The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  Bilsel nodded. ‘Though, legally, her death has always had to be presumed – as with many others. She disappeared. Her body was never found and so never formally identified. She left her house in Nicosia one morning and thereafter was never seen again. It was not a time that many of us now wish to recall, much less to reflect on. You’ll appreciate that.’

  ‘I think I can,’ Dobie said. ‘Though it seems to me to be the sort of thing you have to have lived through—’

  ‘Survived might be a more exact term. Most of us did, but Mrs Arkin didn’t – though she took the proper precautions, as that document witnesses. Precaution wasn’t always enough, though. You sometimes needed good luck, as well.’

  ‘When you say precautions …?’

  ‘The travel document is in her maiden name, as I explained.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Let me explain further. Her brother-in-law, Uktu, as he then called himself … At that time he was one of the leaders of the Turkish-Cypriot resistance. Any of his relatives would have been prime targets for the EOKA and she’d have been in no little danger in Nicosia, where her place of residence, naturally, was widely known. So she’d have done her best to get to the Turkish-held area … in the event, to Famagusta. The document shows how she travelled – by car – and seems to prove that she got there. And that’s something that wasn’t previously known. According to the existent records, as I say, she left her house and that was the end of it. Vanished en route, it was generally thought.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Dobie said.

  ‘Not at all. There were hundreds of Greeks moving south at that time, hundreds of Turks moving north, the whole country was in turmoil. And many people got killed while on the move, passing through villages held by the National Guard on the one hand or by Uktu’s supporters on the other … Of course Uktu himself was killed a few days later, but the shooting went on all through August and way into September. You have to see it against that kind of an overall picture.’

  Dobie couldn’t. All that he could see, but for a few moments with a surprising clarity, was a pale oval dark-eyebrowed face framed in a mist of long black hair. A face like Derya’s in one way, not at all like it in another.

  ‘And if,’ Bilsel said, ‘in fact Uktu hadn’t been killed, the smaller picture might have been clarified very much sooner, since the travel authorisation carries his signature. I’ve called it a travel pass but in effect it was a safe-conduct, as you’ll realise. And the stamps on it show that, in effect, she reached Famagusta safely. What happened to her after that, well, that’s what we still don’t know. Uktu probably had some kind of a hideout arranged for her and Tolga, but the chances are high that she never got there. It’s a quite perplexing business, and in view of Tolga Arkin’s present eminent position … delicate. Delicate.’

  ‘What I don’t see,’ Dobie said, ‘is what all this has to do with Derya. Or with Seymour.’

  ‘Nor do we. We don’t know why Mrs Seymour had the document and we don’t know how she came by it, but,’ Bilsel said, raising one finger to emphasise the significance of the point, ‘your evidence clearly establishes that she did have it and that she kept it in a place of concealment. And that’s what matters. You can take it from me that the Attorney-General won’t be pleased if that document gets introduced into the evidence; it’d be extremely embarrassing and painful especially to Tolga Arkin himself. We could certainly call on him to testify if we chose, and that would be an unpleasant experience for him and for everybody. I’m convinced that the Legislative Assembly would go to considerable lengths to prevent that from happening. Therefore, if we hold back on it, the prosecuting counsel would almost certainly accept a plea of temporary insanity and a recommendation of immediate repatriation to the UK for psychiatric treatment. It’d be an unusual development – in fact, unprecedented – but it would be a highly satisfactory outcome from everybody’s point of view. Most of all, of course, from my client’s.’ He smiled a tight, legalistic little smile and sat back in the armchair.

  Lawyers, Dobie thought, like university professors, seem to be much the same everywhere, the marks of their profession seeming to outweigh even those of their nationality; lawyers and, for that matter, policemen. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘it’s inadmissible evidence? You yourself said you couldn’t see any connection—’

  ‘Presumably there has to be one. And nobody wants to see that connection, whatever it is, established, as the defence would naturally be bound to try to do.’

  ‘And will you try to do so, in fact?’

  ‘That,’ Bilsel said patiently, ‘is what I am trying to explain to you, Professor Dobie. If I can indeed negotiate the terms I’ve suggested with the District Attorney and in effect secure my client’s release to a recognised institution in the UK, then we must also keep to our part of the bargain. The document will remain on file and the whole matter will rest in abeyance. To all intents and purposes, you never found it and I myself will have no cognisance of it whatsoever. Nor will Mrs Bartlett here. That’s why we have to have your assurance of your co-operation. A written assurance, of course, is quite unnecessary. Your verbal agreement will be perfectly satisfactory.’

  This, Dobie told himself severely, is perfectly disgraceful. Under no circumstances would he consent. In any case, ‘But in any case I won’t be called on to give evidence. Not if—’

  ‘True. It would be best, however, if you would undertake to make no mention of this matter to anybody, in private conversation or … through any other means, for as long as you remain in Cyprus. I can assure you that you’ll be serving Mr Seymour’s best interests by complying with my request, and Mrs Bartlett will confirm that, should you be in any doubt about it.’

  ‘You said you’d be retaining the thingummy yourself? On file?’

  ‘Certainly. Until such time as it may be conveniently destroyed.’

  ‘So any comments I might make couldn’t be very easily substantiated. ‘

  ‘They couldn’t. No.’

  The nice lady, throughout this interesting exchange of views, had been fiddling with the strap of her handbag and gazing pensively at the toes of her sensible suede brogues. Now Dobie’s air of deepening gloom provoked her, as it seemed, to utterance. ‘You see, the Foreign Office is taking a hand in the matter now. That’s another way of saying State Security. They have powers of deportation.’

  ‘Deportation? I only just got here.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens, it won’t come to that. It’s just that this … discovery of yours has rather put the cat among the pigeons. That’s why Mr Bilsel insisted on seeing you. To convince you of the importance—’

  ‘What cat? What pigeons?’

  ‘It’s the other way round, really,’ Bilsel said. ‘Any number of Greek cats. And a Turkish pigeon. We simply can’t have Tolga Arkin involved, however indirectly, in a murder case at the present juncture. As a recent arrival here, Professor Dobie, you can have no idea how carefully they watch us, over on the Greek side, and make political capital out of the smallest slip-up. It makes things extremely difficult for us.’

  ‘What you’ve told me,’ Dobie said, ‘is that Tolga Arkin’s wife disappeared way back in 1974 and was very probably killed by terrorists. How can anyone make political capital out of that?’

  Bilsel shook his head and sighed. ‘It opens old wounds. That’s what we don’t want to do, not right now. Above all, Tolga Arkin’s wounds. He’s a figure of international status and an immense asset to us in our political negotiations, but he has personal and family feelings like everyone else. I doubt very much if you can imagine how a man feels when he knows his wife has been murdered. In cold blood.’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ Dobie said. ‘Mine was.’

  After rather a lengthy pause Bilsel said, ‘I didn’t know that. I must apologise.’

  ‘In a way, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You felt you needed a change of scene.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s very much how Tolga Arkin
reacted.’ Bilsel, oddly enough, seemed now to be addressing his remarks to the nice lady; another courtroom tactic, perhaps, designed to cover up his temporary embarrassment. ‘He left the country in September, I seem to recall. To undertake those researches in Europe and America that would lead him to his Nobel Prize. The workings of destiny are quite unfathomable, are they not? A change of scene, yes, as we think at the time, but who knows if Professor Dobie’s stay with us may not prove in the end to be related to some as yet hidden but inevitable purpose?’

  Dobie blinked, uncertain whether Bilsel had diverged into philosophical speculation or was rehearsing some future peroration before the Central Tribunal. ‘It’d be nice to think so, certainly. But—’

  ‘He’s helped to get your client off the hook,’ the nice lady said brightly. ‘And that counts for something.’

  ‘It does indeed. But he is, no doubt, a busy man. As I am myself.’

  ‘So you’ll be wanting to get back to your office.’ The nice lady glanced down at her wrist-watch. ‘I’m sure that now we’ve explained the situation to him, we can fully rely on Professor Dobie’s discretion.’

  ‘I have every confidence in him,’ Bilsel said.

  It had been a sobering, even a depressing interview. After his visitors had left, Dobie pulled on a lightweight sweater and went out for a stroll.

  It was almost dark now but not all Berry Berry’s guests had left: passing by his house, Dobie heard the sound of voices coming from the shadowed back garden. Some of his neighbours, however, had returned to their houses and in the gathering dimness the windows showed little rectangles of radiance, curtained off yet glowing in the stillness, behind which other shadows seemed to move as the curtains were stirred by the evening breeze. Dobie walked on, taking once again the path down to the beach, where to the east the moon was slowly rising over a smooth dark sea. A long wavy line of glittering silver; everything else, dark blue and black. Dobie was reminded of something, but he couldn’t think what.

  For a while he watched the light sparkle on the incoming waves as they rippled gently against the rocks and broke, each one after the other, into a million shimmering facets. Dialectically speaking, the fate of each and every one of those slow-moving waves should be mechanically determinable; Dobie had better cause than most to know that it wasn’t, since in 1974 he himself had formulated those variants of the Vernouli equations which were now held to demonstrate that it couldn’t be, by virtue of the inherent strange attractors. Since those very calculations had two years later gained him his Chair in Mathematics at the age of thirty-four, arguably if he hadn’t established those mathematical proofs he wouldn’t be here in Cyprus now, watching those waves break or doing anything else. An interesting illustration, perhaps, of Bilsel’s point.

  Other things, it would appear, had happened in 1974, events he hadn’t taken much notice of at the time, being otherwise occupied. Events of greater importance, perhaps, than the elaboration of Vernouli variants, at least to the people concerned in them. Dobie had always been a man of limited interests and had always been allowed – indeed encouraged – to cultivate them. In the past, he hadn’t mixed very much with people of very different interests; literature, archaeology and the like. Because of Derya, Cyprus seemed to be offering him an unusual opportunity in that respect. For the first time, he was beginning to think that he might get to like the place, once he started work.

  Work was the whetstone his mind invariably needed to retain its cutting edge. Holidays were what didn’t suit him. He’d been holidaying in the south of France when he’d first met his wife Jenny, and the mild distaste he now felt for all countries bordering on the Mediterranean was related, as he’d come to realise, to the sense of mingled dismay and alarm with which he’d subsequently observed the cock-up that between them they’d managed to make of their marriage. It was odd to think, in retrospect, that he had indeed observed it rather than participated in it – an attitude that couldn’t have done much to help. Well, you do odd things when you’re on holiday, that much was certain; but more importantly, now that the shock of her death was somewhat diminished Dobie was finding himself able to think of it not as an accident but at any rate of having come about by accident, and of their marriage itself in much the same way. He had also discovered that thinking in this way helped him to like Jenny again, as he had when he’d met her, and even in some ways to like her even more; and also to view his present intimate but vexed relationship with Kate Coyle as a bonus rather than as a betrayal of that earlier involvement, since it was Jenny’s death that had chiefly brought it about, and in life one thing leads to another and you have to accept that fact if you want to go on living when someone else is dead. Which on the whole Dobie did. He didn’t accept that conclusion as logically following upon this train of thought, which it didn’t; it was something that, gazing at the moonstruck sea, he could only obscurely sense and yet felt quite sure about. Getting to like himself would be a different matter and might take a whole lot longer, but even that now seemed to rate as an eventual possibility. Feeling that he could now like what he remembered of Jenny was a pretty good start.

  In at least one respect she had rather resembled Derya. The elixir of youth, Seymour had said. The eternal spring. ‘I’ve been looking for it everywhere,’ Dobie said. ‘But I can’t find it. Everything here’s dry. Dry as a bone.’

  Kate was reassuring. ‘You found some fresh evidence, though. That was clever of you.’

  ‘Only by chance. And all they’ve done with it is bury it. I thought people wanted to know the truth about what really happened to Derya. In fact they only wanted to talk up a better deal.’

  ‘They want a happy ending, Dobie, for everyone concerned. You want a solution to an imaginary problem all neatly worked out at the end of the theorem. They know that life goes on and on and there aren’t any final answers. It’s not like adding up a sum. It’s like that,’ Kate said, nodding towards the drifting waves. ‘One wave and then another. And then another. One moment you see a ripple, the next you don’t. And all the time it’s just the sea, really.’

  Kate herself was a bit like that because of course she wasn’t really there at all, except in Dobie’s imagination. Yes, he needed to start work very soon. ‘I do know how it feels, Kate. That’s the point.’

  ‘You didn’t go round writing fake confessions when Jenny was murdered. You fought back, in your own peculiar way. There was a problem. You solved it. But it was just a wave, that’s all. Like this one. Only this wave is someone else’s.’

  ‘Mine, someone else’s, it’s all the same. It’s all part of the sea. You said it yourself. Whether it breaks now or sixteen years ago, it’s all the same. Or at any rate that’s how I’m bound to see it.’

  ‘You’re not bound to see it in any way at all, Dobie. Try looking at it from their viewpoint for a change. It’s someone else’s wave and none of your business. Get back to real work. Do the job you came here to do and leave it at that.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  Anyway, he’d been sitting on the beach long enough. He got up and threw the cigarette he’d been smoking into the sea, where it vanished on the instant; then turned and walked at a methodical and pensive pace across the dry white sand. Its measure was marked out by imprints on the smooth surface, shallow but clearly discernible in the moonlight. Where might his shoes pick up mud? After or even during a rainless summer?

  Not in the village, anyway, or in the army base. Not where, according to Seymour, she’d claimed to have been. Nothing in the village but dust. Dust and desolation. And yet there’d been mud on Derya’s shoes, traces of mud on the pedals of her car. She’d have cleaned her shoes, of course, if she’d had time. But she hadn’t.

  Time … That was what he and Kate had been talking about, really. An aspect of wave mechanics. Moving to regular or to irregular rhythms, but all the same … time. Quite so. And as such, all-embracing; like the sea. Jenny, Derya, Sabiha Arkin: their deaths could be thought of as being pu
nctuation marks in a single long sentence, linking Seymour and Tolga Arkin and Dobie himself into some kind of complex syntactical structure. Complex, but not so complex as to defy analysis, if you were a mathematician and you knew your transformational grammar and you had a computer.

  But then, Dobie thought, time isn’t only measured by people, by their lives and deaths; there’s more to it than that. Time is this beach, those rocks and those pine trees, and behind the pine trees the walls and the high windows of the university buildings, and behind those buildings the tall grey columns of Salamis, and further away still, behind and beneath the dark star-laden sky of the Mesaoria and at the centre of it all, Dobie himself standing alone, a puzzled stranger on a foreign shore. Analyst, analyse thyself. Because that was what it came down to, really.

  Dobie sighed, and lit another cigarette. ‘You’re smoking too much, Dobie.’

  ‘Oh, stop nagging,’ Dobie said.

  All the same, this conversation with Kate had cheered him slightly. When he got back to the house, he’d give her a ring.

  10

  Two a.m. A light rain falling.

  The body lay to one side of the road, under a grey plastic sheet in the puddle of light cast by a regulation police lamp. Not a strong illumination, but strong enough. The ambulance was also drawn up to one side of the road, well clear of the turning, its roof hazard light flashing in the darkness. Kate, who for the past five minutes had been stooped over the cadaver, straightened up and turned and walked away towards the other car and the two men who stood beside it. Jackson offered her a cigarette and then the flame of his lighter, stifling a yawn as he did so.

  ‘Nothing much for you here, Jacko. Classic hit-and-run, I’d say. Fractured skull, shattered pelvis, contusions on legs, a right mess. Hit him at high speed, obviously. Death near enough to instantaneous, that’s why there’s so little blood. They can take him away now.’