The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  He found his thumb pressing so hard against his middle finger that he might have been trying to squash some nasty bug there. With an effort he shifted the pointer on.

  And anyway, though it was untidy and unaesthetic to assume that a mess of unrelated skulduggery was in progress on small Hyos—Anna Laszlo and Butler and Hott and the mystery marksman—it was one degree more credible than the notion of a single intricate pattern relating them all. Suppose Hott were the mystery marksman … with glasses that thick? Things happen round a figure like Thanatos; he not only made events of his own will, but he attracted them involuntarily. He threshed; whirlpools eddied round him; weaker creatures were sucked in, threshing too, as Pibble now threshed on his bed. Suppose … suppose that the marksman had intended to miss, then? To scare? To mew Thanatos up in his plush prison for a while? Bloody fine shot. Buck collaborates with Hott. Together they’re a damn fine shot.

  There was something there, but sleep took him before he could interpret it. The hypnagogic picture that slid before his eyes was the image of St. Sporophore, beaked and feathered, holding in his hand a stick of yellow sealing-wax. Automatically he moved his thumb to his little finger, as if to count the absurd saint as yet another unresolved fraction of the puzzle.

  Dozing through lurching images and half-dreams he kept his hand under the obsessive tension until its discomfort woke him. It was night still, but might soon become dawn. With his left hand he felt for his right to discover what this strange, numb grip was clutching. It turned out to be the knowledge that St. Sporophore had committed a miracle, puncturing a petrol tank with a shot fired at another time.

  Wide-eyed in the dark he thought about it, then switched on his bedside light and dressed.

  The corridor was fully lit. As he walked towards the stair-head a voice hissed at him. He looked up and found himself covered by a squat machine-gun, confidently handled by Serafino who had been standing sentry in the niche outside Thanatos’s bedroom.

  “Where you go?”

  “Outside. Up the hill. There’s something I want to check on.”

  “Must wait until day. Mr. Palangalos’ orders.”

  Pibble went back to his room and thought about it some more. Then he picked up the telephone, looked at the extension sheet and pressed the numbered button. The far bell rang only once.

  “Oriste,” said the calm voice.

  “This is Jimmy Pibble. I want to go and check on something out on the island, but Serafino says I must wait till daylight. It’ll be much more difficult then.”

  “Something important?”

  “I hope so. If I’m right it’ll explain all the bits that don’t make sense, and tell us who fired the bullet.”

  “OK, I will tell Serafino.”

  “You wouldn’t like to come too? I might need somebody who spoke good Greek. It won’t be dangerous.”

  “How far?”

  “About three miles. I don’t want to make a noise, so I’d rather not take a car.”

  “OK. I will come to your room.”

  “We’ll need a torch.”

  “It will soon be light.”

  “We’ll still need a torch.”

  “OK.”

  A large moon was loafing down the western sky, giving enough light for easy walking. The sentinel hound sniffed them at the fence. They didn’t speak until they were out of earshot from the gate.

  “Wait,” said George. “I must know more. Where are we going?”

  “To the monastery. I want to get there before the monks are about.”

  For the first time George seemed at all surprised.

  “What can you find there?”

  “I hope to find a reason why someone in Porphyrocolpos arranged an apparent shooting, so that Thanassi would stay inside the fence for a while.”

  “Am I this someone?”

  “No. At least, that first day, you were very much against the idea that anyone would try and shoot Thanassi.”

  “I still am. But someone did, though you said an apparent shooting. I have thought of Buck twisting in his seat and shooting the holes with a pistol, and then setting fire to the petrol that leaked out. But even he could not achieve that, though he’s great with his hands. He would have to be so quick, and still steer normally, and not be seen by Thanassi, and dispose of the pistol, and even then he could not be sure that the boat would sink and the tank not be found with the holes showing that the bullet travelled in the wrong direction.”

  “They went in the right direction.”

  “They were bullet-holes?”

  “Let’s go and see whether I’m right about the monastery. Then we’ll have a reason. Everything else is just an amateurish bag of tricks, a sort of showing off.”

  “OK. I do not enjoy walking. You carry the torch and I will take the pistol.”

  “Pistol?”

  George took it from his pocket, a middling-sized automatic, its metal too dark to glint in the moon. Pibble laughed.

  “I don’t think we’ll need that,” he said.

  “Who knows?”

  As they walked on Pibble saw that he still held the weapon ready in his hand, only putting it away as they walked through the town. Two dogs yelped at them as they entered and another as they left. Already the sky was greying, and they met an old man leading a donkey laden with empty baskets down to the harbour. George began to pant as they climbed the hill, and stopped to rest where the terraces between the olives gave him a convenient wall to sit on. Now it was more day than night, just, with the beginnings of sunrise stretching a pale streak of pink along the eastern sky; but the sea was still heavy-hued, as if it had been dyed with darkness, and across it the fishing- boats crawled home trailing their strings of lamp-boats, each still showing its paraffin spark.

  “Ah,” said George. “It is a long time since I have seen this. You work, you make yourself rich, you take risks, you begin to need doctors and cupboards full of little pills, and you forget …”

  “We ought to get on,” said Pibble. “We’ve got to get there before the workmen.”

  George smiled, still looking at the sea.

  “The day after Sunday the workmen will not be early at their work. You are taking me to see Tony?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “Hadn’t you better put that gun away, just in case we meet somebody?”

  George smiled and shook his head. It was a good gun, made for use and not for show. Pibble started impatiently up the track, irritated with himself for his inability to enjoy this one hour before the dew was gone, when the moisture seemed to suck out of leaf and soil the fresh smells which would soon fade into the general dusty drought of noon.

  “You think there is a traitor at Porphyrocolpos?” said George from behind his shoulder.

  “No. At least, not the sort of traitor we’ve been looking for. Like Thanassi says, you’re all tied to him much too tightly for it to be worth your while to betray him, in that kind of way. But he’s such a powerful personality that some of you must itch sometimes to be your own men, and do something to prove it. I think that’s what’s happened this time.”

  “It is possible. I do not feel such longings, but I am a dull Greek. If Thanassi makes a lot of money, I make a little, and that is good enough for me.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Wait for me. I cannot talk to your back. I was a kamaryaris, a bell-hop, at his first big hotel, in Cyprus. There was a suicide, a French film star, and the hotel manager was not very sensible. It could have been very bad publicity, with talk of the Thanatos organisation failing to act in time, then trying to conceal; but I gave evidence to the police and to the magistrate. I gave the right evidence. Thanassi helped me after that, so here I am, walking up this hill before breakfast in tight shoes, to look for a traitor.”

  Yes, thought Pibble. He could see
young George, pale-skinned and slight but with just the same black eyes, sticking to his story. There are some witnesses whom no policeman on earth can shake. They seem invulnerable.

  It was full day by the time he turned aside from the path. George immediately dropped behind. Once, when Pibble looked back to check his bearings, he saw that the pistol was half up and that George was looking left and right among the bushes and tree-trunks, like a jungle patrol. So it seemed tactful for Pibble to go up the ladder first and heave the spare ladder over single-handed, and then to descend to the passage alone. For a few seconds George stayed on the wall, looking dubiously down into the darkness below him.

  “Will you shine the torch, please, so that I can see?” he said, or rather ordered. “Also hold the ladder?”

  Pibble obeyed, holding the torch to illuminate himself more than anything else. He also stood so as to present the best possible target. George came very slowly down the ladder with his back to the rungs; the third eye of the pistol pointed steadily at Pibble all the time, while the other two darted to either side, ready for ambushes. Pibble couldn’t see, against the glare of the brightening sky, whether the safety-catch was on or not.

  As soon as George reached the bottom he took the torch and shone it up and down the corridor, probing the empty shadows. Then he grunted and handed it back to Pibble, who led the way down the slope. As they passed each cell he allowed time for a brief check that it too was empty, though he tried to behave as though his own interest in these bleak and boring cubes was real but academic. Their understanding—his and George’s—seemed perfect. Probably Pibble was acting from good motives, but it was sensible for George to act as though he might not be, and equally sensible for Pibble not to take offence. Certainly George’s vigilance didn’t relax; even when they reached the chapel he took the torch and explored for several cells further down the corridor, leaving Pibble alone in the almost-dark.

  Faint glints of gold came from the halo of the Christ in the dome as the torch wavered back up the corridor. Pibble stood, sniffing the strong odour that permeated the place, recognising it for what it was now that the smoke from the censer no longer muddled his nostrils. It was nothing as natural as pine resin, no, far too chemical for that.

  “What is the smell?” said George in his passionless voice.

  “Glue. A modern impact adhesive, like you stick formica on with. Anyway, I’m pretty sure. Have a look at the dome.”

  The torch-beam swung upwards. In its direct light the face of Judgment frowned down, terrific. They could see every stone that made up the enormous lozenge-shaped eyes and the implacable lips. Pibble was amazed that he had ever thought it Victorian. George muttered to himself in Greek what sounded like a prayer.

  “It is genuine?” he said suddenly.

  “I don’t know. If it isn’t, we’re back to square one. Now have a look at the apse behind the altar.”

  The beam swung down.

  “It is rubbish, that,” said George at once. “Modern rubbish.”

  He was right. It wasn’t even mosaic, just paint on a roughish surface perfunctorily imitating the mottled pointillism of tesserae. But in the strong beam of the torch it was possible to see that it had been done with a certain dash, a touch of caricature, as though the artist were amused by his own swift expertise and knew he could afford to take risks because his work was never going to be seen by any eyes except those of elderly, ouzo-riddled monks, or by any light except that of the dim lantern they used. But he must have worked hard at it, and at the later processes, night after night. No wonder his eyes had been rimmed with red.

  “Shine it down here,” said Pibble. “Behind the altar.”

  But first the light swung away to search the sides of the chapel for hidden enemies. When at last it lit the place where the painting ended at a pillar, Pibble knelt and worked his fingers in behind the surface. It was slightly resilient, not like old plaster on linen; it was cardboard. Fully confident now he gripped it and pulled it forward to clear the pillar so that he could begin to slide the whole thing sideways along the apse. It came stiffly, without the floppiness you’d have expected of unsupported cardboard—probably they’d nailed a few battens behind it to steady it. It was light but awkward.

  “Can you take the other side?” he said. “I want to get it right out of the way and see how far they’ve got.”

  George hesitated for a moment before laying the pistol and torch on the altar and taking the far edge. Backing and filling they manoeuvred the whole false apse down into the body of the chapel, where it stood like part of a stage set. Eagerly Pibble started for the altar, but George gripped him by the elbow and he stopped—he mustn’t seem to be rushing for the pistol when it was the torch he wanted. He managed to stand still, though the lust to see made every muscle in him shiver. George picked up the pistol before shining the torch on the apse.

  “Ah,” he said, wholly unastonished. “What does it mean?”

  It had been made by the same workmen as the Christ in the dome. Once again every tile glowed or sparkled. The blue of the background seemed to comprise innumerable receding deeps, in front of which the three figures floated—the passionless Christ, the suffering Virgin, and the saint whose emotions were concealed by his beak and feathers, but who no longer seemed a ridiculous figure. The curious distancing of the great mosaic made him also majestic. His feet were missing where a big triangle, comprising almost a quarter of the whole work, had been removed from the lower right-hand corner.

  “I wonder if they can put it back,” said Pibble.

  “What is it? Who are they? Is it genuine?”

  “I think it must be genuine or they wouldn’t be stealing it. Do you know Ravenna?”

  “No.”

  “There are some tremendous mosaics there, in this style, and it’s only just across the Adriatic. They were done in the time of Justinian, in the sixth century, when this monastery might have started to get rich by collaborating with pirates. The monks might have hired workmen from Ravenna, I suppose—or it might have been a common style at the time. I don’t think anyone knows about that, because all the early mosaics in the Eastern Empire were smashed by the Iconoclasts. You only find them in Italy now.”

  “But why in this little hole? Why not in the Catholicon?”

  “My guess is that this was St. Sporophore’s own cave. The passage down to it looks as if it might have been a cliff edge—I don’t know whether you noticed. I expect they bricked it up to hide it from the Iconoclasts—I’ve read that there were monasteries where every monk died defending their pictures. Something like that could have happened here, and when new monks came back they didn’t know about it. I don’t know how Father Chrysostom found it. Perhaps the wall collapsed—you can see that the arch is new. Anyway, he wouldn’t have known what it was worth—it wouldn’t be until someone came up who knew about the art world, and realised that here was an entirely unknown mosaic of a sort which doesn’t exist in any museum in the world. I’ve no idea what it’s worth if you could get it to America—a million quid?”

  “Buck,” said George softly.

  “Yes, I mean, no one else could have arranged for the boat to catch fire without risking Buck’s life, and I don’t think we’ve got a murderer on our hands.”

  “But he could never do the work. Who is helping him? Dave?”

  “No. Somebody at the South Bay villas, I think. A very competent chap.”

  “How is it done?”

  “I’m not sure of the details, but I’ve watched workmen restoring painted plasterwork—I think they’d have to start by making some sort of matrix out of plaster—I found some plaster on the floor—to set the tiles at their proper angles when they put it together; and then they’d take it section by section, gluing the tiles to fine canvas and then sawing away behind them. You’d have to use a soluble glue.”

  “I found a pile of workman’s materials
in a cell down the passage,” said George. He no longer sounded very interested, but Pibble said “Let’s see,” and groped off down the passage. George followed, silent-footed.

  The cell smelt less unused than some of the others they’d explored. Old cement sacks covered a shapeless pile of oddments in the far corner, not looking like anything special; but the kit underneath them was new and neatly stacked. A roll of fine canvas, two pressure lanterns, a roll of India paper wrapped in polythene, several big tubes of Evostik, bags of plaster of Paris, buckets, trowels, some odd-shaped saws, and two crates. The first was full of carefully wrapped fattish objects; Pibble undid the wrappings of one and found a slightly curved white irregular slab, about nine inches by fifteen, whose concave surface was rough from the trowel and numbered “12” and whose convex surface was rough in a different way, with the exact impression of two hundred tesserae.

  “Yes, that’s part of the matrix,” he said as he wrapped it up and put it back.

  The second crate was less than half full of different-feeling flattish objects, also wrapped. Pibble grunted with the surprising weight of the one he lifted out; it was more awkward to handle because of its slight flexibility; he unwrapped it with almost holy care. It turned out to be a numbered sheet of the canvas, a little larger than the piece of matrix; glued to its surface was a meaningless pattern of glass cuboids, which showed only a glint or two of their brilliance through the mortar powder.

  “That’s the mosaic,” he said, staring. “I should think each bit corresponds to a different bit of the matrix. It must be pretty alarming getting them off. You see, they could build the matrix to its proper shape when they set it up, and strengthen it, and then get each section of the canvas into place and push new mortar through from behind. If they were patient enough they could get every tile at exactly the same angle and position that it held here.”