“I don’t know him very well,” said Pibble. “But if you like I’ll tell Buck Budweiser about you. He used to work for Parke Bernet, and was Mr. Thanatos’s art adviser.”
“Good enough. Thanks, man. Now let’s go and see what those girls have done with each other.”
He laughed again.
As they walked back towards the beach Pibble had an irritable feeling that there were all sorts of nuances he was failing to catch. Hott’s explanation for his friendliness was quite reasonable, but it seemed an extravagant way to behave for a man who expected to sell most of his pictures in New York, at New York prices—but then extravagant behaviour was normal among people who came within the pull of the powerful gravitation centred on Thanatos.
Nancy had vanished, but Tony was lounging against the beach-buggy, talking to a dark young man. Even from the bank above the foreshore Pibble could see that she had reverted to her stance and mood of yesterday. The play was over.
She drove him back along the official track, sedately enough in allow conversation above the noise of the engine.
“Did you tell Mr. Hott I was an ex-cop?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“He must have known before,” she said. “He suckered on to us at the bar because of you.”
“Oh, nonsense. It was you he was interested in.”
She shook her head again, making the unreal hair move as though her nature commanded every swag and scroll of it.
“Nope,” she said. “I know when they mean it.”
As they slowed to enter the town—so white from a distance, so throbbing with colour once you were in it—he found himself watching her dark hand on the gear lever; his eyes travelled up her velvety arm and shoulder and her long neck, half-hidden in hair that was someone else’s. Her jaw was firm, but very finely carved—it was hard to imagine it open to scream its anger at National Guardsmen. Or even …
“Do you chew gum?” he asked.
Nope. Though when I was a kid …”
“She slowed, looked at him and stopped the car altogether to look at him more thoroughly. Her large, dark eyes opened wide behind the big lenses of her sunglasses, and then she frowned slightly, as though the question might be a trap.
“Why?” she said.
“I was looking at your jaw,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to have the muscles.”
She laughed and drove on. Pibble almost sighed with relief that he hadn’t broken by his idiot question the mood of purring intimacy they had achieved. He had achieved, rather.
“Chewing,” she said suddenly. “It’s a nothing thing. You do it because you do it, and so what? My Poppa was a preacher, you know that?”
“Ung,” said Pibble.
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength. I guess ‘soul’ is the same word as the one they’d have used for ‘mind’. Right?”
“It was mens and anima, in Latin, wasn’t it?” said Pibble. “I think they had two different words in Greek—I don’t know about Aramaic. Or Hebrew.”
“Shame on you, Jim. Listen. Anything you do—anything—if you don’t do it with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, you’re betraying yourself. There are things you got to do—got to because you morally must, or because society makes you—and even so you do them like that, or you rebel against doing them like that. Big things or little things, it doesn’t matter what. That’s how you do it.”
“I’ve watched you eating your ice-cream,” said Pibble.
“Sure. ‘N Thanassi’s like that—that’s why I get along with him. If he was a starving man in a slum and he found a bit of bone in a trash-can—a bit of ham-bone—he’d gnaw the meat off it with a kinda love. He’d love his hunger, and love the feel of his teeth nicking the stringy shreds out from the gristle.”
“Yes,” said Pibble. She had made this claim before, and again he wondered whether it was true. “But what’s it got to do with chewing-gum?”
She laughed again. She was happy. With his company? Surely not.
“It’s a nothing thing, like I said. If I’d a million years to live, I’d run a campaign against gum. And tobacco, maybe. And listen, Jim, I’ve known guys so far gone on drugs that already they were walking on the cobbles of hell. But drugs aren’t a nothing thing, no …”
Again Pibble purred in the communicative silence, and again it was Tony who broke it.
“Did Buck see a real bullet-hole?” she said. “What d’you think?”
“Probably not. A professional assassin would have got him when he was standing up in the boat after we’d fished Buck out. But you have to explain the motor failing and the boat catching fire—Alfred looks after them extremely well—and the telegram from Boston. And I heard a story this morning that the Mafia are interested in Hyos …”
“Uh?”
“It’s supposed to be confidential, but I’ll tell Thanassi and you can listen in.”
“But you think he’s in no danger?”
“I didn’t say that. I think the odds are that he’s in some danger —though I don’t know quite what. I still find it difficult to believe that a gunman got as far as the headland, took a shot at him skiing, when he was a difficult target, and failed to take another when he was an easy one.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t add up. Jim … No. Let it go.”
In those words, as she stopped the buggy at the guarded fence round Thanatos’s kingdom, the mood of contact was broken. He wondered what she had been going to ask him for, and whether he would have been able to give it.
“Listen to that!” she said suddenly. “That’s one pig-headed old roughneck. He’s got too used to being lucky.”
Above the noise of their own idling engine he heard the sharp tearing noise of the speedboat out on the bay.
7
But it was Dave Warren who was water-skiing. Buck, with obstinate courage, was driving the speedboat again, while Thanassi fretted on the terrace with a little walkie-talkie radio. A screen had been set up between his table and the headland.
“Where you been, Jim?” he said, far from genially. “We needed you. We got to get a fix on where that boat sank. Go and stand where you were standing yesterday—tell me what you think. Hi, Tony, have a good time?”
Pibble leaned on the balustrade of the terrace and stared at today’s scene, trying to superimpose yesterday’s fading image on it and see where the pictures failed to match.
“They’re too far from the headland,” he said after a while.
“That’s what I told Buck. Whassamatter, honey? Off your feed?”
While he talked sharply into his gadget Tony appeared beside Pibble with a plate of ham. He saw that her own ice-cream was half its usual size.
“I figured you wouldn’t want any more beer,” she said.
“That’s fine,” said Pibble, and turned to look at the glaring water. Thanassi’s low, white cruiser, now anchored in the mouth of the bay, made the perspectives different moreover it was impossible for the dancers to repeat the moves of yesterday’s dance, and even if they had been able to, sending the same veils of spume arching across the same areas of blue, Pibble couldn’t have been sure that this was so the shapes and angles changed so fast that what seemed like a memory of yesterday might be only a memory of five minutes earlier.
“Ask him to go round that circle again,” he said, “and stop as soon as he’s heading away from the shore.”
The boat came round, the plumes of its wake sank, Dave subsided into the water. Everything lay drifting to stillness.
“That’s about it,” said Pibble. “I think the boat was about twenty yards further to the right yesterday, and a little further away from us.”
“Buck says no,” said Thanatos after a further colloquy. “He says you’re likely right about the line from here, but
he was never so near the shore. I reckon he’d be a better judge of that.”
Dave was swimming to the boat. He heaved himself aboard, and then there was a further period of adjusting the position, and finally an indecipherable series of movements aboard before the engine rattled again and the boat moved off, leaving a red buoy bobbing where it had been.
“I’ve got a couple of divers coming tomorrow with a geomagnetometer,” said Thanatos. “They trail it behind a boat and it picks out metal objects on the sea bed where they cause bumps in the earth’s magnetic field. The guy I called isn’t sure whether my boat’s got enough metal on it to register, but I’d like to give it a try. I want to see that motor.”
“So do I,” said Pibble.
“Yeah. We’ve got a lot of things here that don’t add up. Find anything new this morning, Jim? It’d better be good, sneaking Tony off me for a morning when I’m not allowed to get my exercise skiing in my own bay.”
He jumped from the shelter of the screen, scuttled across the terrace like a scout in a Western, grabbed Tony’s wrist and hustled her back to cover. She came without resistance, but in a way that reminded Pibble of a child taking part in a game for good manners and not because she wanted to play. Thanassi, in spite of his bad temper, sensed this and let her settle on to the terrace by his legs, with her knees drawn up under her chin.
“I saw Zoe,” said Pibble, “and she’s drawn blank in the harbour. I drew blank at the villas—they’ve all been here too long, and there aren’t any strangers renting any of them. If that was all, I’d have said you were safe to go where you wanted, and that Buck was mistaken about the bullet-hole. But I talked to a man this morning who has been sent out here in a hurry by a branch of British Intelligence. I recognised him yesterday, and made an appointment to meet him today. He says he’s here to check on a rumour that the Mafia are interested in Hyos.”
“That’s bad,” said Thanatos.
“I think so. If he’s telling the truth, he’s working on the assumption that they’re using the island as a staging-post in the drug trade.”
“Oh, crap!”
“No, honey,” said Tony suddenly. “There’s a connection there.”
“What do you mean?” said Thanatos, but she shook her head.
“If he’s telling the truth, you said, Jim?” asked Thanatos.
“Well, there’s another reason why the Americans would be interested in Hyos, isn’t there?”
“Uh huh.” Thanatos didn’t look down at Tony, but she frowned.
“On the other hand,” said Pibble, “this man didn’t even ask who was staying at Porphyrocolpos. He simply asked me to look the place over and see whether you were running a morphine factory. The yacht, too.”
“Screwy as hell,” said Thanatos.
“Morphine, not H?” said Tony.
“That’s what he said the probabilities were.”
She nodded, as if satisfied.
“There’s also the possibility that he’s not really working for British Intelligence,” said Pibble. “He seemed pretty disaffected. Incidentally he told me that in exchange for his coming here the Americans have mounted some kind of operation on Hog’s Cay. If that’s true, he must at least still have some kind of connection with British Intelligence. But he may just have said it a throwaway line to see how I reacted, which would give him a line on whether we were on our guard.”
“The guy seems to have been free with his secrets,” said Thanatos, characteristically going to one of the weak points.
“I thought so too. I wondered whether you had the connections to find out whether he was telling the truth about why he’s here, or about the Hog’s Cay end.”
“Sure, in normal times,” said Thanatos. “But I daren’t touch them with Tony here.”
“I’m going to hide out for a bit, honey,” said Tony quietly.
“I’ll hide you,” said Thanatos.
“By myself. So I can take what action I like without thinking what’ll happen to anyone else. You’re a great old swine, Thanassi, and I wouldn’t want to land you in the dirt.”
“No dirt’s deep enough if it’s for you, honey.”
He lowered his huge hand to pat her shoulder, but she sidled out from under his touch and he withdrew it.
“Where are you making for?” he growled.
“I got a place, if Alf can run me along the shore a bit, soon as it’s dark.”
“Sure. You going to come back, honey?”
She bit her lip, frowning. Pibble could see that in accordance with her doctrines she would tell the truth. She had been Thanatos’s girl, in order to ‘recuperate’, and she played the part with all her heart and all her mind and all her strength. Now that was over. Pibble got to his feet.
“I’ll look round the house and the yacht now, if that’s all right,” he said. “Then I can report back to this man and see if I can find out any more.”
“OK,” said Thanatos. “Tell Serafino. He’ll show you round. Dave can call the yacht to send a boat out for you.”
He spoke thickly, as though it were an effort to order his wits and control some coming fury. Pibble nodded and almost scuttered off the terrace, but before he was through the bead curtain he heard Tony beginning to talk in a low, steady voice.
He took his search fairly seriously, using a steel rule which Serafino had found for him to measure rooms with. Sometimes, at the bedroom windows which faced across the bay, he would see the couple still on the terrace. Tony seemed to be doing most of the talking, while Thanatos sat half-slumped, pulling at his lower lip. At one point he saw a servant bring out Thanassi’s silver tankard Serafino saw this too, looked at his watch and made a slight click of disapproval.
The search was not difficult, as the house was straightforwardly planned. Compared with the curiously painful scene on the terrace it was dull stuff he found it uncomfortable to intrude on people whom he only knew as obsequious and almost anonymous servants and to find them in a context where they were individuals, sleeping or playing backgammon or studying for some mysterious examination. In fact their rooms appeared to have more privacy than those in which Thanatos housed his guests here (perhaps inevitably in the occasional home of a very rich man) there was a sort of depersonalising luxury which only Buck had been able to make any impression on, thanks to the paraphernalia of crippledom. Even the owner’s bedroom, with its gross couch flanked by consoles of switches, might have been that of any rich man who collected erotic Roman mosaics. Tony’s room was a shambles: Pibble had seen nothing like it except in burgled flats, where the thieves have emptied every drawer and cupboard on to the floor. Among the litter were several more of the russet wigs, and one with the aggressive Afro hair-do that Anna Laszlo had worn before the Folger Library went up in flames. Afro but not Aphro, he decided. As he measured Dave’s ultra-tidy room he found himself thinking about her again: she was nobody’s doll it must be very difficult for the rich not to turn their women into dolls, unless the women can challenge the wealth on equal terms—by being rich too, or by a gift which cannot be bought hence the perennial popularity of opera singers—a million dollars cannot sweeten a sour note and Tony had that kind of gift, in her unlikely sphere. Also, no doubt, she gave her elderly Hercules the glory of bedding with an Amazon to harbour her in his arms was to defy the law of nations—he’d like that. It was not hard, for Pibble of all people, to understand what she meant to Thanatos. But what did she get out of the deal, apart from shelter?
He searched carefully, but without real interest, through the house, the outbuildings and finally the yacht. He wanted to be able to tell Butler the truth, because it is simpler than lying. But all the while as he measured and made notes the problem of Tony’s love, or lust, or liking for Thanatos teased his mind, sometimes as plain prurient fancies, sometimes as quite presentable questions of psychology, but usually slithering between the two poles.
“Here, Jim boy,” he shouted as though Pibble were a dog. Like a dog Pibble trotted over.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing, of course,” said Pibble. No need to tell him about the embarrassed lad on the boat, experimenting with pot.
“You call my filing-system nothing?” purred Thanatos. “You think yourself pretty damned smart to find that, Jim.”
This was true. The big safe with the documents had been carefully made to look like an extension of the lift-shaft. Pibble shrugged.
“You could sell that knowledge, Jim boy.”
“If I knew who to,” said Pibble.
Thanatos, drunker than Pibble had seen him, was clearly winding himself up for some act of random menacing aggression. Now he rattled off a list of names, mocking Pibble’s ignorance of them.
“If they’re the crooks you make them sound they’d cheat me,” said Pibble.
“Socrates Agnon, Miami Beach. Stick out for twenty thousand dollars.”
Pibble shrugged again. Thanatos snarled at him.
“You’re a loser, Jim. You make a trade of it. You want to be cheated, because that makes you an honest man. You wanted my girl, but you wouldn’t make a play for her. You were scared, gut-scared, but you told yourself you were acting honourable. Go and get boozed up, loser, and let’s see if you’ve got any guts in you when you’re tight. That’s an order. And send that nigger out. Tell him I sent for him. Not asked, sent. That’s another order. You’ll do it, won’t you, loser?”
The Lizard in the Cup Page 11
