Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  Pibble swung back and was surprised to see how far they’d come, how fast this cassette of high life was being whisked through the dreary townlands south of the Thames. The windows must be double, so little of the flurry of other traffic reached him, but an even greater luxury was the manner in which the blond thug drove. The man was hurrying, floating his large machine through the other traffic, picking gaps which looked about right for a mini, judging the run of the lights with uncanny cunning but when he got it wrong braking and moving away with such smoothness that, had Pibble shut his eyes, he would not have been sure that the car had ever stopped. The effect was as if he were seated in a peacock blue electric iron, with which some celestial housewife was placidly smoothing out the creased traffic. Hello! Wrong turn! No, of course, they were mucking about with the Old Kent Road again, but by turning down here and left at …

  Yes, this thug was as far superior to a good police driver as a good police driver is to your average rush-hour tachypath.

  The necks of flunkies are unnerving, ever more expressionless than the drilled face muscles, more noncommittal than the toneless sirring. But up and down that poised column raced the electric pulses which commanded toe and finger to cradle one insignificant ex-detective through these cut-above-slums as though he were a fresh-picked, morning-scented virgin being wafted to an emperor’s bed. Yet the guy had opinions, preferences: somewhere above the shaved neck a few braincells must be linked together in a fashion which composed a picture of the passenger, elderly and dispirited, not a nonentity only by the fact of Athanasius Thanatos being momentarily interested in him, made visible, so to speak, like a rock on the moon by the shadow which the sun forces it to cast.

  Not a blond bristle stirred on the pale column; no finger rose to ease the itch of his scrutiny. That, curiously, was the point at which Dr. Silver scratched himself so vigorously. Pibble fell to wondering whether it was the blondness which was offensive, an instinctive anti-Aryanism in himself. If the neck had been Silver’s colour—and it was not all that different, given the whole spectrum—would he have disliked it so much? Surely not. Or take the halfway house of Rue Kelly’s skin, for Rue was a sour Celt, black Irish … And Silver had bestrode the boards of the Abbey Theatre, so he was black Irish in a different way, with his reference to the dumbest doll in Dublin …

  Far down the corridors of his mind the words began to reverberate and acquire a different meaning, like the distant call of ushers in the law courts which change their shape as they echo along Gothic passages but can be interpreted back into their meaning by anyone familiar with legal ritual.

  Black Irish was dead, surely. But Silver wore fake glasses; spoke of the Paperham jobs, and like Pibble put one immediate meaning on the ambiguous word “copper”; in Crete he sold fake antiques to tourists; he created an image of vagueness by deliberately getting people’s names wrong on first meeting them; exploited a hypnotic personality, so that strangers felt an impulse to rely on him. . .Pibble tried to remember about the Black Irish known to the Yard, but only saw vague stirrings in the mists of his memory, like Turner’s Polyphemus.

  He leaned forward and rapped on the glass partition between him and the nape. The man’s voice answered from the ceiling.

  “If you open the panel to your left, sir, and press the second switch from the left, you will be able to speak to me.”

  The panel fitted like the lid of a jewel box, and under it lay a rank of switches and a rank of ivory knobs with symbols on them. Pibble clicked the second switch.

  “Speak in your normal voice, sir.”

  “I know we’re in a hurry, but I’ve just thought of a point which I ought to check before I meet Mr. Thanatos. Can you stop at a phone box?”

  “Would you please pull the button third from the right, sir?”

  The button had a picture of a telephone on it; at Pibble’s touch a hitherto invisible panel beside the switch console flopped open and a thin handset slid out and offered itself to him. There was no dial.

  “Tell the girl the number you want, sir. You may experience a degree of fading between tall buildings, but if you have trouble I will stop where the reception seems adequate.”

  “We’ll see,” said Pibble. He flicked the switch up to return himself to his soundproof world, picked the handset off its cradle, spoke, waited, told the girl at the Yard the extension he wanted, waited.

  “Bradshaw,” said the voice.

  “Brad, this is Jimmy Pibble. Sorry to bother you.”

  “Balls, Jimmy. It’s good to hear your voice. How are you doing?”

  “So-so. I haven’t really sorted myself out yet. Freedom’s nice, but boring. I miss you all.”

  “Whereas office work is nasty but boring. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, Mary’s trapped me into giving a talk to one of her lots of ladies. It’s supposed to be about role-playing the criminal mind. There’s a couple of things I wanted to check on.”

  “Fire away.”

  “What became of Black Irish?”

  “Died in Katanga.”

  “Are you sure? Sorry, I mean …

  “Came through Interpol. Someone saw the body. You think he’s still alive?”

  “I just didn’t know he was dead. He was a big fellow, Irish background, wasn’t he? Hawk-faced, very strong personality, specialized in roles with real class, doctors, priests, archaeologists …”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Still here. This is a funny line.”

  “What are you playing at?”

  “Eh?”

  “Now look here; you’ve come across some villain in the same line of business, haven’t you? If you were giving a lecture, the thing you’d have started from would be the Southward Islands.”

  “I was coming to that,” said Pibble, hoping that his gulp sounded like an effect of the erratic line. “I wanted to clear the other stuff up first. I can only remember bits of it. Give me a quick run-through.”

  “Korean war helped the Colonial Office to hush it up. We sent out a duke to govern the islands. Local resistance group spotted that he looked something like your fellow—Goldsmith he called himself then, or was it Irons? No, it was Nicholl … Kidnapped the duke during a stopover in Rio, caught him as he went into a brothel, I believe, and Nicholl walked out half an hour later wearing his clothes. Caught the plane, came down the gangway, cock-hatted and spurred, ran the islands better than they’d been run for years. Then skipped. Someone in the liberation­ movement peached on him, I think. Islanders petitioned for his return, anyway.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “He didn’t get away with much loot—never did, I believe. He had nerve. There’s a story he spent several weeks at Saint Eustace’s, mostly in the operating room, even did a few ops himself. When they got on to him he skipped, and about three months later somebody noticed something familiar about the padre who was burying their failures at the cemetery next door. We had him inside twice in England, and I should think he knew what a few foreign cells looked like. That all?”

  “Not quite. Can you remember whether the Paperham murderer had a good luck piece?”

  “Wow, that’s a nasty one for your old ladies. What do you mean?”

  “Well, he had a weird homemade religion, didn’t he? Diabolist, vaguely. Did he have any sort of object, or possibly some animal or person, which he consulted, like an oracle, to tell him the right time to start laying for his next victim? Something like that?”

  “Can’t help you much. There was something, Ned Callow told me, but Gorton was damned cagey about it and it didn’t affect the case. Ned thought it was a cat. I think I remember a newspaper cutting about Gorton having a cat as his familiar, but the writer probably got it from Ned. There wasn’t a cat in the basement, anyway, or in any of the other flats, as far as I can remember. OK?”

  “Fine. Thanks. That’s all.”

 
“Jimmy, you’ll take it quiet, won’t you? I’ve been a long time in this hole, long enough to see a lot of good men given the push for bad reasons, some of them worse than yours, mate. I’ve seen them get jobs with private agencies, run into something that was our business, and try to keep it to themselves. Now listen—the people here who know you know you were hard done by. They matter; the other creeps don’t. You won’t prove anything to either lot if you try thief-taking on your own account.”

  “I wouldn’t try. I’m thinking of getting a job helping a doctor with research into the intelligence of mental defectives.”

  “Sounds just like old times. So long.”

  Pibble’s thanks were spoken to the dial tone. The girl’s voice broke in and asked him if he wanted another number. He said no, put the handset back on the cradle, pushed the ivory button, and watched the contraption glide into its nest and the lid click shut. Brad’s a good man, he thought—so the hell with him. You can cultivate a stern and fastidious morality if you sit all day in your gleaming basement surrounded by files and microfilm and computerized memory banks whose function is to provide you with answers. Naturally you treat every question as though there were an answer to it; you are never asked the sort of question which leaves you with nothing but an option between wrong answers, a choice of betrayals.

  He relaxed against the sexy leather and raked at his shin with the slow, unconscious strokes which so infuriated Mary. Role Playing and the Criminal Mind! Crippen, if he’d really been preparing a lecture on it, he couldn’t have chosen a better specimen. Goldsmith, Irons, Nicholl, and now Silver. Presumably he’d called himself Steele at some point, or even Copper. Michael O’Lybdenum? T’ung Sten, the Chinese acupuncturist? Sheikh Al Umi n’Um? Pibble wondered how he had once passed himself off as an English duke and was now so convincingly Levantine. It cannot be done for more than a day with makeup and stains always show—still the aristocracy has seen some swarthy members in its day. He was convinced it was the same man, not only because of the name; he felt proud to have met him—if your idol has feet of clay, it is some compensation that they have been modelled by a master hand.

  There was that Californian who had spent ten years working his way though half the hospitals of the state on forged credentials, diagnosing and healing and operating, never for more than a few months’ salary at a time. It is a sort of madness, an obsession with authority, a yen to be your own father figure; the need to make money in types such as Silver is very secondary. Pibble wondered whether something had happened in Katanga to shake his nerve and reduce him to the role of olive-skinned antique shark on the unprepossessing quay at Iráklion. Though even there he had the role of Great Lover to play, and perhaps the colour was an asset, a thrill for spiky widows relaxing in the notorious Mediterranean air. You couldn’t imagine Mrs. Dixon-Jones babbling secrets about her charges to every chance-met pot-seller; and she had drawn Pibble’s attention to the link between her Cretan knickknacks and the head of paranormal research with a curious air of pride and pleasure. Still, when Silver turned up at the McNair, trailing clouds of money. . .His story about meeting Mr. Thanatos was probably true; no point in lying when Pibble would be able to check in a couple of hours; so he must have used his nugget of knowledge with skill and nerve—though presumably a professional con man makes it his business to know the foibles as well as the movements of every millionaire in the Med.

  So poor Posey. The money was useful, the man who brought it a fraud. Lover or no, she must have cottoned on to that. And being a very good woman indeed—the worst sort—she had refused to shut her eyes to the fraud. To judge by the scrap of tape that had so irritated Silver, she’d only recently screwed herself up to action and asked Rue Kelly what she should do. Alas, Rue was not the type to shoulder responsibilities other than his own; in fact one of the pleasing things about him was his ability to keep his life compartmented, so that you never felt, laughing in the Black Boot, that he was about to borrow money off you or sour the easy time with tales of domestic intransigence.

  Then she’d snatched at a man of straw, old Pibble. Alas again, George Harrowby and Fancy Phillips had guessed his trade as he came through the door, and their whining intuitions were on the tape which went straight up to Silver. The moment she learned that, she tried to send him packing. But then Silver had barged in and hired him. Poor Posey.

  No. Actually the morning had run very well for her all of a sudden. She had got her affairs to a sort of balance. She had not needed to betray her lover to get a genuine crime fighter onto the staff—and a conveniently spineless one, she must have reckoned. The money would continue to come in, but Silver would have to watch his step.

  Pibble suddenly grinned at the notion of Rue Kelly working with a fake colleague. That’s what the scene in the ward had been about. Pibble had stood in for Oenone, while Rue tried to persuade him that Silver was a real medico. And the curious little episode outside the ward door—Rue had tried to shut Silver up as he started to boast about his prowess on the boards, and Silver had taken the warning, and added a little unnecessary encomium on Rue’s “soundness.” So it was conceivable that there was something between them. Could Rue’s expensive equipment—scintillation counters and such—be going to arrive in empty crates? It didn’t seem a likely move for an ambitious man, who had stuck the McNair for two and a half years for the sake of his research. No. More likely Rue wanted to prolong the joke of a secret revenge on his properly qualified colleagues, by working with a fake one, just as good as them. That was a relief.

  Anyway, what should Posey’s man of straw do? Did duty call? If it did, the note was muffled and off key. Who was going to suffer if Silver remained unexposed—except Athanasius Thanatos, that monstrous freebooter? The image of the hotel across the bay leaped to Pibble’s mind; and after all, suppose Silver was now going straight—and he did seem fizzingly enthralled in his loopy research—there’d be a case for slander supposing Pibble got him sacked. And would the lush tide of money continue to reach the children? Pibble had never believed that any of us ever acts from a single motive—the smallest fidget rises from a choice between several drives. Now a welter of reasons decided him to keep quiet—quiet for today, anyway. He’d be in a mess if Silver suddenly decamped with the petty cash, because Brad was sure to hear of it, but for the moment …

  The warm, pure blob of air in which he had been sitting chilled suddenly, and reeked of old fish; the car had stopped imperceptibly and the chauffeur was holding the door for him.

  “I was instructed to bring you to the private entrance, sir.”

  “Are we late?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I enjoyed the way you drove.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  4

  The reek welled from four decrepit dustbins, and the chill smote off a dirty brick wall and hummocky cobbles. Pibble stepped out into an alley between warehouses; red hoists jutted into the skyline; he could smell the river. It looked a good place for a knifing, with the dustbins handy to dump the resulting rubbish in, but the chauffeur was already unlocking a side door into one of the warehouses. He held it open and Pibble walked through, into an industrial lift. The chauffeur pressed the single button and retreated, the gate hissed, the warehouse door blanked out the daylight and left only a dim bare bulb, the hoist whined. When it stopped the gate hissed open and somebody unlocked the further door from the outside—this door was polished steel. Beyond it lay a plush vestibule with a Degas on the wall and an equally rare and perfect artifact holding the door—a bland, stooped, youngish man wearing an Old Etonian tie.

  “Superintendent Pibble?” he said, smiling and holding out his hand.

  The smile was charming, the hand fine-boned as a woman’s.

  “I don’t use the rank any more,” said Pibble

  “I’m Antony Catling. Thanassi’s in here.”

  He opened a door into a large, light room; light because one wall wa
s a window and there lay the river and the stolid barges and Saint Paul’s and an anthology of Wren steeples. Pibble was astonished by how many storeys the lift had whisked him up. Between him and the window stood an extremely beautiful girl wearing a purple trouser suit; Pibble smiled nervously at her and she stared back at him with the princely disdain of a wax model. She was a wax model, so Pibble switched the remains of his smile to the large, red-faced, crew-cut man who was now tossing the New Statesman to the floor and levering himself up from a lying position on the sofa.

  “This is Mr. Pibble,” said Catling.

  The man stopped moving. His gray eyes, very bloodshot, stared at Pibble for a few seconds, then he sprang to his feet like a schoolboy.

  “Fine,” he said. “Now we can have a drink. What’s your first name, feller?”

  Mr. Thanatos had a metallic New York accent. His voice sounded like a disc jockey’s filtered through the cheapest possible transistor, except that his enthusiasm seemed more genuine.

  “James,” said Pibble.

  “I’ll call you Jim. You call me Thanassi. You’ll have to call Tony Tony because if you try anything else you’ll get in a tangle. He’s a viscount.”

  “Thanassi likes to show off his possessions,” said Lord Catling cheerfully.

  “Champagne, Jim? Bloody Mary? Filthy ouzo? Scotch?”

  “Champagne, please,” said Pibble, plumping late for what was least unlike his idea of a prelunch snifter. Evidently he didn’t manage to keep the doubt out of his voice.

  “Milk shake if you prefer it,” said Mr. Thanatos earnestly.

  “No, really. Champagne would be fine.”

  “Quite right. If you’re going to booze with a millionaire you ask for bubbly. D’you know many millionaires, Jim?”