by Trevanian
"Oh?"
She followed him as far as the altar rail. "It's too much nose-thumbing, if you know what I mean."
"As in, 'Oh, grow up'?"
"Yes. As in that." She accepted the chalice of wine and sat on the rail sipping it. He watched her with proprietary pleasure.
"Oh, by the way!" She stopped drinking suddenly. "Do you know that there's a madman on your grounds?"
"Is that so?"
"Yes. I met him on my way up here. He was snarling and digging a hole that looked terribly like a grave."
Jonathan frowned. "I can't imagine who that could be."
"And he was mumbling to himself."
"Was he?"
"Yes. Real vulgar stuff."
He shook his head. "I'll have to look into it."
She did the salad while he broiled steaks. The fruit had been chilling since they got home, and the purple grapes mauved over with a haze of frost when they met the humid air of the garden where places had been set at a wrought iron table, despite the probability of rain. He opened a bottle of Pichon-Longue-ville-Baron, and they ate while the onset of night smoothly transferred the source of light from the treetops of the flickering hurricane lamps on the table. The flicker stopped, the air grew dense and unmoving, and occasional flashes along the storm line glittered to the north. They watched the scudding sky grow darker while little breaths of cool wind leading the storm reanimated the lamps and fluttered the black-and-silver foliage around them. For long afterwards, Jonathan was to remember the meteor trail of Jemima's glowing cigarette when she lifted it to smoke.
He spoke out of a longish silence. "Come with me. I want to show you something."
She followed him back into the house. "There's a certain spookiness about this, you know," she said as he got the key from the back of the kitchen drawer and led her down the half-turn stone steps. "Into the catacombs? Probably a lime pit in the cellar. What do I really know about you? Maybe I should drop bits of bread so I can find my way back out."
Jonathan turned on the lights and stepped aside. She walked past him, drawn in by the paintings that radiated from the walls. "Oh, my! Oh, Jonathan!"
He sat at his desk chair, watching her as she moved from canvas to canvas with an uneven pulsing flow, attracted by the next painting, unwilling to leave the last. She made little humming sounds of pleasure and admiration, rather as a contented child does when eating breakfast alone.
Her eyes full, she sat on the carved piano bench and looked down at the Kashan for some time. "You're a singular man, Jonathan Hemlock."
He nodded.
"All this just for you. This megalomaniac house; these..." she made a sweeping gesture with her hand and eyes. "You keep all this to yourself."
"I'm a singularly selfish man. Like some champagne?"
"No."
She looked down and shook her head sadly. "All this matters to you a great deal. Even more than Mr. Dragon led me to believe."
"Yes, it matters, but..."
...For some minutes they said nothing. She did not look up, and he, after the first shocked glance, tried to calm his confusion and anger by forcing his eye to roam over the paintings.
Finally he sighed and pushed himself out of the chair. "Well, lady, I'd better be getting you to the depot. Last train for the city..." His voice trailed off.
She followed him obediently up the stone steps. While they had been in the gallery, the storm had broken violently above without their hearing it. Now they climbed up through layers of quickening, muffled sound—the metallic rattle of rain on glass, the fluting and flap of wind, the thick, distant rumblings of thunder.
In the kitchen she asked, "Do we have time for that glass of champagne you offered me?"
He protected his hurt by the dry freeze of politeness. "Certainly. In the library?"
He knew she was distressed, and he wielded his artificial social charm like a bludgeon, chatting lightly about the paucity of transportation to his corner of Long Island, and of the particular difficulties the rain imposed. They sat facing each other in heavy leather chairs while the rain rattled horizontally against the stained glass, and the walls and floor rippled with reds and greens and blues. Jemima cut into the flow of anticommunicative chat.
"I guess I shouldn't have just dropped it on you like that, Jonathan."
"Oh? How should you have dropped it, Jemima?"
"I couldn't let it go on—I mean, I couldn't let us go on without your knowing. And I couldn't think of a more gentle way to tell you."
"You might have hit me with a brick," he suggested. Then he laughed. "I must have been dazzled. You're a real dazzler. I should have recognized the anti-chance of coincidence. You on the plane from Montreal. You just happened to pass by Dragon's office in that taxi. How was it supposed to work, Jemima? Were you supposed to bring me to a white heat of desire, then deny your body unless I agreed to do this sanction for Dragon? Or were you going to whisper insidious persuasions into my ear as I lay in the euphoria of postcoitus vulnerability."
"Nothing so cool. I was told to steal your payment for the last assignment."
"That's certainly direct."
"I saw it lying on your desk downstairs. Mr. Dragon says you need the money badly."
"He's right. Why you? Why not one of his other flunkeys?"
"He thought I would be able to get close to you quickly."
"I see. How long have you worked for Dragon?"
"I don't really work for him. I'm CII, but I'm not Search and Sanction. They chose someone out of your department to avoid recognition."
"Very sensible. What do you do?"
"I'm a courier. The stewardess front is good for that."
He nodded. "Have you had many assignments like this? Using your body to get at someone?"
She considered, then rejected the easy lie. "A couple."
He was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. "Aren't we the pair? A selfish killer and a patriotic whore. We should mate just to see what the offspring would be. I have nothing against selfish whores, but patriotic killers are the worst kind."
"Jonathan." She leaned forward, suddenly angry. "Do you have any idea how important this assignment Mr. Dragon wants you to take is?"
He regarded her with bland silence; he had no intention of making anything easier.
"I know he didn't give you the details. He couldn't unless he was sure you would take the job. But if you knew what is at stake, you would cooperate."
"I doubt that."
"I wish I could tell you. But my instructions—"
"I understand."
After a pause, she said, "I tried to get out of it"
"Oh? Did you?"
"This afternoon, while we were lying on the beach, I realized what a rotten thing it would be to do, now that we were..."
"Now that we were what?" He arched his eyebrows in cool curiosity.
Her eyes winced. "Anyway, I left you and came up here to call Dragon and ask him to let me out."
"I assume he refused."
"He couldn't speak to me. He was undergoing a transfusion or something. But his man refused—whatshisname."
"Pope." He finished his wine and placed the glass on a table deliberately. "It's a little hard for me to buy, you know. You've been on this thing for some time—since Montreal. And you seem convinced that I ought to take this assignment—"
"You must, Jonathan!"
"...and despite all that, you expect me to believe that one gentle afternoon has changed your mind. I can't help feeling you're making the mistake of trying to con a con."
"I haven't changed my mind. It's only that I didn't want to do the thing myself. And you know perfectly well that this has been more than just a gentle afternoon."
He looked at her, his eyes moving from one of hers to the other. Then he nodded, "Yes, it's been more than that."
"For me, it wasn't just this afternoon. I've spent days going over your records—which, by the way, are embarrassingly complete. I know what your boyho
od was like. I know how CII roped you into your job in the first place. I know about the killing of your friend in France. And even before this assignment, I'd seen you on educational television." She grinned. "Lecturing about art in your superior, sassy way. Oh, I was ninety percent hooked before I met you. Then, down in your room—I was really pleased when you invited me down there. I couldn't help babbling. I knew from the files that you never bring anyone there. Anyway, down in the room, with you sitting there so happy, and all those beautiful paintings, and that blue envelope with your money sitting so unprotected on your desk... I had to tell you that's all."
"You have anything else to say?"
"No."
"You don't want to talk about shoes, or ships, or sealing wax?"
"No."
"In that case," he crossed to her and drew her out of the chair by her hands. "I'll race you up the stairs."
"You're on."
A rain-shimmered shaft of light lay across her eyes, revealing at surprising moments the harlequin flecks of gold. He lowered his forehead to hers, closed his eyes, and hummed a raspy note of satisfaction and pleasure. Then he drew back so he could see her better. "I'm going to tell you something," he said, "and you mustn't laugh."
"Tell me."
"You have the most beautiful eyes."
She looked up at him with eternal feminine calm. "That's very sweet. Why should I laugh?"
"Someday I'll tell you." He kissed her gently. "On second thought, I probably won't tell you. But that warning about laughing still goes."
"Why?"
"Because if you laugh, you'll lose me."
The image amused her, so she laughed, and she lost him.
"I warned you, right? Although it really doesn't matter, for all the good I was doing you."
"Don't talk about it."
He laughed in his turn. "You know something? This is going to come at you as a big surprise. Endurance is my forte. I'm not conning. That's normally what I have to recommend me. Endurance. How's that for yaks?"
"We have all kinds of time. At least you didn't reach for a cigarette."
He rolled over onto his back and spoke quietly into the common dark above them. "All things taken into consideration, Nature's really a capricious bitch. I've never cared much about the women I was with—I usually don't feel much of anything. And so I'm a paragon of control. And they do very well indeed. But with you—when I cared and it mattered, and because I cared and it mattered—I suddenly became the fastest gun in the east. Like I said, Nature's a bitch."
Gem turned to him. "Hey, what is all this? You're talking like it was afterwards. And here all the time I've been hoping it was between times."
He swung out of bed. "You're right! It's between times. You just wait there while I get us a resuscitating split of champagne."
"No, wait." She sat up in bed, her body outlined with silver backlight and splendid. "Come back here and let me talk to you."
He lay across the bottom of the bed and put his cheek against her feet. "You sound serious and portentous and all."
"I am. It's about this job for Mr. Dragon—"
"Please, Gem."
"No. No, now just keep quiet for a second. It has to do with a biological device that the other side is working on. It's a very ugly thing. If they come up with it before we do... That could be terrible, Jonathan."
He hugged her feet to him. "Gem, it doesn't matter who's ahead in this kind of race. It's like two frightened boys dueling with hand grenades at three feet. It really doesn't matter who pulls the pin first."
"What does matter is that we aren't so likely to pull the pin!"
"If you're saying that the average shopkeeper in Seattle is a humane guy, that's perfectly true. But so is the average shopkeeper in Petropavlovsk. The fact is that the pin is in the hands of men like Dragon or, even worse, at the mercy of a short circuit in some underground computer."
"But, Jonathan—"
"I'm not going to take the job, Gem. I never do sanctions when I have enough money to get along. And I don't want to talk about it anymore. All right?"
She was silent. Then she made her decision. "All right."
Jonathan kissed her feet and stood up. "Now how about that champagne?"
Her voice arrested him at the top of the loft stairs. "Jonathan?"
"Madam?"
"Am I your first black?"
He turned back. "Does that matter?"
"Of course it matters. I know you're a collector of paintings, and I wondered..."
He sat on the edge of the bed. "I ought to smack your bottom."
"I'm sorry."
"You still want some champagne?"
She opened her arms and beckoned with her fingers. "Afterwards."
LONG ISLAND: June 13
Jonathan simply opened his eyes, and he was awake. Calm and happy. For the first time in years there was no blurred and viscous interphase between sleeping and waking. He stretched luxuriously, arching his. back and extending his limbs until every muscle danced with strain. He felt like shouting, like making a living noise. His leg touched a damp place on the sheet, and he smiled. Jemima was not in bed, but her place was still warm and her pillow was scented lightly with her perfume, and with the perfume of her.
Nude, he swung out of bed and leaned over the choir loft rail. The steep angle of the tinted shafts of sunlight across the nave indicated late morning. He called for Jemima, his voice booming back satisfactorily from the arches.
She appeared at the door to the vestry-kitchen. "You roared, sir?"
"Good morning!"
"Good morning." She wore the trim linen suit she had arrived in, and she seemed to glow white in the shadow. "I'll have coffee ready by the time you've bathed." And she disappeared through the vestry door.
He splashed about in the Roman bath and sang, loudly but not well. What would they do today? Go into the city? Or just loaf around? It did not matter.
He toweled himself down and put on a robe. It had been years since he had slept so late. It must be nearly—Jesus Christ! The Pissarro! He had promised the dealer he would pick it up by noon!
He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting impatiently for the phone on the other end of the line to be picked up.
"Hello? Yes?" The dealers' voice had the curving note of artificial interest.
"Jonathan Hemlock."
"Oh, yes. Where are you? Why are you calling?"
"I'm at my home."
"I don't understand, Jonathan. It is after eleven. How can you be here by noon?"
"I can't. Look, I want you to hold the painting for me a couple of hours. I'm on my way now."
"There is no need to rush. I cannot hold the painting. I told you I had another buyer. He is with me at this moment. It is tragic, but I warned you to be here on time. A deal is a deal."
"Give me one hour."
"My hands are tied."
"You said the other buyer had offered twelve thousand. I'll match it."
"If only I could, my good friend. But a deal is—"
"Name a price."
"I am sorry, Jonathan. The other buyer says he will top any price you make. But, since you have offered fifteen thousand, I will ask him." There was a mumble off-phone. "He says sixteen, Jonathan. What can I do?"
"Who is the other bidder?"
"Jonathan!" The voice was filled with righteous shock.
"I'll pay an extra thousand just to know."
"How can I tell you, Jonathan? I am bound by my ethics. And furthermore, he is right here in the same room with me."
"I see. All right, I'll give you a description. Just say yes if it fits. That's a thousand dollars for one syllable."
"At that rate, think what the Megilloth would bring."
"He's blond, crew-cut, chunky, small eyes—close set, face heavy and flat, probably wearing a sport jacket, his tie and socks will be in bad taste, he is probably wearing his hat in your home—"
"To a T, Jonathan. T as in thousand."
It was C
lement Pope. "I know the man. He must have a top price. His employer would never trust him with unlimited funds. I offer eighteen thousand."
The dealer's voice was filled with respect. "You have that much in cash, Jonathan?"
"I have."
There was another prolonged and angry mumble off-phone. "Jonathan! I have wonderful news for you. He says he can top your offer, but he does not have the cash with him. It will be several hours before he can get it. Therefore, my good friend, if you are here by one o'clock with the nineteen thousand, the painting is yours along with my blessing."
"Nineteen thousand?"
"You have forgotten the fee for information?"
The painting would cost almost everything Jonathan had, and he would have to find some way to face his debts and Mr. Monk's wages. But at least he would have the Pissarro. "All right. I'll be there by one."
"Wonderful, Jonathan. My wife will have a glass of tea for you. So now tell me, how are you feeling? And how are the children?"
Jonathan repeated the terms of the arrangement so there would be no mistake, then he hung up.
For several minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes fixed in space, his hatred for Dragon and Pope collecting into an adamantine lump. Then he caught the smell of coffee and remembered Jemima.
She was gone. And the blue envelope, chubby with its hundred-dollar bills, was gone with her.
In a brace of rapid telephone calls designed to salvage at least the painting, Jonathan discovered that Dragon, weak after his semiannual transfusion, would not speak to him, and that the art dealer, although sympathetic to his problem and solicitous of his family's health, was firm in his intent to sell the Pissarro to Pope as soon as the money was produced.
Jonathan sat alone down in the gallery, his gaze fixed on the space he had reserved for the Pissarro. Beside him on the desk was an untouched cafe au lait cup. And next to the cup was a note from Jemima:
Jonathan:
I tried to make you understand last night how important this assignment
Darling, I would give anything if
Yesterday and last night meant more to me than I can ever tell you, but there are things that
I had to guess. I hope you take sugar in your coffee.
Love (really) Jemima