Free The Loo Sanction by Trevanian Page B

You carry Bruno Piattellis, don’t you? Pull a couple off the racks, and have one of your tailors alter them to my paper. Conservative in color, not too trendy in cut. You could do it in three or four hours, if you put two men on it.”
    â€œWe
do
have other commitments, sir.”
    â€œDouble the price of the suit. And twenty quid for you.”
    The clerk sighed histrionically. “Very well, sir. I’ll see what can be done.”
    â€œGood man. Have them delivered to the Charing Cross Hotel, to Mr. (he had to think for a second of the mnemonic device he had used for names) Mr. Charles Crosley.”
    The next call was to his shirtmaker in Jermyn Street. A little more pot-sweetening was necessary there because he despised ready-made shirts, and they would have to be cut from his patterns on file. But eventually he received their commitment to have six shirts delivered by five o’clock, together with stockings and linen.
    Jonathan’s last call was to MacTaint.
    â€œAh, is that you, lad? Just a minute.” (The hiss of a phone being cupped over with a hand.) “Lilla? I’m on the phone. Shut your bleeding cob!” (An angry babble from off phone.) “Put a sock in it! . . . Now, what can I do for you, Jonathan?”
    â€œI’m going to mail off three hundred quid to you this afternoon.”
    â€œThat’s nice. Why?”
    â€œI’m in a little trouble. I want a source of money that’s not on my person.”
    â€œPolice?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAh. I see.
Real
trouble. What do I do with the money?”
    â€œKeep two-fifty handy to send to me if I contact you. I’ll probably be at the Great Eastern. My name will be Greg Eastman.”
    â€œAnd the remaining fifty’s for my trouble?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œDone. Keep well, lad.”
    Jonathan rang off. He appreciated MacTaint’s professionalism. It was right that he accept the fee without whimpering protestations of friendship, and it was right that he ask no questions.
    The telephone box was near an Underground entrance, and Jonathan took the long escalator into the tube. Until this trouble was sorted out, he would travel primarily through the anonymous means of the Underground.
    He reemerged into the sunlight near Soho, and he made his way to a double-feature skin flick:
Working Her Way Through the Turkish Army
and
Au Pair Girls in the Vatican
. For four hours he was invisible in the company of the lost, the lonely, the ill, and the warped, who pass their afternoons in torn seats that smell of mildew, candy-wrapper litter under their feet, staring with frozen pupils at Swedish “starlets” moaning in bored mock ecstasy as they make coy orificial use of members and gadgets.

London
    J onathan stayed in the cover of the crowds around Charing Cross Monument, keeping the facade of the Charing Cross Hotel under observation. It was nearly five, and the go-home traffic had thickened. Queues for buses coiled and re-coiled: in a few minutes vehicular and human traffic would nearly coagulate. He was relying on that, in case the people who were after him had had the experience or intelligence to think of checking with his tailor.
    He looked up to the belfry clock of St. Martin’s-In-The-Fields for the time, and he recalled the newspaper reports of the unfortunate fellow who had been found impaled there. A delivery van bearing the name of his shirtmaker had already arrived at the front entrance of the hotel, but he had seen nothing of the bullet-headed boxer in sunglasses or of the 1950 vintage American tourist. Still the suits hadn’t arrived from his tailor; that was disconcerting because everything depended on his being able to pick up his clothes during the rush hours.
    At five o’clock straight up, a taxi pulled into the bustle of the rank outside the hotel, and a young man alighted. He breasted his way through the press of people, a large white box carried high.