“If Rue meant anything by his joke about immortality,” he said, “I imagine that Mr. Thanatos is supporting your research in the hope that you will find proof that there is life after death.”
Dr. Silver stopped with his foot on the top stair.
“I had not realized that you knew my colleague so well,” he said. “Did he suggest to Posey that you should come?”
“No. Mrs. Dixon-Jones didn’t know I knew him. We just drink together at the Black Boot quite often, and set the universe to rights. He never talks about his work here, or yours, either.”
“Ha! I was surprised earlier by how quickly you appreciated the nature of my work. And now you are right about this, too.”
He started down the stairs, still talking.
“I have told the good Mr. T. that his is a most unscientific attitude, which I cannot condone, but unfortunately he has been reading books. Many serious researchers who have done good work in my field have also attempted to make this leap. They think they are Einsteins, and on the few grains of evidence that they have collected they try to construct a General Theory of Immortality … Ho! This is too bad!”
He stopped and stared in mock dismay at the final flight of stairs. The workmen had evidently been using the scullery at the bottom as their paint store, and the last few steps as extra shelf space. Tottering columns of paint cans rose from a heap of rags and spirit bottles. There was even a twenty-gallon barrel of turpentine blocking half the door. Once again Pibble was struck by the high quality of materials which Mr. Thanatos and the Ministry of Works were paying for together.
“So we cannot sneak out after all,” said Dr. Silver. “No matter.”
As they started to climb, Pibble bonked the wall of the stairs with his hand and heard it ring hollow.
“That’s ingenious,” he said. “One stairwell does for two sets of stairs.”
“That architect was some boy,” said Dr. Silver. “You saw the lodges by the outer gates? They have their cesspits in the foundations, to save the expense of digging two holes. Would little Mr. Costain want to preserve that, d’you think?”
“Not if he had to live in one of them,” said Pibble, amused to find that Dr. Silver had deliberately called his antagonist Costard during the dispute in the passage. Pribble, too. Ah, yes—a touch of the absentminded scientist to lend authenticity to the aura of genius. Silver didn’t need it, but it was an engaging vanity. A solid man is all the better for a few ornate flourishes, just as even this monstrous building was to some extent rescued by its efflorescence of decor, whereas the Thanatos hotel on the island had been offensive as much for its starkness as for its bulk. The contrast amused Pibble all the way down the magniloquent stairway.
Mrs. Dixon-Jones came fretfully toward them across the hall.
“Marilyn’s disappeared,” she said. “She’s not in any of the usual places. I’ve asked Simon at the door, and he just said, ‘Out.’ If she goes to sleep outside, she’ll catch pneumonia.”
“OK, take it easy, we’ll have a scout round. Don’t buzz me unless it’s important. Mr. T.’s car will be coming in forty minutes; buzz me then.”
“Is he coming down here?” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones icily.
“Not a hope. He wants to see Mr. Pibble.”
“Because he’s a policeman?”
“Not any longer,” said Pibble.
“But he has a great future in telepathy,” said Dr. Silver. “A great future.”
“I’m sure he has,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, thawing into artificial warmth. “Thomas, where’s Marilyn?”
“Dunno,” drawled a drifting child.
“They could easily find her if they wanted to,” complained Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I’m afraid they don’t really get on with her. She had an unfortunate childhood, and it disturbs them.”
Unfortunate! thought Pibble. The sly, dark, handsome face of the Paperham murderer drifted into his mind, black eyebrows meeting over the bridge of the nose. Sam something. Sam … The child had stopped. Slowly he turned, like flotsam rotating below wharves.
“Inna wood,” he said. Into the almost toneless voice had crept a hue of distaste. He began to turn away.
“You do that?” said Dr. Silver, glancing at Pibble from under his thrusting white brows.
“I don’t know. I was thinking about the Paperham case.”
“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” snapped Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “It doesn’t do any good to anyone.”
“But it might this time,” said Dr. Silver. “We’ll walk up to the wood and practice our scoutcraft.”
“And I’ll try to think pleasant thoughts,” said Pibble.
“Please do,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “They have so little time, you know.”
She turned and strutted back toward her office, head high.
“That’s a very good woman indeed,” sighed Dr. Silver. “They’re the worst sort.”
It was impossible to tell which parts of this statement were ironic, if any. A different point struck Pibble as they reached the door.
“Nobody seems to have inquired whether I want to see Mr. Thanatos,” he said with deliberate stuffiness. Dr. Silver guffawed.
“Everybody wants to see Mr. Thanatos,” he said. “It is one of the axioms of life. Look in your heart and you will know it is true.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Pibble.
3
Outside the house Pibble shivered again, but this time with ordinary cold. He wished he’d brought his overcoat; the apparent mildness of the morning, compared to the last icy fortnight, had turned out to be mere darkness, dismal after the kindly warmth of the house. He wondered what it cost to keep that huge space heated for its lizard-blooded inmates. The frightened child had even complained that it was too hot—or perhaps the heat was part of the nightmare. That dreary basement in Paperham, familiar four years ago from hundreds of gritty photographs, had been just the milieu for a paraffin stove to spill and flare. Had Sam … Sam—never mind now—put the blaze out and saved the children’s lives, presenting an ironic balance sheet to moral auditors?
Dr. Silver, silent, led him slantwise across the weedy gravel, away from the drive, into the dozen tangled acres which the obstinacy of the Sospice blood had preserved from being smothered by rank upon rank of brick, bow-windowed, slate-roofed villas. Would Mr. Thanatos’ mad, selfish charity extend to levelling the tussocks of the lawn, and set the rakes going again where this year’s leaf fall lay fox-coloured on the blackish slime of last year’s? The garden was a long oval, following the ridge of the hill and covering the top quarter of its western slope. Dr. Silver stopped on a terrace constructed to take advantage of what must once have been a rural vista. In front of him suckers from the rose bed had grown to a savage barrier of briars, and behind him a row of Irish yews stood all uncorseted.
Dr. Silver looked at his watch, sighed, and took a black cigar from the breast pocket of his dustcoat.
“You smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
As he trimmed and prodded the poisonous-looking thing, he began to talk, so quietly that Pibble felt like a contact who has met his spy in the deserted park of a foreign capital.
“I want to tell you about Thanassi,” he said. “We call him Mr. T. here, so that outsiders don’t cotton on. Doll slipped up when she took that call this morning. It was Posey’s notion—she fixed it with Thanassi before I flew in. In fact she told him she wouldn’t have me here if there was going to be any publicity about him and the McNair. You mightn’t think it from what you read, but he’s pretty damned good at keeping his affairs quiet if he feels like it. It’s not all Van Goghs at Sotheby’s and fancy-dress splurges on the Grand Canal. I’m going to tell you how I first met him, because that’ll give you some notion what kind of guy he is.
“I was sitting by the yacht basin in Iráklion wondering where my next drach was coming from. I�
��d had a job at the hospital, but the cops had jumped on me because I didn’t have a work permit, and the reason I didn’t have a work permit was that I’d been in Katanga and all my papers had gone up in smoke, so I was using a passport which was, well, not so good, because I happen to be not very popular with my own government. I was OK with the local police, because their captain had a bitch of a wife who’d got him pretty near impotent, and then he’d nigh on killed himself experimenting with aphrodisiacs, and then he’d come to me because he reckoned that a doctor without a passport would tell him secrets which respectable doctors keep to themselves, and I coaxed him round to trying a course of psychoanalysis. I could have spun that out another couple of months, and I was getting one free meal a week from a bar where I was massaging the proprietor’s father’s spine, but I was broke until charter flights began. Any fool can make a living then, but this was a month too early.
“So I sat and waited for my free meal, pretty damned depressed, and watched a bunch of tourists come cackling down the quay. They stopped right opposite the bar and a Scandinavian-looking dolly, all thigh and teeth, came over and asked if she could take my photograph. Pidgin Greek, but I don’t speak it much better myself. I told her I would charge a small fee, and when she understood she got angry and went back to the others. I was cursing myself, because she might have tipped me if I hadn’t asked, when a thug in a chauffeur’s rig came over. I thought trouble until I saw he had a silver jug and a tumbler, and then I looked at the tourists properly and recognized the big one with the red face, so I let the chauffeur pour me a big Bloody Mary, and I stood up and said, ‘Zeto o thanatos,’ which means ‘Long live death,’ and drank his health. Then he came over himself and asked me what I meant, apart from politeness, and I told him that as I was a doctor my trade was death. He took me a sight more seriously than I meant; but he went back to his party and spoke to them, and they went on down the quay while he came and sat at my table with the jug and another tumbler. We drank, and talked of this and that, including my own troubles, and after a bit the chauffeur came back with a couple of bottles of champagne and a cold roast duck. We drank all that champagne and we ate the duck in our fingers and threw the bones in the harbour. We went on talking. I liked him. I was just thinking it was a bit of a sod this happening on a day when I was due to get a free meal anyway, when he asked if I’d like to come and be his personal physician for a bit. I turned him down, which I’d not have done sober. I told him the truth, which was that I was sick of orthodox doctoring and all I wanted was to get to London and research into the telepathic powers of cathypnic children.
“Well, that meant another hour of talk while I explained about the McNair and we drank Costa’s filthy coffee. About quarter to four he paid for the coffee, tipped Costa a bit over the odds, but not much, said ‘so long’ to me, and walked off. I watched him sail out of the harbour dressed in his swimming trunks and playing backgammon with the Swede. But for the champagne, I thought, I’d have been on that boat. I just sat there. Five o’clock my police captain patient came and fetched me in his private car and took me up to the mayor’s office, where he and the mayor helped me fill in the papers for a new passport. After that we drank ouzo for a bit and I went back to the bar. Costa shooed a couple of sailors out of my table, and brought me the best food on his menu and a bottle of wine. No payment. He told me to come back to lunch next day, and said that he was so grateful for the improvement to his father’s spine that now I could have two free meals a day. My passport came back from Athens inside a week, and by then I’d found that my credit was good all over Iráklion.
“Two weeks later I was woken by the chauffeur thug with my breakfast. We drove round town and paid my debts, went to the British consulate and got my visa. I’d already found a greasy young woman who didn’t feel sick at the idea of going with the police captain, so I dropped in for a final crash session with my patient. A month before he’d have locked me up for what I told him about him and his wife, but I straightened him out and told him where to find the girl. Then we drove to the airport and the thug flew me to London in a twelve-seater jet. No trouble with those bastards in Immigration. Thanassi was in Canada, but the chauffeur drove me down here. The post was waiting for me, with a budget bigger than the Foundation’s whole income in the last five years.”
“You knew Mrs. Dixon-Jones already.”
Dr. Silver gave him the same sharp stare as he had in the hall.
“Somebody must have told you about the telepathy,” said Pibble, “and I don’t think it’s common medical gossip. She has some Minoan-looking scraps on her mantelpiece.”
“I know the guy who makes them. Sure, they’re fakes, but they’re good fakes. Don’t tell Posey.”
“I suppose the point of your story is that Mr. Thanatos is unpredictable, but you know how to handle him.”
“Crude terms, Mr. Pibble, crude terms. The other point is that he is very powerful.”
“Why does he want to see me?”
“Aha! I fear I may have oversold you. We are his hobby, and he is not a patient man. But I was much cheered by that episode in the hall just now.”
“Oughtn’t we to go and look in the wood?”
“Sure,” said Dr. Silver, and moved on toward where the terrace disappeared into a tunnel of trees.
“I’m not certain that I want to get involved with any of this,” said Pibble, awkwardly trying to match his step to the doctor’s big stride.
“Makes you uncomfortable?” said Dr. Silver sympathetically.
Pibble shrugged. It wasn’t the right word, but what was?
“I, too, am not hardened to the children’s fate,” said Dr. Silver. “I think no one here is, which is extraordinary in a charitable organization.”
“What about Rue?”
“Perhaps. And yet he is likely to do most for them in the end.”
“It’s not only the children,” said Pibble. “At least not like that.”
“Aha! You feel I am exploiting them for my own purposes?”
“Well …”
“I am! I am!” cried Dr. Silver, beating his breast with a generous mea culpa gesture and almost laughing with pleasure. “But from my wicked selfishness spring all sorts of fringe benefits. The children are more comfortable and better fed. They will live a few months longer. Rue may even cure them with his scintillation counter. Posey is very unhappy about the whole shoot. She sent for you?”
Something about the long self-revelation had warned Pibble that he would be expected to offer some revelation in exchange, so he was ready for this tiny trap.
“Not exactly,” he said, “My wife asked me to come.”
“Of course, of course. Fund raising, wasn’t it? But that’ll have to wait. This is going to be a truly rewarding adventure for you, both intellectually and financially. Doesn’t it grip you, man?”
“I’d like to think about it,” said Pibble. A thought struck him: had Mary known about the rush of money to the McNair, and sensed a job in the offing? No. Impossible.
“It all seems to be falling very pat,” he said.
“But that’s the point!” cried Dr. Silver. “The kids respond to you like no one else! How many significant incidents have you figured in already this morning?”
Bip. Bip. Bip, went an unfamiliar bird, or grasshopper. “One and two halves,” said Pibble. “But I can think of rational explanations for all of them.”
“Hell!” said Dr. Silver. “I told Posey not to call me.” He pulled a gadget like a fountain pen from his breast pocket. Bip. Bip. Bip, it sang.
“Don’t bother about me,” said Pibble. “I’ll go and see if I can find Marilyn in the wood. If she’s there, it might jack one of the halves up to a whole.”
Dr. Silver laughed and tossed his horrible cigar, half-smoked, down the slope into what had once been an orchard.
“Do that!” he said. “And here, take this damn
ed thing, so we can call you when the car comes. It’s important that you see him, vital—and you’d be a fool not to. He’s a five-star attraction. So long.”
He was already striding off, heavy and masterful, while Pibble settled the little receiver into his pocket. Bip. Bip Bip, it creaked forlornly. That was an odd episode, nothing much said directly, but Pibble felt as though he had only just withstood the blandishments of a door-to-door salesman on the threshold of his soul. The white dustcoat flickered at the far end of the terrace, as though the scene had been set for a fraudulent photograph of a ghost, then vanished. On a police pension there’d be no more holidays in the Aegean, however cheaply packaged. He turned gloomily into the tunnel under the trees. Bip. Bip. Bip, creaked the cricket in his pocket.
It was barely a wood. The darkness at the entrance came from overarching hollies, and elsewhere a thick undergrowth of evergreens spread below the boughs of elderly elms. A widish mossy path led up the middle toward a dim building near the garden’s outer wall, but as Pibble started along it his eye was caught by a footprint in a patch of mud at the entrance to a side path. A child’s footprint. No water lay in the deep heel mark, though the laurels were sodden with the night’s rain. This was real detecting. He turned along the side path, more depressed than ever.
Dowsing, yes. Precognition, no. The former felt right and limited, but the latter burst the fabric of logic. Between these poles Pibble had always ranged, on grounds as much aesthetic as rational, all the rest of paranormalia—ghosts, poltergeists, Ouija boards, telepathy, shamanism, faith healing, mediums, and garbled telegraphese from the Great Beyond—but his mild interest had been wholly academic. One dawn, years ago, he had been woken in his own room, in his own bed, by a gnatlike voice piping in his ear, “My name is [indistinguishable]. I have come down to earth to tell you. . .And Pibble’s mind had shouted “Why me?” just as his heart had given one thump of panic which had truly woken him to his own room and bed, all slightly different from the ones of his dream waking. But even fully awake he had lain sweating with the nightmare of being chosen, rigid with that total stillness of muscle which must be a legacy from the generations when ur-man needed to cower from his fanged hunters.
Sleep and His Brother Page 6