The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  At the sound of his little snort of self-disgust the samimithi flicked out of sight.

  The sun had set before he reached Vangelis’s vineyard. In the dusk he walked noisily between the yellowing rows of vines, scuffing the shaly soil so that it rattled and coughing once or twice. Tony came to meet him with her finger to her lips.

  “She’s asleep,” she whispered.

  They moved further away from the hut and Pibble gave her his message as impersonally as he was able.

  “Tell him no,” said Tony. “Tell him thank you, but no.”

  “All right.”

  “Nothing happens twice. Will he understand that?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Look, when an American chooses to live my kind of life, she sacrifices all kinds of things. Like they say, you are born to the American dream; you decide with your head that it’s a bad dream, and that you must fight it. But you still want it—you want it without the guilt. The old swine gave me that, to be that other Anna, dreaming the dream. And that was fine. I let myself go. Like I told you, if you do anything you do it with all yourself. Thanassi understands that, because that’s how he lives. But then I woke up. No, it wasn’t because I met Nan …”

  “I thought it was the shooting.”

  “No, not that. When Thanassi put me into his game, in the Tank, then. Oh, I tried to go back to sleep again, the way you do, but it wasn’t for real any more. Then I met Nan. Then it looked as though the pigs—sorry, the cops—were on to me. Then I was awake. You tell him all that. You understand, huh?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The funny thing was that even without her wig she was back to being the other Tony as she explained this. Not Thanatos’s luxurious girl, but the earnest and half-innocent child who had pestered the servants about the samimithi; again it was her way of what she called doing it with all yourself. She made her case as well as she could, and part of her case was also to make herself attractive to old Pibble at the same time.

  “I’d better say goodbye,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh. Well. Huh. Well, so long.”

  “Say goodbye to Nancy for me. How is she?”

  “Picking up. I’ve been letting her get pretty drunk between whiles, but she’ll be able to lay off that in a week. She’s had an easy ride, compared to some.”

  “Good. Well, I hope you’ll be happy.”

  He couldn’t avoid giving her this last blessing in the tones of one’s embarrassed good wishes to a colleague who has taken it into his head to marry a tart. Tony reverted to Anna.

  “It doesn’t matter, that,” she said.

  “I hope it anyway,” said Pibble with much more feeling. “Thanks. So long.”

  He went back down the hill.

  Pibble was getting into his pyjamas when Thanatos sent for him, so he went down to the work-room dishevelled and cross. Alfred was at the teleprinter, Dave writing out messages for him in longhand, George working with one hand on a calculator which he didn’t even glance at as he flipped through a typewritten report, extracting the seam of figures from the spoil of words. Thanatos sprawled on a low chair in the middle of the room surrounded by piles of paper, and didn’t look up as Pibble spoke.

  “OK,” he said at last. “I’ve done with her. Thanks, Jim.”

  But they all knew it was a lie.

  That was probably the reason why Pibble’s farewell party at the Lord Byron, the expensive bar by the ferry terminal, was not a success. Thanatos said almost nothing; Buck maintained his peculiar brand of joshing bonhomie through yawns and glowers; Dave was interested in the red power-boat which Pibble had seen before, and managed to work up an argument with George about its probable price and performance, but Thanatos refused to be drawn into anything except grunts and snorts, all derisive. But most of the time he sat silent, tilting back in his chair, sweating rivulets and looking bulkier than ever because of the bullet-proof vest which he had insisted on wearing in mockery of his courtiers’ useless solicitudes.

  Life of a sort arrived in the shape of Mark Hott, who came striding between the charter-artists, deliberately jostling a couple of easels, and plunged up to their table. Pibble saw Alfred move forward from the beach-buggies, ready to act as a chucker-out.

  “Hi, Buck,” said Hott. “Hi, Jim. Mind if I join you? Thought I’d better come and kinda apologise.”

  “Siddown,” mumbled Thanatos.

  “My labour force,” explained Buck with a giggle.

  Hott dragged a chair across and called for beer into the dark cave beyond the awning.

  “How’s the painting?” said Buck.

  “All packed up and ready to go.”

  “Then you will be able to supervise the restoration of the mosaic?” asked George. “That is good.”

  “Me? Sorry, pal, but I’m wanted in Canada.”

  (And that was true.)

  “You are in a weak position,” said George. “If the mosaic is not restored by the time the authorities in Athens are told of its existence—and soon they must be told—they will want to know how it was damaged.”

  “That’s Buck’s lookout,” said Hott without interest.

  “It depends what they are told, sir. We are not without influence in Athens.”

  Hott swung his thick-lensed stare round to check with Thanatos, who answered him with a snort of enraged contempt. They were two of a kind, Pibble thought, but not of a kind that get along well together, more like the tusked wild swine which will fight any other male off its own territory. He listened for a moment as George continued to press Hott with business details. He had no wish to be drawn in, and was happy to be distracted by a big motor booming on the water. The red powerboat was moving now, with half the harbour shouting advice to its bosomy crew. When he turned back to the table Hott was drawing.

  “You have hurt your arm,” observed Doe Trotter.

  “Girl bit it,” said Hott, not ceasing to glance from his glaring host to his sketch and back. Pibble could see on the top of the working forearm a few drops of red, which he had taken for spilt drink, or paint.

  “They spotted you over here,” said Hott. “Me, I can’t see that far. I asked them to come along and introduce me, but they went all coy, and one of them bit me.”

  “Where?” said Thanatos, addressing him directly for the first time.

  “Helicon Bar,” said Hon and pointed.

  Thanatos stood up like a puppet jerked out of collapse by a twitch of strings. Before anyone else was on his feet he was blundering through the first cluster of charter-artists.

  “Some guy,” said Hott as everyone rose. Pibble looked at his watch—there was still half an hour to the ferry. George was counting notes on to the table to pay for the drinks. When he bad achieved the exact sum he sighed, shrugged, and added another hundred-drach note, a ludicrous over-tip. The others had already left, Dave wheeling Buck.

  “I’ll just tell Alfred where we’re going,” said Pibble.

  “OK,” said George, without looking up. He seemed deeply depressed—harrowed in advance, Pibble decided, by the scene that was about to take place at the Helicon. Pibble turned away and left him to his griefs.

  As he repassed the Lord Byron he was amused to see what the girls on the red power-boat had been up to. One was now sunning herself on the cabin roof while the other had nudged the boat in a deliberately purposeless fashion towards the ferry terminal and the Lord Byron. And now their prey had leaped to his feet and gone. It was astonishing, he thought, how fast the word got round that a man like Thanatos is in the market for a new companion. Poor thing, this one would not do, no matter how languidly she displayed her wares. She was well-proportioned but ordinary, like ten thousand other anemones of the Mediterranean littoral, looking so soft and harmless despite being mostly stomach. Even George, for all his troubles, had noticed their
unambiguous approach; Pibble saw him frown at them like a grandfather and shake his head before following the trail of courtiers after the vanished monarch. It seemed kinder to leave him to himself, so Pibble stooped to examine Hott’s unfinished sketch of Thanatos Furens. Disappointingly it was OK, but nothing special.

  Even before he reached the Helicon Pibble could see that Thanatos was alive once more, as he had been up in the monastery. Alive, but not boisterous. There was something about his pose that suggested an angler playing a big fish on tackle too fine for it. Evidently he had decided to try Nancy first; she was still the starved waif, but perhaps a crust less starved than yesterday, and having tasted Hott she looked ready to take a bite out of Thanatos also. Tony was wary but in control of herself and the situation, while the nobles of the court were all vicariously on edge for their king. Only Hott seemed wholly relaxed.

  One table was already full by the time Pibble arrived, so he joined George and Doc Trotter at the neighbouring one. Poor George had seated himself as far as possible from Tony, but was still able to torture himself with looking at her. Dave finished his hellos to Tony and joined the outcasts, making the whole party into a loose figure-of-eight, an amoeba on the point of fission. The conversation in their half was meaningless; they might just as well have been muttering “rhubarb, rhubarb”; the curious contest at the other table was what mattered, its contestants so ill-matched and its judge so biased. In fact they talked about golf architecture—George being a large-green man, Dave a table-topper while the doctor gargled for some intermediate area. Pibble would have liked to switch the talk to something he could take part in, such as the antics of the girls in the red power-boat, now once more aimlessly homing in on them. After all, it was his farewell party. But perhaps the rich might feel that their own tendency to attract parasites was not a subject for polite conversation; and it would only be another vulture at poor George’s liver. So he stopped even pretending to listen to his own table and simply watched the faces at the other. Vainly he tried to imagine what it must be like to be Nancy, suddenly faced by this gross rival in love, this all-time father figure; it seemed inconceivable that she should not detest him, yet now he had made her smile, and Tony laugh. He tilted his chair, hooking his foot under the heavy iron table to prevent himself from toppling right over, looking gross and totally relaxed. Only if you knew him well could you see how wary he was. In fact a curious tension seemed to emanate not only from him, but from the group at the table where Pibble sat …

  Never mind that. Nancy looked much better today, a living proof of Tony’s will-power. Hott rolled one of his slick cigarettes and offered it to Tony, who looked at him guardedly and shook her head without smiling. So she still thought …

  Not thought, knew. And Nancy was better. And Hott rolled and smoked pot, using joss-sticks to conceal the smell of them in his studio. And naturally enough put them into a cigarette packet before passing them to his girl—his ex-girl. And Nancy hadn’t lit her fag in the Refectory that first day, and had thrown it away half-smoked the moment Pibble had come out of the Catholicon.

  Like slates ripped off a roof by a freak wind, a whole area of Pibble’s assumptions was whisked away, leaving the intellectual edifice naked to the light of reason. Hott had never been mad enough to try and steal a mosaic on an island where he was already making handsome money by processing opium into morphine, because the morphine factory was an illusion. And the smuggling of the stuff disguised as abstract art had been an illusion. And the theft of the pictures only less of an illusion by being, as Nancy had hinted, a publicity stunt.

  So that was that. Pibble felt a real aesthetic satisfaction at having eliminated this unnecessary complication, and produced the theft of the mosaic and the decoying of Thanatos away from the monastery as a single, tidy, and contained event. Pity about Canadian customs, waking to probe and analyse Hott’s new show, in vain. That was an untidy strand, and poor old Butler would probably get into hot water over it …

  Butler.

  He had come to Hyos because there’d been a rumour that the Mafia was interested in the island, and they’d thought it must be for the drugs.

  But there were no drugs.

  Therefore the Mafia interest, if it existed, was in something else.

  A flood of alarmed illumination streamed through the stripped roof of Pibble’s mind, like a baleful sunrise. Involuntarily he glanced across the table at George’s saurian face, only to see it launched away from him as George flung himself sprawling across the cobbles. Then the noise began.

  In a whirling world Pibble seemed to see in the same instant, as if through a fish-eye lens, the beauty on the cabin roof scrambling away, the masked face behind the gun muzzle at the window below where she’d lain, Thanatos hurled backwards out of his tilting chair with the table crashing behind him, Tony on her feet and yelling as she dragged Nancy away, Hott’s yellow shirt turning crimson on the ground—and then, close up, the grey-purple cobbles where his own muscles had thrown him unwilled, while the second burst of bullets clanged into the iron table-top and winced, singing, into the dark taverna.

  The yammer paused and began again before the juddering of it was out of his head. Something not quite solid flipped against his leg. White crumbs of plaster suddenly flecked the cobbles. The firing stopped and a deeper note took over. For several seconds he crouched, thinking it was another sort of gun, then recognised the note and raised his head in time to see the powerboat weaving away across the harbour, tilting to skim the water while its ridged wake bounced the other boats about. Thanatos was on his back behind the fallen table which had screened him from all but the first burst; from a muddle of torn flesh in the left side of his neck blood pumped in sudden pulses. So he was still alive. Pibble wrenched the shirt open, only to find the bloodied khaki furrows of the bullet-proof waistcoat covering the whole torso—no time to get him out of that. He hunkered round until he could slide his hand into the bloodslimed collar-opening and with a fierce contortion dig his thumb into the flesh of the neck just above the collar-bone where the common carotid ought to be. The blood still welled, and he pressed harder. It stopped its jerking flow.

  Either he had plugged that leak, or the heart was done with pumping and Thanatos was dead.

  A shadow covered him; he looked up and saw Nancy, with spread nostrils and huge eyes, bending over the body. Her tongue licked thin along her lips.

  “Sit down, baby,” said Tony and eased her away. Then she was kneeling beside Pibble.

  “Dead?” she said.

  “Not yet. Get a sharp knife out of the taverna and cut him out of his shirt, then see if you can get his waistcoat off. I can’t hold the artery much longer at this angle.”

  She was gone, leaving him alone in the precise, intent world of his own urgency, a sphere of concentration outside which the screams and shouts of the Greeks fluctuated with a remote meaninglessness. A pair of smart black shoes and dark trousers strutted into the sphere and a man’s voice shouted in Greek. Pibble simply shook his head.

  But that small action, like the shake of a kaleidoscope, resettled the pointless mess of the last two minutes and made interpretable shapes. The gunman was on the red power-boat. He came from Sicily—Marseilles—didn’t matter. He’d brought two women, accomplices and bait and camouflage, to manage the boat while he hid, and make it look harmless and ineffectual, and provide a reason for trying to get within range of Thanassi when he came down to the harbour. And the boat had not appeared till Zoe had left. And George had known that the bodyguards had gone astray, and had cancelled …

  Tony was suddenly kneeling beside him, working quickly at the sleeve with the bitter-sharp little knife that is used for boning raw fish.

  “Where’s Trotter?” said Pibble. “He’s a doctor—he’d be better at this than me.”

  “Philosophy, philosophy,” said the Negro’s voice, between sobs. “What can I do?”

  “Keep the
se damned people away. See that somebody goes for the police. Get Alfred.”

  “George is dead, George is dead,” cried someone in a wailing chant.

  “Come on, Dave,” said Doc Trotter resolutely. “Help me keep those good folk at bay.”

  The clamour outside the sphere lessened a little. The smart shoes moved reluctantly away. Tony had the shirt off, and was wrapping it round the mangled and bleeding arm. Pibble managed to achieve a new posture that allowed her to get at the zip of the waistcoat.

  “He might be OK,” he said, grunting with the strain of his attitude. “He was tilting his chair and that first blast knocked him over, and then the table screened him. It depends how quick we can get him to hospital.”

  “Is there one?”

  “I don’t know. Ease that flap back if you can. That’s better.”

  “Christ! Alf’s got bandages in the buggy—a whole first-aid kit.”

  “Doc! Doc! Get this chap to stand clear!”

  And then, at last, above the shrilling and muttering of the crowd, the buggy’s harsh engine and Alfred cursing his way through.

  Alfred took charge, and Tony moved out of the sphere. He was firm and skilful, contriving with his inadequate kit a jury-rig under which the battered hulk might just possibly sail safe to port. But it was twenty minutes before Pibble could stand, numb with cramp and tension and reeling with shock, to find himself in a circus. Thagoulos was the ringmaster, and the thrilled sightseers made the ring. Buck, white and weeping, a distorted clown, sat in a gleaming piece of gymnast’s apparatus; two assistants trundled on a more deliberately comic machine, a hand ambulance so old that it had probably been built to wheel the dead children of the 23rd Foot up to the British Cemetery.

  Thanatos groaned, a windy, despairing note, as they lifted him on to it. Blankets covered the bodies of George Palangalos and Mark Hott, who could afford to wait. A helicopter clattered down above the ferry quay. Inside the taverna the bat-eared girl whooped and whooped with unstoppable hysterics. The ferryboat was gone.