by Trevanian
My grandfather’s car skidded off the road in a blinding snowstorm when he was driving from Granville, where he had given money and encouragement to his niece and her husband, to Lake George, where he was going to do the same for us. When the news of his death came, my mother was sick in bed. She had caught a bad chest cold walking to work through the snow, and for days she had been lying in the back room, a racking cough denying her sleep and bursts of high fever causing her to drift along the edges of reality—a recurring pattern of illness that was to become familiar over the years. The neighbor lady who was looking in on my sister and me assured us that Mother would make it through, “So don’t you worry your little heads.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that my mother might not make it through until the neighbor’s assurances suggested that terrible possibility. And it was this same neighbor who got the telephone call about my grandfather and decided that the news of his death would be easier for my mother to bear if it came from me. This neighbor lady whispered into my ear that my grandfather had been killed in a car crash, then she pushed me into the dark bedroom, and when I paused, unwilling, she urged me forward with impatient flicks of her fingers.
I sat on the side of my mother’s bed—she smelled of sleep and the mustard tang of Balm Bengué—and I stroked her damp forehead as I told her that her father had gone to heaven. I was four and a half and she was twenty-five, and on that snowy evening I became my mother’s confidant and “good right hand,” roles that were to continue throughout my childhood. I was proud of my newfound importance; but my retreat into long and complex story games began at this time.
Two years passed, and my mother had just been told that she wouldn’t have a job come the summer because her bad health made her unreliable, when she received a letter from my father, a letter I have before me on my desk. He had made an “error in judgment” for which he had been given five-to-seven in “an institution dedicated to the moral reconstruction of those who take shortcuts to success and comfort.” But he had proved “a contrite and willing pilgrim on the road to redemption” and had received early release after working as assistant to the prison librarian. He was now in Albany, the state capital, and he had rented us temporary lodgings until he was able to find a decent job . . . maybe in a library somewhere. He was all through with chasing rainbows. He was ready to settle down and make a life for his family. He knew he didn’t deserve a second chance (or was it a third chance?), but . . . “You Were Meant for Me,” Toots. Remember?
Although Mother had vowed never to accept another thing from her cousin’s husband after the way he had complained about being burdened with us, she swallowed her pride and wrote, asking if he could bring us and our stuff down to Albany in his old truck. During the trip, I looked out the side window at passing farmland, at the blur of bushes beside the road, and up at the telephone wires that seemed to part and reweave, part and reweave above us. And now we were eating peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen of 238, and Anne-Marie and I were anticipating the St. Patrick’s Day party to celebrate our family’s finally getting together to start a new life.
It was growing dark, so Mother turned the old-fashioned porcelain switch for the kitchen’s naked overhead lightbulb. Nothing.
“Just like him! Didn’t even think to get the electric turned on!”
I had an idea. I went into the bathroom and turned its switch, and the light came on. The kitchen bulb was only burned out. So we finished our sandwiches by the light from the open bathroom door. For some time Anne-Marie had been dipping and dozing on the rim of sleepiness, then her head would snap up as she fought to stay awake until her father came home with the green cake, which she was determined not to miss.
But Mother stood up with a sigh and said he’d come when he came, and there was no point in our sitting up all night. She unpacked the box containing our sheets and our most treasured possession, three Hudson Bay blankets given to her as a wedding present by my grandfather, and we made the beds together. The blankets were thick, top-quality, “five-tail” Hudson Bays with those bands of bright color that fur traders thought would appeal to primitive Indian taste sufficiently to make them part with five beaver hides to get one. I had seen pictures of Indian chiefs wearing “five-tail” blankets, and I wished the neighbors who had scoffed at our battered possessions out on the sidewalk knew that we also owned three of the best woolen blankets in the world. Mother put her reluctant but comatose daughter into the little bed in their bedroom, where, after making Mother promise to wake her up for the party, Anne-Marie instantly fell into a deep sleep, sucking her fingers. Mother and I sat at the kitchen table for a while, silent and with that metallic emptiness in the stomach that follows long periods of excitement. Then she said we might as well go to bed too. I could help her unpack in the morning. I kissed her good-night and told her I’d just set the table first, and I began putting the green paper plates and napkins back into place around the bottle of lime soda, while Mother watched me, shaking her head.
“You’re my good right hand, Jean-Luc. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She kissed me good-night and turned out the bathroom light, and the crepe paper chains disappeared into the dark of the high ceiling.
I lay on my daybed in the front room, which never got totally dark because a streetlamp cast a diagonal slab of light from one corner to the other. I was looking up at the ceiling, intrigued by how, each time a car passed out on the street, the edge-ghost of its headlights slid through and around the chandelier rosette in the middle of which a single lightbulb dangled from a paint-stiffened wire. I lay there for what was, for a kid, a long time, maybe ten minutes, until I thought Mother was asleep, then I eased out of bed stealthily and went to the window to watch for my father’s arrival. He’d be the one coming down the street carrying the string-tied baker’s box with a green cake that he’d finally found after going from one end of Albany to the other, and I would sneak out onto the stoop and beckon him in, putting my finger across my lips to signal him to walk on tiptoes, and we’d put the cake in the middle of the kitchen table and open the green soda carefully, so the pffffft sound wasn’t too loud, and we’d get everything ready, then we’d go into the bedroom and wake Mother and Anne-Marie, and they’d be surprised and all smiles and . . .
I heard a faint sound from the back bedroom. I knew that sound, and hated it. My mother was crying softly to herself, as she did only when the bad breaks and the loneliness and ill health built up until they overwhelmed her. She cried when she was afraid, and the thought of my mother being afraid frightened me in turn, because if that buoyant, energetic woman couldn’t handle whatever the problem was, what chance did I have? Sometimes, I would go to her and pat her shoulder and kiss her wet, salty cheek, but I always felt so helpless that the pit of my stomach would burn. Precocious at games and arithmetic, I had learned a couple of months earlier how to play two-handed “honeymoon” pinochle, her favorite game and one that reminded her of her father. Sometimes playing pinochle took her mind off our problems. But the cards were deep in one of our boxes somewhere, and anyway, I didn’t feel like sitting with her, helpless and hopeless. Everything would be fine when my father got back. Even if he hadn’t managed to find a green cake . . . but I was sure he would . . . he’d care for Mother when she was sick and kiss her tears away when she was blue and play pinochle with her and take responsibility for keeping the family well and happy, and I’d just play my story games, and everything would be fine. I put my cheek against the cool windowpane so I could look as far up the empty street as possible. People passed by occasionally: lone men walking slowly, their fists deep in their pockets, wishing this night were over; women hastening to get somewhere on time; young couples with their arms around each other’s waist, keeping hip contact by stepping out with their inside legs at the same time, wishing this night would go on forever. When a car passed, the edge of its headlights rippled over the brick facades on both sides of the street and lit up my ceiling briefly. I considered slipping i
nto my shoes and going out onto the stoop to await my father’s arrival, but the night was cold, so I sat on the edge of my bed with my Hudson Bay blanket around me Indian-style and watched the street, as I would do night after night.
My father never came. But, of course, you have anticipated that for some time.
A MASTER STORYTELLER
praised by critics and readers for over thirty years, Trevanian’s novels have been translated into more than fourteen languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide.
THE CRAZYLADIES OF PEARL STREET
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THE EIGER SANCTION
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THE MAIN
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SHIBUMI
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THE SUMMER OF KATYA
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Available from Crown Publishers and Three Rivers Press
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Copyright © 1973 by Trevanian
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1973.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trevanian.
The loo sanction : a novel / Trevanian.—1st paperback ed.
1. Art historians—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. 3. Intelligence service—Fiction. 4. Extortion—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.R44L66 2005
813'.54—dc22 2004029743
eISBN: 978-0-307-23841-2
v3.0