Anthony Burgess - Tremor of Intent

'Oh, my God,' groaned Hillier.

'Yes, the Inspector. Nobody knows his name, I doubt if anyone's ever seen him, I sometimes doubt whether he really exists. He is perhaps a mere personification of Honour. But it's convenient to believe in him. No, no, gentlemen, it's no good.' He took from an inside pocket a plush case, rather finely made, and clicked it open. 'I've never had occasion to use this before,' he said. 'See, there are grooves for two fingers. I have another case, rather well-worn, for the single digit. One man I know, very ambitious, uses a cigar-case, but that seems to me to be crude. I had this specially made by a man in Waltham-stow, of all places. I said it was for the accommodation of amputated fingers, and he laughed.'

Hillier could not drag any more smoke from his Brazilian. He had five more in his pocket: what a waste. 'Well,' he said. Roper, as if to ensure that Wriste's token should not disgrace him, though dead, was busily biting his nails.

'Strange, isn't it?' said Wriste dreamily, pulling back the safety-catch. Hillier's eyes were drawn to the weapon; if he and it were to engage in the ultimate intimacy, he had at least to know its name. It was a Pollock 45, beautifully looked after. Wriste wTas a real professional, but there were elements of corruption in him. This personal interest in his victims would be the death of him, Hillier thought. Strange,' repeated Wriste, 'that in a minute or so you will both be vouchsafed the final answer. Religion may be proved all nonsense or else completely vindicated. And the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope of Rome cannot in the least profit from your discovery. Top secret. Locked drawers. A safe with an unbreakable combination. There may be a quattrocento heaven, there may be a Gothic hell. Why not? Our aseptic rational world does not have to be a mirror of ultimate reality. Hell with fire and vipers and mocking devils for ever and ever and ever. At this moment I always survey my victims with a kind of awe. The knowledge they are going to possess is the only knowledge worth having. Would either of you gentlemen like to pray?'

'No,' cried stout Roper. 'A load of bloody nonsense.'

'Mr Hillier?'

Hillier swallowed on a vision of Clara. He had, even though retrospectively, defiled that image. His whores and victims marched, in swirling mist, over an endless plain, their formation S-shaped, pointing at him with three-fingered hands, lipless, noseless, only great eye-lamps staring. 'A form of words,' he muttered. 'No more.' He knew he didn't really believe that. Roper was a better man than he. 'Oh my God,' he recited, 'I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins and detest them above all things-'

'Bloody nonsense,' cried Roper. He seemed determined, like Kit Marlowe, to die swearing. 'Cunting balderdash.'

'-Because they deserve Thy dreadful punishment, because they have crucified my loving saviour Jesus Christ-'

'Bumfluffing bleeding burking tripe. When you're dead you're finished with.'

'-And most of all because they offend Thine infinite goodness. And I firmly resolve by the help of Thy grace never to offend Thee again-'

'That's one resolution that will be fulfilled,' delivered Wriste.

'-And carefully to avoid the occasions of sin.'

There was a timid knock at the door of the little hut. Hillier's heart leaped. Never pray, someone – Father Byrne?-had once said, for the thing of immediate advantage. Wriste joined Roper in swearing, though more softly. Then he said: 'This is awkward. This I had not expected.'

'You talk too much,' said Roper, 'that's your trouble. You could have got this job over nicely if it hadn't been for all that yak.' It seemed a sincere reproof.

'A third,' said Wriste. 'Innocent, perhaps. A pity. Nothing in it for me. Totally gratuitous.' Brooding on the economics of death he pointed his gun at the door. 'Come in.' he called.

The door opened. A boy stood there, draped against the dying rain in a big man's jacket.

'Well,' said Wriste, in his steward's accent, 'if it ain't little Mister bloody Knowall. I'm truly sorry about this, son, but I don't see any way out. Come in, right in,' he gun-waved, using the patrician tones. 'How did you know we were here?'

Roper frowned on Alan Walters as though he had come to a class of his without registering for it. Alan said: 'A bit of a whiff of cigar-smoke. Not much, just a bit. I lost you.' He looked apologetically at Hillier. 'I lost you on the road. And then I looked in the hotel, but it's all filthy drunkenness there.'

'Clever boy,' purred Wriste. 'That stepmother of yours will be pleased to have you out of the way. I wonder if it would bè prudent to seek a small emolument.'

'I was going to put her out of the way,' said Alan. 'This seems good territory for killing people. But then I thought: first things first. I always knew you were a phoney.'

'Oh, naturally. You know every thing, don't you? Including the correct postures for pédérastie gratification.'

'That had to be,' said Alan. 'It was the only way. There are some awful men in the world, you included. But you weren't clever enough. You told me you'd spent the war in an Australian prison. And the next minute you were talking about having an FFI when you came back off leave. I always knew you weren't to be trusted. You'd never do anything without getting money for it first.'

'I'm getting no money for this,' said Wriste. 'Take your hands from underneath that outsize jacket. Join them together. Close your eyes. Say your little boy's prayers. You can precede these gentlemen. The antipasto, the Italians call it. Theodorescu would like that. Come on, boy, we've wasted enough time as it is.'

'You bloody neutral,' cursed Alan. 'You're going where all the neutrals go.' Dull fire spat through the jacket, leaving a smoking hole. In great-eyed surprise Wriste grabbed, rebus, his wrist, cracked bone with blood taking breath to fountain out. He watched, almost with tears, his gun drip from his fingers and fall without noise on one of the massage-cots. Alan now had the Aiken, silencer and all, in the open. 'Now try this,' he said. He aimed at Wriste's pained surprise through the fumes of frying smoked bacon. He thudded fire at the nose and got the right eye. The eye leaped out on its string as in a surrealist montage. The socket leered as the blood prepared to charge, and then the whole face was black fluidity mounted on a falling body. The mouth, independent of the smashed brain, cried 'Cor' in Cockney. The left fingers, like rats in shipwreck, clawed at a cot, seeking to save themselves. Wriste's going down was leisurely, noisy, the body's indulging itself in its closing scene. There was a crack and the sound of spatter from the trousers. Then Wriste was only a thing.

'I think I'd better be sick,' said Alan. 'It's time somebody was sick.' He went and stood, like a naughty boy, in the corner. His shoulders heaved as he tried to throw up the modern world.

'It's back to those days,' twitched Roper in distaste, fascinated by the well-dressed and Harrovian rubbish on the floor. Hillier knew which days he meant. 'There are people bent on making a butcher's shop of the whole world.' He did not mean Alan, on whom he twitched a wondering and nearly grateful look. To Alan Hillier said: 'Get some fresh air. There'll be time enough to say thank you. I won't say it now except just thank you. But go and get some fresh air.' The boy nodded, out of rhythm with his empty spasms, then opened the door and went out. He'd dropped the smoking Aiken on to the nearest cot, wiping his hands against each other, as though that, the corpse-maker, were itself the corpse. From the outer darkness came the noise of song and glass-crashing. 'And now,' said Hillier, when the door was closed again, 'we'll have to be quick.'

'We? What do you mean-we? This is none of my business.'