by Trevanian
She glared at him. "All right, go in." She pressed a button that unlocked the door behind her, then returned to the papers on her desk, not dealing with Jonathan further.
He stepped into the interlock chamber; the door clanged shut behind him; and he stood in the dim red light Mr. Dragon provided as a mezzo-phase from the glittering white of the outer office to the total dark of his own. Jonathan knew he would adapt to the dark more quickly if he closed his eyes. At the same time, he slipped out of his suit coat. The temperature in the interlock and in Mr. Dragon's office was maintained at a constant 87°. The slightest chill, the briefest contact with cold or flu virus would incapacitate Mr. Dragon for months. He had almost no natural resistance to disease.
The door to Mr. Dragon's office clicked and swung open automatically when the cooler air Jonathan had introduced into the interlock had been heated to 87°.
"Come in, Hemlock," Mr. Dragon's metallic voice invited from the darkness beyond.
Jonathan put out his hands and felt his way forward toward a large leather chair he knew to be opposite Mr. Dragon's desk.
"A little to the left, Hemlock."
As he sat, he could dimly make out the sleeve of his white shirt. His eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark.
"Now then. How have you been these past months?"
"Rhetorical."
Dragon laughed his three dry, precise ha's. "True enough. We have been keeping a protective eye on you. I am informed that there is a painting on the black market that has taken your fancy."
"Yes. A Pissarro."
"And so you need money. Ten thousand dollars, if I am not misinformed. A bit dear for personal titillation."
"The painting is priceless."
"Nothing is priceless, Hemlock. The price of this painting will be the life of a man in Montreal. I have never understood your fascination with canvas and crusted pigment. You must instruct me one day."
"It's not a thing you can learn."
"Either you have it or you haven't, eh?"
"You either got it or you ain't."
Dragon sighed. "I guess one has to be born to the idiom." No accent, only a certain exactitude of diction betrayed Dragon's foreign birth. "Still, I must not deride your passion for collecting paintings. Without it, you would need money less often, and we would be deprived of your services." Very slowly, like a photograph in the bottom of a developing tray, the image of Mr. Dragon began to emerge through the dark as Jonathan's eyes dilated. He anticipated the revulsion he would experience.
"Don't let me waste too much of your time, Mr. Dragon."
"Meaning: let's get to the matter at hand." There was disappointment in Dragon's voice. He had taken a perverse liking to Jonathan and would have enjoyed chatting with someone from outside the closed world of international assassination. "Very well, then. One of our men—code call: Wormwood—was killed in Montreal. There were two assailants. Search Division has located one of them. You will sanction this man."
Jonathan smiled at the cryptic jargon of CII, in which "demote maximally" meant purge by killing, "biographic leverage" meant blackmail, "wet work" meant killing, and "sanction" meant counter-assassination. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and Dragon's face become dimly visible. The hair was white as silk thread, and kinky, like a sheep's. The features, floating in the retreating gloom, were arid alabaster. Dragon was one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena: a total albino. This accounted for his sensitivity to light; his eyes and eyelids lacked protective pigment. He had also been born without the ability to produce white corpuscles in sufficient quantity. As a result, he had to be insulated from contact with people who might carry disease. It was also necessary that his blood be totally replaced by massive transfusions each six months. For the half century of his life, Dragon had lived in the dark, without people, and on the blood of others. This existence had not failed to affect his personality.
Jonathan looked at the face, awaiting the emergence of the most disgusting feature. "You say Search has located only one of the targets?"
"They are working on the second one. It is my hope that they will have identified him by the time you arrive in Montreal."
"I won't take them both. You know that." Jonathan had made a moral bargain with himself to work for CII only when it was fiscally necessary. He had to be on his guard against sanction assignments being forced on him at other times.
"It may be necessary that you take both assignments, Hemlock."
"Forget it." Jonathan felt his hands grip the arms of his chair. Dragon's eyes were becoming visible. Totally without coloration, they were rabbit pink in the iris and blood red in the pupil. Jonathan glanced away in involuntary disgust.
Dragon was hurt. "Well, well, we shall talk about the second sanction when the time comes."
Dragon smiled thinly. "People seldom come to me with good news."
"This sanction is going to cost you twenty thousand."
"Twice your usual fee? Really, Hemlock!"
"I need ten thousand for the Pissarro. And ten for my house."
"I am not interested in your domestic economy. You need twenty thousand dollars. We normally pay ten thousand for a sanction. There are two sanctions involved here. It seems to work out well."
"I told you I don't intend to do both jobs. I want twenty thousand for one."
"And I am telling you that twenty thousand is more than the job is worth."
"Send someone else then!" For an instant, Jonathan's voice lost its flat calm.
Dragon was instantly uneasy. Sanction personnel were particularly prone to emotional pressures from their work and dangers, and he was always alert for signs of what he called "tension rot." In the past year, there had been some indications in Jonathan. "Be reasonable, Hemlock. We have no one else available just now. There has been some... attrition... in the Division."
Jonathan smiled. "I see." After a short silence, "But if you have no one else, you really have no choice. Twenty thousand."
"You are completely without conscience, Hemlock."
"But then, we always knew that." He was alluding to the results of psychological tests taken while serving with Army Intelligence during the Korean War. After re-testing to confirm the unique pattern of response, the chief army psychologist had summarized his findings in singularly unscientific prose:
...Considering that his childhood was marked by extreme poverty and violence (three juvenile convictions for assault, each precipitated by his being tormented by other youngsters who resented his extraordinary intelligence and the praise it received from his teachers), and considering the humiliations he underwent at the hands of indifferent relatives after the death of his mother (there is no father of record), certain of his antisocial, antagonistic, annoyingly superior behaviors are understandable, even predictable.
One pattern stands out saliently. The subject has extremely rigid views on the subject of friendship. There is, for him, no greater morality than loyalty, no greater sin than disloyalty. No punishment would be adequate to the task of repaying the person who took advantage of his friendship. And he holds that others are equally bound to his personal code. An educated guess would suggest that his pattern emerges as an overcompensation for feelings of having been abandoned by his parents.
There is a personality warp, unique to my experience and to that of my associates, that impels us to caution those responsible for the subject. The man lacks normal guilt feelings. He is totally without the nerve of conscience. We have failed to discover any vestige of negative response to sin, crime, sex, or violence. This is not to imply that he is unstable. On the contrary he is, if anything, too stable—too controlled. Abnormally so.
Perhaps he will be viewed as ideal for the purposes of Army Intelligence, but I must report that the subject is, in my view, a personality somehow incomplete. And socially very dangerous.
"So you refuse to take the two sanctions, Hemlock, and you insist on twenty thousand for just one."
"Correct."
For a moment the pink-and-red eyes rested thoughtfully on Jonathan as Dragon rolled a pencil between his palms. Then he laughed his three dry, precise ha's. "All right. You win for now."
Jonathan rose. "I assume I make contact with Search in Montreal?"
"Yes. Search Section Mapleleaf is headed by a Miss Felicity Arce—I assume that is how it is pronounced. She will give you all instructions."
Jonathan slipped on his coat.
"About this second assassin, Hemlock. When Search has located him—"
"I won't need money for another six months."
"But what if we should need you?"
Jonathan did not answer. He opened the door to the interlock, and Dragon winced at the dim red light.
Blinking back the brilliance of the outer office, Jonathan asked Mrs. Cerberus for the address of Search Section Mapleleaf.
"Here." She thrust a small white card before Ms eyes and gave him only five seconds to memorize it before replacing it in her file. "Your contact will be Miss Felicity Arce."
"So that really is how it's pronounced. My, my."
LONG ISLAND: June 2
Now on CII expense account, Jonathan took a cab all the way from Dragon's office to his home on the north shore of Long Island.
A sense of peace and protection descended on him as he closed behind him the heavy oaken door to the vestibule, which he had left unaltered when he converted the church into a dwelling. He passed up through a winding, Gothic-arched stair to the choir loft, now partitioned into a vast bedroom overlooking the body of the house, and a bathroom twenty feet square, in the center of which was a deep Roman pool he used as a bath. While four faucets roared hot water into the pool, filling the room with steam, he undressed, carefully brushed and folded his clothes, and packed his suitcase for Montreal. Then he lowered himself gingerly into the very hot water. He floated about, never allowing himself to think about Montreal. He was without conscience, but he was not without fear. These sanction assignments were accomplished, as difficult mountain climbs once had been, on the high-honed edge of nerve. The luxury of this Roman bath—which had absorbed the profits from a sanction—was more than a sybaritic reaction to the privations of his childhood, it was a necessary adjunct to his uncommon trade.
Dressed in a Japanese robe, he descended from the choir loft and entered through heavy double doors the body of his house. The church had been laid out in classic cruciform, and he had left all the nave as open living space. One arm of the transept had been converted to a greenhouse garden, its stained glass replaced by clear, and a stone pool with a fountain set in the midst of tropical foliage. The other arm of the cross was lined with bookshelves and did service as a library.
He padded barefoot through the stone-floored, high-vaulted nave. The light from clerestories above was adequate to his taste for dun cool interiors and vast unseen space. At night, a switch could be thrown to illuminate the stained glass from without, sketching collages of color on the walls. He was particularly fond of the effect when it rained and the colored light danced and rippled along the walls.
He opened the gate and mounted two steps to his bar, where he made himself a martini and sipped with relish as he rested his elbows back on the bar and surveyed his house with contented pride.
After a time, he had an urge to be with his paintings, so he descended a curving stone stairwell to the basement chamber where he kept them. He had labored evenings for half a year putting in the floor and walling the room with panels from a Renaissance Italian palace that had served interim duty in the grand hall of an oil baron's North Shore mansion. He locked the door behind him and turned on the lights. Along the walls leaped out the color of Monet, Cezanne, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Renoir, and Cassatt. He moved around the room slowly, greeting each of his beloved Impressionists, loving each for its particular charm and power, and remembering in each instance the difficulty—often danger—he had encountered in acquiring it.
The room contained little furniture for its size: a comfortable divan of no period, a leather pouf with strap handles so he could drag it along to sit before one picture or another, an open Franklin stove with a supply of dry cedar logs in an Italian chest beside it, and a Bartolomeo Cristofore pianoforte which he played with great precision, if little soul. On the floor was a 1914 Kashan—the only truly perfect oriental. And in a corner, not far from the Franklin stove, was a small desk where he did most of his work. Above the desk and oddly out of keeping with the decor were a dozen photographs attached haphazardly to the wall. They were candid shots of mountain episodes capturing climbers with awkward or boyishly clowning expressions—brave men who could not face a lens without embarrassment which they hid by ludicrous antics. Most of the photographs were of Jonathan and his lifelong climbing companion, Big Ben Bowman, who, before his accident, had bagged most of the major peaks of the world with characteristic lack of finesse. Ben simply battered them down with brute strength and unconquerable will. They had made an odd but effective team: Jonathan the wily tactician, and Big Ben the mountain-busting animal.
Only one of the photographs was of a lowland man. In memory of his sole friendship with a member of the international espionage clique, Jonathan kept a photo in which the late Henri Baq grinned wryly at the camera. Henri Baq, whose death Jonathan would one day avenge.
He sat at his desk and finished the martini. Then he took a small packet from the drawer and filled the bowl of an ornate hookah which he set up on the rug before his Cassatt. He hunched on the leather pouf and smoked, stroking the surface of the canvas with liberated eyes. Then, from nowhere, as it did from time to time, the thought strayed into his mind that he owed his whole style of life—academics, art, his house—to poor Miss Ophel.
Poor Miss Ophel. Sere, fluttering, fragile spinster. Miss Ophel of the sandpaper crotch. He had always thought of her that way, although he had had the good sense to play it shy and grateful when she had visited him in the juvenile home. Miss Ophel lived alone in a monument to Victorian poor taste on the outskirts of Albany. She was the last of the family that had founded its fortune on fertilizer brought down the Erie Canal. But there would be no more Ophels. Such modest maternity as she possessed was squandered on cats and birds and puppies with saccharine nicknames. One day it occurred to her that social work might be diverting—as well as being useful. But she lacked the temperament for visiting slums that stank of urine and for patting children's heads that well might have had nits, so she asked her lawyer to keep an eye out for a needy case that had some refinement about it. And the lawyer found Jonathan.
Jonathan was in a detention home at the time, paying for attempting to decrease the surplus population of North Pearl Street by two bantering Irish boys who had assumed that, because Jonathan astounded the teachers of P.S. 5 with his knowledge and celerity of mind, he must be a queer. Jonathan was the smaller boy, but he struck while the others were still saying "Oh, yeah?" and he had not overlooked the ballistic advantage of an eighteen-inch lead pipe he had spied lying in the alley. Bystanders had intervened and saved the Irish boys to banter again, but they would never be handsome men.
When Miss Ophel visited Jonathan she found him to be mild and polite, well informed, and oddly attractive with his gentle eyes and delicate face, and definitely worthy. And when she discovered that he was as homeless as her puppies and birds, the thing was settled. Just after his fourteenth birthday, Jonathan took up residence in the Ophel home and, after a series of intelligence and aptitude tests, he faced a parade of tutors who groomed him for university.
Each summer, to broaden his education, she took him to Europe where he discovered a natural aptitude for languages and, most importantly to him, a love for the Alps and for climbing. On the evening of his sixteenth birthday there was a little party, just the two of them and champagne and petits fours. Miss Ophel got a little tipsy, and a little tearful over her empty life, and very affectionate toward Jonathan. She hugged him and kissed him with her dusty lips. Then she hugged him
tighter.
By the next morning, she had made up a cute little nickname for it, and almost every evening thereafter she would coyly ask him to do it to her.
The next year, after a battery of tests, Jonathan entered Harvard at the age of seventeen. Shortly before his graduation at nineteen, Miss Ophel died peacefully in her sleep. On the surprisingly small residue of her estate, Jonathan continued his education and took occasional summer trips to Switzerland, where he began to establish his reputation as a climber.
He had taken his undergraduate degree in comparative linguistics cashing in on his logical bent and native gift for language. He might have gone on in that field, but for one of those coincidences that form our lives in spite of our plans.
As a caprice, he took a summer job assisting a professor of Art in the cataloging of artistic orts left over from the confiscation of Nazi troves after the war. The gratin of these re-thefts had gone to an American newspaper baron, and the leavings had been given to the university as a sop to the national conscience—a healthy organ that had recently rebounded from the rape of Hiroshima with no apparent damage.
In the course of the cataloging, Jonathan listed one small oil as "unknown," although the packing slip had assigned it to a minor Italian Renaissance painter. The professor had chided him for the mistake, but Jonathan said it was no error.
"How can you be so sure?" the professor asked, amused.
Jonathan was surprised at the question. He was young and still assumed that teachers knew their fields. "Well, it's obvious. We saw a painting by the same man last week. And this was not painted by the same hand. Just look at it."
The professor was uncomfortable. "How do you know that?"
"Just look at it! Of course, it's possible that the other one was mislabeled. I have no way to know."
An investigation was undertaken, and it developed that Jonathan was correct. One of the paintings had been done by a student of the minor master. The fact had been recorded and had been general knowledge for three hundred years, but it had slipped through the sieve of Art History's memory.
