Tremor of Intent

1

Dry within, wet without, Hillier awoke. It was really very hot. He had lain down on his bunk in his old grey holiday Daks and a green sleeveless Luvisca shirt; now the shirt was soaked and the slacks felt clammy. He was also aware of the smell of himself. Adam had awakened to the scents of a garden; fallen Adam in his early forties was greeted, as a kind of smell-track to painful light, by tobacco-smoke woven into his skin and a vague effluvium of sour meat-juice, also – like a space-traveller freely floating outside, but not too far outside, his capsule – an ex-ternalisation of his own breath: burnt potato and tannery. Hillier got up, tasting his mouth and frowning. He should have switched on the electric fan. He did so now, stripping. The coolness exorcised that small bad dream he'd had – the buffeting with rose-branches, the yelling crowd, his breathless crawling up a road that grew steadily hillier. That, of course, was a dream of his own name; the huge coil of rope he'd been carrying was explained by the name of his quarry. He should by rights have dreamed of new names – a hunter and an island.

He surveyed himself naked in the dressing-table mirror. The body still looked as if it were for use, pretty lean. But he had the impression that it now wanted to sag under the stress of an adventurous past whose record was scored on the flesh-wound-scars, the pitting of an old disease. On his left flank was an indelible brand, a literal one. Soskice, who had eventually been smashed, dying cursing, had watched and grinned with all his blue and yellow teeth while the white-hot iron had been applied. 'S,' he had lisped. 'A signature on one of my lesser works, your body mangled, though not mangled to the pitch of unrecognis-ability.' Strapped to the chair, Hillier had tried to impose another meaning on the brand as, in its mirror-form, it slowly descended. His mother's name – Sybil. That would do. Welcome it, welcome it, he had told his body as Soskice's executioner voluptuously delayed the searing impact. And then. Yearn to it, desire it, he had counselled his skin. It's a poultice, it's good for you. He had not screamed, feeling the intolerable bite, the pain itself S-shaped. The S had hissed into his very bowels, the sphincter – weakest of all the muscles – bidding them open to expel the snake whose body was all teeth. Soskice had been disgusted, but no more so than Hillier. 'I didn't mean that,' Hillier had moaned.'I apologise.'And they had left him for a time in his mess, delaying the consummation. And that delay had (oh, it was a long story bringing in a man called Kosciusko) saved his life. The S now stared back from the mirror, the reversed S of the brand itself. A spectacular thing to carry into retirement. Many a woman had commented on it, tracing the serpentine course, forward and back, in languid wonder after love. And in the languor of retirement Soskice and Brayne and Tarnhelm and Chirikov and Artsibashev would rest, the violent enemies, as fellow-heroes in a remote saga as flavoursome with nostalgia as a dog-eared school Virgil.

Hillier had not yet unpacked. AH he did now was to click open the shabbier of his two suitcases and take out from under his boxes and tins of cheap cigars – Sumovana, Castaneda, Huifkar Imperiales – an old rainbow bathrobe. He did not think it likely that anyone would enter his cabin while he was out taking a shower. Nevertheless he thought he had better find a hiding-place for his Aiken and its silencer, as well as for the box of PSTX ampoules. These latter were a new thing and he had not yet seen them in action. A subcutaneous injection was, so he had been told, immediately followed by drunken euphoria and great amenability. Then sleep came and, after sleep, no hangover. He looked round the cabin and hit on the lifebelt locker above the dressing-table. That would do for the time being. You could never tell, you could never be sure. The fiend is slee. His embarkation would have been noted; no disguise is totally deceptive. Before going for his shower, Hillier surveyed the new face he had given himself. Discreet padding had swollen the cheeks to an image of self-indulgence which his normal leanness hypocritically belied. The greying moustache, the greying hair rendered thinner, the contact lenses which made hazel eyes dark brown, the nose flared, the mouth pulled to a sneer – these, he told himself, belonged not to Hillier but to Jagger, a typewriter technician on holiday. This was the penultimate disguise. And Roper's disguise? This was a great age for beards; nobody pulled beards any more or shouted 'Beaver'. Hillier packed the beard with the ampoules and the Aiken. The plump Edwardian mannekin on the yellowing card of lifebelt instructions pulled his strings tight, looking indifferently out at Hillier-Jagger – as functional as a spy and as dehumanised.

Hillier went out on to the corridor. This'was A-Deck. A scent which reminded first-class passengers that they were paying extra for luxury breathed here, stroking the closed cabin-doors. No smell of engine-oil or galley cabbage, rather something rose-petalled and landlocked. Soft lights hid behind voluted plastic. Hillier locked his door, clasping the key in his bathrobe-pocket as he made for the bathroom. Suddenly the quiet of the corridor erupted into the noise of squabbling. A cabin-door three down from Hillier's own burst open, a boy emerged backwards, shouting. Oh God, groaned Hillier. Children. He didn't like children. They were too vigorous but also too honest, the enemies of intrigue. Besides, they got bored on voyages, they got in the way. This boy was about thirteen, an awkward age. *I only wanted to borrow it,' he was complaining. The accent was not patrician. 'I only wanted to see what it was about.'

'You're too young,' said a girl's voice. 'I'll tell dad. Go and have a nice game of quoits or something.'

'I bet I know more about it than you do,' said the boy. 'And I don't mean quoits.' He was small and compact and dressed like a miniature adult tourist – Hawaiian shirt, tapering brown slacks, sandals, though no camera on his chest. He was also, Hillier noticed, smoking what smelt like a Balkan Sobranie Black Russian. And then, coming closer (he must pass the door to get to the bathroom), he saw the girl. At once, with a kind of groan of habituation, his body made its stock responses – tightening of the larynx, minimal pain in the frenum, a shuddering re-stoking of the arteries, a sense of slight lévitation. She was beautiful: corn-hair piled up carelessly, a nose like an idealisation of a broken boxer's, a mouth whose scolding ought at once to be stopped with kisses. She was in a straight gold dress, deep-cut; legs, arms, neck were bare, honeyed, superb. She was about eighteen. Hillier's groan came up like a dreaming dog's.

'And,' said the boy, 'dad wouldn't give a damn. Nor would she. Flat out they are, both of them. They're only interested in one thing.'

Me too, thought Hillier. He now saw what it was the boy wanted from his sister. A book by a certain Ralph Quintin, its title large: Sex and Patterns of Cruelty. Hillier was shocked. She should not be reading that, one so young and-Her eyes were large, blue pools after Eden's first rainfall. They looked on Hillier widely, then narrowed nastily at her brother. 'Dirty young pig,' she said.

'Pigs,' said the boy, 'are not dirty. A fallacy. Just like the one about goats smelling.' She slammed the door. Hillier said to the boy: 'Dirt is an inescapable part of the animal condition. That's why we take baths. That's why I'm going to the bathroom now. Unfortunately you're standing in my way.'

The boy stared up at Hillier and then, at the leisure appropriate to a holiday, moved, ending by flattening himself against the wall. 'You're new,' he said, puffing up Russian smoke. 'You've only just got on. We, on the other hand, are founder members. We got on at Southampton. It's all eating,' he told Hillier confidentially. 'They gorge themselves till they're sick. That's why some of them get off at Venice and totter back home overland. I hope you like it.'

'I'm sure I will.'

'I shouldn't try to make my sister, though. She's mad about sex, but it's all what D. H. Lawrence calls sex in the head. She just likes to read about it. Would you like one of these Black Russians?' From the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt he drew out a box, also a Cygnus butane lighter.

'I'm a cigar man,' said Hillier. 'Thanks all the same.'

'Try one of my Reservados after dinner,' said the boy. 'They've got some of this very special Remy Martin behind the bar. In a reproduction Louis XIV decanter. Nobody knows how old it is.'

'I look forward to that,' said Hillier. 'And now I must have my shower.'

'You do that,' said the boy. 'I dare say we'll be meeting again at the hour of the apéritif.'

Precocious young bastard, thought Hillier, as he went to the bathroom. Sex in the head, eh? Down, wantons, down. A passer-by hooted loudly from the blue Adriatic.

Hillier turned the knob of the bathroom door. He gaped at what he saw inside.

This was all too totally absurd. He had seen that fair beauty legitimately, clothed at her cabin door. Here, to balance that vision, was another, very dark, unclothed. She stood drying herself, a dusky Indian, her hair loose, a midnight river flowing to her buttocks.

'I'm terribly sorry,' gulped Hillier. 'The door wasn't-'

She already had the bath-towel about her, the ship's name _Polyolbion__ draping her as if she were its beauty-queen. She was less embarrassed than Hillier. Her face was that of a cool straight-nosed Aryan, though burnt to the richest coffee. 'No,' she said, 'the door wasn't. I'm often careless.' It was a kind of finishing-school English with a Welsh lilt. She coolly watched while Hillier let himself out. She seemed to do nothing about re-locking the door. Trembling, Hillier went for his shower. The voyage was beginning either well or badly, depending on which way you looked at things. He had come aboard stringently braced for action. He was already being seduced by flesh, the two extremes of the continuum as it were pegged out for him in a matter of minutes. He took his shower very cold, gasping, then strode back to his cabin looking straight before, inseducible.

The cabin door was open. Someone was singing inside, opening and closing dressing-table drawers. His suitcases were being rummaged. But a cheerful face, unabashed, turned to greet him. 'Mr Jagger would it be, sir? And how about the other gentleman?'

Hillier relaxed as he entered. Of course, the cabin steward. 'Could you,' he said, 'do something about getting me a drink? Whisky. I think-a whole bottle. And some ice.'

'And the other gentleman? Mr Innes?'

'Delayed. He's joining us at the next port.'

'Yarylyuk, that will be. A queer sort of a place.' He laid some of Hillier's shirts in a drawer, singing again.

'I suppose,' said Hillier, 'you'll want some money.' He had already hung his summer jacket in the wardrobe. He went to the wallet there.

'It's the usual thing, sir, as you'll know. A sweetener some people call it.' The tones were either of East London or of Sydney, really both, the sea really, two ends of the sea. Hillier paid out pound notes till the steward's hand ceased to be a table and became a clamp. 'Thank you, sir. Wriste, my name is. Wriste.'

'Wrist?'

'With an e at the end. A queer sort of a name you'd say. Most call me Rick or Ricky. That's short for Richard.' He was about thirty-five, dressed in blue denim trousers and a horizontal-striped singlet. His skin was well tanned and salted, the sumptuousness of line and shadow to be found on an inland Northern face thoroughly pickled out. This man had been long at sea. His eyes had a far-focused look. He was toothless but wore no dentures and, as if to point the fishiness of his mouth, he pouted when speaking, holding the pout when he'd finished, then letting the pout settle very gently to a normal spread. His thin dark brown hair seemed glued to his scalp. He wore well-fitting house-shoes of very expensive leather. 'Any particular brand, sir? We have this very good one, exclusive to the Line. Old Mortality it's called. Oh, by the way, sir, a letter for you. Came aboard at Venice, quite a lot of mail there was, you'd be surprised. But it's all business-men, you know, tycoons. They have to be kept informed.'

It was an official envelope, OHMS, correctly addressed to Sebastian Jagger, Esq.

'You'll want to read it, I suppose, sir. I'll go and get your Old Mortality.' Wriste went out singing. Hillier was aware of a strong thump of apprehension under his ribs.

What warning? What change of plan? He opened the letter. It was, as he'd expected, in code: ZZWM DDHGEM EH IJNZ OJNMU ODWI E XWI OVU ODVP – Long, quite a long message. Hillier frowned. He had no means of breaking the code. Nothing had been said to him about the sending of messages after embarkation. He had neither book nor machine in his luggage. He looked again at the envelope. Inside, previously unnoticed by him, was the thinnest slip of paper, hardly bigger than a cracker motto. On it a rhyme had been typed: November goddess in your glory Swell the march of England's story.

And underneath a cheery message: Regards from all here. Hillier's pulse slowed in relief. It was nothing, then, after all. A facetious farewell from the Department, then, in code like every other letter he had received. A sort of crossword puzzle with cryptic clue. Something for his leisure, when he should have leisure.

When Wriste returned, bearing whisky and an ice-bowl, Hillier was already in evening shirt and black lightweight trousers. He had stowed the code message in the back pocket. Later, perhaps, he would – 'We do dress tonight, do we?' he asked.

'Big ones for dressing, all of them,' said Wriste, 'even on the first night out. Want to convince themselves they're having a good time. And you should see the women.' His fish-lips pursed to a point to whistle one sad note. 'Plung ing necklines? You've no idea. No half-measures with this sort of lot, I'll say that. That's what I appreciate about the rich. Not always all that generous, though.' He was pouring a healthy slug of Old Mortality for Hillier, gold winking through caves of ice. Hillier noticed that there were two glasses on the tray. He motioned to Wriste to have one himself. Wriste took it as his due, cockily saying 'Cheers'.

The whisky was of a smoothness Hillier had forgotten existed. He poured himself another. A mood of quiet excitement came over him as he knotted his black tie: the evening ahead, plunging necklines, the smell of the rich. Wriste got on with the unpacking. 'Although,' he said, 'the couple in here was very generous. To me, that is. Got off at Venice, motoring down the East Coast. Ravenna, Rimini, Ancona, Pescara, Bari, Brindisi. Then into somebody's yacht there. A nice sort of a life. Every day there was a dozen of Guinness paid for for me and my mate. He's a winger in the First Class.'

'I should be honoured,' said Hillier, 'if you would-'

'I expected no less of you, sir,' said Wriste. 'Me and Harry will be proud to drink your health every night. On holiday in Venice, was you, sir?'

'Business,' said Hillier. He might as well try out his new persona before getting on-stage. 'I design typewriters.'

'Do you really, sir?' Wriste hushed his voice as if more impressed than by any other revelation he'd ever heard in this cabin. 'I suppose you've been doing a bit of work for the Olivetti people.'

Careful, careful. 'Hardly in Venice,' said Hillier.

'Of course not, sir. But it's funny that that should be your line. I have a sister who's a secretary, and she was called in on one of these surveys. They'd brought out this typewriter with different-sized letters like in ordinary printing. Which I know a bit about, having worked on a ship's printing press, but not on this ship. You know, an em twice as big as an en. You know, a fat o and a thin i. Well, they thought a lot of her opinion. You, of course, being in the game, would know what her objection was.' Wriste waited, poising a wad of handkerchiefs above a drawer.

'Correction is very difficult,' said Hillier, 'if you don't have a uniform-sized type. In fact, you just daren't make a typing error at all. That sort of thing would drive a typist mad.'

'That's it,' nodded Wriste. 'You've got it.' He displayed to Hillier pink toothless gums. 'And now, sir, what can I do for you?' It was as though Hillier had come through a test, which indeed he had. Wriste shut the handkerchief drawer and came closer. 'Anything about seating arrangements in the dining-saloon, for instance?'

Hillier weighed in his head the light and the dark. 'There's a girl along here,' he said. And then, 'No.'

'If it's who you're thinking of,' said Wriste, 'I understand your point. A forward little sod, that brother of hers is. Big money there, though. The old man's Walters, the big flour man. I get the idea that his missis, younger than he is she is, she wants to see him off. Forcing second helpings on him all the time. Those two kids are by his first marriage. The lad, Alan his name is, was on one of these TV quizzes in the States. Knows it all, they reckon. You keep away from there. Drive you cracked he will.'

'There's an Indian lady,' said Hillier.

'Not moving very far afield, are you, sir?' said Wriste. 'You could bust your G-string on this vessel. Crying out for it a lot are. Neglected wives. Still, keep it on the corridor by all means. Less far to go. You're thinking of Miss Devi. Sort of secretary she is to this big fat foreign tycoon. Mr Theodorescu. Speaks lovely English he does, though, Oxfordeducated I should imagine. At least she's called his secretary. See how much she knows about typewriters.' Wriste thought a moment, eyes down. 'It means fixing things in the purser's office. I'll have to be quick. A few quid should do it.' Sighing, Hillier handed over a five-pound note. He would not be able to live like this in his retirement. 'But,' said Wriste with great sincerity, 'if there's anything at all I can do – anything – you've only got to ask.'

2

Going to the First Class bar, Hillier expected the last word in cushioned silk walls, a delicious shadowless twilight, bar-stools with arms and backs, a carpet like a fall of snow. What he found was a reproduction of the Fitzroy Tavern in Soho, London W. i, the Fitzroy as it used to be before the modernisers ravaged it. The floor had cigarette-ends opening like flowers in spilt beer; a man with long hair and ear-rings was playing an upright piano that must have cost a few quid to untune; on the smoked ceiling there were tiny chalices made out of silver paper and thrown up to stick, mouth down, by their bases. The long wooden bar-counter was set with small opaque windows which swivelled on ornate Edwardian frames, obstacles to the ordering of drinks. A job-lot of horrid art-student daubs covered the walls. There even seemed to be a hidden tape-recording of Soho street sounds, the Adriatic brutally shut out. The Tourist bar, Hillier thought, must have a very luxurious décor, no fun to the decorators.

The passengers, though, were not dressed like touts, yobs, junkies and failed writers. They were dressed like First Class passengers, a dream of rich rippling textures, and some of the men had golden dinner-jackets, a new American fashion. The aroma of their smokes was heady, but some of them seemed to be drinking washy halves of mild beer. Hillier's professional nose at once divined that they were really disguised cocktails. He had not expected that he would have to fight his way to the bar, but this, to the rich, must be part of the holiday. There was, however, no paying with money and no handfuls of soaked change. That would be taking verisimilitude too far. Hillier signed for his large Gordon's and tonic. And the barman, who had got himself up to look dirty, would undoubtedly have liked to look clean.

Hillier was at once accosted by the forward youth called, he remembered, Alan Walters. He was dressed in a well-cut miniature dinner-jacket and he even had a yellow Banksia in his buttonhole. Hillier hoped, for the lad's own sake, that his glass of tomato-juice did not contain vodka. Master Walters said: 'I've found out all about you.'

'Oh, you have, have you?' said Hillier, with a pang of fear that perhaps the boy really had.

'That man Wriste told me. For thirty bob. A very mercenary type of man.' His accent was not right, not rich enough. 'Your name's Jagger and you're connected with typewriters. Tell me all about typewriters.'

'Oh no,' said Hillier, 'this is meant to be a holiday.'

'It's all nonsense about people not wanting to talk shop on holiday,' said Alan. 'Shop is all most people have to talk about.'

'How old are you?'

'That's an irrelevant question, but I'll tell you. I'm thirteen.'

'Oh, God,' murmured Hillier. The nearest group of drinkers – fat men become, with subtle tailoring, merely plump; silk-swathed desirable women – looked at Hillier with malice and pity. They knew what he was going to suffer; why had he not been here before to suffer equally with them?

'Right,' said the boy. 'Who invented the typewriter?'

'Oh, it's so long ago,' said Hillier. 'I look to the future.'

'It was in 1870. There were three men-Scholes, Glidden and Soule. It was in America. They were financed by a man named Densmore.'

'You've just been reading this up/ said Hillier, uneasy now.

'Not recently,' said Alan. 'It was when I was interested in firearms. Technically, I mean. I'm still interested practically.' The neighbour drinkers would have liked to ignore Alan, but the boy was, after all, a kind of monster. They listened, drinks poised, mouths open. 'It was the Remington Company, you see, who first took it up. A typewriter is a kind of gun.'

'The Chicago typewriter,' said a voice. 'It ties up well enough.' Hillier saw that the Indian girl, Miss Devi, had just joined the nearest group. She was holding a martini. She was very beautiful. She was dressed in a scarlet sari embossed with gold images of prancing, tongued, many-armed gods. A silver trinket embellished her nose. Her hair was traditionally arranged – middle parting, plaits on each side of it. But the remark about the Chicago typewriter had come from the man standing by her. This must be her boss, Mr Theodorescu. He was of a noble fatness; the fat of his face was part of its essential structure, not a mean gross accretion, and the vast shapely nose needed those cheek-pads and firm jowls for a proper balance. The chin was very firm. The eyes were not currants in dough but huge and lustrous lamps whose whites seemed to have been polished. He was totally bald, but the smooth scalp -from which a discreet odour of violets breathed – seemed less an affliction than an achievement, as though hair were a mere callow down to be shed in maturity. He was. Hillier thought, about fifty. His hands were richly ringed, but this did not seem vulgar: they were so big, strong and groomed that the crusting of winking stones was rather like adornment by transitory flowers of acknowledged God-given instruments of skill and power and be?^uty. His body was so huge that the wThite dinner-jacket was like a moulded expanse of royal sailcloth. He was drinking what Hillier took to be neat vodka, a whole gill of it. Hillier feared him; he also feared Miss Devi, whom he had seen nearly naked. There had been a man who had inadvertently spied a goddess bathing. Actaeon, was it? Was he the one who had been punished by being turned into a stag and then devoured by fifty dogs? This boy here would know.

This boy said: 'It was Yost who was the real expert. He was an expert mechanic. But the Yost method of inking soon became obsolete. What,' he coldly asked Hillier, 'was the Yost method of inking?'

I used to know,' said Hillier. 'I've been in this game a long time. One forgets. I look to the future.' He'd said that already.

'Yost used an inked pad instead of a ribbon,' said Alan sternly. Others looked sternly at Hillier too. 'It's my opinion,' said Alan, 'that you know nothing about typewriters. You're an impostor.'

'Look here,' bullied Hillier, 'I'm not having this, you know.' The god whom Hillier took to be Mr Theodorescu laughed in a gale that seemed to shake the bar. He said, in a voice like a sixteen-foot organ-stop: 'Apologise to the gentleman, boy. Because he does not wish to disclose his knowledge to you does not mean that he has no knowledge. Ask him questions of less purely academic interest. About the development of Chinese typewriters, for instance.'

'Five thousand four hundred ideographic type faces,' said Hillier with relief. 'A three-grouped cylinder. Forty-three keys.'

'I say he knows nothing about typewriters,' said Alan staunchly. 'I says he's an impostor. I shouldn't be surprised if he was a spy.'

Hillier, like a violinist confidently down-bowing in with the rest of the section, started to laugh. But nobody else laughed. Hillier was playing from the wrong score.

'Where's your father?' cried Mr Theodorescu. 'If I were your father I would take you over my knee and spank you hard and then make you apologise to this gentleman. Abjectly.'

'He's over there,' said Alan. 'He wouldn't do anything.' At a table just by the Fitzroy Street entrance a dim swollen man was being adjured, by a frizz-haired woman much his junior, to down that and have another.

'Well, then,' said Mr Theodorescu, veering round massively as by silent hydraulic machinery, 'let me apologise on the boy's behalf.' He shone his great lamps on Hillier. 'We know him, you see. You, I think, have just joined us. In a sense, he is all our responsibility. I believe he is sincerely sorry, Mr-'

'Jagger.'

'Mr Jagger. Theodorescu myself, though I am not Rumanian. This is Miss Devi, my secretary.'

'I regret to say,' said Hillier, 'that we have already met. It was very unfortunate. I feel like apologising, but it was not really my fault.' It had not been Actaeon's fault.

'I always forget about the locking of bathroom doors,' said Miss Devi. 'It comes of having my own private suite on land. But we are surely above these foolish taboos.'

'I hope so,' said Hillier.

'Typewriters, typewriters,' crooned Theodorescu. 'I have always felt that our house should have a distinctive typeface, very large, a sort of variant of the old black-letter. Would it be possible to write in Roman and Arabic letters on the one instrument?' he asked Hillier.

'The difficulty there would be to arrange things so that one could type from both left to right and right to left. Not insuperable. It would be cheaper to use two typewriters, though.'

'Very interesting,' said Theodorescu, searching Hillier's face, it seemed, with one eye, two eyes not being necessary. Alan Walters was now standing alone at the bar, sulking over a new tomato-juice which Hillier this time hoped contained vodka, a large one.

'He knows nothing about it,' he mumbled. It was recognised that he had been a rude boy; the grown-ups had turned their backs on him. 'Yost and Soule,' he muttered to his red glass. 'He knows nothing about them. Silly old Jagger is a Yost Soule, a lost soul, ha ha ha.' Hillier didn't like the sound of that. But Theodorescu was large enough to be able to be kind to the lad, saying: 'We have not yet seen your beautiful sister this evening. Is she still in her cabin?'

'She's a Yost Soule, like Jagger here. She reads about sex all the time, but she knows nothing about it. Just like Jagger.'

'You may have tested Mr Jagger on the history of the typewriter,' said Theodorescu urbanely, 'but you have not tested him on sex. Nor,' he added hurriedly, seeing Alan open his mouth on a deep breath, 'are you going to.'

'Jagger is a sexless spy,' said the boy. Hillier reminded himself that he was not here to be a gentleman, above such matters as impertinent and precocious brats. He went close to the not over-clean left ear of Alan and said to it, 'Look. Any more nonsense from you, you bloody young horror, and I'll repeatedly jam a very pointed shoe up your arse.'

'Up my arse, eh?' said Alan very clearly. There were conventionally shocked looks at Hillier. At that moment a white-coated steward, evidently Goanese, entered with a carillon tuned to a minor arpeggio. He walked through the Soho pub like a visitor from a neighbouring TV stageset, striking briskly the opening right-hand bars of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata.

'Ah, dinner,' said Theodorescu with relief. 'I'm starving.'

'You had a large tea,' said Miss Devi.

'I have a large frame.'

Millier remembered that he had asked for a place at Miss Devi's table, which also would mean Theodorescu's. He was not sure now whether it had really been a good idea. Sooner or later Theodorescu's sheer weight, aided by Master Walters's shrill attrition from another point, however distant, in the dining-saloon, would bruise and chip the Jagger disguise. Besides, he knew he had made himself uglier than he really was, and he couldn't help wanting to be handsome for Miss Devi. Foolish taboos, eh? That's what she'd said.

3

'You think it good, the cuisine?' asked Theodorescu. The dining-saloon was very far from being like that fried-egg-on-horsesteak restaurant that, in Hillier's post-war London days, had stood just across the street from the Fitzroy. Conditioned air purred through the champagne light and, only a little louder, stringed instruments played slow and digestive music from a gallery above the gilded entrance. The musicians all seemed very old, servants of the Line near retirement, but they made a virtue of the slow finger movements that arthritis imposed on them: Richard Rodgers became noble, processional. The appointments of the dining-saloon were superb, the chairs accommodating the biggest bottom in comfort, the linen of the finest Dunfermline damask. Theodorescu's table was by a soft-lit aquarium; in this, fantastic fish-haired, armoured, haloed, spined, whiptailed – gravely visiting castles, grottos and gazebos, ever and anon delivered wide-mouthed silent reports to the human eaters. There were just Theodorescu, Miss Devi and Hillier at the table. The Walters family, Hillier was mainly glad to see, were seated well beyond a protective barrier of well-fleshed and rather loud-talking tycoons and their ladies. Mainly but not wholly glad: Miss Walters seemed to look very delightful in a shift dress of flame velvet with a long heavy gold medallion necklace. She was reading at table, and that was wrong, but her brother sulked and her father and stepmother ate silently and solidly, Mrs Walters urging further helpings on her dim but gulous husband.

So far Hillier had joined Theodorescu in a dish of lobster medallions in a sauce cardinale. The lobster had, so the chief steward had informed them, been poached in white wine and a court-bouillon made with the shells, then set alight in warm pernod. The saloon was full of silent waiters, many Goanese, some British (one, Wriste's winger-pal, had come up to whisper 'Ta for the Guinness'). There was no harassed banging and clattering through the kitchen doors; all was leisurely.

'I think,' said Theodorescu, 'you and I will now have some red mullet and artichoke hearts. The man who was sitting in that place before you was not a good trencherman. I tend to feel embarrassed when my table companions eat very much less than I: I am made to feel greedy.' Hillier looked at Miss Devi's deft and busy long red talons. She was eating a large and various curry with many side-dishes; it should, if she ate it all, last her till about midnight. 'I think we had better stay with this champagne, don't you?' said Theodorescu. It was a 1953 Bollinger; they were already near the end of this first bottle. 'Harmless enough, not in the least spectacular, but I take wine to be a kind of necessary bread, it must not intrude too much into the meal. Wine-worshipping is the most vulgar of idolatries.'

'You must,' said Hillier, 'allow me to have the next bottle on my bill.'

'Well now,' said Theodorescu, 'I will make a bargain with you. Whoever eats the less shall pay for the wine. Are you agreeable?'

'I don't think I stand a chance,' said Hillier.

'Oh, I think that nauseous boy has impaired your self-confidence. At table I fear the thin man. The fat laugh and seem to cram themselves, but it is all so much wind and show. Are you at all a betting man?'

'Well-' In Hillier's closed tank a sort of fermentation was taking place; a coarse kind of Schaumwein of the spirit made him say: 'What do you have in mind?'

'Whatever sum you care to name. The Trencherman Stakes.' Miss Devi tinkled a giggle. 'Shall we say a thousand pounds?'

Could that, should he lose, be charged to his expenses, wondered Hillier. But, of course, it didn't apply. A cheque signed by Jagger was only a piece of paper. 'Done,' he said. 'We order the dishes alternately. All plates to be thoroughly cleaned.'

'Splendid. We start now.' And they worked away at the red mullet and artichoke hearts. 'Slowly,' said Theo-dorescu. 'We have all the time in the world. Speaking of champagne, there was some serious talk-in 1918, I think it was, the second centenary of the first use of the name to designate the sparkling wines of Hautvillers – some talk, as I say, of seeking canonisation for Dom Pérignon, champagne's inventor. Nothing came of it, and yet men have been canonised for less.'

'Very much less,' said Hillier. 'I would sooner seek intercession from Saint Pérignon than from Saint Paul.'

'You're a praying man, then? A believer?'

'Not exactly that. Not any longer.' Careful, careful. 'I believe in man's capacity to choose. I accept free will, the basic Christian tenet.'

'Excellent. And now, talking of choosing-' Theo-dorescu beckoned. The chief steward himself came across, a soft-looking ginger-moustached man. Hillier and Theo-dorescu ordered ahead alternately. Hillier: fillets of sole Queen Elizabeth, with sauce blonde; Theodorescu: shellfish tart with sauce Newburg; Hillier: soufflé au foie gras and to be generous with the Madeira; Theodorescu: avocado halves with caviar and a cold chiffon sauce. 'And,' said Theodorescu, 'more champagne.'

They ate. Some of the nearer diners, aware of what was going on, relaxed their own eating to watch the contest. Theodorescu praised the red caviar that had been heaped on the avocado, then he said: 'And where, Mr Jagger, did you receive your Catholic education?'

Hillier needed to concentrate on his food. 'Oh,' he said, at random, 'in France.' He had given away too much already; he must maintain his disguise. 'At a little place north of Bordeaux. Cantenac. I doubt if you'd know it.'

'Cantenac? But who doesn't know Cantenac, or at any rate the Château Brane-Cantenac?'

'Of course,' said Hillier. 'But I'd understood that you weren't a wine man. The Baron de Brane who made Mouton-Rothschild great.'

'A strange place, though, for a young Englishman to be brought up. Your father was concerned with viticulture?'

'My mother was French,' lied Hillier.

'Indeed? What was her maiden name? It's possible that I know the family.'

'I doubt it,' said Hillier. 'It was a very obscure family.'

'But I take it that you received your technical education in England?'

'In Germany.'

'Where in Germany?'

'Now,' said Hillier, 'I suggest filet mignon à la romana, and a little butterfly pasta and a few zucchini.'

'Very well.' The chief steward was busy with his pencil.

'And after that some toast lamb persillée and onion and gruyère casserole with green beans and celery julienne.'

'And more champagne?'

'I think we might change. Something heavier. '55 was a great year for clarets. A Lafite Rothschild?'

'I could ask for nothing better.'

'And for you, my dear?' Miss Devi had eaten a great deal, though not all, of her curries. She wanted a simple crème brûlée and a glass of madeira to go with it. She had had her fill of champagne: her eyes were bright, a well-lighted New Delhi, no smouldering jungles. Hillier grew uneasy as, while they awaited their little fillets, Theo-dorescu bit hungrily at some stick-bread. It might be bluff: watch him. The dining-saloon was emptying at leisure: in the distance a dance-band was tuning up: the aged fiddlers had departed. The diners nearest the contestants were less interested than before: this was pure gorging, their full stomachs told them; the men were, behind blue smokescreens, now satisfying hunger for the finest possible Cuban leaf. The Walters family was still there, the girl reading, the boy inhaling a balloon-glass, the wife smoking, the husband looking not very well.

'Whereabouts in Germany?' asked Theodorescu, cutting his fillet. 'I know Germany. But, of course, I know most countries. My business takes me far and wide.' I have been warned, thought Hillier. He said: 'What I meant was that I studied typewriters in Germany. After the war. In Wilhelmshaven.'

'Of course. A great naval base reduced to a seaside centre of light industries. You will probably be acquainted with Herr Luttwitz of the Olympia Company.'

Hillier took a chance, frowning. 'I don't seem to remember a Herr Luttwitz.'

'Of course, stupid of me. I was thinking of a quite different company altogether.'

'And what,' asked Hillier, when the roast lamb came -he could tell it was delicious, but things would soon be ceasing to be delicious – 'is your particular line of business?'

'Pure buying and selling,' shrugged Theodorescu massively. Was it imagination, or was he having difficulty with that forkful of onion and gruyère casserole? 'I produce nothing. I am a broken reed in the great world -your great world – of creativity.'

'Pheasant,' ordered Hillier, 'with pecan stuffing. Bread sauce and game chips.' Oh, God. 'Broccoli blossoms.'

'And then perhaps a poussin each with barley. And sauce béchamel velouté. Some spinach and minced mushrooms. A roast potato with sausage stuffing.' He seemed to Hillier to order with a pinch of defiance. Was he at last feeling the strain? Was that sweat on his upper lip?

'That sounds admirable,' said Hillier. 'Another bottle of the same?'

'Why not some burgundy? A '49 Chambertin, I think.'

The eating was growing grimmer. Miss Devi said: 'I think, if you will excuse me, I shall go out on deck.' Hillier rose at once, saying: 'Let me accompany you.' And, to Theodorescu, 'I'll be back directly.'

'No!' cried Theodorescu. 'Stay here, please. The ocean is a traditional vomitorium.'

'Are you suggesting,' said Hillier, sitting again, 'that I would play so mean a trick?'

'I'm suggesting nothing.' Miss Devi, turning before going through the vomitory of the dining-saloon, smiled rather sadly at Hillier. Hillier, without half-rising, gave her a little bow. She left. 'Let us push on,' frowned Theodorescu.

'I don't like this talk of pushing on. It's an insult to good food. I'm thoroughly enjoying this.'

'Enjoy it, then, and stop talking.'

Enjoying it doggedly but with a lilt of potential triumph, Hillier suddenly heard a crash, a flop, a groan, and little screams from, he now saw, the Walters table. The head of the head of the family had cracked down among the fruit-parings, upsetting cruet and coffee-cups. A stroke or something. A coronary. The stewards who, as the dining-saloon emptied, had been discreetly closing in to watch the eating contest, now converged, with the remaining diners, on to the Walters table, a sudden boil on the smooth skin of holiday. Both Hillier and Theodorescu looked down guiltily at their near-empty plates. A steward ran off for the ship's doctor. 'Shall we,' said Hillier, call it a draw? We've both done pretty well.'

'You yield?' said Theodorescu. 'You resign?'

'Of course not. I was suggesting we be reasonable. Over there a horrible example has been presented to us.' The ship's doctor, in evening dress of the mercantile marine, was shouting for the way to be cleared.

'It's time we moved on,' said Theodorescu. He called the chief steward. 'Bring,' he said, 'the cold sweet trolley.'

'This gentleman's in a pretty bad way, sir. If you don't mind waiting a minute-'

'Nonsense. This isn't a hospital ward.' It looked like it, though. A couple of orderlies had come in with a stretcher. While Mr Walters, snoring desperately, was being placed upon it, a Goanese steward trundled the cold sweet trolley along. Mrs Walters was weeping. The two children were nowhere to be seen. Mr Walters, in cortège, was carried out. Theodorescu and Hillier very nearly had the dining-saloon to themselves. 'Right,' said Theodorescu. 'Harlequin sherbet?'

'Harlequin sherbet.' They served each other.

'I think,' said Theodorescu, 'a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux.'

'What an excellent idea.'

They got through their sweets sourly. Peach mousse with sirop framboise. Cream dessert ring Chantilly with zabag-lione sauce. Poires Hélène with cold chocolate sauce. Cold Grand Marnier pudding. Strawberry marlow. Marrons panaché vicomte. 'Look,' gasped Hillier, 'this sort of thing isn't my line at all.'

'Isn't it? Isn't it, Mr Jagger? What is your line then?'

'My teeth are on fire.'

'Cool them with some of this nectarine flan.'

'I think I shall be sick.'

'That's not allowed. That is not in the rules.'

'Who makes the rules?'

'I do.' Theodorescu poured Hillier a wonderful chill tumbler of frothing Blanquette. Hillier felt better after it. He was able to take some chocolate rum dessert, garnished with whipped cream and Kahlua, also some orange marmalade crème bavaroise, loud with Cointreau. 'How about some apple tart normande with Calvados?' asked Theodorescu. But Hillier had an apocalyptical vision of his in-sides – all that churned mess of slop and fibre, cream sluggishly oozing along the pipes, the flavouring liqueurs ready to self-ignite, a frothing inner sea of souring wine. A small Indian township could have been nourished for a day on it all. This was the West that Roper had deserted. 'I give up,' he gasped. 'You win.'

'You owe me one thousand pounds,' said Theodorescu. 'I wish to be paid before we reach Yarylyuk. No. I may leave the cruise before then. I wish to be paid before noon tomorrow.'

'You can't leave before Yarylyuk. It's our next port.'

'There are such things as helicopters. Much depends on certain messages I may receive.'

'You can have a cheque now.'

'I know I can have a cheque now. But what I want is cash.'

'But I haven't any cash. At least, not that amount.'

'There's plenty in the purser's safe. You have, I take it, traveller's cheques or a letter of credit. Cash.' He now lit a cigar as unshakily as if he'd merely dined on a couple of poached eggs. Then he walked out of the dining-saloon dead straight. Hillier ran, pushing against him. That traditional vomitorium.

4

'And how," asked Hillier somewhat guiltily, 'is your husband?' He felt vaguely responsible for Mr Walters's coronary; he had propagandised for gluttony instead of, after at latest the filet mignon, standing up to denounce it in a Father Byrne-type sermon. But he had thought he stood a good chance of winning a thousand pounds, a useful sum for his retirement. Now he had to pay out all that in cash and he couldn't do it. At any rate, the money had been demanded, with the grace of a brief moratorium. He felt, though, with a spy's intuition, that it might not really come to that. The first thing was to find out more about Theodorescu. That was why he was here, on the touchline of the dance, drinking Cordon Bleu mixed with crème de menthe – a reef of crushed ice below – at the simple graceful metal bar of the open-air recreation deck. He was looking for Miss Devi. It was proper anyway, quite apart from pumping her for information, to want to see Miss Devi on this delicious Adriatic summer night with its expensive stellar and ltaiar show put on for the dancing tycoons and their women. He would, alternatively, have liked to see something of Miss Walters, but her father was very ill, there were questions of decency.

But Mrs Walters seemed above such questions, knocking back large highballs while her husband snored desperately in the sickbay. Hillier was able to see her more closely now, even to glance with shamed favour into the deep cut of her midnight blue straight satin, a gauzy stole of evening blue loose on her shoulders. Her hair was a frizzed auburn, not too attractive; she had a mean heart-shaped face with eyes she narrowed in a habit of cunning; her ears were lobeless and j'angled no rings. She was no more than thirty-eight. She said now, in a contralto surprisingly unresonant: 'He brought this on himself. That's his third stroke. I warn him and warn him but he says he's determined to enj'oy life. Look where enj'oying life has put him.'

'In a decently-run order of things,' said Hillier senten-tiously, 'the pleasures of wealthy age would be reserved for indigent youth.'

'You kidding?' said Mrs Walters. A vulgar woman perhaps at bottom. 'He was brought up on bread and jam, he says. Weak tea out of a tin can. Now he's got the better of bread, he reckons, owning all these flour-mills. Those children of his, believe it or not, have not eaten one slice of bread since the day they were weaned. He won't have bread in the house.' All the time she talked, she looked distractedly beyond Hillier, as though expecting someone.

'But,' repeated Hillier, 'how is your husband?'

'He'll recover,' she said with indifference. 'They've been injecting things into him.' And now she flashed brilliantly, swaying her hips minimally, as a sort of paradigm of a fancy man approached-a man who, Hillier felt, must, beneath the green dinner-jacket, the pomade, talc, cologne, after-shave lotion, anti-sweat dabs in the oxters, have a subtle and ineradicable odour of cooking-fat. They were both vulgar: let them get on with it.

Hillier strolled away from the bar, drink in one hand, one hand in side-pocket, pleased that the thought of cooking-fat did not make him feel queasy. He had given most of the monstrous dinner to the sea-quietly, in a quiet corner near some lifeboats. It had all tasted of nothing as it came up, one flavour cancelling out another. Now he felt well, though not hungry. Gazing benevolently at the dancers, who were performing some teen-age hip-shake, jowls shaking in a different rhythm, he was happy to see that Miss Devi was on the floor, partnered by a junior ship's officer. Good. He would ask her for the next dance. He hoped it would be something civilised, in which bodies were clasped firmly against each other. These new youngsters, who could have all the sex they wanted, were very sexless really. Their dances were narcissistic. They were trying to make themselves androgynous. Perhaps it was the first stage in a long process of evolution which should end in a human worm. Hillier had a vision of human worms and shuddered. Let us have plenty of sex while it is still there. I warn him and warn him but he says he's determined to enjoy life. Mrs Walters and her fancy man had gone off somewhere, perhaps towards the lifeboats. Why were lifeboats aphrodisiacal? Perhaps, something to do with urgency. Adam and Eve on a raft.

The hip-shaking stopped, dancers returned to their tables. Miss Devi was alone with the junior ship's officer. He, a mere servant, could easily be seen off. Hillier waited, watching the two suck up something long through straws. The band-leader, who seemed very drunk, said: 'This next one would be for the oldsters, if there were any oldsters here.' Everything laid on, even flattery. The band started to play a slow fox-trot.

Miss Devi seemed quite pleased to be asked to dance by Hillier. 'I rather regret that silly wager now,' said Hillier as they did feather-steps. 'I don't mean because I lost – that's nothing – but because it was a sort of insult to India. I mean, look at it as a sort of tableau in a play by Brecht or somebody – two Western men gorging, a thousand pounds on it, and India watches, sad-eyed, aware of her starving millions.'

Miss Devi laughed. Her slender body, strained back in the dance, was delicious in his arms. Hillier, as he often did when close to a desirable woman, began to feel hungry. 'Starving millions,' she repeated, with a sort of cool mockery. 'I think that we all get what we want. Having too many children and not farming the land properly -that's as much as to say "I want to starve".'

'So you don't go in for compassion, pity, things of that sort?'

She thought about that, dancing. 'I try not to. We should know the consequences of our acts.'

'And if a mad stranger breaks into my house and knifes me?'

'It's pre-ordained, willed from the beginning. You can't fight God's will. To pity the victim is to resent the executioner. God should not be resented.'

'It's strange to me to hear you talking about God.' She looked coldly at him, stiffening. 'I mean here, on a luxury cruise, dancing a slow fox-trot.'

'Why? Everything's in God-slow fox-trot, saxophone, the salted peanuts on the bar. Why should it be strange? The universe is one thing.'

Hillier groaned to himself: it was like Roper talking, except that Roper wouldn't have God. 'And the universe has only one law?' he said.

'The laws are contained in it, not imposed. Whatever we do, we obey the law.'

'What does Mr Theodorescu say when you talk like that?'

'He tends to agree with me. He accepts the primacy of the will. We should do what we want to do. Never nurse unacted desires.'

Good. 'And if we desire a person, not just a thing?'

'There must be a harmony of wills. Sometimes this is predestined. Usually it has to be contrived out of one person's desire. It's the task of the désirer to bring about a reciprocal desire. That's perhaps the most Godlike function a human soul can take on. It's a kind of creation of destiny.'

As logic this made little sense to Hillier, but he wasn't going to tell her that. Nor did he just yet propose to swoop down to the practical and personal application of her theory. Plenty of time, all the night before you. Switch on the oven and stack the dishes in the warming-drawer. 'You yourself,' he said, 'whose desirability is not in question, must have had this reciprocity wished on you many times. And in many countries.'

'Some countries more than others. But I have little time for social life.'

'Mr Theodorescu keeps you pretty busy?'

'Oh, what a terrible sour note that was.' She screwed up her face delectably. 'That saxophone-player seems to be drunk. What did you say? Oh, yes, pretty busy.'

Hillier now saw the steward Wriste, smoking, watching the dancing from a far door. He had put on a shirt and spotted bow-tie for the evening. Catching sight of Hillier, he waved cheerily but discreetly, opening his mouth with a kind of toothless joy. Hillier said: 'Typing and so on? I've been working on the design of a cheap lightweight electrical typewriter. You can carry it about and plug it into a lamp-socket.'

'We're dancing,' said Miss Devi, 'under the starry Adriatic sky, and all you can think of to talk to me about is typewriters.'

'The universe is one thing. God and typewriters and drunken saxophonists. What sort of business does Mr Theodorescu do? Mr Theodorescu is also part of the universe.'

'He calls himself an entrepôt of industrial information. He buys and sells it.'

'And is he always paid in cash?'

She didn't answer. But 'Look,' she said, 'if you're trying to find out whether Mr Theodorescu and I have a personal relationship, the answer is no. And if you're going to ask me to use my personal influence to get your debt rescinded, then the answer is again no. People shouldn't gamble with Mr Theodorescu. He always wins.'

'And supposing I refuse to pay him?'

'That would be most unwise. You might have an unfortunate accident. He's a very powerful man.'

'You mean he'd harm me physically? Well then, perhaps I'd better get in first. I can fight as dirtily as the best of them. I think a gentleman ought to be willing to accept the cheque of another gentleman. Mr Theodorescu wants cash and is ready to engineer unfortunate accidents. I don't think Mr Theodorescu is a gentleman.'

'You'd better not let him hear you say that.'

'Where is he? I'll say it to his face with pleasure. But I suppose he's flat out on his bunk or in his luxe suite or whatever it is.'

'Ah, no. He's in the radio-room, busy with messages. Mr Theodorescu is never ill. He can eat and drink anything. He is, I think, the most virile man I know.'

'Sorry,' said Hillier to a couple he'd nearly bumped into. And, to Miss dancing Devi, 'Yet he's not virile enough to want to draw you into a reciprocal nexus of desire.'

'You use very pompous words. Mr Theodorescu is interested in a different kind of sex. He has exhausted, he says, the possibilities of women.'

'Does that mean that the precocious Master Walters will have to watch out?'

'He is also the discreetest man I know. He is very discreet about everything.'

'My tastes are normal. I don't need so much discretion.'

'What do you mean?' But, before he could answer, she surveyed his face with cat's eyes. 'It seems to me,' she said, 'that you are for some reason trying to make yourself ugly. The face I am looking at doesn't seem to be your face at all. You are perhaps a man of mystery. That young and forward boy doesn't believe you have anything to do with typewriters. A minute ago you were too quick to bring typewriters into our discourse, as though you were trying to convince yourself that typewriters are your professional concern. Why are you here? Why are you taking this voyage? Who are you?'

'My name is Sebastian Jagger. I'm a typewriter technician.' Hillier sang those words gently in a free adaptation of Mimi's aria in the first act of La Bohème. This did not clash with the music of the fox-trot. The pianist, who seemed as drunk as his leader, was doing something atonal and aleatoric; meanwhile drummer and bassist assured the dancers that this was still the dance they had started off to dance. 'I've been doing some work for Olivetti. I'm returning to England for a time, but I'm taking a holiday first.'

'I would like to strip you,' she said, her eyes deliciously malicious, 'and see what sort of man you really are.'

'Let us,' said Hillier gallantly, 'have some reciprocal stripping.'

The music suddenly, except for the pianist, stopped. A glowingly healthy though tubby man with grey curls, evening dress and dog-collar was standing on the players' rostrum. 'My friends,' he intoned with easy loudness. The pianist came in with a recitative accompaniment but then was hushed. The congregation listened, arms still about each other as in a love feast. 'It has been suggested to me that we end now. As most of you will know, one of our fellow-passengers is in the sickbay. Our revelry is, apparently, all too audible there. The worst is feared, I fear, for the poor man. It would be reverent and considerate to end the evening quietly, perhaps even in meditation. Thank you.' He got down to some light applause. The band-leader called: 'You've had it, chums. Proceed quietly to your homes and do nothing naughty at street-corners.'

'I think,' said Miss Devi, her left arm still lightly about Hillier, 'you're being insolent.'

'You're a great one for the forms, aren't you?' said Hillier. 'You admire discretion, you resent insolence. An indiscreet God had the insolence to make me what I am. What I am you are more than welcome to find out. At leisure. Stripping,' he added, 'was the process you had in mind.'

'I shall lock my cabin door.'

'You do that. You lock it.' Hillier's stomach growled with hunger. Miss Devi's arm was still about him. He slowly dislodged it. 'That silver ring-thing on your nose,' he said. He tweaked it and she started back. 'Keep it on,' he said. 'Don't, whatever else you do, take off that.' She raised her head high as though with the intention of placing a water-vessel on it, sketched a small spitting gesture, and then, with Aryan dignity, made her way off through the dispersing crowd Wriste was still on the periphery. His friend the winger was with him, a lean, burnt, sardonic man in early middle age, still dressed as for the dining-saloon. 'I thought you was doing all right there,' said Wriste. 'Ta for the Guinness,' said the winger once more, leering. Hillier said: 'I want food brought to my cabin.'

'You've got to hand it to him,' nodded the winger. 'Unless, of course, he's just showing off.'

'All passengers' wishes must, providing they seem reasonable, be acceded to without question,' said Wriste primly. 'What can I get for you, sir?'

'Crustaceans, if you know what those are. No garnishings, but don't forget the red pepper. A painfully cold bottle of Sekt.'

'Right, sir. And the number of the cabin you have in mind, if you don't know it already, is fifty-eight. Gor-blimey,' said Wriste old-fashionedly, 'how the poor live.'

5

It was not possible to proceed to that cabin with any degree of furtiveness, even though the hour was very late and the corridor-lights had been dimmed. The snores along the corridor were so loud that Hillier found it hard to believe them genuine; soon doors might fly open and outrage be registered from under curlers and out of mouths with their dentures removed. As an earnest of this, Wriste suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor to say 'Good luck, sir' as though Hillier were going in to bat. And Master Walters, in endragoned Chinese brocade dressing-gown, was pacing like a prospective father, puffing a Black Russian in a Dunhill holder. Hillier, remembering that 'father' was a relevant word here, asked kindly if there was any news.

'News?' The face, for all the precocity, was very young and blubbered. 'What news would there be? As a man sows so shall he reap. Arteriosclerosis. He knew he was bringing it on.' There seemed to be a flavour of Miss Devi's callous philosophy in all this.

'One can't always be blamed for the state of one's arteries,' said Hillier. 'Some people are just lucky.'

'If he dies,' said Alan, 'what's going to happen to Clara and me?'

'Clara?'

'My sister. That other bitch can take care of herself, which is just what she's doing. My father wouldn't listen to reason. I told him not to re-marry. We were doing very nicely on our own, the three of us. And everything will go to her, everything. She hates us, I know she does. What will happen to us then?'

Snores answered. 'Modern medical science,' said Hillier lamely. 'It's amazing what they can do nowadays. He'll be right as rain in a day or two, you'll see.'

'What do you know about it?' said Alan. 'What do you know about anything? Spying up and down the corridor, as I can see, spy as you are. If he dies I'll get her. Or you can get her, being a spy. I'll pay you to get her.'

'This is a lot of nonsense,' said Hillier loudly. A voice from a cabin went shhhhhh. As he'd thought, there were people awake. 'We'll talk about this in the morning. But in the morning everything will be all right. The sun will shine – it will all be a bad dream, soon forgotten. Now get to bed.'

Alan looked at Hillier, who was naked under a bathrobe. 'That's two baths in half a day,' he said. Thank God, the boy still had some innocence in him. 'At least you're a very clean spy.'

'Look,' said Hillier, 'let's get this absolutely clear. I'm not a spy. Have you got that? There are spies, and I've actually met one or two. But I'm not one of them. If you could spot me as a spy, I can't very well be a spy, can I? The whole point of being a spy is that you don't seem to be one. Have you got that now?'

'I bet you've got a gun.'

'I bet you've got one too. You seem to have everything else.'

The boy shook his head. 'Too young for a licence,' he said. 'That's my trouble – too young for everything. Too young to contest a will, for instance.'

'Too young to be up at this hour. Get to bed. Take a couple of sleeping-tablets. I bet you've got those too.'

"You don't seem,' said Alan, 'to be too bad of a bloke, really. Have you got children?'

'None. Nor a wife.'

'A lone wolf,' said Alan. 'The cat that walks alone. I only wish you'd be straight with me. I'd like to strip the disguise off and find out what you really are.'

Miss Devi again. 'Tomorrow,' said Hillier. 'Everything will seem different tomorrow. Which is your cabin?'

'That one there. Come in and have a nightcap.'

'Many thanks,' said Hillier. 'But I have some rather urgent business to attend to.' He writhed as with bowel pain.

'That's all the eating,' said Alan. 'I saw that and I heard about the rest of it. Don't trust that man,' he whispered. 'He's a foreigner. He can't kid me with his posh accent.' And then, in an officer-tone: 'AH right. Off you go.' And he returned to his cabin. Wriste had also gone. Hillier padded to Cabin No.58. As he had expected, the door was not locked. He knocked and at once entered. Again as he had expected, Miss Devi said: 'You're late.'

'Delayed,' gulped Hillier. Miss Devi was lying on her bunk, naked except for her silver nose-ring. 'Unavoidably.' She had loosened her hair and her body was framed in it as far as the knees. Her body was superb, brown as though cooked, with the faintest shimmer of a glaze upon it; the jet-black bush answered the magnificent hair like a cheeky parody; the breasts, though full, did not loll but sat firmly as though moulded out of some celestial rubber; the nipples had already started upright. She reached out her arms, golden swords, towards him. He kicked off his slippers and let his bathrobe fall to the floor. 'The light,' he gasped. 'I must put out the-'

'Leave it on. I want to see.'

Hillier engaged. 'Araikkul va,' she whispered. Tamil? A southern woman then, Dravidian not Aryan. She had been trained out of some manual, but it was not that coarse Kama Sutra. Was it the rare book called Pokam, whose title Hillier had always remembered for its facetious English connotation? What now began was agonisingly-exquisite, something he had forgotten existed. She gently inflamed him with the mayil or peacock embrace, moved on to the matakatham, the poththi, the putanai. Hillier started to pass out of time, nodding to himself as he saw himself begin to take flight. Goodbye, Hillier. A voice beyond, striking like light, humorously catechised him, and he knew all the answers. Holy Cross Day? The festival of the exaltation of the Cross, September 14th. The year of the publication of Hypatia} 1853. The Mulready Envelope, The Morall Philosophie of Doni, the Kenning-ton Oval laid out in 1845, The White Doe of Rylstone, Markheim, Thrawn Janet, Wade's magic boat called Wingelock, Pontius Pilate's porter was named Cartaphilus the wandering Jew. WThen did Queen Elizabeth come to the throne? November, 1558. Something there tried to tug him back, some purpose on earth, connected with now, his job, but he was drawn on and on, beyond, to the very source of the voice. He saw the lips moving, opening as to devour him. The first is the fifth and the fifth is the eighth, he was told by a niggling earth-voice, but he shouted it down. He let himself be lipped in by the chewing mouth, then was masticated strongly till he was resolved into a juice, willing this, wanting it. Mani, mani was the word, he remembered. The mani was tipped, gallons of it, into a vessel that throbbed as if it were organic and alive, and then the vessel was sealed with hot wax. He received his instructions in the name of man, addressed as Johnrobert-jameswilliam (the brothers Maryburgh playing a fife over Pompeii, Spalato, Kenwood, Osterley) Bedebellblair: Cast forth doughtily! So to cast forth in that one narrow sweet cave would be to wreck all the ships of the world-Alabama, Ark, Beagle, Bellerophon, Bounty, Cutty Sark, Dreadnought, Endeavour, Erebus, Fram, Golden Hind, Great Eastern, Great Harry, Marie Celeste, Mayflower, Revenge, Skidbladnir, Victory. But it was the one way to refertilise all the earth, for the cave opened into myriad channels below ground, mapped before him like the tree of man in an Anatomy. The gallons of mani had swollen to a scalding ocean on which navies cheered, their masts cracking. The eighty-foot tower that crowed from his loins glowed whitehot and then disintegrated into a million flying bricks. He pumped the massive burden out. Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Sariel, Gabriel and Jerahmçel cried with sevenfold main voice, a common chord that was yet seven distinct and different notes. But, miracle, at once, from unknown reservoirs, the vessel began to fill again.

'Madu, madu!' she seemed to call. It was then now to be the gross way of the south. She bloated herself by magic to massive earthmother, the breasts ever growing too big for his grasp, so that his fingers must grow and he grow new fingers. The nipples were rivets boring through the middle metacarpal bones. His soreness was first cooled then anointed by the heat of a beneficent hell that (Dante was right) found its location at earth's centre. He was caught in a cleft between great hills. He worked slowly, then faster, then let the cries of birds possess his ears – gannet, cormorant, bittern, ibis, spoonbill, flamingo, curassow, quail, rail, coot, trumpeter, bustard, plover, avocet, oystercatcher, curlew, oriole, crossbill, finch, shrike, godwit, wheatear, bluethroat. The cries condensed to a great roar of blood. The cabin soared, its ceiling blew off in the stratosphere and released them both. He clung, riding her, fearful of being dislodged, then, as the honeyed cantilena broke and flowed, he was ready to sink with her, she deflating herself to what she had been, her blown river of hair settling after the storm and flood.

But even now it was not all over. The last fit was in full awareness of time and place, the mole on the left shoulder noted, the close weave of the skin, the sweat that gummed body to body. The aim was to slice off the externals of the jaghana of each, so that viscera engaged, coiling and knotting into one complex of snakes. Here nature must allow of total penetration, both bodies lingam and yoni. 'Now pain,' she said. Her talons attacked his back; it was as if she were nailing him to herself. When she perceived his sinking, she broke away – viscera of each retreating and coiling in again, each polished belly slamming to, a door with secret hinges. She gave his neck and chest the sounding touch, so that the hairs stood erect, passed, on to the half-moon on the buttocks, then the tiger's claw, the peacock's foot, the hare's jump, the blue lotus-leaf. She was essaying the man's part, and now she took it wholly, but not before Hillier had nearly swooned with the delectable agony of a piercing in his perineum so intense that it was as if he were to be spitted. She was on him then, and though he entered her it seemed she was entering him. He seemed raised from the surface of the bed by his tweaked and moulded nipples. He in his turn dug deep with plucking fingers into the fires that raged in the interlunar cavern, and soon what must be the ultimate accession gathered to its head. With athletic swiftness he turned her to the primal position and then, whinnying like a whole herd of wild horses, shivering as if transformed to protoplasm save for that plunging sword, he released lava like a mountain in a single thrust of destruction, so that she screamed like a burning city. Hillier lay on her still, sucked dry by vampires, moaning. The galaxies wheeled, history shrieked then settled, familiar sensations crept back into the body, common hungers began to bite. He fell from her dripping as from a sea-bathe and, as also from that, tasting salt. He sought his bathrobe, but she grabbed it first, covering herself with it. She smiled – not kindly but with malice, so that he frowned in puzzlement – and then she called: 'Come in!'

And so he entered, still in evening clothes, huge, bald, smiling. Mr Theodorescu. 'Ah, yes,' he organ-stopped. 'Accept only this brand. The genuine article.' The S burned on wet nakedness; it was too late now to attempt to hide it. 'Mr Hillier,' beamed Theodorescu. 'I thought it must be Mr Hillier. Now I definitely know.'

6

'Yes,' said Theodorescu, 'now I definitely know.' He was carrying, Hillier now noticed, the kind of stick known as a Penang lawyer. 'You, of course, Miss Devi, have known a little longer. That branded S tells all. Soskice's work, a cruel operator. The face of Hillier still unknown, but that signature snaking all over Europe, revealed only to the debagger-and your enemies, Mr Hillier, do not go in for debagging, not having been educated in British public schools – to them, I say, or to a lady with the manifold talents of Miss Devi here.'

'I was a bloody fool,' said Hillier. 'There's no point in my denying my identity. Look, I feel as though I'm having a medical. Can I put something on?'

'I think not,' said Theodorescu. Miss Devi still had Hillier's robe about her; she was also sitting on her bunk, so that Hillier could not tug a sheet or blanket off. Hillier sat down on the cabin's solitary chair, set under the porthole. To his left was a dressing-table. In those drawers would be garments. Even now, the prospect of wearing one of Miss Devi's saris or wisp of her underwear met a physical response he had to hide with both hands. Again, in one of those drawers might be a gun. He risked putting out a hand to a drawer-handle, tugged, but the drawer was locked. 'It is better, Mr Hillier, that you sit there in puris naturalibus, delightful coy phrase. Let us see you as you are. Dear dear dear, how scarred your body has been in war's or love's lists. But I would like to see the face. Pads of wax in the cheeks, I should imagine; the mouth-corner drawn down in a sneer – by simple stitching? Is that moustache real? Why do your eyes glitter so? Never mind, never mind. The time for talk is short. Let us talk then.'

'First,' said naked Hillier, 'tell me who you are.'

'I operate under my own name,' said Theodorescu, leaning against the wardrobe. 'I am utterly neutral, in the pay of no power, major or minor. I collect information and sell it to the highest-or shall I say higher? -bidder. I see only two men, usually in Lausanne. They bid according to the funds their respective organisations render available. It is a tolerably profitable trade, relatively harmless. Occasionally I make a direct sale, no auctioning. Well, now. Would you, Miss Devi, be good enough to dress? We will both look the other way, being gentlemen. And then I'd be glad if you'd proceed at once to the radio-room. You know what message to send.'

'What is all this?' asked Hillier. 'Something about me?' Miss Devi rose from her bed, bundling up sheets and blankets as she did so. These she threw, a billow of white and brown, on to the space between Theodorescu and the cabin-door, so that Hillier could not get at them. Theodorescu then stepped gracefully aside, that she might take garments from the wardrobe. She chose black slacks and a white jumper. Hillier, naked, no gentleman, watched. She drew on the slacks without removing the bathrobe. Then she removed and threw it among the sheets and blankets, making Hillier gulp with the nostalgia of shared passion. She pulled the sweater on. Her hair, still flowing, was trapped in it. She released it with a long electric crackle. Hillier gulped and gulped. Theodorescu had kept his eyes averted, looking through the porthole at the deep Adriatic night. Miss Devi smiled at nothing, thrust her feet into sandals, then silently left. Theodorescu came to sit heavily upon the bunk. He said: 'You will have guessed what the message is. You are, if my informants in Trieste have not lied, now on your final assignment. I do not know what the assignment is, nor do I much care. The fact is that you will not be landing in Yarylyuk. Miss Devi is informing the authorities – in a suitably cryptic form they will know how to interpret -that you are on your way. They will be awaiting you on the quayside. I am not doing this for money, Mr Hillier, for, of course, you will not be landing. There will be men waiting for Mr Jagger or whatever new persona you might consider assuming, and they will find nobody answering your description. They mny, of course, find it necessary to strip one or two of the male passengers, looking for a telltale S. Those who are stripped-and they will not be many, most of our compagnons de voyage being old and fat- those who are will not object: it will be a story about adventures in a brutal police-state to retail over brandy and cigars back home. You would, if you were to stay on board instead of landing, also be in some slight danger. For these dear people are efficient at winkling out their quarry, as you well know. Visitors are allowed aboard, in the interests of the promotion of international friendship. This port of call is the sweet-sour sauce of the whole meaty trip. A British meal, British whisky, a few little purchases in the ship's gift-shop – these are encouragements to keep the Black Sea open to British cruises. There will be people wandering the ship looking for you, Mr Hillier. There may even be police-warrants, trumped-up charges. The Captain will not want too much trouble.'

'You do talk a lot,' said Hillier.

'Do I? Do I?' Theodorescu seemed pleased. 'Well, I'd better come to the point or points, had I not? Tomorrow a helicopter will be picking up Miss Devi and myself. We shall be sailing quite near the island of Zakynthos. You are cordially invited to come with us, Mr Hillier.'

'Where to?'

'Oh, I have no one headquarters. We could spend a pleasant enough time, the three of us, in my little villa near Amalias.'

'And then, of course, I would be sold.'

'Sold? Sold? Could I not sell you now if I wished? No, Mr Hillier, I trade only in information. You must be a repository of a great deal of that. We could take our time over it. And then you could go, free as the air, well-rewarded. What do you say?'

'No.'

Theodorescu sighed. 'I expected that. Well, well. The delights that Miss Devi is qualified to purvey are, as you already know, very considerable. Or rather you do not yet know. You've had time to touch only their fringes. Women I do not much care for myself -1 prefer little Greek shepherd-boys – but Miss Devi – this I have been assured of by some whose judgement I respect on other matters of a hedonistic kind – Miss Devi is altogether exceptional. Think, Mr Hillier. You're retiring from the hazardous work of espionage. What have you to look forward to? A tiny pension, no golden handshake-'

'I'm promised a sizeable bonus if I do this last job.'

'If, Mr Hillier, if. You know you won't do it now. Soon you will not say even "if". I offer you money and Miss Devi offers herself. What do you say to that? I am not likely to be less generous in my own bestowals than Miss Devi is in hers.'

'I could think better,' said Hillier, 'if I had some clothes on.'

'That's good,' said Theodorescu. 'That's a beginning. You talk of thinking, you see.'

'As for that, I've thought about it. I'm not coming with you.'

'Like yourself,' said Theodorescu, 'I believe in free will. I hate coercion. Bribery, of course, is altogether different. Well, there are certain things I wish to know now. I shall pay well. As an earnest of my generosity I start by rescinding the debt you owe me. The Trencherman Stakes.' He laughed. 'You need not pay me the thousand pounds.'

'Thank you,' said Hillier.

As if Hillier had really done him a favour, Theodorescu pulled a big cigar-case from his inner pocket. At the same time he allowed to peep out coyly bundles of American currency. 'Hundred-dolla: bills, Mr Hillier. "C's", I think they call them. Do have a cigar.' He disclosed fat Romeo and Juliets. Hillier took one; he'd been dying for a smoke. Theodorescu donated fire from a gold Ronson. They both puffed. The feminine odours of Miss Devi's cabin were overlaid with blue wraiths of Edwardian clubmen. 'Do you remember,' said Theodorescu dreamily, 'a certain passage in the transports you seemed to be sharing with Miss Devi – an excruciatingly pleasurable one, in which it seemed that a claw sharpened to a needle-point pierced a most intimate part of your person?'

'How do you know about that?'

'It was arranged. It was a special injection, slow-working but efficacious. A substance developed by Dr Pobedonostev of Yuzovo called, I believe, B-type vellocet. That has entered your body. In about fifteen minutes you will answer any question I put to you with perfect truth. Please, please, Mr Hillier, give me the credit for a little sense, more – a little honesty, before you say that this is sheer bluff. You see, you will not fall into a trance, answering from a dream, as with so many of the so-called truth-drugs. You will be thoroughly conscious but possessed of a euphoria which will make concealment of the truth seem a crime against the deep and lasting friendship you will be convinced subsists between us. All I have to do is to wait.'

Hillier said, 'Bastard,' and tried to get up from the chair. Theodorescu immediately cracked him on the glans penis with his Penang lawyer. Hillier tried to punch Theodorescu, but Theodorescu parried the blow easily with his stick, puffing at his cigar with enjoyment. Hillier then had time to attend to his privy agony, sitting again, rocking and moaning.

'It is because I believe in free will as you do,' said Theodorescu, 'that I want you to answer certain questions totally of your volition. The first question is for five thousand dollars. It is rather like one of these stupid television quiz-games, isn't it? Note, Mr Hillier, that I needn't pay you anything at all. But I've robbed you of your chance of a bonus and I must make amends.'

'I won't answer, you bastard.'

'But you will, you will, nothing is. more certain. Is it not better to answer with the exalted and, yes, totally human awareness that you yourself are choosing, not having information extracted from you with the aid of a silly little drug?'

'What's the first question?' asked Hillier, thinking: I needn't answer, I needn't answer, I have a choice.

'First of all, and for five thousand dollars, remember, I want to know the exact location of the East German escape route known, I believe, as Karl Otto.'

'I don't know. I honestly don't know.'

'Oh, surely. Well, think about it, but think quickly. Time is short for you, if not for me. Second, for six thousand dollars, I wish to be told the identities of the members of the terrorist organisation called Volruss in Kharkov.'

'Oh, God, you can't-'

'Wait, Mr Hillier. I haven't said anything about selling this information to the Soviet authorities. It's a matter of auctioning. So it's essential that, on top of this particular disclosure, you also reveal the code that I need to contact them. I understand it's a matter of putting a personal message in your British Daily Worker. The only British newspaper allowed in the Soviet Union, as you know, hence invaluable for conveying messages to those disaffected and vigorous bodies which are so annoying-though perhaps only annoying as a mosquito-sting is annoying – annoying, I say, to the MGB. I doubt it their representative will outbid the émigré sponsors of Volruss.'

Hillier, who now felt no pain, who no longer saw any embarrassment in his nakedness, who felt warm and rested and confident, smiled at Theodorescu. An intelligent and able man, he thought. A good eater and drinker. A man you could have a bloody good night out with. No enemy; a mere neutral who was wisely making money out of the wThole stupid business that he, Hillier, was opting out of because the stupidity had recently become rather nasty. And then he saw that this must be the drug beginning to take effect. It was necessary to hate Theodorescu again, and quickly. He got up from his chair, though smiling amiably, and said: 'I'm going to get my bathrobe, and you're not bloody well going to stop me.' Theodorescu at once, and without malice, cracked both shins hard with the Penang lawyer. Pain flowed like scalding water. 'You fucking swine, Theodorescu,' he gritted. And then he was grateful to Theodorescu for turning himself into the enemy again. He was a good man to be willing to do that. He saw what was happening; he saw that he would have to be quick. 'Give me the money,' he said. 'Eleven thousand dollars.' Theodorescu whipped out all his notes. 'Karl Otto,' he said, 'starts in the cellar of Nummer Dreiundvierzig, Schlegelstrasse, Salzwedel.'

'Good, good.'

'I can only name five members of Volruss in Kharkov. They are N. A. Brussilov, I. R. Stolypin, F. Guchkov -1 can't remember his patronymic-'

'Good, good, good.'

'Aren't you going to take this down?'

'It's going down. This top button in my flies is a microphone. I have a tape-recorder in my left inside pocket. I was not scratching my armpit just then. I was switching it on.'

'The others are F. T. Krylenko and H. K. Skovaioda.'

'Ah, a Ukrainian that last one. Excellent. And the code?'

'Elkin.'

'Elkin? Hm. And now, for twelve thousand dollars, the exact location – exact, mind – of Department 9A in London.'

'I can't tell you that.'

'But you must, Mr Hillier. More, you will. Any moment now.'

'I can't. That would be treason.'

'Nonsense. There is no war. There is not going to be any war. This is all a great childish game on the floor of the world. It's absurd to talk about treason, isn't it?' He smiled kindly with the huge polished lamps of his eyes. Hillier started to smile back. Then he stood up again and lunged at Theodorescu. Theodorescu himself stood and towered high. He took both of Hillier's punching hands gently in his, still savouring his cigar. 'Don't, Mr Hillier. What's your first name? Ah, yes, I remember. Denis. We're friends, Denis, friends. If you don't tell me at once for twelve thousand dollars, you will tell me in a very few minutes for nothing.'

'For God's sake hit me. Hit me hard.'

'Oh no. Oh dear me no.' Theodorescu spoke prissily. 'Now come along, my dear Denis. Department 9A of Intercep. The exact location.'

'If you hit me,' said Hillier, 'I shall hate you, and then when I tell you I shall be telling you of my own volition. That's what you want, isn't it? Free will.'

'You're approaching the crepuscular zone, but you've not yet entered it. You'll be telling me because you want to tell me. See, here is the money. Twelve thousand dollars.' He fanned the notes before Hillier's swimming eyes. 'But be quick.'

'It's off Devonshire Road in Chiswick, W.4. Globe Street. From Number 24 to the dairy at the end. Oh, God. Oh, God forgive me.'

'He'll do that,' nodded Theodorescu. 'Sit down, my dear Denis. A pleasant name, Denis. It comes from Dionysus, you know. Sit down and rest. You seem to have nowhere to put this money. Perhaps I'd better keep it for you and give it you when you have clothes on.'

'Give it me now. It's mine. I earned it.'

'And you shall earn more.' Hillier grabbed the money and held it, like figleaves, over his blushing genitals. 'It's a pity you won't come with Miss Devi and me tomorrow. But we'll find you, never fear. There aren't very many places you can retire to. We shall be looking for you. Though,' he said thoughtfully, 'it's quite conceivable that you will come looking for Miss Devi.'

Abject shame and rising euphoria warred in Hillier. He kept his eyes tight shut, biting his mouth so as not to smile.

'You're not a good subject for B-type vellocet,' said Theodorescu. 'There are certain powerful reserves in your bloodstream. You should now be slobbering all over me with love.'

'I hate you,' smiled Hillier warmly. 'I loathe your bloody fat guts.'

Theodorescu shook his head. 'You'll hate me tomorrow. But tomorrow will be too late. You'll sleep very soundly tonight, I think. You won't wake early. But if you do, and if Miss Devi and I are not yet helicoptering off to the isles of Greece at the time of your awakening, it will be futile to attempt to do me harm. I shall be with the Captain on the bridge most of the morning. Moreover, you have nothing with which to do me harm. I took the precaution of entering your cabin and stealing your Aiken and silencer. A very nice little weapon. I have it here.' He took it from his left side-pocket. Hillier winced but then smiled. He nearly said that Theodorescu could keep it as a present. As if he had actually said that, Theodorescu put it back, patting the pocket. 'As for the ampoules you had in the same stupid hiding-place – it was stupid, wasn't it? So obvious-as for those, you can keep them, whatever they are. Perhaps lethal -1 don't know. I found your hypodermic in one of your suitcases. I took the precaution of smashing it. It's best to be on the safe side, don't you agree?'

'Oh, yes, yes,' smiled Hillier. 'How did you get into my cabin?'

Theodorescu sighed. 'My dear fellow. There are duplicates in the purser's office. I said I'd lost my key and I was made free of the board on which the duplicates hang.'

'You're a bloody good bloke,' said Hillier sincerely.

Theodorescu, looking down on Hillier by the porthole, heard the door behind him open. 'Miss Devi,' he said without turning. 'You've been rather a long time.'

'I have, have I?' said Wriste in a girlish voice. He pouted, toothless, towards turning Theodorescu. 'What you doing with him there? He'll catch his death sat like that.'

'He likes to sit like that, don't you, Denis?'

'Oh yes, yes, Theo, I do.'

'Just because a bloke's had a bit of a dip in the jampot,' said Wriste, 'there's no call to get vindictive and sarky. She said she was your secretary. Now we know better, don't we?'

'This,' said Theodorescu, 'is a lady's cabin. You've no right to enter without knocking. Now please leave.'

'I'll leave all right,' said Wriste. 'But he's coming with me. I can see what you've been doing, beating him to a pulp with that bloody stick. Just because your bit can stand his weight better than yours.'

'I shall report you to the purser.'

'Report away.' Wriste saw that Hillier had money grasped tight at his groin. 'Oh,' he said, 'that's possible. I hadn't thought of that. Has he,' he asked Hillier, 'been giving you cabbage to let him bash you about a bit?'

'Not at all,' said Hillier, smiling truthfully. 'Nothing like that at all. He gave me this money for giving him-'

'He had it under the pillow,' organed Theodorescu. 'That's where he had it. All right, take him away.' He picked up the bathrobe from the floor and threw it at Hillier.

'Thank you so very much, Theo. That's awfully kind.'

'I'll take him away all right,' said Wriste, 'but not on your bleeding orders. Come on, old boy,' he said to Hillier as to a dog. 'Why did he have it under the pillow?' he beetled at Theodorescu. 'There's something about all this that I don't get.'

'He doesn't trust anybody,' cried Theodorescu. 'He won't go anywhere without his money.'

'He can trust me,' said Wriste, taking Hillier's hand. 'You trust me, don't you?'

'Oh, yes. I trust you.'

'That's all right, then. Now let Daddy put you to bed.' He led his charge out. Hillier smiled, just starting to drop off.

7

A whole mahamanvantara later, he was shaken gently awake. 'Come on, sir,' coaxed Wriste, 'if you don't eat your breakfast now you won't feel like lunch. ' Hillier could smell coffee. He ungummed his eyelids, then retreated from the light a space so as to make a more cunning and cautious entry into it. He knew that he ought to expect to feel dry-mouthed, headachy, sore-limbed, but he did not yet know why. Then, knowing why, he found himself feeling well and surprisingly energetic. The energy had been pumped in for some urgent purpose. What was it? He was, he noted, in his Chinese pyjamas, the 'happiness' ideogram stitched on the breast pocket. On his bed-table he saw money, foreign money. The bearded face of an American president looked sternly at him. Dollars, a lot of dollars. He remembered. Oh, God. 'Oh, God,' he groaned aloud.

'You'll feel better after this lot,' said Wriste. 'Look.' He arranged pillows behind Hillier, then, as Hillier sat up, placed the tray before him. Frosted orange-juice; a grilled kipper; bacon and devilled kidneys and two fried eggs; toast; vintage brandy marmalade; coffee. 'Coffee?' said Wriste. He poured into a cup as big as a soup-bowl from two silver jugs. Hillier's tissues soaked in the healing aromatic warmth. Healing? It was not his body that required healing. The mingled coffee and milk were a little too light for Miss Devi's colour. A television camera lurched on to last night, presenting it brightly lit and in full detail.

'That man,' he said. 'That woman. Have they gone yet?'

Wriste nodded. 'Quite a little diversion it was. A helicopter whizzing over the recreation-deck and a ladder coming down and then these two going up. I thought his weight would drag the bloody thing down, but it didn't. Light as a fairy he went up, luggage and all. He waved to everybody. Oh, and he left a sort of a letter for you.' Wriste handed over an envelope of an expensive silky weave. It was addressed, discreetly, to S. Jagger Esq. 'Some of these tycoons looked a bit sheepish. That's real big business, that is, when a helicopter comes to take you off in the middle of a cruise.'

Hillier read: 'My dear friend. The offer still stands. A letter sent to Cumhuriyet Caddesi 15, Istanbul, will find me. Miss Devi sends her palpitating regards. Keep out of harm's way when the ship reaches Yarylyuk. Seek sanctuary in the Captain's private lavatory or somewhere. The authorities were grateful for the warning. They cabled their gratitude and promise of a tolerably substantial emolument in Swiss francs. Apparently there is a scientific conference on at the Chornoye Morye Hotel. Redoubling of precautions. What a devil you are! You must not die, you are too useful. Affectionately, R. Theodorescu.'

'Bad news is it, sir?'

'Abuse,' invented Hillier. He put the letter in his pyjama-pocket, drank off his icy fruit-juice and began the kipper. Wriste, sitting on the bed, pouted as if to suck in more. Hillier obliged. 'That money is in payment of a gambling debt,' he improvised. 'He's a big man for betting. He bet me I couldn't make Miss Devi.'

'And then he got nasty, did he?'

'A bit. A very nasty customer. It's a good thing you came in when you did. What made you come in?'

'I seen this Indian bint sending off a cable. I wondered a bit about that, seeing as you was supposed to be making a sesh of it, as I thought. I thought this big fat bastard could get nasty. So I came along and could hear him on to you.'

'I'm very grateful,' said Hillier. 'Would two hundred dollars be of any use?'

'Thank you, sir,' said Wriste, swiftly pocketing three hundred. 'A queer sort of a bugger in more ways than one. He was after that young lad, you know, the one that knows it all. Patting him and that. I don't know whether he got anywhere. Too clever for him that lad, maybe. But he gave this lad a present before he went. I seen him do that, patting him. A nice little parcel in the ship's-store gift-wrapping. But this lad didn't open it, least I didn't see him. Too upset he is. His dad's had it, they say. Won't be long now.'

'And how is the prospective widow?' Hillier forked in devilled kidneys.

'Nice way of putting it, sir. Crying her eyes out whenever she thinks of it, then going off for a sly snog with this Spanish confectioner bloke. At least that's what they say he is.'

'And the daughter?'

Wriste showed the whole stretch of his hard gums, top and bottom. 'I thought that would come into it sooner or later. You're a man with a purpose in life, you are, I'll say that for you, that you are. A purpose. She lies there on her bunk, reading away. Horrible hot stuff it is, too, all this sex. But sad, you can tell she's sad. Well, it's a horrible damper to throw on what should be all what they call pleasure, but there'll be an empty place at their table from now on. You're welcome to it if you'd like to have it fixed. Them two gone now, and you won't want to be noshing all on your tod.' He looked hungrily at the American president, pouting.

'Would a hundred be of any use?' Hillier paid out this time, then put the wad into his pyjama-pocket, where Theodorescu's letter lay. He had finished his breakfast, and now the pocket seared his heart with guilt. It was time to be thinking about things. His watch said twelve-twenty. Wriste removed the tray; Hillier lighted a Churchill Danish. Wriste said: 'You won't be wanting lunch till about two. You take your time, no hurry about cleaning up here. So I'll be seeing you later.' And he left.

Treason, treason, treason. Treason and treachery. But he had had no choice. Or rather he had had no choice but to make a choice. Could he send warning cables of his own now? Not to Karl Otto's guardians nor to Volruss. It was safer to leave things as they were. How about Department gA? Hillier had a vision of two shadowy men at either side of a table in a hotel room in Lausanne, Theodorescu between them, on the table before him an envelope. Gentlemen, who will make the first bid? And where would the bidding stop? Taxpayers were taxed to the hilt; millions were poured down the drain on obsolescent aircraft and missiles and warheads. Let them bid, let them pay out. And where would the bidding stop? Hillier palpated the wad of a few thousand at his breast. He felt bitter towards Theodorescu. Chickenfeed. He would get that bloody bonus, he would bring back Roper.

How? No longer as Jagger. No longer as anyone. D. Wishart, sanitary engineer; F. R. Lightfoot, pediatrician; Heath Verity, the minor poet; John James Pomeroy-Bickerstaff, IBM-man; P. B. Shelley, Kit Smart, Matchless Orinda – all would have an S on the left flank. He was known for that, the S-man, all over Europe, then. Theodorescu, whom he himself had had no occasion to know, knew all the time. He, Hillier, had been better known than he had known of. His time of usefulness as a spy must be over, known as he was. All he had now was information, quick to grow obsolete with the obsolescence of its referents. Could he set up on his own, a rival to Theodorescu? But Theodorescu had Miss Devi. He wanted Miss Devi now, lying there, writhing in his pyjamas. He looked again at Theodorescu's letter. Cumhuriyet Caddesi 15, Istanbul. That was somewhere near the Hilton. Should he? But, in thrall to Miss Devi, he would be Theodorescu's gibbering instrument, no more.

He got out of bed, stripped to the warm noon, and examined for the nth time the S on his flank. It was burnt deep; the dead skin like a luminous plastic. It could not be disguised, however cunning the cosmesis. He dressed quickly, as to hide the problem from sight, giving himself a cat-lick and a once-over with his Philishave. Then he took a swig of Old Mortality and water and went out on deck. It was a glorious blue day, Ionian, no longer Adriatic. In the distance, to port, lay Southern Greece – Kyparissia? Philiatra? Pylos? Tomorrow they would be in the Aegean, dodging through the mess of islands. Then Marmara's womb, through the vagina of the Dardanelles. Then the Bos-phorus, then the Pontus Euxinus – Kara Dengis to the Turks. The Black Sea. Would his grave be there? He shivered in the sun. Black black black. The sea that supported no organic life below one hundred fathoms. Five enough for him. He thought he saw Roper, twitching, hic-cuping. Why? I was wrong, I was wrong, O Jesus Mary Joseph help me. I take back all I said. I want to go home. Home? For a dizzy moment Hillier puzzled over the word, wTondering what it meant. It spelt itself out for him against the Ionian noon. He saw it as four-fifths of a Russian word. HOMEP- nomyer- number. Home had something to do with a number, a number he felt he ought to know, since it was the clue to going home. It was urgent, this matter of a bloody number. In what way urgent? Had it not come to him last night and had he not tossed it away like an old cloakroom ticket? He was not merely slack; he was corrupt.

There was a fair amount of noon drinking going on on deck, passengers looking out at Greece with Pimms and Gordon's and Campari in their mottled paws. Hillier went to the bar on the recreation-deck and drank very quickly a Gordon's and tonic, then a vodka and tomato-juice, then a very large Americano. Think think think. He saw himself carried safely ashore in the guise of a dead man, Wriste one of the bearers. The uniformed thugs stood to attention and saluted the corpse. He looked more closely and saw it was really a corpse. Roper wept. You've let me down you bastard. He w^ept with self-pity.

Hillier wondered seriously, in his depression, whether he had a worm inside him. His breakfast seemed a whole dawn away. He went into the dining-saloon, seeing tycoons and their women in shorts. Wriste had arranged things. The chief steward pulled back his chair at the table of the Walters family. The children looked pale and peaky. Mrs Walters was holding her mouth-corners down with an effort, occasionally dabbing dry eyes. She sent away a near-untouched plate of goulash with evident regret. No, she would have nothing else. Well, perhaps a little macédoine of fresh fruits soaked in Southern Comfort, topped up with champagne. We must keep our strength up. The children sincerely ate nearly nothing. And, added Mrs Walters, some Irish coffee, very strong.

'What news?' asked Hillier softly, as if already at the funeral. This girl – Clara, wasn't it? Was that her name? -was really delightful with her delicate boxer's nose and hair you wanted to eat, insomniac arcs, blue blushes, under her brown eyes. She was wearing an orange and black shift dress with diagonal stripes, a little black stole careless on her lap. She was neither reading nor eating, merely mashing up the buttock of a meringue with a pastry-fork. She was indifferent to Hillier's presence. The boy, in a newspaper shirt, ate a honey mousse in tiny spoonfuls. The woman answered Hillier. She said: 'They don't think he'll last the day out. Very low. In a coma. But he's had his life, that's a consolation. He's had all he ever wanted. We must try and look on the bright side.' Suiting the words, she attacked her macédoine.

'What's going to happen,' said Alan, 'to Clara and me?'

'We've been through all this before. What happens to any children when their father dies? Their mother looks after them, doesn't she?'

'You're not our mother,' said Alan truculently. 'You don't care a bit about us.'

'Not before this gentleman, please.' This woman could have a nasty temper, Hillier saw that. He ate some boned veal loin en croûte with a noodle soufflé and julienne of young carrots and celery. He drank a '49 Margaux. The girl suddenly cried: 'Nobody cares. You sit here stuffing yourselves and nobody cares. I'm going to my cabin.' Hillier's heart melted for her as she got up, so youthfully elegant, and made her way out with young dignity. Poor, poor girl, he thought. But he had things to ask. He asked: 'This may seem a callous question, but what do you propose to do when the time comes?'

'How do you mean?' said Mrs Walters, her macédoine-filled spoon arrested in mid-passage.

'Funeral arrangements. One has to think of these things. Transportation. Burial. Chartering an aircraft. Getting him home.'

'You can't charter aircraft in Russia,' said the boy. 'You'd have to take the State Line. Aeroflot, I think it is.'

'I hadn't thought about all this,' said Mrs Walters. Instinctively she looked about her for a man, her fancy man. But she stopped looking. Fancy men are for fancy things. 'It's all a nuisance, this is. What ought we to do?'

'Bury him at sea,' said Alan, 'with a Union Jack wrapped round him. That's how I'd like to be buried.'

'I don't think that's usual,' said Hillier, 'not when you're so close to a port. The done thing is-' He noticed that Clara had left her little black stole behind; it had sunk to the floor on her sudden rising. He carefully footed it towards himself, then held it between his ankles. She would get it back quite soon.

'The done thing is what?' asked Mrs Walters.

'To see the purser about seeing the carpenter about a coffin. To see the purser anyway. They may have coffins in stock. A cruise like this must encourage coronaries. Or perhaps you ought to get the ship's doctor to sort things out. I'm afraid I've not had any experience of this sort of business.'

'Well, why do you start telling us all about it, then?'

'It's ghoulish,' said Alan, 'that's what it is.' It was, too, agreed Hillier to himself. Ghoulish was what it was. 'It's as though you don't want to give him any hope at all.'

'One ought to be prepared ' said Hillier. 'John Donne, Dean of St Paul's, had his coffin made well in time and used to sleep in it. Sometimes thinking about a person being dead gives them a new lease. Like Extreme Unction. Like an obituary printed prematurely.'

'I don't want to hope,' sniffed Mrs Walters over her Irish coffee. 'I want to face facts, even though they are painful.'

'You were being a bit ghoulish, weren't you?' said Hillier to Alan. 'That business of the Union Jack, I mean.'

'It's different,' said Alan. 'More like heroism. The death of Nelson I was thinking of.'

Hillier ate his dish of asparagus with cold hollandaise. 'Any help I can give,' he said. 'Any help at all.' The difficulty would be getting the genuine corpse overboard. He'd need help. Wriste? Some plausible story to Wriste about that swine Theodorescu stealing his passport and he just had to get into Yarylyuk to see a man about a Cyrillic typewriter. It would mean a thousand dollars or so. Better not. He could do it on his own, prising the coffin open and fireman's lifting the groaning cadaver to the nearest taffrail. Man overboard. He'd have to go over with dead Mr Walters so that there should be someone live to be rescued. But the corpse would float perhaps. Lead weights? Hillier groaned as he fancied that corpse would groan.

The Walters boy and woman prepared to leave. 'Are you going to the sickbay now?' asked Hillier. He was; she was going to have a large brandy in the bar, needing it, she said, the strain terrible. 'A nice present, was it?' said Hillier to Alan. 'From Mr Theodorescu, I mean.'

'It's all right,' said Alan. 'Just what I needed.' They went. Hillier had some pears porcupine. Then some Lancashire cheese and a bit of bread. Then some coffee and a stinger. He felt he needed to build himself up.

He had no hesitation about going to Clara Walters's cabin, displaying to all the world the innocence of his purpose. He listened at the door before knocking. A sort of sobbing was going on in there, he thought. When he gently knocked, with a steward's discreetness, the voice that bade him enter was denasalised by crying. Going in, he found her just sitting up from using the whole length of the bunk for grief, knuckling an eye dry with one hand, roughly smoothing her hair with the other. 'It's only me,' said Hillier. 'I've brought this. You left it in the dining-saloon.' She raised her face to him, all young and blubbered, taking the stole in distracted thanks. 'And,' he said, 'forgive me for seeming so callous. Eating like that, I mean. With such appetite, that is. I couldn't really help being hungry though, could I?'

'I know,' she said, rubbing her cheek against the stole. 'He's not your father.'

'A cigarette?' He always kept a easeful for offering to ladies. Men had to be content with his coarse Brazilian cigars.

'I don't smoke.'

'Very wise,' said Hillier, pocketing the case. 'I had a father though, like everybody else. I know what it's like. But his death didn't affect me right away. I was fourteen when it happened. A month after the funeral I was afflicted with a very peculiar ailment, one that didn't seem to have anything to do with filial grief.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. It was spermatorrhea. Have you ever heard of that?'

Interest glowed faintly. 'It sounds sexual,' she said without pudeur.

'Well, it happened in sleep but without dreams. It was seed-spilling functioning in a void. Night after night, sometimes five or six times a night. It always woke me up. I felt guilty, of course, but the guilt seemed to be the end, not the by-product. Is there anything about that in any of your books?' He went towards the bunk, so as to read the titles of the little library she had ranged on the shelf just above it: Priapus-A Study of the Male Impulse; Varieties of the Orgasm; Pleasures of the (Torture Chamber; Mechanical Refinements in Coition; A Dictionary of Sex; Clinical Studies in Sexual Inversion; The Sign of Sodom; Infant Eros-And so on and so on. Dear dear dear. A paperback on her bunkside table – a blonde in underwear and her own blood – would have been provocative to a man less satyromaniacal than Hillier; these books were more like fighting pledges of her purity, archangels guarding her terrible innocence. Hillier sat on the bunk beside her.

'Look some time for me,' he said. 'You're evidently more learned in sexual matters than I am. But the psychiatrist I went to told me that it was an unconscious assertion of the progenitive impulse, something like that. Mimesis was a word he used. I was acting out my father but turning him into an archetype. Whatever that means,' he added.

She had listened to him with her lips slightly parted. Now she clamped them together and turned their corners down, frowning, dissatisfied. 'I don't know anything,' she said. 'It's all big words. I've tried to understand but I can't.'

'There's plenty of time. You're still very young.'

'That's what they keep telling me. That's what they told me in America. But Alan's younger than me and he was on one of those big quiz shows and he knew all the answers. I'm ignorant. I've not been properly educated.'

She seemed, bouncing on the bunk in petulance, to bounce herself nearer to Hillier. It would be so easy, he thought, to put my arm round her now and say: 'There there there.' And she was ready for crying on the shoulder of a mature and understanding man. But the books above him shouted their battle-slogans: Yoni and Lingam; Sex and Death among the Aztecs. 'What were you doing in America?' he asked.

'It was what they called New Milling Techniques. Mother was dead and they said he ought to get us away for a time. But he thought it would be sinful to take a holiday just then, with her hardly cold in her grave as he put it, and so we went for the New Milling Techniques.'

'And were the New Milling Techniques all right?'

'That's where he met _her__,' she said. 'This one. In America but she's not American. She'd been married to an American, in Kansas it was, and he'd divorced her and he said, my father said, she was a breath of home.'

'So she married him?'

'That was it. _She__ married _him__. For his money.'

'Have you any uncles or aunts or cousins or things?'

'Things,' she said. 'There are some things. That's all you can call them. And they all went to Auckland, wherever that is. And they do something with kauri pine, whatever that is. There's something called a fossil gum.' For some reason, she got ready to cry on this last term, and now Hillier had to put his arm gently about her in what he thought of as a schoolmasterly way. 'They export it,' she now frankly wept. Hillier asked himself what it ought to be. The other arm round, a gentle kiss on the rather low forehead (a protection against too much knowledge, not female animality), then the wet cheek, then the unrouged mouth-corner? No, he could not. He caught a picture of the father snoring towards his death in the sickbay. He felt sickened. Always ready to use people as if they were things, that's all you can call them, and they all went to Auckland. 'Auckland's in New Zealand,' he said. 'It's said to be rather nice there.' That made her cry worse. 'Listen,' he said. 'You and your brother come and have tea with me in my cabin. We'll have a good tea. You've both eaten so little. About half-past four. Would you like that? I have things to tell you, interesting things.' She looked at him with brown eyes awash. He marvelled at himself, Uncle Hillier inviting youngsters to tea. And this delicious grief of hers could so easily be coaxed towards the gentlest and most comforting of initiations. He would not do it; she was not a nubile girl now but a tearful daughter. 'Tell Alan, will you? Tell him I want to let you both into a secret. It seems to me that you're people to be trusted.' Was he one to be trusted, though? The books thought not: The Perfumed Garden had sharp suspicious eyes peering through the flowers. 'So you'll come, will you?' She nodded several times. 'And now I've got to go.' He essayed a chaste kiss on her frontal lobes; she did not turn away. Like dogs the books snarled at him as he left.

He went to the sickbay. He told the orderly on duty there that he'd broken his hypodermic. 'I'm diabetic,' he said. 'Perhaps I could buy one from you.' But he was given one with the fine generosity of a ship at sea. 'How is the old man?' he whispered. No real change, he was told; he might last a long time yet. 'As far as Yarylyuk?' Quite possibly. They could get him ashore. Russian hospitals were good. 'He may live then?' You never could tell. Hillier was relieved at that: one fantastic scheme could be crossed off. There would have to be some playing by ear. Engage first, strategise after. Back in his cabin he restored, with much pain, his face to the face of Hillier. It was the expression more than the physiognomy that was adjusted. Jagger was the name of a function rather than a person. But he must keep the pseudonym. Jagger for the journey, Hillier for home. Home for the elderly, home for inebriates, home for retired spies. As for 'home' _tout court__, he had still to puzzle out a meaning.

8

'You've changed the colour of your eyes,' marvelled Clara. She had changed her clothes – cotton tartan slacks with a plain green T-shirt. Alan was still in his newspaper shirt: a headline – THIS MAN MAY KILL POLICE WARN -looked sternly at Hillier. 'You've got rid of that grey moustache,' approved the boy. 'Better. A lot better.' He folded his arms, obscuring the headline. Hillier, as tea-mother, poured. Lemon for both of them: highly sophisticated. He himself took cream and sugar. Wriste had wheeled in a fair variety of tea-foods – sandwiches, Kunzle pastries, scones, crumpets in a hot dish, a chocolate Swiss roll and a Fuller's walnut cake. 'A sandwich,' Hillier offered. 'Gentleman's Relish. Salmon. Tomato and sardine. Cucumber.'

'We don't eat bread,' they duetted in canon.

'Yes, I knew about that. You ought to try some. A new experience. A nouveau frisson. Go on, be devils.' But they wouldn't risk it; they chose sweet things, nibbling. 'The decline of a civilisation,' taught Hillier, 'is figured in the decline of its bread. English bread is uneatable. Some of the London wealthy have a bread airlift from France. Did you know that? No. The bread on ships is baked properly, not boiled. One has an image of civilisation being maintained on little ships plying from nowhere to nowhere.'

'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 Theo-dorescu 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 Theo-dorescu 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 opponent 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?

9

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.' Un-wontedly, 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.'