The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  Another possibility was that somebody had heard something from the other side about Hog’s Cay, and sent out an unofficial bodyguard. It seemed unlikely to Pibble that this man should be playing cricket with kids, rather than making himself known at Porphyrocolpos. More frighteningly likely was that he no longer worked for Department J—that he was the hired killer they had dreamed up in the Tank. That was certainly conceivable—the contact could have been made in the Mafia scare of ’67. What was less conceivable was that Butler would have missed his first shot and not fired a second—unless, like the man in the Buchan story—he had brought bullets of the wrong calibre to reload. No, he was a professional, dammit. But just suppose … was he now going to wipe out the inconvenient Pibble, who had recognised him? Far more likely he would try to spin Pibble some tale which would allow him to get another crack at Thanatos. The only hope was to wait and see.

  As the road rose, more of the terraces had been let go, though tethered goats and donkeys grazed them. Away to his left a gang of hired olive-pickers, the poorest people on the island, laboured and shrilled. At each step the sea seemed to become larger and the island smaller—soon he might be able to see Zakinthos, dull on the south-eastern horizon. Just beyond where the road dipped over the first real ridge he found the path he had been told about by Serafino, leading up to his right along the slope and finishing at a small white house that lay in a fold at the foot of the southernmost of the island’s two mountains.

  He was very hot when he arrived. The path was steeper than it had looked and had been blocked by the cottage’s chicken-run; the cottage seemed empty, so there was nothing for it but to pick his way among the flustered fowl expecting all the time to be yelled at, angrily and incomprehensibly, by their hidden owner. Nothing happened. As the cackles died to clucks he sat down on a fiat tomb in the shade of a lemon tree and began to read the inscription on the monument opposite. It had been erected to Dorothea, adored wife of Captain Henry Davidson of the 23rd Foot and fifth daughter of Sir Thomas Hartle of Steep in the County of Hampshire, who died in Hyos of the scarlet fever in the thirty-seventh year of her age, leaving, beside her mourning spouse, eight bereaved sons and three weeping daughters. Patience was the chief of her virtues. Erected by general subscription among the regiment which her husband adorned with his valour. Here also were buried Sarah, aged eight; Thos, aged two; and George aged one month, all called to their Maker in the same week by the same fatal agency.

  The cemetery, to a man of Pibble’s temperament, was inconceivably strange and moving. Under the neat rows of orange and lemon trees the white stones lay cool. The air was full of the sharp scent of citrus, and the glossy dark leaves drank up the sun, so that there was none of the dazzle that seemed to batter one’s eyes elsewhere on the island. The cemetery slept in a shallow cup of bare hills, looking out across the cottage tiles to the sea. It would be a good place to die, Pibble thought, supposing Butler were coming up the hill to arrange that.

  Or the plausible tale—it was a good place for that, too. No spy was likely to creep unseen down those naked slopes, and the chickens did raucous sentry-go across the official entrance. While he waited Pibble read inscriptions, counted dead daughters, guessed at lives and miseries. All the names were very English. The private soldiers had their smaller stones in a further corner of the grove, and here he was able to work out the home counties of the several regiments which had been stationed on Hyos—the recruiting officer bad evidently made a hit in the village of Milverton in Warwickshire, for three young men had emerged from those soggy, reddish fields to lie, before any of them was twenty-five, amid this drought. Perhaps they’d all loved the same girl: more likely, in the late eighteen-thirties, they were yokels out of work because of some upheaval in corn prices. Some of the stones had tilted from the vertical, shifted by roots or the slow settling of the soil, but apart from that the grove was beautifully kept, the brown grass short, and no small scrub growing between the tombs. Pibble was using his penknife to clear lichen from an inscription to the Reverend Tertius Manners when his sentries cackled.

  Butler too was hot, and wheezing slightly more than the climb warranted. Pibble watched him pace idly round the perimeter of the trees; then he threaded his way between them and sat with a slight thud on Mr. Manners’ tomb.

  “Bloody good,” he said. “No need to talk code. Smoke?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I rang London about you last night. I was bloody angry when I saw you—I thought they’d got their lines crossed and sent two of us out, though I couldn’t think how you’d got the job. But they say you retired a couple of years back.”

  “That’s right. I told you.”

  “But you’re working for Thanatos.”

  “Just staying with him.”

  “They said working.”

  “They’ve got it wrong. I met him last year, and he was kind enough to stand me and Mary, my wife, a free holiday in his hotel at Corfu, He asked me over, on the spur of the moment, for some advice about one of his business enterprises.”

  Butler nodded.

  “Got himself mixed up with some baddies,” he said. “Wants to know how far he can go and not get copped.”

  “No. The criminals are on the other side. We’ve been trying to guess what they might do.”

  “What did you guess?”

  “If you’ll tell me why you want to know, I’ll tell you, providing it has any bearing on your job.”

  Butler, still wheezing slightly, looked at him with his pale small eyes, very bland, very forthright. He had the look of a dog who expects to be loved, and takes it for granted; but Pibble had seen that look before, often, on the faces of criminals—petty fraudsters usually, men of such total egocentricity that they seem to themselves guiltless. A lie on their tongues is as good as the truth, a death at their hands the victim’s fault. They look at you like that because they feel they have nothing to hide.

  “OK,” said Butler suddenly, “fair enough. I’m here on a bloody stupid exercise. If there’s anything in it, Thanatos might be the man I’m looking for, but he’d have had more sense than to cut you in.” He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed. “I mean what I say about it being stupid. I’m hunting the Mafia.”

  “For the Home Office?” said Pibble. He had felt every muscle in his body go rigid, but Butler misunderstood the note of surprise.

  “I’m on loan, blast it,” he said. “I’d cleared my desk for another job—I’ll tell you about that later—so here I was, a spare bod who spoke good Greek. How much do you remember about the drug trade, opium derivatives in particular?”

  “No more than any copper who retired two years back. I did a short course in ’65, or ’64. And I ran into the results from time to time, naturally.”

  “Right, I’ll give you another short course. The biggest traffic in drugs is to the U.S.A. Most of the soft drugs come up through Mexico, and most of the hard drugs from Europe and Asia. Heroin is the most important. Just under half the heroin trade in the States is in the hands of the Mafia—it’s very big business indeed. The opium poppies are grown in Turkey and Bulgaria. A lot of the crop goes to perfectly legitimate medical needs. We’re concerned with the rest. The seed heads are split and the juice collected. That’s the raw opium. It’s a black or brown tarry substance with a strong characteristic smell—you know it?”

  “I think so,” said Pibble. “It’s not like anything else—rich and spicy.”

  “Always makes me think of Christmas puddings,” said Butler. “Anyway, the smell’s one of the things that make it difficult to smuggle. Also the bulk, and a tendency to seep. So the trick is to get it to a factory to refine it first into morphine and then into heroin. These are both white, odourless powders with a bitter taste. A given quantity of good opium refines down into about a third of its bulk in powder. Morphine is a great deal more stable than heroin. OK? Right, for the last ten years the main
factories have been in Marseilles. The Americans tried to get the French to crack down on them, but old de Gaulle dug his toes in. So the factories had an easy time until he went, and then there was trouble. Among other things, the French suddenly got scared about the purity of their own youth, and started to get very tough even with petty operators and transient hippies. The result is that the big organisations have been setting up factory sites elsewhere—and they’ve learnt their lesson. They aren’t all going to the same place, or the same country—a bit here, a bit there, so that if one government gets tough the rest can absorb the trade.”

  “Why don’t they refine it in the country of origin, and ship it direct?” said Pibble.

  “There’s a bit of that, but not much. They have problems. In Turkey, for instance, you’ve got a lot of American influence, but the opium farmers have votes. So the Turks try to keep the Americans happy—show willing—by jumping hard on illicit refiners. They haven’t got the votes the farmers have. Now the Greek government—they’re very anti-drug, but it’s a straggling country, and Greeks have a habit of keeping secrets. An island like this, almost on the route from Turkey and Bulgaria out of the Med—they might try to set up a factory here.”

  “But you must have something more than that,” said Pibble. “There are hundreds of islands—why Hyos? And why the Mafia, and not one of the other big organisations?”

  Butler nodded.

  “We got a whisper—it came from Montreal—that the Mafia was interested in Hyos.”

  “Not a specific connection with the heroin trade?” said Pibble, taking his chance.

  “No. Just an interest—but there’s only one thing it could mean.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Pibble, trying to sound as though he agreed. “You’ve got a lot on your plate. I mean, there’s over a thousand houses in the town, I should think, and I don’t know how many outlying places like this.”

  He pointed at the pink tiles of the cottage, baking in the sun below them. Butler dismissed it.

  “No good. You need quite a bit of good water and a reliable heat source. I’ll fill you in on the process—it’s long but not difficult—no fancy equipment or ingredients. You take your opium, mash it up with calcium chloride, and extract it with hot water. All the alkaloids, including the morphine, are dissolved in the water, and the acids precipitate as calcium meconate and you can filter them out. You add sodium sulphite, and then you concentrate your solution down to a syrup …”

  “Boil it down?”

  “No, you’d lose too much of the stuff. The right way is with a vacuum pump.”

  “They use a hell of a lot of water,” said Pibble, vaguely remembering gushing taps in the school lab. “On an island like this …”

  “You could recirculate that water with an electric pump. Forget it. Next you add sodium acetate, which precipitates a couple of other things you don’t want, and you filter them out. You add a little alcohol, then lime and ammonium chloride, and this time it’s the morphine which is precipitated. You wash It with benzene, then mix it with boiling water and hydrochloric acid. Morphine hydrochloride crystallises out when it cools. If you want the morphine base you can get that by precipitating it with ammonia. OK?”

  “It doesn’t sound difficult,” said Pibble. “Only tiresome. Just a lot of boiling and mixing and straining.”

  “Right. And waiting about while reactions take place. Now, if you want heroin you treat morphine with sulphuric add to turn it into the sulphate; you dissolve that in water and treat it with acetic anhydride­ to acetylate it—that produces a foul vinegary smell—and you’ve got heroin. Heroin’s not very stable, sensitive to light and damp, and liable to go off however carefully you keep it. From a place like this there’s strong odds that they’d ship it to the States as morphine and treat it there. Morphine’s almost insoluble and very stable.”

  “If you cut out the vinegar smell it doesn’t give you much to look for. Sulphuric acid, lime, other common chemicals they’re mostly pretty everyday things, even on an island like this.”

  “Yeah, but there’s some weak points. Even if they are common chemicals, you need quite a bit of some of them—enough to need an explanation for at the harbour. You need a lot of heat in a reliable form—it’d be three times as easy to do with electricity as it would on an open stove. Even the basic kit—retorts and so on—will sometimes need to be replaced, so you’ll have to import. You’ve got to smuggle that in too, or account for it at the harbour. It wouldn’t be difficult if I could bring the local police in, but I can’t.”

  Pibble looked at him, wondering how the local police would take it if they knew how anxious everyone on the island was not to secure their services. Butler misinterpreted his glance.

  “No offence, old man,” he said after a pause for a wheeze. “Things are bloody delicate between Athens and Washington these days, and you know what the Colonels are like. Puritans in jackboots. If they found out there was a heroin factory in their back garden they’d smash it up with a will, but they wouldn’t be all that grateful to the guys who told them. And if the guys only came and hinted that there might be … well, hoity-toity isn’t the word for their reaction.”

  “I see,” said Pibble. “There was this vague rumour from Montreal, and Washington didn’t like the smell of it. So they borrowed you, and if it goes wrong it’ll only be London who land in the shit. Meanwhile, I suppose, the Americans are being kind enough to shovel some of our dirt about, somewhere else, on the same kind of basis.”

  “Right,” said Butler. “A place called Hog’s Cay, I believe. One of the Southward Islands.”

  Pibble almost laughed—the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

  “How are you tackling it?” he said after a pause.

  “I’ll get some of the kids on it. You saw me with ’em this morning—by God, d’you realise they’re still playing the pre 1928 l.b.w. rule? And you should hear them appeal! Where was I?”

  “You were going to tell me how your playmates will help you spot if anybody’s using unusual amounts of electricity.”

  “No. I can do the power myself. There’s only one potty little office, and I’ll get to look at the bills. The kids can check on who’s been buying double quantities of paraffin or charcoal. I’ll try to buy some opium down in the fish-harbour. . .”

  “Would they sell it to you?”

  “Yeah. If I choose the right chap, he’ll put me in touch.”

  Butler spoke with absolute confidence, and Pibble was sure he was right. He had the knack of making strangers believe him.

  “Will they have opium to sell?”

  “Probably. There’s got to be a bit of leakage along the line of an operation like that. The bosses don’t like it, but they can’t stop it. Everybody takes a cut, and sometimes they take it in kind. If you spot a junkie on Hyos, you’re on to something. He’ll be getting his highs direct from the factory.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Check Thanatos over. That I can’t do.”

  “It would never be worth his while.”

  “You’ve got to check. It’s a sort of power, as much as money, for some people. And there’s a hell of a lot of money in it. Thirty pounds of snow, a suitcase full, sells for just under a million quid. He’s got that yacht, too.”

  “Um.”

  Pibble felt thoroughly irritated. There was the surface irritation of Butler’s assumption that it was somehow an honour to help him by betraying his host. There was the tiresomeness of this seeming confirmation of their mad, bored guess in the Tank—now he would have to believe in it, and not just behave as though he did. Butler’s connection with Washington was a threat to Tony, another nudge at Pibble’s straining and incompatible loyalties. It would almost help matters if Butler had been bought by the opposition, and had told this half-true tale to see how the land lay—if Pibble didn’t now come out with his
side of the story that would be evidence that Thanatos not only knew he had been shot at, but knew why.

  “You don’t like it?” said Butler suddenly.

  “I don’t like having my holiday messed up. I don’t like being asked to spy on a man who has been good to me. I suppose I’m prepared to put up with both of those, as I like the heroin even less. But I also don’t understand why you flew in in such an obvious way; nor why you are telling me all this so openly. That’s not like Department J at all—in my day they’d never even tell you whether they liked their tea with one lump or two. Look, when you rang up, they must have told you I didn’t really retire—I was politely sacked. If Thanatos is a crook, I could easily be disgruntled enough to give him a hand. I mean, I know some of the people who work for him, and they’re his men, body and soul, whatever side of the law he’s on.”

  Butler laughed.

  “That’s what they said. They were worried when you became pally with him. They ran a class-four check on you, in fact—I don’t know whether you spotted it.”

  “No,” said Pibble slowly. Class four—that’s the works. Two months of three men’s time. Crippen! He felt vaguely elated that anyone had thought him worth it.

  “Well, they did,” said Butler, “and they say you’re in the clear and that’s good enough for me, these days. You’re right, though —it wouldn’t have been ten years ago, or even five, but I’m in a hurry. I came on the chopper because I was in a hurry, and I’m baring my breast to you for the same reason. Working in J is just like any sort of police work—you get handed your case and you get on with it. You do the jobs as they come along. But you know it isn’t like that all the time: when there is a plum coming up, you try and put yourself in line for it. All this summer I’ve been playing my cards so that I’d have a clean desk just when the MCC tour of the West Indies came up—they like to have one of us hanging around—you never know when politics aren’t going to muck up a sporting fixture these days. I was in Australia last winter—Christ, was that a boring tour? But the West Indies is something else, and I’d fixed it for myself. Then the A.D.A. sent for me and said ‘Butler, you’ve got a clean desk. I can spare you to go and sort Hyos out.’ Christ I was sick. I said ‘What about the West Indies Tour?’ and he said ‘Clear up this idiot balls in Hyos in five days, and you can have it. Otherwise I’ll go myself.’ Him! He wouldn’t know a Chinaman if he saw one.”