The Lizard in the Cup Page 12

  Pibble turned and walked away.

  “Answer me, loser,” yelled Thanatos.

  He pushed blindly through the bead curtains. A hand caught his elbow, and Dave Warren led him without a word into the big room at the back of the house where all the office work of running a hotel empire was done while Thanatos was at Porphyrocolpos. The other three men were already there.

  “Your watch, Doc,” said Dave.

  The black man picked up an empty tumbler, smiled without meaning, put a handful of ice cubes in it, filled it almost to the brim with vodka and added three drops of Martini.

  “Pussyfoot,” said Buck.

  Still smiling the same non-smile, Doc Trotter went heavily out.

  “You’ve got to fight back at him, Jim,” said Dave. “What’ll you have? Scotch?”

  “Hey! About half that,” said Pibble.

  “Knock it back,” said Dave. “You’ll need it.”

  “You won’t feel a thing,” said Buck. “It’s damned hard to get drunk at all when he’s this way. You got so much adrenaline in your blood that you just burn it up.”

  “What are the rules?” said Pibble.

  “Hit back, hard as you like,” said Warren. “He’ll blast you off the court, even so, but he’ll tire quicker.”

  “I mean, for instance, do we mention Tony?”

  Dave made a face.

  “You’ve got to,” he said. “Make a rule like that and he’ll notice. He’s hurt, and he wants you to pick his wound for him.”

  “Pain’s a way of existing,” said Buck. He knew, of course.

  Dave drank, deep and gloomy.

  “Jim’s an oddball,” said Buck in an inquisitive tone. “He’s not tied to the guy the way we are. I wonder how he’ll get at him.”

  “I met another oddball this morning,” said Pibble, to change the conversation.

  “This guy in the helicopter?” said Dave. “Thanassi was telling us about him. It doesn’t sound good, his rumour about the Mafia.”

  “No, I didn’t mean him,” said Pibble, irritated by how rapidly he had allowed an official secret to become unclassified gossip. “Though he’s an oddball too—he spends most of his time playing cricket with the boys in the town. But I was talking about a man who lives at the South Bay villas, called Mark Hott, a Canadian, a white on white abstract painter.”

  “That guy?” said Buck eagerly. “What’s he doing on Hyos?”

  “He lives in one of the South Bay villas, He wants to show you his work so that you can persuade Thanassi to buy a few hundred of them.”

  “What’s he doing now? Any good?” said Buck, as though this were a perfectly proper suggestion.

  “I’m no judge,” said Pibble. “I’m abstract-blind—like being tone-deaf. But it’s gadgety in the kind of way Thanassi likes. And it looks, well, smart.”

  “I’ll bum out and see him tomorrow.”

  “With the hangover you’ll have?” asked Dave.

  “I got a hollow leg,” said Buck, laughing as he touched his tiny shank.

  In ones and twos they took turns with the ogre on the terrace, recuperating in the working-area between whiles. Pibble was on his third huge Scotch—and as Buck had foretold not noticing it—when Dave came back from duty.

  “We’re changing for dinner,” he said. “Tuxedos.”

  “That is bad,” said George.

  “I haven’t got the kit,” said Pibble.

  “It’s in your room. Serafino looked you out something that will fit. Christ, sometimes I could kill that man. Do you know what he said just now …”

  8

  The throb of his hangover was already diminishing when Pibble left the Aeschylus Hotel, having deposited a note for Butler making an appointment to meet at the Helicon at six. He had signed it ‘Jimmy Pibble’. But he still had enough of a singing head to fail to notice that there really was something different about the town this morning—that the change was not only in the bloodshot eye of the beholder. The rural differences struck him first—no old woman hoeing among the vines, no parties of shrilling olive-harvesters, a strange stillness. Then he thought back and decided that the town too was altered; shops had been shut, people had seemed older and tidier, the air had smelt less of fish and more of bread. Now, behind him, a bell began a monotonous beat. It was Sunday. All Saints’ Day in the West. The feast of St. Sporophore on Hyos.

  Gladly he slowed to the pace of a workless day. Physically he didn’t feel too bad, but morally he felt blasted.

  In a year’s time, perhaps, he would be able to look back to the Halloween­ dinner and be glad to have been there; but now … pictures ran through his mind like fragments of dream in a delirium, repeated themselves, interlocked. J. Pibble strolling into the never-used dining-room, feeling pleasantly peacockish in the ridiculous frilled shirt that Serafino had put out for him, to find Thanatos already eating, still in his slacks and tea-shirt, though they were now stained with the blotches of a dozen spilt Bloody Marys. He could feel—no, that must have been much later, after Thanatos had tossed a decanter of Cheval Blanc 1945 through the window and then begun to heckle Pibble for being shocked at the waste, as if he could discern the difference between decent wine and Chianti brewed from banana skins—he could feel the sudden tug that pinned him to the table-edge as the big hand shot out and ripped one set of ruffles half off his chest, leaving him to finish his meal with a strip of pale skin exposed, one nipple and a few grizzled hairs framed by the spoilt finery. It was odd that the shock of physical assault—the only actual violence that any of them had experienced during the long night—was still so strongly palpable when at the time it had seemed so trivial beside the mental bludgeonings, even in its way a relief from them. Both Dave and George had ridden the tempest with something like equanimity, except when Thanatos had spent twenty minutes comparing Tony with Zoe, in leisurely, almost dreamy detail. George endured and endured, and then suddenly he was standing over Thanatos’s chair, with blotchy patches on his grey face, shouting at him in Greek, while Thanatos sat nodding­ and smiling like a stage director who has extracted from his performers precisely the effect he wanted. Doc Trotter had wept often, and been too easy meat to please the monster; Buck had shouted and snarled all the time, but seemed only to have been really hurt by sudden random solicitudes, as when Thanatos had insisted that he should sit in a proper chair and that Dave should help him into it.

  Of course it had all been a game, a therapeutic game. It had also been an insight into the relationship between a monarch and his court, powerful nobles, each with his own pride, whose lives and fortunes yet depended on one man absolutely. Life with Henry VIII must have had moments like that. And underlying it all, even in Pibble’s half-bared breast, there was a steady tide of compassion, sorrow for the great beast wounded and raging in the pit. Pibble had often read about the scared hyenas round Stalin, but now he understood for the first time how they had mixed their hate and terror with more than mere respect—awe, and a sort of love. Doc Trotter would not have been made to weep by someone he merely hated. And what was it all for? A test of trust: Thanatos pushing his friends to the very limit of their fidelity, not just to prove his power over them, but to prove their loyalty too. They would not follow Tony.

  The faint, sage-smelling breeze carried up the hill the far buzz of an engine. He turned and saw, between him and the dunes, one of the ridiculous beach-buggies skimming along the track to the south bay villas; far though it was, Pibble could recognise the driver by the way he sat—eager-beaver Buck, scurrying to start a round of art-wheeling-and-dealing. Pibble hoped that he wouldn’t get back to find that miniature sun revolving in his bedroom, though presumably it would not be considered philistine to switch it off at night.

  A wave of his hangover washed over him, so that he nearly vomited, and had to sit on a boulder by the path, feverish and sweating. When he started up the path he
began to wonder who the private detective had been whom Thanatos had set to report on him almost a year ago, soon after they had first met. Thanatos’s mock-genial revelation of how closely he had studied the Pibbles’ small lives, of how well he knew Mary’s ferocious feuds against random tradesmen, or the four months’ money-fret after the mistake over Pibble’s pension—this had been momentarily startling, but not really damaging­ because the man had skimped his job, made mistakes, guessed. (Perhaps Dave was at this moment on the phone to London, sacking him. No—far more likely Thanatos had learnt about Department J’s class four check on the Pibbles, and used his influence to get a sight of it. That wasn’t particularly reassuring, either.) Thanatos’s own guesses at the curiosa of bed and bowels had been more telling. It was not pleasant to have one’s introspection done for one by another party, to feel one’s mind being drilled without an anaesthetic. His present expedition was one of revenge: he wanted to know something which mattered to Thanatos, but which Thanatos himself didn’t know. Pibble was ashamed of this, and tried to persuade himself that it was important that someone at Porphyrocolpos should know.

  He reached the olive grove where he had first found Father Chrysostom, and turned off between the trees, heading down in the direction from which he thought Vangelis had come. Beyond the grove the ground rose again into an area of small folds and undulations, with many trees obscuring any distant view. He found a small vineyard, but it was neglected and there was no hut in it. By a little copse of ilex and cypress he found a hut, locked, and showing no sign that it had been used for living in. The whole hillside seemed deserted—of course, everyone would be down in the town, the oldsters praying, the young ones sporting on the beach. Even so he still moved carefully, keeping as much as possible in cover, because he would much rather not be noticed snooping. If he was unsure of his own motives, how could he expect anyone else to give him the benefit of the doubt? So he wasted an hour, and found nothing.

  Then, over to his left, a strange noise began, a regular clatter accompanied by a regular cry, both noises resonant and uninterpretable. He gave up his search and walked towards them.

  As he emerged up a steep slope between clumps of loose scrub he saw Father Chrysostom standing at the monastery door and looking down the path towards the town, making both noises. The clatter came from a heavy old plank which he was beating with a stick, and the cry from his blue lips. He didn’t notice Pibble coming up from the side until they were only a few feet apart; then he leaned plank and stick against the wall, smiled with extraordinary welcome—almost relief—and held out his hand to shake.

  “Kaloste, kirie,” he said. “Embros, viazomaste. Argisame.”

  He looked piercingly at Pibble, as though trying to force comprehension into his skull through the eyeballs.

  “Kalos sas vrikamee,” said Pibble blankly. “Poo ine Nancy?”

  Father Chrysostom clicked a negative, muttered “Meta, meta,” and pulled Pibble through the door by the elbow. A minute later he was standing in the refectory while Father Chrysostom draped round him a plain white robe which smelt and felt like a very old horse blanket. Father Polydore, even more elaborately garbed, sat at his work-desk with his head between his hands. But for the stench and weight of his robes and the nausea of his hangover, Pibble might have been quite pleased at this upshot. He had felt inquisitive about the monastery and would have liked time and opportunity to poke round on his own; Nancy had been a very partial guide.

  “Then esthanete kala,” said Father Chrysostom, working his way into a magnificent chasuble, so moth-eaten that the underlying cloth seemed in places to be held together solely by the gold thread-work. That makes two of us not feeling well, thought Pibble. Gently Father Chrysostom raised Father Polydore from his stool and led him across to Pibble, where he placed the old man’s left arm round Pibble’s shoulders and Pibble’s right round the old man’s waist. Then he thrust a smoking censer into Pibble’s free hand, picked up a book and a jewelled cross, opened the far door and stalked along the passage, chanting in noble tones. Pibble and Father Polydore shuffled after him; the old man was shivering, and stank. Suddenly, among the booming echoes set off by Father Chrysostom, Pibble detected a faint, quavering buzz, and saw that Father Polydore too was chanting, and by some miracle of memory chanting the same words.

  The service in the Catholicon—the big cave-church—was endless but athletic. First of all Father Chrysostom stood before the altar, praying in a rapid mutter; between prayers he would hiss and point, and Pibble would guide his aged burden across to some new station. His head sang. The stink of his robes and of the old man he supported, the reek of the censer, the dank and heavy air, all combined to bring the vomit to his gullet. He swallowed it back, then toted Father Polydore round the whole church in the tracks of Father Chrysostom, praying every few steps to some strange dark saint in a niche; after the first few Pibble knew the words well enough to join in the responses, but despite the comfort of having something to do he was almost fainting before Father Chrysostom flung open the doors and led the miniscule procession out into the hot fresh air.

  The religious observances for the day were not yet over, by no means. The monastery turned out to be richly endowed with its peculiar saints, far more than could have been accommodated in the main basilica without overcrowding. No doubt the whole company of them could have danced together on the point of a needle, in the spirit, but their fleshy remains required more room. Besides a number of small chapels the big honeycomb was dotted with individual shrines, usually consisting of no more than a name on the wall with a dark brown icon hanging beside it. But in several places there was more ornamentation, and this was always either a picture or a relief carving of a casket. After a while Pibble decided that at all these places the relics of minor saints had actually been walled into the masonry—here a femur, there a funny-bone—in the belief that their miraculous intervention would, as it were, key the building into the living rock behind, pin it there and prevent it from slithering down the cliff.

  They came at last to a place where the miracle had proved insufficient and the winding passage ended in sunlight; two lashed planks spanned the gap to the dark arch where it began again; the hand-rail was of rope and looked grey with rot, but Father Chrysostom muttered a quick, private prayer, crossed himself and marched across the bouncing planks. Pibble hesitated. His head was spinning, and the mess of rocks and tiles and rotten beams below seemed to recede and then climb nearer to him, and then recede again. Father Polydore looked up at him, smiled with sudden sweetness, disengaged himself and darted on to the planks. But half-way across he seemed to lose confidence; he let go of the hand-rail and stood swaying in the slight updraught; Pibble gave a grunt, dashed forward and caught him by the waist just as he was losing his balance to fall between the walkway and the cliff, hauling him back with his free hand grasping the iron stanchion that supported the rope in the middle. For a moment they stood teetering, with the boards creaking beneath their double weight. Poised thus, Pibble too lost confidence.

  Father Chrysostom heard the various noises and turned in the mouth of the dark arch. He looked at them for a moment, then raised his right hand and boomed a polysyllabic blessing. Father Polydore responded in a cracked wheeze and launched himself over the second half of the gulf; Pibble had no recourse but to follow, wondering how many of his sins had now been absolved. He walked carefully across the grey planks, conscious of nothing but the sunlight and the sharp sweet smoke from the censer.

  Over here there was only one saintly limb to pray to, walled into a cleft in the rock; but right at the limit of the building they came to a long, irregular room in which lay, neatly on low stone slabs, skeleton after skeleton. Here they used a different form of prayer, which involved only occasional interjections from Father Polydore and no movements from Pibble. He looked out of a slit window at blue sea flecked with gold, and wondered how long the bones had lain there. It was irritating not to know how ol
d anything was—he had always been one of those sightseers who are as much impressed by time as by aesthetic values, so that a shapeless hutch, or the brickwork of a sewer, could give him the authentic thrill provided modern scholarship believed them to be a couple of thousand years old; without that guarantee they were just a hutch and some bricks. It seemed important to know how often this self-same liturgy had been droned in this chamber. Were these the skeletons of hermits who had endured the incredible severities of holy living in the Dark Ages? Or were they simply the results of some medical misjudgment less than a century ago? There was no way of asking.

  The return journey along a higher level was less sanctified and so more rapid; and the planks over the gap had a wooden handrail, which made all the difference. They emerged on the flight of steps between the main entrance and the refectory, and here the two monks embarked on what Pibble took at first for a new form of ritual, but soon discovered was a quarrel. Father C spoke mildly but firmly; Father P muttered his disagreement; Father C spoke more loudly; Father P stuck out his lower lip, hunched himself, and said the same words as before; Father C glanced at Pibble and spoke abruptly; Father P simply repeated himself—it was extraordinarily like a liturgy, a litany, with the varying prayers and the unaltering responses. Suddenly Father Chrysostom gave a huge sigh of despair and walked down the stairs without another word. Father Polydore smiled at Pibble.

  “Viazomaste,” he said, and set off in the opposite direction. Pibble followed, swinging the censer as little as possible. The dash across the perilous planks had cleared away much of his hangover, but it threatened to return in the claustrophobic corridors. He thought that swinging the censer increased the draught, and hence the burning and the reek. Besides, he was, if anything, a very low-church protestant.

  This passage was a ramp, sloping irregularly down. They passed the gap in the wall and roof where the builders had been working, and Pibble looked up at the branches of a tree and wondered whether he would ever escape, whether he was now a Greek Orthodox monk for the rest of his meagre days. The ramp sloped down and down until they were well below the level of the cliff-top; from the texture of the floor below his feet Pibble decided that they were walking down what must once have been a sloping ledge on the face of the cliff, though in places it had narrowed to a six-inch toe-hold and had later been artificially widened to form this sloping tunnel. Rock and flagstone and tile were all so worn that they had the texture of boulders in a stream, a ceaseless whispering stream of holy insteps, polishing the rock.