The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Page 17

  Joshua had come to squat at Pibble’s elbow. His belly, culminating in a protuberant navel, sagged outward and down toward his knees. The whole mass trembled slightly, a continuous excited shiver. The note of the rhythm changed; Robin was working steadily now with three drums, the two wooden ones making a flat, dead noise under his left hand while his right hand kept the metal one alive. This he was working now to a slower and slower beat, catching its internal resonance just as it died away into whimperings. At first he filled the gaps with a hiccupping rattle on the small drums; then he added to this a backhanded slap at the long log which groaned its deep note against the metal whanging of the dustbin. Pibble thought he had some sort of wooden knuckleduster laced to the back of his hand, but it was hard to see through the dust and smoke.

  Jacob stalked out from the wings and began to strut in front of the circle, as clockwork in motion as the springtime pigeons Pibble had watched that morning. One of the old men handed him a bottle, which he tilted back and drank from. The bull-roarer had stopped, but the old men were calling excitedly together, still in monosyllables, backing the compulsive iteration of the drums. Jacob kept the bottle and continued his strutting. Suddenly he staggered in his march, hunched his shoulders together, threw his head back, and began to glide around the room in a wallowing lope. From his mouth came a high, absurd voice, the voice of a don on “The Critics,” speaking the Ku language in rapid spasms. He tilted the bottle back again, but this time most of the liquid spilled down into his beard and over his neck and shoulders. He gulped unheeding.

  “Good,” said Joshua. “It is Korapu. He is drunk and a bully and a coward, but he comes before.”

  “Before the green snake?” whispered Pibble.

  “Do not name it!” whispered Joshua. “It is ill fortune!”

  He moved away from Pibble, as if from the contamination of cholera. The beat of the drums was now very loud. The whole room seemed to have acquired the internal resonance of the metal drum, so that the boards and beams picked up harmonics from each thud and rattle and groan and transmitted them along the framework of Pibble’s skeleton. Robin was sitting on the far edge of the light, his whole body slippery with sweat as he worked his instruments into the lurches of the coward god’s dance. Korapu broke from the figure of eight through which he had been reeling and rushed straight at Pibble. Pibble rose in self-defense. Korapu screamed a cackling curse and thrust his bottle under Pibble’s nose. Pibble took it, put it to his lips, tilted it back, and sucked. Christ! It was raw spirit! He choked halfway through his swallow, did the nose trick with the reeking acid, choked again, and shook his head, his ears singing. Korapu cackled again, a zany’s laugh this time, and reeled away. Pibble sat down.

  Several times more, Korapu left his dance to share a drink with the watchers; they humored him and took their swigs and, when the bottle was empty, gave him another one. The second time he came to Pibble, Pibble managed the encounter with more dignity, answering the jeering babble with the only Latin he could remember, “Bis dat qui cito dat,” and swallowing his tot with a full command over his gullet. The old men were getting bored with this minor demon and beginning to whisper among themselves when Robin caught him in mid-stagger with three strokes at the long log which cut the ribald ecstasies of sound. Korapu fled. The black body he had ridden shriveled and collapsed. Jacob knelt in the middle of the floor in the attitude of the embryo, his torso pulsing like that of an embryo as he gulped, exhausted, at the smoky air. The men didn’t seem to look at him.

  Robin settled into a slow movement, rubbing a heavy throb out of the long log and counterpointing it with a subdued tapping at one of the small drums. It was a sullen, earthy noise, too slow for any human rhythm, going on and on, subduing thought. The men stood still and waited. Ishmael started his bull-roarer again, timing the emphasis of its downswing to underpin the groanings of the big drum. There were no shouts now. After ages of sound, Robin added a fluttering double beat to the pattern, and then another. The lump of black flesh in the middle of the floor stopped its heaving and began to twitch. A new life flowed into it, slow and cold. It stirred upward, jointless. The head of the man it inhabited craned forward, his eyeballs showed only white, his tongue stuck out between stretched lips. A whispering hiss came from the roof beams.

  All the men shouted together, and the hiss answered them. The drums boomed on, busy with innumerable interlocking rhythms. Melchizedek made a short speech in the Ku language and the hiss replied. It was just a hiss, with no syllables in it. Melchizedek spoke again, with the emphasis of a man arguing a case, but before he had finished the hiss cut him short. The men began to sing all together, a chant of short sentences each slightly varied from the last. In the middle of one of these sentences, the snake god left; there was a quick, agonizing spasm and Jacob bowed forward from the hips, his head nearly banging the floor. Then he stood up, scratched his ribs and neck, walked over to where Korapu’s bottle stood, took a long swig, and sat down next to Ishmael.

  After that, Daniel did a clowning obscene dance in his own person. No spirit came to ride him, and the men shouted happily at him as he bounced and postured. Robin played trickily with the drums but without intensity. When Daniel was tired, he sat down and the men carried Robin out of the circle. The cuts in his back looked raw and nasty. Pibble wondered whether they’d had the sense to use antiseptic on them.

  Elijah wobbled affably over.

  “Now we will drink kava and sleep,” he said. “Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you,” said Pibble. “I must stay awake tonight. That was very interesting. What on earth was in the bottle?”

  Elijah winked and brought the key from the bag which now hung flopping on his chest.

  “You must show us round Scotland Yard someday,” he said. “That would also be interesting. Good night.”

  “Good night,” said Pibble, and went groggily down the stairs. He recognized that he was in a state of half shock—vaguely the same sort of walking-dead feeling as he’d had when Richard Foyle, his first boss and only hero, had been convicted of corruption. More than vaguely; once again the intellectually stimulating and cheerful surface of his job had suddenly rotted away, leaving only the wicked skeleton. He was sure now that the drumming ritual was wicked, a corruption of humanity as horrid, in its way, as Richard’s involvement with the Smith machine had been.

  Light glared out from the door of Eve’s living room. A voice said, “That you, Jimmy?” so Pibble went in. Paul was lying on the floor reading Graphis, and Eve and Ned Rickard sat together on the sofa, solemnly regarding an elaborate structure of string which Eve held on her fingers.

  “The next bit is not easy,” said Eve in her don’s voice, “and is considered as a pons asinorum, or shibboleth, among the tribes of the Ku group. The tribes on the other side of the big range, as well as those in the coastal strip and most of the islands, have a completely different cultural history which includes a form of cat’s cradle a man can play by himself. Indeed, this is perhaps the most discriminating criterion of the cultural origins of a tribe, as it is completely independent of any oral tradition or communication. You have to be shown. A man from one of the other groups of tribes might have picked up the earlier stages, but unless he had learned and practiced this one among the other children in his village he would probably make a mess of it. Do you think you can get this onto your own hands, Superintendent, and I will show you?”

  “I don’t see any way in,” said Ned. “Try and tell me. It doesn’t matter if I make a mess of it, as I ought to have a chat with Jimmy. I hope he’s been treating you proper.”

  “He would have made a sound scholar,” said Eve seriously. Paul looked up from his magazine with a booming chuckle, waved a paw at Pibble, and returned to the study of a group of André François’s posters.

  “Now, Superintendent,” said Eve, “you have two problems. First, as you can see, the initial asymmetry involved in the cr
ossing of strings in any cat’s cradle pattern has now multiplied itself to a point where we must either go back, or tangle ourselves in a knot, or evolve a countervalent asymmetry. The left hand is quite easy. Put your index and thumb round the upper crossing and hook your little finger round the inside of the lowest string. You are going to have to turn that hand inward and down when the time comes. Now, with your right hand, take the lower crossing between the little finger and the ball of the right thumb; that’s right. Move your wrist out a bit. You are going to have to turn that hand inward and up. Tuck your two middle fingers out of the way. The problem is to put your thumb and index into the two loops that will be made by the slackening of the upper crossing after they have traversed the first parallel string and before they come to the second.”

  “I see what you mean about oral communication,” said Ned. “Are you ready? One, two, three, go!”

  The four hands danced together in a quick flight. One of them stumbled. Ned cursed and then laughed, gazing at the meaningless mess of string on his hands.

  “Not bad,” said Eve. “You did catch one, Superintendent. If you had caught them both, I would have owed you a suckling pig. What happened upstairs, Mr. Pibble? I would be most grateful if you let me have some notes when you have finished with the criminal aspects of this affair.”

  “Hell, Jimmy,” said Ned. “What’ve you been up to? You look as if you’d been walking the fells with ghouls.”

  “I have,” said Pibble. “You look better, Ned. Has something broken?”

  “Not half. Come outside and I’ll tell you—it’s your doing, really. Scuse us, Dr. Ku.”

  “Good night,” said Pibble. “I’ll be back about nine in the morning. Perhaps I’ll have some ideas by then. In any case, there are several things I ought to talk to you about, I suppose.”

  “Good night,” said Eve and Paul together.

  It was quite dark in the street. Only the lamp at the end was working. Ned walked over to a long car, whose bodywork gleamed glossy in the faint illumination, and rested an arm across it in an ownerly way.

  “Like my new bus?” he said. “The Ass. Com. ordered me to take it. It’s the bulletproof job.”

  “Crippen, Ned, are you as near as that?”

  The car was a souped-up Mercedes saloon, both joke and myth at the Yard, the folly of a long-retired Commissioner who had convinced himself that Chicago was coming to London any month now. It would do a hundred and forty; its bodywork was solider than most chassis; the interior was pitted with pockets for small arms, tear-gas cylinders, smoke bombs, and such; there was a searchlight on the roof as well as the usual loudspeaker. Pibble leaned over the roof to feel for its controls.

  “It’s got a trigger grip inside,” said Ned. “You can switch it on and off, turn it, and tilt it all with one hand. I say, Jim, that flat is going to be a breakthrough. We knew it existed but we didn’t know that it mattered. I’ve had five chaps worrying at it all afternoon, and we’ve turned up trumps. It’s registered in Mrs. Furlough’s maiden name—she’s a nice lass, Roedean, breeds West Highlands down at Sonning, thinks her hubby’s in show business—and Burnaby did a fluke with the carrot merchant opposite—it’s just off Covent Garden, you know—who remembered the name of the builders who did the alterations last summer, because he was thinking of putting on an extra bathroom himself and was on the lookout for builders. I suppose the breaks always come in the end if you wait for them. You know one of the things they put in where any normal man would have put a hanging cupboard? A ruddy great fireproof, thief proof steel filing cabinet. We’re going in tonight, and I’m due for the sack if it’s got nothing in it except theatre programs. Furlough’s got some biggish friends.”

  “Good luck,” said Pibble. “Will you be able to keep Miss Hermitage out of it?”

  “Hope so, Jim. She’s a dish, isn’t she, our Nan?”

  “What about Caine?”

  “Our legal Johnnies don’t think he’s broken the law,” said Ned flatly. “Besides, I don’t want him in in case the whole show gets mucked up with accusations of personal bias. Besides, Sukie seems happy with him. How’s your show going?”

  “Getting nowhere,” said Pibble tiredly. The shock of the drumming ritual and that abominable liquor seemed to have drained him of will. He looked up at the crenelations of Flagg Terrace, where the façade stood black against the reflected blue-pink glare of neon which is all London ever seems to know of night. Robin was presumably up there somewhere, mooning on the roof and becoming a schoolboy again. Pibble stared at the pitch-black vertical shadows that hung where the beams of the single street lamp could not reach to the brickwork. You’d never see a climber working his way across there, even if you were looking. Yes, you would, though! At least you’d see something.

  Pibble opened the near door quietly and slid on his back across the front seats till he could look out of the far window. The movement in the shadow seemed to have gone, but he knew where it ought to be, and reached up for the pistol grip of the searchlight. Lying like this, he had to work it with his hand back to front, but he aimed it roughly and tilted it back and switched on.

  Missed! A circle of brickwork and pipes and window ledge glared into being too low and to the left. He steadied the searchlight up and caught the climber five feet below the battlements.

  Dear God, the climber was moving quickly, like a scurrying spider. He was too small! He was making a mess of it!

  Struck by the solid blaze like a rioter caught in a power hose, the climber staggered in his lissome movements. A straining white face shone for a moment over his shoulder; then the right hand, no longer guided by the light-blinded eyes, grabbed an inch below the overflow pipe it was reaching for while the left hand had already let go of a drip course. The body, face still twisted to the fatal summons of the searchlight, heeled slowly back from the wall, feet splayed along an inch-wide slope of bath waste, then peeled away and plunged outside the circle. It fell four stories into the basement area, but there was no cry. Only a thud like a sack of cement dropped too heavily onto a path and bursting a little at the corners.

  Pibble weaseled out of the car and ran across the road. Ned was already there, craning over the railings. Pibble craned beside him and looked down to where the body lay broken-backed on the spikes of the cross-railings between the areas of No. 8 and No. 9. The light was on in the women’s kitchen, so that you could see at once that the climber was dead, not even twitching, with a mess of blood black below the body. You could see the off-mouse hair trailing downward. You could see who it was.

  “Oh God!” said Pibble, “she was left-handed!”

  He moved his hand along the railing toward Ned and touched something loose, a pair of National Health spectacles, both the strong lenses shattered. Instinctively he held the frame out consolingly to Ned.

  “Crippen,” he said, “I’m—”

  He never saw Ned’s fist that came looping out of the dark, but felt the stunning agony in his nose and all over his face, and the helpless backward reeling, and then …

  X

  The trouble with delirium is this—that the trouble with delirium is this—that the trouble with delirium is that unless you get a hold on yourself man and keep a hold on yourself and keep keeping a hold on yourself and—unless—and—you—unless—and you just fall backward and backward and backward into a nasty mucky messy drivelogue going round and round and round and a handsome male head with bruise sacs under the eyes going round and round and round in the cannibal pot and it’ll never be cooked laughing at you like that because it married a left-handed wife who chops up her left thumb slowly, slowly as though it were vital that every strip should be the same precise width because she doesn’t want you to see that if she were chopping up her right thumb with her left hand she’d be able to go snip snap snop and it’d all be done in a second and you’d be able to plaster it up with knots of string wound in and out like the cul
tural traditions on the other side of the mountain of love and never mind about the meaty smell because it’s been in your nostrils all night and you can’t expect to smell it in the morning any more than an old man who’s been with a lady all evening can be expected to smell her waiting to murder him with a piece of wood or a stone picked up by the path and you can’t expect—and you can’t expect—and you can’t—get a hold on yourself man and keep a hold on yourself and keep keeping a hold—get a hold—expect a secretive old man but very honorable too not to come waddling round in his pajamas to tell his lady friend that he was stopping his installments on the sacrifice—twenty years of little outgoings after the first down payment and in the end it had not turned out to have been worth while—and so she knew—she knew—and we knew she knew because she made a mess about the drums which he had talked about—of course he had because he was an honorable man and he’d tell her the reason and show her the penny too—but she’d made a mess about the drums—and the drums had made a mess of her when the snake god killed her mashed her into bleeding pulp which was what Ned wanted to do with Furlough and perhaps she’d known about Furlough too—more than Bob realized Miss Hermitage had said and you’ll never see her again with her gawky walk—she looks different already and tells her real name to her clients before she’s got a stocking off and she’ll kill herself next Christmas with a college scarf round her neck because she was a truth addict—but Mrs. Caine would lie Ned said and go up to the police station pretending to have lost keys and asking about a missing husband—so she hadn’t known about Furlough then—but perhaps she took steps to find out and then she’d know like she’d known what Aaron had stolen only she stopped herself saying it and like she’d known that Caine—was a mover-on and that was the foundation of a happy marriage believe it or not but the foundations were sand and when Bob got turfed out he’d leave her of course Miss Hermitage had said but she was a sharp princess who wanted to stay with her loathsome worm and if I want something I want it—and—if I want somebody dead I want him dead and while he’s walking home I go and pick up a shiny piton from my husband’s desk and then I remember about the owl so I put it back in the wrong place and go and bash my old pal all for the sake of a pair of bruise-colored sacs going round and round with bits and bobs of people’s behavior swirling past in the stew—bits of Bob and parts of the flesh are succulent but other parts are poisonous—and the eyes laugh because Bob was the catalyst and when the explosion is over all that’s left of God’s chemistry set is Bob untouched and laughing because he lured you into believing he’d do anything for himself when he could get someone else to do it and our legal Johnnies don’t think he’s broken the law and the law is above our customs but there may be matters you do not understand any more than you can see the fish in the stomach of a heron any more than you can understand why a cuddly admiral’s daughter the daughter of a cuddly admiral the cuddly daughter of an admiral any more than you can understand why why why why got it! “They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn” because it’s Australian and her dad reads her Wodehouse now she’s a big girl but he read her Kipling when she was younger and children are easily bored even by prolonged excitement so it would be a kindness to take the body away a kindness to take the tiresome old puritan out of the permissive system which he was irritating after all Our Father was very averse to overriding anyone unlike some I could name who want a jungle to tidy and are in and out of the jungle whenever there’s scarlet fever because they’re nurses and Ned had said she was between hospitals and her voice had the sharp reasonableness no not of a businesswoman in a B film but a sister telling Gregory Peck to stay in bed and so they know exactly where to hit and exactly where to find a loose owl because they’re in and out of the jungle whenever there’s scarlet fever and the jungle’s where they live their strong cruel tiger life and they’re too stupid to see that this is something different and their agent will chalk it up against the future because he’s that sort and he’s more important than our irrelevant little tragedy here the breaks always come in the end you fish but it has its moments when you see a slight change in the surface and color of the water and you know there’s a big one there and the question is can you get him out but who’ll be a farthing worse off if we never find out what happened here so vey wouldn’t send one of ver big boys out on a kinky little case like vis too much to lose nuffing to gain they’d send Pibble because it’s your cup of tea honest send honest Pibble honest Iago Pibble to nose around like a maggot in the glass-sided ants’ nest with his scholarly inquisitiveness and oh my lord beware of jealousy it will send you beagling after a white Othello with bruise sacs under his eyes and the hell with the black one who’s already reached the butt and very seamark of his utmost sail and it’s you who’ll be the catalyst while the head goes laughing round in we call it stew you who’ll tell her that Robin says he could name the murderer if he chose and you who’ll lie on your back and fiddle with the trigger grip and make a blind guess too low and to the left blinded by the obvious blinded by a searchlight blinded too blinded to notice ah no you noticed there was something clumsy about the way she was sewing but you’d put the plaster onto her curving thumb that very morning onto her curving thumb with its nail bitten to the quick her left thumb her perfect woman slips sensation curving left thumb because she’d been wrestling with her right hand to open the tin not her left hand which she would have managed easily but her right not her left right left right get a hold on yourself man if I haven’t said that before get a hold he said and so she got a hold and she used her thumb with the plaster to hold the needle and you saw it her left thumb to hold the needle hold the needle hold the needle but it’s stuck in the groove and goes round and round like the laughing head in the stew saying hold the needle hold the needle hold the needle.