Skios: A Novel (20 page)

Wherever Wilfred was. Giving a lecture. Gone.

At any moment the woman would be back, still suitcaseless, and angrier than ever. It might be an idea, thought Georgie, to follow the example of the suitcase—to be out of the house and away from here.

*   *   *

Oliver rested his head against the side window of the taxi, absently watching a plane that had taken off from the airport just ahead of them. Up, up it soared, catching the early evening sun as it began a long climbing turn. He felt like that plane—light, unencumbered, free. As magically as a plane becoming airborne he had become Dr. Norman Wilfred. As easily as a plane revolving the landscape beneath itself he had rocked the world a little on its axis. Had varied the great dullness of things, the vast yawning predictability of the planets going round the sun.

Then, just as easily, he had reverted to being Oliver Fox again, and was off. There was nothing he had to drag through the airport and get airborne with him. His suitcase could stay where it was, in the room he had left. Nothing in it that he couldn’t abandon as easily as the room. Nothing in it that belonged to him, in any case, now he thought about it. Not even the suitcase. Somewhere there must be another suitcase, full of things that actually were his. It was presumably in the keeping of that other Dr. Norman Wilfred, the shadowy figure who was now free to step forth into the light again and resume his existence. Let him have both suitcases, whoever he was.

All Oliver needed in life he carried in his pockets. A little cash and a couple of credit cards. He checked his trouser pockets. OK. Fine. He checked his shirt pocket. He had his phone. Not essential, perhaps, but certainly useful. The bar of chocolate and the pack of soluble aspirin. Optional, but handy. Nothing else in the whole wide world did he require.

Oh. One thing …

*   *   *

Nikki sat down. Her legs had gone wobbly. She looked at the passport yet again.

No, there was no way round it. The spelling was definitely wrong. “Norman” was not spelled O-L-I-V-E-R. “Wilfred” was not spelled F-O-X.

35

“Thirty-two euros,” said Stavros.

He had to say it twice, because the first time Dr. Wilfred was standing on a dark hillside somewhere under the glittering night sky, explaining to Georgie how the apparently random distribution of the heavenly bodies was entirely consonant with a causality fully determined by the preexisting fundamental laws, and it was difficult to see how the sum of thirty-two euros came into the relevant mathematics at any point.

The stars faded. Oh, yes, Stavros. The taxi. They had arrived at the foundation. Dr. Wilfred got out and hoisted his flight bag onto his shoulder while he fumbled for his wallet. He couldn’t help being aware that there were gratifyingly large numbers of people arriving at the same time to hear his lecture. Over and over again the glass doors slid back to admit them. Surprisingly many of them were obese, and they were dressed in surprisingly informal ways, with bare bulging midriffs and sun-reddened knees and shoulders. A lot of them had brought their children, and they were all pushing baggage carts piled with suitcases.

The thirty-five euros Dr. Wilfred had got out of his wallet hesitated in the air above Stavros’s waiting hand.

“Hold on…” he said.

*   *   *

“Thirty-eight euros,” said Spiros, in the taxi pulling up outside Departures just behind Stavros’s.

Oliver didn’t get out, however. He checked all his pockets once again. No, he hadn’t got it. For a moment he thought he might try to talk his way through passport control without it. If so many people were prepared, without any effort on his part, to believe that he was Dr. Norman Wilfred when he wasn’t, surely a few simple officials would take his word for it that he was Oliver Fox when he actually was …

“No,” he said finally. “I’ll have to go back.”

“Back?” said Spiros.

He had left his identity behind. Put it down in the guest suite somewhere, when he had been taking off Oliver Fox and putting on Dr. Norman Wilfred, and forgotten to pick it up again.

They had to wait, though, because the man who had just got out of the taxi in front was also changing his mind and getting back into it.

*   *   *

Still Nikki sat gazing at the passport. Her first thought was that the passport office had made a mistake. It was so obviously Dr. Norman Wilfred in the photograph! But then it started to seem not quite so obvious after all.

She became aware that she was also still holding the phone. She put it back to her ear. There was silence. Georgie had evidently calmed down a bit. Which gave Nikki a chance to tell her that their roles were now reversed.

“Georgie,” she said quietly, “I think
I’ve
done something rather silly, too.”

Because
of course
Dr. Wilfred wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. How could he be? Dr. Wilfred would be somewhere in his fifties. She knew that perfectly well. He couldn’t possibly be an amiable young idiot with an engaging smile and hair flopping into his eyes. He was a self-important celebrity with a bald head and a lot of expensive meals built into him.

How had she ever for one moment thought that Dr. Wilfred was Dr. Wilfred?

Because—yes—it had happened at the airport, in the very first moment that she had set eyes on him. He had looked at her sign and smiled. She had said “Dr. Wilfred?” and he had said yes. It was as simple as that.

No, he hadn’t even said yes. She remembered exactly what he had said: “I cannot tell a lie.”

He couldn’t tell a lie. He
hadn’t
told a lie. She had made Dr. Wilfred into Dr. Wilfred all by herself, single-handed.

“This person I told you about,” she said to Georgie. “He isn’t who I thought he was. You told me, didn’t you. You said, wait till you’ve known him for a bit longer. Actually I suppose I really did know. Always. From the very first moment. Of course I knew. Everything about him was just too good to be true.”

There was no reply from Georgie.

“Georgie?” she said. “Can you hear me? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, I am here,” said a voice which was not Georgie’s. “And your filthy little friend isn’t, and nor is my suitcase. And if you were somehow also involved in stealing it then let me tell you that this is my phone and I now have the number of yours.”

Nikki put the passport carefully on the desk next to the suitcase and ended the call. Somewhat reluctantly. She felt so small and lonely that she was almost ready to confess herself even to the cleaning woman.

36

Down, meanwhile, the sun moved towards its nadir, and its foreordained daily extinction in the ocean. On the foundation sailed towards its apogee, and its scheduled annual apotheosis in the Fred Toppler Lecture. Sun and foundation both were as complexly self-absorbed as a liner steaming towards New York, or the world itself on its great journey towards whatever fate awaits it. Neither sun nor world, nor foundation either, were troubled by any small internal discrepancies.

The agency waiters who had arrived on the morning ferry from Athens were clipping on their bow ties. The string quartet who would be playing inaudibly during the champagne reception in the Temple of Athena were setting up their music stands and squabbling about the mess the second violin had made of their booking the previous night at a funeral in Kalamaki. In guest villas among the greenery all over the headland wives were standing in front of mirrors, looking with dissatisfaction at themselves over the dresses they were holding up, and asking husbands for the reassurances they had uttered so many times before over the years; and husbands were reclining on beds, still sunk in their early evening torpor, gazing at the ceiling and murmuring sight unseen the well-rehearsed words yet again.

Around the board room table in Democritus the bishop of the Hesperides Archipelago and other worthy trustees of the foundation were busy receiving apologies, adopting minutes, approving accounts, reappointing auditors, suppressing yawns, expressing thanks, offering congratulations, standing down, standing again, and looking forward to any other business, or rather the absence of it. Behind the closed doors of the conference suite in Aristippus Mr. Papadopoulou was hosting a private meeting of his own with Oleg Skorbatov and various other business associates from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and southern Italy, though exactly what their discussions had to do with European civilization no one knew, since Mr. Papadopoulou’s people had swept the entire premises for bugs, and Mr. Skorbatov’s people, not trusting the Greeks, had swept them all again; and because now all the security people from the various parties involved were standing outside the doors watching one another.

Down on the waterfront Giorgios, the security guard, wandered slowly along the dock, yawning and scratching himself. There was little for him to do, since so many of Mr. Papadopoulou’s guests had brought their own security people—and since in any case the whole foundation seemed to be entirely secure without the help of any of them. A large wooden crate had appeared on the dockside, he noticed. “Marine diesel spares,” said the stencil on the side, in Greek and English. Curious. A useful addition to the facilities of the waterfront, though, because it was a good five feet high, and there was enough room behind it for Giorgios to sit on the edge of the wharf and lean against it, out of sight of any possible security cameras.

He took off his shoes and socks, and lowered his feet into the water. All around him the waiting crews of the visitors’ yachts and cruisers were going about their traditional maritime business, hosing down decks and coiling ropes, throwing kitchen waste overboard and rattling crates of empty wine bottles. It was pleasantly relaxing to watch other people working.

Marine diesel spares … Still attached to the small crane that had presumably swung them ashore. From which of the boats, though? From
Why Worry
, of Dubrovnik?
Lady Luck
, of Istanbul?
Ciaou Ciaou
, of Brindisi? Their chrome fittings flashed in the sun. Their spotless white paintwork gleamed. None of them looked like the kind of vessel that might be shipping crates of marine diesel spares around the Mediterranean.

Giorgios smiled. He had a pretty good idea what was in that comfortably placed crate, and it wasn’t marine diesel spares. It was cash. Used banknotes from all over the eastern Mediterranean. Everyone knew that the function of the Fred Toppler Foundation for Mr. Papadopoulou was to launder the proceeds from some of his other enterprises. Giorgios had no idea what money laundering involved, but he liked the feeling that something useful was going on here, some clean and wholesome operation that made the world a better place.

He leaned back against the solid comfort of all that money and lit a cigarette. He had scarcely taken his first long, consoling drag, though, when the world fell to pieces around him. He was sprawling on his back, his support gone. The currency had collapsed! It was flying in the sky above his head. He struggled to sit up. The crate was swinging away out over the water, and the crane it was swinging from was being operated by Reg Bolt, the director of security. Giorgios threw his cigarette into the water and scrambled to his bare wet feet.

Reg Bolt, though, was gazing at him as if it was not Giorgios but he himself who had been caught napping. He was offering some kind of explanation, but since it was in English Giorgios had no idea what he was saying, only that it referred to the crate, which was now heading away from the dockside on the deck of a trim white launch. The marine diesel spares were not imports, they were exports, and the launch was heading for the biggest of all the yachts out there—
Rusalka
of Sevastopol.

After Reg Bolt had gone, and Giorgios was left to drag his socks up over his wet feet, he couldn’t help wondering what it was that the Fred Toppler Foundation could be exporting to Sevastopol, in the personal transport of one of Russia’s great oligarchs. Perhaps it was the finished products of the laundry operation. What was laundered money like? Perhaps it wasn’t just figures written in a bank account, or zeroes on the screen of a computer, as Giorgios had vaguely supposed. Perhaps it was banknotes going back out again, hundredweights of them, crates of them, freshly pressed and starched, wrapped in soft tissue paper, to be laid out by Mr. Skorbatov’s valet for his personal use.

*   *   *

Nikki hurriedly blindly from one final check, one last-minute problem, to the next. Eric Felt appeared out of nowhere, bulging accusingly at her, and holding up a small gray object. “A toe,” he said. “I found it near the new swimming pool. One of your people has obviously bashed into something. I shall have to report this to Christian. He’s going to be very upset.”

“Superglue,” said Nikki. But what she was thinking about was how Dr. Wilfred had told her he had once been older than he was now.

“Salt-free onion-free,” said Yannis, when she went into the kitchens, showing her a single portion of mushrooms à la grecque in its own skillet. “And it’s also kosher veggie, because hey, what the hell?”

“Brilliant,” she said. “Not that it matters anymore.”

“Not matter?” said Yannis. “If he’s allergic? If he’s gonna swell up and get red spots and choke to death?”

“Not anymore, he isn’t,” she said. “Unfortunately.” But all she could see were the wet footprints outside her window.

And no sign of him anywhere. Not that she knew what she was going to say to him when she found him. Or what she was going to do about it.

She was angry, though. Angry with him for making her ridiculous. Angry with herself for letting him. He had looked around—and picked her out to be his victim. He had destroyed her professional credibility and all her hopes for the future.

What kind of lecture was he going to give, anyway? Had he somehow got hold of the real Dr. Wilfred’s text? Or was he going to invent some lecture of his own? A mockery of a lecture? A hoax lecture, in the spirit of the masquerade he had been—was still—performing? Or would it be no lecture at all? Perhaps, when the moment came for him to stand up, he would remain sitting. Or stand up and say nothing. Or prove to have slipped away into the darkness a moment earlier.