‘They’d still have to have our flour,’ said Alan.
‘How is he?’ asked Hillier.
‘Plying from nowhere to nowhere. No change. She,’ said Alan bitterly, ‘has quarrelled with that wop type man. A kind of Norwegian type man has been teaching her to dive. Golden muscles and that.’
‘Fond of men, is she?’
‘She’s got this one back home. That’s her steady one. And Dad pretended to know nothing about it. He feels he needs to trust somebody. A wife is a person you trust.’
‘Have you a wife?’ asked Clara.
‘No,’ answered Alan. ‘Nor children. He’s on his own. Going around in disguises and then taking them off. That man Theodorescu told me all about you,’ he said to Hillier.
‘Did he?’ said Hillier without fear.
‘He called you a womaniser.’ Clara looked interested. ‘He gave me a camera as a present,’ said Alan. ‘A new Japanese type. A Myonichi, it’s called. He said it would make an amusing hobby for me to go round recording you womanising.’
‘Perhaps he’s jealous,’ said Hillier. ‘He can’t do any womanising.’
‘No,’ said Alan. He shifted on his chair as in slight pain. ‘Or won’t.’ He turned to his sister in sudden contempt, ‘You and your books about Sodom. Sex on paper instead of a bed.’
‘It’s the safest kind of sex,’ said Hillier. ‘Did Mr Theodorescu say anything else about me?’
‘He didn’t have much time for talking. He had to helicopter off to a takeover bid or something. But he didn’t have to tell me anything really, because I know you’re a spy.’
‘That always seems a dirty word,’ said Hillier, pouring more tea. ‘I much prefer “secret agent”.’
‘That’s what you are then?’ said Clara.
‘Yes. That. It’s a job like any other. It’s supposed to call for the finest qualities in a man. You know – bravery, skill, cunning, supreme patriotism.’
‘And womanising,’ added Alan.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why are you telling us?’ asked Clara.
‘He had to sooner or later. Me, anyway. He knew I knew. So,’ said Alan, ‘you’re throwing yourself into our hands.’
‘In a way, yes. I need friends. That man Theodorescu has wirelessed the Soviet police. My cover has been blown sky-high, as they say. Whatever disguise I assume I can be identified by an ineffaceable mark on my body.’
‘A birthmark?’ asked Clara.
‘A deathmark, rather. I was most cruelly branded. It was one of my many adventures,’ said Hillier modestly. He ate a cucumber sandwich.
‘Wait,’ said Alan. He went to the door and peered out. ‘Nobody eavesdropping.’ He came back. ‘You’re being careless. Are you sure this cabin isn’t bugged?’
‘Pretty sure. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got to land in Yarylyuk whatever happens. It means contriving something when we get there. What I mean is that I’m expected. But they know I know I’m expected. They expect me to be among the passengers, but they don’t expect me to go ashore. They know I’m not a fool and they know that I know that they’re not fools either. My danger will be on this ship. That’s why I’m going ashore.’
‘But,’ said Alan, ‘they will know that too. I mean, they’ll always be one jump ahead.’ And then: ‘I always knew that Theodorescu man wasn’t to be trusted. A queer smell came off his body. This ship seems to be full of spies.’
‘Not full exactly.’
‘But one thing we don’t know,’ said Alan, ‘is who you’re spying for. How do we know that you’re not spying for the other side and that the danger comes from spies on our side who are disguised as spies on their side? Or police. Or something.’ He accepted a Kunzle cake. ‘That you’re trying to get back to Russia with secret information and somebody working for our side is already waiting to come aboard and get rid of you?’
‘Much too complicated. The whole thing could, theoretically, spiral to an apex where the two opposites embrace each other and become one, but it doesn’t work like that in practice. There’s a British scientist attending a conference at Yarylyuk – a man I used to be at school with, strangely enough – and my job is to get him on board and take him back to England. It’s as simple as that. It’s nothing to do with spying.’
The brother and sister thought that over, warily eating Kunzel cakes. Clara’s eyes shone gently but Alan’s were hard. Alan said: ‘Where do we come into this?’
‘You believe me, then?’
Clara nodded with vigour; Alan said, off-handedly: ‘Oh yes, we believe you. But what do you want us to do?’
‘I don’t want you,’ said Hillier sternly to Alan, ‘to start blurting about my being a spy any more, especially when I may seem to be doing strange things. If I seem to be acting oddly, and if anybody starts to get suspicious, then it’s your job to find excuses for me. I want you to be around, both of you, when I try to do what I have to do to get off this ship. Diversions. Anything. You, my boy, should be equal to contriving the most fantastic of devices.’
‘You talk like one of my books,’ giggled Clara nervously. ‘Most fantastic of devices. In Argentina or somewhere it is. Knobs and spikes and things.’
‘Keep off sex,’ said Alan, ‘just for five minutes, please. This is serious stuff.’
‘Let’s not keep off sex altogether,’ said Hillier. ‘You, Clara, are a girl of considerable beauty.’ Clara simpered prettily; Alan bunched up his mouth and made whistling noises. ‘I want you to make use of it, if need be, for diversionary purposes. The odd ogle, the provocative glance. You know the sort of thing.’
‘It’s not in any of my books,’ she said, frowning.
‘No, I suppose not. Your books all start at a stage beyond provocation.’
‘Will you go in armed?’ asked Alan.
‘There’s absolutely no point. Besides, that man Theodorescu stole my gun, you know.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘But the carrying of a gun is merely talismanic in this sort of affair. Once you start shooting you infallibly get shot.’
‘Phallic,’ said Clara. ‘Not always,’ said Alan. Both ate more cakes, thinking; they had recovered their appetites. ‘Well, now,’ said Alan. ‘Is there anything more you want from us?’
‘Yes. What we call the terminal message. If I don’t return to the ship I shall want you to send this to London. A cable.’ He handed over a slip of paper.
Alan frowned at it and then read it aloud, though in a whisper. ‘Chairman, Typeface. That isn’t much of an address.’
‘Never mind. It’ll get there.’
‘Contact unmade. Jagger. Hm. And that means what?’
‘It means they’ve got me.’
‘Death?’ said Clara softly. ‘It means they’ll kill you?’
‘I don’t know what more it means except that they’ve got me. That’s enough. Somebody may come and try to get me out. But it means the closing of a dossier. Anyway, this is my last assignment. I don’t think anybody at home will really care.’
‘It’s a hard life,’ said Alan, as though it had been his life too.
‘It’s the life I chose.’
‘But what’s it all for?’ asked Clara. ‘Agents and spies and counter-spies and secret weapons and dark cellars and being brainwashed. What are you all trying to do?’
‘Have you ever wondered,’ said Hillier, ‘about the nature of ultimate reality? What lies beyond all this shifting mess of phenomena? What lies beyond even God?’
‘Nothing’s beyond God,’ said Alan. ‘That stands to reason.’
‘Beyond God,’ said Hillier, ‘lies the concept of God. In the concept of God lies the concept of anti-God. Ultimate reality is a dualism or a game for two players. We – people like me and my counterparts on the other side – we reflect that game. It’s a pale reflection. There used to be a much brighter one, in the days when the two sides represented what are known as good and evil. That was a tougher and more interesting game, because one’s op
ponent wasn’t on the other side of a conventional net or line. He wasn’t marked off by a special jersey or colour or race or language or allegiance to a particular historico-geographical abstraction. But we don’t believe in good and evil any more. That’s why we play this silly and hopeless little game.’
‘You don’t have to play it,’ said Alan.
‘If we don’t play it, what else are we going to play? We’re too insignificant to be attacked by either the forces of light or the forces of darkness. And yet, playing this game, we occasionally let evil in. Evil tumbles in, unaware. But there’s no good to fight evil with. That’s when one grows sick of the game and wants to resign from it. That’s why this is my last assignment.’
‘It’s doing good, I should have thought,’ said Clara. ‘You’re getting a British scientist out of Russia.’
‘I’m removing him from the game,’ said Hillier, ‘that’s all. A chessman off the board. But the game remains.’
‘I think,’ said Alan weightily, offering a Black Russian to Hillier, ‘we ought to stick together, the three of us.’ Unwontedly, Hillier accepted the cigarette and a light from the flaming Cygnus. ‘We can have dinner in one of those special little dining-rooms. I’ll go and arrange that.’
‘Won’t it look too much like a conspiracy?’ asked Hillier, amused but touched.
‘So it will be. A conspiracy against her. You talk about good and evil not existing much any more, but she’s evil.’
‘I thought it was just men she wanted. Young men. Sex, I mean.’
‘A sex goddess. That’s how she sees herself. A tatty old sex goddess.’
November goddess in your. Hillier went to the wardrobe and felt in the back pocket of his dress trousers. ‘Here’s something you can help with,’ he said. ‘Try and decipher that. It’s not very important, just a kind of joking farewell message from the Department. But try it. You ought to be good at that sort of thing.’
Alan took the folded paper, gently concave from Hillier’s sitting on it, and took the giving of it as a dismissal. ‘Come on, Clara,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you at dinner, then.’
‘I think not tonight. Thanks all the same. I’ll have some dinner in my cabin. And then a bit of self-communion.’
‘That sounds religious,’ said Clara.
‘It is religious,’ said her brother. ‘Everything he’s told us is religious.’
Three
1
The flour king snored on, with increasing feebleness, towards his own black sea. Kraarkh kraarkh. Their memento mori tucked away, the voyagers tucked in. The Polyolbion dodged among the Cyclades. Kraarkh. The ham had been cooked in equal parts of chicken stock and muscatel, sliced to the bone, each slice spread with chestnut purée, ground almonds and minced onion. Covered with puff pastry, browned, served with a sauce Marsala. Kraarkh. Milos, Santarin. Roast chicken Nerone, with potatoes romana. Siphnos, Paros. Here the Nereids sing, their hair as gold as their voices. Tournedos truffés with a sauce bordelaise. Kraarkh. On Sikinos the Nereids appear with donkey or goat hoofs. Steak au poivre aflame in brandy. Master Walters frowned over the coded message. ZZWM DDHGEM. Kraarkh. Ariadne’s island. Pommes Balbec. Kythnos, Syros, Tinos, Andros. EH IJNZ. Parian marble, wine, oil, gummastic. Kraarkh. Hominy grits. Egg nog ice cream. OJNMU ODWI E. Kraarkh. The Northern Sporades. Sherry bisque. OVU ODVP. Kraarkh. Veal cutlets in sour cream. To starboard, Mytilene, then the Turkish mainland. Kraarkh. Miss Walters, excited by what was to come, quietened her nerves with a sex-book. The Polyolbion delicately probed the Dardenelles. Swell the march. Kraarkh with olive potatoes and juniper berries. Of England’s story with kraarkh and courgettes. Hillier kept to his cabin because of Clara Walters. This was no time for cramming that honeycomb into his mouth.
Spare bread and cheese and bottled ale fed that mouth which spent much time testing its Russian accent, re-acquiring facility. Wriste was worried: was he perhaps not well? Wriste sat with him sometimes while he ate, telling tales of when he was a muckman in Canberra, a brutal stretch in jail in Adelaide, sheilas on Bondi Beach. The salt of the earth, Wriste. Of England’s story. Kraarkh. The Sea of Marmara. A mere wave at Istanbul to port: they would be visiting Istanbul on the way back. The Bosporus, Beykoz to starboard. Kraarkh. He was still alive, a mere vat of feebly bubbling chemicals. He might last till Istanbul. It would be easier there to arrange his transport to a British crematorium. The ship moved firmly towards the Crimean peninsula. Yarylyuk smiled equivocally ahead.
Nightfall; landfall. The evening was all plush, studded with Tartar brilliants; the air like soft and snaky Borodin. Some instinct told Hillier to greet his danger in underpants and dressing-gown. His L-shaped cabin was on the port side; from the light or deck-window above the washbasin he could see the harbour nuzzle up without himself being seen. He was in the dark, really in the dark. The horror was that he had no plan. He faced his fate, the fat laughers on deck their fun. There was always something inimical about the approach of land after long days at sea, even when that land was home, whatever home was. It was like the intrusion of the sforzandi of hearty visitors into the quiet rhythms of a hospital ward, or like the switching on of a raw electric bulb as the cosy afternoon of toe-toasting in the shadows, by the hypnotic cave of a Sunday fire, became church-going evening. The quay lights of Yarylyuk were naked enough; the go-downs were ugly with smashed windows. A dog barked somewhere in comforting international language. Tamburlaine and his sons, shabby in washed-out worker’s blue, looked up at the British ship: cruel Tartar faces with papirosi burning under ample moustaches. There was a shouting handling of ropes. Hillier heard the gangplank thud down. Some of the passengers cheered. He tried to think beyond the piled packing-cases, trolleys, oil-slicked stones, cracked windows, YARYLYUK in Cyrillic lettering and yellow neon glowing from a roof, to the distant hills, cypress, olive, vine, laughing teeth – sempiternal innocent life, clodhopping dances and flowery folk festivals. He tried, gulping, to think beyond the uniformed and capped smokers, arms akimbo, doing the rump-cleft-freeing knees-bend as they watched and waited. There would be unofficial lights-villas and workers’ holiday hostels – to left and right of this way in for foreigners. There would be little boats and regatta yachts with flags. A couple of uniforms strolled into his view. Perhaps they were not so clever here as in Moscow; perhaps Theodorescu’s message had been misunderstood or not taken too seriously. These were, surely, decent ordinary militsioners who wanted no trouble – a British whisky in the ship’s bar rather, a pen or camera or doll in Tudor silk. Their roubles would be acceptable; British shore visitors would want roubles; no trouble with roubles, no rouble-trouble.
Three jaunty Slavs, not Tartars, passport-stamping men in uniform, stamped past Hillier’s light, talking loudly. All intending shore visitors, it had been loudspeakered earlier, must report with their passports to the bar on C-deck. And would there be stripping for the thinner men in a commandeered cabin near by? A coachload was to be sped to the Hotel Krym, where there would be a feast of Crimean oysters, salmon, sturgeon, seethed kid, ripe figs and wine as sweet as ripe figs. Hillier started as his door was suddenly opened, letting in light from the corridor. ‘You’re in the dark,’ said young Alan. His Black Russian announced itself. Hillier drew the runnered curtain across his view of Yarylyuk. ‘You can switch on,’ he said. Alan was in a decent dark blue shore-going suit with a polka-dot bow-tie. At once Hillier realised why he himself was near-naked. Yarylyuk was going to give him a uniform. ‘I’ve cracked this code,’ said Alan.
‘Never mind about that now. Where’s your sister?’
‘She’s just finishing dressing. She’ll be here in a minute. Look, about this code. The November goddess is Queen Elizabeth I. She came to the throne in November, 1558.’
‘1558?’ That had something to do with Roper. The family-tree on the wall in Didsbury, Manchester. The ancestor who died young for his faith, 1558: an Elizabethan martyr. ‘I’m beginning to see,’ said Hillier. ‘A binary code, is it?’
‘
If you mean alternate letters belong to alternating systems, yes. In one system the first letter is the fifth, in the other the fifth letter is the eighth. It’s quite simple, really. But I haven’t had time to do it all. They call you by a different name. I suppose it stood to reason your name couldn’t be Jagger. It begins: DEAR HILLIR. That’s a foreign-sounding name. Are you sure,’ he said accusingly, ‘you’ve been telling us the truth?’
‘They may have spelt it wrong. It should be Hillier.’
‘I didn’t get much further than that. But it’s full of apologies, as far as I can see. They’re sorry about something or other.’
‘Perhaps the amount of my terminal bonus. Anyway, I can have a look at it later. Thanks. You’d do well in this game.’ There was a knock at the door and Clara walked in. She looked ravishing. Hillier knew he had been right to go into retirement this last day and more, subsisting on bread and cheese and Russian. Infirm of purpose. She was in a cocktail dress of silver lamé with cape back and treble pearl-diamanté collar necklace, her shoes of silver kid. Perfume of an older woman clouted Hillier’s nostrils, making him salivate. He yearned for her. Damn work. Damn death. ‘How is he?’ he asked.
‘About the same.’
‘And that bitch,’ said Alan evilly, ‘is going ashore with that muscled Scandinavian bastard, God curse them both.’
‘Language, language,’ reproved Clara. She shook her head in sorrow at him and then went to sit on Hillier’s bunk. Her knees showed; Hillier knew, but did not show, an accession of agony. He said briskly: ‘To business. I want a Russian police uniform and I want it now. This means that a policeman will have to be lured in here –’
A loud complaint came from the corridor: ‘Making me bloody strip for a short-arm inspection. If that’s the condition for going ashore I’m staying on board. Bloody Russkies.’ A cabin-door slammed. So Theodorescu’s prediction was being fulfilled: a very capable, though bad, man.