‘Oh, you even have to make a game out of that,’ sneered Alan. He took out of his dressing-gown pocket a much-mauled piece of paper. ‘Look at it,’ he said. ‘This is that message you gave me to decode.’ Hillier took it. The paper was quite blank. ‘No come-back there,’ said Alan. ‘They play the game well.’
‘Seven-day vanishing ink,’ said Hillier. ‘I might have known.’
‘It would be lovely if everything could vanish as easily. Conjuring tricks. Games. Oh, let’s get back to the real world.’ He made as to leave. ‘You coming, Clara?’
‘In a minute. I just want to say goodbye.’
‘I’ll see you at breakfast.’ And, with no farewell to Hillier, he left. His mature smoker’s cough travelled down the corridor, perhaps to a boy’s tears in his own cabin, the natural self-pity of a newly-made orphan. Hillier and Clara looked at each other. He said: ‘A kiss wouldn’t be in order, would it? Too much like love.’
Her eyes were bright as from dexedrine. She lowered them bashfully. ‘It doesn’t look as if you’re going to get any morning tea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you lock the door again?’ He stared at her incredulously. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ she said, raising her eyes to him. How often had he seen those eyes before.
‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Go on. Out.’
‘But you seemed to like it –’
‘Out.’
‘You’re horrible.’ She began to cry. ‘You said you loved –’
‘Go on.’ Blindly he pushed her out on to the corridor.
‘Beast. Filthy filthy beast.’ And then, as she too made for her cabin, it was just tears. But tears, however public, were in order. Hillier settled in his wretchedness to the bottle of Old Mortality.
9
Hillier had three days to wait in Istanbul. His hotel was pretentiously named – the Babi Humayun or Sublime Porte – also misleadingly, since it was nearer the Golden Horn in the north than the Old Seraglio in the south-east of the city. But it suited Hillier well enough. The final act to be performed accorded better with fleas, foul lavatories, stained and carious wallpaper, than with the grand asepsis of the Hilton. His room was shady and smelt shady: the bed had surely known gross and barbaric gesta, the paint scratched from its iron by strong and cruel fingers from the hills, fingers unwashed from dipping in rank stews of goat-mutton. Bearded phantoms shuffled the floor in the night in greasy slippers, muttering last words before the striking down for a little bag of coins ill-concealed under the bursting mattress: shadows of murderous thieves danced on the walls in the dim light from the three-in-the-morning street. The room had a balcony long uncleared of Turkish cigarette-ends, old cobwebs thick with white dust; the one chair was rickety. But Hillier liked to sit there and take his early breakfast of yoghurt, figs, unleavened bread and goat-butter, thick syrupy coffee and foul Brazilian cigars, looking into the clear glimmer of the morning Bosporus. He reflected, naked under his dressing-gown, on how wrong he had been about things, believing too much in choice and free will and the logic of men’s acts; also the nature of love.
On Cumhuriyet Caddesi he had watched, half-hiding like some native of the city up to no good, the loading of the flour-king’s coffin on to the closed BEA van, later the boarding of the flour-king’s orphans, two pale and elegant children, with the rest of the passengers on Flight BE 291, and he had waved feebly as the coach ground off to Yesilköy Airport. He had gone to the address given to him by Theodorescu and found it a decent bundle of business offices. At the enquiry-desk he had asked if there were anything for Mr Hillier; a Mongol-looking woman with hair streaked white had given him an envelope. A note inside merely said: FAIL WHOLLY TO UNDERSTAND BUT WILL BE THERE. It was signed T.
And then to wait. Breakfast, the first raki of the day, fried fish or kebab for lunch, raki going all the time. Sleep or a restless wandering of the city, cocktails at the Kernel or the Hilton, a European dinner, then a raki-crawl and early bed. Istanbul disturbed him with its seven hills, as though Rome had tried to build herself on another planet. The names of architects and sultans rang in his mind in dull Byzantine gold – Anthemius, Isidorus, Achmet, Bajazet, Solyman the Magnificent. The emperors shrilled from a far past like desolate birds – Theodosius, Justinian, Constantine himself. His head raged with mosques. The city, in cruel damp heat, smelt of wool and hides and skins. Old filth and rusty iron, proud exports, clattered and thumped aboard under Galata’s lighthouse. Ships, gulls, sea-light. Bazaars, beggars, skinny children, teeth, charcoal fires, skewered innards smoking, the heavy tobacco reek, fat men in flannel double-breasteds, fed on fat.
In the early evening of the third day, Hillier arrived back at the Babi Humayun from a trip to Scutari. He was damp and tired and his head ached. His pulse raced when he saw in the entrance-hall a small pile of good leather luggage. Someone had arrived from somewhere. Who? He did not dare ask the squinting bilious-skinned porter. He took the lift (old iron for export) to his floor, went to his room, stripped, and checked the Aiken and silencer before loading. He hid the weapon among his few remaining clean shirts in the top drawer of the dressing-table. He drank raki from the flask by the window. Dressing-gowned, towel round his neck, he went out to the bathroom, feeling slightly sick, eyes focusing badly; he noted the tremor of intent in his fingers as they reached for the bathroom door. He knew what he would see inside.
Miss Devi stood under the shower’s cold trickle. He surveyed her nakedness as coldly as she suffered his gaze. Fronds and dissolving islets of water flowered and fell upon the baked skin; the tar-black bush glistened. She had hidden her hair in a plastic cap; her face seemed more naked than her body. The nipples were pert after the shock of the douche; like eyes they met his eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Is he here?’
‘Later. He has things to do. He found your message very mysterious. He will not trick you, of course. No tape recorder. But his memory is very good.’
Mine too, thought Hillier. His flesh crawled as it remembered that night in her cabin. Was it proper now to feel desire? That past desire had been used to betray him; this time it would be different. Shatter that child’s body; those scents that lingered in his nostrils and the feel that was stitched into the whorls of his hands could only be exorcised by the ranker contacts of a knowing, mature, corrupt routine. Hillier said: ‘Would you now? I take it there is time.’
‘Oh, there’s time. Time for the vimanam and the akayavimanam. Mor and the taddinam and the Yaman.’
‘Yaman? That’s the god of death.’
‘It’s just a name. My room is 47. Wait there.’
‘Let’s go to mine,’ said Hillier.
‘No. I have the instruments of the Yaman. Wait for me there. I must perform the triple washing of the vay.’ Hillier noticed that she had a little waterproof bag on the chair by the bath. There would be other engines there than those of the Yaman. He went to her room. It was as seedy as his own, but her presence rode it strongly, sneering at the accidents of decay. He washed himself in cold water from her basin and briskly dried himself. Then he got into her bed (the sheets must be her own: crisp black linen) and waited. In five minutes she came to him, plunging into bed naked from the very door.
‘It’s no good,’ said Hillier, after the simple movements of the vimanam. ‘I want something too direct and easy and tender for you. I want a simple tune, not a full orchestra. It’s just the way I am.’
She went cold and stiff beneath him. ‘A little English girl,’ she said. ‘Blonde and trembling and talking about love.’
‘She never talked about love,’ said Hillier. ‘She left that to me.’
With a swift muscular convulsion she rejected him. He was not sorry to be rejected. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You’d better go.’ The voice was glacial. ‘Mr Theodorescu said something about business first, dinner after. He’ll see you in your room as you requested. He asked me to see that you have drinks sent up. Not raki. It can go on his bill, he told me to tell you. And now get out of here.’
Hillier sat in his room waiting. The marine sky insinuated itself, through phases of pink and madder, into a velvet transformation. Stars over the Golden Horn, its gold in darkness now like the gold of Byzantium. On the table by the balcony were whisky, gin, cognac, mineral water, ice, and a box of cigarettes whose paper was like silk and whose tobacco tasted like burnt cream. Hillier checked his gun once more and placed it in the right-hand pocket of his moygashel jacket. He waited.
Theodorescu entered without knocking. He was in a lounge suit and silk shirt; he smelled of an ideal Orient, not the gamy real Asia that started here east of the Bosporus. He was huge; his baldness was massive smoothed stone; he was urbane, genial, saying: ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to wait, my dear Hillier. There were things in Athens that had to be seen to. Miss Devi entertained you, I take it? No? You seem very serious, glum almost. This is not the naked Hillier I knew and respected on shipboard.’ There were chairs on either side of the drink-table. Theodorescu took a whole gill of whisky; ice clinked in with the tones of a tiny celeste.
‘You respect me no longer?’ said Hillier. ‘Now that I’m going to give you something for nothing? Now that I’m going to give you everything for nothing?’
‘My trade is a crude one. I’m used to buying and selling only. I doubt if anybody’s ever genuinely given me something for nothing. Presents, bribes – those are different. There’s a tag, isn’t there, about dona ferentes? You say you have things to give me. What do you want in return?’
‘Release,’ said Hillier. ‘I’ve a burden to jettison. A general confession that justifies my staying alive. Do you understand me?’
Theodorescu shone both eyes full on him. ‘I think I do. You’re turning me into a priest. I’m honoured, I suppose. And now I have to take the burden over. I see. I see. I see why you wanted no mechanical recorders. Well, go slowly – that’s all I ask.’
‘A confession,’ said Hillier. ‘But also a gift horse. I’ll take my own time.’
‘Begin, then. Bless me, father, for I have sinned –’ Hillier did not answer his smile; Theodorescu ceased smiling.
‘That’s not for you. But this is, these are.’ And he started. ‘The identity of Avenel is H. Glendinning of Seyton House, Strand-on-the-Green, London. Abu Ibn Sina, known to the Baghdad police, runs the radio station known as Radio Avicenna. The three international saboteurs who call themselves the Adullamites are Horsman, Lowe, and Grosvenor; you will know the names, I think.’
‘Indeed. Hypocrites.’ He took another gill of whisky. ‘Pray continue.’
‘Operation Aegir is to be mounted near Gellivare six months from now. H. J. Prince, at Charlinch near Bridgwater, Somerset, England, is in charge of a training school for subversion called Agapemone. A pocket television transmitter called, for some reason, Nur-al-Nihar, is in process of development at a station near El Maghra, southwest of Alexandria. Twin missiles named Aholah and Aholibah are near completion on the Jordan border, east of Beersheba. The assassin of Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov is in retirement at Fribourg; he goes under the name of Chichikov – a pretty touch. T. B. Aldrich, an importer, runs our station at Christinestad; he is in radio contact with GRT, as it’s called, which is in the Valdai Hills, south of Staraya Russa. The scheme known as Almagest is already being mounted at Kinloch on Rhum Island. Escape route Gotha starts three miles north-west of Cöpenick. Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys and Hopkins, a so-called pop-group named the Anarchists, have plans of the San Antonio installations in a villa outside Hartford.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘One can never be totally sure. They may have other things too. That’s why there’s been no pounce as yet.’
‘I doubt if I shall remember more than a fraction of all this. You’re a hard man, Mr Hillier.’
‘C. Babbage is in charge of the Cambridge team which is developing the Zenith PRT calculator. A very corruptible man. John Balfour of Burley leads the Cameronian sect with its headquarters in Groningen – mad but potentially dangerous. The Nero Caesar cryptogram has been broken by Richard Swete in Tarante. The sea-trials of the Bergomask have been indefinitely postponed. Watch very carefully the activities of the Bismarck Group in Friedrichsruh. The Black Book of the Admiralty has disappeared: don’t try and sell that to the press. Rolf Boldrewood is forging roubles in Bolt Court off Fleet Street, London. The air-exercise known as Britomart will be photographing the base at Varazdin. An atomiser-gun provisionally named Cacodemon is being tested at Gonville Hall. The French nuclear scheme is phased according to the revolutionary months. Completion stage is designated Fructidor. At present the Thermidorian tumbrils are coming – that was the message received.’
‘Good God.’ Theodorescu had finished three-quarters of the whisky.
‘Watch Portugal. Leodogrance has, we gather, seen plans of an ICBM called Lusus. But Leodogrance was raving from the cellars at Santarem. Watch Spain. There are rumours of what is known as a Pan-Iberian doctrine being drafted underground at Leganes. There are some very strange installations at Badajoz, Brozas, and in camps in Southern Pontevedra.’
‘That I knew.’
‘That you knew. But you didn’t know that Colvin was in Leningrad as a fur-buyer. Nor that a certain Edmund Curll is fabricating indecent photographs to compromise Kosygin. His shop is on Canonbury Avenue, London, N1. Our agents in Yugoslavia are at Prijepolje, Mitrovica, Krusevac, Novi Sad, Osijek, Ivanic and Mostar. They all give English lessons. The password till September 1 is Zoonomia.’
‘Please spell that.’
‘The UAR call their long-term anti-Israelite attrititive scheme by the Koranic name of Alexander the Great-Dhul’karnain. Hence arms-dumps are indicated by the sign of the two horns. Johann Döllinger has recently been expelled from the underground neo-Nazi Welteroberungsbund. He drinks all day in a rooming-house on Schaumkammstrasse, Munich. The Druidical movement in Anglesey is not to be laughed off: it is financed by Boltger and Kandier, late of Dresden. Laurence Eusden was seen with a Moorish boy in Tangier.’
‘I have photographs.’ Having finished the whisky, Theodorescu started on the cognac.
‘Give me some of that,’ said Hillier. His brain was becoming a jumble of names. He drank. He must push on. He said: ‘Miniature nuclear submarines called Fomors are to be launched secretly off Rossan Point, Donegal. Gabriel Lajeunesse is the code-name for the graminicidal experiments to be carried on south of Carson City, Nevada. Joel Harris is the official executioner of J24, at present residing in Lübeck. Godolphin still seems to be at large: Hodgson reports having seen a man answering to his description in Zacatecas.’
‘Very small stuff.’
‘Perhaps. Remember that this is a team of gift horses.’
‘Jades. Nags. Rocinantes. But I see I’m presenting myself as ungrateful and discourteous. My apologies.’ He looked at his watch, a flat gleaming Velichestvo. ‘Do continue. Or, if you can, conclude.’
‘Watch Plauen, watch Regensburg, watch Passau. America looks east with new-mark 405 installations. Ingelow has been sent to Plovdiv in time for the Dzerzhinski visit. There’s an American military mission, disguised as travelling evangelists, visiting Kalatak and Shireza. The Kashmir business is being forced into blowing up again soon: those packing-cases in Srinagar contain flameguns.’
‘Yes yes yes. But you know what I really want.’
Hillier sighed. ‘What you really want. But you’re not entitled to anything. You bloody pederastic neutral.’
Theodorescu laughed. ‘Would you address your priest so? I suppose you could. We shrink to our offices, or expand.’
‘Evil,’ said Hillier between his teeth, ‘resides in the neutrals, in the uncovenanted powers. Here it all comes, then – what you really want.’ Theodorescu leaned forward. ‘Number One Caribbean Territories is F. J. Layard,’ said Hillier, all his instincts telling him to be sick, faint, gag. ‘Savanna la Mar, Jamaica. The office is at the rear of a bicycle-store called Leatherwood’s. Layard goes under the name of Thomas North.’
&
nbsp; ‘Come nearer home.’
‘Number Two (Operations) is F. Norris, on six months’ leave, living with his aunt at Number 23, Home Road, Southsea.’
‘Never mind about the Caribbean. It’s London I want.’
Hillier retched, then swigged some cognac. ‘Headquarters in Pennant Street – Shenstone Buildings, tenth floor, Thaumast Enterprises Limited. The Chief –’
‘Yes yes?’
‘Sir Ralph Whewell. Albany and a house called Trimurti, Battle, Sussex.’
‘Old India man, eh? Good. Never mind about other names. Just give me the frequencies you work on.’
‘On the Murton scale, 33, 41, 45.’
‘Book codes?’
‘Very seldom.’
‘Thank you, my dear Hillier. You said I was evil a minute ago. I quite probably am. But I’m honest, you know. I couldn’t stay in this business if I cheated. When I place that envelope on the table in Lausanne, when I say: “Gentlemen, this contains the name of the Chief of the BES” or “Here is the exact location of Intercep”, my potential bidders never doubt that I’m telling the truth. And they know I never sell the same information twice. I’m honest, and I’m fair. You insisted, out of your generous heart, on giving me all those titbits, dry and succulent alike, for nothing, so I would never insult you by offering a token gift in return. But I took something of yours – or rather Miss Devi did – and I insist on giving a fair price. Shall we say two thousand pounds?’ From his inner pocket he extracted the blue-scrawled Roper manuscript and waved it. ‘She stole this, my dear Hillier, while you waited in her bed just now for the ecstasies some block of guilt prevented your consummating. You’ll probably regard me as greedy and ungrateful, but I always take what I can when I can how I can.’
‘You knew I had it?’
‘Not at all. Routine rummaging, you know. I was rather pleased. I first heard of the libidinous Sir Arnold Cornpit-Ferrers from a young lady in Güstrow. She had some little secrets to sell and was put in touch with me – pathetic rags and tatters of information they were, picked up while she worked as a prostitute in London.’