The Eiger Sanction

The Eiger Sanction

Wormwood's step was crisp along the emptying street. He felt uplifted by a sense—not of greatness, to be sure—but ofadequacy . For once he had not muddled the job. His reflection rippled along a dark shop window, and he was not displeased with what he saw. The confident glance and determined stride more than compensated for the sloping shoulders and balding head. Wormwood twisted his palms outward to correct his shoulder slump because someone once told him that the best way to achieve manly posture was to walk with the palms forward. It was most uncomfortable, and it made him walk rather like a penguin, but he did it whenever he thought of it. He was painfully reminded of his recent encounter with the rosebush, but he discovered that he could relieve his discomfort by nipping the seam of his pants between thumb and forefinger and tugging it away from his buttocks. And this he did from time to time, ignoring the open curiosity of passersby.

He was content. “It's got to be a matter of confidence,” he told himself. “I knew I could pull this off, and I pulled it off!” He treasured a theory that one attracted bad luck by anticipating it, and the results of his last several assignments seemed to lend support to the concept. In general, theories did not hold up for Wormwood. To his problem of balding, he had applied the principle of Keep It Short and You'll Keep It Long, and he always wore a crew cut that made him appear less significant than necessary, but his hair continued to fall. For a while, he had clung to the theory that early balding indicated uncommon virility, but personal experience eventually forced him to abandon this hypothesis.

“This time I'm home free, and no screw-up. Six o'clock tomorrow morning I'll be back in the States!” His fist tightened down on the bubble gum. He could not afford another failure. The men at home base were already referring to him as the “one-man Bay of Pigs.”

As he turned left into Lessage Lane, the street seemed empty of sound and people. He took note of this. By the time he had turned south again on St. Dominique, it was so silent that the sound of his footfalls seemed to clip back at him from the facades of unlit, dreary brick buildings. The silence did not disturb him; he whistled as a matter of choice.

“This think-positive bit really scores,” he thought jazzily. “Winners win, and that's a fact.” Then his round boyish face contracted into concern as he wondered if it was also true that losers lose. He tried to remember his college logic course. “No,” he decided at length, “that doesn't necessarily follow. Losers don't always lose. But winners always win!” He felt better for having thought it out.

He was only one block from his third-rate hotel. He could see the damaged sign H TEL in vertical red neon down the street. “Almost home free.”

He recalled CII Training Center instructions always to approach your destination from the opposite side of the street, so he crossed over. He had never fully understood the reason for this rule, beyond simple sneakiness, but it would no more occur to him to demand an explanation than it would to disobey. St. Dominique's wrought iron streetlamps had not yet fallen prey to urban uglification in the form of lip-blacking mercury lamps, so Wormwood was able to amuse himself by watching his shadow slip out from beneath his feet and grow long before him, until the next lamp assumed domination and projected his shadow, ever shortening, behind him. He was looking over his shoulder, admiring this photic phenomenon, when he ran into the lamppost. Upon recovery, he glanced angrily up and down the street, mentally daring anyone to have seen.

Someone had seen, but Wormwood did not know this, so he glared at the offending lamppost, straightened his shoulders by twisting his palms forward, and crossed to his hotel.

The hall was reassuringly redolent of that medley of mildew, Lysol, and urine characteristic of rundown hotels. According to subsequent reports, Wormwood must have entered the hotel between 11:55 and 11:57. Whatever the exact time, we may be sure he checked it, delighting as always in the luminosity of his watch's dial. He had heard that the phosphorescent material used on watch dials could cause skin cancer, but he felt that he made up for the risk by not smoking. He had developed the habit of checking the time whenever he found himself in a dark place. Otherwise, what was the use of having a watch with a luminous dial? It was probably the time he spent considering this that made the difference between 11:55 and 11:57.

As he climbed the dimly lit staircase with its damp, scrofulous carpet, he reminded himself that “winners win.” His spirits sank, however, when he heard the sound of coughing from the room next to his. It was a racking, gagging, disease-laden cough that went on in spasms throughout the night. He had never seen the old man next door, but he hated the cough that kept him awake.

Standing outside his door, he took the bubble gum from his pocket and examined it. “Probably microfilm. And it's probably between the gum and the paper. Where the funnies usually are.”

His key turned the slack lock. As he closed the door behind himself, he breathed with relief. “There's no getting around it,” he admitted. “Winners—”

But the thought choked in mid-conception. He was not alone in the room.

With a reaction the Training Center would have applauded, he popped the bubble gum, wrapper and all, into his mouth and swallowed it just as the back of his skull was crushed in. The pain was very sharp indeed, but the sound was more terrible. It was akin to biting into crisp celery with your hands over your ears—but more ultimate.

He heard the sound of the second blow quite clearly—a liquid crunch—but oddly it did not hurt.

Then something did hurt. He could not see, but he knew they were cutting open his throat. The image of it made him shudder, and he hoped he wouldn't be sick Then they began on his stomach. Something cold rippled in and out of his stomach. The old man next door coughed and gagged. Wormwood's mind chased the thought that had been arrested by his first fright.

“Winners win,” he thought, then he died.

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, Professor of Art, spun out his closing lecture to the mass class in Art and Society—a course he abhorred to teach, but one which was the bread and butter of his department. His lecture style was broadly ironic, even insulting, but he was vastly popular with the students, each of whom imagined his neighbor was writhing under Dr. Hemlock's superior disdain. They interpreted his cold acidity as an attractive bitterness in the face of the unfeeling bourgeois world, an epitome of thatWeltschmerz so precious to the melodramatic soul of the undergraduate.

Hemlock's popularity with students had several unrelated bases. For one, at thirty-seven he was the youngest full professor in the Art faculty. The students assumed therefore that he was a liberal. He was not a liberal, nor was he a conservative, a Tory, a wet, an isolationist or a Fabian. He was interested only in art, and he was indifferent to and bored by such things as politics, student freedom, the war on poverty, the plight of the Negro, war in Indochina, and ecology. But he could not escape his reputation as a “student's professor.” For example, when he met classes after an interruption caused by a student revolt, he openly ridiculed the administration for lacking the ability and courage to crush so petty a demonstration. The students read this as a criticism of the establishment, and they admired him more than ever.

“...after all, there are only Art and non-Art. There are no such things as Black Art, Social Art, Young Art, Pop Art, Mass Art. These are merely fictional rubrics designed to grace, through classification, the crap of inferior daubers who...”

Male students who had read of Hemlock's international exploits as a mountain climber were impressed by the image of scholar/athlete, despite the fact that he had not climbed for several years. And young ladies were attracted by his arctic aloofness, which they assumed concealed a passionate and mysterious nature. But he was far from the physical idiom of the romantic type. Slim and of average height, only his precise and wiry movements and his veiled green-gray eyes recommended him to their sexual fantasies.

As one might suspect, Hemlock's popularity did not extend to the faculty. They resented his academic reputation, his refusal to serve on committees, his indifference to their projects and proposals, and his much-publicized student charisma, which term they always inflected so as to make it sound like the opposite of scholarly integrity. His major protection against their snide bile was the rumor that he was independently wealthy and lived in a mansion on Long Island. Typical academic liberals, the faculty were stunned and awkward in the face of wealth, even rumored wealth. There was no way for them to disprove or substantiate these rumors because none of them had ever been invited to his home, nor were they likely to be.

“...the appreciation of art cannot be learned. It requires special gifts—gifts which you naturally assume you possess because you have been brought up on the belief that you were created equal. What you don't realize is that this only means you are equal to one another...”

Speaking automatically, Hemlock allowed his eye to wander over the front row of his amphitheatre classroom. As usual, it was filled with smiling, nodding, mindless girls, their skirts hitched too high and their knees unconsciously apart. It occurred to him that, with their up-turned little smiles and round, empty eyes, they looked like a row of umlaut U's. He never had anything to do with the female students: students, virgins, and drunks he held to be off limits. Opportunities were rife, and he was not enfeebled by free-floating morality; but he was a sporting man, and he ranked the making of these dazzled imbeciles with shining deer and dynamiting fish at the base of the dam.

As always, the bell coincided with the last word of his lecture, so he wrapped up the course by wishing the students a peaceful summer unsullied by creative thought. They applauded, as they always did on last day, and he left quickly.

As he turned the corner of the hall, he encountered a mini-skirted co-ed with long black hair and eyes made up like a ballerina's. With excited catches of breath, she told him how much she had enjoyed the course and how she felt closer to Art than ever before.

“How nice.”

“The problem I have, Dr. Hemlock, is that I have to keep a B average, or I lose my scholarship.”

He fished in his pocket for his office keys.

“And I'm afraid I'm not going to do well enough in your final. I mean—I have gained a greatfeeling for Art—but you can't always put feelings down on paper.” She looked up at him, gathered her courage, and tried hard to make her eyes terribly meaningful. “So, if there's anything I can do to get a better grade—I mean, I'd be willing to do anything at all. Really.”

Hemlock spoke gravely. “You've considered all the implications of that offer?”

She nodded and swallowed, her eyes shining with anticipation.

He lowered his voice confidentially. “Do you have anything planned for tonight?”

She cleared her throat and said no, she didn't.

Hemlock nodded. “Do you live alone?”

“My roommate's gone for the week.”

“Good. Then I suggest you break out the books and study your ass off. That's the surest way I know to ensure your grade.”

“But...”

“Yes?”

She crumpled. “Thank you.”

“A pleasure.”

She walked slowly down the hall as Hemlock entered his office, humming to himself. He liked the way he had done that. But his euphoria was transient. On his desk he found notes he had written to himself, reminders of bills soon due and past due. University rumors of private wealth were baseless; the truth was that Hemlock spent each year a little more than three times his income from teaching, books, and commissions for appraisal and evaluation. Most of his money—about forty thousand a year—he earned by moonlighting. Jonathan Hemlock worked for the Search and Sanction Division of CII. He was an assassin.

The telephone buzzed, and he pressed down the flashing button and lifted the receiver. “Yes?”

“Hemlock? Can you talk?” The voice belonged to Clement Pope, Mr. Dragon's first assistant. It was impossible to miss the strained, hushed tone. Pope loved playing spy.

“What can I do for you, Pope?”

“Mr. Dragon wants to see you.”

“I assumed as much.”

“Can you get over here in twenty minutes?”

“No.” Actually, twenty minutes was ample time, but Jonathan loathed the personnel of Search and Sanction. “What about tomorrow?”

“This is top drawer. He wants to see younow .”

“In an hour, then.”

“Look, pal, if I were you I'd get my ass over here as soon as—” but Jonathan had hung up.

For the next half hour Jonathan puttered around his office. When he was sure he would arrive at Dragon's in something over the predicted hour, he called a taxi and left the campus.

As the grimy, ancient elevator tugged him to the top floor of a nondescript Third Avenue office building, Jonathan automatically noted the familiar details: the scaly gray paint on the walls, the annual inspection stamps slapped haphazardly over one another, the Otis recommendation for load limit, twice scratched out and reduced in deference to the aging machinery. He anticipated everything he would see for the next hour, and the anticipation made him uneasy.

The elevator stopped and swayed slackly while the doors clattered open. He stepped out on the top floor of offices, turned left, and pushed open the heavy NO ADMITTANCE fire door leading to a stairwell. Sitting on the dank cement stairs, his toolbox beside him, was a huge Negro workman in coveralls. Jonathan nodded and stepped past him up the steps. One flight up, the stairs came to an end, and he pressed out through another fire door to what had been the loft of the building before CII had installed a suite of offices there. The smell of hospital, so sharply remembered, filled the hallway where an overblown cleaning woman slowly swung a mop back and forth over the same spot. On a bench to one side of a door bearing: “Yurasis Dragon: Consulting Service,” sat a beefy man in a business suit, his briefcase in his lap. The man rose to face Jonathan, who resented being touched by these people. All of them, the Negro worker, the cleaning woman, the businessman, were CII guards; and the toolbox, the mop handle, and the briefcase all contained weapons.

Jonathan stood with his legs apart, his hands against the wall, embarrassed and annoyed with himself for being embarrassed, while the businessman's professional hands frisked part of his body and clothing.

“This is new,” the businessman said, taking a pen from Jonathan's pocket. “You usually carry one of French make—dark green and gold.”

“I lost it.”

“I see. Does this have ink in it?”

“It's a pen.”

“I'm sorry. I'll either have to keep it for you until you come out, or I can check it out. If I check it out, you'll lose the ink.”

“Why don't you just keep it for me.”

The businessman stepped aside and allowed Jonathan to enter the office.

“You are eighteen minutes late, Hemlock,” Mrs. Cerberus accused as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

“Thereabouts.” Jonathan was assailed by the overwhelming hospital smell of the glistening outer office. Mrs. 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.”