The Loo Sanction

care if the handles match my cummerbund. I am not MI-6.'

'Yes. Of course. Sorry.' The American accent had disappeared again.

Jonathan lay back and rubbed his temples. 'Another thing. Have someone who knows his business dumdum the bullets.'

Yank's sporting sense was offended.

'Tell whoever does it that I want to be able to spin a man around if I only hit him in the hand. Lead slugs without jackets. Points both scooped out and crosshatched.'

'Yes,' Yank said coldly. 'I quite understand.'

Jonathan smiled to himself. Yank really had no stomach for his job. The romance and peekaboo of being a government agent doubtless appealed to him, but, as his reaction to the Feeding Station had shown, the grisly 'wet work' of the business upset him.

But he recovered quickly. 'When you get back to your pad, you'll find everything A-okay. I suppose you'll want a box of cartridges? Taped under the toilet top, maybe,' he added helpfully.

Jonathan laughed aloud. If he couldn't do it with ten shots, it would be because he was too dead.

'OK. So much for the gun. After tea, you'll be having a little brushup with The Sergeant. He's a top man in both judo and karate. Marine champion in his day. You could learn a lot from him.'

Jonathan nodded absently.

Yank swung his feet down from the dresser. 'Right. See you later, alligator.'

As he left, Jonathan returned to rubbing his temples. 'After a while...,' he mumbled.

Jonathan and Maggie took tea together in a corner of the phony Tudor dining room beneath a window. She was quiet and distant, and he assumed she was thinking about her role as an inside person at The Cloisters. He was willing to let the silence lie over them. They no longer needed to touch or to talk.

Briefly, a warm sun penetrated the hanging clouds and touched her cupric hair. The light was vagrant and indirect, seeming to come from within the hair, as gloamings seem to rise from the ground. She was looking down, and her eyes were half hidden by her soft lashes.

'You're a beautiful woman, Maggie Coyne,' he said matter-of-factly.

She looked up at him, the bottle green eyes caught in a triangle of sunlight.

The light dimmed out as the sun disappeared into a wrap of misty clouds.

Then Yank arrived. 'We gotta get to gettin',' he said brightly. 'The Sergeant's waiting on you in the exercise room.'

Jonathan smiled good-bye to Maggie and followed Yank out of the dining room. As they passed through the lounge, he picked up a back copy of Punch and started thumbing through it idly as they mounted the stairs.

From within the exercise room came the sound of guttural grunts, a shouted open vowel, then, as they entered, the splatting thud of a man being slammed down on the mats.

The room was a converted library with its paneled walls incongruously covered with hanging tumbling mats, as was the parqueted floor. It was directly above the pub, and there was a faint odor of stale beer rising from the floor and mixing with the saline smell of sweat. Henry was just rising from the mats slowly and painfully while another Loo man was kicking at a mat-wrapped beam, his toes curled to take the impact on the balls of his feet. He shouted with each blow as he shifted his practice from a front attack to a lateral one.

In the center of the room, large and hulking in his loosely bound judo jacket, was The Sergeant, his heavy frame oddly graceful as he shuffled toward Henry who was crouched in a defensive posture. Jonathan knew that The Sergeant had seen them enter and would do something to impress him, and he mildly pitied Henry.

Yank leaned against the padded wall and watched in silent admiration as The Sergeant stalked his prey, not bothering to feint and grunt. He carried his hands a bit too high. Bait for the trap, Jonathan thought. Henry feinted at The Sergeant, then went in to take advantage of the high guard. A clutch at the jacket, a sweeping kick, and Henry was in the air. He was not able to lay out fully and achieve the flat, wide distribution fall that would absorb most of the impact, and he came down on one shoulder with a liquid nasal grunt.

Stepping over Henry, and pretending to see them for the first time, The Sergeant said, 'Well, bless me if it isn't the American doctor.' He was confident and at his ease, for this was his ground.

Jonathan's face was bland. 'That was amazing,' he said, and The Sergeant thought he detected a hint of nervousness in the way he fingered the magazine.

'Just training, mate. Well, let's get to it. What's your pleasure? Judo? Karate?'

Jonathan looked around helplessly at the other men in the room, who were watching him with much interest and some amusement. The Sergeant had been talking about this encounter all day. 'Well, actually, neither one. I suppose you've read my records from CII.' He laughed hollowly. 'Everyone else seems to have.'

The Sergeant closed the distance between them and stood looking down at Jonathan from a three-inch height advantage, his thumbs hooked in his loosely tied black belt. 'I looked over the part the Guv give me. But I couldn't make no sense of it. Where it should read 'level of competence,' it said something odd.'

'Yes.' Jonathan walked past The Sergeant and sat down at a little library table in a protected alcove, set back out of the way of the combatants. The chair he selected left the only vacant one in the corner of the room. 'I believe the records said 'not qualified, but passed.''

'Right. That was it. Now, what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?'

Jonathan shrugged and looked up at him with diffident, wide eyes. 'Well, it's a peculiar thing. It means that I've never qualified myself in any hand-to-hand sport. Boxing, judo, karate—none of them. But the instructors—men like you—saw fit to pass me anyway.'

The Sergeant crossed and stood over him. 'Well, you'll not find anything slipshod like that in Loo. If I pass you, you're damned right qualified.'

'I suppose you know what's best. But I'd like to explain something to you.' Jonathan searched hard for the right words, and as he did so, he stared absentmindedly at The Sergeant's crotch. Growing uncomfortable, The Sergeant shuffled for a moment, then sat down in the corner chair opposite Jonathan.

Jonathan's demeanor was uncertain. 'Well, if I explain this weird thing to you, perhaps you can give me some pointers that will help me improve my tactics.'

'That's what I'm here for, mate.'

'You see. Although I have never learned much about formal methods of fighting, I almost always win. Isn't that odd?'

The Sergeant regarded the slim body across from him. 'I'd say you were bloody jammy.'

'Perhaps,' Jonathan admitted openly. 'But there's more to it than that. You see, when I was a boy, I knocked around on the streets. And I was fairly lightweight then too. But I had to find some way to stay in one piece when it came to Fist City.' He smiled wanly. 'As it did from time to time.'

Yank made mental note of the term 'Fist City.' He would use it someday.

'And how did you manage that?' The Sergeant asked, obviously bored with this talk and eager to get on with it.

'Well, for one thing, I seem to be able to lull the other man into a sense of security. Then, too, I learned that no fight has to last more than five seconds, and the man who lands the first two blows inevitably wins, if he is not bound to conventions of sportsmanship, or to the effete nonsense of any given technique.'

The Sergeant wasn't sure, but he felt that there was a knock at his trade in that somewhere. His shoulders squared perceptibly.

Jonathan treated him to the gentle clouded smile that other men had recalled in retrospect. 'You see, there's a period of warming up in any fight. The bowing and shuffling of judo; the angry words before a barroom brawl. And I learned that I could do best by attacking with whatever weapon was handy while the other fellow was still pumping himself up for the fight.'

The Sergeant snorted, 'That's all very well and good, if there's a weapon handy.'

Jonathan shrugged. 'Oh, there's always a weapon handy. A brick, a belt, a pencil—'

'A pencil!' The Sergeant roared with laughter, then addressed the small audience. 'You 'ear this? The yank here toughs up his opponents by tappin' 'em on the head with a pencil! Must take a while!'