The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘But I am connected with Derya. Not very closely, of course. But more closely than with him, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘Yes. It may not seem very logical,’ the nice lady said, ‘but then he isn’t in a logical frame of mind. He’s obviously very seriously mentally disturbed. And … it’s just something that seems to be worth trying.’

  After a while Dobie said, ‘I was told he wrote some kind of a confession.’

  ‘So he did. Or, at least, dictated and signed it, if we have to be exact. It’s a confession all right, but the police seem to be happier with it than maybe they should be.’

  Dobie wondered what she meant by that. ‘You’ve seen it yourself?’

  ‘A transcript, yes, of course. Bilsel – his lawyer – has a copy.’

  ‘And how incriminating is it?’

  ‘Bilsel thinks we can maintain that he dictated it while the balance of his mind was disturbed and if so, then he can get it thrown out of court. But of course, to maintain that convincingly—’

  ‘He wants Seymour to tell you more about it.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Um,’ Dobie said.

  Ahead of the car he saw trees, crossroads, a petrol station sign cutting across the long flat line of the empty horizon. A khaki-clad, white-helmeted guard came to attention and saluted as the car turned sharply into what was clearly a military encampment. A curious place to put a foreign subject awaiting trial on a serious civil charge, but then not many things in Cyprus seemed to be done by the book. Dobie wasn’t even sure that there was a book. Instead there was a row of huts, a lorry park, a grassless football pitch, everything seemingly stupefied in the noonday heat. Even the flags on the bonnet drooped limply downwards now.

  ‘Well,’ Dobie said grumpily, ‘I suppose if he really wants to talk to me, I can’t stop him.’

  His thoughts were still dwelling lustfully on that sirloin steak but he didn’t see any way he was going to get his gnashers into one right now.

  Seymour sat stoop-shouldered at the table, his forearms resting on his knees and his hands dangling loosely between them. Bony-knuckled hands with long thin fingers. He seemed indeed to be greatly changed from Cardiff days, though that, Dobie thought, was to be expected. The beard, for a start. Rather a ragged affair, with reddish patches here and there. Probably they hadn’t allowed him the use of a razor; you could see why they might have thought it wise to enforce such a prohibition. Something about the way his eyes moved constantly here and there without ever seeming to focus clearly on anything …

  The only thing that struck Dobie as instantly familiar was the broad frontal bar that ran across his forehead, raising the auburn-coloured eyebrows and giving his expression, then as now, a certain lowering, almost a threatening quality. His present posture, however, wasn’t at all threatening, and as he hadn’t as yet looked towards Dobie it was hard to be sure whether he’d recognised his visitor or not. He hadn’t said anything, either, to indicate that he had.

  Then, just as Dobie himself was about to speak, ‘Well,’ Seymour said. ‘So now you can see what’s become of Waring.’ He lifted his hands, palms turned upwards, about six inches, then dropped them to hang loose again.

  ‘What?’ Dobie said, taken by surprise. ‘Sorry, I didn’t—’

  ‘Since I gave them all the slip.’ Wearing a slip? What? Under the straggling edges of face fungus the corners of his mouth seemed to have lifted very slightly. ‘The glory is departed, right enough. Ichabod, Ichabod.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Dobie nodded emphatically. That was certainly one way of putting it.

  ‘You don’t follow me?’

  ‘Not completely.’

  ‘Browning.’

  ‘Who? Me? Oh no, I don’t think so. No more than a touch of suntan, surely.’

  A faint expression of disbelief crossed Seymour’s face, or as much of it as was visible under the beard. He changed position to sit with his elbows on the table surface and with his chin dropped on to the knuckles of his interlinked hands, a posture of comfortably relaxed intellectual alertness that somehow conveyed a totally opposite, or anyway a totally different, impression. Possibly he’d picked it up from someone. From Derya, conceivably. It wasn’t a posture that seemed natural to him, somehow. ‘D’you believe in telepathy?’

  ‘Telepathy? Well …’

  ‘I believe in telepathy. I believe in fairies and Father Christmas and unidentified flying objects and the Athanasian Creed and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. I mean, I’m a real fruitcake, didn’t they tell you? That’s the logical explanation for it all and I believe in logical explanations. Yes. That’s what I believe in.’

  ‘So do I,’ Dobie said. ‘I’m a mathematician.’

  ‘And also a bit of a weirdo. Derya always said so.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Said you were brilliant. But barmy. Just like me.’

  Dobie had heard this view expressed on previous occasions. He nodded again, though much less emphatically. ‘Is that why you wanted to see me?’

  ‘Look,’ Seymour said. ‘I told them what happened but words are no good and I don’t want to talk about it any more. I don’t need a mathematician. Don’t think that.’

  ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Just out of here. A woman. A fix. You name it. Anything so it’s out of this bloody dump. No, OK, it isn’t on, I know that. They got to keep me here. It’s OK.’

  His ideas, of course, were disjointed to the point of incoherence but might well seem less so to Dobie than to most other people, conversational incoherence being one of Dobie’s specialities. And it can’t be easy when you’re hooked on an addictive drug and they put you on cold turkey; it can’t be easy to think rationally or to do anything else other than try to fight off the shakes. In a curious way, though, Dobie felt that he could see what Seymour was getting at. Words were no good. He could understand that.

  ‘I was thinking about you,’ he said, ‘when that woman rang. I doubt if it was telepathy, though. Just a curious coincidence.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one from the Foreign Office or whatever it’s called. The one who’s looking after … your interests.’

  ‘Ah. That woman. And you were thinking about me, you say? In what sort of a connection?’

  ‘Well, they’ve put me in your house, you see.’ Dobie was apologetic. ‘I mean, to live. For the time being. Another coincidence, in a way. Though not very considerate, either.’

  Seymour blinked, perhaps being a little taken aback to encounter someone whose conversational gambits appeared to be almost as desultory as his own. More probably, however, this was a nervous habit of recent development. ‘So why did she ring you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That woman.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one who you said rang you.’

  ‘Ah. She knew of the connection, you see.’

  That made it Seymour’s turn to play the lob to the back of the court. ‘What connection?’

  ‘Between … You do remember me, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. You were Derya’s supervisor, back in Cardiff.’

  ‘Well. There you are. That’s it.’

  ‘That’s what?’

  ‘The connection.’

  ‘Ah,’ Seymour said, mis-hitting the ball weakly into the net. For a while they both sat there, surveying it glumly.

  In the end Seymour said, or at any rate appeared to say, ‘… Excavating for a mine.’

  Dobie (for once) was familiar with the quotation and indeed even able to identify its source, but wasn’t immediately able to perceive its relevance. He therefore let that one whizz past him without even attempting a stroke. ‘Sorry?’ he said, belatedly.

  ‘Hesketh Basinger was mine. My supervisor. I expect you knew him.’

  ‘Oh, Hesketh, yes. He went on somewhere. Birmingham or some out-of-the-way place like that.’

  ‘Would
n’t know. Didn’t keep in touch. What with one thing and another.’

  The Old-Collegians’-Reunion aspect of all this was of course deeply touching but the whole drift of the interview seemed to Dobie to be getting out of hand. He’d expected something more on the lines of the initial confrontation of Lord Peter Wimsey with Harriet Vane, though omitting, naturally, any overt or for that matter covert proposal of marriage. Seymour’s attitude, on the contrary, suggested rather that of a dyspeptic don conducting a tutorial with a sullenly recalcitrant student; perhaps, Dobie thought, he’d been too much in the society of university lecturers of late. Immersion in such an ambience is often of itself enough to drive an inexperienced young fellow right up the wall. ‘Such as going to Cyprus, I suppose.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You said, what with one thing and another. Going to Cyprus, I mean, could be one of those things.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Seymour said.

  Dobie wondered what he meant by that and then decided that it didn’t much matter. ‘I suppose it was Derya. Who brought you here.’

  ‘Yes. Well, she got that job.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And I didn’t have one. And I thought it mightn’t be a bad place to settle in and write a novel, bearing in mind what a hopeless mess the UK is in nowadays …’

  His voice tailed away. Dobie waited for him to continue. But he didn’t.

  ‘And was it? A good place?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Seymour said again. ‘It didn’t seem to work. Nothing did. Or maybe it was me. I don’t know. Or perhaps it was the pattern that was wrong.’

  ‘The pattern?’

  ‘Yes. You know. Everything here’s that little bit out of date, out of kilter. It’s like a regression, coming here. Like going back to … But I thought that didn’t matter. Regression’s more interesting than evolution in lots of ways. Look at Hemingway. What he got out of Spain and the Civil War.’ Seymour was blinking again, while moving his chin jerkily to and fro across the backs of his hands. ‘Bitter lemons there all right, wouldn’t you say?’

  Well, Dobie had heard of Hemingway. Just. Nobel Prize et cetera. Like old whatname. But—’

  ‘You know what Cyril Connolly said?’

  ‘Er … No.’

  ‘Well, I think he got it exactly right. He said that while Hemingway was so good at getting surface textures, at writing about bulls and girls and wine and the heat and the alegría and so on, his real subject was always the shadow of those things, the dark shadows cast by the sunlight … a sort of inner sadness, if you like. A melancholy. You’ll find that here, too. Because this is a Mediterranean culture, after all.’

  The Turkish military policeman standing by the door had just changed position, his boots scraping noisily on the tiled floor. Now he was statue-still again. Dobie couldn’t help wondering why Seymour was being kept under quite so close a guard; they couldn’t imagine that he was dangerous, surely? Loony, yes, perhaps. But dangerous, no.

  ‘They’ve had their political troubles here, too,’ Dobie said. ‘Or so I understand.’

  ‘Oh, don’t ever think you understand.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have said—’

  ‘At first you think that’s the cause of it. Of the sadness. But it isn’t. It goes far deeper than that. It’s like when Aeneas arrives at Carthage, you know, and looks around him and decides that these people, whoever they are, must be a civilised lot because they obviously understand the lacrimae rerum– the tears of things, the sadness of human life. And they were a Mediterranean race, you see. That’s how I feel here in Cyprus. Like Aeneas.’

  ‘Look,’ Dobie said. ‘What I really wanted to know—’

  ‘Even the tourists feel it sometimes. They don’t really come here to laze about on the beaches and pick up a suntan. Browning. That’s a good one.’ Seymour snickered briefly. ‘No, it’s the elixir of bloody youth they’re after. A beaker full of the warm south. Maybe even a Grecian urn. With the tears of life winking away at the brim.’

  ‘Is that what Derya had?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The elixir?’

  Seymour stopped blinking and stared instead fixedly at the far wall. ‘I was right, then. You do understand. At least … something. No one else does. They can’t. They’re all too close to it, they can’t see the hole for the trees. Wood for the trees, I mean. I tell them what happened and … no. They don’t get it.’

  Perhaps the room where he was usually kept didn’t get much sunlight. Perhaps the sunshine coming in through the side window was a little too bright. At any rate, now that he’d stopped blinking his eyes seemed to be moist.

  ‘And, ah … the novel?’

  ‘Novel?’

  ‘The one you were writing …’

  ‘Yes. What about it?’

  ‘You said it didn’t work out.’

  ‘It didn’t. Nothing has. That’s the point. I put it aside and did something else, instead. Sort of a … guidebook, what the hell …’ For the first time Seymour sat back in his chair, letting his hands slide down to lie flat palms downwards on the table. A more relaxed posture, but one that seemed as unnatural as the other. ‘Look, forget about all this Greek-and-Turk nonsense. Christian, Moslem, whatever. What they are, they’re pagans. Derya and all the rest of them. That’s why they have this feeling, this sense of sorrow. They know this life is all they’ve got, that’s why. That’s how they can see the shadow as well as the sunlight, how they can see things the way we can’t unless of course you’re someone like … But then he was a pagan, too. Hemingway was. He shot himself, didn’t he? To prove it. But he didn’t have to do that. He’d proved it already by writing the way he did.’

  ‘And Derya?’ Dobie grabbed rather clumsily for the only handle he could perceive in all this rigmarole. ‘Was she a pagan?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s how I know about … Well, the little that I do know. Which isn’t much. But—’

  ‘Was that why you killed her? To prove something?’

  The hands pressing hard down upon the table’s surface didn’t move. After a while Seymour said, ‘What could it prove?’

  ‘Maybe something to yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Seymour said. ‘Nothing like that. No. No.’ He shook his head and went on shaking it for some little time. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. I explained all that part of it. I wrote it all down.’

  ‘It’s the part you didn’t explain …’

  ‘Because I can’t. I told you. Words are no good.’

  ‘But you signed a confession. That’s the trouble. If you’d had proper legal advice—’

  ‘No, no, not that. I wrote it all down, before and after, it’s in the drawer. Desk drawer, I think. Everything else I burnt, all that rubbish. It’s in the desk drawer. And in the book. The publishers have the book, it should be … It’s a mystery, you know. There’s no doubt about that.’

  His tone was showing for the first time signs of serious perturbation. And for the rest, it had to be rambling. Maybe the interview had gone on too long, but for some reason Dobie refrained from glancing down at his wrist-watch. He felt that if only for a minute or two he could get Seymour to keep to the point …‘They say you were stoned.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you did it. They say you were stoned out of your mind.’

  ‘Yes. Flying. OK. Right. I was. I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s true. Like I was someone else but still me. Amphitryon. You know? Me and not me. Multiple personality, maybe. I’ve read about that. I’ve read of cases. Telepathy, no. That’s shit. But that I can believe in. Because that’s how it was. Me up there in the sunlight and underneath … the shadow. Another kind of being. It’s like that with all of us, I’m convinced of it. Deep down we’re all pagans, because that’s what we all were, once. I mean, it wasn’t just old Hemingway. Look at Lawrence. He knew. He knew about the underworld, Hades and that. He knew it existed. He’d been there.’ Seymour surveyed his visitor cagily, his head cocked to one side
like a bird’s. ‘So have I.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Oh, dark,’ Seymour said. ‘Amid the blaze of noon. Dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. It’s horrible. I’ll never go there again.’

  ‘Would you say he was loopy?’

  ‘A little unbalanced, certainly. But not noticeably more so than certain other of my colleagues back home.’

  ‘That’s where I’d very much like to see him sent,’ the nice lady said. ‘Because here, he’s a serious embarrassment to everyone. He really is.’

  Dobie was disposed to be wary. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Every which way. Legally. Politically. Medically. At least he spoke to you. That’s something.’

  ‘Yes, but he seems to have a very literary sort of mentality. He made a lot of allusions, or I think they were allusions, that I couldn’t recognise. But then lots of people express themselves very abstrusely nowadays, don’t you find?’

  ‘He certainly does. But the psychiatrist regards that as a manifestation of the withdrawal syndrome.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Dobie said. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  The nice lady elucidated the matter further. ‘They’ve taken him off the hard stuff so he’s flipping his lid.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dobie said. ‘Gotcha.’

  The car was trundling them both comfortably back to Salamis. The road was straight and almost empty of traffic. Away to the right and on the horizon he could see the low hills over Greek-side. Even with the air-conditioning ticking over, it was hot and sticky on the back seat.

  He felt a little drowsy.

  ‘But of course’ – the nice lady wasn’t paying any attention to the passing scenery, having no doubt seen it all before; many times – ‘he isn’t getting any intensive psychiatric attention. I told Bilsel he should fly in an expert in criminal psychiatry to help him prepare the defence, but he wouldn’t agree. Of course that’d be expensive and Mr Seymour’s financial resources are very limited. But even so.’