Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

other’s. Minds, I mean. But,’ he chuckled, ‘don’t say anything about Original Sin.’
    When the discussion started (and it was a very earnest sixth-form-type discussion, full of fundamentals), I found myselfswitching on the professional ear. But any hammering-out of the position of science and technology in a progressive society had to be above suspicion. Britain, whatever party happened to be in power, was now committed to socialism. This group was concerned with laying down a series of articles for a Socialist scientist’s creed. The pipeman Cavour was presumably to do the actual writing of the proposed pamphlet, since he tried to fix all conclusions in a ponderous literary form, going er and ar in search of the
mot juste
, correcting people’s grammar. ‘Something like this,’ he said. ‘We er hold that the past is dead and the future is er upon us. Meaning the Scientific Revolution. We think in world terms, not er the antique terms of nationalism. Ultimately we envisage a World State and World Science. Ar.’ Brenda, her token-bracelet jangling, was getting it all down. Lucy sat in one of the two moquette-covered armchairs, Roper on the arm. He seemed happy. He seemed to have got over sin. He was safe, sir.
    Of course he was safe, cuddled by a humanitarian and rational philosophy which occasionally gives Britain a government. The whole Roper case, if I may call it that at that stage, was perhaps ready to bubble with a political extremism that, during a long Tory summer, sought fulfilment in a country that wasn’t merely doctrinaire about a World State and World Science. Must a man be blamed for being logical? I don’t know how far Lucy, who seemed to be a very serious girl, helped. I was out of England long before Roper. What I’m trying to say, sir (or would be trying to say if I were saying it), is that you can’t condemn a man because an ineluctable process carries him. If you wanted Roper’s logic – and you did and still do – you have to swallow it all. That is why I can’t attempt any serious moral persuasion when, the day after tomorrow, late at night, I eventually reach him. The bribes, of course, he’ll, and very rightly, scorn. It will have to be the ampoule, the forcible abduction of a Soviet citizen temporarily disguised as a drunken British tourist. And I’m doing this for the money.
    I’m doing this for the money, for the terminal bonus (I am most bribable now) which, in my retirement, I shall need. If it were not for the retirement I should not be proposing to play a mean trick on a friend. But, as I’ve already told you in a
real
letter – dispatched, received, ruminated, replied to – I am retiring precisely because I’m sick and tired of having to play mean tricks. You might as well, while my hand is in, have the lot.
    Lot what? Lot the next to the last in this shame’s auction to bidding oblivion of the shabby contents of my long-leased spy-house. You have my report of the successful betrayal of Martinuzzi, very brief, totally factual. The lying code-message about Martinuzzi’s being on the double game was, as we knew it would be, intercepted. When Martinuzzi was taken over to Rumania he expected, I suppose, praise, bonuses, promotion. We know what he got.
    End of Martinuzzi. Of Signora Martinuzzi and the three bambini in Trieste also the end, but that, of course, irrelevant. The explosion of a paraffin stove in the little Casa Martinuzzi on the Via della Barriera Vecchia and the burning alive of mother and eldest child, as well as the cat and her kittens, was just an unfortunate accident. A spy should not give hostages to fortune: that’s what whoever was responsible really meant. I was sick; I vomited a bellyload into the gutter. What made my shame worse was the visit of some British louts with guitars and emetic little songs; they filled the Opera House with infantile screamers. Their