The Lizard in the Cup Read online

  Butler looked at him for a long time. You’ve got your eye on somebody?” he said.

  “Sort of. He has the contacts, though he claims they are his enemies. He is going to be put in a position where he could do the job.”

  “But nothing to do with Hyos, except that he’s here at the moment?”

  “Yes, and ten days ago no one knew he would be here.”

  “I should write him out of your script. He sounds like a very minor character, one of those bloody little pansies who come on in Shakespeare to tell you that the Duke is at hand.”

  Pibble blinked. This image of the courtiers surrounding the great man was oddly near his own fancies. No doubt Butler, if he could still do a trick like that, must have been very good at his job once. And he was right about another thing—the very nearness of the great man tended either to drain the character from his attendants, or to force them into eccentric attitudes. Dave Warren was one type, Buck the other. It was hard to tell which way Doctor Trotter would go yet, but it would be a relief to eliminate him from the possibilities—a variable that ceased to be a variable and became zero.

  “I expect you’re right,” he said.

  “OK. That’s all. I’ve got my in at the electricity company, by the way. One of the kids’ uncles runs the place—chief accountant, linesman, repairman, sales executive—and he used to open for the Hyos first eleven. Once took a century off the Mediterranean Fleet. Used to take his fortnight’s holiday in England, following Len Hutton round places like Leeds and Bradford. Bet you his missus was sick.”

  Pibble laughed as he stood up to go.

  “You make good use of your hobby,” he said.

  “Keeps me out of trouble,” agreed Butler.

  The small, pernickety hunger which sometimes takes over from a hangover was bothering Pibble now. Beer was an essential, even Greek beer, and the little strips of fried squid and octopus that he’d nibbled at the Helicon yesterday would be just right. He walked in that direction.

  Today the long, curving quayside was converted into a promenade, thronged with Hyotes, all in their best clothes, walking in families and picking their way politely between the charter artists. Small groups of younger Greeks stood behind each easel, commenting clear-voiced over the flustered shoulders of the painters, certain that no tourist—at least no tourist who behaved in this fashion—understood Greek. Pibble was delighted to see another nation than the English being insular. The largest and loudest such groups operated towards the further end of the quay, and at first Pibble couldn’t see what the attraction was. The painter was a youngish man wearing an old straw hat, and his face was red with more than the heat of the afternoon; but his painting was much like any of the others’—perhaps a little better than most because he was laying the paint on with a certain boldness and spontaneity. Then a voice said something from the middle of the crowd, and a sort of silent snigger rippled all round the artist; the speaker had used Greek, but not with a Greek accent; Pibble knew before he had moved enough to see him that it would be Mark Hott. He commented again, and this time the laugh was audible.

  Pibble pushed his way through to him.

  “Hello,” he said. “I owe you a drink.”

  “Great,” said Mr. Hott. “Come along.”

  The moment he turned away from his victim the rest of the crowd started to break up. He didn’t look back.

  “OK,” he said, “you be kind to the animals—you can afford it. But to me they’re vermin. Come along—we’ll be lucky if we find a table.”

  But there were several spare tables under the orange awning, and enough chairs for Mr. Hott to collar a second one and put his feet on it. Pibble sipped his beer and nibbled the little fishy squares, while Hott growled his tirade against the amateur artist and the problems of educating the public into the new languages that art had found in the last fifty years if the public’s eyes were constantly befuddled with degenerate and crass apings of the great impressionists.

  “Did Buck Budweiser come out and see you?” said Pibble, not looking at Hott but considering the curious change from yesterday’s view, now that the sub-fusc band of the strolling crowd was spread in a diminishing curve across the broader band of the houses.

  “Sure—you should’ve told me he was a cripple. I wasn’t ready for that.”

  Pibble raised his eyebrows, thinking of the compendium of ailments that enriched the South Bay villas.

  “He can look after himself,” he said.

  “Sure, sure. He’s a great guy once you know him.”

  “Was he any use to you?”

  “So-so. I didn’t sell him anything—it’s all earmarked for my winter show, so it’s not for sale just now. But he talked the right talk—he’ll be a useful contact.”

  “I don’t think he does any art dealing these days,” said Pibble. “He’s what he calls a travel consultant.”

  “Balls. Once you’ve begun, it’s a habit you never kick. Put a guy like that on a desert island and he’ll start auctioning oyster-shells to the turtles at twenty per cent commission. Hi, Nan, I kept a chair for you.”

  Little Nancy, wearing sun-bleached jeans and a crudely mended blouse, slumped into the chair and grunted sulkily; without orders the proprietor came out with a glass of tea for her. Hott rolled a couple of his beautifully turned cigarettes and tossed one to Nancy, who sniffed at it ungraciously, stuck it in her mouth and lit up without thanks. Hott went back to his grousing about the charter artists, repeating for her bored benefit the points he’d made for Pibble. As he spoke he emptied the contents of his pocket on to the iron table until he found a pencil and a piece of paper to draw on. Still grumbling, hardly looking at the quay, he started to draw rapidly. Pibble watched him for a bit, not really listening, thinking how thin Nancy’s arms were—even for her small body—and that he should have noticed this earlier. He was quite unprepared when Hott shoved his drawing across the table and began to gather his debris back into his pockets.

  It was two drawings, one marked Ham and the other Pro. Both were very simplified versions of what Pibble had already seen, the different bands of texture curving and diminishing round the harbour. It was hard to see quite where the two versions differed, except that the central band which was the moving promenaders and the doors of houses and a few parked cars and the despised charter artists themselves seemed to be slightly exaggerated in the Ham version and slightly diminished in the Pro one; but the total difference was immense. Above, a dull and almost uninterpretable series of lines; below, depth and sparkle and the play of light.

  “Can I keep this?” said Pibble.

  “I haven’t signed it,” said Hott with his derisive laugh as he rose to his feet. Nan put out her hand and pushed towards him the unopened packet of cigarettes which he’d left on the table.

  “Keep it,” he said. “It’s a present. So long. Be good, kid.”

  His hand patted her possessively on the hair as her fingers closed over the packet. She gave a funny little cry, jumped to her feet ran to the edge of the quay and hurled the gift out into the water.

  “Girls can’t pitch for nuts,” called Hott. “So long, Jimmy.”

  He lumbered away as Nancy came draggingly back to the table and took a few sips of tea. The men at the other tables watched her with dull eyes. Pibble sat, very depressed, looking at the two drawings; when he turned the sheet of paper over he found that it was a receipt for a life-insurance premium from the Ottawa office of Standard Mutual. Not Montreal then. But even so, back to square two. Nancy was an addict, Hott had been expecting her and had brought along a fresh supply disguised as a packet of cigarettes. He went night-fishing, and had a landing-stage by his villa. Joss-sticks burnt in his studio, which would disguise the reek of raw opium. He had all the necessary facilities—and all that meant that Butler’s story was true, which in turn meant that there had been no shot at Thanatos. So the question was now no
t how to preserve his hideous host, but what to tell Butler. There was no link to Hott without mentioning Nancy; if Butler found Nancy he would find Tony; and judging by his readiness with the life and times of Ted Follinger he would know who she was. And why shouldn’t he be allowed to? Why shouldn’t the whole CIA jump on her with hobnailed boots? Tony d’Agniello might be a harmless odalisque, but didn’t Anna Laszlo deserve to suffer? There are no answers to that sort of question. You could say that, pragmatically, as long as she stayed Tony she was harmless, whereas Anna was a focus, either free or on trial, a point of danger. You could add that if she were captured Thanatos would guess who had betrayed him, who had been the lizard lurking in the cup of friendship; and then Pibble would be smashed. You could further mumble that old Pibble was fond of the girl. And then you could look in your diary and work out that by the time these trivia of the conscience had been appeased another cargo of soul-poison would be on its way to Montreal. Hott was shipping an exhibition over next week—it would be something to do with that—perhaps one could sell Butler a hunch about the exhibition, enough to get those fat white slabs of abstract paint sampled and probed … Yes, there had been the art thefts, two paintings stolen from successive shows. Ingenious.

  “D’you mind if I tell you the story of a film I once saw?” he said.

  Nancy groaned.

  “If you must. You’ll have to buy me a drink, though.”

  She called for ouzo in Greek, then turned with lack-lustre eyes to Pibble.

  “It won’t take long,” he said. “I can’t remember the details, but there was a girl in it who was sheltering someone whom the police were looking for in a general way, and the police wanted to talk to her about something quite different, and one of the policemen—did you know I used to be a policeman?—wanted to warn her but he had to do it in a café where anyone might be listening—you know, warn her that there might be cops coming up the hill to her cottage and just stumbling on this other person who was hiding there. I’m sorry. I’ve not made it sound very interesting. I was just reminded of it by this bar. It was a French film.”

  “I hate French films,” whispered Nancy. “How did it end?”

  “I didn’t stay to see.”

  She smiled, genuine through the strain.

  “It makes a change,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “Oh, when I first came here I tried to find out something about the Resistance in these islands—my father was in the Resistance—and people used to come to me with the most extraordinary and thrilling stories they’d just remembered. It was only when winter came and I started going to the cinema most weeks that I found where the stories began. I mean, one week there’d be a film about a redskin who rather than be captured dived into the sea and clung to a rock till he drowned, and next week people would start showing me the actual rock where some Hyote had done that very thing. That’s what I mean. Your story’s the other way round.”

  “I see. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “You can lend me fifty drachs—I want to buy a bottle of ouzo. Thanks. Did this … person who was hiding know about the girl and the policeman?”

  “I don’t think so. They were all—I don’t mean the policeman—involved in a sort of eternal triangle situation with someone else. It was that sort of film.”

  Her face went very blank as she stood up and leaned with both hands on the rim of the table to look at him. This stance exposed the inner side of her wasted forearms, and they still seemed unscarred—an addict’s needle tends to leave a landscape of festering pocks, quite different from the invisible and hygienic results of a hospital hypodermic. Nancy was still sniffing then; perhaps her arms had always been thin; with Tony’s help she should pull through. He looked at her face and thought for a moment she was going to spit at him, but then she gave another of her wailing cries and rushed into the taverna like Mrs. Siddons studying at Bedlam to be a madwoman. When she came out, nursing her bottle, she neither looked at him nor gave him his change.

  He sat for a long while, slowly drinking beers and nibbling the little morsels of fish. At times he watched the strollers or the boats —a new red power-boat was being incompetently cajoled towards its anchorage by a couple of lubberly but handsome young women who seemed to enjoy being mocked by the other boatmen. At times he brooded dully. His thoughts were not coherent, in fact little more than a Hott-like grumble against the situation in which he found himself. He felt as though he were being pushed around—not deliberately shoved across the board like a counter in backgammon, skipping uncomprehending from peak to peak, sometimes solitary, sometimes in a jostling crowd. No, it was nothing as meaningful as that, more like the motion of a twig in the backwash of a stream below a bridge, round and round and round in the grip of invisible currents. First the threat to Thanatos had been unreal, and then it had been real, and now it was unreal again. First Butler’s presence had been a peripheral nuisance, then central, and now peripheral again.

  He watched a dark-skinned, plainish girl walking between her wizened parents flash a glance of extraordinary brilliance at a young man strolling in the other direction. The young man spoke a greeting but the parents bowed unsmiling and dragged her on.

  That made him think of Tony. Like most men he found the notion of lesbianism sexually stimulating, but the fact of it left him cold. Or was it that Tony was now Anna, and he didn’t want Anna—he wanted the luxurious child who ate ice creams? Thanatos, presumably, had room in his soul for both. They made a curious triangle, the gross monarch, his revolutionary mistress and the waif who had drifted between them. He wondered whether Nancy had done this before, whether some of her strain came from a sense of shock. Oh, hell! The problem was going to be how to tell Butler about Hott and get him off the island, without telling him about Nancy and hence Tony.

  In an effort to organise his thoughts he found a biro and wrote the possibilities down on a blank space on Hott’s receipt. M for murder. H for H. -H, -M; -H, +M; +H, -M; +H, +M. He crossed the first two out. H was pretty certainly now plus. He stared at the fourth, then crossed that out. If the Mafia were organising an H on Hyos, they wouldn’t jeopardise it by flooding the island with police investigating an M. That left the third. It also left him no forrarder.

  His mind was shying from the problem for the fifth time when a hand touched his arm. He turned to see a simian brown face at shoulder-level, a boy who began to talk to him in rapid demotic. Pibble caught one word the second time round—astifilakos, a policeman.

  “Ime astifilakos,” he said.

  The child frowned and made that negative click and jerk of the head, then tugged at Pibble’s sleeve.

  “Ela. Ela,” he said impatiently.

  Pibble paid for his beers and went with the boy, wondering what dim tourist-trap he was being conducted to. But the boy didn’t relapse into the confident lounge of the tout who has hooked his sucker; he dodged and scuttered between the strollers so that Pibble had to follow him faster than he wished through the dust and stuffiness of a windless afternoon. They turned up the Odos Basilissa Bictoria, passed the Aeschylus and came to the main square. The boy darted up the steps of what must be the town hall, a stodgily pompous building with windows opaque with old dirt; he led Pibble down a passage, knocked at a door, heard the answering shout, opened the door and motioned Pibble to go in.

  Pibble knew where he was before the door had shut behind him with the boy outside. It wasn’t merely the wooden counter barring a small area by the door from the rest of the room, nor the dull look of the man behind the desk, nor the uniform cap that hung from the other door. All police stations feel alike.

  The man said “Orate?” in a bored voice.

  “Kserete Angliko?” said Pibble.

  The man became a semitone less bored and called to the next room, a sentence containing the word Angliko. A tenor voice answered and then a slight man, wearing the jacket of
his uniform despite the heat, came through the far door.

  “Pliss come this way, mister,” he said.

  Pibble lifted the flap of the counter and walked through into a stifling small office. The man in uniform was already sitting behind his desk. He spat into his handkerchief and studied the result for a moment before looking up.

  “Ullo,” he said. “Good afternoon.” He studied a phrasebook and added “What can we do for you?”

  “I don’t know. A boy, a Greek boy, brought me here and told me to come in. Perhaps it was a joke.”

  “Spik slowly, pliss.”

  Pibble did so. The man looked at him, very official.

  “Understood. You are friends with Mr. Butler, yes?”

  “I know Mr. Butler. I do not know him well. We have talked three times, that is all.”

  “Your name, pliss.”

  Pibble still carried, from sentimental habit, a few of the unnecessary cards which Mary had given him on his last promotion. The officer looked at it very carefully, then referred to a small dictionary.

  “Endaksi. You are colleague to me, yes?”

  “I’ve retired. I’m on holiday.”

  “Yes? Where do you stay?”

  “At Porphyrocolpos.”

  “You are friends with Thanatos?”

  This time he had left the final ‘yes’ off his question, perhaps because of the sheer improbability of the idea. Or perhaps because his English was growing more confident with practice. Anyway, Pibble supplied it.

  The officer sat still, turned the card over, turned it back again and looked at Pibble. Then he spun round in his chair and opened a cupboard from which he brought out a bottle of brandy, a soda-siphon and two glasses. He took a clean tissue from a drawer and polished both glasses. Pibble could see that he was thinking all the time.

  “Pliss sit,” he said. “You will have one drink, yes? I am in a difficultness. I will shut the door, pliss.”