The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  Beyond the broken roof all was darkness; though there were still cells on the right of the passage, they had either been built without windows or had had their windows blocked up, perhaps to encourage an especially severe grade of austerity, depriving their inmates of that last comfort, the Mediterranean sun. This section felt chillier and somehow older than any Pibble had hitherto seen. He peered into musty cells by the light of the lantern which Father Polydore had taken from a shelf and lit with a faltering Greek match.

  All of a sudden a raw modern element intruded among the ancient masonry. An arch of bright red brick sustained the left- hand wall where it should not have needed sustaining because it was solid cliff. Father Polydore stopped before the arch, burbled a quick prayer, placed his lantern on a shelf just inside the opening and lurched into the shadows. Pibble followed him.

  They walked into a cave. But the cave was a chapel, small as an ordinary living-room, but ornamented with innumerable marbles so that no inch of the real rock showed. Over their heads a mosaic glinted in the yellow light, the fearsome face of Christ in Judgment frowning out of a deep blue dome, a dome which sustained no roof but had been shaped out of the rock. Another mosaic, quainter and duller, covered the apse behind the altar. When Father Polydore settled his lantern up there and began to quaver and lurch his way through the ritual, Pibble was able to look at this picture with as much attention as his sickness and the reek of the incense—much worse in here, and shot through with a strange resinous odour—allowed.

  It was extraordinary enough to hold his mind, despite those disadvantages. The Christ was here again, full-length, floating out from a far less intense blue; on His right was the Virgin; on His left a bizarre figure, clearly a man, but with a beak where his nose should have been and all his flesh, except the face covered in fur. No, feathers. Dizzy with the endless ritual and his persistent hangover, Pibble still found it interesting that the Victorian (presumably) monks who had commissioned the decoration of this chapel had chosen a much more primitive style than that of the Catholicon. Primitive was the wrong word, though; the attempt was at a very early, but highly sophisticated style, that of the huge-eyed saints and courtiers in the churches and baptisteries of Ravenna. There was even that startling line of orange tessera to outline the nose. Alas, the result was as insipid as if they hadn’t tried at all—just as with English stained-glass windows, where the designer may have had the right ideas, but if the work was done at the wrong period, the glass was inadequate to bring them off. Even so, it seemed surprising that Nancy had thought there was nothing this side of the monastery worth seeing.

  Father Polydore swung round, hissed at him, and made a patting motion with his hand. Obediently Pibble knelt, but the movement brought the worst wave of revulsion so far; he shut his eyes and endured the foul air, chill-faced but sweating. Another hiss, and he had to open his eyes to scramble to his feet; as he did so he noticed, piled against the single step of the altar, a little mound of powder as white as salt, looking as though it had fallen there while he knelt.

  “Little mounds of white powder,” Butler had said, but satirically. As he followed Father Polydore out of the chapel he realised that it must be something to do with repair-work in the chapel. The arch of brick had looked fairly new, and there was no reason why some repairs to the plaster, unrevealed by the dingy lantern, shouldn’t be newer still. And anyway, thank heavens, that was the last of the morning’s devotions. Father Polydore led him back to the Refectory.

  Father Chrysostom had the ouzo bottle out, and made them great welcome as though they were back from some fraught expedition. As soon as Pibble was clear of the appalling horse blanket he shook him warmly by the hand and thrust a glass of ouzo at him. There was no remedy but to drink it; as it happened, there was no remedy like it. His mouth and throat scorched, and were clean; his head rang like a gong, and cleared; the rebellion in his gorge was quelled, once and for all. Even the reeking censer began to smell quite pleasant, with none of the chemical-resin odours that had filled the chapel.

  “Poo ine Nancy?’ he said.

  Father Chrysostom fetched a scrap of paper and a ballpoint from the cupboard and drew a map, so simple and clear that Pibble at once understood he had been searching the wrong slope of the hill, naïvely assuming that all the Vangelis property would be in one area. He made polite and smiling farewells, but was frowning by the time he climbed the stairs.

  The workmen had left their ladders in place, so it was easy to climb back into the monastery, balancing on the wall to heave the lighter ladder over into the passage. Five minutes later he was climbing out again, with a pinch of tasteless and odourless white powder screwed into a fifty-drach note in his pocket, and the resinous smell, uncomplicated by incense, strong in his nostrils. The whole idea was inconceivable—ludicrous. You couldn’t imagine a less convenient place for a morphine factory than the Chapel of St. Sporophore. But Father Chrysostom had been anxious to prevent his visit. Tony believed there were drugs of some kind on Hyos, and could only have learnt of them at the South Bay villas. Pibble hadn’t noticed her talking to Mlle Guillerand, but …

  If Father Chrysostom, who liked money, was in on the racket, they’d be able to use the bay below the monastery for shipping in the opium, and not even the local fishermen need know about it. Hell, no amount of small corroborative points could make the main notion any less ludicrous.

  The hills were still deserted. Pibble wondered why none of the islanders had attended the service at the monastery, though Father Chrysostom had clearly been expecting a congregation, and in the end had made do with a single heretic. Now the heretic was picking a careful way along the slope above Vangelis’s vineyard. He had seen the roof of a hut from a couple of hundred yards away, and so was able to choose a path which kept him just out of sight without having to resort to stooping or crawling. He would prefer not to be seen, but if he was seen he wanted to look as though he didn’t mind. In the end he had to cross the ridge and recross further along, so that he could make his final approach between the dark, ordered trunks of yet another olive grove.

  The girls were sitting in the sun. He would not have recognised Tony if he hadn’t known who she was, though her russet wig was hanging dishevelled by the door. Her scalp was now covered with her own close-shorn dark curls—but it wasn’t just that. She sat with her back against the doorpost, cross-legged, her head balanced on the straight column of her neck. Her face as well as her pose had lost its softness, and the noon sun showed up the hollows beneath the cheekbones and the strong muscles round the mouth. He couldn’t see Nancy’s face because it was hidden in Tony’s lap, but her small shoulders shuddered all the time as Tony’s dark hand moved across them in slow, tender strokes. Tony stared straight ahead. She looked like a redskin gazing out over lost territories. Beyond the hut a tethered donkey searched for grass.

  Suddenly Nancy jerked herself into a sitting position. Her face was grey, her eyes swollen, and her mouth worked all the time.

  “I can’t!” she shrieked. “I can’t! I can’t! Let me go!”

  Her head fell forward against Tony’s breast and was cradled there. The hillside was so quiet that Pibble could hear the husky comfort of the answer.

  “Yes you can, honey. Take it easy. You’re not that bad. I’ve seen it often, often. I brought Ted Follinger through, and he was worse than you. He was bad. He was on H. You’ll be better tomorrow, honey. You’ll be OK.”

  The cropped head bent, talking now too softly for the words to carry to the olive trees. Slowly the shuddering of Nancy’s body quietened until it looked as though she were sleeping, but then her grimy hand and thin arm slid in under Tony’s unbuttoned blouse and she pulled herself into a position where they could kiss. After a few seconds Tony raised her head, laughed softly and with beautiful ease and tenderness shifted both bodies into greater comfort.

  Pibble moved quietly off, neither stirred nor ashamed of his prying, any more
than he would have been if he had been watching the courtship of otters. He had come up wondering how he could protect them from Thanatos, but now he realised that Butler was the greater danger.

  He decided to lie to Butler, but show him the powder. At once, if he could find him.

  9

  Not H,” said butler after a sniff and a taste. The slightly prissy way he used the slang was very much part of his personality.

  “Thank God,” said Pibble.

  For the second time that afternoon Butler looked at him oddly. The first had been while he was still standing by Butler’s table in the fig-smelling dining-room of the Aeschylus. Butler had looked up from his work of hacking off the corner of an iron-hard slab of goat cheese and said “Hello, Jimmy.” “James,” Pibble had answered and dropped the screwed-up note on the table. Butler had glanced round the empty room and given Pibble a very odd look. And now, as they were sitting over cups of coffee that consisted of a quarter of an inch of tepid ooze on top of an inch of sludge, he did it again before calling for a glass of water.

  They sat in silence till it came, then Butler tipped half the powder into the glass and stirred it with his coffee-spoon, watching the liquid cloud and clear again as he stopped stirring and the tiny whirlpool stilled. The powder settled into a white gub at the bottom. Butler dipped his fingers in the liquid and tasted one drop.

  “Not horse, not morphine. Almost tasteless—slight flavour of chalk. No sign of a high. I wouldn’t have said any of it had dissolved, either. Heroin’s highly soluble. Not having my lab equipment handy, I’d say it was plaster of Paris.”

  “So would I,” said Pibble.

  “What did ‘Thank God’ mean, then?”

  “Just the place I found it. Up in the monastery—and there was a resiny smell I couldn’t place, though I don’t think it was opium. And I found it in a chapel where one of the monks made a definite attempt to stop me going. It didn’t make sense in other ways—I mean the well is some way off and there’s no electricity, or any other kit I saw, but …”

  “Then why this James bit? I was due to meet you at the bar in five hours. Couldn’t it have waited?”

  “Yes, of course it could. It worried me, though, and I wanted …”

  Butler was still looking at him oddly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pibble with as much plaintiveness as he dared risk. “I had a very bad night last night.”

  “Gippy tummy?” said Butler with sudden sympathy. “I’ll give you a spot of advice about that. Everyone’s dead scared of sea-food, but sea-food can’t do you one spot of harm in a place like this. Dammit, the Hyotes live on sea-food. They know enough not to gather the sea urchins near the harbour. No, beans is what you have to watch out for. Not decent green beans, but these whitish jobs they give you with everything. They’re hell on the intestines, something to do with fermentation processes—you think there’s something crooked about the monastery, then?”

  “Crooked?”

  “Come off it, Jimmy. You’ve heard the word before—in the course of your career.”

  “Sorry. No, not crooked in that sense. It’s an extraordinary place, though. It’s vast, and it hangs on the cliff like a honeycomb, but there’s only these two old ouzo priests living there.”

  “Come again.”

  “Like Graham Greene’s whisky priests. I shouldn’t think Father Polydore’s got more than a couple of months to live, the rate he’s soaking the stuff up. They’ve been very poor, so they haven’t had any new recruits, but now some decision in Athens has given them back a lot of land they used to own, and they’ve nothing to do with the income except repair the place and drink themselves stupid. The set-up’s cranky, but not crooked, twisted but not bent …”

  “Go and write a thesaurus. They’ve got a harbour?”

  “Certainly. Quite a good one in the prevailing winds. But the monks would have to know if it was being used, and I’d have thought the organisation you’re looking for wouldn’t regard two drunk old monks as very reliable conspirators. It’s got to be something more professional.”

  “Yeah. It’s just something Chris said to me. . .”

  “Chris?”

  “You saw him yesterday, but you mightn’t have noticed him. An ugly little runt who bowls a bloody fierce leg break. He said his uncle and aunt weren’t going to the special service up at the monastery, which they usually do because they’ve got land up there. Something unlucky was going on, he said. Just a bit of conversation I couldn’t follow up without seeming too interested.”

  “Is the uncle called Vangelis?”

  “That’s him.”

  “He’s having a row with the monks about the ownership of part of an olive grove.”

  “You get around all right, Jimmy. Mind if I call you that? When I checked with London they were a bit funny about you. Chap I talked to, every sentence started off with a pat on the back for you and finished with a but. Anyway, he said you definitely had a sort of a knack.”

  “But. . .” said Pibble.

  “Yeah. D’you miss all that?”

  “I don’t miss the work, though it was always interesting or worth doing, and sometimes both. But when I left, after I’d pulled myself together from the shock of being fired, I realised how long I’d been breathing stale air. On the other hand I do miss the people—even the ones I didn’t get on with. I think it’s natural for a man to belong to an organisation, and unnatural to be a lone wolf. It isn’t just a loyalty thing—it’s something deeper than that.”

  “You’ve been reading The Naked Ape. Bloody clever book.”

  “As a wagonload of monkeys,” said Pibble. “But it isn’t only belonging I miss—it’s being kept, well, sharp.”

  “In training?”

  “Sort of. I’ll give you an instance. I was at a party out at the South Bay villas yesterday—by the way I met somebody who might just possibly be a junkie there—and I was talking to a Canadian …”

  “From Montreal?”

  “Didn’t ask. Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, he was talking about the difference between England and America, and he said that England was quite incapable of producing a Ted Follinger. Now, who the hell is Ted Follinger? I know I’d have known a couple of years ago—it rings that kind of bell.”

  “Was, not is,” said Butler. “The cops in New Jersey got him in a shoot-up with the Black Panthers. Last summer. He was wanted before that on a bombing rap. He started with a stretch for rape when he was fifteen … Arkansas, I daresay he looked at the lady. They’d have fried him if he’d been five months older. That was ten, eleven years back. No, more like fifteen. He did his rap, and was luckier than a lot of black men who got slung into southern pens those days because he was part of an intake for a showpiece rehabilitation course, and came out with a couple of years’ training as a watch-repairer. He went north, fell in with Anna Laszlo and that crowd, made the time-pieces for their bombs for a while. Funny this Canadian of yours should mention him.”

  “Oh,” said Pibble, who had been trying to strain a few more drops of coffee out of the sludge to hide his irritation with himself for bringing the name up. After all, there was still a possibility that Butler was here to look for Tony. But he turned out to be interested in a different coincidence.

  “Yup,” he said thoughtfully. “Your Canadian might be from Montreal, where our whisper about the Mafia began. And Follinger tangled with the Mafia: he was all set to become a hero of the Left when they dropped him, bang, and then he was all set to become a bogey of the Right when the cops got him. Thing was, or that’s what I heard, that he’d got bored with politics and set out to muscle in on the Mafia’s drug interests—and they tipped the cops off where to find him, and maybe sent a man of their own along. He was articulate, so everyone took him for a rebel when all he was a crook. An articulate bum. What about this junkie of yours?”

  Pibble described Mlle
Guillerand’s appearance and behaviour, telling himself meanwhile that he was at least being half-honest, trying to lead Butler towards his own knowledge of the existence of some kind of hard drugs on the island, without showing him the actual trail he’d followed.

  “Dumpy,” you said?” said Butler when he’d finished. “Arms bare?”

  “I didn’t see any needle pricks.”

  “No. But if they’ve been on it long, you get this wasting. Arms like matchsticks.”

  “No. The other way, if anything. Pudgy but unhealthy.”

  “Probably just some kind of nut,” said Butler. “Have you looked over Thanatos’s house yet?”

  “I did what I could yesterday. I told him what I wanted, and I was given the keys. I measured up the rooms and so on. Unless he’s sunk a room into the rock, I don’t think there’s anything there.”

  “I can check on that. He had that place built by imported labour, I’m told, but some of the kids’ dads did casual labour on it. How about the yacht?”

  “No room for a workshop, but plenty of places to hide parcels of processed stuff if he wanted to. I did find one of the crewmen smoking pot.”

  “Throw the little ones back.”

  “If I may. There’s only one other thing, much vaguer. Suppose there were somebody on the island who was going to run a heroin depot for the Mafia, elsewhere I mean—much nearer America—and he was simply here as part of the process of setting it up. Would that be enough to account for the rumour that reached you?”