The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘What was it she wanted?’

  ‘I’ve told you. She wanted … Oh, she wanted Berry Berry’s job for a start. She wanted money. Prestige. Everything. But chiefly she wanted me … where she’d got Seymour. She wanted to use my father’s guilt the way she’d used Seymour’s. Maybe I saved Seymour, too – had you thought of that? He may be able to get back on top with … proper medical attention. That’s what he needs, you know. What Seymour needs. He’s a junkie all right but he’s crazy like a coot on top of it. I mean it’s genuine. His mind gave way. His mind is … You know how it happened? You think you know it all, don’t you, Dobie? Well, he came back. That’s what happened. He listened like he wasn’t listening and walked away and then he came back – when I was having her. You’re going to say I’m crazy, too, but when she … when she … After I’d seen what I had to see and we talked about it, look, it was so damned hot and we were sweating and she took her clothes off and I had her right down there on that … on that … And you know what he said? Standing over by that archway, looking down at us? “Why don’t you take that mask off?” he said. And then he went away again. Mask, what mask? I wasn’t wearing any mask, I wasn’t wearing … But later on, I thought, perhaps there was something that … something that made me look different to the kind of person I really am because I’m not the kind of person who does things like that, so OK … A mask, if you like … And perhaps the men who raped my mother and killed her, shot Uktu and all those other people, perhaps they weren’t really that kind of person either, you know what I mean? Like something that comes down and hides your real face, the mask, you see? … of Zeus …’

  It had happened all right. Dobie sat very still. It was very hot and they were both sweating, too, but Dobie could feel something very cold in the pit of his stomach and he wondered what it was. ‘It’s as good an explanation as any other. Except that it raises another question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Did you take it off? Or are you wearing it now?’

  Once again that level-eyed gaze, disconcertingly like that of the woman in the photograph, took him in, enveloped him, discarded him. ‘A maddening fellow,’ Cem said. ‘He just sits there and lets me talk and talk. And then asks me what I’m going to … What do you want, Dobie? I mean, what are your terms? You want me to confess or something, like Seymour did? And how the hell can I do that without explaining everything that happened? All this? Or do you want me to say it was a crime of passion? That I climbed into her room and … Who’s about to believe a story like that?’

  ‘I think I might,’ Dobie said.

  The telephone in Dobie’s house went on ringing.

  It was dark in the house and nobody answered the call. Dobie was out.

  The telephone rang a few more times and then stopped. In Cardiff, Kate put down the receiver and stared for a while at the circle of numbers on the dial. No. She was sure that she’d dialled the right number.

  Dobie had to be out. That was all.

  ‘Fuck you, Dobie.’

  ‘You’re rationalising it a bit too bloody much. You loved her all right. You must have done. Being a god’s next door to being a machine, and you’re not like that. You’re Cem Arkin.’

  ‘I’m Tolga Arkin’s son.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And I’m all Tolga Arkin’s got. I’m his only son. His brother’s dead and his wife’s dead and he killed them both and that was a crime of passion if ever there was one, a crime of … jealousy … hatred … I don’t know. But if anything happened to me now, it’d destroy him. No, I’m not Zeus, I’ve got no power at all but I’ve got responsibility and I’m sick and tired of it. Confessing? What good would that do? Me or anyone? You’re just not thinking straight, Dobie, you’re thinking in terms of all those … British things, fair play and justice and all that codswallop. The criminal being brought to book and paying the penalty. That’s fiction, Dobie – the sort of thing that Seymour writes. This is Cyprus, this is real life, it just doesn’t work out like that.’

  ‘So you have to put the mask on again, after all.’

  ‘If I have to,’ Cem said, ‘I have to.’

  ‘Because of Derya. Because she has you where she wanted you. Shot through with guilt, just like Seymour. That’s what you really have to hide.’

  After a while, Cem Arkin said, ‘I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘Only you can see that clearly and he couldn’t.’

  A drop of sweat fell from Cem’s forehead. It splashed on the floor. The sound it made was audible. Dobie tried to ease the pain in his stomach by leaning forwards a little on the bench. It didn’t help.

  Cem said, ‘All right. I’m not a god. And you’re not a drug addict or a blackmailer. We’re both human beings and I’m prepared to trust you.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Let’s say that I don’t see how you can possibly know that you can.’

  ‘Ah,’ Cem said. ‘I trust the human being. Not the logician.’

  ‘The trouble is you’re up against what mathematicians call the tontine.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘In the present case, you can take it to mean that a secret is safe when it’s known to one person and one person only.’

  ‘In the present case, to the person who walks out of this dump alive.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said.

  ‘And I’m the one with the gun.’

  ‘Which makes it all very simple.’

  ‘But will it be safe?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said.

  The eyes turned towards Dobie once again and this time didn’t discard him.

  ‘I shouldn’t have put my hand in, should I?’

  ‘Put your hand where?’

  ‘Into the lucky dip.’

  Dobie switched his torch on. ‘I’ll be going now,’ he said. His knees cracked noisily as he stood up and started to walk away. Or not so much to walk away as to move one foot and then the other, each in turn; something that required immense, indeed total concentration. He couldn’t think about anything else. Because he knew that if he paused for so much as a moment, the gun now pointed at his retreating back would make a very loud noise and after that he wouldn’t be hearing any others.

  It’s remarkably hard, he thought, to keep your balance when walking steadily forwards. To hold yourself upright as one muddied shoe swings past the other and the rearward ankle starts to flex. The ankle and then the toes. Moving out of sharp white light and into darkness. Keeping the torch beam pointing straight ahead. A great black shadow dancing up and down on the wall in front; why dancing? He wasn’t dancing. He was walking, very slowly. And as steadily as he could. Breathing very slowly and very deeply, as there didn’t seem to be much air about the place right now. The noise when it came was very loud indeed, seeming to pulverise both the air and the quivering darkness and to hammer at his eardrums, and when it came he did lose his balance, his right knee jerking uncontrollably and throwing his body sideways against the wall of the archway … He pressed his hands against the cold damp stone surface, holding himself stiffly erect as the echoes of the shotgun blast reverberated round and round the chamber. Nasty things at close range, shotguns. He didn’t want to turn round.

  But he knew that he’d have to.

  When he did, he saw the body sprawled out with the shotgun lying beside it and with its face turned away towards the inner room. Rather luckily, Dobie thought, since Cem did indeed seem to have very nearly blown his fucking head off. His shoulders rested on the edge of the mosaic where the subtle blues and blacks of the faceted stones were splashed with stains of a glistening red. The great masked figure, poised to thrust, stared towards Dobie inimically, its empty face spattered with other drops of blood. Dobie turned again and went on through the archway, moving more quickly now, the torch beam leaping wildly up and down; not only his hand but his whole body was shaking. All logical, he told himself. The only remaining alternative. Though mathematical, mat
hematical … mathematical …

  He knew that he was going to be sick. He was.

  He collected his jacket and went back to his car. A fine warm starry night, with plenty of fresh air coming in from the sea. Dobie gulped in lots of it.

  The torchlight showed him Cem’s car, half hidden in the bushes some ten yards behind his own.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, the search parties would go out. They’d find Cem’s car, sooner or later. But of course they wouldn’t find Cem.

  Not ever.

  ‘Kate,’ Dobie said. ‘You’re a doctor.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, listen. Did you ever … Did you ever talk anyone out of committing suicide?’

  A pause. ‘I like to think I may have done. Once or twice. Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve just done exactly the opposite.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Silence. Over a thousand miles of space.

  ‘You can’t feel too good about it.’

  ‘I don’t. Kate?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can you come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘If you need me.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then I’ll get the next plane out.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Dobie said, ‘I’m going to be scared of flying any more. And everything else is going to be all right, too. You know … You and me. Jenny. Everything. Whatever it is I had, I’m cured of it.’

  ‘Cyprus must suit you.’

  ‘It’s a fine warm starry night,’ Dobie said. ‘You’ll like it when you get here.’

  ‘Meantime …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Those pills I put in your travel bag. Take a couple of them. Now.’

  ‘What’ll they do?’

  ‘You’ll get some sleep.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said. ‘That’d be nice.’

  Cem wouldn’t need any pills. Cem would be sleeping soundly, sleeping there below, sleeping the big sleep – hadn’t they called it that in the days when such acts of violence had been allowed a comfortingly rhetorical conclusion? – resting with Sabiha and all the others, sharing in a dark seclusion that might last for centuries or even for ever, since Dobie of course intended to keep his part of the unspoken bargain and to take a share, also, in their silence, if in nothing else. Recalling now that final macabre conversation in which so much had been said and so very much more had been left unsaid, Dobie realised that he’d never be able even to guess what the odds against him had truly been when in the end he’d stood up and walked away, nor what had finally tilted the balance away from the logical fifty-fifty when Cem had raised the gun. So he couldn’t decide if he had been brave, or very stupid, or neither.

  He was getting tired, anyway, of sitting there in the dark. He leaned forwards in his armchair and turned on the table lamp. On the wall directly in front of him the photograph of a dead girl glowed into life again, though of course it didn’t really. It was a photograph. That was all.

  Guilt, Dobie thought. So many people find it hard to live with. Perhaps he should have learnt from Derya way back, when he’d had the chance. No morals, no sense of guilt, a selfishness that bordered on self-adoration; it was easy for Derya. There’d always been others around to pick up the tab for her. Seymour, perhaps, had wanted to learn from her, had tried to learn and had failed. Even for the Greeks and the Romans, the worship of beauty and of youthful vitality hadn’t been quite enough. Because in the long run, it isn’t.

  Derya was sleeping too now, sleeping with but apart from the others in a tree-shaded cemetery somewhere in Famagusta. And other people had picked up the tab again and done all the wheeler-dealing and Seymour would be given at least as good a chance of returning to life as Dobie had given himself, down there in those other depths. Probably better. In England there’d be other people, again, who’d help him to kick the habit. Not the drug habit, though that no doubt was bad. But the guilt habit. La honte d’être un homme. Which was worse.

  As Dobie knew.

  Looking at the photograph, he suddenly recollected his old blue towelling wrap, long since discarded. Derya had had it around her bare shoulders when she’d come in from the bathroom that night was it five? six? years ago, entering the horrible airport hotel bedroom where he’d had to stay before catching the early morning redeye to the States. Then she’d let it fall. Fifty-fifty? Nothing like that. Not one chance in a hundred for poor old Dobie. Though, again, he’d tried.

  ‘Derya, I, I, I … I don’t go to bed with my students, I mean not as a rule …’

  ‘Well, you’re going to bed with this one. Move over.’ Calm. Self-assured. Full of confidence. Of course, she’d had every reason to be so.

  ‘But it’s, don’t you see I …’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Dobie. I’ve done a bloody good thesis an’ you know it. That’s got nothin’ to do with it. I like you.’

  ‘I like you too, Derya. Very much.’

  ‘That’s OK then. Isn’t it? There … You see? …Mmmmmmm …’

  Voices in the memory. Fading into silence, into darkness. Dobie wondered if Cem had ever heard those two quiet voices. Derya wouldn’t have told him about them … but yes, he’d have heard them. He’d have known. And maybe that knowledge had tipped the scale the tiniest fraction as he’d come to his last decision. Cem had known. And Seymour, too. All along, an unadmitted bond between the three of them that explained some things you couldn’t explain otherwise.

  While other things still seemed very strange. All those people, for example, the villagers of Alanici now lying underground, and Cem’s mother … they’d have had countless mourners. Hundreds had wept for them, and no doubt still did on occasion. And there’d be many on the island who’d mourn for Cem Arkin, for his sudden and inexplicable passing. But nobody, as it seemed, had been prepared to shed a tear for Derya, any more than they had for Jenny. For Derya, the bitch goddess, with her devouring ambitions. For Derya, that other pagan deity. For Aphrodite. Dobie stood up and took down the photograph. He placed it face downwards on the table and then took off his glasses.

  There was still something the matter with his eyes. They seemed to be wet.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11