The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  Pibble wiped the blood off the glass of his watch to look at the time. But there was no question of his leaving for at least another day. He sat down at one of the taverna tables and began to arrange the muddle of knowledge and guesswork in his mind, ready for questioning.

  12

  The interpreter was another kind of lizard—the brown, dry scaly sort that live remote from men and look wise and wary. He was, in fact, a very old and distinguished British archaeologist whom Captain Thagoulos had whisked over from Zakynthos, where he now lived, to help with the preliminary investigations. He was called Sir Thopas Jones, a name which Pibble’s unreliable memory associated with a long-exploded theory about the Etruscans. Now he sat in the sultry office, bright-eyed but dry-voiced, and interpreted Captain Thagoulos’s questions into careful English, and Pibble’s replies into equally careful Greek. Captain Thagoulos finished reading aloud from a typed report in front of him. Sir Thopas spoke.

  “The gist of that is that the doctors have no idea whether your friend will live or die; if he lives, they have no idea what sort of mental and physical condition he’ll be in—that is to say whether he will make any real recovery. They don’t even know whether they’re going to amputate his arm.”

  Pibble sighed, and felt bleak. No more water-skiing. No more exultation.

  Captain Thagoulos put the report back in the file on his desk and picked out of it a small rectangle of cardboard. He flicked it with a fingernail as he spoke.

  “The Captain,” said Sir Thopas, “is under the impression that you told him last time you met that you were an active policeman. He has since been in touch with London and learnt that you left the force under, well, not exactly dubious circumstances, but …”

  “I told him I’d retired,” said Pibble firmly. “He may not have understood.”

  “OK, OK,” said Captain Thagoulos, waving his hand forgivingly. He then spoke to Sir Thopas at some length, and while he did so Pibble considered his own situation. Thagoulos was a good and careful policeman. He wouldn’t bring up a point like that, and then dismiss it, except as a deliberate warning. From now on nobody was going to get away with anything. And Pibble, after a shocked, dazed night in grieving Porphyrocolpos, had still not decided what to do—about Buck and the mosaic, about Nancy and the pot, about Tony and the bombs.

  “The Captain is appealing to you,” said Sir Thopas suddenly. “He says that you will understand, having been a policeman. Hyos is a small island, and now the eyes of the world are on it. There will be senior policemen arriving from Athens this afternoon, and it is important to him to know as much as possible about the reason for these murders. He is anxious to be able to present Athens with a clear and coherent picture of what has been going on in his bailiwick. He is under the impression that you know considerably more than you have yet told him.”

  Damn the man’s impressions, thought Pibble. He was too sharp.

  “No,” he said, “that’s not true. I mean, of course I know more than I told him, but with one exception—about a man called Butler—I did tell him everything I then knew which was relevant. I’ve worked out a lot of other things since. I’ll begin at the beginning. First. . . do you think you can explain to him what a war game is?”

  “Game?” said Captain Thagoulos. “Cricket?”

  Sir Thopas explained until Captain Thagoulos held up his hand and said “Understood.”

  Pibble went into Thanassi’s war game in some detail, giving the roles that all the participants had played. Captain Thagoulos made notes, but sighed and made a negative click of disbelief when Pibble explained how he had represented the Mafia.

  “I was a stop-gap,” said Pibble. “There was a chap called Hal Adamson who was supposed to take the part, but he had a last-minute accident in Minneapolis. I think it might just be worth sending a wire to find out whether there was anything fishy about the accident. I mean, he’s apparently some sort of an expert on the Mafia, and it’s possible that he was deliberately delayed.”

  Captain Thagoulos made another note as Sir Thopas translated, then held up his hand for silence as Pibble began to speak again. He made Pibble write Adamson’s name down for him.

  “You can get the other details—address and so on—from Dave Warren at Porphyrocolpos,” said Pibble.

  Again the negative click, and a brief remark.

  “Apparently you have implied that somebody at Porphyrocolpos is not to be trusted,” said Sir Thopas. “I don’t follow that.”

  “If Mr. Adamson’s accident wasn’t an accident,” said Pibble, “somebody must have told the Mafia where he was going, and why. But it’s all right—that man’s dead.”

  Captain Thagoulos frowned, wrote on the pad which bore Adamson’s name, called one of his bleary-eyed assistants in, and gave him the paper with brisk orders. The man went out, then Pibble carried on with his tale, until he was interrupted again.

  “Why didn’t you consult the island police about this assassination threat?” interpreted Sir Thopas.

  “Because nobody really believed it. It seemed just worth while taking our own precautions, and Thanatos is rich enough to send for professional bodyguards and regard them as a minor precaution. But although he has a lot of influence at Athens he doesn’t like using it for things like this; it was probably only a silly scare.”

  The half-truth sounded weak. He still hadn’t decided what to do or say about Tony. Meanwhile there was also the problem of Buck and the mosaic. The odds were that Dave Warren or Doc Trotter would come out with that. So …

  “Now we come to a major complication,” he said. “One of the people at Porphyrocolpos wanted to keep Thanatos inside the fence for his own reasons, so at the war game he supported the idea of an assassination attempt very strongly, and then faked a shooting attempt which sank a boat which was towing Mr. Thanatos while he was skiing.”

  Thagoulos’s eyebrows asked the obvious question.

  “I’d rather you asked Dave Warren about that,” said Pibble. “The thing is, it’s something over which Mr. Thanatos would be prepared to use his influence at Athens, supposing he recovers. If I were you I’d move very carefully.”

  Captain Thagoulos listened to the translation and suddenly looked very tired. When he spat into his handkerchief he inspected the sputum with no real interest. Presumably he had been up all night, helping a bewildered and panicking headquarters in Athens to organise the pursuit of the killers.

  “Now I think I’d better account for Mr. Butler’s arrival,” said Pibble. “I couldn’t tell you at the time, but he was in fact an active policeman—not quite a secret policeman, but that sort of thing. London had heard a rumour that the Mafia was interested in Hyos—it’s all right; they thought it was nonsense too, but they thought they’d send a man to check, rather than bother Athens with a mare’s nest …”

  Captain Thagoulos looked not at all appeased by this explanation, and his pencil dug deep into his pad as he made the necessary notes. Pibble thought he did well to be angry.

  “Naturally,” he continued, “we were alarmed when we learnt this. I tried to persuade Mr. Thanatos to consult you, but he wouldn’t. Butler’s idea was that if the Mafia did have an interest in Hyos, it was as a staging-post for the heroin trade. I agreed to tell him if I found anything which was an indication one way or the other, but I didn’t tell him about the possibility of a murder attempt. Again, this was because Thanatos was anxious not to complicate his deal with the government of the Southward Islands more than he had to. Despite the rumour which Butler’s bosses had heard, he still thought the notion of killing him was nonsense.”

  Captain Thagoulos listened to the interpretation without full attention; he seemed to have accepted the idea that Thanatos was outside the law—at least for the moment.

  “The next thing that happened,” said Pibble, “was that George Palangalos rang you up from Porphyrocolpos and told you that Butler was
playing with Hyote boys.”

  “Palangalos,” said Captain Thagoulos, and added a sentence in Greek.

  “He is your traitor?” interpreted Sir Thopas. “The least likely person?”

  Pibble ignored the donnish gloss. Poor George—he had been the only possible person, once one had realised what passions churned beneath the still exterior.

  “Yes,” he said. “He wanted Butler out of the way, in case he should spot the men the Mafia sent. At first he denied having made the call—and so did everyone else of course—but he told me yesterday morning that he’d done it.”

  Thagoulos asked a question.

  “Why did he tell you? What reason did he give?” said Sir Thopas.

  “He told me because I’d worked out about this other thing I was telling you about—the man who wanted to keep Thanatos at Porphyrocolpos—and was taking George to show him. If that was cleared up, George didn’t want any other unexplained mysteries lying around. The reason he gave for the call was the one he’d given on the telephone, that he didn’t approve of rich foreigners seducing Greek boys.”

  Thagoulos nodded. Pibble realised that he’d now passed his last chance to tell him who Tony really was, without having to admit to lies and half-truths, So now he would never tell—and if next year, somewhere on the other side of the world, the torn bodies of the half-innocent sprawled on a sidewalk …

  “Have you any other evidence than the telephone call to involve Palangalos?” said Sir Thopas. Pibble hadn’t even heard the original question in Greek. He pulled himself together.

  “Nothing absolutely direct and concrete, but I’m fairly sure I’m right. First, Palangalos had been the strongest opponent in the war game of the idea of an assassination; then, when we agreed to try to check the island, he arranged for his wife to do the harbour. But as soon as the fake shooting occurred he used that as an excuse to send her out of danger. The assassin’s boat arrived next day. Then, when I took George out to look at this red herring I was telling you about, he kept me covered with a pistol most of the time—why should he do that if he was really convinced that the threat to Thanatos was imaginary? And why should he be in danger? Next, when we got back from this expedition we were told by Dave Warren that the guards we had sent for had been searched at the frontier and refused entry because they were carrying illicit weapons. George immediately cancelled the order for a fresh lot of guards to be summoned …”

  Captain Thagoulos held up his hand before Pibble could take over from Sir Thopas’s fluent Greek. He asked a brief question.

  “You think the customs were, um, tipped off?” said Sir Thopas.

  “I certainly think it would be worth checking,” said Pibble, “though I doubt if you’ll find a direct connection with George. He was a careful man. Where was I? Oh, yes, when we went to the harbour yesterday afternoon at first we were sitting outside the Lord Byron, but then we moved down the quay to the Olympia. I’d noticed the girls’ boat edging towards us, and I thought it was just that they wanted to attract Thanatos’s attention. There was one sunning herself provocatively on the roof. But we moved off to the Olympia before they got near enough for shooting. I went off to see about my baggage at the ferry terminal, and when I came back I noticed George shaking his head at them. At the time I thought he disapproved of the girls’ behaviour, but now I think it more likely that he was trying to persuade them not to make the attempt. Last of all, just before the shooting started, I saw him throw himself flat on the quay—he knew what was coming. And then, of course, they shot him on purpose. They fired a separate burst at him. I felt his body knock against my leg. He had served his purpose.”

  Captain Thagoulos sat looking at his notes for a while, sorting them out in his mind.

  “Where did the girls come from?” said Pibble. “I imagine they checked in with you when they arrived.”

  “The documents are from Brindisi. The Italian police are already looking for them.”

  “I can’t imagine they’ll find them alive,” said Pibble. “My bet is that they’ll have been shot and dumped overboard as soon as the boat was clear away.”

  “Dear me.”

  That was Sir Thopas’s own comment. Pibble looked at him and saw that the old man was for the first time visibly distressed. It took him several seconds to translate Captain Thagoulos’s sudden question.

  “Why should Palangalos do this? He’s known to be a close associate of Thanatos—his right-hand man.”

  “There was a girl at Porphyrocolpos called Tony d’Agniello …”

  “One harlot,” said Thagoulos, without waiting for the translation.

  “No,” said Pibble. “She was Thanatos’s mistress, but he didn’t give her money. In fact I’m convinced he loved her and she was fond of him. She’s very attractive indeed, and George wanted her, though he had recently married a new wife. It took me some time to realise how obsessed he was with her …”

  Pibble paused for the translation, swallowing his own obsessions.

  “A crime passionnel,” commented Sir Thopas.

  “Not wholly,” said Pibble. “It’s rather difficult for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to realise the intensity of the loyalty which someone like Thanatos demands from his followers. At times he deliberately tests that loyalty to breaking-point—I saw this happen a couple of nights ago. But when the loyalty really does break, it goes with a vengeance. Literally, in this case. George was not an attractive man, cold and reserved and rather ugly. In some ways he was rich and successful, but he owed all that to Thanatos—it wasn’t his own, so to speak. I think even Zoe, his new wife, he really owed to Thanatos, because I doubt if she’d have married him if he hadn’t been rich and successful. But Thanatos himself could have what he wanted, and it was his own thing. For instance Tony, though she left him a couple of days ago, told me that she’d have got along with him—and by implication been his mistress—even if he’d been poor. I don’t think George could ever have commanded that sort of response. So, though he was genuinely obsessed with Tony, there were deeper impulses at work. I mean, if she hadn’t been there I think he’d still have broken with Thanatos in the near future, though perhaps not so violently.”

  Thagoulos frowned as he listened to the translation, then spoke.

  “Apparently the girl was present at the shooting,” said Sir Thopas. “She was questioned with the rest of you last night, but didn’t say she’d left Porphyrocolpos. Do you know where she is?”

  “Staying with a girl called Nancy in a hut on the hill by the monastery. The hut belongs to a man called Vangelis.”

  Captain Thagoulos nodded and commented.

  “He says this Nancy is a half-wit,” said Sir Thopas. “Of course the Greeks have their own ideas about the degrees of lunacy.”

  “She is a bit unbalanced,” said Pibble. “When the Captain questions Miss d’Agniello, he might bring up another point which has a bearing. Yesterday morning George and I met her, and George had an argument with her. I didn’t hear it all, but my impression was that at first he was asking her to come back to Porphyrocolpos, because he couldn’t bear not to have her about; but then he realised that if she stayed away then Thanatos was more likely to get frustrated enough to leave the safety of his own grounds and go somewhere where he could be shot at.”

  Captain Thagoulos made a final note, drew a line under it, then sat silently gazing at Pibble. After a while he leafed through the file and removed a telegraph form which he read carefully through, frowning and consulting his dictionary a couple of times. At last he took from a drawer the necessary kit to roll a cigarette and started carefully on that job. Watching him tease the treacly-looking tobacco into shape, Pibble thought of Hon’s neat, stubby fingers doing the same job. Hott was dead. Would he have been alive if Pibble had read the signs more accurately? No, he would still have drifted up against Thanatos’s magnetic bulk at the lethal moment. Pibble had made no diff
erence. Hott had been a large life, and he was obliterated. Thanassi, a larger life still, hovered on the grey frontier. And George. It was lucky that there hadn’t been more—in some ways the ruthless indiscriminacy of the shooting had been the worst thing of all. They didn’t care who died, provided their enemies were among them.

  “I think you are one friend,” said Captain Thagoulos suddenly, and passed the telegram across the desk. It was addressed to Pibble at Porphyrocolpos, and had been sent from London Airport.

  “YOUR MONTREAL CONTACT CHECKED LAST YEAR AND FOUND OK STOP THINK AGAIN STOP AM PROCEEDING BARBADOS PRONTO BUT GROUNDED HERE BY BOMB SCARE ON PLANE STOP KEEP STRAIGHT BAT MESSAGE ENDS.”

  There was no signature.

  Pibble sighed. The bomb scare would have been a hoax, of course, but in his mind’s eye he saw the wreckage scattered over eighty fields, bright torn chunks of metal, smoking segments of engine, unrecognisable lumps of rag and meat which had once been people, the stretcher men trudging about, the useless ambulances, the gathering gawpers kept back by police. He also saw Nancy’s tongue licking thin along her lips as she stared at the mashed body on the quay.

  “There’s one other thing I ought to tell you,” he said, “though it doesn’t concern this case directly. The girl who calls herself Tony d’Agniello …”

  He explained in an emotionless voice. When he’d finished he sat in silence while Thagoulos made a fresh set of notes, but all the time he seemed to hear a shrill hissing note in his ears. Thagoulos put his pencil down and took out the brandy, glasses, and a jug covered with a needlework square. Sir Thopas smiled when this caught his eye; he studied the design for a moment, then turned to Pibble.

  “There’s a curious legend on a number of Greek islands,” he said conversationally, as the brandy bottle glugged. “I don’t know whether you’ve come across it. It’s about a species of lizard called the samimithi …”

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