“Well done. That sounds all right.”
George didn’t even hear him. As soon as Tony turned from the window he darted in front of her, totally ignoring Nancy. Tony looked at him with an odd expression combining tenseness with boredom.
“Please,” he said, “do not be angry. I see you are right. It is best for you to keep away for a few days.”
“I was planning to,” said Tony, suddenly dismissive. As she turned to Pibble he was wondering whether he was going to get similar treatment, but she smiled.
“Bye, Jim. I’ll let you know what this year’s scene will be, and then you can do your duty. Right?”
“I expect so,” said Pibble.
He started to smile in a fatherly way at Nancy, who had the purged and saintly look of any child fresh from vomiting; then he remembered about the blacked-out volume and the deficiencies of fatherliness, so he swivelled and said his guidebook goodbyes to the monks.
“What does she mean about next year’s scene?” said George as they came through the gate of the monastery into the already desiccating morning.
“Oh, nothing to do with any of this.”
George frowned and swallowed his inquisitiveness. Pibble wondered whether it was worse being successful but not attractive than it was being neither. There was something of the half-man about George, the hotel servant, bred to behave with insensate politeness, to lie with tough discretion about the suicides of film stars, to be all things to all men—how could he ever now become anything special to one woman? And for the woman he wanted to be Tony? It was a measure of his passion that he had let his mask slip so during the scene in the refectory. Poor old George. But though Pibble genuinely did feel a certain sympathy for his companion, he found that what he was really thinking was poor old Zoe.
The ripping noise of a hard-driven engine came from below them, sorting through rapid gear-changes on the erratic slopes.
“This’ll be Buck,” said Pibble. “I think we’d better let him know. I don’t think he’ll be difficult—it’s been a sort of game— but if he’s got Mark Hott with him you may need that pistol.”
“Idiots,” said George quietly, and stepped away from the track.
Buck was alone. Pibble was tensed to jump for his life as the purple buggy hurled up at him, but Buck lugged at the handbrake and halted it in the last possible instant.
“Strong nerves!” he shouted above the idling motor. “Where’ve you been? Where’s old George? Serafino said you left together.”
Pibble nodded to where George was standing between two gorse bushes with his right hand in his jacket pocket, and then walked round to Buck’s side of the buggy.
“Great!” said Buck. “Thanassi was fretting. I’ll run you home.”
“We’ve been looking at mosaics,” said Pibble quietly.
“Mosaics, huh?”
“Yes. Now we ought to go down to Mark Hott’s to see if he’s got any of that yellow sealing-wax left. But George wants to get home.”
Buck blinked once, like a boxer taking an unexpectedly hard punch, and turned to see how George was reacting. But George had composed himself to his usual cold calm so Buck turned back to Pibble’s more interpretable features. Then he flung back his head and shouted with unembarrassed laughter.
11
Astonishingly Thanatos laughed too, a long weeping cackle, nearer the edge of hysteria than Pibble had ever imagined he could come.
“That makes two good losers,” said Dave with extreme sourness; but Thanatos and Buck only laughed again, Buck grinning and bouncing in his wheelchair, the practical joker whose wits have been enough to bewilder a group of clever men with proper legs.
“That first morning was some giggle,” he said. “I didn’t need to do a thing, not after Jim had come up with the idea of bumping you off—only keep bringing the rest of ’em back to the point when they shied away. George didn’t like that at all, did you, pal?”
“I knew it was nonsense,” said George, smiling the smile of the courtier who smiles because the king smiles, and with no pleasure of his own. Pibble, just beginning to be able to read the emotions behind the mask, decided that George was irritated by the whole episode, and bored with the recapitulation of its details, just as he would have been bored but polite if he’d had to listen to two moderate golfers recounting the ups and downs of some close, inept contest; but at the same time he was glad it was over, because now sane business life could begin again and distract him, perhaps, from fretting after Tony.
Doc Trotter, by contrast, was mystified but fascinated. He could not begin to understand how an adult could behave in this fashion; the idea of deliberately stepping out of the comfort of Thanatos’s shadow into the blaze of the competitive world was for him an inconceivable motive. His bloodshot heavy eyes wheeled from face to face, as if hoping that one of them would suddenly reveal that this post mortem on Buck’s hoax was itself a further leg-pull, designed to baffle innocent black men. And Dave was furious. He’d already been furious when the beach-buggy had come churning into the courtyard; he’d had a teleprinter message clenched in his fist and had thrust it at George before he was out of his seat. George had read it and passed it to Pibble, saying “At least that need not now disturb us.”
Between the gibberish of transmission instructions, Pibble had read:
“GUARDS DISPATCHED AS REQUESTED BUT REPORT HITCH AT FRONTIER STOP ENTRY REFUSED STOP CUSTOMS SEARCH DISCOVERED SPECIALIST EQUIPMENT STOP PROPOSING DISPATCH FRESH PARTY WITH PERMITTED ARMS ONLY.”
“Goddammit!” Dave had shouted, “What kind of boneheads did they send, trying to get through all in one party?”
Playing stud on the ammunition boxes,” said Buck, reading the message over Pibble’s shoulder.
“I’ll have their balls,” said Dave.
“Forget it,” said George. “It is of no consequence. There has been no attempt on Thanassi’s life, no shot fired at him. Jim will explain. Cancel this second party of guards, Dave.”
It had taken Dave some time to begin to understand Pibble’s explanation, even with the grinning corroboration of the culprit, and then he had become really angry. And now he was angrier still when he discovered that Thanatos wasn’t. Watching him, Pibble wondered how much of this rage was fuelled by his own repressed desire to do some similar thing, to be his own man, to act and conquer outside Caesar’s provinces. He sucked his lips in and gulped saliva; he didn’t touch his drink; he began sentences and cut them short; finally he strode to the terrace edge, drank his whole glass at one draught and stood staring out to sea.
Slowly the mood of the little court changed, responsive to the ruler’s mood. Only Buck failed to realise that he was no longer the all-licensed fool, and what weather was now coming.
“We’ve got to get Tony back now,” said Thanatos. “No reason for her staying out—think you can find her, Jim?”
Something rang hollow under his confidence. Pibble shook his head.
“Ah, come on, Jim. Call yourself a detective?”
“Not that sort of detective.”
Thanatos realised how ill-chosen the words were before Pibble did. He glared up, made as if to hurl himself out of his chair with his usual crude energy, then sank back as if he had been pushed in the chest by an invisible hand.
“You know where she is,” he said. There was no need for Pibble to answer because it wasn’t a question.
“She can bring the other girl,” said Thanatos. “They can have rooms right away from mine—one room, if that’s how they fancy it. We’re broadminded in Porphyrocolpos, provided nobody tells those oafs in Athens. You tell her that, Jim.”
“I don’t think I can help you.”
“I don’t think I can help you,” mocked Thanatos. “Christ, you’re a prissy old maid. Ah, go and knit yourself a coffin. Never met any lesbians before? Didn’t know they existed?”
“Hey,” said Buck, “do you know the one about the butch usherette at the girlie show? There was this …”
Thanatos gave a jerk of his head and George rose quickly from his seat, tilted the wheelchair back so that the brakes on the little front wheels wouldn’t bite, and whisked Buck into the house like a waiter hurrying off with the fruit-trolley. When he came back his mouth was working down and sideways as though he were chewing on something.
“Do not send for Tony, my friend,” he said. “Let us settle these. . .”
“Screw you,” said Thanatos.
“No. What you said to Jim, about this other girl, are you serious?”
“Yeah. She spelled it out.”
“But then … how could she …”
It was distressing to watch George. In most ways he was a very conventional man; up in the Refectory he had been so obsessed by his own yearnings that he had never noticed the relationship between the girls. Now, in his shock, he was asking the unaskable—if that was Tony’s nature, how could she have borne to be complaisant, let alone apparently delighted, with a gross herd bull like Thanatos?
“Screw you,” said the bull. “We got along.”
With an effort George settled his features into blankness.
“Perhaps if you leave her alone the madness will work itself out,” he said. Thanatos ignored him.
“You’ll tell her what I say, Jim?”
“If I see her.”
“OK. When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow, if that’s all right. There’s a ferry in the afternoon. I don’t want to leave Mary alone longer than I can help.”
“She’s all right, pal. I told my manager there to find her a handsome fisherman.”
“That was friendly.”
“Christ, maybe I should have too, for real. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of you, Jim. Now I’m going to ski. Then there’s work to do—we’ll clear a couple of hours in the afternoon to go up to the monastery and see what all the fuss was about. Buck’s going to laugh a mite less when he finds he’s got to pay to put it back. And Christ, I’ll sting him for that boat of mine. One of a pair, that was, belonged to the Duke of Westminster, unique. Hey, Buck …”
The trip to the monastery was surprisingly enjoyable. George had sent a message to warn the monks that they were coming, and that Thanatos might be shocked, and therefore less generous with his donations if he found the sacred edifice littered with women. Father Chrysostom greeted them with grave pomp, speaking to the millionaire on equal terms—or more than equal, like God receiving Mammon. Doc Trotter bought an icon from Father Polydore, who sloughed his senility to demand six times the price he would have asked from an ordinary tourist. Two bottles of ouzo were drunk.
They had left Buck behind, sulking now; so it fell to Pibble to expound what he thought was the technique for removing the tesserae from the wall and reassembling them in whatever American museum was expecting to announce next year its unique new treasure of unknown provenance. No, Buck wouldn’t have had time to find a certain buyer; but be knew that world well enough to be confident. While Father Chrysostom stood suave and smiling in the shadows of the chapel, Thanatos stared at the two Christs, fidgeted with the torches to achieve the maximum play of light from innumerable tilted facets, and ran caressing fingers over the tesserae. For the first time for three days he seemed himself again, sucking the world into the whirlpool of his own enjoyment.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know a bit about mosaics—I have some in my room, which Buck found for me. He’d know how to do it. This kind would be easier than Roman ones—look at these bloody great gaps between the tiles.”
“But what is it worth?” said Doc Trotter, is his solemn, furry voice, fretting perhaps at the knowledge that Father Polydore had overcharged him for his icon.
“A million bucks?” guessed Dave.
“Crap,” said Thanassi without turning from his study of the Virgin. “You’d get any price you wanted. There isn’t a museum in the world that wouldn’t try to raise the dough, once it was cleared through customs. What about that, Jim?”
“Hott’s got a boat which he could bring round to the harbour here. He’d have lowered it down and taken it round to his own place, then just crated it up as part of his exhibition. He’s shipped exhibitions in before, and …”
“Bloody convenient,” said Thanatos. “Finding a guy who could do all the work, and had all the kit, and could fake it up as modern art.”
“Yes,” said Pibble. “But put it the other way round—I don’t expect he would have tried if he hadn’t got someone like that to bring it off.”
Thanatos grunted. Pibble hoped he was too absorbed in his appreciation of the mosaic to notice the wariness of some of the answers. There was a lot it was sensible to keep quiet about: Hott’s need (if Butler was right) of a big lump sum to buy himself out of his Mafia concession; Nancy’s lie, the first time he met her, about the existence of the chapel; and had Hott continued to supply her with morphine because he might need her to manage the boat while he lowered the mosaic down? There was no question of Father Chrysostom touching any aspect of the theft except the final pay-off.
“Like it, Doc?” said Thanatos suddenly.
Doe Trotter sighed, a strange deep whistle that was almost a groan.
“How can I tell? I must be educated to appreciate such things. I must be shown. I must see other things of the same kind, and learn the relationships. How can this happen if the only examples are in places which I never visit? Ravenna? And now Hyos? It would be better in a museum.”
Thanatos’s cackle crackled, and from dark cells down the corridor the echo crackled back.
“OK, OK,” he cried, “so we’ll bring the people to it. I was going to wait until these two old soaks were dead, but now I reckon I’ve got them fixed. They’ll be an asset, and we’ll hire a few more, too. We’ll keep a section of the place going as a monastery—this, and the Catholicon and a batch of cells—and the rest of it we’ll do up with plumbing and lifts and a five-star restaurant. We’ll make it like Mount Athos, on wheels.”
“A two-sex Mount Athos?” asked Dave, nodding to where Father Chrysostom stood gravely contemplating his feathered patron.
“I’ve got them fixed,” said Thanatos again. “He was in this, up to the neck, and we can prove it, eh, Jim?”
“I expect so,” said Pibble dully. Thanatos slapped him on the back.
“Ah, cheer up, you old misery! Now let’s go home and do a bit of skiing. I don’t trust this weather to last.”
“There’s a pile of work waiting,” said Dave.
“How much?”
“You won’t get through it in eight hours.”
“Right, we’ll stay sober this evening and do half of it. Then we’ll tackle the other half tomorrow morning. We gotta keep the afternoon clear, Dave, so we can have a bit of a drink before we see old Jim on to the ferry.”
“Carry him up the gangway?”
“Right. Jim, you’ll find Tony and tell her what I said?”
“I’ll tell her if I see her.”
“Do that.”
Pibble hung about the monastery after the others had left, strangely cheerless. For a while he explored the enormous honeycomb, finding little that differed from any other part of the building. Then at the extreme end of the corridors beyond the Chapel of St. Sporophore he found a broken wall which allowed him to scramble out on to an area of tumbled rock, inaccessible by other means, with cliff above and cliff below. Here he sat for a good hour, enjoying the milder vigour of the sun as it sloped towards setting. He tried to work out why he so disliked Thanatos’s plans for the monastery. They would mean that the place became alive again, and that the mosaic would be seen and enjoyed by people, many more of whom (probably) would really appreciate it than the monks ever had, even when the cells were all filled with them. But, despite a
ll rational arguments, he found himself thinking that he would prefer the whole place to decay, to slide into the sea, than thus to be artificially preserved. He wondered whether he could do anything to forestall the change, even if it meant betraying Thanatos …
A patch of colour on another rock, less than six feet away, caught the corner of his eye. Knowing that there was only one thing of that precise hue, he moved his head round with painstaking slowness to stare at it.
This samimithi was twice the size of the one he had seen on the path down from the cemetery. Spread on the rock, it relished the same sun as old Pibble. He could see the minute palpitation of its breathing, and the jerky flicker of its gold eye. It was not really translucent; only its colour was so much fleshier than flesh that it seemed that some of it must come from inside the surface, a radiation, a sort of warning. Pibble wondered whether it glowed at all in the dark—it looked as though it might. As he watched, the crest on its nape rose, webbed with skin between the spines; a gill-like area behind its jaw-bone puffed out to double the size of its mask; the creature gave a shrill, shivering rattle which lasted for an incredible time—more than a minute—and then the spine and the gills subsided and it lay still again.
Pibble released his breath slowly, as though he were himself an animal in danger. It had been a performance, anthropomorphically speaking, of extraordinary malevolence. No wonder the samimithi accumulated superstitions—if you found one of those things drowned in the cup you had been drinking from, flabby with death and the glow of the skin fading and the gold eye glazed, you’d have every right to feel frightened, and betrayed by the friendly and innocent milk that had hidden the corpse.
It was curious that what he had at first thought of as a sex-symbol should now have become an image of betrayal. Or perhaps they were the same thing.
Well, he would do what Thanatos wanted. Forget about the monastery, find Tony and give her the message. Sex and betrayal could be left to someone else.
The Lizard in the Cup Page 18
