The Loo Sanction
Authors: Trevanian
St. Martin's-In-The-Fields
H
is pain was vast. But at least it was finite. Sharp-edged waves of agony climaxed in intensity until his body convulsed and his mind was awash. Then, just before madness, the crests broke and swirled over his limen of consciousness, and he escaped into oblivion.
But always he emerged again from the delirium, cold and perspiring, weaker than before, and more frightened.
A crisp wind fluted through the arches of the belfry in which he was prisoner and drove his tears horizontally back to his temples. During troughs of awareness between crises of pain, his mind cleared, and he was bewildered by his reactions to impending death. Matthew Parnell-Greene (“Uranus” in the planet-code of the counterespionage agency that employed him) had always known that violent death was a very real alternative to retirement in his line of work. He was not physically braveâhis imagination was too active for thatâso he had sought to mute his fear by callusing that imagination. He had forced himself to rehearse being shot, being knifed, taking a faceful of cyanide gas from a tube concealed in a folded newspaper, being poisonedâhis urbane flair always insisting upon the poison being in exotic foods consumed at really good restaurants. And he had attempted to toughen his tender imagination by abrading it with anticipations of the more disgusting alternatives. He had been drowned in a bathtub; he had been suffocated, his face blue and his eyes bulging within a polyethylene bag; air had been injected into his heart. Always he had died well, with a certain dignity, not struggling dumbly against impossible odds. He had imagined pain, but the end had always come quickly. He had long ago realized that he could not withstand torture and had decided he would cooperate fully with his questioners, should it come to that.
Fear, pain, anger, even self-pity had been anticipated so often that they held no more dread than he could stand. But his anxious fantasies had not prepared him for the emotion that now overwhelmed his mind: disgust. Disgust was bitter in the back of his throat. Disgust curled the corners of his mouth and dilated his nostrils. When they found him, he would be unsightly, revolting. The thought of it embarrassed him intensely.
In the two hours since a watery dawn had made London visible below him, Parnell-Greene's eyes had dimmed many times, with each fresh crisis of pain that carried him over the brink of unconsciousness as some membrane inside him ripped through, sending waves of shock through his body.
How long had he been there? Six hours? Half his life? His existence seemed divided into two parts, one containing forty-seven active, colorful years; the other, six hours of pain. And it was the second half that really mattered.
He remembered them bringing him to St. Martin's. Although he had been heavily drugged, it was all perfectly lucid. The drugs had been pleasant, euphoric; they had sapped his will, but he remembered everything. Two of them had brought him. They had stood on either side of him because he was unsteady on his feet. He had sat for a time with one of themâThe Muteâin a back pew, while the other went up to the belfry to see that the apparatus was in place. He remembered the oaken contribution box with its notice:
C
ONTRIBUTIONS TO KEEP
THIS CHURCH ALWAYS OPEN
AND TO MAINTAIN ITS SERVICES
They had led him up the winding metal staircase and out onto the dark windy platform of the belfry. And then they had . . . and then they . . . Parnell-Greene wept at the sadness of it.
He sobbed, and that was a mistake. The convulsion ruptured something inside, pain clawed through his body and throbbed in his head. He fainted.
The streets below the church streamed with people. Hundreds gushed up Villiers Street and poured from Charing Cross Station, all hurrying toward work or standing with turgid obedience in queues, waiting to crowd into red double-decker buses, bodies touching, eyes assiduously averted. Escalators spewed anonymities from the Undergrounds: young office men, bareheaded and red-eyed; cloth-capped laborers, sullen and stunned with lives of monotony; shopgirls and secretaries, miniskirted despite the season, their hands, faces, and legs ruddy and chapped; older women on the prowl for bargains, waddling through the press, heavy objects in their dangling string bags a threat to passing shins.
Any one of them might have seen Parnell-Greene's huddled silhouette in the arch of the belfry, but no one looked up. In the automaton way of British workers, their chins were sunk in their collars, their minds involute.
Perspiration was cold on his forehead when he returned to consciousness. He breathed carefully, his mouth wide open so as not to make a movement. At last, his tightly bound arms were numb, and that was a blessing. For the first hour or so, the loss of circulation had caused a regular dull ache that was somehow more wearing than the irregular ecstasies of agony when something tore within him.
He did not shout for help. He had tried that at first, but no one could hear his feeble voice from the height of the belfry, and each attempt had been rewarded with a bursting sac of liquid pain.
Slowly, the numbing of his overloaded nerves came into balance with this new level of agony, and neutralized it. He knew that more exquisite levels of pain would come, but it was no longer an animate enemy he might get by the throat and crush, and crush! His pain and his life had welded into one. They would always be together now. When there was no longer pain, there would no longer be life.
He felt very cold, and very sad.
He looked out, across the river, over the bulk of the Charing Cross Hotel. There were the elements of new London. The in-articulate, utilitarian bulk of the Royal Festival Hall. The addled architecture of Queen Elizabeth Hall, a compromise between a penal institution and a space station. New London. Economical and unmerciful architecture. And beyond, cubes of aluminum and glass persuaded the skyline of London to imitate Chicago. Some of the bloodless hulks stood unfinished, victims of continual strikes. Above these ugly heaps, giant construction cranes lurked, dinosaur skeletons poised to feed on huge blocks of salt.
Distressed, he turned his eyes away. So much of it was going! Even the facades temporarily spared from Progress were masked by scaffolding and canvas as they were being steamed and scrubbed to rid them of the character of patina.
It was all going.
He felt liquid dripping down his legs. And not only blood, he realized with despair. Revolting. Disgusting.
A bit of sun broke through the low layers of zinc cloud. He began to feel warm. Light. As though he were floating. It would be good to be weightless. Merciful numbness began to spread upward. His throat thickened. He was so tired.
The whir and clatter of machinery tugged him back to consciousness. The clapper of the great bell was grinding back against its spring, and it hovered for a second before it shot forward. The belfry roared and vibrated! The apparatus shook violently. The pain was pyrotechnic as everything within him burst!
Now Parnell-Greene screamed.
Unheard.
        Â
That evening the facts were carried by the London newspapers, each reflecting the taste of its readership:
MAN IMPALED IN ST. MARTIN'S-IN-THE-FIELDS
OPPOSITION QUESTIONS SECURITY OF NATIONAL BELFRIES
BELL RINGER INVESTIGATES THUD!
EARLY CHURCHGOER GETS THE POINT!
BBC 2 interrupted its yearlong series on the development of the viola da gamba for a special broadcast in which three university dons outlined the uses of torture in general and impalement in particular in the Western world. Then a panel of experts discussed the implications of this latest impalement on the eve of Britain's entry into the Common Market. Finally, a woman Labour MP made the point that this literal impalement had shocked and sickened the nation, while it remained perfectly indifferent to the figurative impalement of womanhood on the phallus of male chauvinism over the years, which, after all, was . . .
Bloomsbury
“
Y
ou!” the singer accused, pointing over the heads of the crowd with an arched forefinger, the other fist on his hip, his eyes wild and round in their pits of green mascara, his gold-tinsel wig glittering under the spotlight. “You! . . .
. . . you're driving me crazy.
What can I do? What can I do?
My love for you makes everything hazy . . .”
*
1
His thin metallic alto blended with the muted instruments as his stiff torso dipped in tempo to the song, his knees flexing mechanically. He stood on a raised platform, and his eyebrowless, clown-white face bobbed rhythmically over the heads of the chit-chatting crowd. The showrooms of Tomlinson's Galleries buzzed with conversation: intimate talk, meaningful and intense; significant talk about art and life; witty talk designed to be overheard and repeated.
“. . . so I simply put myself into his hands. He designs all my clothes and even selects the shirts and ties. In effect, he does me as he sees me. . . .”
“. . . for God's sake, Midge, he's not only your husband, he's my friend. Do you think
I
want to hurt him? . . .”
“. . . it would be a challenge to paint you. I would like to try and capture yourâahâdepth and to express it inâwell, franklyâin sexual terms. . . .”
“. . . well, if you ask me, it was a blatant act of defianceâa challenge to the police. To impale a man on a wooden stake right in the belfry of St. Martin's-In-The-Fields! Have you had your martini, love?”
The minute Jonathan Hemlock stepped into the crowded reception room, he was sorry he had come. He looked over heads, but he didn't find the woman he was supposed to meet, so he began slowly to ease toward the door, juggling his glass adroitly and nodding to the empty-eyed models who hung impatiently on the arms of older men, and who smiled at him as he passed. But just as he made the door, David Tomlinson caught him by the arm, directed him to the center of the room, and jumped up on a pouf.
“Listen, everybody! Everybody?” (Silence rippled reluctantly from the center outward.) “I have the very great honor to introduce you to Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, who's come all the way from America to set us all straight on art and all that.” (Titters and one “hear-hear.”) “All sorts of people have consorted to get him over here: the Guggenheim, the Arts Councilâall that benevolent lot. And we must make good use of him. No comments from you, Andrew!” (Titters.) “Now, you'll all have to watch yourselves because Dr. Hemlock actually
knows
something about art.” (Groans and one giggle.) “I'm sure you've all read his books, and now he's here in the flesh, as it were. And remember this! You saw him first at Tomlinson's.” (Laughter and light applause.)
Tomlinson stepped down from the pouf and spoke with such sincerity that he appeared to be in pain. “I am truly delighted that Van was able to persuade you to come. You've
made
the evening. May I call you Jonathan?”
“No. Look, you haven't seen Van, have you?”
“In point of fact, I haven't.”
Jonathan grunted and slipped away to the bar, where he ordered a double Laphroaig. He didn't notice fforbes-Ffitch's approach in time to avoid it.
“Heard you were going to be here, Jon. Thought I'd drop around for the event.” fforbes-Ffitch spoke with the crisp, busier-than-thou accents of the academic hustler. He had taken his doctorate in the United States, where apparently he had majored in grantsmanship, which training he applied with such industry that he became the youngest head of department at the Royal College of Art and had recently been made a trustee of the National Gallery.
“Say, Jon. Tell me, did you receive my memo?”
Jonathan never used fforbes-Ffitch's first name. He didn't even know what it was. “What memo?”
fforbes-Ffitch preened his drooping moustache by pressing it down with his thumb and cleared his throat to speak importantly. “That one about your doing a lecture series for us in Scandinavia.”
Jonathan had received it weeks before and had dismissed it as an attempt by f-F to brighten his reputation as a man who knows important people and gets things done. “No, I never received it.”
“How does the idea sound to you?”
“Terrible.”
“Oh? Oh? I see. Well, that is too bad. Ahâquite a gathering here this evening, don't you think?”
“No.”
“Well, yes. I agree with you. Not real scholars, of course. But . . . important people. Well! I have to be going. Desk piled with work crying out to be done.”
“You'd better get to it.”
“Right. Cheers.”
Jonathan felt great social fatigue as he watched f-F depart through the crowd, shaking hands with all the “names,” studiously ignoring the others. No doubting it, f-F was a man on his way to a knighthood.
Jonathan had just finished his whiskey and was ready to get out when Vanessa Dyke appeared at his side.
“Having fun, love?” she asked evilly.
He smiled blandly out onto the throng and spoke to her out of the side of his mouth. “Where have you been? You told me it wouldn't be another of these.”
She waved at someone across the room. “The truth is, I lied. Simple as that.”
“One of these days, Van . . .”
“I look forward to it.” She tapped out a Gauloise on her thumbnail and lit it, cupping the match like a sailor on a windy deck, then she squinted through the curling acrid smoke to find a handy ashtray, failing which, she tossed the match onto the thick carpeting. One fist on her hip, she looked disdainfully over the party, the pungent French cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, the hard, intelligent eyes examining and dismissing the guests. An expatriate American, Vanessa wrote the leanest, most penetrating art criticism current in England under the name Van Dyke, which the uninitiated took to be an alias. Jonathan had known her for years and had always admired and liked her, even during the flamboyant stage of her life when she had turned up at parties with a young whore on either arm, flaunting her homosexuality with defensive vigor. They disagreed totally about art, and had great battles in private, but should someone less informed join in, they united to destroy him.
Jonathan looked at her profile and noticed with surprise that age was making rapid inroads on her. Still thin as a reed under the black slacks and turtlenecked sweater that were her trademark, she had short tousled hair shot with gray, and the alert, nervous movements of her expressive hands revealed nails bitten to the quick.
“Have you met the Struggling Young Person?” she asked, leaning against the bar with her elbows and surveying the gathering without sympathy.
“No. Why did you ask me to come here?”
Vanessa avoided the question. “Have you seen his shit?”
“I glanced around when I came in.”
“That's him over there.” She gestured with her pointed chin.
Jonathan looked through the milling bodies to a dour young man with a shaggy beard and a corduroy hunting jacket, flaunting his nonclass by drinking beer. He was surrounded by people so eager to be seen in his company that they were willing to pay the price of listening to him. Hovering in the background was a sere, uncertain girl in a long dress of madras, her nose sharp between falls of long oily hair. She had the intense look of a graduate student's wife concerned with social injustice, and Jonathan took her to be the painter's mistress.
Christ, they all look alike!
Knowing that the tenor of his thoughts would be identical to her own, Vanessa shrugged, saying, “Well, at least he's fairly unassuming.”
Jonathan looked again over the modern daubs on the carpeted walls. “What are his options?”
A couple were pushing their way through the crowd toward Jonathan. “Oh, Christ,” he said from between teeth clenched in a smile.
“Come on,” Vanessa said, drawing her arm through his and guiding him away, leaning against him in a masque of romantic conversation. But as they turned the first corner they ran smack into a conversational group of three that blocked their passage.
“Van, you harlot!” greeted a young man in a pale blue suede jacket with metal-tipped fringe. “You've just taken our much-touted art expert here all for yourself and you're gobbling him all up!” He looked at Jonathan, his eyebrows arched in anticipation of an introduction.
Vanessa ignored him, turning to a middle-aged man wearing heavy clothes and an open, eager expression that had a canine flavor. “Sir Wilfred Pyles, Jonathan Hemlock. I believe your commission had something to do with getting him here.”
“Good to see you here, Jon.”
“You mean at this party, Fred?”
“Well, no. I meant in the country, actually.”
“Ah-ha!” Vanessa said. “I had no idea you two knew one another.”
“Yes indeed,” Sir Wilfred explained. “I've been an admirer of Jon's for years. But not as an art critic. I'm afraid I'm only one of those chaps who know what they like. No, my acquaintance with Jonathan Hemlock was under rather a different heading. I used to be an enthusiastic amateur mountaineer, don't you know. Just puffing about and hill bashing, really. But I read all the journals and became familiar with this fellow's exploits. And, when I had a chance to meet him, I grabbed it. That wasâhow long ago was it, Jon?”
Jonathan smiled, uncomfortable as he always was when talking about climbing. “I haven't climbed for years.”
“Well, I shouldn't wonder. I meanâthat must have been a nasty business on the Eiger. Three men, was it?”
Jonathan cleared his throat. “I don't climb seriously anymore.”
“Not only that,” Vanessa said, squeezing his arm, realizing that he wanted to change the subject, “he's given up serious criticism as well. Or haven't you read his latest bag of garbage?” She turned to the crisp, beautiful woman of uncertain years who stood beside Sir Wilfred. “And you are . . . ?”
“Oh, yes. Sorry,” Sir Wilfred said. “Mrs. Amelia Farquahar. A friend of mine, actually.”
“No one's introduced me yet,” the suede jacket said.
Vanessa patted his cheek. “That's because no one's noticed you yet, darling boy.”
“Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that.” But his peeve lasted only a second. “Actually, we were having a lively conversation when you broke in. Lively and a little naughty.”
“Oh?” Vanessa asked Mrs. Farquahar.
“Yes. We were, in fact, discussing the myth of vaginal climax.” Mrs. Farquahar turned to Jonathan. “What are your opinions on that, Dr. Hemlock?”
“As an art critic?”
“As a mountain climber, if you'd rather.”
Sir Wilfred grunted. “All part of women's liberation, I shouldn't wonder. I hear you've been having quite a lot of that in your country.”
“Mostly among the losers,” Jonathan said, smiling.
Vanessa smiled back. “You turd.”
“And you, Miss Dyke?” Mrs. Farquahar asked. “Do you have an opinion on that?”
Vanessa dropped her cigarette butt in suede jacket's wineglass. “I don't think it's a myth at all. The misconception is that it takes a penis to achieve it.”
“How interesting,” said Mrs. Farquahar.
“I say!” injected suede jacket, feeling somehow he had been left out of the conversation. “Did you read about that man found impaled in St. Martin's-In-The-Fields?”
“Oh, ghastly business,” Sir Wilfred said.
“Oh, I don't know. If you have to go . . .” He wriggled a shoulder and took a sip of wine.
While he was coping with the mouthful of tobacco, Vanessa said to Mrs. Farquahar, “Come, let me introduce you to the young man who has drawn this sparkling company together.”
“Yes. I'd like that.”
They pushed off through the crowd, Vanessa leading the way and prowing through the congested sea of people. Suede jacket stood on tiptoe and waved extravagantly to someone who had just entered, then struggled off after a word of apology.
Jonathan and Sir Wilfred stood side by side against the wall. “What's all this about climbing, Fred?” Jonathan asked without looking at him. “You get a nosebleed from standing on a thick carpet.”
“Just the first thing that came to my mind, Jon.” The flappy tones of the bungling British civil servant dropped away from his speech.
“I see. Are you still in the Service?”
“No, no. I've been on the shelf for several years now. The extent of my counterespionage activities now is trying to find out how much my chauffeur tells my wife.”
“When I saw your name on my appointment to come over here, I assumed MIâ5 had found you an elastic cover.”
“I'm afraid not. I am well and truly out to pasture. The electronic age has caught up with me. One has to be a damned engineer these days to stay in the game. No, I serve my country by chairing committees devoted to the task of bringing cultural enrichment to our shores. You constitute a cultural enrichment.” He laughed. “Who would have thought in the old days when we were flogging about Europe, now on the same team, now in opposition, that we would be brought so low.”
“You
do
know that I'm out of it totally now?” Jonathan wanted to be sure.
“Oh, certainly. First thing I checked upon when your name came up. The chaps at the old office said you wereâto use their uncomplimentary complimentâpolitically subpotent. By which I take it that you and CII have parted company.”
“That we have. By the way, congratulations on your knighthood.”
“Not so much of an achievement as you might imagine. These days few people escape that distinction. When you leave the Service they automatically lumber you with a K.B.E. They've found it's cheaper than a gold watch, I suspect. Ah, the ladies return.”
As she approached, Vanessa said to Jonathan, “I didn't lure you here just to punish you with my acquaintances. There's something I want to show you.” She turned to Mrs. Farquahar. “Jon and I have to run off for a moment.”