Tremor of Intent

'I still want to know why,' sweated Hillier.

'I think I can give the answer,' said Roper. 'You know too much.'

'Too much for what}'

'You're being deliberately obtuse,' said Wriste. 'Too much to be let loose into a retirement. Mr Roper is perfectly right. I should imagine you've already sold information to Theodorescu. That money on your naked lap -what a stupid story you told me about a wager. Your generous hand-outs to me, incidentally, seem to attest a sense of guilt. Anyway, were you to live you'd sell more information or even give it away. That you were brought up a Roman Catholic was always one thing against you. You left your Church, but you'd probably go back to it in retirement. A sort of hobby, I suppose. As with Mr Roper here, that old loyalty tended always to militate against another. You could never be wholly patriotic. Add to this your known sensuality – itself a kind of substitute for faith-and you have, I should have thought, enough grounds for a quiet and regretful liquidation. Think about it, Mr Hillier. Put yourself in the position of those English gentlemen who, when they're not on the golf-course, worry about security.'

Roper seemed less fearful than interested. He frankly leered his admiration of Wriste's lucidity of exposition. He said: 'Where do I come into this?'

'A pendent, as I told you. It was considered, for obvious reasons, better that Mr Hillier should be given his quietus on Soviet soil. You, Mr Roper, were never thought of as more than a mere pretext for getting Mr Hillier here. This will be unpalatable, I know. You are – and I have this on the highest authority – not wanted back in England.'

Roper, despite all he had spat out at Roper-burning England, now seemed to tamp down indignation. 'I'm not having that, you know.'

'Come now, think it over. You've already done your best work. Scientists, like poets, mature early and decay early. It is young scientists that are wanted. The stock fictional image of the grey-haired doddering genius being smuggled in or out is totally false. Your value to the Russians is mostly symbolic. The British are more concerned at the moment with luring Alexeyev over to the West than with reclaiming you.'

'Alexeyev?' went Roper. 'But Alexeyev's only a bloody kid.'

'It's the bloody kids that are needed,' said Wriste. The locution, in Wriste's pedantic tones, carried co

Roper went crimson. Hillier asked: 'What muck?'

'I don't know the whole of it,' said Wriste. 'Those passages of Mr Roper's autobiography that I've read-'

'How did he get hold of that?' asked Roper in red anger. 'That bugger you mentioned – Theo something-or-other-'

Wriste shrugged. 'Apparently you've had a double agent snooping in your vicinity. Perhaps a lab-boy or room-cleaner or something. He sold a Xerox copy of your completed chapters to a man who sold it to a man who sold it to a man who sold it to Mr Theodorescu. Mr Theodorescu is voracious for information. Of course, a typescript – top copy or carbon – is valueless in any market other than the literary. It's holographs that are needed. Though to the student of human motivation, the chronicler of that specific kind that produces the traitor, your typescript isn't without interest. The trouble is that anybody with a moderately inflamed imagination could have written it. And your typescript seems to leave off, as though with fright, on the threshold of the really significant revelation. I should be interested to know why you embarked on this task at all.'

'It was suggested to me,' said Roper, mumbling again. 'Clarify my ideas. Examine myself. It was an exercise. But you still haven't said why-'

'I think all that's clear now, isn't it? The client I have to serve in respect of you, Mr Roper-'

'Look,' said Roper, 'I'm sick to death of this bloody mister. I'm Doctor Roper, got it? Doctor, doctor, doctor.' It was like a stoic cry out of Jacobean drama: / am Duchess of Malfi still.

'Alas, Mister Roper, your doctorate was taken away from you. It was publicly a

'That's a bloody lie.'

'Probably. But it was in the national interest that you should seem to be a fraud and a fake. The British public could sleep sound. A man of straw had gone over to the Russians. The news of your dedoctorisation, if that's the right term, never appeared in the Daily Worker, and certainly Pravda wouldn't mention it. You remained ignorant.'

'So did I,' said Hillier. 'A great deal of what you're saying grows more and more suspect.'

'As you please. But you, Mr Hillier, began to opt out of the modern world long before you sent in your resignation. You read mostly menus and the moles oil whores' bellies. All this is unimportant. What I say now is far from unimportant. A certain cabinet minister, Mr Roper, be- came agitated when he learned, at a little di

'Well,' said Roper, more cheerfully, 'you don't have to do the job, do you? You're going to kill Hillier, and H illier won't be taking me-' He nearly said 'home'.

'Ah, that's not it.' Wriste head-shook sadly.

'You've got your money,' said Hillier. 'You said so. You don't have to kill either of us.'

'I've got some money,' said Wriste. 'Not all. You paid me at the begi

'A finger?'

'Yes. For the fingerprints. Most of my patients are fingerprinted men. Agents and top-level scientists and so on, men with detailed dossiers. Strange, once you have a dossier you seem potentially to have committed a capital crime. This sort of punishment-' He waved his gun. 'It always hovers. When you've finished that cigar, Mr Hillier, the hawk must swoop.'

'You could,' said Roper, 'cut off a finger and let us go.' He spoke as dispassionately as if his body were a tree to be pruned.

Wriste again shook his head, more sadly than before. 'I've never yet performed an act of other than terminal surgery, though the request has been made often enough. No, gentlemen both, I have my honour, I have my professional pride. If either of you were ever to appear, finger-less but otherwise whole, walking the world smiling, my career would be at an end. Besides, there's a man called the Inspector.'