The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘Bilsel?’

  ‘Mr Seymour’s lawyer. He says that the tribunals aren’t too impressed by that kind of evidence and I expect he’s right. He knows his own system, after all, and he’s supposed to be good.’

  ‘Psychiatrists,’ Dobie said, ‘are inclined to be …’

  ‘Abstruse.’

  ‘Yes. But then, so are lawyers.’

  ‘When it suits them to be so, no doubt. Which is most of the time. But Bilsel reckons that if he claims his client went and knocked off his wife in the heat of the moment, after a flaming quarrel, that’s the sort of thing the local people can understand – and maybe even sympathise with, up to a point. Especially if the defence can show that Mrs Seymour was consistently unfaithful and Bilsel seems to think that won’t be difficult. Whereas if he puts forward a whole load of psychological jargon …’

  ‘I can see his point.’

  Dobie could also see that whatever the financial state of Bilsel’s client, the nice lady didn’t look as though she’d ever be pushed for want of a few bob. Nothing ostentatious, of course. All in the best of irreproachable Home Counties taste, twin-set and pearls without the pearls but wearing instead a rather attractive coral bracelet round her left wrist. Unlike Seymour, she kept her hands remarkably still, neatly folded on her beige-linen-skirted lap. ‘And besides,’ she said, ‘he wants to keep the drug-addiction thing right out of it because that’s bad publicity for this side of the island, politically speaking. Maybe he’s even talked up a deal with the prosecution on that one. I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘So that’s why he’s an embarrassment.’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons why he’s an embarrassment. Yes.’

  Dobie considered the matter for a while. It certainly made better sense than Seymour himself did. ‘But was there a flaming quarrel?’

  ‘Oh, yes. On his own admission. It’s all in the … But of course you haven’t seen the transcript yet. I’ll let you have a copy.’

  ‘Of his confession?’

  ‘If that’s what you call it.’

  ‘Isn’t that what it is?’

  The nice lady sighed. ‘It amounts to that, yes. But it wouldn’t stand up in a British court of law because it wasn’t dictated under conditions that a British judge could possibly accept.’

  ‘But this isn’t the UK.’

  ‘Indeed it isn’t. And that embarrasses them, too. They’re perfectly well aware that the legality of all their court decisions can be called into question outside the island. And sometimes is. Certainly they’re going to be awfully reluctant to pass a death sentence on a British subject at the present moment in time. Bilsel’s playing that card as well.’

  ‘So that’s in Seymour’s favour.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re not satisfied?’

  ‘Would you be? If you were he?’

  Dobie considered the matter. He found it easier to do so if he lowered his eyelids slightly. Really it was never very easy to give matters serious thought here in Cyprus; there was something about the climate or the temperature or the atmosphere; no, he didn’t know what to make of Cyprus at all, of the Turkish Republic as they called it, an imaginary garden, hadn’t someone said? – with a real toad in it and while the legal system here also seemed to be in some respects also imaginary he didn’t really know enough about it to …

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, yes. Well.’ He opened his eyes again with some reluctance. ‘I suppose it would depend on the weight of the evidence against me. Him. And as he hasn’t—’

  ‘There isn’t any. Apart from what he states in his so-called confession, it doesn’t amount to anything and the police haven’t done very much to uncover any. I mean – we’ve got a confession so why bother? That’s their attitude.’

  ‘It’s um-derstandable.’

  ‘Yes, but if there’d been even a suggestion of a not-guilty plea, they’d have gone into the whole thing a bit more thoroughly. As it is, the verdict’ll be practically prearranged. Bilsel and the prosecuting counsel will fix up a deal that suits all parties. No scandal, no turning-over of stones with nasty crawly things underneath them, and in return … no death sentence. Just a minimal fifteen years that’ll be six or eight in practice. It’s all very convenient and even humane but …’ She paused. ‘No, I’m not satisfied. I’m not satisfied that things have been done properly. You know what I mean?’

  Yes. Dobie did. But where were they ever? ‘If your main purpose is to act in Seymour’s interests—’

  ‘As he’s a British subject, yes, it is. But you’ve got to remember that an awful lot of Cypriots are British subjects. Seymour’s wife was, if it comes to that. The trouble is …’ She clicked her tongue. ‘The law is the same but the application is different. Because the pressures that are put upon it are different. Perhaps you haven’t been here long enough yet to understand.’

  ‘I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘That’s an advantage in a way.’

  ‘An advantage?’

  ‘You may not understand the situation but at least you know the people. The university people. You’re working with them, you’re living among them. In fact you’re actually living in Seymour’s house.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘All I’m asking is that while you’re here you look around a bit. Talk to people. Find out if what Seymour says … In other words, do what the police haven’t done.’

  ‘You mean … look for evidence sort of thing?’

  ‘Look for something,’ the nice lady said, ‘that might persuade the lawyers to change their minds and run a proper trial instead of going through the motions. Not get him off. We can’t do that. But at least give Bilsel something to work with so he can stop them from simply making a deal. He’s a clever chap and he won’t need much. But he does need something.’

  Dobie sighed. He was tempted to say what he should have said much earlier, that all this had nothing to do with him and that he much preferred not to be in any way involved, because … But of course he didn’t. ‘I don’t quite know what sort of evidence you had in mind. Those crawly things you were talking about … You weren’t very specific, were you? But if they think there are a few stones lying around it would be best to leave unturned, you ought to consider the possibility that they might be right. There’ve been stones like that in every university I’ve ever worked in, I can assure you. There’s nothing even remotely unusual about it, is all I’m saying.’

  The nice lady was silent for a moment, staring thoughtfully out of the window as the car approached the Salamis turnoff without any slackening of speed.

  ‘Or putting it another way,’ Dobie added, ‘why pick on me?’

  ‘Because you’re a stranger here, Dobie. That’s the point. You see, Cyprus … There are stones that have been lying around here for hundreds of years and nobody even notices them any more. People take them for granted. They pick up chunks of Roman temples and wall off their fields with them. They never ask any questions. They never stop and say to themselves, What’s this? But you will. You’re bound to. Like I said, you have an advantage.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Dobie said, ‘I’m not very good at noticing things.’ And he, too, was silent for a moment. The car took the turn and, committed to a new and bumpier route, raced off towards the not-far-distant mountains and the Karpaz hills, outlined now against a cloudless sky. ‘But all right,’ Dobie said. ‘I’ll try.’

  5

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  by Adrian Seymour

  The moonlit nights were best, when without turning on the electric lights he could move quietly from room to room, everywhere in the house, upstairs, downstairs … Well, not quite everywhere, but everywhere he chose, which was what mattered, the important thing, that at night choice should become action in this way, become movement of feet and hands and eyes instead of lines of words on white paper. Of course, being what he was he had no need to move feet or hands or eyes …

  In the desk drawer, exa
ctly where Seymour had said it would be. In certain respects, then, it looked as though his word might be trusted, or as though at least he knew what he was talking about. It was all there in the desk drawer, pages and pages of it. Dobie read through it carefully, sitting at the desk where presumably Seymour had written it, one leg tucked angularly under the chair like a roosting stork’s. When he had finished reading it, he read through it again.

  Seymour, he then decided, might know what he was talking about but what he was writing about was something else again. It was all very … Well, it wasn’t at all clear what it was. Not to Dobie, anyway. Was it supposed to be a story of some weird kind? Or … something pretty literary, anyway. Not the sort of thing that Dobie was used to dealing with. Hillyer, on the other hand, might be.

  Yes, Hillyer would be the man to see about it. Hillyer would know about Amphitheatre and Jupiter and people like that. Moreover, a sightseeing tour had been arranged with Hillyer for tomorrow morning, some kind of quick trip round the local fleshpots. There would be ample opportunities, surely, for raising the matter. But on the other hand …

  Beauty, though, is sometimes a matter of unobvious things, like little undisciplined wisps of hair, the half-furtive rub of a shoe against the edge of a carpet. Often when you look for it somewhere, it’s somewhere else …

  Not only beauty, Dobie thought. But other things as well. Strange, though, that he too should remember Derya. Like that …

  ‘This is where it happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Where he killed her.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Hillyer, Dobie thought, was after all a Britisher like himself. A British Britisher, so to speak. And therefore, if the nice lady was right, someone who’d be good at observing rocks and ruins. They seemed to have observed an awful lot of them that morning.

  ‘Though one wonders,’ Hillyer said, ‘why he didn’t simply push her out the window. Quite a nasty drop, as you can see.’

  Quite a nasty drop, and quite an impressive view. Brown roofs, palm trees, lion-coloured battlements: Famagusta, sweltering in the rays of a September sun. Dobie dabbed sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. Quite unnecessary, he decided, to shove anyone out of the window; a tumble down the stairs they’d just surmounted would certainly have settled any young lady’s hash. He found that for a very personal reason an unpleasant image and lowered his gaze, staring down at his own dust-smothered shoes. ‘In fact he strangled her, as I believe.’ What window? There wasn’t any window. Just a flat stone space where they both stood, a stone floor hammered to dust by centuries under the sun. A ruin, in short, like everything else.

  ‘She was suffocated, in point of fact. With a pillow. Though Shakespeare was never very accurate on points of fact. He was certainly never here, as goes without saying. It’s generally held,’ Hillyer said, ‘that Othello wasn’t a Moor at all. He was a Venetian general called Cristoforo Moro. Hence the misapprehension. Upon which, of course, the whole point of the play depends. Sometimes one wonders how many of the great works of literature owe their existence to total misapprehensions on the part of their authors. It’s interesting, anyway, to speculate.’

  Dobie shook his head sadly. He didn’t really think so. It was kind of Hillyer to show him the sights of Famagusta, but it struck him as being a bit of a dump, really, and his guide and mentor certainly tended to drone on rather. Not to say drivel. He turned round. Directly behind them was the port; the eye of Cyprus, directed unblinkingly towards the exotic and mysterious Levant. Dobie saw rows of dilapidated warehouses, three or four equally dilapidated and rusting merchant ships; nothing moving. It was bloody hot. Not, surely, the scene that Shakespeare had envisaged; but then he couldn’t envisage Shakespeare’s version, either, or even remember much about the plot. Something about a handkerchief, wasn’t it? Lost in the laundry? He looked at the sodden specimen still clutched in his right hand and returned it to his pocket.

  ‘That’s what Seymour did, of course,’ Hillyer said, rather shortly. ‘Smothered the girl. With a pillow. I must admit to having speculated on that subject, as well. As to whether he got the idea from … However.’

  ‘Or maybe he was under some kind of misapprehension.’

  ‘Yes. That’s possible. The mind is prey to curious vagaries in times of stress, or so I understand.’

  Dobie, whose mind was subject to curious vagaries at any time at all, didn’t comment. The stairs were steep and dangerous enough to discourage further conversation as they descended them and Hillyer didn’t speak again until they had passed through the gate of the citadel and were once again approaching the car, conveniently parked in a patch of shade. When he did, however, it was to put forward a practical rather than a purely speculative proposition. ‘How about a beer?’

  ‘A good idea,’ Dobie said. ‘Let’s go to Petek’s.’

  ‘OK.’

  Dobie cast a last glance backwards at Othello’s Tower before clambering into the little Renault, at the dark shadowy gateway with the lion of St Mark prancing kittenishly over the low lintel. It was too damned hot for sightseeing, really, but interesting, no doubt, if history and all that turned you on. It was something, at any rate, that he could tell Kate about next time he wrote. And there were times, indeed, when he regretted the limited nature of his own interests. Not many times. But some. ‘He was jealous of her, wasn’t that it?’

  ‘Seymour?’

  ‘No, no, the other chap. Othello.’

  Hillyer, manoeuvring the Renault out on to the empty road, glanced at him briefly and almost, Dobie thought, commiseratingly. ‘He was. Though again, in consequence of a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Because he had no reason to be?’

  ‘Exactly. Though he thought he had. Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the play or are you having me on?’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t remember things very well,’ Dobie explained. ‘Unless they’re important, I mean equations and theorems and things like that, and even those I … So I may have been getting him mixed up with the other one.’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘The one who wasn’t married to what’s-her-name.’

  ‘You mean Iago.’

  ‘No, no. The other one. Macdougal.’

  ‘Macdougal?’

  ‘The one who was married to Lady Macdougal. The lady in the nightie.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hillyer, whose mind had turned wildly in the direction of children’s animated films, visibly relaxed, though only slightly. ‘Yes. I’m with you now. Or I think I am. You allude to Macbeth, the eponymous hero of an altogether different dramatic work.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  Dobie sighed windily. He was tiring of this thrust and parry of intellectual rapier-work. Really, one might as well be sitting in the House of Commons. ‘I expect I do, if you say so. But it’s all very confusing. Not to say bemusing.’

  ‘Lady Macbeth,’ Hillyer said, braking the car rather sharply and tucking it neatly away into an altogether different patch of shade beside another battlement, ‘was beset by vaulting ambition and egged her unfortunate husband on to a station in life beyond his true deserts. To be King of Scotland, in fact. She was,’ he added, after a pause chiefly dedicated to applying the handbrake, ‘rather like young Derya in that respect, though not in many others.’

  ‘She was ambitious?’

  ‘I’ve just said so.’

  ‘I meant Derya.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘But Derya married an Englishman. Not a Scotsman.’

  ‘Yes. You know, you’re right? It’s most confusing. And yet I’m sure I had it all clear in my mind before we started.’

  Beer beckoned. In Petek’s they served Pilsner lager ice-cold in long frosted glasses, a nasty Continental habit to which Dobie nevertheless felt he could quickly become accustomed. They could, while sinking these noggins, look down from the first-floor balcony on to the street and cracked pavements beneath, while (relatively) at ease i
n the comforting shade and cooled (comparatively) by the slow sea breezes that breathed, rather than blew, over the baking foreshore. Now and again a car drove unhurriedly by, but the pavements remained empty of life except for the occasional appearance and staggering passage of small groups of lightly clad sun-drugged tourists, arms and legs a rich tomato colour, returning to the air-conditioned safety of the hotel bus waiting round the corner.

  ‘This used,’ Hillyer said, ‘to be called Shakespeare Road. Now it’s Kalesi Kambulat. Kambulat Street. A Turkish general, he was. Regarded as a bit of a hero.’

  Dobie drank more beer. ‘Why?’

  ‘Fell in battle. Facing fearful odds.’

  He should then be regarded as a bit of a dickhead, in Dobie’s opinion. But then Dobie was of resolutely unheroic a nature. ‘Don’t they have any local heroes? Cypriot ones?’

  ‘Not really. I suppose they went through that phase three thousand years ago and just grew out of it. They think pretty highly of Asil Nadir, though.’

  ‘The financier? The one who went bust?’

  ‘They don’t hold that against him. They maintain all those big Greek money-men in London got in the boot. The way they see it, if you don’t come some kind of a cropper you’re hardly a hero – their view of life is quite Shakespearean in that respect. Fail or fall in battle, it’s all the same. They don’t admire success here. Quite the opposite.’

  ‘So they don’t much admire Tolga Arkin?’

  ‘Funny you should say that.’ Hillyer removed a fleck of foam from his chin with a paper napkin. ‘They don’t, you know. Not nearly as much as Uktu. Though all he did was get himself shot by the Greeks in ’74. Uktu’s a local hero, if you like. And there it is. Brain has to give way to brawn every time, if it’s heroes you’re looking for.’

  Dobie wasn’t. The nice lady, he thought, had really been way off the mark with that theory of hers about strangers picking up stones. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t she asked Hillyer? Hillyer was clearly a knowledgeable person. And Seymour’s next-door neighbour, for goodness’ sake. Surely Hillyer would have been far more suitable. ‘Uktu?’