by Trevanian
“A civil service trollop.”
“It’s a job. Good pension. Henry and me have decided that I should go on working after we’re married. Until we have kids, that is. We’re saving our money, and we got fifteen books of green stamps. One of these days, we’re going to get a little off-license in Dagenham. He’s got a level head on him, Henry has. Well, then. If you won’t be wanting me, I’ll get back to the telly. Wouldn’t want to miss It’s a Knockout if I could help it.”
“No, I won’t be needing you. You’re a cute little girl, but this is a bit clinical for me.”
She shrugged and left. There was no understanding some men.
He was in a deep layer of sleep when the visceral throb of the discotheque snapped him into consciousness—sticky-minded and stiff-boned. He could not believe it! The volume was so high that the thump of the back-beat bass was a physical thing vibrating the floor and rattling the drinking glass on the washstand. The singsong, hyperthyroid patter of the disc jockey introduced the next selection in a rapid, garbled East End imitation of American fast-patter deejays, and the room began to vibrate again. He swung out of bed and pounded on the wall to be let out. There was no response, so he rattled the door, and it opened in his hand. So. He was no longer locked in. The Vicar must have told them that he was firmly hooked and would not try to escape.
After splashing his face and changing shirts, he went down to the foyer, to find it and the adjacent pub packed with young people, shouting at each other, pushing through, beer mugs held high, and brandishing cigarettes. He pressed through the crowd in the saloon bar, trying to find a way out of the din, and instead found himself in a discotheque, surrounded by youngsters who hopped and sweated to the deafening throb of amplifiers in a murky darkness broken occasionally by a flash of color from a jury-rigged strobe light. The noise was brutal, particularly the amplified bass, which vibrated in his sinuses.
A form approached him through the smoky dark. “Did the noise wake you up?” Yank asked.
“What?”
“Did the noise wake you up?”
Jonathan shouted into Yank’s ear. “Let’s not do that number. Show me how to get out of here.”
“Follow me!”
They threaded through bodies gyrating in a miasma of smoke and stale beer, and out a back door to the parking area, now filled with cars and small knots of young men, talking together and erupting into jolts of forced laughter whenever one of them said something bawdy.
Well beyond the car park, in the garden Jonathan could look down on from his window, the noise was low enough to permit speaking. They stopped and Yank lit up a cigarette.
“What is going on here?” Jonathan asked.
“We have discotheque five nights a week. Kids come all the way from London. It’s the Guv’s idea. It provides cover for our operation here, and a little extra income.
Jonathan shook his head in disbelief. “When does it come to an end?”
“Closing time. About ten-thirty.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“Don’t you dig music?”
Jonathan glanced at him. “My door is no longer locked. I take it I’m free to wander about now?”
“Within limits. Perhaps it would be better if I came along.”
They strolled through the garden and up a footpath that led away from the inn. Yank babbled on about the virtues of America, things American, places he was going to go and things he was going to do when he saved up enough money to emigrate. “I guess it sounds as though I had it in for old Blighty. Not true, really. There are a lot of British things—ways of life, traditions—that I admire and that I’ll miss. But they’re really gone anyway. Gone, or on their way out. England has become a sort of low-budget United States. And if you have to live in the United States, you might as well live in the real one. Right?”
Jonathan, who had not been listening, indicated a fork in the path. “What’s up this way?”
“Oh . . . nothing, really.” Yank started to take the lower fork.
“No. Let’s go on along here.”
“Well . . . you can’t go very far up that way anyway. Fenced off, you know.”
“What’s up there?”
“Another branch of our operation. The guards you saw come from there. I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s . . . ah . . . it’s called the Feeding Station.”
“A farm?”
“Sort of. Let’s be getting back.”
“You go back. I can’t take the noise.”
“OK. But don’t go too far up this path. The dogs are loose at night.”
“Dogs? To keep people out of the Feeding Station?”
“No.” Yank took a long drag on his cigarette. “To keep people in.”
Jonathan sat in the darkness on a stone bench beside the quatrefoil pool. A light mist was settling in the windless air, and his skin tingled with cold. There was a crimson smear in the northern sky, the last burning off of the stubble fields; and the air carried the autumn smell of leaf smoke. The discotheque had closed down, and the crowds had poured out to their cars, laughing and hooting in the car park. Horns had sounded and gravel had been sprayed, and one last drunk, alone and stumbling in the dark, had called for “Alf” several times with growing desperation before staggering onto the road to hitchhike.
There was a period of deep silence before the night creatures felt safe; then began the chirp of insects, the rustle of field mice, the plop of frogs.
Jonathan sat alone and depressed. He had been so sure his break with CII was permanent. He had repressed all the nasty memories. And here he was. They had him again. But what bothered him most was not the irony of it, or the loss of freedom of choice. It was the discovery that he had not left this business as far behind as he had thought. Already, the high-honed, aggressive mental set necessary to survive in this class of action had returned to him, quite naturally, as though it had always been there buried under a thin cover of distaste.
He heard her approach from fifty yards away. He didn’t bother to turn his head. There was no stealth in the footfalls, no urgent energy, no danger signals.
“Do you have a light?” she asked, after she had stood beside him for some time without attracting the least recognition of her existence.
“What happened? Your cigarette lighter run out of film?”
She made a pass at laughter. “It doesn’t matter, really. I don’t have a cigarette anyway.”
“Just this deep desire to communicate. I know the feeling.”
“Jonathan, I hope you don’t feel too badly toward me, because—”
“Yes, this lack of communication is the major problem in the world as we know and love it around us in everyday life. All people are essentially good and loving and peace-seeking, but they have trouble communicating that fact to one another. Right? Perhaps it’s because they raise barriers of mistrust. People ought to learn to trust one another more. The only people you can really trust are women named Maggie. Someone once told me that the name Maggie, while not melodious, was at least substantial. You could always trust good old Maggie.”
“All right. I give up.”
“Good.” He rose and started back toward the inn.
She followed. “There is one thing, though.”
“Let me guess. You’d give anything in the world if you hadn’t had to set me up. You could almost weep when you think of me, lying there in the deep sleep of the sexually exercised and satisfied—probably a boyish smile on my face—while you slipped out of bed and opened the door to let the Loo men in and gut-shoot that poor bastard on my crapper.”
“Really, I didn’t know—”
“Certainly! After all, I was just a cipher to you at first. But later, it was different. Right? After we’d exchanged trivial confidences and fucked a bit, you discovered deeper feelings. But by then it was too late to back out. Maggie! . . .” He reined his anger and lowered his voice.
“Maggie, your actions lack even the charm of new experience for me. I was nailed once before by a lady. The only difference is that she was in the major leagues.”
Her eyes had not left his, and she had not flinched through his tirade. “I know, Jonathan.”
He realized that he had reached out and was grasping her upper arms tightly. He released her, snapping his hands open. “How do you know?”
“Your records. CII sent us your entire file, and I was required to study it carefully before . . .”
“Before setting me up.”
“All right! Before setting you up!”
He believed the shame in her sudden rush of anger. Suddenly he felt very tired. And he regretted his loss of control. He looked away from her and forced his breathing to assume a lower rhythm.
She spoke without temper and without pleading. “I want to tell you this.”
“I don’t need it.”
“I need it. I didn’t know what they had in mind. I thought they were going to set you up with a drug plant or something. When they appeared at the door with that poor man, I . . . I . . .”
“He was alive at that time.”
She swallowed and looked past him, down the road gleaming faintly in the ghost light of moon above fog. Talking about it required that she pick at the painful scab of memory. “Yes. He was badly doped up. He couldn’t even stand without help. And he was wearing that horrid grinning mask. They had to carry him in and put him onto the . . . But he was aware of what was happening. I could see it in his eyes—just the eyes behind the cutouts in the mask. He looked at me with such . . .” She blinked back the tears. “There was such sadness in his eyes! He was begging me to help him. I felt that. But I . . . Lord God above, it’s a terrible business we’re in, Jonathan.”
He drew her head against his chest. It seemed the only reasonable thing to do.
“Why didn’t they kill him cleanly?”
She couldn’t speak for a while, and he heard the squeaking sound of tears being swallowed. “They were supposed to. The Vicar was very angry with them for bungling it. They went into the bathroom while I waited outside. Then you turned over in your sleep and made a sound. I was frightened you might wake up, so I tapped at the door, and at the same moment I heard a popping sound.”
“A silencer.”
“Yes, I suppose. They rushed out immediately, but one of them was swearing under his breath. My knock had startled him and spoiled his aim.”
He rocked her gently.
“I crept back into bed, trying not to wake you. I didn’t know what to do. I just lay there, staring into the dark, concentrating as hard as possible, trying to keep dawn from coming.”
“But no luck.”
“No luck at all. Morning came. You woke up. Then . . . I just couldn’t make love when you wanted.”
He nodded. That was to her credit. “Come on. Let’s take a walk around the inn before turning in.”
She sniffed and pulled herself together. “Yes, I’d like that.”
They strolled slowly, arm about and arm about, each accommodating for their difference in stride. “Tell me,” he said, “why didn’t you throw the cigarette case away?”
“You know about that? Well, I suppose the real question is, why didn’t I leave it behind in your room, as I was supposed to do. I don’t know. At the moment, I thought I might be protecting you by denying them the films. But directly I had time to think it out, I realized that they were determined to get you. There was no point in denying them the films. They’d only have set something else up, and you would have had to go through that.”
“I see.” He looked down, watching their shoes step out in rhythm. “Who were the men who came to my flat?”
“The two you rode here with in the Bentley. Not Yank, the other two.”
“And who did the shooting?”
“The Sergeant.”
“Figures.” He added another line to the bill The Sergeant was running up with him. The payoff became inevitable.
They walked without speaking for a time, breathing in the moist freshness of the night air.
“It may be silly,” she said at last, “but I’m glad you didn’t take Sylvia up on it.”
“Who is Sylvia?”
“The girl who works here. You know, Henry’s friend.”
“Oh, her. Well, she isn’t my type.”
They were at the door again. She turned to him and asked, “Am I your type?”
He looked at her for several seconds. “I’m afraid so.”
They went in.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said out of a long silence. She was sitting up, braced against the carved oaken headboard, and she had just lit another cigarette.
He hugged her around the hips and put his cheek into the curve of her waist. They had made love, and slept, and made love again, and now his voice was ragged with sleepiness. “Sorry about what?”
“About that last bit—those internal contractions when I climax. I can’t help them. They’re beyond my control.”
He growled and mumbled, “By all means, do let’s talk about it.”
She laughed at him. “Don’t you like to talk about it afterward? It’s supposed to be very healthy and modern and all.”
“I suppose. But I’m old-fashioned enough to be sentimental about the operation. For the first few minutes anyway.”
“Hm-m.” She took a drag on her cigarette, her face briefly illuminated in the glow. “Your kind of people are like that.”
He turned over. “My kind of people?”
“The violent ones. They tend to be sentimental. I guess sentiment is their substitute for compassion. Kind of a surrogate for genuine feelings. I read somewhere that ranking Nazis used to weep over Wagner.”
“Wagner makes me weep too. But not from sentiment. Go to sleep.”
“All right.” But after a moment of silence: “Still, I am sorry if my little spasms ruined any plans you had for epic control.”
“Sorry for me? Or sorry for yourself?”
“Oh, you are feeling a bit bristly, aren’t you? Do you always suffer from postcoitus aggression?”
He rose to one elbow. “Listen, madam. It doesn’t seem to me that I started any of this. The only thing I’m feeling at this moment is postcoitus fatigue. Now, good night.” He dropped back on his pillow.
“Good night.” But he could tell from the tension of her body that she was not prepared to sleep. “Do you know what I wish you suffered from?” she asked after a short silence.
He didn’t answer.
“Intracoitus camaraderie, that’s what,” she said, and laughed.
“OK. You win.” He pulled himself up and rested against the headboard. “Let’s talk.”
She scooted down under the covers. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind of tired.”
“You’re going to get popped right in the eye.”
“I’m sorry. But you are fun to tease. You rise to the bait so eagerly. What do you want to talk about, now that you’ve got me wide-awake?”
“Let’s talk about you, for lack of more interesting things. Tell me, how did a nice girl like you, et cetera . . .”
“Why am I working for Loo?”
“Yes. We both know why I am.”
She knew that taunt was not completely in jest, but she decided he had a right to some bitterness. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to share the truth with him. After all, the truth did mitigate her complicity. “Well, most of what I told you about myself the other night was true. I was born in Ireland. Went to university over here, then returned. I was young and silly and politically committed—looking for a cause, I suppose. Or bored, maybe. I used to meet my brother and some of his friends at a coffee shop, and we would talk about a united Ireland. Angry speeches. Plans and plots. You know the sort of thing. Then one day my brother was gone. I discovered that he had gotten into Ulster. He had always said he wanted to take an active part in the thing, but I had written that off as romantic game-playing. He
was a poet, you see. Flashing eyes and floating hair and all that. I don’t imagine you would have liked him.”
“He died?”
He felt her nod. “Yes. He was found in his car.” Her voice became very soft. “They shot him through the ear. And I . . . I . . .”
He hugged her head to his side. “Don’t talk about it.”
“No, I want to. It’s good for me. For months the image of him being shot in that car haunted me. I used to have nightmares. And do you know what image used to shock me awake, all sweating and panting?”
He patted her.
“The noise of it! Can you imagine the terrible noise of it?”
Jonathan felt helpless and stupid. He was sorry for her, but he knew the emptiness of saying so. “Who did it?” he asked. “UDA? IRA?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? They’re all the same.”
“I’m surprised you realize that. Good for you.”
“Oh, I didn’t know it then, of course. I wanted revenge. More for myself than for my brother, I suppose. I went to Belfast and joined a cell of activists. And . . .”
“You got your revenge?”
“I don’t know. We set bombs. People got hurt—probably the wrong people. After a while, I came to my senses and realized how stupid the whole business was, and I decided to return to Dublin. And that’s when I was picked up and arrested. Things always happen that way.”
“You were sentenced?”
“No. They were taking me from one prison to another in an army vehicle, when they were run off the road by armed hijackers. The soldiers were all shot. The hijackers took me with them. Only me. They left the other prisoners.”
“I assume the hijackers were Loo people.”
“Yes.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Only a month. They brought me here for a week of briefing on your background file from CII. Then they placed me at Mr. MacTaint’s, where we met. And that’s it.”
Jonathan slid down beside her, and they lay for a time staring into the dark above them. “Why you, I wonder,” he said at length. “Not that I’m complaining.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I could paint—well, in a way. And there was no question about my being cooperative. All the Vicar has to do is lift a telephone, and I’m back in Belfast facing charges. And this time I’ll have to answer for those dead soldiers as well.”