The Loo Sanction

great effort, his diction trammeled through clenched teeth. 'Finish the job, Hemlock.'

'I have.'

'No. Not finished. I'm still alive.'

'If you want to die, why don't you do it yourself?'

'Can't. No gun. Grace wouldn't help me. Too weak to get to window.'

The eye glittered with sudden anger. 'Do you know what you did to me?' With a convulsion of effort and a snort of pain, he tore the towel from the side of his face. The cheek was gone, and grinning molars were visible to just below where the ear would have been. The teeth were held in by tapered pink tubes of exposed root. And the eye, lacking support, dangled like a limp mollusk. The bleeding had been staunched, but the flesh oozed with a clear liquid and it had begun to fester.

Jonathan glanced away as Strange replaced the towel. When he looked back, the eye was crying. 'Please kill me, Hemlock. Please? My whole life... devoted... beauty.' The voice grew faint and the fingertips fluttered. The visible cheek had the subaqueous tint of somatic shock, and Jonathan was afraid he would pass out.

'What have you done with Maggie Coyne?'

The eye was dim and confused. 'Who?'

He didn't even know her name. 'The girl! The one Yank informed on. Where is she?'

'She... she's—' The eye pressed shut as he tried to clear his mind. 'No. I have something to bargain with, haven't I?'

Jonathan considered for a moment. 'All right. Tell me where she is, and I'll kill you.'

'You give... word...' The head nodded as the tide of shock rose.

'Come on!'

The eye opened again, the lid fluttering with the effort. 'Word as a gentleman?'

'Where is she?'

'Dead. She is dead.'

Jonathan's insides chilled. He closed his eyes and sucked air in through his lower teeth. He had known it. He had felt it back at the Vicarage. And again as he drove through the sad, deserted city. It had seemed as though some energy out there—some warm force of metaphysical contact had been cut off. But he had conned himself with fragile fables. Maybe they held her hostage. Maybe she had escaped.

Strange's eye grew large with terror as Jonathan turned and walked aimless toward the door. 'You promised!'

'Who killed her?' Jonathan asked, not really caring.

'I did!'

'You? Yourself?'

'Yes!' There was a flabby hiss to the word as air escaped through his cheekless teeth.

Jonathan looked down on him dully. 'You're lying. You're trying to make me kill you in anger. But I'm not going to. I'm going to call for an ambulance. And I'll warn them you're suicidal. So they'll protect you from yourself. They'll fix you up—more or less. And it will be months before you find a way to kill yourself. All that time they'll be looking at you. Nurses. Doctors. Prison guards. Lawyers. They'll look at you. And remember your face.'

Strange's swathed head vibrated with impotent rage. 'You son of a bitch!'

Jonathan started toward the door, the revolver dangling in his hand. 'See you in the newspapers, Strange.'

Strange grasped the back of the sofa for support and pulled himself up. The effort caused the wet towel to fall from his mutilated face. 'Leonard killed her!'

Jonathan turned back.

'I told you once, Hemlock, that I had a vice—expensive—subtler than sex. My vice is expensive because it costs lives. I like to watch the kinds of things Leonard does to women. Leonard was in particularly creative form with this girl of yours. And I watched! She didn't disappoint me, either. She had a strong will. It took a long, long time. We had to revive her often, but—'

Strange won.

He got his way after all.

Stockholm, 28 Days Later

'...in fact, the word 'style' has been gutted of meaning. Overused. Misused. It's a critic's word. No painting has 'style.' Come to think of it, few critics do.'

The audience tittered politely, and Jonathan bowed his head, losing his balance slightly and catching at the side of the podium. When he continued speaking, he was too close to the microphone, and he set up a feedback squeal. 'Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh. Right! It is as meaningless to speak of the style of the Flemish School as it is to babble about the style of this or that painter.'

'You miss my point, sir!' objected the young, terribly intelligent instructor who had introduced the subject.

'I don't miss your point at all, young man,' Jonathan said, taking a sip from the glass of gin he fondly hoped passed for water. 'I anticipate your obscure point, and I choose to ignore it.'

At the back of the auditorium, the with-it young American who was responsible for USIS cultural lectures in Sweden cast an anxious glance toward fforbes-Ffitch, who had flown over from London to see how the lectures he had co-sponsored were going.

'Is he always like this?' fforbes-Ffitch asked in a thin whisper.

'I don't think he's been sober since he came,' the American said.

fforbes-Ffitch arched his eyebrows and shook his head disapprovingly.

'...but you can't deny that the Flemish School and that of Art Nouveau are stylistically antithetical,' the bright Swedish instructor insisted.

'Bullshit!' Jonathan made an angry gesture with his arm and struck the microphone, causing an amplified thunk to punctuate his statement. He shushed the mike with his forefinger across his lips. 'Of course, one can cite broad differences between the two movements. The Flemish painters chose in bulk to deal with natural subjects in a vigorous, healthy, if somewhat bovine manner. While the Art Nouveau types dealt with organic, hyper- sophisticated, almost tropically malignant things. But no painter belongs to a school. Critics concoct schools after the fact. For instance, if you want to look at 'typically Art Nouveau' treatments of floral subjects, I refer you to the Flemish painter Jan van Huysum or, to a lesser degree, to Jacob van Walscappelle.'

'I'm afraid I don't know the painters to whom you refer, sir,' the young Swede said stiffly, giving up all hopes of having his thesis supported by this acrid American critic whose books and articles were just then holding the art world in uncomfortable thrall.

The great majority of the audience was composed of young, shaggy Americans, this USIS center operating, as most of them do, more as a sponsored social club for Americans on the drift than as an effective outlet for American information and propaganda. Jonathan's lectures had broken the usual pattern of boycotting and sparse attendance that resulted from strong feelings against America's failure to grant amnesty to the men who had fled to Sweden to avoid the Vietnam debacle.

'It's a wonder there's a soul here,' fforbes-Ffitch whispered, 'if he's been drunk and nasty like this every night.'

The American diplomat-in-training shrugged. 'But it's been the best houses we've ever had. I don't understand it. They eat it up.'

'Odd lot, the Swedes. Masochists. National guilt over Nobel and his damned explosives, I shouldn't wonder.'

Jonathan's voice boomed over the loudspeakers. 'I shall end this last of my lectures, children, by allowing our joint hosts to say a few words to you. They are obviously bursting with a need to communicate, for they have been babbling together at the back of the hall. I have it on good authority that your USIS host will speak to you on the subject: Why has the nation failed to grant amnesty to young men who had the courage to fight war, rather than to fight people.' Jonathan stepped from the stage, stumbling a little, and the audience turned expectant faces toward the back of the auditorium.