The Lizard in the Cup Page 7

  This was a toy, a dream. Its timber was grained like an antique escritoire, and its fittings twinkled with polish. He deduced that it must be pre-war—anything much later would surely have been made of fibreglass. It was cousin to a vintage Lagonda, except that it had been refitted with a bulging big outboard motor; in fact the commonplace yellow jerrican which rested in the stern provided a very plebeian note amid the sheen.

  Thanassi laughed and Pibble looked back at him, He was sitting in the water now, like a man lounging in an armchair, with the tips of his unequal skis projecting from the surface in front of him. He was laughing to Tony, laughing like a charioteer in Byzantium under the benches where the official prostitutes sat. Whatever he was shouting was drowned by the sudden bellow of the motor. Then he was being dragged through the water, clumsy only for a moment before he rose on to the skimming skis, kicked the left one off and hurtled away framed between the wings of spray from the boat, gross but triumphant.

  “What’s this girl like?” said Tony.

  Pibble was surprised. He had forgotten about Nancy.

  “Young,” he said. “Small, dark, dirty, rude. Interesting. Lives in a hut in a vineyard and makes her living painting icons for an even dirtier monk at the monastery. I liked her.”

  “Then I shall. It’ll make a change from this scene.”

  A tiny gesture of her head indicated the luxurious mansion and terrace, and at the same time allowed her hair (which was so much a part of the unnatural luxury) to shift from one perfection and resettle into another. The noise of the boat, having faded, rose again. Buck had completed a wide half-circle and was heading in towards where they stood, with Thanassi weaving across the wake so that his ski squirted up a twelve-foot arch of spray each time he leaned inward to take the parabolic curve. The extra length of his track meant that he was moving almost twice as fast as the boat.

  “Don’t you enjoy this kind of life?” said Pibble. “Then you put on a very good act, if I may say so.”

  “I was doing a job,” she said. “Don’t ask me what—it was just a job, and it was worth doing. Then I got ill, and Thanassi said he’d look after me. I needed a man for a bit, yes, but it didn’t have to be a rich man—only somebody I clicked with, like I do with Thanassi. If Thanassi were a trucker or a shoe-salesman, I’d still click with him. Move back, or you’ll get wet.”

  The boat was coming at an angle towards the shore, so as just to clear the tip of the slipway; Buck, hunched at the wheel and grinning, curved his course to run parallel with the terrace, about twenty foot out. Pibble, as he moved daintily back, could see what would happen as Thanatos too, coming at a much sharper angle, cleared the slipway. Pibble climbed on to a chair to watch from a safe distance as the straining shoulders and the red mask hurtled past, fearsomely close to the terrace, yelling with exultation; then the wide plume of water scythed along the terrace edge, drenching the skier’s own table, his own umbrella, his own girl.

  Pibble tiptoed forward through the swilling brine. Tony was as wet as if she’d been ducked in the sea.

  “That must play hell with your hair,” he said.

  “The hell with my hair,” she said. “If that’s as far as his sadism goes, I can stand the masochism bit.”

  “Are you going back to your job when you’re well?”

  “Sure—that or one like it. I may have a bit of trouble with the old pig. I don’t want to hurt him, but sometimes I guess he’s lying to me about what the doctors say. Now I’d better go and change. But that’s a date for tomorrow—twelve at the Helicon Bar to learn about lizards.”

  “I’ve got another date before that,” said Pibble. “You’d better go straight to the Helicon, and if I’m not there ask for Nancy.”

  ‘‘OK.”

  She slopped off, barefooted. Pibble wondered who she was, and whether he knew her real name—probably not, having been out of touch for over a year. Being ill and convalescing tinder the care of Thanatos was a convenient metaphor for being wanted and hiding out under his amorous wing. And she paid her debt to him, in the currency he fancied. Pibble wondered whether she was right in believing that she would be able to retain the same relationship with Thanatos if he were nothing but his own personality, without money, without power. The power was part of the personality, surely. Even the physical and sexual vigour at that age must be partly fed by a different sort of potency.

  Pibble looked out to where the boat was skimming the water with uptilted nose, bouncing slightly as it went; behind it hashed the pale doll, leaning against the pull of the rope and sending his sparking waterfalls into the sunlight. The boat curved seaward, going very fast, hidden from Pibble by the plume of its own wake, with Thanatos hurtling towards the western headland. It was a beautiful, bright dance. At this range he was no longer gross, but a trained performer playing with veils of water.

  Abruptly, as Pibble watched, the dance faltered and the veils died. The doll subsided into the sea. There was something the matter with the boat. Pibble heard a single, wuffling thud just as the cackle of the motor ceased. A black plume rose irregular where the arched white had been—smoke. Buck was pulling himself over the gunwale with his hands, like a man about to be seasick, then tumbling into the water. Pibble couldn’t see if he was floating—he didn’t even know if he could swim—but Thanatos heaved an arm out of the water, then the other, and it was possible to sense the bulky body surging towards the burning boat. Pibble ran to the side of the terrace above the boathouse and yelled for Alfred, who appeared in shirtsleeves from a door at the lower level and looked enquiringly up.

  “The boat’s caught fire!” shouted Pibble.

  Alfred nodded and ran into the boathouse. Pibble scampered down the marble steps and then down the concrete path to the sea’s edge. On this side, between the house and the artificial beach, an inlet had been scooped from the rock so that the water could run at a good depth right in under the terrace, to form an amphibious garage for the rich man’s toys. Both the boats and the beach-buggies were kept here. Albert was already in a boat exactly similar to the one Buck had driven; he was kneeling in the stern, fixing feedpipes to another yellow petrol-tank which he had evidently lifted from the row of the things that were stacked along the wall.

  “Shall I come, too?” said Pibble.

  “If you will, sir. And in that cupboard by you there’s a frogman suit—flippers, skin, goggles, mouthpiece, oxygen-pack. Thank you, sir, yes, that’s the lot, and I checked these cylinders yesterday. Will you drive, please, sir, and I will change into this kit.”

  He fiddled with the motor for a moment.

  “Right. That’s the starter, sir. That’s the throttle. Clutch-pedal at your foot. Forward and reverse lever. Right, take her out easy, sir.”

  The engine banged into life as Pibble pulled the knob; he slid the throttle down, let in the clutch and allowed the craft to chunter out and turn into the artificial inlet. Three seconds after opening the throttle to full he discovered what Buck had meant about having all that power under your hunkers.

  “Easy, sir,” yelled Alfred. “Don’t run them down. Left a touch. Slow engine. Neutral. Reverse now—give her full throttle—cut. Left a touch. Beautiful.”

  Pibble glanced up. Alfred had stripped to his underpants but still had only encased his legs in the black rubber. His pale but muscular torso rose arrogant in the sunlight as he balanced in the rocking boat and judged the course to where the double-headed creature was floating, one head dark-haired but balding, the other grizzled and close-cropped. As the speedboat drifted to a stop beside them Pibble cut the engine completely. He could hear the dull crackle of the burning boat, though the flames were invisible in the sunlight and there was little smoke now. The whole stern was blackened to cinder—all that glorious wood—and was also sitting lower in the water than before. A big hand gripped the gunwale beside him.

  “Going my way?” said Thanatos.

&nb
sp; “How’s Buck?” said Pibble.

  “Passed out, but he’s breathing. He may be burnt bad, though. We’ll get him in over the stern.”

  In fact it was a struggle to get the cripple aboard. He was surprisingly heavy and inert, and the big motor prevented two people reaching him from above. In the end Alfred lugged him up by the shoulders while Thanatos, with one hand on the gunwale, shoved from below. Pibble tidied in the dangling limbs, and then Thanatos heaved himself aboard with a jerk and a grunt like a walrus emerging to its rock. They laid Buck down Iii the space between the seat and the rear thwart. He was pale, but Pibble could see his lungs moving.

  “Pulse not bad, sir,” said Alfred, straightening up. “If he was badly burnt, his clothes would be singed, and I don’t see anything.”

  “Great,” said Thanassi. “We’ll get him ashore, and then you van come out and tow the other … Hey! Look at that!”

  Pibble swung round. The other boat was gone. The flames had burnt through, letting in the water, and the weight of the engine had pulled it under, leaving only a little oil to show where it had been.

  “Hell!” said Thanatos. “Now I don’t have a pair.”

  “May I buoy the place before we go, sir?” said Alfred. “I would like to dive for it. I checked that engine. . .”

  “Keep down,” said a whispered croak. “Keep down. Shot at us. Got the tank. Saw the hole. Fire.”

  The boat rocked as Thanatos fell to a crouching position over Buck’s body and Alfred, still half cased in rubber, flung himself into the driving-seat. The engine bellowed and they were flouncing over the water, weaving irregularly as they went. Pibble, kneeling by the deafening engine, gripped the gunwale and tried to scan the headland—useless. He twisted to see the shore rushing towards them, the white-faced watchers lining the terrace and peering, like aquarium creatures, through the long window of the Tank. The whole boat heaved as Alfred went from full forward speed into reverse. The wash of their coming was still settling on the rocks outside when the boat bumped against the footboards of the boathouse.

  “Great steering, Alf,” said Thanatos, heaving out of his hidey-hole. “You’ve still got something to beat, Buck, man.”

  But Buck had passed out again.

  Pibble, trained sleuth, spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening patiently quartering the headland in the company of one of the perimeter guards and his dog. The dog was bored, baffled and ultimately unmanageable; it was the red setter/Alsatian cross, so he had many of the right instincts, but he didn’t know what trick he was being asked to perform, any more than Pibble did. The three of them picked their way through pathless scrub—myrtle still green and shiny, fierce gorse, grey rock-rose already losing­ its leafage, and monstrous thistles, yellow now with autumn but barbed with heraldic prickles. The dusty air reeked of sage mixed with a faint animal odour which he took to be drying goat-dung, but he saw no animals—though the dog sometimes tried to streak into the thickest bushes after small prey. Between them, in the six or so steep acres between the shore and the skyline, they found a hundred places from which it was possible for a marksman to sight across the bay. None of them bore a sign of occupation, but the earth was baked hard and all the grass already broken-stemmed. And anyway, they must have missed a hundred other places.

  In a way Pibble was relieved. If he had come across a litter of cigarette butts and a cartridge case, that would have been an overwhelming argument for calling in the island police. Thanatos had discussed this briefly with Tony—Tony in fresh clothes and freshly perfect hair, interested and unhysterical. She had agreed with Pibble and George Palangalos that Buck had been mistaken in what he saw: Pibble was almost convinced of this—it seemed incredible to him that a professional gunman should fire a single shot at the difficult target of the swaying skier, and not even attempt the much easier one of Thanatos, five minutes later, standing large and still in the boat. Buck had been furious about this, though more furious at having needed to be rescued. He was adamant that he had heard a sudden clang from the stern, looked round and seen petrol pouring from a small circular hole in the tank, and the whole rear section of the boat exploding into scorching flame. He said that at that instant Thanatos had been directly between the boat and the headland, and how the hell was Jim so sure that it must be a professional when he’d been talking about unreliable hairy Sicilian gunmen at lunch?

  “Lay off Jim,” Thanatos had said. “We’ve all been guessing, and his guesses sounded good.”

  That was the only suggestion that the shooting—if it was not imaginary—was somehow Pibble’s fault.

  Now, resting for a moment on a bare jut of rock which formed yet another excellent vantage-point, Pibble looked down into the bay to where Dave and Zoe Palangalos were manning the spare boat while Alfred dived for the wreck. If he found it, that would confirm the bullet-hole, or deny it. If it confirmed it, Pibble was determined to go to the police, though still in a chaos of confused emotions about whether to tell them who Tony was. He was fairly sure himself now, having realised that the russet hair was a wig— two wigs —chosen to be as unlike her normal hairstyle as possible. Mooching through the scrub he had tried to picture that flattish, highly intelligent, small-featured face surrounded by dark, short hair. The picture had clicked when he put square-spectacles on it—he must have seen it twenty times in the newspapers, illustrating stories about the heroes of the American left—Anna Laszlo, the Bomber Queen.

  From his lonely crag Pibble looked across at the house, wondering whether he would catch a puff of blackish smoke to mark where Thanatos and George were burning a cracked spare tank to show him when he returned. It would be plausibly scorched, fresh dipped in the sea, and Buck would now be sulkily ready to admit that the hole he thought he’d seen could well be a round oil-spot—which Alfred, of course, would confirm had been a feature of the unburnt tank.

  Dusk began to settle. A small red insect bit hideously at his forearm. He heard the motor start in the bay and saw the boat planing back towards the house. If they’d found the burnt tank he would have been able to see it through the binoculars Dave had lent him. They would know that, so there would be no fake tank.

  He too called off the search.

  5

  Just where the inland road from the town lifted to tackle the hills there was a patch of beaten earth on which a gang of children were playing cricket. Three very old men were watching them, but Butler was keeping wicket. Pibble saw a child with legs and arms as thin as splints canter towards the crease and bowl a fastish leg-side long-hop with a windmilling action; it was fast enough to scare the little batsman, who dodged but made a halfhearted effort to hook as he did so—more to save face than to score runs; Butler, standing up, took the ball cleanly through the tangle of whirling legs and bat; the child, overbalanced by a bat too large for him, teetered for an instant out of his crease, and Butler had the bails off. The fielders yelled and the old men clapped like Members in the Long Room. Long-off turned and saw Pibble.

  “Englesos?” he said eagerly.

  “Neh.”

  “Boleis, Englese?” said the boy, making a wheeling motion with his arm.

  “Ime poli arheos,” said Pibble. He stooped his shoulders and hobbled a few paces with the back of his wrist held arthritically to his spine.

  “Kritos, kritos,” shouted the children.

  “They want you to umpire,” called Butler. “I warn you, there’s a lot of local rules to learn.”

  “Tell them I’m blind,” said Pibble, shading his eyes and peering at the nearest child.

  There was a squeal of laughter and several repetitive shouts. Even the Long Room members cackled.

  “They say it doesn’t matter,” said Butler. “All umpires are blind.”

  Pibble laughed, pleased with the universality of the joke, and walked up the hill. Butler was a problem. Presumably he had come to that point to see whether Pi
bble indeed took the road to the cemetery, and had joined the game from the same extrovert high spirits that made him, in his professional field, ruthless. There were a number of possibilities, Pibble thought. The most likely was that he had come to Hyos to find Anna Laszlo—though it was hard to see why an Englishman from the Home Office should be chosen for that. No, not so hard: Department J might pick up a whisper from their London contacts in the refugee underground—there were quite a few Americans there; they’d merely want to confirm it, before selling the news to the FBI on a quid pro quo basis.

  He stopped in the road and scratched irritably at his chin, watching an old woman hoeing a little strip of vineyard. He wondered whether she was older than he was, so bent and yet so dogged. Anna Laszlo’s group had certainly claimed responsibility for the Folger Library explosions: how does one balance the destruction of eight First Folio Shakespeares against that of a beautiful and clever girl for whom one feels sudden fierce freshets of half senile passion? And the Pan-Am Building disaster? She had been accused of that—but the left had claimed that the actual deaths were the result of panic and bad handling of the evacuation.

  The old woman half straightened and stared at him accusingly, as thought it was her that he longed to, er … He walked on.

  The road was a line of brownish-grey dust twisting through an area where the slope had been part-terraced, long ago, and only haphazardly maintained. Some of the patches of earth that thus followed the contours were as neat as an English allotment, growing vegetables as familiar as cauliflowers and as strange as the big radishes whose leaves the islanders esteemed. Pibble would normally have gone and tried to talk to a young man whom he saw tending such a patch about the problems of black-fly and soil and fertiliser and irrigation. His Collins phrase-book contained a handwritten addendum called “In the Garden”. But today he had Butler to think about.