"What is it?"

"My watch has stopped."

The man on the other end of the line sighed heavily. "Good night, Yank."

"Good night, sir."

Jonathan 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.

"Fucking 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 for them. Under the protection and blessing of the government, he had performed a half-dozen counter-assassinations ("sanctions," in the crepuscular bureaucratese of CII).

Tired and depressed, he had pushed open the door to his flat, and walked in on a party in progress. Every light was on, his whiskey had been broken out, Haydn played on the phonograph, and the furniture had been moved about to facilitate examination of the eleven Impressionists lining the walls.

But it was a party for only one person. An old man sat alone in a deep wing chair, glass in hand, his tattered overcoat still on, its collar up to his ears revealing only tousled gray hair and a bulbous, new-potato nose.

"Come in. Come in," the old man invited.

"Thank you," Jonathan said, hoping the irony had not been too heavy.

"Have some whiskey?"

"Yes, I think I will." Jonathan poured out a good tot of Laphroaig. "Could I freshen up yours?"

"Oh, that's good of you, son. But I've had sufficient."

Jonathan tugged off his raincoat. "In that case, get the hell out of here."

"In a while. In a while. Relax, lad. I'm feasting my tired eyes on that bit of crusted pigment there. Manet. Good for the soul."

Jonathan smiled, intrigued by this old leprechaun who looked like a cross between a provincial professor emeritus and a dirty dustman. "Yes, it's a first-quality copy."

"Pig shit."

"Sir?"

The visitor leaned forward, dandruff falling from his matted hair, and enunciated carefully. "Pig shit. If that's a copy, I'm a glob of whore's spit."

"Have it your own way. Now get out." As he approached the gnomish housebreaker, Jonathan was deterred by a barrier of odor: ancient sweat, body dirt, mildewed clothing.

The old man raised his hand. "Before you set to bashing me about, I'd best introduce myself. I'm MacTaint."

After a stunned moment, Jonathan laughed and shook MacTaint's hand. Then, for several hours, they drank and talked about painting. At no time did MacTaint take off the tattered, heel-length overcoat, and Jonathan was to learn that he never did.

MacTaint downed the last of the whiskey, set the bottle on the floor beside his chair, and regarded Jonathan with an evaluative squint from beneath shaggy white eyebrows, the salient characteristic of which was maverick hairs that hooked out like antennae over the glittering eyes. "So! You are Jonathan Hemlock." He chuckled. "I can tell you, lad, that your appearance on the scene scared the piss out of a lot of us. You could have been a vast nuisance, you know, with that phenomenal eye of yours. My colleagues in the business of reproducing masters might have found it difficult to pursue their vocations with you about. There was even talk of relieving you of the burden of your bleeding life. But then! Then came the happy news that you, like all worthy men, were at heart a larcenous and acquisitive son of a bitch."

"I'm not very acquisitive anymore."

"That's true, come to think of it. You haven't made a purchase for-how long is it?"

"Four years."

"And why is that?"

"I parted company with my source of money."

"Oh, yes. There was rumor of some kind of government association. As I recall, it was the kind of thing no one wanted to know about. Still. You haven't done half badly. You own these grand paintings, two of which, if I may remind you, came through my own good offices."

"I've never been sure, Mac. What are you? A thief or a handler."

"A thief, by preference. But I'll flog another man's work when times are hard. And you? What are you-other than a frigging enigma?"

"Frigging enigma?"

MacTaint scratched the scruff on his scalp. "You know perfectly well what I mean. My comrades on the continent shared my curiosity about you at first, and we pooled our fragments of information. Bits and pieces that never seemed to form a whole picture. You had this gift, this eye that made it possible for you to spot a fake at a glance. But the rest didn't make much sense. University professor. Critic and writer. Collector of black market paintings. Mountain climber. Employed in some kind of nasty government business. Frigging enigma, that's what you are..."

The taxi driver swore under his breath and jerked back the hand brake. They were frozen in a tangle of traffic around Trafalgar Square. Jonathan decided to walk the rest of the way. His eagerness to be away from the people at Tomlinson's had made him an hour early for his appointment with MacTaint anyway, and he could use the exercise.

To get away from the crowds and the noise for a second, he turned down Craven Street, past the Monk's Tavern, to Craven Passage and The Arches where destitute old women were settling in to pass the night on the paving stones, scraps of cardboard beneath them to absorb the damp, their backs against the brick walls, bits of fabric tugged about them for warmth. They drowsed with the help of gin, but never so deep into sleep that they missed the odd passerby whom they begged for coins or fags with droning, liturgical voices.

Swinging London.

He held to the back streets as long as possible. His mind kept returning to the Renaissance man he had met at Tomlinson's. Five million pounds for a Marini Horse? Impossible. And yet the man had seemed so confident. The event had made Jonathan uncomfortable. It had those qualities of the deadly absurd, of melodramatic hokum and very real threat that he associated with the lethal game players of international espionage, that group of social mutants he had despised when he worked for CII, and whom he had driven from his memory.

He turned back up into the lights and noise of center city. The rain had developed into a dirty, hanging mist that blurred and blended the stew of neon and noise through which crowds of fun-seekers jostled their way.