Sleep and His Brother (10 page)

“Right,” said Mr. Thanatos. “You try and do business with an Italian. You'll lie British and he'll lie Italian and you'll finish your deal with both of you feeling that the other one's a dirty customer. That's why countries have to go to the crazy expense of hiring ambassadors—they all lie diplomatic. But if I have to do business with a wop, I lie wop and we get along fine. I can even lie alongside prickly sods like you, Jim. OK, so I
know
you're lying, because everybody's lying. But you aren't lying about what this kid said and did—you're lying about something else; I know that, too. Get it?”

“Thanassi rides his hobbyhorses harder than any man I know,” said Catling.

“And the pale one hardest of all,” said Mr. Thanatos. Pibble thought it was a good joke, but that he had made it before. It is a considerable measure of luxury to have a viscount as your straight man. But Catling had somehow altered the flow, so that Pibble no longer felt compelled to tell his host about the Paperham murderer—an irrelevance which he had deliberately left out.

“OK, I'm lying,” he said. “And it's no business of mine who you trust. Tell me why you think that the telepathy of the children at the McNair can throw any light on life after death.”

“You done any prospecting, Jim?”

“No. But I do believe in dowsing, as it happens.”

“Water divining,” translated Catling.

“I go prospecting when I can,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It's a thrill. I like it best in bits which other people haven't thought of. You trek and you trek and you come to a stretch of desert which looks like any other stretch of desert and the guy you've hired to do your guessing for you says, ‘Here, maybe,' and your team sets up the instruments and you let off a few bombs—I do that bit—and you take the readings to another guy back in the city and he says it looks promising and takes his fee. So then you go and haggle with governments and try and find some suckers to pay for the drilling, and it's two, three, four years before you can say for sure whether the stuff really is down there. I've lost more money over oil than I've made—tell him so, Tony.”

“I'd have thought you'd just about broken even,” said Catling.

“Not even enough. Now, Jim, death is a desert. Same all over, nothing growing anywhere, nasty. But under it there's a secret, an answer. I can't go tunnelling down there—no one can—so I've got to judge by what I can see on the surface, right? Those kids of Ram's look sort of promising to me, so I hire a guy to test for results: that's Ram. He tells me he's getting interesting results from a new seismograph: that's you. And I'm the sucker who's going to pay for the drilling, because this matters one hell of a lot to me. I had sixteen years of my life stolen, and I mean to get them back.”

Pibble thought of the swathed shapes of children lying in Kelly's ward. Hamburgers are good food for negotiating over, because you have a chance not to say anything while you chew; then you say something different, provided the champagne lets you.

“Do you think the medical side of the disease is important?” he said.

“That Irishman?” said Mr. Thanatos. “What's he like? What's he up to?”

“I knew him before, as a matter of fact. He's clever and works hard, and he seems to be learning quite a bit about the physical aspect of the disease.”

“That's a pretty serious aspect,” said Mr. Thanatos. “I don't want an afterlife if it's not physical. When Ram and this Irishman have worked out everything about cathypny, they'll know how the kids see into each other's minds, and then we'll get hold of somebody who isn't a moron and induce the same effect in him, and then we can go places.”

Crippen, thought Pibble, he means it.

“You'll have to look for a very dedicated volunteer,” he said. “The children's abilities are probably the result of some deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies. They're deficient in almost everything that makes life worth living. Have you met them?”

“No, and I don't want to. I like things to be perfect, and people to be perfect. Of their kind. I choose girls who are perfectly beautiful, even if they are perfect bitches—I prefer them that way. I like Tony because he's a perfect specimen of his class. I'm not sure if I like you yet, Jim, and I know I wouldn't like a lot of kids with metabolic deficiencies. I don't like
any
kids—they can't be perfect till they've finished growing. I never was a kid.”

“If you look at it the other way,” said Catling, “you still are one. Shall I open another bottle?”

“Do that,” said Mr. Thanatos.

“Not for me,” said Pibble. Mr. Thanatos drank much faster than he did, but had given the Englishmen the start of his Bloody Mary, so they'd all three drunk about two-thirds of a bottle. Not that it was the type of champagne that makes you think after your second glass that it's time for a different taste—and the second lot of hamburgers had been much spicier, perhaps deliberately mixed to keep the thirst pricking. Catling turned, bottle poised, and Pibble put his hand over his glass.

“Crap,” said Mr. Thanatos. “I haven't done talking to you. Too, you have a moral duty to drink as much of this stuff as you can pump into your gut. You'll never drink it again, but if you swill away like a soldier now until it's coming out of your ears, you'll get to know the taste of it like a catechism. You won't forget it. Twenty years from now you'll be able to say, ‘Once I drank Thanassi Thanatos' champagne and it tasted
so
!”

He pointed the last syllable with a quivering hand cupped under Pibble's nose, as though he were offering him this immortal taste as a physical gift. Then the hand snatched Pibble's away from the glass and Catling filled it up.

“It's worth remembering,” said Pibble. “Did you know that there aren't any perfect beers left? I can remember what Bass tasted like before the war, in pubs where the landlord knew how to nurse it.”

The thought made him suddenly melancholy, darkening the tone of his voice.

“Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos, “I believe I'm beginning to like you. Let's have some more hamburgers.”

“Coming up now,” said Catling.

“What's on your mind, Jim? You think somebody down there is trying to take my money off me? Ram Silver? Your Irishman?”

“Nothing as clear as that,” said Pibble. “Doctor Silver's an extraordinary man. How did you come across him?” Mr. Thanatos laughed.

“It was the damnedest thing,” he said. “Iráklion. I wouldn't go near the place normally, but we were trying out my new boat and my girl bullied me into going over to Crete and putting in to the Venetian Harbour so that she could rook me for some Minoan junk. I reckon she knew some of the junk sellers and was getting a rake-off, but the day you start fretting about that kind of graft is the day you find you can't get along with anyone except a bunch of other millionaires, and I hate their guts. I'm rogue rich, Jim—I belong to the club, but they'd all be happy to see me slung down the steps. Anyway, we bought these fakes and we all went back to the harbour; but just as we came out of the Khania Gate Karen spotted this very spectacular Arab type sitting at a table in front of a taverna, and ran over to photograph him. He said she'd have to pay. She was sore—she's used to being paid. I like to see 'em sore, so I sent my man over with a drink for the guy. He stood up, poured a libation like a priest in a temple, and said, ‘
Zeto o thanatos
.' You know what that means?”

“Long live death,'” said Pibble. “You said ‘Here's to life' just now.”

“Correct. Now, Jim, I was having a hell of a time. My girl was a drip, my lovely new boat was a sow, and Mrs. Gandhi was trying to nationalize me. Those kinds of things don't matter, but they seem to at the time and you forget the things that do. And then this Arab wipes them away in three words. So I sat down at his table and talked to him all afternoon. I reckon he wanted me to take him aboard as my doctor—they're all on the make, Arabs—but I'm never ill. He was in some kind of fix with the police, he told me, and he'd made it worse by using a fake Egyptian passport, and you could smell he hadn't a drach in his pockets, so I made a deal with him. If he came over to the McNair, I'd fix the police and the passport. You don't fancy that kind of deal, Jim?”

“It's no business of mine. I doubt if you could do it in England.”

Mr. Thanatos threw his hamburger to the floor, where it broke into several pieces that scuttered across the carpet. Catling sighed and pressed a bell push, but no servant came. Instead a low cupboard opened under the Canaletto and a shiny green gadget stalked into the room, muttering along on eight metal legs and groping blindly with a vacuum snout. Beneath its belly a couple of brushes rotated. It fussed along by the wainscot to the corner, sucking and brushing, then up by the window. It seemed to know where the obstacles were.

“Lift your legs up when it gets to you, Jim,” said Catling. “Have you finished with your paper, Thanassi?”

“I hate the English,” whispered Mr. Thanatos.

“Don't chuck him out,” said Catling. “Remember he's given you a chance to show off your toy.”

“There's that,” admitted Mr. Thanatos. “All right, Jim, so you think you are all average, normal, and all the rest of us are some kind of freaks. Of course I'd have a bit of trouble fixing police and passports here, but you bear in mind that there are things I can do here which I'd never even dare to try on those clods in Athens, even though I was building them twenty hotels on stinking barren lumps of rock.”

“I suppose Doctor Silver told you about the cathypnics.”

“Yeah. That's another thing about being rich—people like to show you that they've got something you haven't got, something you can't buy; all the poor bastards have got is secrets, so they tell you them, and then you've got them too.”

“You must have thought it a curious corner for a qualified doctor to fetch up in.”

Mr. Thanatos put his glass on the floor with uncharacteristic care and leaned forward to stare, gray-eyed, at Pibble. Close to you could see that he was older than he looked, old enough to have been picked out of a mass grave in Adana in 1909. The surface of his skin was innumerable tiny wrinkles, and the pinkness not the flush of health but a crazed lacework of strained veins and blood vessels.

“I get it,” he said. “You
are
trying to warn me. Against my friend Ram Silver. You've talked about lying, you've asked about how I met him, and now you've talked about his qualifications. You know something I don't, like I said earlier.”

“I've been a policeman all my life,” said Pibble. “I haven't any evidence that anybody is trying to cheat you in any way, but in my experience rich men don't get cheated in the area of their main business—they're on the lookout all the time there. It's the odd enthusiasms—what you call the hobbyhorses—that seem to have the pitfalls in them. You've arranged a very odd setup at the McNair, with a lot more money floating around than you'd lose over a bit of casual grafting in Twenty-sixth August Street.”

“Twenty-fifth,” said Mr. Thanatos. “Tell him, Tony.”

The antics of the green gadget had given Pibble an excuse to look away from Mr. Thanatos. It had, during its second circuit of the room, found the biggest bit of hamburger a foot out from the wall and had tried to suck it through the nozzle. Failing, it stopped and the nozzle thrust itself inward like the trunk of a feeding elephant and pushed the bread into the brushes, which scrubbed ineffectually at it until a couple of paddles extruded themselves, scooped inward along the carpet, and hoisted the object into the hidden maw. The gadget purred, jerked, and trundled on. It made surprisingly less noise than the ordinary domestic vacuum cleaner.

“We
think
it's all aboveboard,” said Catling aloofly. “I take it you've met Mrs. Dixon-Jones.”

Pibble nodded.

“A rum egg, wouldn't you say? But uncomfortably honest. We did a crash investigation of her as soon as Thanassi told me what he wanted. Nobody had a kind word to say for her, except that she'd do anything for these children and that she'd cut off her right hand rather than a steal a halfpenny. So all the money goes through her, and …”

He stopped, eyebrows slightly raised, because Pibble had laughed aloud.

“Glad you approve, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos. “What d'you think, Tony?”

“He probably knows something,” said Catling. “But if he does he won't tell us.”

“Open another bottle,” said Mr. Thanatos.

“Not for me,” said Pibble quickly.

“Not for me, then,” said Mr. Thanatos. “Ram's got pretty good qualifications—they could afford decent doctors in Katanga—but it wouldn't bother me if he were as phony as a Hong Kong pearl. What's the use of passing a raft of examinations on the spleen when you're going to do soul research?”

“Ah,” said Catling, “but Empedocles believed that the seat of the soul was in the spleen. Or was it Pythagoras?”

“Crap,” said Mr. Thanatos. “All Greeks are liars and thieves. Now, Jim, you're going back to the McNair, and you'll take this job Ram's lined up for you, and you'll get through to those kids—I know you will. And on the side you'll keep an eye open and get in touch with Tony if you come across any monkey business­. Right?”

Pibble stood up. His head felt as clear as well water and his stomach cozy and content, but the connection between these two organs was, for the moment, tenuous, while his limbs seemed to have developed a curious autonomy.

“I'll talk to Doctor Silver,” he said. “And if I can be useful I'm prepared to help. I'm certain that
if
we get any results they'll be far more readily accepted if I'm not paid. I won't spy for you. If I learn anything which concerns you but which is being kept from you I'll try to see that you are told about it. And if by any wild chance I come across anything which looks like police business I'll have to tell them.”