lights on, the gold and black decor looked tawdry and cheap, and the air was stale with cigarette smoke and the smell of booze. Jonathan waited a moment for his eyes to adapt to the dimmer light.
“Close the door behind you, sir. It is cold this morning.”
Jonathan recognized the basso rumble of P’tit Noel’s voice. Then he saw him, sitting at the back of the lounge.
“I am sorry, sir, but we have closed. Like ghosts, our customers fade away with the cocorico of the morning rooster.”
Jonathan raised the revolver in his hand and walked back slowly toward P’tit Noel.
“It is odd, is it not, sir, that roosters around the world do not speak the same language. In Haiti, they say cocorico, while in Britain they—”
“Where’s Strange?”
“Sir?”
“Don’t screw around, P’tit Noel. I’m tired.”
The Haitian rose languidly and blocked the entrance to the internal stairway, his Roman breastplate muscles tense under the white knit pullover. Without taking his calm eyes from Jonathan’s face he spoke in patois to the charwoman. “Vas-toi en, tanta.”
The cleaner was clicked off, its whir dying with a Doppler fade, and the crone departed noiselessly.
“The gun is for me?” P’tit Noel asked.
“Not really. But I don’t intend to grapple with you.”
“Actually, I am a strong man, sir. I could probably absorb the first bullet and still get a hand on your throat.”
“Not a bullet from this gun.”
P’tit Noel looked into the big bore.
“Are they upstairs?” Jonathan asked.
“They were expecting someone. Not you. Someone with a package.”
“He won’t be coming. Listen, I don’t care about Grace. If she stands between me and Strange, I’ll cut her in half. If she stands back, I’ll let her go.”
P’tit Noel considered this. He nodded slowly. “Mam’selle Grace has a gun. Give me a chance to get her out of the room. If you do not harm her, I shall leave you alone. The man is nothing to me.”
He turned and led the way up the stairs and down a corridor. Raising a hand to gesture Jonathan back, he tapped at the door softly.
Amazing Grace’s voice was strained. “Yes?”
“It is I, Mam’selle Grace. He is here, the one you await.”
Jonathan pressed back against the wall as the lock clicked and the door opened. “Where the hell have you—Hey!”
P’tit Noel’s hand snapped in with the speed of a mongoose and snatched Grace out into the hall by her arm. She screamed as her little automatic arced across the corridor and clattered to the floor. “Max!” Then she saw Jonathan, and fury glittered in her eyes. “It’s Hemlock, Max!” She threw her diminutive naked body toward him, fingernails spread like talons, her lips drawn back, revealing thin sharp teeth. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” P’tit Noel swept her up as though she were weightless. It took all of his strength to hold her as she squirmed and snarled in his arms, her naked body oily with the sudden sweat of rage. “Let me go, you nigger bastard!” He began to walk clumsily toward the stairs, his awkward, savage burden screaming and kicking and clawing at him. But he could not bring himself to strike her, or even to protect himself from the punishment of her impotent, desperate anger. She dug her fingernails into his cheek and tore four deep furrows of red through the brown, but he only looked at her with resigned, unhappy eyes.
“Please, please!” She sobbed and panted promises. “I’ll let you screw me if you let me go! Max! Max!”
He made consoling sounds as he continued down the stairs. She clung, pale-knuckled, to the railings, but the steady power of his momentum tore them slowly away.
Even after they disappeared down the stairs, Jonathan could hear her screams and invective. There was one last tormented wail, then the sound of sobbing.
A muffled voice spoke from within the apartment. Jonathan kicked open the door and dashed across the opening to draw fire. But no shot came. The muffled sound again. Incomprehensible words, as though someone were speaking through a gag. He pressed against the wall outside, the revolver before his face.
The words became distinguishable. The voice was a guttural whisper through clenched teeth. “Come . . . in, Dr. Hemlock.”
Jonathan eased the door farther open with his toe and looked through the crack. Strange lay limp on the red velvet sofa, his shirt off and a wet towel covering half his face. He had both hands lifted to show that he had no gun.
Jonathan entered and locked the door behind him. He crossed to the bedroom, checked it out, then returned.
Strange’s uncovered eye followed his every movement, hate and pain mixed in its expression. He spoke with great effort, his diction trammeled through clenched teeth. “Finish the job, Hemlock.”
“I have.”
“No. Not finished. I’m still alive.”
“If you want to die, why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Can’t. No gun. Grace wouldn’t help me. Too weak to get to window.”
The eye glittered with sudden anger. “Do you know what you did to me?” With a convulsion of effort and a snort of pain, he tore the towel from the side of his face. The cheek was gone, and grinning molars were visible to just below where the ear would have been. The teeth were held in by tapered pink tubes of exposed root. And the eye, lacking support, dangled like a limp mollusk. The bleeding had been staunched, but the flesh oozed with a clear liquid and it had begun to fester.
Jonathan glanced away as Strange replaced the towel. When he looked back, the eye was crying. “Please kill me, Hemlock. Please? My whole life . . . devoted . . . beauty.” The voice grew faint and the fingertips fluttered. The visible cheek had the subaqueous tint of somatic shock, and Jonathan was afraid he would pass out.
“What have you done with Maggie Coyne?”
The eye was dim and confused. “Who?”
He didn’t even know her name. “The girl! The one Yank informed on. Where is she?”
“She . . . she’s—” The eye pressed shut as he tried to clear his mind. “No. I have something to bargain with, haven’t I?”
Jonathan considered for a moment. “All right. Tell me where she is, and I’ll kill you.”
“You give . . . word . . .” The head nodded as the tide of shock rose.
“Come on!”
The eye opened again, the lid fluttering with the effort. “Word as a gentleman?”
“Where is she?”
“Dead. She is dead.”
Jonathan’s insides chilled. He closed his eyes and sucked air in through his lower teeth. He had known it. He had felt it back at the Vicarage. And again as he drove through the sad, deserted city. It had seemed as though some energy out there—some warm force of metaphysical contact had been cut off. But he had conned himself with fragile fables. Maybe they held her hostage. Maybe she had escaped.
Strange’s eye grew large with terror as Jonathan turned and walked aimless toward the door. “You promised!”
“Who killed her?” Jonathan asked, not really caring.
“I did!”
“You? Yourself?”
“Yes!” There was a flabby hiss to the word as air escaped through his cheekless teeth.
Jonathan looked down on him dully. “You’re lying. You’re trying to make
me kill you in anger. But I’m not going to. I’m going to call for an ambulance. And I’ll warn them you’re suicidal. So they’ll protect you from yourself. They’ll fix you up—more or less. And it will be months before you find a way to kill yourself. All that time they’ll be looking at you. Nurses. Doctors. Prison guards. Lawyers. They’ll look at you. And remember your face.”
Strange’s swathed head vibrated with impotent rage. “You son of a bitch!”
Jonathan started toward the door, the revolver dangling in his hand. “See you in the newspapers, Strange.”
Strange grasped the back of the sofa for support and pulled himself up. The effort caused the wet towel to fall from his mutilated face. “Leonard killed her!”
Jonathan turned back.
“I told you once, Hemlock, that I had a vice—expensive—subtler than sex. My vice is expensive because it costs lives. I like to watch the kinds of things Leonard does to women. Leonard was in particularly creative form with this girl of yours. And I watched! She didn’t disappoint me either. She had a strong will. It took a long, long time. We had to revive her often, but—”
Strange won.
He got his way after all.
Stockholm
28 Days Later
“. . . In fact, the word ‘style’ has been gutted of meaning. Overused. Misused. It’s a critic’s word. No painting has ‘style.’ Come to think of it, few critics do.”
The audience tittered politely, and Jonathan bowed his head, losing his balance slightly and catching at the side of the podium. When he continued speaking, he was too close to the microphone, and he set up a feedback squeal. “Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh. Right! It is as meaningless to speak of the style of the Flemish School as it is to babble about the style of this or that painter.”
“You miss my point, sir!” objected the young, terribly intelligent instructor who had introduced the subject.
“I don’t miss your point at all, young man,” Jonathan said, taking a sip from the glass of gin he fondly hoped passed for water. “I anticipate your obscure point, and I choose to ignore it.”
At the back of the auditorium, the with-it young American who was responsible for USIS cultural lectures in Sweden cast an anxious glance toward fforbes-Ffitch, who had flown over from London to see how the lectures he had co-sponsored were going.
“Is he always like this?” fforbes-Ffitch asked in a thin whisper.
“I don’t think he’s been sober since he came,” the American said.
fforbes-Ffitch arched his eyebrows and shook his head disapprovingly.
“. . . but you can’t deny that the Flemish School and that of Art Nouveau are stylistically antithetical,” the bright Swedish instructor insisted.
“Bullshit!” Jonathan made an angry gesture with his arm and struck the microphone, causing an amplified thunk to punctuate his statement. He shushed the mike with his forefinger across his lips. “Of course, one can cite broad differences between the two movements. The Flemish painters chose in bulk to deal with natural subjects in a vigorous, healthy, if somewhat bovine manner. While the Art Nouveau types dealt with organic, hypersophisticated, almost tropically malignant things. But no painter belongs to a school. Critics concoct schools after the fact. For instance, if you want to look at ‘typically Art Nouveau’ treatments of floral subjects, I refer you to the Flemish painter Jan van Huysum or, to a lesser degree, to Jacob van Walscappelle.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the painters to whom you refer, sir,” the young Swede said stiffly, giving up all hopes of having his thesis supported by this acrid American critic whose books and articles were just then holding the art world in uncomfortable thrall.
The great majority of the audience was composed of young, shaggy Americans, this USIS center operating, as most of them do, more as a sponsored social club for Americans on the drift than as an effective outlet for American information and propaganda. Jonathan’s lectures had broken the usual pattern of boycotting and sparse attendance that resulted from strong feelings against America’s failure to grant amnesty to the men who had fled to Sweden to avoid the Vietnam debacle.
“It’s a wonder there’s a soul here,” fforbes-Ffitch whispered, “if he’s been drunk and nasty like this every night.”
The American diplomat-in-training shrugged. “But it’s been the best houses we’ve ever had. I don’t understand it. They eat it up.”
“Odd lot, the Swedes. Masochists. National guilt over Nobel and his damned explosives, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Jonathan’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “I shall end this last of my lectures, children, by allowing our joint hosts to say a few words to you. They are obviously bursting with a need to communicate, for they have been babbling together at the back of the hall. I have it on good authority that your USIS host will speak to you on the subject, Why has the nation failed to grant amnesty to young men who had the courage to fight war, rather than to fight people?” Jonathan stepped from the stage, stumbling a little, and the audience turned expectant faces toward the back of the auditorium.
The young USIS man blushed and tried to fake his way through, raising his voice to the verge of falsetto. “What we really wanted to know was . . . ah . . . are there any more questions?”
“Yeah, I got a question!” shouted a black from the middle of the group. “How come all this Watergate shit didn’t come out until after Nixon got his ass reelected?”
Another American stood up. “Tell him that if he grants us amnesty and lets us come home, we won’t tell anyone about the garbage he’s made of the American image abroad.”
fforbes-Ffitch took this opportunity to say that none of this had anything to do with him. “I’m English,” he told two nearby people, who didn’t care.
By then Jonathan had walked up the side aisle and had joined the flustered USIS man. He put his arm around the lad’s shoulder and confided in a low voice, “Get in there, kid. You can handle them. After all, you’re a government-trained communicator.” He winked and walked on.
“Well,” said the USIS man to the audience, “if there are no further questions for Dr. Hemlock, then I ask—”
The hoots and boos drowned him out, and the audience began to break up, chattering among themselves and laughing.
Jonathan made his way to a display room off the foyer. On exhibition were a lot of clumsy ceramics done by star students and faculty of a well-known California school of design, and brought there to show the Swedes what our young artists could do. One of the pieces had a title calculated to suggest creative angst and personal despair. It was called The Pot I Broke, and that’s what it was. Next to it was a particularly pungent social statement in the form of a beer mug featuring Uncle Sam with black features and bearing the cursive legend “Don’t drink from me.” But the star piece of the collection was a long cylinder of red tile that had drooped over during the baking, and had subsequently been titled Reluctant Erection.
Jonathan took a deep breath and leaned his head against the burlap-covered wall. Too much. Too much hooch. He had been drinking for weeks. Weeks and weeks and weeks.
“Is it so bad as that?” asked one of the Swedish girls who had been looking around for him and was standing at the door.
Jonathan pushed himself off the wall and sucked in a big breath to steady the world. “No, it’s great stuff. That’s our subtle way to win you over. Dazzle you with our young art. A nation that can produce this stuff can’t be all bad.”
The girl laughed. “At least it shows your young people have a sense of humor.”
“Don’t I wish. Every time I see a piece of young crap, I try to forgive the artist by assuming it’s a put-on—camp—but it won’t wash. I’m afraid they’re serious. Trivial, of course, and tedious . . . but serious. I assume there’s a party somewhere?”
She laughed. “They’re waiting for you.”
“Wonderful.” He went into the foyer and joined a group of young Swedes exuding energy and good spirits. Th
ey invited him to come along with them to dinner, then off on a crawl of bars and parties, as they had done every night. They were attractive youngsters: physically strong, clear-minded, healthy. He had often reflected on how life-embracing the Swedes were on average, forgetting the traveler’s adage that the most attractive people in the world are those one first sees after leaving England.
Outside, the cold was jagged and the wind penetrating. While the young people waited, blowing into their hands, Jonathan said a very formal good night to the green-coated Beräknings Aktiebolag guard who patrolled the American Culture Center in response to repeated bomb threats. He felt sorry for the poor devil, stiff-faced and tearing in the numbing cold. He even offered to stand his watch for him.
A bar. Then another bar. Then someone’s house. There was a heated discussion and a fight. Another bar—which closed on them. Someone had a wonderful idea and telephoned someone who was not home. Jonathan crowded with the four remaining students into a little car, and they drove back to the Gamla Stan to return him to his hotel on Lilla Nygatan, for he had been drinking heavily and had become embarrassingly antisocial.
They dropped him off on the edge of the medieval island, which is closed to private vehicles. Someone asked if he was sure he could find his way, and he told them to drive on—in fact, go to hell. When the red taillights of the car had disappeared into the swirling snow, he turned to find that a Swedish girl had gotten out with him. So. The party was still on! He put his arm around her—girls feel good in thick fur coats, like teddy bears—and they trudged around looking for an open bar or a cave. They found one, an “inne stället for visor, jazz och folkmusik,” and they sat drinking whiskey and shouting their conversation against blaring music until the place closed.
They walked unsteadily through deserted narrow streets, holding on to one another, the snow deep on the cobblestones and still falling in large indolent flakes that glittered and spiraled around the gas lamps. Jonathan said he didn’t much care for Christmas cards. She didn’t understand. So he repeated it, and she still didn’t get it, so he said forget it.
A little later he fell.
