Skios: A Novel (10 page)

“I believe you know Senator Hauptmayer, sir?” said one of the faces.

And here it was—a question. A perfectly easy one to deal with, however, even though he so rarely resorted to lies.

“How is the senator?” he asked.

“Poorly, as you know.”

“Give him my best regards.”

“I will, sir.”

Another face: “I read your book … What was it called…?”

Harder, but not impossible. Dr. Wilfred spread his hands helplessly and smiled. He didn’t know, either. Everyone laughed.

“Anyway,” said the face, “you know the one I mean, and I wanted to ask you: when you wrote this book, what were you trying to tell us?”

He could put this one away in the same fashion as he had the last one.

“Heaven knows,” he said. More laughter. “Only whatever it was I was trying to tell you, I obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.”

Another hit. On the edge of the group, behind all the unfamiliar faces, was one that he knew. Pleasantly open eyes, watching him and smiling. He gave her a little wave, and a small special smile that she would be able to see was different from the smiles he was handing out to all the others. She did; she quickly looked away to hide how pleased she was.

Another face: “Now, I’ve read that book, and I was somehow expecting you to be … well, I don’t know …
different
…”

“No,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I’m pretty much the way I am.”

They loved it. Another face coming up, though: “You won’t recall this, Dr. Wilfred, but we have met before.”

Ironical, obviously. Means he’s met Dr. Wilfred and it wasn’t me. On the other hand … “Where was it? Not at that thing in Mexico?”

“Montreal,” said the face.

“Montreal … In the bar?”

“In the hot tub!”

“I wonder you recognized me with my clothes on.”

“I never forget a face. Though, yes, you’ve changed.”

“Changed? Have I?” The dark depths waiting below the high wire. The audience watching expectantly.

“You’ve got younger, Dr. Wilfred!”

“Hot tubs, obviously.”

Unbelievable, thought Dr. Wilfred. You were who you said you were, even if they knew you weren’t! And even as he thought this he realized that it was Dr. Wilfred who was thinking it. He was Dr. Wilfred not just for the people around him. He was becoming Dr. Wilfred for himself.

It was all too easy! More danger, more danger!

“Just a quick question, if I may,” said a small man in a pair of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. “Oh—Professor Norbert Ditmuss, Department of Applied Dynamics, University of West Idaho. Emeritus, but I like to keep in touch with the subject. Now, sir, you say in your book
Planned Innovation,
Chapter Seven, I think it is, page 179, am I right, in the footnote on your statistical methodology, that assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler Distribution, given that lambda is negative and mu is greater than phi, will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobald’s constant. Now, my question to you, sir, is exactly
how
close?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Wilfred. “As close as a dog and a flea.”

Everyone laughed respectfully. Except Professor Ditmuss. “Yes, but seriously,” he said.

“Seriously?” said Dr. Wilfred. “An inch and a half.”

“I really do need an answer to this question, Dr. Wilfred,” said Professor Ditmuss, “because I am writing a paper that will reference your work, and I don’t want to be unjust. So would you be kind enough to take us step by step through your calculation?”

“Well…” said Dr. Wilfred.

There was an easy way round this question, just as there was to all the others, but for some reason Dr. Wilfred couldn’t see what it was. He seemed to have come rather suddenly to the end of the golden pathway that had stretched out before him.

Everyone around the table had turned to watch him. None of them had understood a word of the question, and they looked forward to the brilliance that Dr. Wilfred would display in providing an answer not a word of which any of them would understand either.

“Well…” said Oliver, since Oliver was what Dr. Wilfred was now rather swiftly subsiding back into.

“I hate to interrupt,” said a soft and welcome voice. Nikki had stepped forward. “But I shall have to ask you two gentlemen to discuss technical questions at some other time. I’m whisking Dr. Wilfred away for a rather important meeting.”

19

On the pergolas in the shade garden, the plumbago was piled as high and blue as the sky above it. Nikki looked up at it and felt as serenely happy as the blossom. There were forty different things she should have been doing. But she wasn’t doing any of them. She was strolling through the shade garden with Dr. Wilfred.

“This is the important meeting I’ve got to go to, is it?” said Dr. Wilfred.

“It
is
important,” she said. “We’ve got to discuss your schedule.”

She couldn’t get over the sheer lightness with which he wore his immense distinction. You would never have guessed from meeting him how much he knew and how much he had done. He was totally unlike any other guest of honor they had ever had. And everyone plainly loved him. Of course. How could they not? From the first moment she had set eyes on him at the airport she had known they would. And it was she who had suggested inviting him. He was her discovery.

She found herself telling him about her childhood. She had always wanted to be an artist, she said—she had had such intense feelings stirring in her when she was sixteen, and the longing to express them had welled up like the sap in spring pouring upwards through the plumbago. Somehow, though, she found herself doing a degree in arts administration instead. Then gradually, step by step, by way of jobs in provincial art galleries and touring theater companies, she had made her way to where she was now.

“Actually,” she said, “what I’m doing is not
totally
dissimilar to your job. I know you’re dealing with billions of pounds, and decisions that are going to affect the whole future of the world. Whereas I’ve only got the odd few million dollars to play with each year for this place. But I have to say who gets it and who doesn’t! I’m the one who has to provide some structure! Scientific research is probably a bit like the arts, isn’t it? I mean …
messy.
You don’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”

“True,” said Dr. Wilfred. “Well,
I
certainly don’t. Not a clue.”

“It’s like kids messing around in the sandpit. Great fun for the kids. Very educational. But someone’s got to look after the sandpit. Stop the cat from using it as cat litter, and the children from walking it into the house. Wash the sand out of their hair and clean it out of their noses. Yes?”

“Science and scientists! A total mystery to me!”

“Arts and artists are the same. Some of the writers we’ve had here!”

“I can imagine.”

She brushed her hand through the flowers in the herbaceous border. A shower of sparkling drops still hanging on leaves and petals from the overnight sprinklers came cascading down. “Orodigia,” he told her. “Flowering pangloss. Jacantha. Smithia. Peloponnesian daisies.”

“My God, you’re a gardener as well as everything else?”

“Of course not. I’m making it up as I go along. Like all the rest of it.”

They walked on in silence for a while.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got plans for the future. I can’t do much at the moment. Christian’s still in charge. The director. You haven’t met him. No one ever sees him. That’s the way he exercises his power—by being invisible, like God, and doing nothing. Some people don’t even believe he exists. I have a feeling he won’t be here for much longer, though. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I think you may be the final nail I’m hammering into his coffin.”

She broke off a low-hanging spray of violet blossom.

“Jacantha?” she said.

“If you like.”

She put the spray in the buttonhole of his shirt.

“Now, your schedule. This morning it’s simply more mingle, mingle, if you can bear it. Yes? Then at midday, you’ll remember, you’re having drinks with Mrs. Fred Toppler. Lunch with the other guests. After lunch…”

“A little siesta? Check that it really is right-hand inside?”

“I shall be at the airport, meeting Mr. Luft.”

“Mr. Luft?”

“Wellesley Luft! For your big interview! It’s in your program!”

“Of course.”

“Then tomorrow you’re on the ten-forty-five flight back to London. After which, I suppose, we’ll never see each other again.”

“But first a good night’s rest.”

“First, the lecture.”

“Oh, yes. The lecture.”

*   *   *

One after another, all over the newly carpeted piazza, white tablecloths flew up into the sunlit air, spread their wings, and settled on the battered caterer’s tables like huge birds landing. The agency waiters and waitresses who had come off the overnight ferry from Athens pounced on them and wrestled them down. The whole square was turning into an open-air banqueting hall in front of Dr. Wilfred’s eyes.

“This is the agora,” Nikki told him. “The old marketplace. You’ll be sitting exactly where we’re standing, at the same table as Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou and their guests. There’s quite a number of Mr. Papadopoulou’s business associates coming.

“It will be getting dark as we eat. By the end of dinner the only light will be from the candles on the tables.

“And then those spotlights up there will come on, and Mrs. Toppler will stand up and introduce you. I hope I’ve got everything right in her speech. She may read it out wrong, of course, because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses.

“Then the maître d’ will move the lectern and the microphones, and put them here, in front of you.”

He stood in front of the still imaginary microphones and lectern, almost too dazzled by the imaginary spotlights to see the imaginary candlelit faces gazing up at him from the imaginary darkness. He was in no hurry. He waited while the imaginary audience settled. And then …

“And then,” said Nikki. “Scientometrics!”

“Scientometrics? What are scientometrics?”

“What you’re talking about! Isn’t it? That’s what we’ve announced! ‘Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics.’ You don’t want to change it, do you?”

“No, no. Scientometrics. Wonderful.”

“I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say!” said Nikki.

“Nor can I,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred.

*   *   *

“And then at last,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred, “after the lecture…”

They had left the agora and reached a belvedere overlooking the sea. He leaned slowly towards her, smiling his lopsided smile. She put her finger on his nose and pushed him gently away.

“Some of your audience arriving,” she said. She nodded at the waterfront below them.

A vessel that looked like a miniature cruise liner was backing towards its moorings. On the stern, in huge chromium letters clearly legible even from where they were standing: R
USALKA
, S
EVASTOPOL
.

“Oleg Skorbatov,” said Nikki. “You’ve read about him in the papers. Everything you’ve read is true. Rich and ruthless. What Mr. Papadopoulou is to Athens, Mr. Skorbatov is to Moscow. A lot more yachts still to come. From Sicily, from Egypt, from Lebanon. All the places that Mr. Papadopoulou does business with. Also helicopters at the helipad down there behind the winter garden. Executive jets at the airport. And me, rushing back and forth all day from waterfront to airport, from airport to helipad. All so that people can hear you speak!”

“I’ll try to think of something good.”

She laughed. “I love your casualness about it all.”

“What I love is the way you take it all so seriously.” He leaned towards her again.

“Back to work,” she said. “Go and be lionized … Excuse me one moment.”

Her phone was ringing. “Thank God,” she told it. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you! Are you all right…? You’re lying
where
…? Oh, in the sun. I see. So what’s happened to this rapist person…?”

She gazed at Oliver as she listened, and moved her head from side to side a little to indicate to him a detached and mocking attitude to what she was hearing. He smiled back at her, and for no reason at all suddenly remembered Georgie.

He was suddenly engulfed in a wave of panic.
When
had she said she was arriving? Wasn’t it tomorrow? But that was yesterday. Tomorrow today was today.

“Me?” said Nikki into the phone. “No. Not yet … I know, but things got in a bit of a tangle…”

She looked straight at Oliver as she spoke. She laughed. “Yes, he is … Yes, more than ever. Never mind about me, though. Where exactly
are
you?”

She waited for a moment. The phone at the other end had obviously gone dead. She put her own back in her pocket and laughed. “Old schoolfriend of mine,” she said. “She’s quite sweet, and I can’t help being rather fond of her. But she is a total idiot. She spends her entire life getting herself into the most ridiculous situations.”

“A
rapist,
though?”

“Yes, well. My idiot friend has gone off God knows where on some wild fling with some other idiot she’s only just met. The other idiot doesn’t turn up, and then suddenly in the middle of the night he
does,
and he gets into bed with her, only it’s
not
her idiot, it’s some
other
idiot. And now this other idiot, who’s not
her
idiot, has vanished again. I think. Only of course her phone keeps going dead, probably because it hasn’t ever occurred to her to plug it in and charge it, and I still haven’t heard the end of the story.”

Oliver’s moment of panic had passed. He might well have not have listened to her message yesterday, he realized. He might have listened to it only today. He
would
listen to it today, as soon as he got back to his room, where he had left his phone. If he listened to it today then tomorrow would still be tomorrow.

20

Georgie’s phone had not, in fact, gone dead. Not, at any rate, when Nikki had assumed. The silence was simply because Georgie had stopped breathing. She had stopped breathing because she was suddenly paralyzed from head to foot.