The Loo Sanction Read Online Free Page A

heads of the company, chanting in thin falsetto something about a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and you.
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    The Renaissance man settled into the passenger seat of his Jensen Interceptor and adjusted his suit coat to prevent its wrinkling. “Has he left?”
    The Mute nodded.
    â€œAnd he’s being followed?”
    The Mute nodded again.
    The Renaissance man clicked on the tape deck and settled to listen to a little Bach as the car crunched along the driveway, its lights out.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    A young man with a checked sports coat and a camera depended from his neck stood in a red telephone kiosk beneath a corner streetlamp. While the phone on the other end of the line double-buzzed, he clamped the receiver under his chin awkwardly as he scrawled in a notebook. He had been holding the license number on the rim of his memory by chanting it over and over to himself. Hearing an answering click and hum, he pressed in his twopence piece and said in a hard “r” American accent, “Hi, there.”
    A cultured voice responded, “Yes? What is it, Yank?”
    â€œHow did you know it was me?”
    â€œThat hermaphroditic accent of yours.”
    â€œOh. I see.” Crestfallen, the young man abandoned his phony American sound and continued with the nasal drawl of public school. “He has left the party, sir. Took a cab.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWell, I thought you would like to know. He was followed.”
    â€œGood. Good.”
    â€œShall I tag along?”
    â€œNo, that wouldn’t be wise.” The cultured voice was silent for a moment. “Very well. I suppose you have the Baker Street ploy set up?”
    â€œRight, sir. By the way, just in case you want to know, I took note of the time of his departure. He left at exactly . . . Good Lord.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œMy watch has stopped.”
    The man on the other end of the line sighed heavily. “Good night, Yank.”
    â€œGood night, sir.”

Covent Garden
    J onathan sat deep in the back of the taxi, attending only vaguely to the hissing pass of traffic over wet streets. He experienced his usual social nausea after public gatherings of reviewers, teachers, gallery owners, patrons—the paracreative slugs who burden art with their attention—the parasites who pretend to be symbions and who support, with their groveling leadership, the teratogenetic license of democratic art.
    â€œFucking grex venalium,” he muttered to himself, displaying both aspects of his background—the slums and the university halls.
    Forget it, he told himself. Don’t let them get to you. He looked forward this evening to a pleasant hour or two with MacTaint, his favorite person in London. A thief, a rogue, and a con with a fine sense of scatology and a haughty disdain for such social imperatives as cleanliness, MacTaint seemed to be visiting modern London from the pages of Dickens or the chorus of
Threepenny Opera
. But he knew painting as did few people in Europe, and he was England’s most active dealer in the gray market of stolen art. Although Jonathan had never before been to MacTaint’s home, they had often met in little pubs around Covent Garden to drink and joke and talk about painting.
    He smiled to himself as he recalled their first meeting three months earlier. He had returned to his flat after a day marred by lectures to serious, ungifted students; meetings with committees whose keen senses of parliamentary procedure obscured their purposes; and gatherings of academic people and art critics, all fencing for position in their miniature arena. He was fed up, and he needed to pass some resuscitating time with his paintings, the eleven Impressionists that were all that remained from the four years he had worked for the Search and Sanction Division of CII. These paintings were the most important things in his life. After all, he had killed