The Lizard in the Cup Read online

  “Screw everything!” hissed Mr. Thanatos, and proceeded to do so. Perhaps he was trying to unstick the quavering circuits by operating the switches near-by. A steel storm-shutter chuntered across the outside of the big window, shutting out the day; the lights dimmed and a projector whirred into life, throwing on to the side wall a picture of a yellow hand with enormous fingernails caressing a white breast; the lights changed to mauve; a blast of roasting air drove through the room, followed by a wind off winter mountains; the pictures on the walls replaced themselves like postcards on a souvenir rack, Van Goghs flicking out of sight to be succeeded by autumnal Renoirs, succeeded in turn by gaunt Dubuffets; the atmosphere became a scotch mist of Chanel; Sinatra crooned.

  “Screw everybody!” shouted Mr. Thanatos and turned the chaos off, carefully, switch by switch, until the steel panel slid back and let the dying daylight in.

  “I don’t know why I come to Greece,” he snarled, plunging into a vast armchair. “No one here knows how to connect one wire to another. Get Serafino. Come and comfort me, honey.”

  Pibble noticed Zoe Palangalos twitch, but it was Tony d’Agniello who got up and slouched across the room, smiling at her childish old lover. She nestled into the chair beside him. George picked up a telephone and said a few words in Greek.

  “Watch this,” said Dave Warren, as though he were a guide at a quaint local custom. “Serafino’ll fix it, and that’ll make Thanassi sorer than ever.”

  A dark, plump man in a white coat came in, smiling with a servant’s detachment, as though it were merely his duty to smile. He pressed the switch that had baffled his master; while the panel was still sliding open he rapped it with the toe of his glistening shoe; the trolley sidled out, but before it could hesitate Serafino nudged it with his knee, and stamped hard on the floor behind it as soon as it was clear of the opening. It hummed sedately to its proper terminus and stopped. The panel closed.

  “Sorry,” said Serafino. “Is the air condition. No like when room too cold.”

  With a harlequin gesture of chilliness, arms huddled across his chest, he smiled himself out.

  “Screw him, also,” said Mr. Thanatos with a world-weary grimace. “Make me a drink, Dave, and tell me what to do.

  Dave sloshed and rattled at the trolley, still frowning.

  “You’re staying on?” he said at last.

  “This weather? Sure. Even if I knew a couple of punks with sub-machine guns were laying for me, that wouldn’t stop me skiing. I’ll go anywhere you like as soon as the weather breaks. It’s sure to next week, or the week after. It never lasts long into November.”

  “OK, that’s a fixed point,” said Dave. “We could have looked after you better in London or Paris, but … I reckon Jim’s got the right approach. He said a hundred to one. Shall we take 1those odds?”

  “OK.”

  “Right. You stake a week and that gives you two years.”

  “I’m stupid today. Try again.”

  “You behave for a week as if the hoodlums are out there. If we’re right, then that buys you the rest of your life. If we’re wrong, then you’ve wasted a week of your life. I reckon you can expect to live more than a couple of years more, doing what you damn well fancy, so it’s a good bet at those odds.”

  “OK. I get you. So how do I behave?”

  “Jim’s the expert,” said Dave, as he carried a pint-size silver mug of bloody Mary over to his master.

  Pibble quivered. Still, in a way, it was true. Or at least he was less inexpert than anyone else in the room. He cleared his throat, but was interrupted.

  “I’m still skiing,” said Mr. Thanatos, “and not in my bulletproof vest, neither. That’s what I come for—that and the local girls.”

  He pinched Tony’s thigh to make sure she appreciated the insult. She snatched up his hand and bit it. Good humour started to seep back into him.

  Buck perhaps noticed the change as he wheeled himself back from the trolley, cradling his martini between his tiny thighs.

  “You’ll be OK inside the fence,” he said, beaming. “You stay here, and hire some professionals, and they can’t touch you.”

  “New York offices are open now,” said Dave. “I’ll get on to Whatmore at Pinkerton’s and have him send some good men out. And, too, he’s got Mafia contacts—he might be able to check that end whether they’re showing any interest in this place, or you.”

  “Jim?” said Thanatos patiently.

  “The first thing you ought to do is contact the local police. They …”

  “No cops,” said Thanatos. Behind the two words came the whole force of his soul, now focussed again. This mattered. Mattered more than his hypothetical murder.

  Pibble didn’t like it at all, nor the stillness of the rest of the group, waiting to see how he’d take it. He turned to the trolley and found a bottle of Whitbread’s, much too chilled for his taste. When he turned back with the icy glass in his hand the faces round Mr. Thanatos were still forcing themselves into naturalness. Only Doctor Trotter, who was standing over by the window teasing Zoe’s broken English with his pidgin, seemed unaware that a new and nastier wind was blowing.

  “You still want to help, Jim?” said Mr. Thanatos. There was a question in his hot small eyes, and it wasn’t ‘Who’s been paying for a holiday you could never have afforded?’ It was ‘Who do you trust? Where are your loyalties? Who is your friend?’

  “I suppose so,” said Pibble. “I was going back tomorrow. I’ll have to ring up Mary …”

  Mr. Thanatos cackled.

  “I like you, Jim,” he said. “Now tell me what to do.”

  Pibble found it hard to collect his thoughts as he stood in front of the armchair and watched Tony d’Agniello’s long fingers moving in small caresses through the fuzz of fur that showed on the rich man’s chest where his gold robe opened in a vee. It was impossible not to feel jealous—jealous in a different fashion from how he might have felt if she’d been curled up against heavy, handsome Dave instead of this gross old bear.

  “How long have they known you’d be coming here now?” he said.

  “A week, ten days. I didn’t know myself. Buck was here already, doing a job for me, but the rest of us came out almost as sudden as you.”

  “All right,” said Pibble. “I think Buck’s right and you should stay inside the fence for a couple of days. It looked quite good to me …”

  “Cost twenty pounds a yard,” said Dave. “We’ve got guards on it, and three dogs. We can arm the men.”

  “You said a couple of days, only?” said Buck. He sounded as though that spoilt the fun.

  “Suppose we treat the threat as real,” explained Pibble. “There are three serious possibilities. First, that the enemy have an ally inside the house, who might, for instance, poison you. Second that they will try a commando-style attack, probably from the sea. Third that they will send a couple of professional gunmen to the island and try to ambush you. Shall we take them in that order—which is actually the order of improbability.”

  “We’ve hired a new gardener,” said Dave. “And there’s a room-maid I’ve not seen before.”

  “Pay them off,” said Mr. Thanatos. “We can grow weeds and sleep in dirty linen.”

  “OK,” said Dave. “The mouth of the bay’s narrower than it looks. We can get Tisiphone round.”

  “Until a sou’wester blows up,” said Mr. Thanatos. “I’m not having my new boat smashed for a crappy idea like this.”

  “If a sou’wester blows up there won’t be any skiing and you can go to Paris,” said Dave. “A raid’s a lot to lay on, isn’t it, Jim?”

  “Yes. That’s why I said it was improbable. You’d need a boat, a crew, someone who knew the water … The best bet is gunmen on the island. I think we could check that in a couple of days.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot of island,” said Dave. “Guerrilla
s hid out for months here in the war.”

  “It isn’t like that,” said Pibble. “When a professional lays on a job like this—usually it’s a bank raid—the first thing he plots is his getaway. He won’t tackle it unless there’s an escape route. Here he’ll have a powerful boat at a safe anchorage, and another over at Zakynthos probably. He will pretend to be a tourist, which will give him a reason for wandering about in unlikely places, and my bet is that he wouldn’t seem to have any connection with the getaway boat, which would have arrived separately. He’d be staying at one of the hotels, or just conceivably in a tent. So what we’ve got to do is check the hotels, have a look at the new arrivals if possible, and check the safe moorings. If we draw blank in both, I think Thanassi will be safe out on the rest of the island. The odds would have risen, and he’d be staking a hundred years against his week, which isn’t such a good bet.”

  “We have come here to work,” said George. “Not to play foolish detective games.”

  “OK, OK, we’ll let you off,” said Mr. Thanatos. “Dave, too. What’s your Greek like, Jim?”

  “Puerile,” said Pibble sadly.

  “Hell. Buck can check the hotels—he’s only got to show his card and they’ll give him every document in the building—line all the guests up for him and throw out the ones he picks on. OK, Buck?”

  “Fine.”

  “Zoe can check the harbour for you,” said George. “This is a stupid game, but she will enjoy it. She likes boats, and making friends with strangers. It will amuse her while I do my boring work.”

  “That’s great,” said Mr. Thanatos, beaming. “She can find a few pretty girls for me while she’s at it. Then Jim can do the rest of the island, seeing he thinks it’s so easy.”

  “What does it consist of?” said Pibble.

  “Nothing except a bunch of phoneys out at the South Bay villas, the other side of the town,” said Dave. “Some of them have jetties, and they all speak English.”

  “Is that all?” said Pibble, surprised.

  “Most of these islands are like that;’ said Dave. “They look as if you could land anywhere, and so you can; but the minute a wind blows up you’ve lost your boat. Even those South Bay villas are dangerous in a west wind, and this place is hell in a sou’wester. The rest of it’s rocks and cliffs and a few beaches.”

  “Then we should be able to do it in two days, quite easily,” said Pibble. “After that you’ll have your professional bodyguards here, and they can keep an eye on the likely places in case something turns up after we’ve checked. I don’t think there are any other precautions we can take with the men we’ve got, and even if there were I don’t think there’d be any percentage in taking them.”

  “Don’t forget the monastery,” said Mr. Thanatos.

  “Hell, they wouldn’t try up there,” said Buck.

  “Best anchorage on the island,” said Mr. Thanatos. “And those two old lushes would do anything for a few hundred drachs. They know more about smuggling than they do about praying. If they get their souls past St. Peter it’ll be as contraband. You go and look them over, Jim. Look the whole place over. It’s worth the visit.”

  “What’s your interest, baby?” said Miss d’Agniello, tweaking a hair out of the mat on his chest “I don’t see you getting to be a monk.”

  Thanatos clutched her to him and his grating laugh shook the Dubuffets.

  2

  Yasas, pater,” mouthed Pibble carefully. It was not the meeting he had rehearsed, but the greeting would have to do. The monk peered down from the tree. His beard was a dirty yellowish grey and covered almost all his face, except for the bloodshot brown eyes and the blue lips. The unkempt hair and the blue colouring, all framed by the silvery olive leaves, gave him the look of some hitherto unclassified ape; but the long black garments and the decrepit riding-boots were human enough, even perched among the branches.

  “Kalos orisate,” said the monk, deep and formal. He studied Pibble for a while and then said “Englesos?”

  “Yes,” said Pibble. “I mean ney.”

  The blue lips smiled sweetly at him, and then spoke a long sentence. Pibble shrugged helplessly.

  “Then sas kataleveno,” he said, ashamed as always that the one sentence of the language he was really practised in expressed his incomprehension of all the rest.

  The monk smiled again, and pointed to where a number of baskets were propped against each other by the foot of the tree. They were shaped like flower-pots, two large ones and four small ones; one of the large ones had a layer of glossy black olives in the bottom; Pibble picked it up and hefted it towards the monk, who began to descend gruntingly from his perch. He had only one hand to hold on by, because the other hand was clutching a section of his black garment in front of him as if it had been an apron. It took a bit of manoeuvring before both men were in a position where he could tip the olives he had picked into the basket. He balanced himself, let go of the branch he was holding, and used both hands to shake the fruit out of the apron. He had almost finished when he slipped.

  Pibble would not claim to have caught him; but he undoubtedly broke his fall. Part of it, anyway, for the monk must have managed to clutch at a branch and slow his descent, or Pibble would have been more crushed than he was. The man was large, and well-fleshed, and his garments smelt like a cow-byre.

  Pibble lay on his back; the monk lay on his front, spreadeagled across Pibble; the basket, its base caught in a crotch, rained olives on them. In a few seconds the monk grunted, stirred, and hauled himself upright by the tree-trunk, where he stood, cursing. Pibble was slightly winded, but the monk made no effort to help him up. Suddenly the big face tilted to ask a brief apology of the sky for the bad language, and then smiled down at Pibble.

  “OK?” he asked.

  “OK,” wheezed Pibble, and sat up. The monk picked up one of the smaller baskets, knelt, and began to gather the fallen olives, so Pibble took another one and did the same. There were two sorts, the glossy, almost plum-like ones, soft and showing white flesh where the fall had broken the skin, and little raisin-like objects, shrivelled and hard. He showed one of the latter to the monk, who said “Ohi” and jerked his eyebrows up, so Pibble left them lying.

  An hour later he was up a tree himself, and ludicrously happy. This was his sixth visit to Greece, and though he loved the country almost as much as Mary, his total failure to learn the language had left him each time more discontented; he still lacked the knowledge and confidence to do more than order easy drinks in tavernas too primitive for the waiters to speak English. On one’s first holiday in any foreign country what matters is landscape and buildings and beaches and food; the inhabitants, apart from bringing the food and driving the excursion coaches and arguing drunkenly under your window in the small hours, seem to have no more relevance than the mysterious small figures in the corner of a Poussin landscape; but at each fresh visit they matter more—as in the Poussin, where one comes to realise that the landscape would be nothing without the figures, and starts to wonder what the man’s heroic gesture means, and why he is wearing his helmet for what otherwise appears to be an amorous assignation. The inhabitants become steadily more solid, and oneself, the tourist, less so; to them, one finds, one is not a person at all, only part of a crop. There is a tree-like structure in their lives and interrelations, rooted in this soil, putting out leaf and flower—no, the tourist is not the fruit, that is his money; he is only a curious earwig-like creature, crawling from flower to flower, from resort to resort, making them fertile. And even if one were to settle on Hyos—supposing one could afford one of the staring new villas of the South Bay, which Pibble had seen from the ferry—one would still be only a parasite on the tree; mistletoe, or the aptly-named dodder. Pibbles, unless they are very much in need of a rest, make poor tourists; after the first few days they are oppressed by their own functionlessness; if only there were a wall to repoint, a series of petty
thefts to be sorted out, roses to prune; but all one is permitted to do is be a bystander, to sit drinking retsina by the quay while the octopi are tossed ashore. One is a ghost-like thing, unreal because one cannot take part in the real life, doubly unreal because one cannot communicate.

  But now, up in his tree, Pibble was at least taking part, and had no need to communicate. Picking olives turned out not to be a difficult job, in a technical sense. The black ones were ripe, and the green ones were not. The trouble was that it was early in the long season during which olives are gathered, so that there were comparatively few of the black, and those were mostly towards the top of the tree, where they got more sun. The first tree he had done had been properly tended, pruned as one prunes a standard apple to keep it open and airy; but the one to which the monk had now led him was a mess, a tangle of criss-cross twigs through which he had had to force his way until he emerged into the brilliant October sunshine. But it was worthwhile; a lot of olives had ripened up here, the tangle of twigs gave him something to balance his basket and the main branches offered several good footholds. He made a resolution to climb more trees for pleasure; it must be fifty years since he had last done so—and only occasionally since then by way of trade. Last year he’d climbed down a cedar to escape from a burning building, and before that—it must have been 1958 when that tobacco heiress had tried to fake her own kidnapping in a balloon. . . He began to wonder whether there was a book in it—must be natural for ex-apes to climb trees, subliminally frustrating not to—or would it be more profitable to found a tree-climbing clinic? The Dendropsychists?

  He was stretching for a succulent monster olive at the limit of his reach when somebody yelled at him from the ground. He started, re-balanced himself and the basket, and parted the leaves to peer down. The man shouted again. He wore a grey shirt, pale old jeans, and even paler boots; his face was as brown as timber, his eyes dark, and he had trained across his cheeks a sweeping black moustache which gave fire and drama to what would otherwise have been a vacuous countenance. He went on shouting. He gesticulated. He kicked the tree.