Cerberus was squat and muscular in her starched white nurse's uniform, her coarse gray hair cropped short, her cold eyes pinched into slits by pouches of fat, her sandpaper skin appearing to have been scrubbed daily with sal soda and a currycomb, her thin upper lip aggressively mustachioed.
'You're looking inviting today, Mrs. Cerberus.'
'Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting,' she snarled.
'Who among us really does?'
'Are you healthy?' she asked without solicitude.
'Reasonably.'
'No cold? No known contact with infection?'
'Just the usual lot: pellagra, syphilis, elephantiasis.'
She glared at him. 'All right, go in.' She pressed a button that unlocked the door behind her, then returned to the papers on her desk, not dealing with Jonathan further.
He stepped into the interlock chamber; the door clanged shut behind him; and he stood in the dim red light Mr. Dragon provided as a mezzo-phase from the glittering white of the outer office to the total dark of his own. Jonathan knew he would adapt to the dark more quickly if he closed his eyes. At the same time, he slipped out of his suit coat. The temperature in the interlock and in Mr. Dragon's office was maintained at a constant 87°. The slightest chill, the briefest contact with cold or flu virus would incapacitate Mr. Dragon for months. He had almost no natural resistance to disease.
The door to Mr. Dragon's office clicked and swung open automatically when the cooler air Jonathan had introduced into the interlock had been heated to 87°.
'Come in, Hemlock,' Mr. Dragon's metallic voice invited from the darkness beyond.
Jonathan put out his hands and felt his way forward toward a large leather chair he knew to be opposite Mr. Dragon's desk.
'A little to the left, Hemlock.'
As he sat, he could dimly make out the sleeve of his white shirt. His eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark.
'Now then. How have you been these past months?'
'Rhetorical.'
Dragon laughed his three dry, precise ha's. 'True enough. We have been keeping a protective eye on you. I am informed that there is a painting on the black market that has taken your fancy.'
'Yes. A Pissarro.'
'And so you need money. Ten thousand dollars, if I am not misinformed. A bit dear for personal titillation.'
'The painting is priceless.'
'Nothing is priceless, Hemlock. The price of this painting will be the life of a man in Montreal. I have never understood your fascination with canvas and crusted pigment. You must instruct me one day.'
'It's not a thing you can learn.'
'Either you have it or you haven't, eh?'
'You either got it or you ain't.'
Dragon sighed. 'I guess one has to be born to the idiom.' No accent, only a certain exactitude of diction betrayed Dragon's foreign birth. 'Still, I must not deride your passion for collecting paintings. Without it, you would need money less often, and we would be deprived of your services.' Very slowly, like a photograph in the bottom of a developing tray, the image of Mr. Dragon began to emerge through the dark as Jonathan's eyes dilated. He anticipated the revulsion he would experience.
'Don't let me waste too much of your time, Mr. Dragon.'
'Meaning: let's get to the matter at hand.' There was disappointment in Dragon's voice. He had taken a perverse liking to Jonathan and would have enjoyed chatting with someone from outside the closed world of international assassination. 'Very well, then. One of our men—code call: Wormwood—was killed in Montreal. There were two assailants. Search Division has located one of them. You will sanction this man.'
Jonathan smiled at the cryptic jargon of CII, in which 'demote maximally' meant purge by killing, 'biographic leverage' meant blackmail, 'wet work' meant killing, and 'sanction' meant counter-assassination. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and Dragon's face become dimly visible. The hair was white as silk thread, and kinky, like a sheep's. The features, floating in the retreating gloom, were arid alabaster. Dragon was one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena: a total albino. This accounted for his sensitivity to light; his eyes and eyelids lacked protective pigment. He had also been born without the ability to produce white corpuscles in sufficient quantity. As a result, he had to be insulated from contact with people who might carry disease. It was also necessary that his blood be totally replaced by massive transfusions each six months. For the half century of his life, Dragon had lived in the dark, without people, and on the blood of others. This existence had not failed to affect his personality.
Jonathan looked at the face, awaiting the emergence of the most disgusting feature. 'You say Search has located only
'They are working on the second one. It is my hope that they will have identified him by the time you arrive in Montreal.'
'I won't take them both. You know that.' Jonathan had made a moral bargain with himself to work for CII only when it was fiscally necessary. He had to be on his guard against sanction assignments being forced on him at other times.
'It may be necessary that you take both assignments, Hemlock.'
'Forget it.' Jonathan felt his hands grip the arms of his chair. Dragon's eyes were becoming visible. Totally without coloration, they were rabbit pink in the iris and blood red in the pupil. Jonathan glanced away in involuntary disgust.
Dragon was hurt. 'Well, well, we shall talk about the second sanction when the time comes.'
Dragon smiled thinly. 'People seldom come to me with good news.'
'This sanction is going to cost you twenty thousand.'
'Twice your usual fee? Really, Hemlock!'
'I need ten thousand for the Pissarro. And ten for my house.'
'I am not interested in your domestic economy. You need twenty thousand dollars. We normally pay ten thousand for a sanction. There are two sanctions involved here. It seems to work out well.'
'I told you I don't intend to do both jobs. I want twenty thousand for one.'
'And I am telling you that twenty thousand is more than the job is worth.'
'Send someone else then!' For an instant, Jonathan's voice lost its flat calm.
Dragon was instantly uneasy. Sanction personnel were particularly prone to emotional pressures from their work and dangers, and he was always alert for signs of what he called 'tension rot.' In the past year, there had been some indications in Jonathan. 'Be reasonable, Hemlock. We have no one else available just now. There has been some... attrition... in the Division.'
Jonathan smiled. 'I see.' After a short silence, 'But if you have no one else, you really have no choice. Twenty thousand.'
'You are completely without conscience, Hemlock.'
'But then, we always knew that.' He was alluding to the results of psychological tests taken while serving with Army Intelligence during the Korean War. After re-testing to confirm the unique pattern of response, the chief army psychologist had summarized his findings in singularly unscientific prose:
...Considering that his childhood was marked by extreme poverty and violence (three juvenile convictions for assault, each precipitated by his being tormented by other youngsters who resented his extraordinary intelligence and the praise it received from his teachers), and considering the humiliations he underwent at the hands of indifferent relatives after the death of his mother (there is no father of record), certain of his antisocial, antagonistic, annoyingly superior behaviors are understandable, even predictable.
One pattern stands out saliently. The subject has extremely rigid views on the subject of friendship. There is, for him, no greater morality than loyalty, no greater sin than disloyalty. No punishment would be adequate to the task of repaying the person who took advantage of his friendship. And he holds that others are equally bound to his personal code. An educated guess would suggest that his pattern emerges as an overcompensation for feelings of having been abandoned by his parents.
