Tremor of Intent (23 page)

‘Well,' said Roper, more cheerfully, ‘you don't have to do the job, do you? You're going to kill Hillier, and Hillier won't be taking me –' He nearly said ‘home'.

‘Ah, that's not it.' Wriste head-shook sadly.

‘You've got your money,' said Hillier. ‘You said so. You don't have to kill either of us.'

‘I've got
some
money,' said Wriste. ‘Not all. You paid me at the beginning of your trip, Mr Hillier, and you were presumably going to pay me at the end. So with these two jobs. Before I can receive the balance – from Department X and Mr Y alike – I have to furnish evidence of the satisfactory fulfilment of the assignments. What I normally take back is a finger –'

‘A
finger?
'

‘Yes. For the fingerprints. Most of my patients are fingerprinted men. Agents and top-level scientists and so on, men with detailed dossiers. Strange, once you have a dossier you seem potentially to have committed a capital crime. This sort of punishment –' He waved his gun. ‘It always hovers. When you've finished that cigar, Mr Hillier, the hawk must swoop.'

‘You could,' said Roper, ‘cut off a finger and let us go.' He spoke as dispassionately as if his body were a tree to be pruned.

Wriste again shook his head, more sadly than before. ‘I've never yet performed an act of other than terminal surgery, though the request has been made often enough. No, gentlemen both, I have my honour, I have my professional pride. If either of you were ever to appear, finger-less but otherwise whole, walking the world smiling, my career would be at an end. Besides, there's a man called the Inspector.'

‘Oh, my God,' groaned Hillier.

‘Yes, the Inspector. Nobody knows his name, I doubt if
anyone's ever seen him, I sometimes doubt whether he really exists. He is perhaps a mere personification of Honour. But it's convenient to believe in him. No, no, gentlemen, it's no good.' He took from an inside pocket a plush case, rather finely made, and clicked it open. ‘I've never had occasion to use this before,' he said. ‘See, there are grooves for two fingers. I have another case, rather well-worn, for the single digit. One man I know, very ambitious, uses a cigar-case, but that seems to me to be crude. I had this specially made by a man in Walthamstow, of all places. I said it was for the accommodation of amputated fingers, and he laughed.'

Hillier could not drag any more smoke from his Brazilian. He had five more in his pocket: what a waste. ‘Well,' he said. Roper, as if to ensure that Wriste's token should not disgrace him, though dead, was busily biting his nails.

‘Strange, isn't it?' said Wriste dreamily, pulling back the safety-catch. Hillier's eyes were drawn to the weapon; if he and it were to engage in the ultimate intimacy, he had at least to know its name. It was a Pollock 45, beautifully looked after. Wriste was a real professional, but there were elements of corruption in him. This personal interest in his victims would be the death of him, Hillier thought. ‘Strange,' repeated Wriste, ‘that in a minute or so you will both be vouchsafed the final answer. Religion may be proved all nonsense or else completely vindicated. And the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope of Rome cannot in the least profit from your discovery. Top secret. Locked drawers. A safe with an unbreakable combination. There may be a quattrocento heaven, there may be a Gothic hell. Why not? Our aseptic rational world does not have to be a mirror of ultimate reality. Hell with fire and vipers and mocking devils for ever and ever and ever. At this moment I always survey my victims with a kind of awe. The knowledge they are going to possess is the only knowledge worth having. Would either of you gentlemen like to pray?'

‘No,' cried stout Roper. ‘A load of bloody nonsense.'

‘Mr Hillier?'

Hillier swallowed on a vision of Clara. He had, even though retrospectively, defiled that image. His whores and victims marched, in swirling mist, over an endless plain, their formation S-shaped, pointing at him with three-fingered hands, lipless, noseless, only great eye-lamps staring. ‘A form of words,' he muttered. ‘No more.' He knew he didn't really believe that. Roper was a better man than he. ‘Oh my God,' he recited, ‘I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins and detest them above all things –'

‘Bloody nonsense,' cried Roper. He seemed determined, like Kit Marlowe, to die swearing. ‘Cunting balderdash.'

‘ – Because they deserve Thy dreadful punishment, because they have crucified my loving saviour Jesus Christ –'

‘Bumfluffing bleeding burking tripe. When you're dead you're finished with.'

‘ – And most of all because they offend Thine infinite goodness. And I firmly resolve by the help of Thy grace never to offend Thee again –'

‘That's one resolution that will be fulfilled,' delivered Wriste.

‘ – And carefully to avoid the occasions of sin.'

There was a timid knock at the door of the little hut. Hillier's heart leaped. Never pray, someone – Father Byrne? – had once said, for the thing of immediate advantage. Wriste joined Roper in swearing, though more softly. Then he said: ‘This is awkward. This I had not expected.'

‘You talk too much,' said Roper, ‘that's your trouble. You could have got this job over nicely if it hadn't been for all that yak.' It seemed a sincere reproof.

‘A third,' said Wriste. ‘Innocent, perhaps. A pity. Nothing in it for me. Totally gratuitous.' Brooding on the economics of death he pointed his gun at the door. ‘Come in,' he called.

The door opened. A boy stood there, draped against the dying rain in a big man's jacket.

‘Well,' said Wriste, in his steward's accent, ‘if it ain't little Mister bloody Knowall. I'm truly sorry about this, son, but I don't see any way out. Come in, right in,' he gun-waved, using the patrician tones. ‘How did you know we were here?'

Roper frowned on Alan Walters as though he had come to a class of his without registering for it. Alan said: ‘A bit of a whiff of cigar-smoke. Not much, just a bit. I lost you.' He looked apologetically at Hillier. ‘I lost you on the road. And then I looked in the hotel, but it's all filthy drunkenness there.'

‘Clever boy,' purred Wriste. ‘That stepmother of yours will be pleased to have you out of the way. I wonder if it would be prudent to seek a small emolument.'

‘I was going to put
her
out of the way,' said Alan. ‘This seems good territory for killing people. But then I thought: first things first. I always knew you were a phoney.'

‘Oh, naturally. You know every thing, don't you? Including the correct postures for pederastic gratification.'

‘That had to be,' said Alan. ‘It was the only way. There are some awful men in the world, you included. But you weren't clever enough. You told me you'd spent the war in an Australian prison. And the next minute you were talking about having an FFI when you came back off leave. I always knew you weren't to be trusted. You'd never do anything without getting money for it first.'

‘I'm getting no money for this,' said Wriste. ‘Take your hands from underneath that outsize jacket. Join them together. Close your eyes. Say your little boy's prayers. You can precede these gentlemen. The
antipasto
, the Italians call it. Theodorescu would like that. Come on, boy, we've wasted enough time as it is.'

‘You bloody neutral,' cursed Alan. ‘You're going where all the neutrals go.' Dull fire spat through the jacket, leaving a smoking hole. In great-eyed surprise Wriste grabbed, rebus, his wrist, cracked bone with blood taking breath to fountain out. He watched, almost with tears, his gun drip from his fingers and fall without noise on
one of the massage-cots. Alan now had the Aiken, silencer and all, in the open. ‘Now try this,' he said. He aimed at Wriste's pained surprise through the fumes of frying smoked bacon. He thudded fire at the nose and got the right eye. The eye leaped out on its string as in a surrealist montage. The socket leered as the blood prepared to charge, and then the whole face was black fluidity mounted on a falling body. The mouth, independent of the smashed brain, cried ‘Cor' in Cockney. The left fingers, like rats in shipwreck, clawed at a cot, seeking to save themselves. Wriste's going down was leisurely, noisy, the body's indulging itself in its closing scene. There was a crack and the sound of spatter from the trousers. Then Wriste was only a thing.

‘I think I'd better be sick,' said Alan. ‘It's time somebody was sick.' He went and stood, like a naughty boy, in the corner. His shoulders heaved as he tried to throw up the modern world.

‘It's back to those days,' twitched Roper in distaste, fascinated by the well-dressed and Harrovian rubbish on the floor. Hillier knew which days he meant. ‘There are people bent on making a butcher's shop of the whole world.' He did not mean Alan, on whom he twitched a wondering and nearly grateful look. To Alan Hillier said: ‘Get some fresh air. There'll be time enough to say thank you. I won't say it now except just thank you. But go and get some fresh air.' The boy nodded, out of rhythm with his empty spasms, then opened the door and went out. He'd dropped the smoking Aiken on to the nearest cot, wiping his hands against each other, as though that, the corpse-maker, were itself the corpse. From the outer darkness came the noise of song and glass-crashing. ‘And now,' said Hillier, when the door was closed again, ‘we'll have to be quick.'

‘We? What do you mean – we? This is none of my business.'

‘Oh, isn't it? You've been concealing things from me, Roper. Going on about bloody martyrdom and red roses when all the time there was something else. What have you been doing with cabinet ministers? I'll find out, never fear. In the meantime, help me to get these trousers down.'

‘Disguised as a steward, was he?' said Roper, not helping. ‘You just never know, do you? Harmless-looking people waiting and watching, grinning and friendly but always ready to pounce.
Ikota ikota
,' he hiccuped as Hillier exposed dead Wriste's left flank. ‘Ergh.' He screwed up his nose. ‘What the hell
ikota
is all this for?'

‘This,' Hillier said, ‘is me out of the way. Me done for, finished. The ultimate opting-out.' He took out his pocket-knife and then, digging deep, scored an S on Wriste's unresisting skin. Then he lighted a
Handelsgold
Brazilian, the first of his posthumous ones, puffing gratefully.

‘It's a desecration,' said Roper. ‘R. I. P. He's paid the price.'

‘Not quite.' By rapid pumping with his breath, Hillier inflamed the tip of the Brazilian to a red-hot poker-glow. ‘This is a very inadequate substitute for the real thing,' he said, applying the first burn to the S-channel. ‘But it will serve.' To the smoked-bacon smell of the gun, still lingering, a richer more meaty aroma began to be added.

‘What the hell –
ikota ikota
–'

‘Tonight,' said Hillier, ‘in the L-shaped cabin we're sharing, you'll see exactly what all this is about.'

‘I'm not coming. What the hell have I to come for? Where will
you
be going to, anyway?'

Hillier looked up and stared for four seconds. ‘I just hadn't thought,' he said. ‘Of course, we haven't had time to take all this in, have we?' He almost let the cigar go out. ‘Good God, no. We're both exiles, aren't we?' He bellowsed the end red again and continued, delicate as a musician, his scoring.

‘I'm home,' said Roper. ‘This is where I live. The Soviet Union, I mean.
I'm
not in exile.' He coughed at the smoke and the smell of searing. ‘I'm better off than you are.' And Hillier saw himself from the wooden ceiling – in stolen Soviet police-uniform, drawing an S in fire on a corpse with a ruined face, the security-men watching at Southampton, at London Airport, just to be on the safe side, the sawn-off token undelivered. ‘Home,' delivered Roper, ‘is where you let things gather dust, where things get lost in drawers and the waiter in the corner restaurant knows your name. It's also where the work's waiting.'

‘And a woman waiting? Wife or daughter or both?'

‘I've got over all that,' said Roper. ‘What I mean is, in that old way. There are some very nice girls at the
Institut
. We have a meal and a drink and a dance. I'm not in need of anything.'

Hillier finished his pokerwork, dusting off bits of charred hair and skin. Then, without help from Roper, he pulled the trousers up and, grunting with effort and distaste, secured them to their braces. ‘This raincoat will be useful,' he said.

‘Defile the corpse and strip it, eh?' twitched Roper. ‘Your work's very dirty work, Hillier. Not like mine.'

‘Let's see what –' I'm entitled to this, thought Hillier, drawing out from the dead man's inner pocket a very fat wallet. Sterling, his own dollars, roubles. ‘Roubles,' he showed Roper. ‘Don't feel too secure when you talk about home. How do you know Wriste wasn't doing a job for Moscow as well as for those bastards I called my friends? A defecting scientist shot when a British ship was in port. You were going on about reading the Douay Version. Perhaps they know you'll be returning to religion one of these days—'

‘Never. A load of balderdash.'

‘Who can ever tell what he'll do in the future? Even tomorrow? For that matter, look at me tonight, making a good act of contrition.'

‘I was ashamed of you,' twitched Roper.

‘One of these days you'll be defiling your pure scientific thought with Christian sentimentality. Or getting out of Russia to kiss the Pope's toe, taking your formulae with you.'

‘Look,' said Roper bluntly. ‘Nobody's ever above suspicion. Do you get that? Those drunks in there are just the same as I am. It's just something you live with, but it's the same everywhere. It's the same in bloody awful England. As for that thing there,' meaning brain-smashed, branded, robbed Wriste, ‘he told the truth about that bloke gunning for me in England. That's one thing he told the truth about. That business about me being too old and losing my doctorate was just a lot of nonsense. But he was right about the other thing. What I'm going to do now is get back to my room and have a decent night's kip. I'll take a couple of tablets first, I think. But I'm home, remember that. And I'm all right.'