The Loo Sanction (8 page)

“But . . . cinema? You're in painting, aren't you?”

“I'm in just about everything. And, despite Godard, cinema is still essentially a visual art. Do you have a car here?”

“Why, yes.” fforbes-Ffitch was surprised and pleased. “Could I run you over to the college?”

“If you would.” f-F's lickspittle conversation would be fair pay for the cover of traveling with him, in case Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head should be hanging about outside the post office bulk of the Embassy.

         

“. . . which rhythms are established by cutting rate and cutting tone. While the intensity of the visual beat is a function of what Whitaker, in his lean description of film linguistics, has called ‘cutting volume.' Does that answer your question?”

Jonathan scanned the packed audience for a glimpse of Maggie while he responded automatically to the questions. The hall was filled, and a few people were standing at the back of the house. Because of the overcrowding, a policeman was present. In his tall hat and stiff uniform, he was in sharp contrast to the earthy-arty appearance of the audience.

Someone with a thin nasal voice in the back of the hall was proposing a question when Jonathan caught sight of Maggie against the back wall. She stood under one of the conical light fixtures set in the ceiling of the overhanging balcony, and the soft narrow beam isolated her from the mass and mixed with the amber of her soft hair. He was pleased she was there.

“. . . and therefore ineluctably interrelated with it?”

He had not caught the whole of the question, but he recognized the style of inquiry: another involute question asked by a bright young person, not to learn, but to demonstrate the level of his recent reading.

Jonathan faked his way out. “That's a sinewy and complicated question with ramifications that would take more time than we have to explore adequately. Suppose you break off the fragment that most puzzles you and phrase that concisely.”

The thin voice hemmed and hawed, then restated his question in full, adding additional fragments of erudition that occurred to him.

But Jonathan's attention was even slighter than it had been before. At the back of the hall, leaning against the wall, was Bullet Head. Jonathan scanned around. Aloha Shirt was making his way down the right aisle. Jonathan looked for Maggie. She still stood in her beam of light, evidently unaware of them.

A pause and a cough. The question had been posed, and they awaited an answer. A couple of remembered key words in the question gave Jonathan adequate cue to form an answer: “That shifts us from the discussion of film qua film to a look at the state of film study and criticism in the world. But I'm willing to make the shift if you are. In broad, it is safe to say that current film study and criticism are both a chaos and a desert. First, we must acknowledge that, with the exception of Mitry and perhaps Bazin, there are no film critics of substance.”

Where the hell was that bobby?

“All we really have are reviewers on varying altitudes of diction. The French school—if one can call that colloidal suspension of spatting personalities a school—works from the principle that cinema is a Gallic invention, the subtleties of which can never properly be mastered by peoples of less fortunate nativity.”

Bullet Head was making his way down the left aisle. Maggie still stood alone in the cone of light.

“Their most insidious export since the French pox has been their capricious insistence that American cinema is greatest at its most common denominator. They have seduced spineless American and British scholars into giving the benediction of serious study to such thin beer as the films of Capra, Hawks, and Jerry Lewis.”

The young driver of the Bentley was moving across the back of the hall toward Maggie! Where in hell was that policeman?

“The situation is no healthier in the United States, where the ranking reviewers operate as petulant social starlets. Snide infighting, phrasemaking, and pantheon building are the symptoms of their critical affliction. Then, of course, you have the Village Blat types pandering to their young readers' assumption that befuddlement is Obscurantism and that technical incompetence denotes social concern. But the greatest burden to American film criticism is that it is resident in the universities and therefore blighted by the do-nots.”

Aloha Shirt stood at the foot of the stage steps on one side, Bullet Head on the other. The young driver had slipped to Maggie's side.

“The East Coast universities devote their attention to obscure films, sequences, and filmmakers that require the beacon of critical analysis to rescue them from the limbo of deserved obscurity. This symbiotic affair between filmmaker and critic has entangled them in studies of Vertov and Antonioni that delight small coteries of wide-eyed apostles, but contribute nothing to the mainstream of cinema. The West Coast schools are little better. All hardware and hustle, they produce students in whom the technical proficiency of Greenwich Village is blended with the sensitivity of ‘I Love Lucy.'”

The driver leaned over and said something to Maggie. She looked at Jonathan, her eyes wide. He shook his head in answer. The driver took her arm and guided her out the back door. Where the fuck was that bobby?

“And in the center of the continent, insulated by landmass and disposition from contradictory thought, is what might be called the Chicago School of Criticism. Here we find bitter, envious young men who, lacking the spark of creativity, attempt to deny its existence in others by focusing their attention on filmic
genres
. As though films made themselves, and the men who direct them are no more artists than are they, the leveling critics.”

A question came from the hall. Jonathan glanced into the wings and was relieved to see the dependable bulk of the policeman, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the lights in the grid, stoic and bored. A rock in the storm.

“As a guest in your country, I should say nothing about the state of British film study other than it's well financed and the government seems particularly patient with the several institutions who have been sorting themselves out for years now. I feel sure they will get around to making a contribution to film study by the end of the century.”

Ignoring the applause, Jonathan made quickly for the wings, where he addressed the police officer, who appeared to be surprised at being approached by him. “There are three men out there, Officer.”

“Is that a fact, sir?”

“They've got a girl with them.”

“Have they, sir?”

“I haven't time to explain. Come with me.”

“Right you go, sir.”

A quick glance over his shoulder told Jonathan that Aloha Shirt and Bullet Head had not come onto the stage. The bobby following along, he pushed through the exit doors from the wings and ran down a deserted outer corridor. Echoing footfalls advanced toward them from around the far corner. Jonathan stopped, the policeman beside him. The footsteps continued to near. Then the four of them came around the corner, Bullet Head and Aloha Shirt in front, the driver with Maggie behind. They stopped at their end of the hall.

Jonathan and the bobby walked slowly toward them. “Let her go,” Jonathan said, his voice unexpectedly loud in the empty corridor.

The policeman spoke. “Is this the man, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Jonathan and Aloha Shirt had spoken at the same time.

“Right you are, then!” The big bobby took Jonathan by the arm with a grip like metal.

“What the hell is going on?” Jonathan protested.

“Our car is just outside, officer,” Aloha Shirt said. “Bring him along, won't you?”

“Come on now, sir.” The Officer spoke with condescending paternalism. “Let's not have any trouble.”

Bullet Head closed the distance between them with a menacing swagger. “Maybe
I
should take him. He wouldn't give me no trouble.” He brought his porcine face close to Jonathan's. “
Would
you, mate?”

Jonathan looked past the ape to Aloha Shirt, who seemed to be in charge. “The girl isn't in this thing.”

“Isn't she?”

“Let her go.”

“Can it, buddy,” Aloha Shirt said. The sound was odd: American words with a British accent.

“If you let her go, I'll come with you without trouble.”

Bullet Head sucked his teeth and thrust out his head. “You're coming along with us no matter what, mate.”

Jonathan smiled at him. “You'd love me to make a run for it, wouldn't you?”

“You got it right there, chum. I'm sick of chasing your arse around London.”

“But you're not carrying a gun. Fat though you are, I can see you're not carrying a gun.”

“Here, none of that,” the policeman warned.

“I got
these
,
mate.” Bullet Head held out his hands, blunt and vast.

Jonathan turned to the bobby. “Officer?”

The policeman's politeness was automatic. “Sir?”

That was it! At that instant Jonathan had it!

For a fraction of a second everything was right—the position of Jonathan's body relative to Bullet Head's, the slight relaxing of the policeman's grip as he answered—at that instant Jonathan could have made it. The heel of his hand into the tip of Bullet Head's nose would have disabled him, possibly killed him if a bone splinter were driven into the brain. He could have been away from the officer with one jerk, and he'd have had Aloha Shirt by the larynx before the driver could react. That would have given him the life of one man between his thumb and forefinger as hostage. Once on the street, he knew he would be an odds-on favorite in any game of hide-and-seek.

But he let it go. Maggie was three strides too far away. The driver would have had her before Jonathan had Aloha Shirt.

Damn it!

“Sir?” the bobby asked again.

Jonathan's shoulders slumped. “Ah . . . did you enjoy my lecture?”

“Oh yes, sir. Not that I followed all of it. It's your accent, you know.”

“Come on!” Bullet Head growled. “Let's get it moving!”

The Bentley was parked outside, and behind it was another dark sedan with a driver. As they descended the long sweep of shallow granite steps, Jonathan felt the Kafkaesque anomaly of the situation. They were being abducted with the help of a policeman, in the middle of the afternoon, with people all around.

Maggie was deposited in the backseat of the sedan with a young man who had seemed to be loitering against a postbox, while Jonathan was conducted into the back of the Bentley. Aloha Shirt got in back with him; Bullet Head and the driver in front; and they pulled away from the curb, the two cars staying close together until they got onto a motorway. They picked up speed and started off toward Wessex.

“Care for a coffin nail?” Aloha Shirt asked, producing a pack of American cigarettes.

“No, thanks.”

Aloha Shirt smiled affably. “No need to get uptight, Dr. Hemlock. You struck out, but everything's going to be A-okay.”

“What about the girl?”

“She's fine and dandy. No sweat.” Aloha Shirt smiled again. “I should make introductions. The driver there is Henry.”

The driver stretched to seek Jonathan's reflection in the rearview mirror and grinned in greeting. “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Hello, Henry.”

“And my burly sidekick there is The Sergeant.”

“Not ‘Bullet Head'?”

The Sergeant scowled and turned to stare out the windscreen, his jaw set tight.

“And I'm called Yank.” He grinned. “It's kind of a weird moniker, but they call me that because I dig American things. Clothes. Slang. Everything. For my money, you guys are where it's at.”

In the space of a few minutes, Yank had used slang sampling a thirty-year span of American argot, and Jonathan assumed he got it from late-night movies. “Where are we going, Yank?”

“You'll see when we get there. But don't worry. Everything's cool. We're from Loo.” He said this last with some pride.

“From where?”

“Loo.”

The Olde Worlde Inn

A
s they rushed along the motorway, Yank sketched in the history and function of the Loo organization. Though his instructions allowed him to impart no information beyond this, he said they would meet a man at their destination who would clarify everything.

Following the typical pattern of development for espionage organizations in democratic countries, England's earliest felt need was for a domestic agency to ferret out and control enemy espionage and sabotage within its borders. Building up its information files on real and imagined enemies, and occasionally stumbling onto a genuine spy cell while groping about for a fictive one, this bureaucratic organism grew steadily in size and power, justifying each new expansion on the basis of the last. From a single cluttered desk in the Military Intelligence building, it swelled to occupy an entire office: Room #5. And by the simplistic codes of the service, it became known as MI–5.

It eventually occurred to the intelligence specialists that they might do well to assume an active as well as passive role in the game of spy-spy, so they set up a sister organization to control British agents operating abroad. The traditional British penchant for independence dictated that these two agencies be fully autonomous, and the rivalry between them extended to refusal to admit the existence of the other. But this resulted in a certain erosion of manpower, inasmuch as the agents of each organization spent much of their time spying on, thwarting, and occasionally killing the agents of the other. In a master stroke of organizational insight, it was decided to open communications between the two agencies, and the international branch was installed in the next office down the corridor, becoming known in official circles as MI–6.

In harness, they muddled their way through the Second World War, relying largely on the French organizational concept, “
système
D.” Their agents earned reputations for bravery and enterprise, which qualities were vital to survival, considering the blunderers who insisted on parachuting French-speaking agents into Yugoslavia. No energy was spared in the rounding up of Irish nationalists on the basis of the rumor that Ireland was a secret signatory of the Axis Pact.

At home, their operatives uncovered spy rings that were passing information by means of cryptic keys in the knitting patterns of balaclavas that women's institutes were supplying to troops in Africa. And they captured no fewer than seven hundred German parachute spies, nearly all of whom had been trained with such insidious thoroughness that they spoke no German at all and pretended to be innocently pushing their bicycles to work in munitions plants. It was obvious that these were agents of the highest importance, because their controls had gone to the trouble of giving them covers that included homes hit by the blitz and county clerk records supplying them with generations of British ancestors.

In Europe, MI–6 agents blew up bridges in the path of the advancing Allied armies, thus preventing hasty and ill-considered thrusts. It was they who uncovered Switzerland's intention to declare war on Sweden as a last resort. And on three separate occasions only bad luck prevented them from capturing General Patton and his entire staff.

When the war was over, each agent was required to write a book on his adventures, then he was permitted to enter trade. But the romance surrounding MI–5 and MI–6 was tarnished somewhat by a pattern of defections and information leaks that embarrassed British Intelligence almost as much as the existence of that agency was an embarrassment to British intelligence. Clearly, something had to be done to prevent these defections and leakages and to maintain the honor and reputation of the organization. Following the fashion of the day, the government turned to the United States for its model.

At about the same time in America, the 102 splinter spy groups that had sprung up in the Army, Navy, State Department, Treasury, and Bureau of Indian Affairs were merged into a vast bureaucratic malignancy, the CII. This organization, like its British opposite number, was having its share of defections and its share of witch-hunting self-examination spawned by the McCarthy panic. In reaction, it organized an internal cell designed to police and control its own personnel and to protect them from assassination abroad. This last was achieved by the sanction threat of counterassassination, and the cell that performed these internal and external sanctions was known as the Search and Sanction Division—popularly known as the SS Squad. It was for SS that Jonathan had worked, before he managed to release himself from their coils.

Emulating the American structure, the British developed an elite inner cell which they installed in the next room up the corridor, which room happened to be a toilet. Despite the fact that they refurbished the space to accommodate its new function, wags immediately gave the assassination group the nickname: The Loo.

“. . . and that ought pretty much put you into the big picture,” Yank concluded. “At least you know who we are. Any questions?”

Jonathan had been listening with only half an ear as he watched the countryside flow past his window, a grimy twilight beginning to soften the line of the background hills. They had left the motorway and were threading through country lanes. When they passed through a village, Jonathan noticed the arms over a public house: vert, three blades of grass proper, a bend of the first. Obviously they were still in Wessex and had been weaving through back roads without making much linear progress. He glanced out the back window to make sure the car carrying Maggie was still following close behind.

“No sweat,” said Yank, “they know where they're going. Everything's real George.”

“That's wonderful. Now, why don't you tell me what this is all about?”

“No can do. The Guv will lay it on you when we get there. You'll like the Guv. He's old school and all that, but he's no square from Delaware. He's hip to the scene.”

The Bentley turned in at a roadside inn called the Olde Worlde and crunched over a gravel drive to the back, where it stopped against a retaining log. The car carrying Maggie followed and parked twenty yards away. Two young men conducted her to the back door of the inn.

“Well, what do you think of it?” Yank asked as Jonathan stepped out and was flanked by The Sergeant and Henry. “Nice pad, eh?”

Jonathan scanned the sprawling warren. It was phony Tudor, built at the end of the last century by the look of it, and certainly not originally designed to be an inn. Dozens of details had that inorganic appliqué quality of a style imitated. But where taste and constraint had been lacking, funds had not, for the glass, the wood, the brick were of the best quality available in the 1880
s—that last moment before craftsmanship fell victim to the machine and the union.

“This way, sir.” Henry's accent had the chewed diphthongs of the working class. They conducted Jonathan around to the front of the inn where, at the reception desk, they were greeted by a healthy, overly made-up young lady wearing a tight sweater and a mini so short that the double stitching of her panty hose showed. Her accent, clothes, and makeup clubbed her with Henry's class, and by the looks they exchanged, it was evident that Henry and she had something going.

“Is this the ‘special' you've got with you?” she asked, giving Jonathan a head-to-toe look meant to be sultry.

“That's right,” Yank said. “He's to see the Guv straight off.”

“The Guv's down to the church. Evening service. Will he be staying long?”

Jonathan resented being spoken of in the third person. “No, I won't be staying long, duck.”

“A few days,” Yank said.

“Then I'll put him in 14,” the bird said. “You and The Sergeant can have the rooms on either side. How's that?”

Yank took the key and led the way as they climbed a narrow, ornately carved staircase to the second floor where, after passing through a maze of dark broken corridors with irregular floors that squeaked under carpeting, they stopped before a door. The Sergeant opened it and gestured Jonathan in with a flick of the thumb.

The room was large, uncomfortable, and cold, as befitted its period. The first thing that caught Jonathan's eye was the open wardrobe in which the clothes he had had brought to the hotel were hung.

“We were expecting you,” Yank said, openly proud of his organization's efficiency.

Jonathan crossed the room and looked out over the vista. Beneath his window was a neat garden, scruffy now with autumn brownness, in the center of which was a formal quatrefoil pond, the water green with algae and rippling in the brisk wind. Beyond the garden rolled the gentle hills of Wessex, sucked empty of color by the metallic overcast. The prospect was marred by the thick bars on the window.

“The bars help to keep out the draft,” The Sergeant said with a heavy chuckle.

Jonathan glanced at him wearily, then spoke to Yank. “They're all your people, I suppose. Hotel personnel and all?”

“That's right. Loo owns the whole shooting match. By the way,” he said with a knowing ogle, “what did you think of the girl at the desk? Slick chick, eh? Lucky bugger!”

Jonathan wasn't sure, but he assumed the bird did tricks for the special guests. “When do I meet the head crapper?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Loo. The
Guv
.”

“Soon,” Yank said, obviously annoyed at Jonathan's irreverence. “I think you'll be comfortable here. There'll be one inconvenience, though. You'll be locked in until the Guv says otherwise, and the WC
's down the hall, so . . .” Yank shrugged, embarrassed that British inns lacked the convenience of American ones.

The Sergeant broke in. “So if you have to go potty, mate, just rap on the wall, and I'll take you down by the hand. Got it?”

Jonathan regarded The Sergeant languidly as he asked Yank, “Does he have to stay around? Don't you have a kennel?”

The Sergeant rankled. “I hope I'm not going to have any trouble from you, mate!”

“Hope's cheap, anus. Indulge yourself.” He turned to Yank. “What about Miss Coyne, the young lady you picked up with me? There's no reason to hold her. She's nothing to me.”

“Don't worry about her. She'll be all right. Now, why don't you wash up and grab a few Zs before your chat with the Guv.”

Left alone in the room, Jonathan stood by the window, feeling off balance and angry. His sense of déjà vu was total. These people with their ornately staged machinations, this feeling of the ring closing in on him, the vulgar Sergeant for whom murder and mayhem would be an exercise, the veneered Americanism of Yank—everything here was a British analogue of the CII. And if this “Guv” was true to form, he would be urbane, hale, friendly, and ruthless.

He lay back on the bed, his fingers pressed lightly together and his eyes set in infinity focus on the wall before him, and he began deliberately to empty his mind, image by image, until he had achieved a state of neutrality and balance. The muscles of his body softened and relaxed, last of all his stomach and forehead.

When they knocked at his door twenty minutes later, he was ready. The machinery of his mind and body was running calmly and smoothly. He had reviewed the events of the past two days and had come to one distasteful realization: It was possible, it was likely even, that Maggie had set him up for the Loo people.

         

With the threatening presence of The Sergeant close behind them, Yank and Jonathan walked some two hundred yards down the road from the Olde Worlde Inn before turning off into a yew-lined lane that led through an arched gateway to a curious church.

As they stepped into the vestibule, the teetering tonal imbalance of amateur singers making a joyful noise unto the Lord announced that evening service was in progress. The Sergeant remained outside, while Yank and Jonathan advanced into the church. It amused Jonathan to see Yank tiptoe across to a back pew and kneel briefly in rushed and mumbled prayer before sitting up and staring at the serving priest with an expression of bland and dour piety. Jonathan glanced around at the decor of the church and was surprised to find it was Art Nouveau: a style unique in his experience for religious architecture. He examined it with open curiosity as the vicar began his sermon to the handful of faithful scattered sparsely among the pews.

“No doubt you will recall,” the voice was a rumbling bass with the nasal and lazy vowels of the well-educated Englishman, “we have begun to examine the meaning of the sacraments. And this evening I should like to take a look at baptism—the one sacrament that, for most of us, is an involuntary act.”

The decor of the church fascinated Jonathan without pleasing him. Mother-of-pearl and pewter were inlaid into the ornate floral carving; tubercular angels, their long-waisted bodies curved in limp S-forms, their fragile-fingered hands pressed lightly together in prayer, looked down on the congregation with large, heavy-lidded eyes; exotic, short-lived flowers drooped from slender stems up the stained glass windows; and above the altar a glistening effeminate Christ in polished pewter trampled the head of a snake with ruby eyes.

The service continued through communion, and everyone but Jonathan went up to receive the Host. Jonathan watched Yank return from the rail, his palms pressed together, his eyes lowered, Christ melting in his mouth.

At a signal from Yank, Jonathan remained seated as the rest of the faithful filed out after a last vigorous attack on Song. Then Yank conducted him to the vestry where the Vicar was finishing off the last of the communion bread.

“Sir?” Yank's voice was diffident. “May I introduce Dr. Hemlock?”

The Vicar turned and with an open gracious smile of greeting took Jonathan's hand between his large hirsute paws. “This
is
a pleasure,” he said, winking. “So good of you to come.” His mellow basso warmed with practiced civility. “Just allow me to finish and we'll have a good natter.” He drank off the last of the communion wine and wiped out the chalice carefully, while Jonathan studied his full puffy face with its tracery of red capillaries over the cheekbones and in ruddy abundance on the substantial amorphic nose. His hair had retreated beyond the horizon line of his broad forehead, but was long on the sides and blended with his full muttonchop sideburns.