‘Lured?’ said Alan. ‘How lured?’
‘You have two techniques available. If one fails, try the other. You, my boy, take that camera on deck. The Japanese one –’
‘Japanese one?’ He looked puzzled.
‘Yes, yes. The one you say Theodorescu gave you. Take it without the case, though –’ There was a knock at the door. It was Clara who raised her finger to shushing lips. ‘Come in,’ shouted Hillier bravely. He would bare his chest to bullets; he knew when he was beaten. Wriste peered in, then entered. He was smart for a shore visit, the grey suit natty enough for London, the tie – a vulgar touch that went with the toothless jaws – mock-Harrovian. He said: ‘Not dressed yet? Still not feeling so good?’ He saw Clara sitting on the bunk and did a Leporello-type leer.
‘All right, forgive me butting in, but there’s two blokes in the bar asking for you.’
‘Russians?’
‘Yes, but nice blokes both. Laughing and joking, speak lovely English. They said something about typewriters.’
‘And they asked for Jagger.’
‘More like Yagger. I just happened to be there getting my passport stamped. I didn’t say more than that I’d look to see if you was in.’
‘Well, I’m not. Say I’ve gone ashore.’
‘Nobody’s gone ashore yet. They’ve got some kind of FFI thing going on in one of the cabins. A very thorough lot, the Russians. Looking for drugs hidden up people’s arseholes, perhaps. I beg your pardon, miss. I do most definitely beg your pardon. I really and most sincerely apologise for what I said then. I just forgot myself. I do most definitely –’
‘You’ve heard of industrial espionage,’ said Hillier. ‘The Russians are better at it than anybody. Slip me a mickey and then gouge out all my technical secrets. Say,’ he said, inspired, ‘that I left the ship with a certain Mr Theodorescu. You saw that helicopter. A lot of people did. Tell them that.’ Wriste discreetly slid his thumb along his finger-ends, three times, rapidly. ‘Here,’ Hillier sighed. He dug out a hundred-dollar bill from his bunkside table drawer. ‘And don’t let me down.’
‘You, sir? You’re my pal, you are. And I’m really sorry, miss. Sometimes my tongue just carries me away –’
‘What’s FFI?’ asked Alan.
‘Free From Infection,’ said Wriste promptly. ‘We used to have it coming back off leave.’
‘How about now?’ asked Hillier. ‘This business now, I mean?’
‘That’s the funny thing,’ said Wriste. ‘They didn’t want everybody. Just a selected few. They could see I was honest.’ He struck a pose and leered. Then, wagging his hundred-dollar bill, he cake-walked out.
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘You said something about a camera.’
‘Find a solitary policeman and offer it for five roubles. That’s mad, of course, but never mind. Just hold up five fingers and say rubl. He ought to slaver over a chance like that. And then say you’ve got the case in your cabin, no extra charge.’
‘How do I say that? I don’t know any Russian.’
‘You disappoint me, you do really. Use gesture. He’ll understand. Then bring him in here. He’ll be quite willing to come. Any chance to snoop. He won’t be suspicious of you, a mere youngster. There won’t, of course, be any camera-case. There’ll just be me.’
‘And supposing it fails?’
‘If it fails we bring Plan Number Two into operation. Or rather Clara does.’
‘What does Clara do?’
‘You offer a camera, Clara offers herself.’ The two drooped and became what they were, children. They widened shocked and fearful eyes at Hillier. ‘It’s an act,’ said Hillier rapidly. ‘Just that, no more. Just a bit of playacting. Nothing can happen. I shall be here in that wardrobe, waiting. But, of course,’ he ended, as they still looked at him dumbly and reproachfully, ‘you can’t really fail with the camera trick.’
‘But how do I do it?’ asked Clara.
‘Do I really have to tell you that? I thought you were interested in sex. All you have to do is to sway seductively and give him a bold look, what they call the old come-hither. You’re supposed to know all that instinctively.’ Ridiculously, Hillier demonstrated. They didn’t laugh.
‘All right, then.’ Alan didn’t look too happy. ‘I’ll go and start Plan Number One.’
‘And the very best of luck.’ Alan went out hanging his head. ‘Well,’ said Hillier to Clara, ‘that’s deflated him a bit, hasn’t it? Not quite so cocky as he was.’ He considered sitting beside Clara on the bunk, but then thought better of it. He took the nearest chair instead, crossing his legs, disclosing a bare hairy one beyond the knee, swinging it. There were women, he knew, who pretended that male knee-caps could be sexy. Clara didn’t look at it; she looked at him. She said: ‘Alan hasn’t got a camera.’
‘What?’
‘He’s never had a camera. He’s never been interested in photographing things.’
‘But he got one as a present. He said so.’
‘Yes. I couldn’t understand why he lied. If he’d got one he would have shown it me. He certainly wouldn’t have hidden it. What he got from that man he hid.’
‘Oh, God. Why didn’t he say? This is no time for having secrets from each other.’ That touched something in her – not sexology but True Romances. Hillier again considered sitting beside her.
‘Why don’t you forget all about it?’ she said. ‘It’s just not worth it, is it? Killing and spying and kidnapping. Men. A lot of children.’
‘Would you like a lot of children?’
‘Oh, fancy asking a question like that now. There’d be time for questions like that if you weren’t mixed up in all this stupidity. We could have a nice voyage.’
‘We shall have a nice voyage when I’ve finished the job. I promise you. We’ll read your sex-books together and drink beef-tea at mid-morning. Or perhaps we’ll throw your sex-books overboard.’
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘I’m not,’ said Hillier, not laughing. ‘I’m deadly serious.’ And then he thought: seriously dead; a serious case of death; prognosis purgatory. He wanted to live. The vowel shifted. A fat letter for a thin one. It seemed a long time since Wriste had talked about his typing sister. ‘I think,’ said Hillier, deadly serious, ‘I could talk about love.’ No man, uttering that word outside the heat of urgent need, could ever fail to be embarrassed by it. It was a con-man’s word. But with women, even more with girls, it was different. Clara went roseate and looked down at the Line’s carpet. Hillier had to give the word a meaning satisfactory to himself. The love he proposed, still marvelling at himself, was the only genuine kind: the incestuous kind. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Love.’ And as an earnest of meaning it he covered his knees with his dressing-gown, imagining himself glued by honour to his chair.
‘You shouldn’t have said it,’ flushed Clara. ‘Not to me. We don’t know each other.’
‘It’s not a word in your sex-books. If I’d proposed fellation you’d have taken it in your stride. Love. I said love.’
‘I mean, there’s the difference in our ages. You must be old enough to be my father.’
‘I am. Soon you’ll be needing a father. And I still say love.’
‘I shall have to – what’s the word? – lure him into my own cabin,’ she mumbled, still looking down. ‘It’ll be – what’s the word? – more plausible. You don’t think ahead, that’s your trouble. You just think of hitting him and taking his uniform. There’s the time after that. A dirty old man breaking into a young girl’s cabin –’
‘You needn’t choose an old one.’ Love. He loved this girl.
‘And then when you’ve gone off wearing his uniform I can scream till somebody comes and then I can say he took it off himself for what purpose everybody will know and then I lured him and got him off his guard and hit him – What would I hit him with?’
‘With the heaviest of your sex-books.’
‘Seriously.’ She tamped with excitement. ‘What are you going t
o hit him with?’
‘With his gun.’
‘Oh.’ The proscenium arch had come down. The maniac on the stage had leapt into the audience. ‘I hadn’t thought he’d be carrying a gun.’
‘These men will not be village bobbies. I won’t hit him too hard, just enough to give him an injection of PSTX. That produces an effect of great intoxication. If he’s already out he’ll probably stay out. Splendid. He came in drunk and undressed and then you clonked him with a stiletto heel – do that, you must do that – and then –’
‘Then I bundled his clothes out of the porthole to make things more difficult for him. Including the gun.’ She was ashine with eagerness to get down to the job of luring a strange man in.
‘You’re a beautiful and desirable and clever and brave girl,’ said Hillier gravely, ‘and I love you. And in jail or labour-camp or salt-mine I shall go on loving you. And even when the bullet bites I shall love you.’ It all sounded preposterous, like love itself.
‘But you’ll be coming back. You will come back, won’t you?’
Before he could answer, the door opened. Alan came in, very hangdog. ‘No luck,’ he mumbled. ‘Nobody wanted to buy a camera. So I tried a Parker pen, and they didn’t want that either. Nor some shirts. Not even my dinner-suit.’
‘I don’t think,’ said Clara, ‘young boys wear dinner-suits in Russia.’
‘I did my best,’ said Alan defiantly. ‘I’m not much good at this sort of thing. I’m sorry.’
‘Never mind,’ said Hillier, kindly, in love. ‘It stands to reason that you still have a lot to learn. Let Clara and me take over now.’
‘I think I’ll go ashore,’ said Alan. ‘There’s this big coach waiting at the dock-gates.’ He paused, waiting in vain to be told to be careful. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said, doubtfully.
‘Act Two,’ announced Hillier. ‘A change of venue, but not really of scene. I’ll throw those sex-books of yours through your porthole,’ he told Clara. ‘We don’t want anybody to say you encouraged him.’
2
There was time for Hillier to make delicate love to Clara’s cabin, an extension of herself. First, though, he put out his tongue at the sex-books, bundled them, struggling to be free, in his arms, and then hurled them out into the starboard night. The illiterate sea took them as indifferently as a Nazi bonfire. Then he padded round with tiny steps, stroking hairbrushes against his hands and face (prickly male kisses, but proxies of hers), sniffing her unguents and pancake make-up and too-mature perfume. There were stockings on the chair, of a gunmetal colour, and he tried to strangle himself with them, at the same time chewing the dampish feet. She took size nine. He hesitated about burying his face in the underwear in the drawer or taking a drink of tap-water from a shoe that poked out from beneath the bed (size four). The calm of an army was the anger of a people. Love, for the moment, must be the purpose blazoned on a war-poster, not the tremor of the trigger-finger. It was time to be getting into that wardrobe. He had to crouch in it, among her dresses. These, being the external or public she, could not excite him as much as what had lain against or soothed or scented or stimulated her skin. But he kissed the hems of her invisible garments and prayed, not at all to his surprise, less to the goddess who manifested herself to the world in them, so many discardable bodies, than to that devil Miss Devi who had racked his nerves with lust and left them weakened and exposed (flagellated into sainthood) to more spiritual influences. Through the chink of the infinitesimally ajar wardrobe door he saw just such a bunk as that on which he had suffered and enjoyed Dravidian transports. He set Miss Devi upon it in the lotus position, multibrachiate, and prayed his thanks for those fires of purgatory through which he had been permitted to pass to reach the beatrical vision. Then he wiped her out before she became human again and lay on the coverlet, waiting for him.
Time passed, and he wondered whether he had done right to expose this shining one, Clara, to even the playacting of whoredom. But it would not be the postures of professional seduction that would excite so much as the evident innocence of their unhandy imitation. The man she would bring in here would be a bad man, no doubt of it, and would deserve what he was going to get. Then he thought about love and wondered whether any woman who was loved at all realised how excruciating were those intensities of devotion. The troubadours and con-men had debased the language, and the physical act reduced one to a paradigm of animality. Seek to possess the body of the loved one and you might as well be in a brothel. The act could not be ennobled into a sacrament in the way that bread could be transubstantiated. You could cram bread into your mouth at breakfast, spitting out crumbs as you talked about the sermon, but before that you had taken an insipid wafer, no nutriment in it, and muttered ‘My Lord and my God’. And you believed you were heard. With love you had to take breakfast and sacrament together and could not, at the moment of revelation, cry ‘My lady and my goddess’. Or if you could, you knew that there would be nobody to hear you.
Hillier suffered from cramp, crammed in among the odorous dresses. He opened the wardrobe door and prepared to loosen up his limbs, and then he heard footsteps approaching. He crammed himself in again, a mouthful of bread, and literally heard his heart hammer, out of phase with the footsteps. The cabin-door opened, my Lord and my God, she had bloody well done it. He saw drab police-uniform, the dull shine of a holster, riding-boots, and, refracted to thirty or more slivers by the intermittency of his view, her silver lamé dress. How much could he bear? That belt and holster had to come off, but would she be unflustered enough to get him to unbuckle it now before those hard police-fingers mauled and probed? What Hillier saw he saw in slices, but he heard clearly enough the hoarse one Russian word: ‘Razdyevay – razdyevay –’ He widened the chink and saw too much – the rip of the dress at the shoulder, a Slav rape of the West, the fat red neck and the coarse stubble above it, the rank of the man (by God, she had done well, his brain coldly noted, noting insignia he had forgotten how to interpret but knew were above the badge of a lieutenancy, noting too, as he saw the blunt face in profile, a couple of rows of medalribbons and despising the man for this deflection from purpose but also loving him for being human enough to be deflected and then hating him for that lust that was all too human and was grunting and grinning in gold and stained ivory towards the one intolerable desecration). Clara, very fearful, already dishevelled as after a whole night’s forced abandon, looked across the bearing-down shoulder towards her salvation in the wardrobe. Hillier looked out at her an instant, pointing desperately towards the holster. She at once began to try to loosen the man’s tunic and he, grinning ‘Da, ya dolzhen razdyevat’sya’, rose from her, unbuckled his belt and threw it to the floor, then started to unbutton clumsily. To Clara he said, as before: ‘Razdyevay – razdyevay –’ The verb to undress, in its intransitive and reflexive forms, was one she ought to remember, thought Hillier madly, crouching hidden again. Now, in his shirt, the man made for her with fingers spread as for wrestling, and Hillier took his chance.
‘Khorosho,’ he said, pointing the gun (it was a heavy police Tigr, one of the new issue) and thumbing open the stiffish safety-catch. ‘Vstavayetye, svinyah.’ It was back to that afternoon with the Westdeutsche Teufel, though in a more satisfactory language. The shirted man addressed as pig was slow in standing up; he seemed even desirous of clinging to Clara for protection. But now, in a genuine officer-voice, Hillier called him a leching bitch-get, and told him to come over to the gardyerob, he himself arcing away from it, and to stand with his fat pig-guts and lavatory-face facing it. The man obeyed, rumbling and spitting, though, disquietingly, his rather fine brown eyes looked with some warmth on Hillier: it was as though it were a pleasant capitalist relaxation – like drinking Scotch or listening to jazz – to be caught in a mere boudoir predicament. ‘This,’ said Hillier in kind Russian, ‘will not hurt much.’ He cracked the gun-butt on the man’s stubbled occiput. To his surprise, there was no response. He cracked harder. The man, with mammy-singer’s arms
, tried to embrace the wardrobe and then, the skirr of eight finger-nails drawing old-time music-staves on the two wooden sides as he went down, he went down.
Hillier turned to Clara. He was shocked but wretchedly excited to see so much shoulder exposed and even an upper quadrant of her right breast. She seemed all right, though, not frightened any more. ‘I’ll buy you a new dress, my darling,’ he groaned. ‘I promise you.’ She said: ‘You didn’t hit hard enough. Look.’ The man seemed to prepare to raise himself with one hand-press from his prone moaning. Hillier gave him the gentlest of butt-thumps and, with a sigh of content, the man subsided. Hillier said: ‘I hope you’ll see me dress again. Often. But in future in my own clothes. Give me a hand with these boots. Too big for me, but never mind.’ Then came the breeches. Under them Hillier saw, with pity, patched drawers. He struggled into the uniform, panting. ‘How do I look?’
‘Oh, do be careful.’
‘Now his belt. Where’s the cap? Ah, behind the door. Treating the place as his own, the svinyah.’ The breeches were roomy, but the tunic would hide all bagginess. ‘I’d better pad myself out a bit.’ He stuffed Clara’s bath-towel in his chest. ‘And now.’ He took the loaded syringe from his dressing-gown breast-pocket, squirted a sample at the air, then, in the man’s bare forearm, plunged the rest deep and rough. Some rilled along the skin, meeting russet hairs. Then, to both their astonishments, the man came to. He came to suddenly, as if from a fairy-tale kiss. He re-entered consciousness in a state of robust drunkenness, blinking, lip-smacking, then smiling. His liberated under-mind began a drunken Russian monologue to which Hillier listened fascinated: ‘Dad in bed mother warm snow on ground said hot tea now no samovar hit Yuri hard on snout Lukerya cry tears freeze give cold boiled beetroot juice dad drunk.’ He tried to get up, gazing with love on Hillier. Hillier, with a new idea, said to Clara: ‘Where’s your stepmother’s cabin?’
‘Along here, we’re all along here together.’