Sleep and His Brother (9 page)

Then she'd snatched at a man of straw, old Pibble. Alas again, George Harrowby and Fancy Phillips had guessed his trade as he came through the door, and their whining intuitions were on the tape which went straight up to Silver. The moment she learned that, she tried to send him packing. But then Silver had barged in and hired him. Poor Posey.

No. Actually the morning had run very well for her all of a sudden. She had got her affairs to a sort of balance. She had not needed to betray her lover to get a genuine crime fighter onto the staff—and a conveniently spineless one, she must have reckoned. The money would continue to come in, but Silver would have to watch his step.

Pibble suddenly grinned at the notion of Rue Kelly working with a fake colleague. That's what the scene in the ward had been about. Pibble had stood in for Oenone, while Rue tried to persuade him that Silver was a real medico. And the curious little episode outside the ward door—Rue had tried to shut Silver up as he started to boast about his prowess on the boards, and Silver had taken the warning, and added a little unnecessary encomium on Rue's “soundness.” So it was conceivable that there was something between them. Could Rue's expensive equipment—scintillation counters and such—be going to arrive in empty crates? It didn't seem a likely move for an ambitious man, who had stuck the McNair for two and a half years for the sake of his research. No. More likely Rue wanted to prolong the joke of a secret revenge on his properly qualified colleagues, by working with a fake one, just as good as them. That was a relief.

Anyway, what should Posey's man of straw do? Did duty call? If it did, the note was muffled and off key. Who was going to suffer if Silver remained unexposed—except Athanasius Thanatos, that monstrous freebooter? The image of the hotel across the bay leaped to Pibble's mind; and after all, suppose Silver was now going straight—and he did seem fizzingly enthralled in his loopy research—there'd be a case for slander supposing Pibble got him sacked. And would the lush tide of money continue to reach the children? Pibble had never believed that any of us ever acts from a single motive—the smallest fidget rises from a choice between several drives. Now a welter of reasons decided him to keep quiet—quiet for today, anyway. He'd be in a mess if Silver suddenly decamped with the petty cash, because Brad was sure to hear of it, but for the moment …

The warm, pure blob of air in which he had been sitting chilled suddenly, and reeked of old fish; the car had stopped imperceptibly and the chauffeur was holding the door for him.

“I was instructed to bring you to the private entrance, sir.”

“Are we late?”

“No, sir.”

“I enjoyed the way you drove.”

“Thank you, sir.”

4

T
he reek welled from four decrepit dustbins, and the chill smote off a dirty brick wall and hummocky cobbles. Pibble stepped out into an alley between warehouses; red hoists jutted into the skyline; he could smell the river. It looked a good place for a knifing, with the dustbins handy to dump the resulting rubbish in, but the chauffeur was already unlocking a side door into one of the warehouses. He held it open and Pibble walked through, into an industrial lift. The chauffeur pressed the single button and retreated, the gate hissed, the warehouse door blanked out the daylight and left only a dim bare bulb, the hoist whined. When it stopped the gate hissed open and somebody unlocked the further door from the outside—this door was polished steel. Beyond it lay a plush vestibule with a Degas on the wall and an equally rare and perfect artifact holding the door—a bland, stooped, youngish man wearing an Old Etonian tie.

“Superintendent Pibble?” he said, smiling and holding out his hand.

The smile was charming, the hand fine-boned as a woman's.

“I don't use the rank any more,” said Pibble

“I'm Antony Catling. Thanassi's in here.”

He opened a door into a large, light room; light because one wall was a window and there lay the river and the stolid barges and Saint Paul's and an anthology of Wren steeples. Pibble was astonished by how many storeys the lift had whisked him up. Between him and the window stood an extremely beautiful girl wearing a purple trouser suit; Pibble smiled nervously at her and she stared back at him with the princely disdain of a wax model. She was a wax model, so Pibble switched the remains of his smile to the large, red-faced, crew-cut man who was now tossing the New Statesman to the floor and levering himself up from a lying position on the sofa.

“This is Mr. Pibble,” said Catling.

The man stopped moving. His gray eyes, very bloodshot, stared at Pibble for a few seconds, then he sprang to his feet like a schoolboy.

“Fine,” he said. “Now we can have a drink. What's your first name, feller?”

Mr. Thanatos had a metallic New York accent. His voice sounded like a disc jockey's filtered through the cheapest possible transistor, except that his enthusiasm seemed more genuine.

“James,” said Pibble.

“I'll call you Jim. You call me Thanassi. You'll have to call Tony Tony because if you try anything else you'll get in a tangle. He's a viscount.”

“Thanassi likes to show off his possessions,” said Lord Catling cheerfully.

“Champagne, Jim? Bloody Mary? Filthy ouzo? Scotch?”

“Champagne, please,” said Pibble, plumping late for what was least unlike his idea of a prelunch snifter. Evidently he didn't manage to keep the doubt out of his voice.

“Milk shake if you prefer it,” said Mr. Thanatos earnestly.

“No, really. Champagne would be fine.”

“Quite right. If you're going to booze with a millionaire you ask for bubbly. D'you know many millionaires, Jim?”

“Only one old man who'd given it all away.”

“Decided that the club was getting crowded, I bet. You eaten, Jim?”

“No, but—”

“What can we rustle up, Tony?”

“I've ordered hamburgers.”

“That'll do.”

Mr. Thanatos turned and began to rattle at bottles on a silver tray under the only picture in the room, a vast Canaletto of roughly the same view that lay outside the window. It was a curious room; the things in it looked battered but newish, as though they had had their sheen knocked off them in a few weeks by the millionaire's clumsy energy. Only the disdainful model was perfect; Pibble wondered whether his host owned, in her, the only fully clothed Allen Jones statue in the world. The New Statesman had come unstapled under his glare. Mr. Thanatos seemed to have been reading the same article that Pibble had seen on the weekend, about how the disputed South Bank site ought to be converted by the government into a world centre for student protest, and not allowed to swell the profits of this notorious crony of the Athens colonels.

Mr. Thanatos swung round holding an oddly shaped bottle from whose neck gold gouts fell foaming to the carpet. Catling produced two tall glasses and when they were full handed one to Pibble. Mr. Thanatos returned to his rattling and sploshing, and emerged at last with a pint-sized Bloody Mary.

“Sit down, Jim. Here's to life. Sit here.”

Mr. Thanatos fell into the sofa like a demolished factory chimney and banged the cushion beside him to stake a claim for Pibble's buttocks. The red goo in his mug slopped slightly onto the fabulous carpet, but he paid no attention—judging by other bloody flecks it had happened before. Pibble took a beer drinker's swig at his glass; it was not at all like the stuff you get at weddings. He sat, feeling as though he had been lowered into an upholstered bear pit.

“Pretty foul deal you got over your job, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos.

“I'd have been retiring in a year or two, anyway. How did you know?”

“Tony was at school with a guy. That's what I pay him for.”

“I don't think they were necessarily wrong,” said Pibble. “I seemed to be becoming sort of accident prone.”

“Sure. But there are ways of giving a guy the push, and there are other ways. You don't feel sore at my checking, Jim? Ram Silver gave you a pretty hard sell this morning.”

“Of course not. Sacked policemen don't exactly inspire confidence.”

“Depends where you are. Some countries they're the only guys you can trust. What's your attitude to life after death, Jim?”

He gave the phrase capitals—Life After Death—and his Brooklyn vowels shifted a few degrees toward Billy Graham-land.

“I'm afraid I haven't thought about it seriously enough to have an
attitude
. Usually I don't believe in it, I suppose, and when I do it's not exactly a fervent belief.”

Mr. Thanatos nodded and looked sad.

“Tony's the same,” he said. “It's something to do with your bloody weather. But Ram's onto something pretty exciting down there, wouldn't you say?”

A faint bell sounded, and Catling, who had been standing looking out at Saint Paul's, went and opened a small door in the wall and brought out a plate whose meaty reek filled the room.

“I've only known about it since this morning,” said Pibble.

“Spread a lot of mustard on it,” said Mr. Thanatos, watching Pibble's movements very closely as if to make sure that Pibble prepared his hamburger in such a way that no droplet of pleasure should be wasted. The big rolls were warm from baking, the meat in them a steaming, oniony swadge. Pibble smeared on the mustard, took a good bite at his roll, chewed, and washed it down with the princely fizz. It was schoolboy food, a truant picnic, buns and lemonade rendered fabulous by the touch of Midas. Eating it made him feel strangely cheerful and gave him time to think.

“I'm quite certain, myself, that some of the children are telepathic in certain circumstances,” he said.

“Tell me.”

Pibble explained between mouthfuls about his meeting with Marilyn Goddard by the mausoleum in the wood.

“Hold it,” said Mr. Thanatos when he'd got to the first of the hidden articles, the sixpence.

“Give me some wine now, Tony,” he said. “And fill Jim's glass. We'll try it again, Jim. I'll be this girl, you can be you. Do just what you did with her. I'll guess what you're holding and Tony can try to spot if there's any way I could be cheating. She was sitting on the ground, right?”

Mr. Thanatos threw himself with a thud to the carpet and Pibble squatted before him to produce in turn the knife, the mower nut, and the invisible conker. As each try ended he told them what Marilyn had said. Mr. Thanatos leaned against the sofa and glared at Pibble's fists in a fury of concentration, breathing so hard that he snorted at the end of each breath. Catling lounged above them, aloof but apparently just as intent, as if the charade had been some game on which he had wagered his whole estate. When it was over Mr. Thanatos erupted back to the sofa, emptied his glass, and bit a huge crescent out of a fresh hamburger.

“Two out of three,” he said through his chewings. “Crap. Bloody near evens, and that's only guessing which hand. I should have known you'd carry a penknife, Jim—you're the type—but that would have been experience and reasoning, which aren't what we're looking for. The other two were as near impossible as makes no difference. What did you spot, Tony?”

“Damn all. I think if I'd been behind him I might have seen what he took out of his jacket pocket—that was the nut—but not from the front.”

“And this kid got all four of them, Jim? Hand correct, object correct?”

“Well, not quite,” said Pibble. “They've got a very small vocabulary, and I expect ‘Hole in it' is as near as she could have got to the mower nut, but I'd have thought that she'd know the word for ‘knife' and she said ‘sharp.'”

“Crap. That's the word she'd know. It does for knives, scissors, anything that might cut you. Have another bun. Finished that bottle, Tony? How did this kid react?”

He sprang from the sofa, picked another bottle out of the ice bucket, ripped the foil and wire off it and hoicked the cork out, as though he were too thirsty to let the pressure blow it out for him. But once the wine was frothing out he stood there and let it fall to the carpet while he listened to what Pibble had to say.

“You can't tell what they feel until you know them very well, which I don't. I got the impression that it really was just a game—a way of staying awake until she felt like going back to the house.”

Mr. Thanatos nodded, filled his glass, and sat down again. “That's pretty interesting,” he said admiringly. “Yes, that's pretty interesting. What do you say, Tony?”

“It sounds like a remarkable experiment. I wonder whether Jim could repeat it.”

“What did Ram Silver make of it, Jim?” said Mr. Thanatos.

“I didn't get a chance to tell him before I was brought up here. You'll remember I may be lying, won't you? Or at least exaggerating.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, the McNair Foundation was very poor and ramshackle, but suddenly there's a lot of money available. The money depends on your favour, and that depends on the continued significance of Doctor Silver's work. He's offered me a post, so it must be in my interest to produce apparently remarkable results with the cathypnics.”

“I don't know why I ever come to England,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It rains all the time, softies and lefties take turns to ruin me, and the streets are full of hypocrites. Listen to me, Jim. I don't know who my family was, so I can't have a family tree or a scutcheon like Tony wears on his underpants. But I can have a motto. It says ‘Everybody is lying.'”

“Not just Cretans?” said Catling.

“Everybody.”

“Have another hamburger, Jim,” said Catling. “Thanassi's going to tell you about life, and that takes time. Don't hold back—he'll eat eight—there's more coming up. Where's your glass?”

“Adana,” said Mr. Thanatos.

Pibble felt blank, and no doubt looked it.

“No, no one's ever heard of it,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It's a town in Turkey.”

“Just north of the top right-hand corner of the Med,” explained Catling. “Not far from Tarsus, where Paul came from.”

“That's the place,” said Mr. Thanatos, “but it might have been any other hick town, anywhere, except that in 1909 they had a bit of a riot there. The local Turks decided that the local Armenians were letting the tone of the place down, so they knocked them about a bit. Thirty thousand Armenians got the chop in that riot, Jim. Thirty thousand. You wouldn't say I looked like an Armenian, would you?”

“No,” said Pibble, bewildered.

“Nor would I. Sometimes I think I may be Georgian—there'd have been some of them down there, and a lot of Greeks, and some Jews and Bulgarians and other trash. When you go on the town like those Turks did, you don't stop to ask exactly what sort of foreigner the guy you meet is—if he's not a Turk you give him the chop. Sometimes I think I might be German. Germany was building up influence in Turkey, so there'd have been a fair sprinkling of Huns even in a hole like Adana, but they'd all have run to the consulate and if anyone was missing there'd have been one hell of a fuss. I've looked through all the documents, and the Herrenvolk made no complaints about any of their friends being sliced up and thrown into a mass grave. You needn't look at me like that. I wasn't sliced, but I was thrown. A little old Greek priest snuck out in the dark to pray by one of the big holes they'd dug and hadn't filled in yet in case they found a few more oddments lying around; and he heard something moving in the pit. At first he thought it was just the bodies slithering against each other as they settled, but it went on and the moon came out and he saw something moving, so he climbed down and walked over the corpses and found a child, two or three years old, crawling about down there. He was pretty struck with the incident, so he called me Athanasius Thanatos, but he didn't tell me why until he was dying of pneumonia in a sod of a cattle boat trying to get across from Smyrna in 1922, full of hysterical Greeks. Course, he didn't think it mattered who the hell I was—I was going to serve God and wear a stupid black hat and smell of incense, and for all civil purposes I was Greek. But I'm not. Since those two days on that cattle boat I belonged to no nation. I was sore about it at first, but in the end it's got me where it has. Do you know why this Common Market crap you've fallen for won't work, Jim?”

“Tell me,” said Pibble. He had drunk a lot of champagne and his glass seemed full again. Catling had passed him a fresh plate of hamburgers. He felt happy, as though Mr. Thanatos' dervish energy was enough to change the air of the room and give all who breathed it new hopes, new strengths, new fires.