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.
6
‘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 pr
ice.’
‘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.’
‘You very nearly weren’t.’
‘Nor were you.’ He grinned for the first time that evening. ‘Poor old Hillier. You’re in a bloody bad way, aren’t you? But here’s something that might be useful to you. You can get the bastards with this.’ And he took from his inner pocket a rather grubby wad of paper scrawled in blue ink. ‘This is the chapter I’ve been working on. I don’t think I want to push on with my memoirs now. They served their purpose, clarified things. Here you are, something to read on the voyage to wherever you’re going. Where are you going?’
‘First stop Istanbul. I’ll think things over there. And there’s a man I’ve got to see.’ Hillier took the wad. ‘You’ve become a great one for giving me things to read. I had things for you to read – letters. But that was a long time ago. Well, I suppose we’d both better get out of here.’
‘It was nice seeing you after all these years. You could, you know,’ Roper afterthought, ‘stay here if you wanted. I should imagine they’d find you useful.’
‘That’s all over for me. I’m retiring. I don’t think I like contemporary history much.’
‘Some aspects of it are very interesting.’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘Up there, I mean. Men in space. “We’ll be making the moon any day now.’
‘A barren bloody chunk of green cheese. Well, you’re welcome to it.’
The door opened and Alan rushed in, his face green cheese. ‘There’s a thing out there. Something crawling and moaning. It was trying to follow me.’
It was Roper who picked up the Aiken from the cot. ‘Your friend here,’ he told Alan, ‘is finished with all this sort of thing. Leave it to me.’ He strode bravely out in a night that, the baser smells of contemporary history now subsiding, was full of rain-wet flower-scents. Meanwhile Hillier looked down on the boy, that former horrid precocious brat, with compassion and a love referred from that other love. Whether, like a father, to hide the boy’s distress in his arms was something he couldn’t decide. He said:
‘I think I can guess what the crawling thing is. There’s nothing to be frightened about. Well,’ he added, ‘I let you in for more than you could have dreamed possible when you left Southampton. Should I say I’m sorry?’
‘I can’t think, I just can’t think.’
Hillier, seeing Theodorescu leering inside him, went hard for an instant. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘you seduced yourself into becoming a member of the modern world.’ He shuddered, watching the lecherous breathing bulk of Theodorescu descend on the thin young body. ‘You must have wanted that gun very badly.’
‘I didn’t know it was yours. I swear. And all I wanted to do really was to frighten her.’
‘In that vast dinner-eating crowd?’
‘I thought I’d get her alone. What I really mean is I didn’t think. I just didn’t think.’ He began to cry.
Hillier put his arms round the boy’s shoulders. ‘I’ll look after you,’ he said. ‘You’re my responsibility now. Both of you.’
Roper could be heard speaking bad Russian. There was also the noise of skirring feet, as though a man was being half-carried. Hillier went out to help. It was the guard, sorely thumped by Wriste but not killed. A skullcap of dried blood sat on his hair; on his soaked suit a few red rose-petals clung. Roper said, weightily through his panting, ‘Vot tarn chelovyek – there’s the man.’ The guard, open-mouthed, glazed, frowning in rhythm with his pain, saw but did not recognise. The shop-assistant’s face looked bewildered, as if he had been unaccountably accused of short-changing. Wriste still had half a face. That half ought, by rights, to go. Perhaps that could be left to Roper. A totally faceless S-man was required. The guard wanted to lie down. ‘And now,’ said Roper, ‘you two ought to get out of here. Leave everything to me now. One in the eye for old Vasnetsov and Vereshchagin in there. Drunk as coots and supposed to be in charge of security. A bit of a shambles all round. One in the eye all right, having to leave everything to an Englishman. We’ll show them all yet.’
‘See what I mean?’ said Hillier. ‘The old Adam coming out.’
‘None of us is perfect. There’s a bloke on this conference who says that the Ukrainians could knock spots off the Muscovites. The thing to do is to get on with the job.’
??
?I borrowed this jacket,’ said Alan, taking it off, ‘from a man asleep in the vestibule. Will you give it back to him?’
Roper took out a mess of old envelopes from the inner pocket. He snorted. ‘This belongs to Vrubel. I’m going to have some fun here, I can see that. I don’t care much for Vrubel.’
‘We’ll have to get a tram,’ said Hillier. His tunic seemed crammed with passports and money. ‘When we’ve gone, would you mind completing the image –’ He made a coup de grâce pantomime. Roper seemed to understand. ‘With his,’ he added. ‘I’ll have my own back.’
Roper surrendered the Aiken with a smirk of regret. ‘Nice little job. I assumed you wouldn’t be needing it any more.’
‘It’s unwise to assume anything. You should know that, being a scientist. I fancy I have just one final job to do. On my own account.’
‘Well, it’s been nice seeing you,’ said Roper, as though Hillier had just dropped in from next door to enjoy an evening of referred crapula, fear, threats and assassination. To Alan he said: ‘You’ve been a good boy,’ as though he’d sat in the corner with cake and lemonade, causing no trouble. Then he twitched a cheery goodbye.
Going down the winding path to the coast-road, Hillier and Alan heard a very dull thud from the massage-hut. The S-man was now fully there. Alan shivered. Hillier tried to laugh, saying: ‘Imagine you’re in a novel by Conrad. You know the sort of thing: “By Jove, I thought, what an admirable adventure this is, and here am I, a young man in the thick of it.”’
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘A very young man. But ageing quite satisfactorily.’
Hillier saw trolley-sparks and heard, over the sea’s swish and shingle-shuffle, the familiar rattle. ‘By Jove,’ he said, not in Conrad now but in Bradcaster after an evening at the cinema with Roper, running for the last tram, ‘we’ll have to –’ They arrived breathless at the stop just as it began to rattle off. Hillier groaned under his breathlessness as he saw who was sitting opposite.