The Eiger Sanction (8 page)

They lay side by side on the warm sand under a sky no longer brittle blue, but bleaching steadily with a high haze that preceded the wall of heavy gray cloud pressing inevitably from the north. They had changed back into work clothes, but had not returned to work.

“That's enough sun and sand for me, sir,” Jemima said eventually, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. “And I don't feel much like getting stormed on, so I'm going up and stroll around in the house. OK?”

He hummed drowsy acquiescence.

“Is it all right if I make a phone call? I have to tell the airline where I am.”

He did not open his eyes, fearful of damaging the half-doze he was treasuring. “Don't talk more than three minutes,” he said, barely moving his mouth.

She kissed him gently on his relaxed lips.

“OK,” he said. “But no more than four minutes.”

When he returned to the house it was late afternoon and the cloud pack was unbroken from horizon to horizon. He found Jemima lounging in the library, looking through a portfolio of Hokusai prints. He looked over her shoulder for a time, then drifted up to his bar. “It's getting cold. Care for some sherry?” His voice bounced through the nave.

“Sounds fine. I don't like your bar, though.”

“Oh?”

She followed him as far as the altar rail. “It's too much nose-thumbing, if you know what I mean.”

“As in, 'Oh, grow up'?”

“Yes. As in that.” She accepted the chalice of wine and sat on the rail sipping it. He watched her with proprietary pleasure.

“Oh, by the way!” She stopped drinking suddenly. “Do you know that there's a madman on your grounds?”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. I met him on my way up here. He was snarling and digging a hole that looked terribly like a grave.”

Jonathan frowned. “I can't imagine who that could be.”

“And he was mumbling to himself.”

“Was he?”

“Yes. Real vulgar stuff.”

He shook his head. “I'll have to look into it.”

She did the salad while he broiled steaks. The fruit had been chilling since they got home, and the purple grapes mauved over with a haze of frost when they met the humid air of the garden where places had been set at a wrought iron table, despite the probability of rain. He opened a bottle of Pichon-Longue-ville-Baron, and they ate while the onset of night smoothly transferred the source of light from the treetops of the flickering hurricane lamps on the table. The flicker stopped, the air grew dense and unmoving, and occasional flashes along the storm line glittered to the north. They watched the scudding sky grow darker while little breaths of cool wind leading the storm reanimated the lamps and fluttered the black-and-silver foliage around them. For long afterwards, Jonathan was to remember the meteor trail of Jemima's glowing cigarette when she lifted it to smoke.

He spoke out of a longish silence. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

She followed him back into the house. “There's a certain spookiness about this, you know,” she said as he got the key from the back of the kitchen drawer and led her down the half-turn stone steps. “Into the catacombs? Probably a lime pit in the cellar. What do I really know about you? Maybe I should drop bits of bread so I can find my way back out.”

Jonathan turned on the lights and stepped aside. She walked past him, drawn in by the paintings that radiated from the walls. “Oh, my! Oh, Jonathan!”

He sat at his desk chair, watching her as she moved from canvas to canvas with an uneven pulsing flow, attracted by the next painting, unwilling to leave the last. She made little humming sounds of pleasure and admiration, rather as a contented child does when eating breakfast alone.

Her eyes full, she sat on the carved piano bench and looked down at the Kashan for some time. “You're a singular man, Jonathan Hemlock.”

He nodded.

“All this just for you. This megalomaniac house; these...” she made a sweeping gesture with her hand and eyes. “You keep all this to yourself.”

“I'm a singularly selfish man. Like some champagne?”

“No.”

She looked down and shook her head sadly. “All this matters to you a great deal. Even more than Mr. Dragon led me to believe.”

“Yes, it matters, but...”

...For some minutes they said nothing. She did not look up, and he, after the first shocked glance, tried to calm his confusion and anger by forcing his eye to roam over the paintings.

Finally he sighed and pushed himself out of the chair. “Well, lady, I'd better be getting you to the depot. Last train for the city...” His voice trailed off.

She followed him obediently up the stone steps. While they had been in the gallery, the storm had broken violently above without their hearing it. Now they climbed up through layers of quickening, muffled sound—the metallic rattle of rain on glass, the fluting and flap of wind, the thick, distant rumblings of thunder.

In the kitchen she asked, “Do we have time for that glass of champagne you offered me?”

He protected his hurt by the dry freeze of politeness. “Certainly. In the library?”

He knew she was distressed, and he wielded his artificial social charm like a bludgeon, chatting lightly about the paucity of transportation to his corner of Long Island, and of the particular difficulties the rain imposed. They sat facing each other in heavy leather chairs while the rain rattled horizontally against the stained glass, and the walls and floor rippled with reds and greens and blues. Jemima cut into the flow of anticommunicative chat.

“I guess I shouldn't have just dropped it on you like that, Jonathan.”

“Oh? How should you have dropped it, Jemima?”

“I couldn't let it go on—I mean, I couldn't letus go on without your knowing. And I couldn't think of a more gentle way to tell you.”

“You might have hit me with a brick,” he suggested. Then he laughed. “I must have been dazzled. You're a real dazzler. I should have recognized the anti-chance of coincidence. You on the plane from Montreal. You just happened to pass by Dragon's office in that taxi. How was it supposed to work, Jemima? Were you supposed to bring me to a white heat of desire, then deny your body unless I agreed to do this sanction for Dragon? Or were you going to whisper insidious persuasions into my ear as I lay in the euphoria of postcoitus vulnerability.”

“Nothing so cool. I was told to steal your payment for the last assignment.”

“That's certainly direct.”

“I saw it lying on your desk downstairs. Mr. Dragon says you need the money badly.”

“He's right. Why you? Why not one of his other flunkeys?”

“He thought I would be able to get close to you quickly.”

“I see. How long have you worked for Dragon?”

“I don't really work for him. I'm CII, but I'm not Search and Sanction. They chose someone out of your department to avoid recognition.”

“Very sensible. What do you do?”

“I'm a courier. The stewardess front is good for that.”

He nodded. “Have you had many assignments like this? Using your body to get at someone?”

She considered, then rejected the easy lie. “A couple.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. “Aren't we the pair? A selfish killer and a patriotic whore. We should mate just to see what the offspring would be. I have nothing against selfish whores, but patriotic killers are the worst kind.”

“Jonathan.” She leaned forward, suddenly angry. “Do you have any idea how important this assignment Mr. Dragon wants you to take is?”

He regarded her with bland silence; he had no intention of making anything easier.

“I know he didn't give you the details. He couldn't unless he was sure you would take the job. But if you knew what is at stake, you would cooperate.”

“I doubt that.”

“I wish I could tell you. But my instructions—”

“I understand.”

After a pause, she said, “I tried to get out of it”

“Oh? Did you?”

“This afternoon, while we were lying on the beach, I realized what a rotten thing it would be to do, now that we were...”

“Now that we were what?” He arched his eyebrows in cool curiosity.

Her eyes winced. “Anyway, I left you and came up here to call Dragon and ask him to let me out.”

“I assume he refused.”

“He couldn't speak to me. He was undergoing a transfusion or something. But his man refused—whatshisname.”

“Pope.” He finished his wine and placed the glass on a table deliberately. “It's a little hard for me to buy, you know. You've been on this thing for some time—since Montreal. And you seem convinced that I ought to take this assignment—”

“Youmust , Jonathan!”

“...and despite all that, you expect me to believe that one gentle afternoon has changed your mind. I can't help feeling you're making the mistake of trying to con a con.”

“I haven't changed my mind. It's only that I didn't want to do the thing myself. And you know perfectly well that this has been more than just a gentle afternoon.”

He looked at her, his eyes moving from one of hers to the other. Then he nodded, “Yes, it's been more than that.”

“For me, it wasn't just this afternoon. I've spent days going over your records—which, by the way, are embarrassingly complete. I know what your boyhood was like. I know how CII roped you into your job in the first place. I know about the killing of your friend in France. And even before this assignment, I'd seen you on educational television.” She grinned. “Lecturing about art in your superior, sassy way. Oh, I was ninety percent hooked before I met you. Then, down in your room—I was really pleased when you invited me down there. I couldn't help babbling. I knew from the files that you never bring anyone there. Anyway, down in the room, with you sitting there so happy, and all those beautiful paintings, and that blue envelope with your money sitting so unprotected on your desk... I had to tell you that's all.”

“You have anything else to say?”

“No.”

“You don't want to talk about shoes, or ships, or sealing wax?”

“No.”

“In that case,” he crossed to her and drew her out of the chair by her hands. “I'll race you up the stairs.”

“You're on.”

A rain-shimmered shaft of light lay across her eyes, revealing at surprising moments the harlequin flecks of gold. He lowered his forehead to hers, closed his eyes, and hummed a raspy note of satisfaction and pleasure. Then he drew back so he could see her better. “I'm going to tell you something,” he said, “and you mustn't laugh.”

“Tell me.”

“You have the most beautiful eyes.”

She looked up at him with eternal feminine calm. “That's very sweet. Why should I laugh?”

“Someday I'll tell you.” He kissed her gently. “On second thought, I probably won't tell you. But that warning about laughing still goes.”

“Why?”

“Because if you laugh, you'll lose me.”

The image amused her, so she laughed, and she lost him.

“I warned you, right? Although it really doesn't matter, for all the good I was doing you.”

“Don't talk about it.”

He laughed in his turn. “You know something? This is going to come at you as a big surprise. Endurance is my forte. I'm not conning. That's normally what I have to recommend me. Endurance. How's that for yaks?”

“We have all kinds of time. At least you didn't reach for a cigarette.”

He rolled over onto his back and spoke quietly into the common dark above them. “All things taken into consideration, Nature's really a capricious bitch. I've never cared much about the women I was with—I usually don't feel much of anything. And so I'm a paragon of control. And they do very well indeed. But with you—when I cared and it mattered, andbecause I cared and it mattered—I suddenly became the fastest gun in the east. Like I said, Nature's a bitch.”

Gem turned to him. “Hey, what is all this? You're talking like it was afterwards. And here all the time I've been hoping it was between times.”

He swung out of bed. “You're right! It's between times. You just wait there while I get us a resuscitating split of champagne.”

“No, wait.” She sat up in bed, her body outlined with silver backlight and splendid. “Come back here and let me talk to you.”

He lay across the bottom of the bed and put his cheek against her feet. “You sound serious and portentous and all.”

“I am. It's about this job for Mr. Dragon—”

“Please, Gem.”

“No. No, now just keep quiet for a second. It has to do with a biological device that the other side is working on. It's a very ugly thing. If they come up with it before we do... That could be terrible, Jonathan.”

He hugged her feet to him. “Gem, it doesn't matter who's ahead in this kind of race. It's like two frightened boys dueling with hand grenades at three feet. It really doesn't matter who pulls the pin first.”

“What does matter is that we aren't so likely to pull the pin!”

“If you're saying that the average shopkeeper in Seattle is a humane guy, that's perfectly true. But so is the average shopkeeper in Petropavlovsk. The fact is that the pin is in the hands of men like Dragon or, even worse, at the mercy of a short circuit in some underground computer.”