Anthony Burgess - Tremor of Intent

'As you well know,' said the man opposite, tucking away his Sport, 'we're here.' He let, or made, Hillier get off first.

The Chornoye Morye Hotel was on the left, away from the beach but with a winding path through a rich but ill-tended garden. Its name was on a board, floodlighted. The architecture was good Victorian English seaside, a sort of Blackpool Hydro with striped awnings. Hillier was disturbed to find plain-clothes men, bullish, thuggish, patrolling near the ornate entrance. But, of course, a temporary requisition. A scientific conference, big stuff, state stuff, the S-man, despite negative reports from the docks, perhaps really at large. That damned man was behind him, saying: 'There you are. Real police. They'll see through you. They'll know you for what you are, samoz-vanyets.' Hillier blazed. He turned on the man, grasped him by his dirty kitchen-worker's collar and pulled him into an arbour of cypress and myrtle and begonia. He said: 'This gun I have is not just for show. I shall use it on you without hesitation. We can't have filthy little nobodies like you getting in the way of vital state business.'

'I'll confess everything.' The man gibbered. 'It was only two cartons. The head waiter's in it up to his eyeballs.'

'English or American?'

'Lakki Straiyk. Two cartons. I swear. Nothing else.'

'Let me see you go straight to the kitchen entrance. Any nonsense at all and I shan't think twice about shooting.'

'And the Direktors in it. Watches. Swiss watches. Give me time and I'll make out a full list of names.'

'Go on.' Hillier butted him with his gun-butt. 'Get in there and nothing more will be said. But if I hear that you've been talking any more nonsense about impostors-'

The man snivelled. 'It's back to the days of Stalin,' he said. 'All bullying and threatening. It was different when we had poor old Niki ta.'

This man was a nonentity, yes, a nichtozhestvo, but nonentities talked more than entities; what he said in the kitchen (probably scullery) would be transmitted very quickly to the office of the Direktor. A sort of copper sniffing after smuggled fags. Chewing-gum too, perhaps. A thug in a cheap suit, the right jacket-pocket weighted down, rotated his jaws as he said to Hillier, with little deference, 'Any news? Any sign of anybody?' From within the hotel came noise and a faint percussion of glasses clinked in toasts: here's to you; here's to me; here's to Soviet science.

'False alarm,' said Hillier. Another thug came up, a Baltic type, to peer at Hillier as though, which he couldn't, he couldn't quite place him. 'There's a Doctor Roper here,' said Hillier, 'an Englishman.'

'Da, Doktor Ropyr, Anglichanin. Trouble at last, eh?'

"Why should there be trouble?' Hillier proffered his White Sea Canals and took one himself. He was dying for a real smoke, one of his filthy Brazilians. Thank God he'd brought some with him. Later, talking quietly with Roper, he would have one. 'There's no trouble that I know of. Something to do with his papers, that's all. A matter of routine.'

'Ah, rutina.' The first thug shrugged. Hillier was welcome to go in if he wanted. The other thug said: 'Moskva?'

'That's right, Moscow.'

'You don't talk like a Moscow man.' Nor like a Yarylyuk one either. You couldn't win.

'I,' said Hillier, 'am an Englishman who speaks very good Russian.' That went straight to their hearts. They waved him in, puffing laughter through their papirosi.

The entrance-hall was shabby and pretentious. There were a couple of noseless stone goddesses sightlessly welcoming, both eroded as by November rain, their glory gone. The carpet had, in places, worn down to a woofless warp; in other places there were holes, the biggest one outside the gentleman's tualet. An old man in uniform chewed his beard outside the lift-gates, though the lift was labelled Nye Rabotayet – Out of Order. He was sticking to his post, all he had. The dining-room was straight ahead, full of what Hillier took to be Soviet scientists. Most seemed rosy and happy: this seaside convention was doing them good. They were seated, in fours and sixes, at tables with little flags of provenance, though surely all must now be con-vivially stirred up, making nonsense of all divisions outside of palpable ethnology. Hillier squinted through the smoke: limp pennants for the Ukrainian, Azerbaijan, Georgian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Kirghiz, Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics, but blaring banners (several) for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Time was short. That scullion nonentity might already be at work. Where was Roper? Hillier dredged the Slav, Lithuanian, Moldavian Armenian, Ostyak, Uzbek, Chuvash, Chechenet roaring and toasting commingling for an Anglo-Saxon face. The trouble was that no one would stay still. No sense of guilt stirred by the presence of a police uniform, the scientists quaffed to each other (Budvar beer, Russian champagne, Georgian muscatel, vodka and konyak by the hundred-gramme fiasco) in amiable contortions – arms linked at the elbow, close bodily embraces so that each drank the other's, alternate cheek-smackings between draughts. Some of the scientists were ancient and giggled naughtily in their cups, beards framing wet lips framing few or no teeth. Where the hell was Roper? Hillier grabbed a white-coated waiter with a spilling tray, young, cocky, his Mongol hair in a cock-crest.

'Gdye Doktor Ropyr?'

'KtoT 'A nglichanin.'

The waiter laughed and nodded towards the far end of the dining-room. There was a glass door there that seemed to lead to a garden. 'Izvyergayet,' he said gaily. Being sick, was he? That seemed typical of Roper somehow. Hillier marched towards that door.

A string of fairy-lights with gaps in the series was draped among the cypresses: surely a scientific conference ought to be able to do better than that. Otherwise it was dark, the moon still unrisen. Hillier urgently whispered: 'Roper?' There was a response of hiccups, somehow Russianised: ikota, ikota, ikota. Wherever he was, he was outside the square of light that came from the window. Hillier nicked his lighter, thought he might, while he was at it, have a coarse Brazilian, so lit up one. Better, much better. 'Roper?' A man came up with an electric torch, a new thug, so Hillier doused his light. The man sprayed the police uniform with his beam then, satisfied, grunted and spotlighted a hiccuping shape on a stone garden-seat. 'You,' laughed the man, 'are the Englishman who speaks very good Russian.' Either he was one of the hotel-entrance thugs or else the joke had spread quickly. 'Here is another Englishman whose Russian is not so good.'

'Go away,' said Hillier. 'We want to talk.'

Roper, by the sound of it, was sick. 'Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he prayed, in English.

'Amin,' said the Russian in Russian. Then he said: 'If you want to talk, go to the massage-hut there. Wait, I'll switch on the light for you. Shall I bring strong coffee?'

'That's kind,' said Hillier, uneasy that things were going so well.

'Ikota,' went Roper. 'Ikota ikota.' And then, at the end of a little path of myrtle and roses, disclosed by the walking torch, bright light, as of an interrogation-chamber, suddenly shone. Hillier took Roper's arm.

'KtoV asked sick Roper, with a very English vowel.

'Politsia. Rutina.'

'Oh God,' said Roper in English. 'I meant no harm walking out like that. I can't take it like they can. I wasn't trying to be insulting.'

'Chtor 'Nichevo,' said Roper. 'Bloody blasted nichevo. I think I'm going to be sick again.' He retched, but nichevo came up.

'Perhaps,' said the thug, 'vinegar would be better than coffee.' In the full light of the hut his face showed most un-thuggish: it had something of the helpful shop-assistant in it.

'Coffee,' said Hillier. 'And thank you. But take your time about it. Shall we say in about ten minutes?'