The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  Pibble sat on a creaking upright chair, took the unwanted glass when it was handed to him, and waited.

  “You speak Greek, no?” said the officer.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Good. My name is Captain Thagoulos. I am chief policeman in Hyos. How do you do? Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  “I go to the ecclesia, the church, this morning. After, I come here. I take one telephone. The man is not Greek, but he talks good Greek. He says Mr. Butler comes to Hyos to play with our little boys. Understood?”

  “Yes. Do you know where the call came from. Can you trace a call?”

  “Easy … easily. It is from Porphyrocolpos.”

  Pibble almost did the nose-trick with the dung-smelling local brandy. After that there was no point in trying to hide his surprise.

  “Let’s talk about that later,” he said. “What did you do?”

  “I send one man to search for this Mr. Butler. He finds him talking with boys. He sees that they are friends, too much friends. Thus he brings Mr. Butler to talk with me. Mr. Butler is not … satisfying.”

  “Satisfactory.”

  “Not satisfactory, no. His story is … OK, but I think it is not satisfactory. He says he is one London businessman; he talks good Greeks; he says he is on short holidays, thus he comes in the helicopter; he plays cricket with the little boys.”

  “He likes cricket.”

  “So why is he coming to Hyos? He can play cricket in London.”

  “Not in October. Too cold and wet.”

  “Understood. But I am policeman many years. It is not satisfactory. His room at Hotel Aeschylus is OK—no evil books, no evil pictures—but is not satisfactory. Is not the room of the man who comes for holidays. Yes?”

  “I know what you mean,” said Pibble. Captain Thagoulos was clearly a good, experienced policeman. Now he opened a drawer and threw a fat yellow volume on the desk. He leafed through the dictionary.

  “Is one cricket book. In his room. But we think it is one code book. I am not a Hyote—a senior officer is not permitted to be stationed in his home places. I do not know cricket. Only when the ball breaks the window, then I am interested.”

  Pibble smiled as he picked up the 1969 Wisden and flipped through it.

  “I think it’s all right,” he said. “I mean, it is not surprising that Butler brought it.”

  “OK. What does Thanatos want me to do?”

  “Thanatos?”

  “One man telephones me from Porphyrocolpos. I capture Butler. Now you come.”

  “I don’t know anything about the telephone call,” Pibble said. “I did tell the others that I’d seen Butler playing cricket with the boys, because it amused me. I met Butler in the Aeschylus two days ago, and we met again at the English cemetery yesterday. I had quite a long talk with him then. And I had coffee with him after lunch today. I was sitting at the Helicon bar when a boy came and brought me here—that’s all I know.”

  “Why do you talk with him so much? You have friends at Porphyrocolpos, no?”

  “Yes, of course. But I am not used … accustomed … to such friends. I liked Butler.”

  “You do not like little boys, no?”

  “No. Not that way. What would you like me to do?”

  “I like you. It is Thanatos who likes me!”

  Captain Thagoulos suddenly frowned and riffled through his dictionary to peer despairingly at a page in the L’s.

  “‘Like’ means a lot of different things,” said Pibble. “Anyway, the hell with Thanatos. You’re sure it wasn’t a Greek who spoke to you.”

  “He speaks good … well. But if he is Greek, he … pretends he is not. Why?”

  “A Greek might not have understood what I said. And he might object to an Englishman playing with Hyote boys for reasons of morality.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. I think you’ve made a mistake. Can’t you just let Butler go and tell him that?”

  “No. No. I cannot. We are a very pure country. I have a very pure island. I do not wish Athinai to say I permit that rich English­men play with my little boys.”

  “I’m sure that part’s a mistake. He just has this passion for cricket.”

  Thagoulos simply looked at Pibble, not even mockingly.

  “Are you going to prosecute him? Have you got any evidence?”

  “The evidence of boys?” A movement of the Captain’s shoulders implied that you might just as well pick straws to decide guilt or innocence. “No, Mr. Rivvley. I wish that Butler leaves my island. But I wish that he leaves easy … easily. No policeman to push him on the boat, yes?”

  “OK. I’ll talk to him. Is he at the hotel?”

  “Come this way, pliss.”

  Cells too are much the same anywhere, allowing for such trivial variations as the difference between glare and gloom in the corridor, and the residual odour of wine-vomit as opposed to beer-vomit. They are all places where time goes by, unmeaning.

  Butler was sitting, perfectly patient and calm, on the single chair.

  “I leave you,” said Captain Thagoulos. “The door to stay open.”

  “Thank you,” said Pibble to the spruce back.

  “Hello, old man,” said Butler. “What brought you along?”

  “A boy fetched me. He had a face like a monkey.”

  “Chris. What’s the line out there?”

  Pibble looked meaningly at the door.

  “We’re not wired for sound,” said Butler. “They claim that they’ve got a buggery charge against me.”

  “The Captain told me. They haven’t got any evidence and I don’t think they’re aiming to fake it. Did you ask to see the British Consul?”

  “Nearest one’s at Corfu. No point in bringing him in if the thing would clear itself up without. Does me no good at the office.”

  “Would you be prepared to cut your holiday short and go home now?”

  “I’d prefer to stay on a couple more days.”

  “No go. I think if it came to that they’d put you on a ship; but of course they’d rather you went of your own accord.”

  “Hell! … Thing is, I particularly don’t want to blot my copybook with this West Indian deal just coming up—and the office happen to know I’m, er, that way inclined.

  That’s how they like it, matter of fact—no domestic entanglements. But they’d be distinctly shirty if they heard I’d been thrown out of Greece for buggery. Not that I’ve ever gone for small boys. I hope you don’t mind my saying so, old man, but policemen are more my line.”

  “Shut up!” said Pibble, furious. It was astonishing how the old gibe still stung. But when he looked at Butler he saw that he might not have been joking: that note of irony in his voice which had bothered Pibble at times might not be irony at all, only a schoolboy tone of voice, acquired to conceal awkwardness, now a habit.

  “I think I can help you keep your office sweet,” he said. “You remember that deal in Montreal you were talking about? I’ve just realised I know exactly the contact you need.”

  “Come off it.”

  “No, I’m sure. This chap’ll do the trick for you all right.”

  “Thanatos put you on to him?”

  “No. I don’t think he’s got any contacts in Montreal. Look, if I tell Captain Thagoulos that you’re ready to pack and go without a fuss, I think he’ll let you out at once. Then I can give you the details while you’re packing. It’s an hour and a half till the ferry leaves.”

  “I’m in your hands.”

  “I don’t know whether that part was a new idea,” said Pibble, sitting on the bed and watching the finicky accuracy with which Butler folded every garment and put it into a prepared place in his suitcase. “I mean, smuggling heroin disguised as abstract sculpture. He had two paintings stolen each time out of a
whole show, so if the customs just tested a sample they’d have a good chance of missing them.”

  “Why bother to have them stolen? Couldn’t some rich guy just come along and buy them?”

  “Well, some other rich guy might have got there first, and to prevent that you’d have to have the gallery’s complicity. And it broke the trail, I suppose—no receipts or fake documents. And the cops would be looking for professional art thieves. I don’t know how much morphine he could get into one of those paintings.”

  “How much do they weigh?”

  “The big ones—half a hundredweight or more.”

  “They’d be about seventy-five per cent plaster—say fifteen pounds of drug to a picture.”

  “It doesn’t sound much.”

  “It’s a lot. But it’s not as much as I’m looking for. Perhaps his bosses are trying to get him to expand. How’d he take that?”

  “I don’t think he’d like it. In fact, I suspect he may be trying to get out. There’s been a curious side-effect to the whole operation, which is that the thefts from his shows produced a lot of publicity, which raised the prices of his pictures to a point where he could live off them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was trying to duck out. How would the Mafia take that?”

  “They wouldn’t like it.”

  “I mean what would they do? Rough him up?”

  “Not at once. They’d offer to let him buy himself out, and set a price much higher than he could possibly pay. That’d be a start. Anyway, if you’re right, we can do quite a neat job. The Canadians can pick this lot up—make it look like a fluke—and then tell Athens where it came from. Athens can jump on Hott then, without thinking that they’re obeying big brother over the Atlantic. I wish you could give me a bit more, though. It’s pretty thin so far. If you’ve sold me a bum steer about Montreal, and the office learns why I left Hyos, I won’t be getting much of a sniff at my pension rights. They’re bastards about that sort of thing.”

  “Do you mind if I talk about X?”

  “It’s your alphabet—do what you like with it.”

  “The first time I met X he was sulky and rude and rather difficult. He’s young, and his arms are very thin, and he looked dirty. He’d been given a drink of ouzo but I saw him pour it away surreptitiously, though he told me he liked the taste. Then the two of us went for a walk, and I went into a church to look round, but he stayed outside. When I came out he was suddenly much perkier. Then I met him down in the town, next day, and he was very bright—sharp—quite different. And he’d tried to clean himself up a bit. Then I saw him later with a girl, out up the hill. They didn’t know I was watching them. He kept shouting ‘I can’t, I can’t.’ The girl tried to comfort him) and told him about somebody she’d helped who’d been on H.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Butler. “That sounds like something.”

  “Wait. Last time I saw him was an hour ago, at a bar. I was with Hott when X arrived. He looked as though he’d been expecting to find Hott there. He also looked pretty sick. Hott found an excuse to take all the contents out of his pockets, and then put everything back except a fresh packet of cigarettes, which he offered to X. X jumped up and threw the packet in the harbour.”

  “You can’t smoke morphine, you know.”

  The ironic note in Butler’s voice was very strong, but probably still unintentional

  “I know. Hott rolls his cigarettes, very tidily. So he’d have no need of a packet. I thought it might be an unobtrusive way of passing morphine on—X does smoke, by the way. Anyway, Hott didn’t seem at all surprised, and when he’d gone X borrowed some money off me to buy a bottle of ouzo, so he’s back on that now. I talked to him in an elusive way about lying low for a bit, and he got what I was talking about.”

  “Right,” said Butler. “Let’s add up. Hott goes night-fishing, so he’s got the opportunity to get the opium in. Joss-sticks in his studio would hide the smell. His studio is windowless and well kitted out. He is geared to ship his pictures to the U.S. If I’ve got my chemistry right, he could precipitate morphine base out of an aqueous salt with ammonia—that’s almost insoluble in water, so he could mix it with plaster of Paris, which isn’t very soluble either. There’d be very little reaction. Any good chemist could separate it all out at the far end. Yeah, it would work, but …”

  He paused, thinking.

  “. . . but it won’t wash,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all so fancy. Joss-sticks! Stealing pictures! Asking an ex-cop into the place where he does the work! Passing the stuff in fag-packets, to some nut!”

  “Yes, he’s a show-off. The very first words he said to me were a quotation from Rimbaud about disordering the senses, which I think were part of something about experimenting with hash and absinthe.”

  “You think that’s Mafia style?”

  “No, I don’t. Besides, there’s one or two other things you’ve left out. The most important is that the quantities he’d be able to get into two pictures being quite a lot too small.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what I think is this. He’s an amateur. He’s set this up by himself, or perhaps with one or two other amateurs. Hyos isn’t a very likely place to start a fair-sized operation, but he chose it because he was already living here. Now his system seems to be working, and he’s getting the stuff into the States on a fairly reliable basis, and so he’s attracted the attention of the big boys. They want to take over. That’s how the rumour got about that the Mafia are interested in Hyos.”

  “Uh-huh. You may be right. Amateurs will try anything, and sometimes it works. We’ll let Canada check it out.”

  “I feel fairly confident.”

  “Bully for you. I take it this X is a girl.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Thing is, there’s no real percentage in his flogging the stuff on the island, especially to someone who doesn’t carry the price of a bottle of ouzo; but it’s a way of making an independent dolly dependent, and he sounds the type. You want to look after her?”

  “If it doesn’t muck things up for you.”

  “She’s going to have a hell of a time getting off—she’ll be lucky if she’s through it in a couple of months …”

  “Isn’t morphine easier than heroin?”

  “Not that I know of. Athens is going to move before then, and Thagoulos will give all Hott’s buddies a proper going-over. He’s pretty certain to spot her, wouldn’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Otherwise she’d do bloody well to skip for a couple of months. Athens is damned nasty about this sort of thing.”

  “It doesn’t queer your pitch, leaving X out?”

  “Far from it. She’s a British citizen, I take it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well then, if Athens picks her up, that’s a hell of a lot of trouble for the F.O. And if it gets back to the F.O. that Athens was acting on a tip from us, that’s a hell of a lot of trouble for Department J. That’s why it’s so neat letting Canada handle Hott—keeps our noses clean.”

  Everything was so neat, thought Pibble, moodily watching the military back on its way up the gangplank to the ferry-boat. Butler disposed of, pressure off Tony, Nancy left out of the reckoning with Hott, Mafia’s interest in Hyos accounted for.

  Neatness is all, he thought, turning away and nodding to Thagoulos where he stood in the shadow of the Customs shed.

  What we need now, he thought, as he started back along the dusty road to Porphyrocolpos though the yellow slant light of evening, is for Alfred to have found the speedboat and fished out the motor and found out what made it burst into flames. Then we can all relax in a totally neat world.

  Alfred had done his stuff. The motor lay on the terrace. There were two bullet-holes in the petrol tank that stood beside it—a neat round for entry and a torn gas
h for exit.

  10

  In the pit of the night Pibble gave up on any pretence of sleeping, turned onto his back, and began to enumerate, pressing thumb against successive fingertips, all the things that were wrong about the set-up as seen from Porphyrocolpos.

  First, the failure of the gunman on the headland to fire his second shot. The psychology of professional gunmen had also been argued inconclusively back and forth in the gathering dusk. He still didn’t believe any of the theories that accounted for it.

  Second, the telephone call. No one admitted to that. No one was interested in it. It was conceivable that one of the courtiers had attempted to please the monarch by removing Butler, as a potential threat to Tony. And it is part of a courtier’s loyalty to do the necessary crooked deed in such a way that the monarch remains untainted. Besides, it involved the police, and Thanatos wouldn’t like that. Or, as George said, a mistake might have been made in tracing the call. Why the hell should anyone at Porphyrocolpos want to remove Butler, unless someone there was the Mafia’s man, deep in the morphine trade? Wait. Buck had shown a sudden eagerness to meet Hott, had driven out to see him, hangover and all. And Hott had good as asked to meet Buck—and then been implausibly surprised to find him a cripple. If he’d wanted to see him, either above or below board, why shouldn’t he make contact direct? Just the fancy footwork of the amateur again, probably. Mlle Guillerand said she had already seen the beach-buggy, and the buggies were new toys. So perhaps Buck had been out to the South Bay villas before, when he should have been checking hotels. Yes, Hott had known about Thanatos’s plans for the monastery; he’d known Pibble was an ex-cop; according to Tony he’d been more interested in Pibble than her. He’d wanted to check on this possible new danger, and wanted to provide an excuse for more meetings with Buck. So the telephone call had been made by Buck.

  No. Buck’s accent was worse than Pibble’s. So someone else at Porphyrocolpos was in the ring. In that case, they must all be.

  Inconceivable. Rubbish. Airy nothings. A mere construction. And another thing—if Hott was just shipping a load off, he must have got his raw materials in long ago, so there’d be no need to go night-fishing for fresh supplies, and get his eyes red-rimmed with lack of sleep. No, perhaps he’d be starting afresh, at once; presumably the opium harvest was over, and it was sense to lay the stuff in at once. Forget it.