The Lizard in the Cup Read online

  Pibble blinked, wondering how the Yellow Peril had intruded on the sacred turf of Butler’s paradise, then remembered that Tony Lock used to bowl Chinamen. No, not Lock …

  “Were you still serving for the South African tour?” said Butler.

  “Just about, but I wasn’t involved. The one that was cancelled, you mean?”

  “We chickened out,” whispered Butler. “We let a lot of long-haired louts and yobs scare us. That South African team was as good a side as you’ll see in a hundred years. What the hell does it matter who their bloody government is? You go along to the National Gallery and you look at a Velasquez, and what does it matter to you that the man he’s painting was a pimply tyrant who burnt his enemies alive? And Graham Pollock’s in the Velasquez class, and you can’t put him in a museum. You’ve got about five years to watch him at his peak, and we chicken out. Here am I—fifteen years of doing dirty jobs for my country, because it’s something I believe in, something I think’s worth protecting with every weapon God gave us, and then I watch them chuck it away because a few kids whine at them. My Christ! Now I don’t risk anything more than I bloody well have to do to keep my job and earn my pension, and if I see a short cut I take it. The way they treated you, you know what it feels like.”

  He raised a strangely short arm and snapped off a twig of the lemon tree above their heads. For a moment it looked as if he were going to tear it to bits, leaf by leaf, but suddenly he put it to his nose and sniffed mournfully at the bittersweet scent of its one small blossom. Pibble made a few sympathetic clicks. In its odd way this seemed to him a more reasonable and honest account of one man’s patriotism than he’d heard for a long time; if Butler’s idea of England—the ideal country for which he was prepared not merely to die but to do dirty jobs—was symbolised by flannel-clad marionettes prancing on green turf, Pibble’s own was probably just as parochial—a certain elm at leaf-fall, the attitude of old railway-workers as they bicycled out of the sheds and across the iron swing-bridge …

  “Five days,” wheezed Butler. “Are you going to give me a hand, old man?”

  “I’ll check Porphyrocolpos and the yacht for you,” said Pibble. “I may tell Thanatos what I’m doing—I haven’t really thought it out.”

  “I leave it to you,” said Butler dully.

  “And I’m going to some sort of party at the South Bay villas this morning. I won’t be able to go nosing around, I expect, but I’ll let you know if I spot anything odd.”

  “Let me know if you don’t,” said Butler. “That’d be something. That sort of crowd, you get everything. Drink, drugs, all the perversions from the little toe to the lughole—and they’ll spend their time telling you they’ve left England because they saw it was going to the dogs. Scum!”

  “You can’t think of anything else I ought to look for,” said Pibble. “Apart from the opium smell and the apparatus, I mean.”

  “Little mounds of white powder,” said Butler with sudden sarcasm. “Hell, you won’t find anything. The whole thing’s a balls-up. No, I don’t mean that—there just might be something in it. If you spot a junkie, you’re probably on to something. That’s all.”

  He didn’t sound very interested. He was staring moodily at the tomb of Mrs. Davidson.

  “Patience was the chief of her virtues,” he snarled. “That’s what they try to tell us. Learn to wait the other chap out, and you’ll win. Bollocks. Double-bollocks. I’ve wasted years waiting, and the best things I’ve ever done I’ve pulled off on the instant, by hunch. Like hooking a bouncer. Well, thanks, old man. Sorry to have spouted like this. I don’t often get a chance, you know.”

  “I’ll leave a message at the Aeschylus,” said Pibble. “If I sign it Jimmy Pibble it’s not important. If I sign it James it means I’ve found something.”

  “That’ll do.” Butler got up but stood where he was. “You aren’t really too blind to do a stint of umpiring, are you? Those kids!”

  “I’m the worst umpire in the world,” said Pibble. “I’m too easily influenced.”

  Butler laughed with mild incredulity and strode off between the tombs. As the clacking of the hens rose Pibble returned to his task of restoring Mr. Manners’ virtues to legibility. Butler was out of sight by the time he was clear of the hen-run. The noon sun battered his scalp. It was hard to believe that in three days it would be November. He thought of London—the last plane-leaves shuffling along pavements under a moist chill breeze, the tan greying on the returned holiday-makers. He was bothered by the notion that he had some sort of residual duty to get word to London, to Department J, that their Captain Butler was cracking up.

  To whom, he wondered, did he owe such a loyalty? To his elm-tree and railway-workers? To the force which had been his life? No, he decided, it was to two or three men with whom he had worked. They were still on the job, and though none of them was in Department J, or remotely connected with it.

  And if he told them about Butler, he would have to tell them where Anna Laszlo was hiding. After he had drunk Thanassi Thanatos’s Guinness, guzzled his ham? At this very moment, just over the northern horizon, a dark and silky waiter would be bringing Mary half a bottle of Heidsieck and a little plate of roseate prawns—the sort of automatic luxury which she had never known, and to which she was responding as a broad bean plant responds to a foliar feed. (Make it a rose-bush, you prosaic elder. But a rose doesn’t react with such miraculous speed, nor …)

  A flicker of pink caught his eye beside the path and was still. He stopped and saw a little lizard, two inches long only, spread­eagled on a whitish stone; it was the colour of smoked salmon, and had the same slightly translucent look; at the ends of its wide-spread claws were tiny pads; a spiny little crest ran down its nape. Pibble stared at it, still as the drooping angel on Mrs. Davidson’s monument. It rustled and flicked into a cranny.

  Not merely interesting—uncanny. The samimithi. You drink the homely milk out of the familiar cup—an action so ordinary that you never even think of questions about trust or danger— and in the last inch you find this creature. And then you die.

  Pure superstition of course.

  6

  He was already late by the time he reached the waterfront. The first thing that struck him was that the charter group of artists had indeed arrived—there they were, dotted along the quay, hunched over splayed easels, frowning as they settled to their first vain effort to capture on canvas the peculiar soul of Mediterranean blue—blue sky, blue water, and in between the blues the yellow-orange plaster, the pinkish tiles and the lounging boats. Pibble picked his way among them, feeling benign. They were no problem. He didn’t yet know what to think, but one thing he refused to believe in was a greying matron from Haywards Heath who could hold her own in talk about colour-balance and canvas textures, and on the side was a hatchet-man from the Mafia.

  “Jeem! Jeem!” squawked a voice as he passed the posh, expensive bar, the Lord Byron, half-way to his objective. He looked round, baffled, until he saw the startling orange coiffure of Zoe Palangalos. She was waving feverishly at him from a table under the awning, but she looked sulky. George, beside her, wore an uninterpretable expression. Pibble swore and went over.

  “Ullo, ullo,” she gasped, like a telephone operator. “Goodbye.”

  Pibble blinked, then saw that she was dressed to travel, and that by her chair was a clutter of carrier-bags and vanity-boxes.

  “Are you leaving?” he said. “Already?”

  “Leavink,” she said, pouting. “An I am not knowink anybody. Comink. Goink.”

  “It is not safe,” said George in a low voice. “I did not mind her playing around in the harbour when I thought the whole idea was rubbish. But now. . . She is too new a wife to lose.”

  He patted her hand, but she snatched it away.

  “I don’t imagine you found anything suspicious in the harbour,” said Pibble, to change the subject. Zoe threw her
hands wide, as if to embrace the bay.

  “All my friends,” she cried. “All good men. All bad girls. Is right?”

  “Sounds like the Garden of Eden,” said Pibble.

  She laughed, partly with pleasure at her own cleverness, as one does when one gets a joke in a foreign language.

  “Adamos,” she said, leaning over to pinch George’s ear. “Is always thinkink. Eva is I, is always playink. Jeem, you are my snake, is right?”

  “No, I’m just one of the animals, and you can give me a name,” said Pibble.

  He was embarrassed for George—she was cross at having to go, and was teasing her husband by a blatant display of seductiveness, aimed at any old man who happened to pass by.

  “OK, OK,” she fluted. “You are cold, you are dry. I am namink you Mr. Savra. What is that meanink, George?”

  “Lizard,” said George. Pibble blinked with shock.

  “Is rude?” asked Zoe. “Oh, Jeem, I am jokink!”

  She leapt to her feet and flung her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek. The scent she was wearing was as strong as catmint, and she pressed deliberately against him so that he could feel the softness of her breasts on his gristly sternum. He made as apologetic a face as he could muster over her shoulder at George, who shrugged, spread his palms and smiled.

  “It wasn’t rude,” said Pibble. “It’s just that I’d been thinking about lizards. You must be telepathic.”

  “What is meanink?” said Zoe, letting go. George explained in Greek.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pibble. “I’m the rude one, because I’ve got to go. I’m late already. I’m very sorry that you’re off, Zoe. I do hope we’ll meet again.”

  “Ope. Ope,” mocked Zoe. “Goodbye, Jeem. Watch that George is not talkink to the bad girls.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Pibble.

  He was cross with himself as he walked on—cross for being disturbed by Zoe’s treatment, for letting it bother him at all. Also for thinking about lizards, another famous symbol. He could see the Helicon bar now, a few white tables on the quayside and a faded blue awning; two figures sat at one of the tables. He tried to think about Greek—the hotel manager hadn’t known the English for helicopter, Zoe had been baffled by telepathy—it ought to be possible to construct a sentence in English consisting almost wholly of Greek words. Analysing the physiognomy and psychology of synchronous saurians … Hell!

  He searched the withered landscape of his mind for a more practical problem to occupy him. Something flicked and was still. Another lizard—a dark one.

  Suppose Doctor Trotter had told Thanatos, and then Pibble, five-sixths of the truth. Suppose he had fallen out with his clan over the division of spoils, and gone to Thanatos for revenge, and contrived to manoeuvre himself into a position of power in the future Hog’s Cay complex. All that was true, he’d admit. But then suppose that he was planning to use this position in much the way his cousins would have: that he had feelers out to the other side and was offering them most of what they wanted—a depot for the heroin trade in particular—provided he himself got his cut? Was that enough to account for the rumour Butler had brought?

  Just possibly. It would have to have been a rapid rumour to have worked so fast, though. Nor could Doc Trotter, however corrupt, have corrupted a bullet-hole into a petrol-tank. He might, then, have got in touch with some other faction of the notoriously riven Mafia. Porphyrocolpos could have an enemy without and within.

  Tchah! There was no evidence for it at all.

  The Helicon Bar was a whole civilisation away from the Lord Byron, and much more Pibble’s style. Its orange awning had been patched and repatched, and dimly visible in the reeking cavern behind it a bat-eared girl was cooking something by waving a paper fan at a biscuit-tin full of glowing charcoal. The tables on the quay were immensely heavy and ornate cast iron, painted so often as almost to obscure the regimental badge embossed on each bowed leg, the stodgy lamb of the 23rd Foot, Captain Davidson’s regiment. Pibble bent to examine one, thinking how gratifying it was that this legacy of Imperialism (and probably of some Quartermaster’s corruption) should still be finding a use. Then he moved on to where Nancy and Tony sat at the furthest table, deep in talk and drinking tea out of thick tumblers. The proprietor came up as Pibble was pulling back a chair and mumbling unneeded introductions.

  “Thelo mia bira,” said Pibble.

  “The Greeks make the worst beer in the world, and Yannis keeps the worst beer in Greece,” said a voice behind him.

  “Then I ought to try it,” said Pibble, looking round.

  “Quite right,” said the square young man who had come up behind him. “Il s’agit d’arriver a l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tour las sens. Hi, Nan. Thio bires, Yanni.”

  He fell into his chair with a thud. He was blond, wore thick glasses, and talked English, French and Greek with an accent that Pibble took for American. The proprietor slid into the dark intestines of his bar.

  “Mezethez,” shouted the man after him. “They don’t always bring ’em with beer. My name’s Hott, Mark Hott. I’m a painter.”

  “I’m Jimmy Pibble. I’m a tourist. I think I’ve heard of you, haven’t I?”

  “You from London? I’ve never shown there.”

  “No, but I’ve seen your pictures in a magazine. White on white?”

  “Yeah, that might be me. You don’t have to say anything about my work. In fact you better not.”

  “Gee,” said Nancy suddenly, “I just love all that white, Mr. Hott. You’re the whitest painter I ever did meet.”

  She did the accent very well.

  The proprietor came out with the beers and a plate of little fried fish-fragments.

  “Screw you,” said Mr. Hott happily to Nancy. “Who are your friends?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nancy. “We caught Mr. Pibble stealing Vangelis’s olives yesterday, and he made a date to go with me to Randy Wolf’s this morning, to see whether he feels like retiring into that kind of lot. And now he’s had the nerve to bring his bodyguard along. She says her name’s Tony. You’d better watch your step, Mark—she’s tougher than you are.”

  Pibble was interested to find Nancy so on-the-spot today. She’d registered Mr. Hott’s obvious glances, and she had somehow arrived at this less obvious truth about Tony. Moreover, though not quite clean, she had certainly washed since yesterday. She was wearing one of those Iroquois-looking shifts, more fringe than fabric. Her bare arms were sheathed in thin silver bracelets. Her nose was sharp and her eyes were sharp and her prattle was sharp —he found he liked her less than he had the morose waif in jeans.

  Mr. Hott gave Tony a big glad grin. She looked coolly at him, sipped her tea and said nothing. Pibble cleared his throat to describe the pink lizard he had seen, realised that he didn’t want this crass newcomer holding forth on the local superstitions which were such close kin with Pibble’s own private fantasies, so drank the beer. Mr. Hott’s fat, hairy arm swung up suddenly to gesture at the quay. His eyes behind the thick lenses were bloodshot, which made him look more furious than perhaps he felt.

  “Look at them,” he growled. “They paint like they were knitting.”

  It was true. All along the waterfront where the charter artists toiled, the butts of their fifty paintbrushes bobbed and weaved at the canvases with much the motion that the needles used to move in the hands of Mary’s mother as she knitted Pibble his ritual, unwearable Christmas jumper.

  “Mark’s a hard man,” said Nancy. “He paints with a knife.”

  “Keep your ignorance to yourself,” said Mr. Hott. “I do my preliminary sketches with a brush, just like Breughel, so as even Nan could recognise them as pictures of what I’ve been looking at. They get a little different when I work them up.”

  He was talking to Tony, who had the gift of appearing to take part in a conversation without actually saying any
thing.

  “Canada,” said Pibble suddenly.

  “He got it from my Quebec accent when I did my Rimbaud bit,” said Mr. Hott. He was still talking to Tony.

  “No,” said Pibble. “I remembered it from the magazine. You’re the one whose pictures keep getting stolen.”

  Tony looked at him now, for the first time, from above her tepid, milkless tea which she was sipping as lasciviously as if it were one of the monstrous ice-creams that the chef at Porphyrocolpos concocted for her. The glance implied shared knowledge and shared caution—that Pibble might remember a series of thefts because he had once been a policeman, but she would say nothing of that, and nor would he of her “illness”. It was a lot to read into a glance—wishful thinking, Pibble decided, that he could interpret her looks at all.

  “Only twice,” said Mr. Hott. “There’s some kind of Hott addict down there in New York. Four good paintings I lost out of two shows.”

  “Lovely publicity,” said Nancy. “His prices shot sky-high.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. But these things I did with my guts, and now I don’t know what’s become of them—don’t even know if they’re hanging in a good light … Hey! If we’re going to Randy’s we gotta be moving—he serves Rumanian Scotch after the first half-hour, and it’s twenty minutes’ walk—thirty this weather.”

  “Tony’s brought a beach-buggy,” said Nancy. “I’ve never been in one.”

  “Thanassi’s new toys,” said Tony. “He brought them this time.”