“You two missed the excitement, being out,” said Dave. “We got a wire from Boston, anonymous, just saying ‘Watch your step’.”
“Wow!” said Buck. “That might be Hochheim. He wouldn’t write on Stubbs notepaper.”
“It might be anybody,” said George. “We are always getting threats.”
“How did you two make out?” said Dave.
“Nothing special,” said Pibble. “I learnt to pick olives. You may have noticed a helicopter—I checked the passenger. He’s OK.”
Dave’s superb head turned to Buck, who seemed to be bursting with news, but it wasn’t about any sleuthing.
“I got an idea,” he said. “Those fishing-boats. You see them going out in the dusk with a train of little lamp-boats behind them. Then they’re out all night. One of them could lie off from the fleet a bit and pick up a couple of guys from somewhere—Sicily, maybe.”
“I don’t think so,” said Pibble. “The contacts between the U.S. and Sicily are still mostly sentimental, with a bit of business added. I should think the Americans would consider Sicilian mafiosi a bit hairy and unreliable when it comes to killing. They’ll have the contacts, through the drug trade, to hire the men they want in Marseilles. And I don’t think they’ll go messing about in lamp-boats.”
“It is all a guess about a guess about a guess,” said George with perfect truth.
The whole group stirred, as shrubs in a garden stir at the first breath of evening wind after a still and blazing day. Their movement was subconscious, but an acknowledgment all the same that Thanatos had come out to the terrace, heavy and lowering. Courtiers must have twitched and fidgeted in much the same way at the approach of their absolute monarch, bearing in his person wealth or penury, fame or disgrace.
This monarch was almost naked. Wearing only exiguous shorts he stood for a moment in the sunlight; the brown slab of his torso was marked with a V of thick grey hair running from his navel to his collar-bones—it looked like the marking of some beast. He grunted like a beast, too, and lurched over to the luncheon trolleys and tore the leg and thigh off a cold roast duck. A servant handed him his silver mug. Chewing his meat he went to his own table in the corner of the terrace and sat down. The convention was that nobody else sat there unless he invited them.
“Get yourself some grub, Jim,” he called. “I want to talk to you.”
As millionaires go, Thanatos was capable of considerable social tact. He was always anxious that anybody enjoying his wealth really did enjoy it—so, though there was champagne and caviar on the trolleys, there was also beer and corned beef. Pibble took another Guinness and a plate of ham over to the table; Thanassi tossed him a crumpled ball of paper, which he smoothed out and found to be the telegram from Boston; there was nothing to be deduced from it except the obvious, if that.
“I hear you get a lot of threatening letters,” he said.
“Hell, they come and go, but they’re all from cranks and nuts—you can smell ’em. I made a few real enemies, too. I suppose there’s a couple of them might push me off a cliff if they happened to come up behind me. But they wouldn’t lay for me. They’re too busy.”
He picked the telegram up, rolled it tight, shouted and threw it across the terrace to Warren, who put it in his pocket. Pibble told what he’d found that morning, omitting the fact that he knew who Butler was. He outlined his thoughts about the getaway boat and the possibility of an attack from the sea.
“Dave’s radioed my yacht,” said Thanatos. “She’ll be here by nightfall—she’s at Patras—and there’s enough crew to guard the mouth of the bay.”
Pibble looked out across the inlet to where the two horns of land came almost together again a mile and a half away; the lower one lay at a safe distance, but the one to his right hulked up, grey and khaki, at the range of a long rifle shot.
“I wonder whether we ought to have a man up there,” he said. “It’s outside the fence, isn’t it?”
“You’d have to have an army,” snorted Thanatos. “It’s all scrub, high as your shoulders. And it’d be the hell of a shot, across water. They’ve got to hit first time. If they just scare me, they’ve lost me. And if you’re expecting me to sit out here in my bullet-proof vest, screw you.”
“Have you really got one?”
“Sure. I’ve been in some uncivilised parts in my time, Jim. That’s why we’ve got a few guns, too.”
“Well … OK, OK, I get your point. The other question we haven’t talked about is the possibility that somebody inside the fence has been bought. One of us. Or one of the servants.”
“Albert and Serafino are screening the servants. They’ll find out. You six? No dice. Dave, George, Buck and the Doctor— they’re businessmen. They can count. They’re making so much out of me that you’d have to pay them, oh, more than a million bucks to get them to do something legitimate against my interests. And as for rubbing me out … Take Buck—he was in Parke Bernet when I found him—put me in the way of a couple of Sisleys and a Vlaminck. I’ve gone off Vlaminck. At first, I just hired him to take care of some of my art interests; then I found that he’s got a gift—he knows what people want. He has this feel for ordinary people’s ordinary hankerings. He knows what the mortician’s wife from Squaw’s Neck, Idaho, hopes to find in fabled Europe. I set him up on his own, as a travel consultant. He does a bit of work for air companies, but mostly it’s for me. Even if he hated my guts he’d lose one hell of a packet if I faded out. Look at him. He’s as nervy as hell about this business under all that bounce.”
Pibble glanced at the party by the other umbrella. He couldn’t see anything different about Buck, but he didn’t know him as well as Thanatos. Tony was talking, and George smiling.
“The others are the same,” said Thanatos. “They get a cut, too. George is a millionaire—dollars, not drachs. Dave will be in a couple of years. Old Doc Trotter will make a mint at Hog’s Cay, but not if I’m dead. Then there’s the other thing, Jim. You get where I’ve got by trusting the right guys. You pick ’em, and then you trust ’em. You don’t pick many, but when you’ve picked ’em you stick with ’em. Yeah. It’s a relationship. You get a kick out of it, knowing there’s so much of you in this guy’s hands, and he won’t let you down.”
He paused, and again Pibble thought of the strange loyalties of courtiers for their half-holy king.
“That leaves me and Tony,” he said.
“They hadn’t time to buy you,” said Thanatos. “I’m not saying they could, Jim. Just they hadn’t time after Hal Adamson’s smash-up. Tony—I can’t buy her, so I reckon they can’t either. You like her, Jim?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Me too. First girl in twenty years who’s really worked the trick with me. You get me, not just the old here-we-go-again bit, but by Christ this is what I was born for.”
He tossed his bone into the sea. For a moment it was actually buoyed on the surface by the nuzzling of hundreds of little fish who loitered off the terrace waiting for crumbs, then it sank into the calm and brilliant water. The fish were as bad as the people, Pibble thought, all creation waiting to be nourished by the big man’s leavings. He wondered, supposing he’d been in the same position as Buck and Dave and the others, whether he wouldn’t itch to strike out on his own, bring off some solitary coup, and then swim back to the monster’s side, smug in the knowledge that it was possible to survive without him.
“Hi, girl,” called Thanatos in a note of mock warning. “Lotta calories there!”
Tony d’Agniello had just begun to lick at the vast, many- coloured ice-cream which was her daily lunch, bending over it with the purring absorption of a cat at its saucer. She looked up, pouted, snatched off the top dollop and slung it at Thanatos like a snowball. It missed and splurged against the balustrade. Thanatos vented his harsh, monotone laugh. One servant came across with a plate and a cloth and wiped the balustrade clean and ano
ther appeared with a fresh scoopful of ice-cream. As Tony returned to licking, Thanatos quietened.
“Great girl,” he said, grinning. “I’ll tell you about her. . .”
“No thanks,” said Pibble quickly.
“Someone else told you? I don’t like that.”
“No. All I know is that you began to suggest yesterday that she knew as much about liberation movements as I do about the Mafia, and that you must have a good reason for not wanting the police in on this thing. And she didn’t say much in the Tank yesterday, but when she did she hit the jargon and the mood off exactly. Much better than the rest of us.”
“Uh-huh, If you knew, you’d split?”
“It depends what I knew. Supposing that you were to tell me that she was wanted by the police of a civilised country for a definite crime of some importance—yes. But so long as it’s only guesses …”
“Stay guessing.”
Pibble felt that he was already slithering into a mess of mixed loyalties, and envied the courtiers whose loyalty lay wholly with their single monarch.
The monarch brooded for a while, gloomily.
“This murder crap,” he said at last, “what do you think!”
“I’m uneasy,” said Pibble. “Consciously I’m aware that the whole idea is improbable, but that, on the evidence, it’s just worth your while taking precautions. Subconsciously I’m more worried. I can’t say why. Sometimes I think that it’s because there’s something phoney about the whole set-up, and sometimes that the set-up’s genuine, but whatever’s going to happen will happen in a way we haven’t thought of.”
“Right. I’ll give it two days. Those odds Dave was laying yesterday—that’s crap. Life’s not like that. I don’t come to Hyos to be cooped up in my own yard. I like to sit at tavernas and shout to the fishing-boats. I want to go up the hill and look at those old monks, guess how long they’ll hang on. When they go, I got my eye on that monastery for a hotel. That’d be really something, eh, Jim? Tell me about this girl they’ve got now.”
Pibble, shaken at the vision of that great decaying honeycomb all spruced up and plumbed and glazed and electrified for yelling holiday makers, told him a few unevocative fragments about Nancy. He didn’t say he was meeting her tomorrow. He made no attempt to describe what she was like. Thanatos, who would normally have noticed the deterioration of their intimacy after the first few syllables, was only half listening because his main attention was caught by Tony where she slouched against the balustrade crumbling bread to toss to the fishes. Suddenly lie grunted, lunged out of his chair and strode to her. He put his arm round her waist, and she acknowledged let. coining by kissing his ear before she continued to pamper the already grossly overfed sardines and anchovies. Or red mullet and loup-de-mer, perhaps. Pibble found himself enormously irritated by the foreign-ness of foreign fish. Sexual jealousy, of course. Fish are a famous symbol.
He dozed, dreaming that he was rummaging through a huge supermarket deep-freeze, all of whose contents had started to thaw, for a packet of fish-fingers still rigid enough to be edible.
A presence woke him. At first it was an unnamable shadow in his dream, and then, though he kept his eyes shut for a time, it was the knowledge that somebody was sitting in the chair beside him. He was tempted to pretend that he was still asleep, but remembered that he hadn’t much enjoyed his dream.
The man was Doctor Trotter.
“My thought woke you,” he said. “I intruded my thought into your dream. I apologise.”
“That’s OK.”
“I am interested in the theory of knowledge.”
Pibble shook himself into baffled politeness and said, “I’ve read Ayer.”
“Ah, yes. Now there you are.”
“Ung?”
“Take Ayer. The question ‘How do we know?’ It is strictly academic, is it not?”
“I suppose so.”
“Of course it is. All knowledge is relative. My knowledge that I am sitting here beside you is more certain than my knowledge that I sat at this table yesterday, which is in turn more certain than my knowledge that I intruded into your dream or that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. When I say ‘I know’ I am merely betting on very high odds—or odds that seem to me very high—and I was, as it happened, ruminating on the fact that you and Dave both expressed the possibility of a threat to Thanassi’s life in terms of odds—very high odds against. It interested me that this was a natural thing to do, but to think in terms of very high odds in favour is less natural. We prefer, unless we are discussing the future, to talk about knowing. That is how my thought intruded on your dream.”
“I see. How did you meet Thanassi?”
“I wrote and asked for an appointment.”
Pibble was astonished. Of all the possible methods of meeting Mr. Thanatos—in a dark wood, in a bramble, on the edge of a grimpen—this was one he had never considered.
“The first Trotter, about a hundred years ago, contrived to be the only man on several islands. The legend—the story—ah, you see what I mean about probability? It is more likely true than Homer, less likely than today’s newspaper. What shall we call it? Fifty-fifty? This Trotter persuaded the men of several inhabited islands that a much richer island lay just beyond the horizon. He led them there, leaving all the women behind to till their meagre patches. He had imported a barrel of rat poison from Birmingham, and on this other island he contrived to poison all the men. He sailed home alone and persuaded the women that their husbands’ ghosts would haunt them if they did not accept him as a substitute. Thus he repopulated the islands. He exchanged letters with Queen Victoria, but about other matters. He was an old man when he died, and I have seen his silk hat. He created a ruling caste of his offspring, all called Trotter. They are corrupt, but innocently corrupt, as I am also. Would you impute that to environment or heredity?”
“I don’t see the connection with Thanassi,” said Pibble.
“Aha! But you would if you had been born a Trotter. Imagine it —a whole archipelago on the wrong side of the blanket! You look at the world sidelong. So among these Trotters there are factions, feuds, piff-paff. My uncles decided that I was to be educated, which is minimally possible on these islands, but when I returned from Oxford those uncles had vanished, and another lot held power. I did not get my share of the by-products of government, to wit money and power. I was incensed by the injustice of this, but my education enabled me to extrapolate from my own injustice to the injustice the islanders were suffering at the hands of the Trotters. For a while I worked to bring our President to power. He is a very great man, though no relation of mine, and even my cousins could not keep him down. But they crept back and I lost favour—the President was quick to see that he would be tainted should he promote his own friends, so he promotes his enemies. I was incensed all over again, so much so that when I learnt what was planned for Hog’s Cay I decided to prevent it. I looked round for a tool, and chose Thanassi. Now the tool uses me. It is odd that none of us would be here, now, if I had not written to him. He makes me afraid, you know?”
“Ung?”
“It is the events always exploding round him. I have sometimes been surprised that television sets do not lose their picture when he comes into the room.”
“I know what you mean.”
In the ruminative pause Pibble shifted himself slightly. The remains of his doze had left him chilly, and the sun had moved while he slept so that most of his body was in shadow. Old blood, he thought. It heats slowly, freezes fast. And in a week’s time it will be November.
“I can do it!” shouted Buck’s voice, very excitable. “Leave me be!”
“Are you sure, sir?” said a calmer voice—Alfred, chauffeur and bodyguard.
Buck blasphemed his certainty. Pibble stretched and walked across to the other table where Tony was reading a paperback. All the paraphernalia had been silently cleared away in his
sleep, as though he had merely dreamed that luxury, a feast prepared by Ariel.
“What’s happening?” he said quietly.
“Buck can’t stand to be helped,” said Tony, putting the book down. It was Spanish. The cover was vaguely vorticist, and included a stooped figure and a gun. “He’s going to drive the boat for Thanassi’s skiing—it won’t be warm enough many days longer, I reckon, though the old pig’s got a furnace in him. He’d be a good man to share an igloo with.”
Pibble felt strangely trapped. He was obsessed with a notion that she knew what he was thinking—what he was trying not to think—sharing an igloo with her for instance. Anything else he thought of saying—about the book on the table, or his own life, or hers—seemed to lead to dangerous territory. She sat relaxed, and looked at him, but said nothing.
“Oh,” he said at last, “this might … I’m going to a party at the South Bay villas tomorrow, before lunch, I want to check on the people who live there, and the landing places and so on. The girl who’s taking me is the one who told me about the samimithi, that lizard. I don’t see why you shouldn’t come too, if you’d like to, and then you can ask her. We’ve arranged to meet at the Helicon bar by the fish-quay, at noon—so you can just talk about it there and not come to the party at all, if that’s what you want.”
He felt that his voice was hardly his own, some raw boy’s, absurdly eager to offer an enticing date to the school beauty. A big motor roared alive, drowning any answer. As it throbbed its way down to a tolerable drumming she rose and walked to the right-hand corner of the terrace. Pibble followed and stood beside her, though there was no question of his arm sidling round her waist, nor of her lips welcoming his almost virginal ear.
Thanatos was already waiting on the slipway that ran all the way down the side of the house and the terrace, projecting far enough into the almost tideless water to allow a fair-sized boat to come alongside. He wore his gold wrap like an emperor’s robe and watched Buck manoeuvre the boat in a cunning curve that brought it just to the limit of the slipway, facing towards the bay. Alfred, who had been standing out of sight against the wall beneath them, stepped forward and took the coiled rope out of the stern. Pibble didn’t see how Thanatos actually got into the water, because he was staring at the boat.
The Lizard in the Cup Page 6