"Thank you," she said softly, "for the advice about pushing down with the feet. It certainly helps."
"I like to leave people a little richer for having known me."
She held out her hand and he took it. "You really have magnificent eyes, Hemlock. I'm very glad you came."
"Good of you to have me."
In the hall, as he waited for the elevator, he felt pleased about the evening. It had been simple, uncomplicated, and temporarily satisfying: like urination. And that was the way he preferred his love-making to be.
In general, his sex life was no more heroic than, say, the daydreams of the average bachelor. But romantic activity tended to peak when he was on sanction assignments. For one thing, opportunities abounded at such times. For another, his sexual appetite was whetted by the danger he faced, perhaps a microcosmic instance of that perverse force of nature that inflates birthrates during wartime.
Once in bed, he was really very good. His mechanical competence was not a matter of plumbing, in which respect he differed little from the mass of men. Nor, as we have seen, was it a result of wooing and careful preparation. It was, instead, a function of his remarkable staying powers and his rich experience.
Of the experience, it suffices to say that his control was seldom betrayed by the tickle of curiosity. After Ankara, and Osaka, and Naples, there were no postures, no ballistic nuances foreign to him. And there were only two kinds of women with whom he had never had experience: Australian Abos and Eskimos. And neither of these ethnic gaps was he eager to fill, for reasons of olfactory sensitivity.
But the more significant contribution to his epic endurance was tactile. Jonathan felt nothing when he made love. That is to say, he had never experienced that local physical ecstasy we associate with climax. To be sure, his biological factory produced semen regularly, and an overabundance disturbed him, interfered with his sleep, distracted him from work. So he knew great relief at the moment of discharge. But his relief was a termination of discomfort, not an achievement of pleasure.
So he was more to be pitied for the basis of his remarkable control than he was to be envied for the competence it granted him.
MONTREAL: June 9
He finished his smoke then flushed the contents of his ashtray down the toilet. He sat fully clothed on his bed and did a calming unit, breathing deeply and regularly, softening in turn every muscle in his body, his fingertips pressed lightly together and his concentration focused on his crossed thumbs. The dim of his hotel room was lacerated by lances of sunlight through the partially closed blinds. Motes of dust hovered in the shafts of light.
He had passed the morning rehearsing Garcia Kruger's daily routine for a final time before he destroyed the Search tout. Then he had visited two art galleries, strolling with deliberate step, pressing his metabolic rate down to prepare himself for the task before him.
When his body and mind were completely ready, he rose slowly from bed and opened the top drawer of a chest to take out a brown bag folded over at the top like a lunch bag, but containing the silenced revolver Miss Arce had given him. He slipped an identical bag, empty and folded flat, into his coat pocket, then he left his room.
Kruger's office was on a narrow, duty street just off St. Jacques, near the Bonaventure Freight Station. "Cuban Import and Export—Garcia Kruger."
An ostentatious name for a company that received and sent no shipments, and a ludicrous name for the man, the product of some random sperm a German sailor had left for safekeeping in the womb of a Latin lady. Just in front of the building some children were playing cache-cache among the stoops. In fleeing from a pursuer, a ragged gamin with a hungry face and aerodynamic ears bumped into Jonathan, who held onto him to keep him from falling. The boy was surprised and embarrassed, so he scowled to conceal his discomfort.
"I'm afraid you've had it, kid," Jonathan said in French. "Running into a Protestant citizen is an act of FLQ terrorism. What's your name?"
The boy read game-playing in Jonathan's mock-tough voice, and he went along with it. "Jacques," he said, with the broad au diphthong of Quebec horsetalk.
Jonathan mimed a notebook in the palm of his hand. "J-a-c-q-u-e-s. Right! If it happens again, I'll turn you over to Elliot."
After an instant of indecision, the boy grinned at Jonathan and ran off to continue his play.
Garcia Kruger shared a second floor with a dentist and a dance instructor. The lower halves of their windows were painted over with advertisements. Just inside the entrance, Jonathan found the cardboard box he had instructed Miss Arce to have left for him. He carried it up the worn wooden stairs, the loose strips of cross-hatched metal squeaking under his foot. The corridor was cool and silent after the brilliant, cacophonous street. Both the dentist and the dance instructor had gone home for the day, but Jonathan knew from the tout that he would find Kruger in.
His knock was answered by, "Who's there?" from an irritated voice within.
"I'm looking for Dr. Fouchet," Jonathan said in a valid imitation of the smiling/stupid voice of a salesman.
The door opened a few inches and Kruger looked out over a latch chain. He was tall, cadaverous and balding, with a day's growth on his cheeks and dots of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. His shirt was crumpled blue and white stripe, wet in irregular crescents under the arms. And on his forehead there was a scabbed-over bruise, doubtless from his contact with the lamppost.
Jonathan looked awkward and incompetent with the cardboard box in his arms and the brown paper bag balanced on top and held under his chin. "Hi. I'm Ed Benson? Arlington Supplies?"
Kruger told him the dentist was gone for the day, and started to close the door. Jonathan quickly explained that he had promised to bring Dr. Fouchet a sample of their new dental floss, but he had been delayed "...and not by business either," he added, winking.
Kruger leered knowingly, and from his teeth it was evident that he was only casually acquainted with the dentist. But his tone was not civil. "I told you he was out."
Jonathan shrugged. "Well, if he's out, he's out." He started to turn away. Then, as though an idea had struck him, "Say! I could leave the sample with you, sir. And you could give it to Dr. Fouchet in the morning." He produced his most disarming smile. "It would sure get my ass out of the sling."
Grudgingly, Kruger said he would take it. Jonathan started to hand him the box, but the latch chain was in the way. Kruger closed the door with an angry snap, undid the chain, and opened it again. As Jonathan entered, he babbled about how hot it was on the street, but how it wasn't so much the heat as the humidity that got you down. Kruger grunted and turned away to look out the window, leaving Jonathan to put the box down wherever he could in the littered office.
Thunt! The sound of a silenced thirty-eight firing through a paper bag.
Kruger was spun around and slammed into the corner between two windows on which "Cuban Imports" was written backward. He stared at Jonathan with total astonishment.
Jonathan watched him narrowly, expecting a movement toward him.
Kruger lifted his hands, palms up, with a touching gesture of "Why?"
Jonathan considered firing again.
For two terribly long seconds, Kruger remained there, as though nailed to the wall.
Jonathan began to smart with discomfort. "Oh, come on!"
And Kruger slid slowly down the wall as death dimmed his eyes and set them in an infinity focus, the repulsive white dots of mucus still visible. Never having met Kruger before today, and not having any apparent motive, Jonathan had no fear of identification. He folded up the ruptured bag and placed it and the gun inside the fresh bag he had brought along.