The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘That seems illogical.’

  ‘Life isn’t logical. In fact, it’s full of ironies. Tragic ironies, sometimes. You know, my mother was travelling to the Turkish-occupied zone when she was killed. Nicosia was dangerous for her, so they moved her to a place of safety. As they thought. See what I mean?’

  ‘They told me that in fact she disappeared. No one knew where she’d gone.’

  ‘Uktu knew. He sent her there. He arranged it. But he was killed himself, three or four days later. And of course my father must have known, but after it happened he wasn’t in any condition to answer questions. Anyway, what would have been the point of asking questions? It happened somehow. And that was that.’

  What, indeed, was the point? And how much, Dobie wondered, do any of us know about our parents? With the first twenty-five or thirty years of their lives inevitably and impenetrably sealed off for us, known to us only through hearsay and mostly their hearsay at that? Years that presumably made them whatever it was that they were, to us and to themselves? We think we know them well. But we don’t. It’s like unravelling a length of twine: seemingly a single piece, but the more you unwind it, the more the two ends go off in different directions. And neither of them, in the present case, pointing towards Seymour or even Derya. Ah, but the piece of twine itself had to have another end and that was where he should have started from, if only he’d been able to find it.

  Or maybe he should have thought in terms of searching for a pattern. An overall design. Something with a mathematical form, something a sensibly programmed computer could effectively deal with. The pattern formed, say, by six houses grouped almost in a circle, the light from their uncurtained windows uncertainly illuminating the roundabout at their centre, the light from his own sitting-room window contributing to the general glow that after all didn’t really do much more than emphasise the surrounding all-pervasive darkness. A hot, still night, the sea-haze obscuring all but a few of the clustered stars. Dobie sat at the window, staring out at it.

  Cem Arkin’s house, directly opposite. Then Ozzie Ozturk’s, its porch light striking reflections from the roof and bonnet of Ozzie’s black BMW drawn up just outside. In Kaya’s house the curtains were half drawn across and a shadow moved to and fro behind them; Kaya pacing up and down, maybe doing some fetching and carrying. Only the Berrys’ house was hidden from view by the silhouetted bulk of Hillyer’s, where the nearest window showed a faint glow, that of the reading-lamp in the corner of the sitting-room; Hillyer was probably also preparing his notes for next term’s lecture courses. Shakespeare, maybe. Othello. Put out the light, and then … put out the light …

  A play on words, of course. Dobie sighed. Seymour did that, too; that was the trouble. Unless you were a literary person yourself you couldn’t see … the hole for the trees or whatever it was he’d said. Not that Shakespeare was all that difficult. No. He thought he could make sense of the death scene all right. Jealousy came into it, of course, as Hillyer had said, but mostly it was pride. Pride turned to self-hatred and from thence to ashes. She’s like a liar gone to burning hell. It was me. I did it. Else, he could have pushed her out of the window – again, as Hillyer had said. Or down the stairs. A terrible accident. And she had lied, about going to the village; to Alanici. Or Seymour had lied on her behalf, so to speak. The words he’d written didn’t have to be the words she’d spoken, as was obvious. And it was crazy, anyway, the way he’d gone about it. He could have got away with it easily, but for his pride. But then he was jealous, wasn’t he? Not thinking straight.

  Any more than I am now …

  But Seymour hadn’t been writing straight, either. And not because of jealousy, not because of any young Turkish officer, Cassio or whoever. I’m hot-tempered, he’d said, but not a jealous person. OK, maybe one didn’t have to believe that, either. He was a literary person, that was for sure. He liked to play with words. Or perhaps he didn’t like to. Perhaps he just couldn’t help it.

  Perhaps what he’d had to say couldn’t have been said in any other way. It had to be put obliquely because seen through a glass, darkly. Put out the light. Reach me a torch. Not Desdemona, then. Alcmena. Yes, you could understand that part of it, once you’d grasped the part in the puzzle that jealousy played or didn’t play. But that didn’t help. Because where was the connection?

  Maybe Seymour hadn’t got it right. ‘“Reach me a gentian, give me a torch.” A poem of Lawrence’s,’ Hillyer had said. ‘One of his best-known. “Bavarian Gentians”. Seymour was a great admirer of DHL. Sad to say, I could never share his enthusiasm …’ Dobie didn’t think that he could, either, but he thought that he might as well make sure. He put Othello down on the table and went to fetch the other book from the shelf. Opening it, he found the poem every bit as incomprehensible as it had seemed before.

  A black lamp? Burning blue? No kind of illumination might be expected from such a source. Surely it was bilge, pure and simple? Dobie flipped the book shut with an irritated gesture and looked once more out of the window, staring at those other lights, those real lights, as perhaps Seymour had done while waiting waiting waiting for Derya’s return … and seeing the pattern made by those lights against the dark crouching shapes of those other houses he had … yes, another. Another extraordinary idea. Or maybe just a wild guess, a brief and fleeting version of the other end of that coiled and knotted length of twine. Not a guess as to where it was, but a guess as to where he ought to look for it. Not the same thing, of course. No, not the same thing at all. And while he was still pondering on the implications of this intuition, the call that he had been waiting for came through and he went to answer it.

  ‘At least I think I know now how this Amphitryon character comes in on the scene.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s a giant step forward,’ Kate said.

  ‘Er, no. Not really. But it’s all to do with Seymour having made heavy use of similarity. Which is basically quite a simple mathematical concept, I mean I can understand that. What would you say, for instance, to a twin brother?’

  ‘I haven’t got a twin brother. Neither has Seymour. Has he?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Dobie, you’re being difficult. Again.’

  ‘So how are things back at the ranch?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual cholera epidemic. Nothing out of the ordinary. Got called out on a patho, though. Hit-and-run case by the look of it. Jacko’s doing his nut.’

  ‘He can’t find the culprit?’

  ‘He hasn’t as yet.’

  ‘Nor have I.’

  ‘I gathered as much,’ Kate said.

  ‘Mind you, I’ve broken the case.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘But it’s the wrong one.’

  ‘I see. For a moment there, you had me worried.’

  Dobie, of course, was showing off. A flicker of enlightenment isn’t a solution, not by a long chalk. Just because he now thought he knew what he was looking for didn’t mean it was going to be easy. The elixir of life? Gilgamesh had found it, according to Kaya, but hadn’t been able to keep it. It might be easier, Dobie thought, if I could question Kaya directly about it, but I don’t want to do that. I’ve a feeling I may have asked too many questions already. The only thing I can safely interrogate now is sitting there in my office and it isn’t human. Therefore, it doesn’t tell lies. Though that isn’t the only reason why it’s safe. Derya’s computer is running fine, but Derya is dead.

  Professor Dobie reached his office punctually the following day and spent the whole of the morning with K4 in the slot, questioning away, letting the print-out sheets pile up in the reception tray on his desk. They made an imposing heap but that part of the program didn’t take very long. Going through them and making his first selection took much longer. By the time he had printed out that selection again, this time on graph paper, and re-checked the results, it was time for lunch. He felt he could take his lunch break with a clear conscience. There were indications that he was on the track of something.
Maybe, indeed probably, not the right something. ‘But it was something that there should be something there at all, where it shouldn’t be.

  Before heading for the cafeteria he took his metal wastepaper-basket out on to the balcony and lit a nice little fire inside it, committing his entire morning’s labours piece by piece to the flames. When the last charred edges had smouldered into darkness he churned up the ashes and surveyed the residue thoughtfully. Rather a futile gesture, he thought, that of Seymour’s. Symbolic, maybe. Burning papers instead of his boats. But (as he now felt sure) Derya’s papers also. Futile, because the disc was what mattered, not the print-outs, but Seymour probably didn’t know much about computers; he wouldn’t have been able to find the disc very easily, tucked away in the office filing cabinet, or to distinguish it from the eighteen other discs where Derya’s lecture programs had been filed. And naturally he couldn’t have interpreted the print-outs. Only the computer could do that – if Dobie could persuade it to do so, with due perseverance and loving kindness. But he must have known what the print-outs represented or why else would he have destroyed them? That had to count as another indication that the something Dobie was searching for was the right something. He’d known what they represented because Derya had told him.

  Or, just possibly, someone else.

  Dobie chewed methodically away at his fried chicken, the K4 disc securely stashed away in his inside jacket pocket. Today the blonde instructresses with the long brown legs weren’t in evidence and he ate alone. He wasn’t disappointed. On the contrary, he was beginning, just beginning to feel excited. Thinking not about the instructresses but about the near-naked German girls on the beach, the Bavarian gentians, and about other girls, totally unclothed, splashing about and giggling in the shallow sparkling waters of the swimming-pool. The elixir. It had to be there somewhere. That was obvious.

  He vaguely recalled an Egyptian parable of time he’d read about somewhere. The goddess endlessly plaiting a rope of straw, the donkey walking along behind her eating it up. No doubt as to Dobie’s role in that little picture. But this wasn’t like the other nonsense, unravelling a length of bifurcated twine; this was a completely familiar challenge, a mathematical problem pure and simple, set not (as it turned out) by Derya but by some forgotten geometrician long ago. Some of the greatest mathematical intellects known to history had been operating around about that time, but this had to be a comparatively straightforward problem and some advances, after all, had been made since the days of Pythagoras and Euclid. Derya’s computer was one of them. Nevertheless a straight line was still the shortest distance between two points and Dobie was still as ready as any Greek to shift the world on its axis, once provided with a fulcrum. ‘Direct in her methods,’ Kaya had said. ‘And her approach.’ Oh yes, Derya had always favoured the straight line, that was for sure.

  Not so her husband.

  That’s the advantage of a mathematical as opposed to a literary intelligence. You see what you want and you go for it. But of course you can have that kind of intelligence without being a mathematician, as such. You might be an electrical engineer, like Ozzie. Or have been trained as an architect, like Kaya. Or even be into IT, like Cem Arkin. In almost any university you’d find plenty of people capable of working out a set of multiple co-ordinates and three-dimensional ratios, such as K4 appeared to specify. Given, that is, a starting-point. A fulcrum. Such as Derya might have indicated, or inadvertently let slip, to someone else. Dobie, lone Archimedes, would have to discover the entry key for himself.

  Because the print-outs didn’t tell the true story, any more than Seymour had done. There were closed-access files (which Dobie had singled out) and naturally an encrypting algorithm (which Dobie had established) which meant that Derya had committed the researcher’s cardinal sin of holding information back. She’d have had her reasons, or a reason. Which didn’t matter. What Dobie had to do now was uncover the encrypting key, an option that she had used to secure the data, which wasn’t something you could hit upon by stretching yourself out in a bathtub. You had to go at it through a process of elimination. You’d have to run a hundred and sixty-odd print-out pages again and again to find out which two or three or maybe four of those pages contained the material upon which the computer, agile dialectician, could base the required metathesis. It all took time …

  Go and eat more straw, Dobie.

  Throughout the long hot afternoon Dobie sat at the computer keyboard, sweating profusely and conjuring up image after image after image on the monitor screen. Sometimes messages appeared, not all of them very enlightening. ERYSIP HDNIRM PFFYWE NYNCOC KFYWQN … That sort of thing. But mostly the images were graphic. Endless patterns of intersecting lines. Squares. Rectangles. Cubes. Boxes. Dobie moved them about the screen, superimposing one image on another, re-COPYing, re-PRINTing, frequently CANcelling. The sense of mild excitement he’d felt while gulping down his lunch had of course long since disappeared; within ten minutes of setting himself down at the keyboard he himself had become something like a machine, impervious to all external noise and movement, incapable of tiredness, eyes that watched and fingers that tapped in conditioned response to the visual messages coming through while querying the source of every stimulus, perhaps as a hunter moving through a dark wood queries every movement in the swaying branches … or perhaps adopting the status of a common-or-garden moron, making his mind a near-total blank so that the disturbing static of normal thought shouldn’t blur the reception of that tiny flicker of communication which might come and be gone in a millisecond – if it came at all.

  Because this is how mathematicians work, damn it. In a kind of miasma of self-imposed stupidity. Dobie could well see why some people imagined it to be dull and he himself to be … let’s say a shade distrait … and indeed the idea that his was in some ways an odd occupation was one that often occurred to him. If he was a hunter at all, he was a hunter of a most peculiar kind. More like the army recruit who, according to the legend, wandered round and round the barrack square picking up bits of paper and then throwing them away again, sadly muttering, ‘No … that’s not it …’ Summoned before a medical tribunal and duly dismissed the service as a congenital imbecile, he seized upon his demobilisation order and began to caper round the room with it, shouting, ‘That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! …’, Dobie said out loud, staring at the monitor screen.

  Eureka …

  He didn’t start capering round the room, however. He’d found his fulcrum but he didn’t altogether believe it. What he couldn’t believe was the size of it. And the depth. If the figures were correct, the leverage was going to be colossal. He checked the figures for several minutes before running off his final page print. Then he ejected K4, sleeved it and slid it into his pocket; folded the print-out and put it into his briefcase. ‘That’s it,’ he said again, and pushed his chair back.

  Now he could feel tired. And did. The task was completed.

  But he couldn’t go home. Not just yet …

  11

  … Pluto’s dark-blue daze,

  black lamps from the hall of Dis, burning dark blue,

  giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps

  give off light,

  lead me then, lead me the way.

  Reach me a gentian, give me a torch

  let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this

  flower

  down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened

  on blueness,

  even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted

  September

  to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the

  dark

  and Persephone herself is but a voice

  or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

  of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense

  gloom,

  among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding

  darkness on the lost bride and her groom …


  Maybe, Dobie said to himself, that’s the secret of serendipity. To make of one’s mind not a thoroughfare for alien thoughts, other men’s flowers, but a cul-de-sac, a huis clos, a darkened cave where all the tracks go in and none come out. A sort of prison, in fact. Because a prison can also be a refuge and it had been stupid of him not to have seen that at once. A prison cell, yes, you might well feel safe in a prison cell when someone wants to kill you, provided of course that person stayed outside. And a suitably vaguely phrased confession might well be your quickest and easiest way of getting there. No visitors would be admitted, as a matter of simple and sensible precaution, except for poor old Dobie – no reason to be afraid of Dobie who hadn’t been around at the time and knew nothing about anything, anyway. Seymour had maybe asked too many questions and been vouchsafed too many answers. Asking questions … That’s dangerous, or can be. Dobie had been asking questions, too, but luckily he’d been able to put his most pertinent questions to a computer; Seymour hadn’t done that and couldn’t have. He’d asked people, instead. Derya, naturally.

  Where’ve you been?

  Just down to the village.

  So what’s the latest gossip?

  You may not be a jealous husband, but you can still ask awkward questions. And invent them, sometimes. He had to have known where Derya had been because they’d left together. And he’d come back in one of the university taxis. Down to the village, bollocks. A false scent, if ever there was one. They’d taken the other road, a different direction completely.

  A set of co-ordinates was what Seymour had lacked. He’d probably seen Derya’s print-out and had known what it represented – if he hadn’t, why should he have destroyed it? – but he couldn’t have interpreted it because a set of tridimensional co-ordinates isn’t a map. There’s a similarity, of course; you might even call it a map translated into another language and Dobie did in fact have a map tucked into his pocket alongside his copy of the print-out, a map with nice clearly drawn lines and neatly marked rectangles showing the salient features of Kaya’s Salamis, the lines of the access roads and crumbled aqueducts, the rectangles of the gymnasium and the temple of Zeus and the baths and the pumping stations.