Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Page B

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. All 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. Thensleep 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-pet-alled 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.’
    â€˜You’re too young,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘I’ll tell dad. Go and have a nice game of quoits or something.’
    â€˜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 levitation. She was beautiful: corn-hair piled up carelessly, a nose like an idealisation of a broken boxer’s, a mouth whose scolding ought at