“Long live death,’” said Pibble. “You said ‘Here’s to life’ just now.”
“Correct. Now, Jim, I was having a hell of a time. My girl was a drip, my lovely new boat was a sow, and Mrs. Gandhi was trying to nationalize me. Those kinds of things don’t matter, but they seem to at the time and you forget the things that do. And then this Arab wipes them away in three words. So I sat down at his table and talked to him all afternoon. I reckon he wanted me to take him aboard as my doctor—they’re all on the make, Arabs—but I’m never ill. He was in some kind of fix with the police, he told me, and he’d made it worse by using a fake Egyptian passport, and you could smell he hadn’t a drach in his pockets, so I made a deal with him. If he came over to the McNair, I’d fix the police and the passport. You don’t fancy that kind of deal, Jim?”
“It’s no business of mine. I doubt if you could do it in England.”
Mr. Thanatos threw his hamburger to the floor, where it broke into several pieces that scuttered across the carpet. Catling sighed and pressed a bell push, but no servant came. Instead a low cupboard opened under the Canaletto and a shiny green gadget stalked into the room, muttering along on eight metal legs and groping blindly with a vacuum snout. Beneath its belly a couple of brushes rotated. It fussed along by the wainscot to the corner, sucking and brushing, then up by the window. It seemed to know where the obstacles were.
“Lift your legs up when it gets to you, Jim,” said Catling. “Have you finished with your paper, Thanassi?”
“I hate the English,” whispered Mr. Thanatos.
“Don’t chuck him out,” said Catling. “Remember he’s given you a chance to show off your toy.”
“There’s that,” admitted Mr. Thanatos. “All right, Jim, so you think you are all average, normal, and all the rest of us are some kind of freaks. Of course I’d have a bit of trouble fixing police and passports here, but you bear in mind that there are things I can do here which I’d never even dare to try on those clods in Athens, even though I was building them twenty hotels on stinking barren lumps of rock.”
“I suppose Doctor Silver told you about the cathypnics.”
“Yeah. That’s another thing about being rich—people like to show you that they’ve got something you haven’t got, something you can’t buy; all the poor bastards have got is secrets, so they tell you them, and then you’ve got them too.”
“You must have thought it a curious corner for a qualified doctor to fetch up in.”
Mr. Thanatos put his glass on the floor with uncharacteristic care and leaned forward to stare, gray-eyed, at Pibble. Close to you could see that he was older than he looked, old enough to have been picked out of a mass grave in Adana in 1909. The surface of his skin was innumerable tiny wrinkles, and the pinkness not the flush of health but a crazed lacework of strained veins and blood vessels.
“I get it,” he said. “You are trying to warn me. Against my friend Ram Silver. You’ve talked about lying, you’ve asked about how I met him, and now you’ve talked about his qualifications. You know something I don’t, like I said earlier.”
“I’ve been a policeman all my life,” said Pibble. “I haven’t any evidence that anybody is trying to cheat you in any way, but in my experience rich men don’t get cheated in the area of their main business—they’re on the lookout all the time there. It’s the odd enthusiasms—what you call the hobbyhorses—that seem to have the pitfalls in them. You’ve arranged a very odd setup at the McNair, with a lot more money floating around than you’d lose over a bit of casual grafting in Twenty-sixth August Street.”
“Twenty-fifth,” said Mr. Thanatos. “Tell him, Tony.”
The antics of the green gadget had given Pibble an excuse to look away from Mr. Thanatos. It had, during its second circuit of the room, found the biggest bit of hamburger a foot out from the wall and had tried to suck it through the nozzle. Failing, it stopped and the nozzle thrust itself inward like the trunk of a feeding elephant and pushed the bread into the brushes, which scrubbed ineffectually at it until a couple of paddles extruded themselves, scooped inward along the carpet, and hoisted the object into the hidden maw. The gadget purred, jerked, and trundled on. It made surprisingly less noise than the ordinary domestic vacuum cleaner.
“We think it’s all aboveboard,” said Catling aloofly. “I take it you’ve met Mrs. Dixon-Jones.”
Pibble nodded.
“A rum egg, wouldn’t you say? But uncomfortably honest. We did a crash investigation of her as soon as Thanassi told me what he wanted. Nobody had a kind word to say for her, except that she’d do anything for these children and that she’d cut off her right hand rather than a steal a halfpenny. So all the money goes through her, and …”
He stopped, eyebrows slightly raised, because Pibble had laughed aloud.
“Glad you approve, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos. “What d’you think, Tony?”
“He probably knows something,” said Catling. “But if he does he won’t tell us.”
“Open another bottle,” said Mr. Thanatos.
“Not for me,” said Pibble quickly.
“Not for me, then,” said Mr. Thanatos. “Ram’s got pretty good qualifications—they could afford decent doctors in Katanga—but it wouldn’t bother me if he were as phony as a Hong Kong pearl. What’s the use of passing a raft of examinations on the spleen when you’re going to do soul research?”
“Ah,” said Catling, “but Empedocles believed that the seat of the soul was in the spleen. Or was it Pythagoras?”
“Crap,” said Mr. Thanatos. “All Greeks are liars and thieves. Now, Jim, you’re going back to the McNair, and you’ll take this job Ram’s lined up for you, and you’ll get through to those kids—I know you will. And on the side you’ll keep an eye open and get in touch with Tony if you come across any monkey business. Right?”
Pibble stood up. His head felt as clear as well water and his stomach cozy and content, but the connection between these two organs was, for the moment, tenuous, while his limbs seemed to have developed a curious autonomy.
“I’ll talk to Doctor Silver,” he said. “And if I can be useful I’m prepared to help. I’m certain that if we get any results they’ll be far more readily accepted if I’m not paid. I won’t spy for you. If I learn anything which concerns you but which is being kept from you I’ll try to see that you are told about it. And if by any wild chance I come across anything which looks like police business I’ll have to tell them.”
“Hoity-toity,” said Mr. Thanatos. He was grinning and looked satisfied. “Phone your wife from my car and tell her where you are and who you had lunch with. Tell her oysters, not hamburgers. I like you, Jim, but you are short on glamour. Ask Alfred to show you how to disconnect the tape recorder if you want to talk secrets.”
“Tape recorder?”
“I had one put in,” said Catling. “It’s wired up to the telephone so that I know how many hotels Thanassi has bought and sold when he comes back from a spin. You’d better see this before you go.”
He pointed behind the sofa, and Pibble turned. The green gadget, trundling round its ever narrowing rectangle, had come at last to the spilled pages of the New Statesman. First it nozzled at them, then it stuffed them between its legs toward the brushes, then the paddles came down and scooped at them without success, and then the whole machine shook itself irritably and began to buzz. Under the glistening carapace a new door opened, into which the paper rose, only to be excreted almost at once as a pyramid of fine shreds. The nozzle probed back between the legs to the base of the pyramid and sucked the shreds in, and in less than half a minute all that high-minded gossip, those solemn admonishments, those lucid analyses of cultural dandruff, were gone the way of Mr. Thanatos’ hamburger.
“See you, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos.
“Good-bye,” said Pibble, “and thank you for the wine.” As Catling unlocked the lift he said i
n a low voice, “Well done, Mr. Pibble. You managed that very well.”
The door hissed shut. Pibble decided he was paid to say that to all the visitors.
Only among the dustbins did he discover how drunk he was, as the fresh air smote him, but a deft fist caught him by the elbow and wheedled him through the peacock door and into his chair with a solicitude that implied that only age and weariness had overcome the traveller. Practice makes perfect servants.
“Thanks,” said Pibble. “Mr. Thanatos said that you would show me how to disconnect the tape recorder from the telephone.”
Alfred slipped into the compartment, opened the switch panel, and raised a switch.
“Was my other conversation recorded?” said Pibble.
“Yes, sir. You told me it concerned Mr. Thanatos, so I have sent the tape through. I hope that was right, sir.”
“Fine,” said Pibble. Now he had betrayed one side and lied to the other, not a bad position for a neutral. “If we pass a chemist I’d better have some Alka-Seltzer.”
Alfred, still crouching to attention, flipped himself round like a gopak dancer and fiddled with the wall below the glass partition; silver flasks slid into view, and a gnome’s pharmacopoeia; Alfred fiddled and buttled, then turned with a foaming tumbler.
“This is Mr. Thanatos’ own prescription, sir.”
“Thanks.”
Ten seconds later the car was drifting up the alley, while a commissionaire held up the lorries in Park Street to allow them out.
The drink was pink. Ice from the tiny refrigerator jostled amid the bubbles. Pibble waited till the foam was less eruptive and drank it all in three huge swallows; it was scouringly bitter and made his ears ring. When he could see he settled the tumbler into the holder which Alfred had pulled from the wall and pressed the button with the telephone on it. This time he noticed the elaborate aerial extruding itself to the left of the windshield … She was out … No. He was so relaxed that for the first time in years he noticed how welcoming Mary’s voice could sound.
“Hello, pigeon. I’ll give you a million guesses. Not just tiddly—tight, but it’s in a good cause. I’ve been swilling champagne with Athanasius Thanatos—yes, him—and now I’m sitting in his Rolls on my way back to the McNair. It’s all right, he told me to—he said I lacked glamour. I’ll tell you when I see you, about half past six I should think. Look, pigeon, when you talked to Mrs. Dixon-Jones and Lady Sospice … No, nothing shady, but they’ve offered me a job. Yes, it would, but there are snags. I’ll tell you. Of course. But what were they talking about before you, er, joined them? Not the Preservation people? You’re quite sure? I met Mr. Costain this morning, by the way. Liked him. Lady S., though—was it anything to do with the new head of research? Oh, well. Do you know anything about her granddaughter, Dorothy, though everybody calls her Doll? Not even any cousins? Is there much in the kitty? Oho! Yes, I’ve—”
“Have you nearly finished, sir?” said the ceiling. “Mr. Thanatos would like to speak to me.”
Pibble gave the man a thumbs up: if he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head Thanassi should sack him.
“I must ring off now, pigeon. There’s a queue of millionaires waiting for the phone. I love you, too. Bye.”
The instrument sighed back into its niche and Pibble sighed with it. The romance was over. Despite the dream luxury of the car he was outside the pale again, trudging along the public tarmac and unable to see over the eight-foot league-long wall behind which Wealth and Power lolled or sported. Even when you come to open gates between ludicrous lodges the driveway always bends behind screening trees, lest any finial of the mansion should be contaminated by an outsider’s glance. Hemingway was an ass, he decided (not for the first time): there is something different about the very rich, an attraction—no, not an attraction, because it also says DO NOT TOUCH—but you feel that if you did touch the silky skin your fingertips would tingle. Did Mary receive the same prickling shock from the presence of horrible Lady Sospice? It would be difficult to ask.
Pibble decided to go and see the old girl himself—perhaps the honourable Doll would take him, supposing she was on speaking terms with her grandmother. They might live together, but it was hard to imagine so attractive a child fitting in easily with a tyrannical dotard. He remembered that Doll had said the old lady was nicer than she looked, but he knew too well the mysterious way in which people will find peripheral or meaningless virtues to praise in their most obnoxious relations. To be nicer than you looked, if you looked like Lady Sospice, was low praise indeed.
Pibble found himself thinking about Rue Kelly, and fidgeted in his chair, only to find that his seat belt constrained him—Alfred must have fastened that with unnoticeable tact. There were two possible explanations, as far as he could see, for Rue’s cooperation with Silver. Either he was expecting to muscle in on some sort of fraud, or he simply enjoyed the deception; the secret and mildly risky betrayal of his whole profession might give him an iconoclastic kick. The trouble was that Pibble so much wanted the second explanation to be true that he suspected its plausibility for that very reason. And similarly, how remarkable was Rue, really? How clever? How good a doctor? Mightn’t an elderly failed policeman elevate any young man who happened to be polite to him to the rank of genius? You make allowances for cronies because they are part of you; you have grown to fit in with them as a limpet’s shell grows to fit in with one particular area of rock, on which alone it is watertight when the tide goes out. The Pibbles had once owned a black-and-white mongrel, a dull dog but eccentric in its small way, which was to lie brooding in front of the coke boiler in the scullery even when the thermometer stood at eighty. When Pibble came to fill the boiler the dog would sit up and watch without interest but with its head in such a position that the swung coke scuttle bonked the back of its skull; if he tried to miss the dog he missed the boiler, too, and coke scrunched across the scullery floor. The dog never learned to get its head out of the way, so after a while Pibble developed a trick of pawing the animal aside with one foot as he swung the scuttle; months after it had been run over by the school bus, he realized that he was still making a sweeping motion with his left leg to scuff it out of the way as the scuttle began its backward swing. There could be few weirder reasons for installing an oil-fired boiler, paid for out of inadequate savings.
So was Rue really only a habit? To the outsider, who didn’t owe him what Pibble did, would he have seemed merely a rather hard young man on the make? But hard young on the make don’t trap themselves in dead ends like the McNair. On the other hand, he had been brutal to his pretty girl in front of other people, and …
For a while Pibble dozed. His dreams were about arresting the Paperham murderer.
5
I hope you don’t mind walking a short way, sir,” said the ceiling.
Pibble woke, shivering. He was soberer, but not yet sober. “The exercise will do me good,” he said.
“Can you suggest anywhere I could hide the car for a while?” said Alfred. “You’re a local, aren’t you, Sir?” Pibble looked through the window and saw where he was. “One, two, third on the left, Mortimer Street, there’s an undertaker. Joy riders stole one of his hearses a month ago and it was a write-off, so he might have room.”
“Mr. Thanatos would appreciate that, sir.”
“I’ll walk from here. Have you got something to change into?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
A blush of surprise mantled Alfred’s pallid tones. Pibble walked up the hill feeling that he’d won a small but immortal victory against flunkies. He felt happy and excited, and strode springy-footed, filling his lungs with the dank, familiar air. First he must try to explain to Mrs. Dixon-Jones about his game with Marilyn, so that she could judge the evidence for herself. Then find Rue alone, and coax him or startle him (perhaps with details about Ram Silver’s past) into saying what else was nasty in the woodshed.
&
nbsp; Rue knew something about Silver; he was not the type to rest till he knew all. Ask the honourable Doll for an introduction to her grandmother. Give Silver a report on his tête-a-têtes with Marilyn Goddard and Mr. Thanatos. And only then could he reasonably look for Marilyn herself.
He stopped suddenly and laughed aloud, so that a mother wheeling a pram down the pavement glanced sharply at him and swung out to cross the road before they met. He walked on more slowly, fascinated by the discovery that an elderly policeman had been running like a lover to the mental embrace of a nine-year-old moron—though if she slept twenty hours a day it was five to one that she’d be doing so now. But amid all the seductions of Thanassi’s Bower of Bliss his subconscious had remained faithful, treasuring the weird stimulus of that meeting of minds. Well, if he could repeat the effect he had a moral duty to explore further; not to do so would be a sin against Holy Knowledge, as bad as book burning. So he couldn’t tell Brad or anyone at the Yard about Silver, or they’d send a bobby up to lean on the doctor’s shoulder and say, “We’re watching you, mate.” At which point the experienced con man picks up his traps and goes, and with him goes the chance of adding Pibble’s pebble to the cairn of knowledge. And that in turn meant that he, useless, sacked, demolished old Pibble, had to play cops again, find out what Silver’s lay was, prevent the moment when a custom-built electron microscope arrived in an empty crate just as a new numbered account in Zurich achieved a gratifying credit balance.
Sleep and His Brother Page 10
