The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  “Some of them you could,” she said, relaxing. “If … hang on, tomorrow’s the last Saturday of the month, so Randy Wolf will be giving a party. I’ll take you, if that’s what you really want.”

  “If it’s not a nuisance.”

  “No. It’s time I went. I rather rely on them for company when I get sick of Greeks and still feel suicidally lonely. Does Thanatos want to buy them out?”

  “Not that I know,” said Pibble. “My wife has a passion for Greece, and I want to find out what it would be like to retire to a place like this.”

  A curious thing about this not very pretty or pleasing girl was that it made him uncomfortable to lie to her. Although she was an adult, and clearly determined to go her own way, there was something uncompleted about her personality—not childish, but as though a growth process had been omitted, in her personality as well as her body. So it felt, after all, like lying to a child.

  “I hope you’ve got something the matter with you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She grinned, more like a Dickens urchin than ever.

  “You’ll see. I’ll pick you up at the Helicon Bar, down by the fish quay, about noon. If I’m late, order me a coffee and tell Yanni I’m coming.”

  “I don’t know your surname.”

  “Nor does Yanni.”

  “Andio, Pater. Andio, Kyrie Vangeli,” said Pibble in a louder voice.

  “Sto halo,” said the two dice-players without looking up.

  “See you,” said Nancy as she turned to the desk and started to blank out the ruined faces of the Holy Family.

  3

  Most Greek towns, in Pibble’s experience, tend to name their main streets by dates—meaningless to the outsider, but no doubt celebrating the liberation of the country from the tyranny of one form of government into the chaos of the next. He had sometimes wondered how many appointments went astray after the meeting had been fixed to be at Number 4, February 15th Street, at on February 14th. But Hyopolis had a proper sense of history, and so the Hotel Aeschylus stood in the Odos Basilissa Bictoria.

  It stood about fifty yards up the slope from the harbour; two mosaic medallions adorned its frontage, depicting the Great Queen and the Great Tragedian staring fixedly away from each other; poor things, thought Pibble, they have not been introduced.

  The foyer was garish, and a juke-box behind the reception counter played bazouki rock. When he started to ask his question the manager switched the thing off, so that for a word or two Pibble found himself speaking in a slow bellow, as if to a deaf idiot. He started again.

  “I am looking for a friend,” he said. “He is American. He is not staying in this hotel, but I think he might call here today. His name is Budweiser, and he cannot walk.”

  The manager raised his eyebrows and did the negative click. Pibble got his Collins Guide out.

  “Not necessary,” said the Manager. “Your friend has not been. We have one Englishman staying here, and many more come tomorrow—a party, you know, to paint.”

  “Oh, I see. Thank you. In fact Mr. Budweiser was going to introduce me to an Englishman. This might be the one.”

  “He comes only this morning,” said the manager. “In a …” he twiddled a loose-wristed hand above his head to indicate the rotors of a helicopter.

  “That might be him,” said Pibble. The man from the Mafia was unlikely to be genuinely English, but at least he could save Buck one piece of checking. “What’s his name?”

  The manager riffled a page back in his ledger.

  “He is a Mr. Vutler,” he said. “He is in the bar now. OK?”

  “That’s not him,” said Pibble. “But perhaps he has sent a colleague. I’d better just go and say hello.”

  “OK,” said the manager and shut the ledger, as though it all sounded a quite likely tale to him.

  Pibble pushed through the bead curtains and peered round the bar with deliberate vagueness. There was only one man in the room, who sat like a Greek, with his feet on the rung of a spare chair and his broad back to the wall so that he could watch the passers-by out of the window, but at the slither of the beads he looked round. His face was bland and round and brown, his eyes blue, his hair cropped close. Pibble recognised him at the second glance. He had the reputation of a killer, but nothing had ever been proved. After all, he worked for a very big organisation.

  There was no knowing from that amiable face whether he recognised Pibble, but it was too late now not to go through with the charade. Pibble walked over to his table.

  “Mr. Butler?” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Jimmy Pibble. I was expecting to meet a chap called William Thackeray here, but last time I heard from him he said he might have to send a colleague. I thought it might be you.”

  “William Makepace Thackeray?” said Butler with no audible sneer.

  “That’s him.”

  “Never heard of him. But sit down and have a drink and tell me about the place. I’ve just got here for a short holiday. What’ll you have?”

  “Coffee.” Butler shouted an order in quick and excellent Greek.

  “You been here long?” he asked.

  “This is my third day.”

  “Business?”

  “Sort of. I retired from my old job in England and. . .”

  “Uh huh. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Have you heard of anything special I ought to see—not all overrun with tourists—I’m a solitary rubberneck.”

  “I’m told the English cemetery is very interesting,” said Pibble. “I doubt if you’ll find any other tourists there. As far as I know you and I are the only English visitors to the island, though there’s a charter group of artists coming tomorrow. And there’s a few of us who actually live here, mostly in the villas of the South Bay. And there’s one girl who lives in a hut on the hill.”

  “None of them sound great tomb-haunters,” said Butler. “OK, I’ll try it tomorrow morning, before the sun gets too hot.”

  After that they talked about the weather, spinning the variations out until Pibble had finished his coffee and could go.

  Zoe Palangalos’s absurd orange helmet burned on the water. It was as unmistakable as a buoy, both in reality and reflection, as she steered a little blue motor-boat down a lane between two lines of yachts. She seemed to be making friends rapidly and happily, to judge by the shouts and the arm-wavings. It amused Pibble that the apparently reptile-chilly George should be married to this coarse, spontaneous creature, but as he trudged along the sandy track that led out of the town to Porphyrocolpos his amusement died and was replaced by vague alarms. OK, they had convinced themselves notionally but not emotionally that somebody might try to kill Thanatos, and had been going through the necessary steps to protect him without much real conviction—like actors rehearsing a play which will probably never be staged. But now things were different. The Home Office had sent one of their best men from Department J to Hyos—a man who had nearly certainly eliminated more than one of his country’s enemies in his time. If it had been the Foreign Office that would have been straightforwardly alarming, for Britain retained a residual interest in the good government of Hog’s Cay. But the Home Office. Perhaps Butler had transferred, but it wasn’t likely. And why had they hurried him in by the blatant clatter of a helicopter? And why should he want to make an appointment for a long private chat with old Pibble? It would take a few more years before the Mafia actually infiltrated the Home Office, surely. But it was a serious possibility that Butler himself had been bought.

  Pibble was very irritable by the time he reached the fence— enough for him to fret at the wait for the telephone call to the house. He inspected the three dogs, which were on parade—two of them looked the part more than their handlers, but the third had a touch of red setter in its ancestry, which gave it a fawning, sentimental look. The f
ence was as good as could be bought, running along an artificial dip in the land to make it less obtrusive; but Pibble thought a professional, with the right tools, could get through it in twenty minutes without setting off any of the alarms, provided he wasn’t interrupted.

  “OK,” said the guard at last, and motioned him through into unreality of Porphyrocolpos. Four bored horses mooched in a corral. Over the first rise the villa lay, with its white arcades and fretted screens finishing abruptly at the fiat roof. It was a sawn-off pleasure dome. Beware, beware his flashing eyes, his floating hair …

  Her floating hair, actually.

  4

  Buck Budweiser spun his wheelchair over the fine, raked gravel of the courtyard. Tony d’Agniello, her russet hair half-veiling her bare fawn arms, leaned on the balcony above with a stopwatch in her hand and watched the pattern he was making. It was a sunflower pattern, such as a schoolboy doodles on the back of homework books with his first pair of compasses, a basic circle with a series of half-circles curving across it, meeting at the centre and the circumference to form the petals. Buck’s round white face was blobbed with sweat; his big hands grabbed at the wheel-rims to hurtle the chair across each curve; his thin little legs swung out, muscleless, under the centrifugal force until the sudden stop at the outer circle sent them flying forward; the unworn heels of his child-size shoes clattered back into the metal frame of the chair as it twirled for the next curve. Pibble stayed where he was on the edge of the courtyard.

  “Hi, fuzz,” called Tony, smiling from her vantage point. Pibble waved back, but said nothing for fear of upsetting Buck’s concentration. It was an intensely serious business, a way in which the cripple could get the exercise his body needed by performing an athletic feat up to near-Olympic standards. Pibble was beginning to think Buck the most American American he had met, a particular example of all the generalisations.

  The rattle of gravel stopped with a final clack from the dangling shoes. Buck carefully wheeled himself to the corner of the yard, spun round and sat panting and studying the pattern he had made.

  “Ninety-eight seconds,” called Tony.

  “Third time this morning I broke the hundred, Jim,” said Buck.

  “Are you going to try for the ninety now?”

  “Uh-uh. Can’t be done. Can not be done. I’m going to figure out a new play.”

  “I’ll give you eight point six for accuracy,” called Tony.

  Buck looked disgusted.

  “Aw, come on, honey,” he grumbled. “That’s a nine all over. What d’you make it, Jim?”

  “You’re the Giotto of the wheelchair, Buck. But won’t you get suspended by the Discipline Committee for arguing with the referee?”

  Buck laughed.

  “Thanks, Tony,” he said. “OK, Dimitri. Epharisto.” His accent was worse than Pibble’s.

  He dropped a fifty-drachma note on the gravel and trundled himself towards the front door. Tony had already disappeared from the balcony. A gardener appeared from where he had been sitting in the shade of one of the cypress trees, picked up the note and began to rake the gravel.

  “How did you make out?” said Buck in a low voice. “That monastery’s some place, huh?”

  “Fascinating,” said Pibble, “but I think we can cross it off our list.”

  He followed Buck’s chair through the self-opening doors into the cellar-like chill of the hall.

  “That’s what I said,” said Buck.

  “They couldn’t use it without the monks’ knowledge,” said Pibble. “And they’d have a tricky couple of miles across the island from anywhere they’re likely to be able to take a shot at Thanassi. And supposing the monks are bribable, they’ve got to know that.”

  “Yeah. I reckon you’re right. Help me up this step, will you?”

  “I’ve done a bit of your job for you,” said Pibble as he tilted the wheelchair up to the different level of the terrace. “I saw a helicopter come in this morning, so I called at the Aeschylus to see whether you’d got there on your rounds. . .”

  “I had work this morning …” explained Buck.

  Pibble was amused to learn that the threat to Thanatos’s life was part of a game—like the wheelchair pattern—compared with real work. Buck certainly had played the game hard yesterday in the Tank, then.

  “Of course,” said Pibble. “Anyway, though I missed you I found the chap who’d come in on the helicopter. He’s OK. And they aren’t expecting anybody else there except a charter flight of artists from England tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” said Buck as he parked himself in the shade of one of the huge umbrellas. The terrace ran the whole length of the house, to form the roof of both the Tank and the boat-shed, and the sea lapped below its balustrade. With its tables and umbrellas it always looked more like part of an hotel than any private house, and more so than ever now as the white-coated house-servants wheeled out the luncheon trolleys. Buck snapped his fingers at them and called out for a drink. The larger one nodded and glided off.

  “Hey!” called Buck, “I reckon Miss Tony’s coming too.”

  The man raised a hand to show he’d heard. Pibble fiddled with his chair until his head was in the shade and the rest of him in the sun. Tony, wearing huge round sunglasses, slouched up, laid her fingers like a bishop’s blessing on Pibble’s balding scalp, and sat in the sun. One of the many pleasant things about her was that she didn’t mind being looked at, nor did she mind being ignored. The servant returned with pineapple juice for her, a Daiquiri for Buck and a Guinness for Pibble.

  “Can’t think how you drink that, this weather,” said Buck.

  “Nor can I,” said Pibble. “But they’ve got it into their heads it’s what I like, and I don’t want to worry them by upsetting the system.”

  “I’ll fix it for you,” said Buck eagerly, as though fixing systems were the finest sport in the world. “Tell me what you want, and you’ll get it.”

  “I never know till the time comes, and not always then.”

  “Aw, hell!” cried Buck and flung himself against the back of his chair, disgusted at this lack of organisation in a man’s life.

  “I found a new method of poisoning someone this morning,” said Pibble, reminded of it by the opacity of Tony’s drink. He told them about the samimithi. Buck listened intently at first, as though it were something that might some day come in useful, but became mocking and fidgety when he discovered it was only myth. Tony on the other hand moved from boredom to fascination and was full of questions, soon exhausting Pibble’s meagre knowledge and darting off to interrupt the servants in the task of bringing out the banquet which passed for a picnic at Porphyrocolpos. But as she spoke no Greek, and their English lost its gloss the moment it was called on to do more than answer a guest’s ordinary needs, she learnt little more. Pibble was amused to see how her normal lounging posture became athletic and intense as soon as she was really interested in something. Even by the (presumably) high standards of millionaires’ mistresses, she was something special—not only beautiful and exotic, but also somehow both childlike and sophisticated. Pibble thought it surprising, considering what a ceaseless flicker of flashlights Thanatos moved through in the outer world, that he’d never seen a photograph of her with him. He was sure he’d have remembered her.

  A shape moved silently beside him. George Palangalos was now sitting there, as though he had been there all along.

  “What amuses Tony?” he asked when Pibble looked round.

  Pibble explained about the samimithi again.

  “And she believes this?” said George.

  “She wants to believe it,” said Buck, “just because it ain’t true.”

  Pibble cocked his head.

  “These college kids,” said Buck. “If a thing’s real, certain, hard, sharp, always been there, always will—they say it’s a dream. And their dreams, that’s what’s real for them
.”

  “Tony is not like that,” said George quietly.

  “No, I guess not. She’s the kind who think that if they bust things up a bit, their dreams will grow on top of the rubble. They got no sense of reality either. No values. You want to know about Tony, Jim …”

  “Be quiet,” said George, just as quietly but with an emphasis that made Buck blink. He looked at Pibble, then at George.

  “OK,” he said sulkily. “But if Jim …”

  “It’s all right,” said Pibble. “Let’s talk about something else. I saw Mrs. Palangalos down in the harbour. She seemed to be making plenty of friends.”

  “Zoe is good at that,” said George. “I am not.”

  “You were lucky to find her a boat so quickly,” said Pibble.

  “I buy it for her,” said George. “Easy.”

  “What kind?” said Buck.

  Pibble was lost in the technical discussion of makes and types of boats. Tony came back to finish her fruit-juice. George made room for a chair beside him, but she settled herself opposite.

  “Do you do a lot of sailing?” said Pibble to Buck.

  “Not sailing. Power-boats. No-legs like me—” he patted his inadequate thighs “—we get a boost to our ego sitting there with that amount of power under our hunkers. What did Zoe make of Thanassi’s boat, George?”

  “She says it is beautiful. She says can she have one like it. That I cannot buy so easy.”

  “You should see them, Jim. They’re a pair, and they’re something —all silver and mahogany, made for some duke. Thanassi’s rigged them up with modern outboards—I’m taking him out this afternoon, and you can look then. Hi, Dave, what are you drinking?”

  Dave Warren came and sat gloomily in the last chair. Despite his gaudy beach shirt he still looked like Mark Antony, but Mark Antony the morning after some Lucullan night. A servant brought him an ice-dewed can of thin American beer, and he sucked pensively at the hole in the lid.

  “You told ’em?” he said to George, who shook his head.