Sleep and His Brother (11 page)

“Hoity-toity,” said Mr. Thanatos. He was grinning and looked satisfied. “Phone your wife from my car and tell her where you are and who you had lunch with. Tell her oysters, not hamburgers. I like you, Jim, but you are short on glamour. Ask Alfred to show you how to disconnect the tape recorder if you want to talk secrets.”

“Tape recorder?”

“I had one put in,” said Catling. “It's wired up to the telephone so that I know how many hotels Thanassi has bought and sold when he comes back from a spin. You'd better see this before you go.”

He pointed behind the sofa, and Pibble turned. The green gadget, trundling round its ever narrowing rectangle, had come at last to the spilled pages of the
New Statesman
. First it nozzled at them, then it stuffed them between its legs toward the brushes, then the paddles came down and scooped at them without success, and then the whole machine shook itself irritably and began to buzz. Under the glistening carapace a new door opened, into which the paper rose, only to be excreted almost at once as a pyramid of fine shreds. The nozzle probed back between the legs to the base of the pyramid and sucked the shreds in, and in less than half a minute all that high-minded gossip, those solemn admonishments, those lucid analyses of cultural dandruff, were gone the way of Mr. Thanatos' hamburger.

“See you, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos.

“Good-bye,” said Pibble, “and thank you for the wine.” As Catling unlocked the lift he said in a low voice, “Well done, Mr. Pibble. You managed that very well.”

The door hissed shut. Pibble decided he was paid to say that to all the visitors.

Only among the dustbins did he discover how drunk he was, as the fresh air smote him, but a deft fist caught him by the elbow and wheedled him through the peacock door and into his chair with a solicitude that implied that only age and weariness had overcome the traveller. Practice makes perfect servants.

“Thanks,” said Pibble. “Mr. Thanatos said that you would show me how to disconnect the tape recorder from the telephone.”

Alfred slipped into the compartment, opened the switch panel, and raised a switch.

“Was my other conversation recorded?” said Pibble.

“Yes, sir. You told me it concerned Mr. Thanatos, so I have sent the tape through. I hope that was right, sir.”

“Fine,” said Pibble. Now he had betrayed one side and lied to the other, not a bad position for a neutral. “If we pass a chemist I'd better have some Alka-Seltzer.”

Alfred, still crouching to attention, flipped himself round like a gopak dancer and fiddled with the wall below the glass partition; silver flasks slid into view, and a gnome's pharmacopoeia; Alfred fiddled and buttled, then turned with a foaming tumbler.

“This is Mr. Thanatos' own prescription, sir.”

“Thanks.”

Ten seconds later the car was drifting up the alley, while a commissionaire held up the lorries in Park Street to allow them out.

The drink was pink. Ice from the tiny refrigerator jostled amid the bubbles. Pibble waited till the foam was less eruptive and drank it all in three huge swallows; it was scouringly bitter and made his ears ring. When he could see he settled the tumbler into the holder which Alfred had pulled from the wall and pressed the button with the telephone on it. This time he noticed the elaborate aerial extruding itself to the left of the windshield … She was out … No. He was so relaxed that for the first time in years he noticed how welcoming Mary's voice could sound.

“Hello, pigeon. I'll give you a million guesses. Not just tiddly—
tight
, but it's in a good cause. I've been swilling champagne with Athanasius Thanatos—yes, him—and now I'm sitting in his Rolls on my way back to the McNair. It's all right, he told me to—he said I lacked glamour. I'll tell you when I see you, about half past six I should think. Look, pigeon, when you talked to Mrs. Dixon-Jones and Lady Sospice … No, nothing shady, but they've offered me a job. Yes, it would, but there are snags. I'll tell you. Of course. But what were they talking about before you, er, joined them? Not the Preservation people? You're quite sure? I met Mr. Costain this morning, by the way. Liked him. Lady S., though—was it anything to do with the new head of research? Oh, well. Do you know anything about her granddaughter, Dorothy, though everybody calls her Doll? Not even any cousins? Is there much in the kitty? Oho! Yes, I've—”

“Have you nearly finished, sir?” said the ceiling. “Mr. Thanatos would like to speak to me.”

Pibble gave the man a thumbs up: if he didn't have eyes in the back of his head Thanassi should sack him.

“I must ring off now, pigeon. There's a queue of millionaires waiting for the phone. I love you, too. Bye.”

The instrument sighed back into its niche and Pibble sighed with it. The romance was over. Despite the dream luxury of the car he was outside the pale again, trudging along the public tarmac and unable to see over the eight-foot league-long wall behind which Wealth and Power lolled or sported. Even when you come to open gates between ludicrous lodges the driveway always bends behind screening trees, lest any finial of the mansion should be contaminated by an outsider's glance. Hemingway was an ass, he decided (not for the first time): there
is
something different about the very rich, an attraction—no, not an attraction, because it also says DO NOT TOUCH—but you feel that if you
did
touch the silky skin your fingertips would tingle. Did Mary receive the same prickling shock from the presence of horrible Lady Sospice? It would be difficult to ask.

Pibble decided to go and see the old girl himself—perhaps the honourable Doll would take him, supposing she was on speaking terms with her grandmother. They might live together, but it was hard to imagine so attractive a child fitting in easily with a tyrannical dotard. He remembered that Doll had said the old lady was nicer than she looked, but he knew too well the mysterious way in which people will find peripheral or meaningless virtues to praise in their most obnoxious relations. To be nicer than you looked, if you looked like Lady Sospice, was low praise indeed.

Pibble found himself thinking about Rue Kelly, and fidgeted in his chair, only to find that his seat belt constrained him—Alfred must have fastened that with unnoticeable tact. There were two possible explanations, as far as he could see, for Rue's cooperation with Silver. Either he was expecting to muscle in on some sort of fraud, or he simply enjoyed the deception; the secret and mildly risky betrayal of his whole profession might give him an iconoclastic kick. The trouble was that Pibble so much wanted the second explanation to be true that he suspected its plausibility for that very reason. And similarly, how remarkable was Rue, really? How clever? How good a doctor? Mightn't an elderly failed policeman elevate any young man who happened to be polite to him to the rank of genius? You make allowances for cronies because they are part of you; you have grown to fit in with them as a limpet's shell grows to fit in with one particular area of rock, on which alone it is watertight when the tide goes out. The Pibbles had once owned a black-and-white mongrel, a dull dog but eccentric in its small way, which was to lie brooding in front of the coke boiler in the scullery even when the thermometer stood at eighty. When Pibble came to fill the boiler the dog would sit up and watch without interest but with its head in such a position that the swung coke scuttle bonked the back of its skull; if he tried to miss the dog he missed the boiler, too, and coke scrunched across the scullery floor. The dog never learned to get its head out of the way, so after a while Pibble developed a trick of pawing the animal aside with one foot as he swung the scuttle; months after it had been run over by the school bus, he realized that he was still making a sweeping motion with his left leg to scuff it out of the way as the scuttle began its backward swing. There could be few weirder reasons for installing an oil-fired boiler, paid for out of inadequate savings.

So was Rue really only a habit? To the outsider, who didn't owe him what Pibble did, would he have seemed merely a rather hard young man on the make? But hard young on the make don't trap themselves in dead ends like the McNair. On the other hand, he had been brutal to his pretty girl in front of other people, and …

For a while Pibble dozed. His dreams were about arresting the Paperham murderer.

5

I
hope you don't mind walking a short way, sir,” said the ceiling.

Pibble woke, shivering. He was soberer, but not yet sober. “The exercise will do me good,” he said.

“Can you suggest anywhere I could hide the car for a while?” said Alfred. “You're a local, aren't you, Sir?” Pibble looked through the window and saw where he was. “One, two, third on the left, Mortimer Street, there's an undertaker. Joy riders stole one of his hearses a month ago and it was a write-off, so he might have room.”

“Mr. Thanatos would appreciate that, sir.”

“I'll walk from here. Have you got something to change into?”

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

A blush of surprise mantled Alfred's pallid tones. Pibble walked up the hill feeling that he'd won a small but immortal victory against flunkies. He felt happy and excited, and strode springy-footed, filling his lungs with the dank, familiar air. First he must try to explain to Mrs. Dixon-Jones about his game with Marilyn, so that she could judge the evidence for herself. Then find Rue alone, and coax him or startle him (perhaps with details about Ram Silver's past) into saying what
else
was nasty in the woodshed.

Rue knew something about Silver; he was not the type to rest till he knew all. Ask the honourable Doll for an introduction to her grandmother. Give Silver a report on his tête-a-têtes with Marilyn Goddard and Mr. Thanatos. And only
then
could he reasonably look for Marilyn herself.

He stopped suddenly and laughed aloud, so that a mother wheeling a pram down the pavement glanced sharply at him and swung out to cross the road before they met. He walked on more slowly, fascinated by the discovery that an elderly policeman had been running like a lover to the mental embrace of a nine-year-old moron—though if she slept twenty hours a day it was five to one that she'd be doing so now. But amid all the seductions of Thanassi's Bower of Bliss his subconscious had remained faithful, treasuring the weird stimulus of that meeting of minds. Well, if he could repeat the effect he had a moral duty to explore further; not to do so would be a sin against Holy Knowledge, as bad as book burning. So he couldn't tell Brad or anyone at the Yard about Silver, or they'd send a bobby up to lean on the doctor's shoulder and say, “We're watching you, mate.” At which point the experienced con man picks up his traps and goes, and with him goes the chance of adding Pibble's pebble to the cairn of knowledge. And that in turn meant that he, useless, sacked, demolished old Pibble, had to play cops again, find out what Silver's lay was, prevent the moment when a custom-built electron microscope arrived in an empty crate just as a new numbered account in Zurich achieved a gratifying credit balance.

Thanassi knew about Silver now. He'd listened to the tape and ordered Alfred to stay in the area and watch over his interests, which would not be easy to do inconspicuously in peacock livery. Alfred for Thanassi, then, and Pibble for the rest. If Brad got to hear about it, there would be no defence; It was Pibble's bad luck that it seemed the only thing to do.

He was feeling considerably less exhilarated by the time he pushed the door of the McNair open, but cheered at the sight of the two doorkeepers sitting back to back on the carpet.

“Hello, you two,” he said.

“Man,” said one child, unsmiling.

“Shove off,” drawled the other.

“I'm the copper who lost his hat,” explained Pibble. “I want to see Posey again.”

“Poor Posey,” said one child.

“Man,” said the other.

Perhaps they weren't even reacting to his presence at all—Marilyn­ had said “Poor Posey.”

“Shove off,” said both children together.

He crossed the hall to the glaring passage.

Mrs. Dixon-Jones did not look in the mood to play Poor Posey. Her face and lips were pale except for a bright red blotch below each cheekbone. She hardly opened her mouth to free the acid syllables.

“Come in, Mr. Pibble,” she said. “I've just been talking about you.”

“Oh, who to?”

“An employee of Mr. Thanatos called Catling.”

“Viscount Catling.”

The title was not emollient.

“He says it is Mr. Thanatos' wish that you should be taken onto the staff in an advisory capacity, to help Doctor Silver with his research, and that I am to settle your salary with you. I can understand that, though I cannot see the point of it. But he also says that you are to make any recommendations about the Foundation which you think fit.”

“Oh, I say, that's a bit thick!”

“He says that you are to have full facilities to investigate my department, as well as Doctor Silver's and Doctor Kelly's, and that you are responsible to no one but Mr. Thanatos himself.”

“But this is nonsense!” said Pibble.

“I'm glad to hear you think so.”

“I had lunch with Mr. Thanatos and Lord Catling and we talked about the telepathic abilities of the children. I agreed to talk to Doctor Silver about helping him with his research, but that was the only practical result. Most of the time we were talking about life and death and things like that.”

Mrs. Dixon-Jones was once more tapping her pen against the little silver globe, punishing the Bering Straits for Pibble's shortcomings.

“What salary do you suggest?” she said.

“I told him I didn't want to be paid, at least for the time being.”

“He usually gets what he wants the way he wants it. He finds a lever.”

“That's one advantage of being retired,” said Pibble. “There isn't a fulcrum any longer, if you see what I mean.”

(Even if you have a betraying tape, there's no longer a job for you to lever against.)

“Well, that's something,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones without relaxing. “I can put off filling in those ghastly forms for you. What do you want to know about my department, Mr. Pibble?”

“Nothing. I just—”

“You'll have to ask me,” she snapped, “or Mr. Thanatos will decide that I've been obstructive and I'll be sacked. After seventeen years!”

“He can't do that—there are limits to his power. He's not God. He doesn't own the place.”

“As good as,” she said. “I went down on my knees to the trustees, but he had them hypnotized. They called it ‘a very happy solution to the Foundation's financial difficulties.' Oh, God, I wish I'd never …”

Been born? Been to Crete, more likely.

“Was this what you were talking to Lady Sospice about?” he asked.

She nodded.

“He must be putting up a very large sum of money,” he said.

“He's mad, but it's not as much as you'd think. We were nearly broke, but we got along. Ram's toys are expensive, and Rue's even more so, but apart from that it didn't need a lot to put us on our feet.”

“This place must eat money,” said Pibble. “Couldn't you have sold it and gone to live somewhere easier to run?”

She shook her head, still stately but less enraged.

“It isn't worth much, because no one would get building permission here. And we'd have to get a bill through Parliament to vary the Trust, because one of the conditions is that we live here.”

“Who are the trustees?”

“The mayor, the bank, and one of the Sospice family lawyers.”

“Not Lady Sospice?”

“She's the patron, which means she has no powers except to make life hell for me.”

“We all seem to do that. I really came to explain about my talk with Marilyn Goddard this morning.”

“Yes,” she said. Despite the sharp impatience of the mono­syllable, Pibble began at the beginning. She snorted when he described Mr. Costain's camerawork, but with less fire than she would have that morning—perhaps Thanassi's tampering with the hierarchy had given her a new foe. Pibble began to describe the guessing game.

“You're not making this up?” she said.

“No, as a matter of fact, not. But I quite see why I might be.”

“Go on.”

“How much do you remember about the Paperham murders?”

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“It matters.”

“I got one of the books out of the library, but I couldn't read it. They should have hanged him.”

“I don't know,” said Pibble, uneasy because he really didn't.

“Go on, anyway.”

“When she saw I hadn't a chestnut she was terrified.”

“You can't read their faces.”

“You could this time.”

“She's often frightened. She's different from the others.”

“I know. I know why.”

He told her about “Good day for Posey,” and what he thought it meant, and Marilyn's sudden friendliness, and Brad's half-confirmation­ of his guess. When he'd finished piecing it together it didn't sound like a rigid logical structure, but she took a different­ line of attack.

“They can't see into the future. They think they can, but I'm sure they can't.”

“Yes, but—”

“And the man's locked up, so it's nonsense.”

“It doesn't have to be that man. The victims at Paperham were all very respectable women, well-to-do, smart by Paperham standards. They had quite a lot in common with you, and if somebody round here were thinking of harming you—making plans, as it were—Marilyn might have been aware of the impulse and felt it was the same as her stepfather's.”

“No doubt I have a lot of enemies,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, and looked it. “You said that little rat Costain was there—be might be thinking about strangling me, but it's ridiculous to suggest he'd actually
do
anything.”

Pibble shook his head. If Marilyn had picked up a murderous echo of her past from Mr. Costain, he would need to have been thinking about his human quarry with excitement, pleasure, a sort of lust. So far only great brickwork and the Domestic Grandiose seemed to have moved him to passions of that stature.

“I probably shouldn't have worried you with this,” he said.

“Never mind. You'd better tell Ram about your game.”

“Yes. What do you want me to say about the second half?”

“I'd rather you left it out.”

“OK. It doesn't prove anything.”

“Not yet,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. Suddenly she laughed with a strange and bitter glee.

“I'd like to see him try,” she said. “You'll find Ram in his office. Do you want me to do a memo for him and Rue Kelly about your being allowed to snoop into their affairs?”

“I'll leave it to you,” said Pibble, and left.

The tape recorder in the corridor was listening to silence with a diligence that so irritated him that he shouted “Boo!” into the microphone for the pleasure of watching the machine's green eye wince with the shock of sound. But the children by the door, though they had moved round face to race and were now playing a slow, strange finger-touching game, ignored him as he crossed the hall, even though he thought with every cranny of his mind about the richness and pinkness of raspberry ice cream.

Depressed and ashamed of himself, he mooched up the monstrous stairs. He had been behaving like a tiresome old hen, the sort that you hear in the bay windows of public libraries rattling away to some unwilling stranger about her premonitions of family debacles. The intensity of the guessing game by the mausoleum was already fading, becoming more like a dream or a daytime fantasy of self-importance; and his own guesses about the meaning of the child's words—which had seemed so sure, so confirmed by her sudden trust—he could now see would bear a hundred other explanations. And Mrs. Dixon-Jones, in sour contrast, had behaved extremely well. You'd have expected her to be jealous that this tedious newcomer should have been able to make contact like that with one of the children, while she, who had known and adored them—generations­ of them, living their moth-short lives—had never been allowed to. She could easily have shown she disbelieved him, but her heroic animosities were above bothering with Pibbles.

A boy was asleep in a doorway on the landing. Pibble knelt and with some difficulty found his pulse, slow but quite firm.

“That's Peter,” said Ivan's voice above his head. “Don't worry—he's OK.”

“They manage to look very, er, inert,” said Pibble.

“You get used to it. We don't lose many, honest. We've had a lot of practice looking after them—keep them warm, you know, and that. We've only lost one in my time, apart from cathypny itself—a kid in Doctor Kelly's ward got meningitis month before last. Can't do much about that.”

Pibble straightened up and walked with Ivan toward Dr. Silver's domain.

“Do you like working here?” he said.

“Sure. I sometimes think that it's going to feel a bit funny when I marry and have kids of my own, normal kids, not dormice. They'll never be quite the same thing, somehow. See you.”

He went into the room with the purring recorders in it, and Pibble took the next door.

Dr. Silver was also asleep, lying in his black, expensive chair with his mouth slightly open and his arms dangling. He slept with great authority, as if giving a demonstration of the techniques of slumber. Pibble was almost able to persuade himself that he could remember seeing that noble head among the thousands of photographs of trivial villains which year after year had passed across his desk. He tiptoed across the lush carpet to the door from which the secretary had emerged that morning.

“Mr. T. treat you properly?” said the rich voice as his hand started to turn the handle.

“I was trying not to wake you up.”

“Time I woke. That guy Doll quoted was half right. Sleep is beautiful. In short doses. Death goes on a bit long for my tastes. How did you make out?”

“Oh, he gave me champagne and hamburgers, and he said he liked me. He wants me to take the job we were talking about, but I decided I'd rather do it for free and see how it goes. I imagine that paid performers are more suspect than volunteers, in your kind of work.”