The Loo Sanction Read Online Free PDF Page A

well what I mean. My comrades on the Continent shared my curiosity about you at first, and we pooled our fragments of information. Bits and pieces that never seemed to form a whole picture. You had this gift, this eye that made it possible for you to spot a fake at a glance. But the rest didn’t make much sense. University professor. Critic and writer. Collector of black market paintings. Mountain climber. Employed in some kind of nasty government business. Frigging enigma, that’s what you are . . .”
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    The taxi driver swore under his breath and jerked back the hand brake. They were frozen in a tangle of traffic around Trafalgar Square. Jonathan decided to walk the rest of the way. His eagerness to be away from the people at Tomlinson’s had made him an hour early for his appointment with MacTaint anyway, and he could use the exercise.
    To get away from the crowds and the noise for a second, he turned down Craven Street, past the Monk’s Tavern, to Craven Passage and The Arches, where destitute old women were settling in to pass the night on the paving stones, scraps of cardboard beneath them to absorb the damp, their backs against the brick walls, bits of fabric tugged about them for warmth. They drowsed with the help of gin, but never so deep into sleep that they missed the odd passerby whom they begged for coins or fags with droning, liturgical voices.
    Swinging London.
    He held to the back streets as long as possible. His mind kept returning to the Renaissance man he had met at Tomlinson’s. Five million pounds for a Marini
Horse
? Impossible. And yet the man had seemed so confident. The event had made Jonathan uncomfortable. It had those qualities of the deadly absurd, of melodramatic hokum and very real threat that he associated with the lethal game players of international espionage, that group of social mutants he had despised when he worked for CII, and whom he had driven from his memory.
    He turned back up into the lights and noise of center city. The rain had devolved into a dirty, hanging mist that blurred and blended the stew of neon and noise through which crowds of fun-seekers jostled their way.
    Modern young girls took long steps with bony legs under ankle-length skirts, their thin shoulders stooped with poor posture, some with frizzly hair, others with lank. They were the kind who abjured cosmetic artifice and insisted upon being accepted for what they were—antiwar, socially committed, sexually liberated, dull, dull, dull.
    Working-class girls clopped along in the thick-soled plastic shoes Picasso’s kid had inflicted on mass fashion, their stride already displaying hints of the characteristic gait of adult British women: feet splayed, knees bent, backs rigid—seeming to suffer from some chronic rectal ailment. Substantial legs revealed to the crotch by miniskirts, vast liquid breasts sloshing about within stiff brassieres, chattering voices ravaged by the North London glottal gasp, complexions the victims of the Anglo-Saxon penchant for vitamin-free diets. Doughy bodies, doughy minds. Gastronomic anomalies. Dumpling tarts.
    Swinging London.
    Jonathan walked close to the buildings where passage was clearest.
    â€œPenny for the Guy, mister?”
    The voice had come from behind. He turned to find three leering hooligans in their early twenties, jeans and thick steel-toed boots. One of them pushed a wheelchair in which reclined a Guy Fawkes effigy composed of stuffed old clothes and a comic mask beneath a bowler.
    â€œWhat do you say, mister?” The biggest hooligan held his sleeve. “A penny for the Guy?”
    â€œSorry.” Jonathan pulled away. He walked on with the sense of their presence etching his spine, but they didn’t follow.
    He turned into New Row with its gaslights, shuttered greengrocers, and bakeries. His pace carried him slowly away from the Mazurka Clubs, Nosh Bars, and Continuous Continental Revues of