Skios: A Novel (25 page)

She gazed at him in amazement.

“What? You want to let that ridiculous little fraud give your lecture for you?”

Dr. Wilfred held up his typescript. “He can’t give
my
lecture.”

“No—he’s going to be doing what he always does—he’s going to make it up himself as he goes along! Some complete rubbish of his own! You’re someone well known, are you? You’re going to be a lot better known still when people hear what you’re supposed to have said! You’re going to be a public laughingstock!”

Still this poor broken specimen was silent.

“Come on!” she said. “Wake up! Make an effort! This little rat has stolen your life!”

God, the effort one always had to make with men! It should have been the other way round! It should have been
him
struggling to persuade
her
!

“You’re not worrying about your starving lady friend, are you? I’ll tell you where she is by this time. At the dinner! With him! Eating her head off!”

He seemed to have forgotten about her, though. She had blown into his life by some sequence of mistakes and coincidences. Now, by some further sequence of mistakes and coincidences, she had blown out of it again.

“I’ve had a rather difficult day, one way and another,” he said. “I think what I should really like to do is go back to the villa, if that’s all right with you. We could finish the canapés. Get an early night, perhaps.”

She looked at him. He wasn’t beginning to nourish any illusions about
her,
was he? It would be typical, of course. A bird in the hand—just what Oliver could never resist.

Yes. Well. Nevertheless. She modified her approach a little.

“We’re going to be doing this together,” she said softly, and kept her eyes fixed on him until he felt the pressure of her gaze, and glanced round at her. She smiled. He looked away, then looked at her again. She switched on the interior light, so that perhaps he could see, in her wide-open dark Latin eyes, the tawny splash of Baltic amber in the pupils.

She had plainly unsettled him a little. She had unsettled herself a little, too, she realized, now that she was looking at him so hard. He wasn’t quite as old and broken as she had supposed. In the dim light of the taxi, with the red baldness of his head and the scruffiness of his clothes hidden in the shadows, he was, well, not so insignificant, after all. Some lingering traces remained of the importance that he had described to her over the canapés. He wasn’t remotely the man she knew in her heart that she really deserved, that quiet, laughing, considerate giant, who would be romping with the children when she came back from an exhausting day of negotiations with her fellow bankers in Zurich—and who would break off to throw his arms round her and whirl her around until he and she and all six children collapsed laughing on the hearth rug in front of the crackling log fire. He was obviously something of a figure in the world, though. In demand to speak at international conferences and festivals. She saw heads turning and cameras flashing as he and she arrived in Montreal or Montevideo for their joint presentation …

An absurd thought. All the same, she made sure that when he looked round at her again he found her still softly gazing at him. He smiled. A little ruefully, perhaps, a little awkwardly, but resignedly.

So—they were going to do it. They were going to finish Mr. Oliver Fox once and for all. Slay the dragon at last that had wrought such havoc up and down the land.

She leaned towards the driver.

“Step on it, will you, Stavros? It is Stavros, isn’t it?”

“Spiros,” said Spiros.

Instead of going faster, though, he was slowing down. The taxi was plowing through some sort of obstruction. It appeared in the headlights to be a broken suitcase that someone had abandoned in the middle of the road, with a long trail of dusty shoes and clothes spilling out of it.

“Disgusting, what some people do with their rubbish,” said Annuka Vos.

Dr. Wilfred said nothing.

*   *   *

Still Nikki stood in Parmenides, holding Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport. So where was he? The real Dr. Norman Wilfred?

In London, perhaps. Had missed the flight. No, he’d caught the flight—she’d spoken to his PA. And the flight had arrived. She’d been at the airport to meet it. So he had reached Skios. And yet somehow, on the spur of the same moment in which Oliver Fox had appointed himself to be Dr. Norman Wilfred, he had come into possession of Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport.

So he had somehow made the real Dr. Norman Wilfred vanish. Had abducted him. Kidnapped him.

How, though? He could scarcely have done it on his own. Particularly since he had been with her all the time, enjoying himself by watching her become ever more hopelessly entangled in the web he had spun. He must have had people working with him. They would have had to do it, not on the spur of the moment at all, but according to a careful plan made long in advance. They would have had weapons and safe houses.

So perhaps this wasn’t a joke, after all. It was something quite different. Into her mind came the picture of Mrs. Toppler talking to Oliver Fox, her hand on his arm, telling him everything. And then of Oliver Fox turning to talk to Mrs. Skorbatova. And of Mrs. Skorbatova suddenly able to understand English.

And of Mr. Skorbatov cutting the grapes with those tiny silver scissors. She thought about the way he had been holding them, the surgical ruthlessness with which he had used them, and then how each grape had vanished into his mouth, snap, like a fly into the mouth of a lizard …

45

Behind the bougainvillea that screened the car park the fat limousines and four-by-fours purred as contentedly as well-fed cats, while the chauffeurs tipped their seats back and settled to an hour or two of air-conditioned sleep.

In the lodge Elli yawned and phoned her mother in Ioannina.

At the barrier in front of the lodge Giorgios had taken over while the rest of the security staff had their supper break. There was nothing for him to do. All the guests had arrived long since. He sat down in the darkness under an oleander and lit a cigarette. He had scarcely taken his first consoling drag, however, when the lights of an approaching car appeared. He got himself wearily to his feet and stubbed the cigarette out. This job had certain perks, it was true, but there was even less chance for the occasional relaxing smoke than he would have had looking for gas leaks.

The familiar
. Spiros or Stavros? Stavros. Giorgios wandered over and shook hands while Stavros’s passenger, a woman wearing an evening dress made of complex folds and swags of tulle, got out of the back. Giorgios and Stavros had quite a lot to talk about. Stavros’s mother was a cousin of Giorgios’s aunt, and they hadn’t seen each other since Uncle Panagiotis had run off with the girl from the ice cream bar.

“Hey!” interrupted Stavros suddenly. He jumped out of the taxi and looked round. His passenger was just disappearing under the barrier, into the darkness inside the foundation, her tulle hoisted up around her.

“Invitation!” shouted Giorgios, and ran after her.

“Thirty-two euros!” shouted Stavros, and ran after Giorgios.

*   *   *

There was another slight disturbance occurring in the harbor. An incoming yacht,
Happy Days,
registered in Izmir, had just collided with something large and solid in the darkness.

“Sorry about that,” said the man at the helm, in an expensively educated English voice. “Only paintwork, though.”

“Patrick’s arseholed again!” said a second matching voice. “Someone else take the wheel!”

“Trouble is,” said a third voice likewise, “all the rest of us are arseholeder than Patrick.”

“Look at it, though!” said a fourth voice. “Is that what we hit? It’s the size of an aircraft carrier!”

Heads had appeared over the rail above their heads, shouting in a foreign language.

“Oh my God!” said the third voice on
Happy Days
. “Russians! And they’re waving things at us!”

“Submachine guns,” said the second voice.

“Do beg your pardon!” the fourth voice shouted up to them. “Helmsman arseholed!”

Happy Days
motored gently on into the darkness and hit the dockside with reassuring firmness. All three men who weren’t holding on to the wheel for support fell over and laughed.

“Anyway, he’s got us there,” said the third voice. “Good old Patrick!”

“Yes, but
where’s
he got us?” said the second.

“Skabulos,” said the third.

“Skrofulos,” said the fourth, taking a line ashore.

“Who cares?” said the third. “As long as it’s dry and it’s not rocking about.”

“And there’s somewhere we can get a few beers,” said the fourth.

“I can see a taverna!” said the second. “Look! Candle-lit tables! The works!”

“Women!” said the third. “I can see women!”

“No women for Patrick,” said the fourth voice. “He’s in a serious relationship.”

“Well, I am,” said Patrick. “So fuck off. Though since she’s in Switzerland at the moment…”

*   *   *

In Empedocles Christian at last roused himself from his long meditation. He brushed the gray veil of hair away from his face and tucked Oliver Fox’s passport carefully away beneath his prayer shawl. He sighed deeply. Eric Felt, dozing on the other side of the low table, started awake at the unaccustomed sound, and then gazed in astonishment.

Christian was getting to his feet.

Eric hastily scrambled up as well, and stood bulging excitedly. The moment had come.

*   *   *

In Parmenides Nikki looked in the bathroom mirror. Her hair had gone flat and brooding. She quickly brushed it up with her hand. She removed the sour and vengeful look from her face and restored its usual pleasant openness. She carefully clamped Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport onto her clipboard. It wasn’t Mrs. Toppler she needed to show
this
passport to—it was Mr. Papadopoulou. He was the one Mr. Oliver Fox had in his sights.

And he was the one with people who could take care of things like this.

*   *   *

Giorgios had abandoned the chase after Stavros and his passenger, and returned to guard the barrier, still out of breath. He arrived just in time to find another taxi, Spiros’s this time, delivering two more late arrivals—an oddly matched couple, she expensively dressed and groomed, he apparently some kind of down-and-out. The man began fumbling in his pockets to pay Spiros, but already the woman was propelling him impatiently towards the barrier.

“Invitation,” said Giorgios, whereupon the woman knocked him unceremoniously aside with her handbag. Giorgios, discouraged by the pain in his elbow, and still short of breath from his last attempt to preserve the foundation’s security, watched her push her companion under the barrier. He turned back to discuss the news about Uncle Panagiotis with Spiros. But Spiros was already ducking under the barrier in his turn.

“Thirty-two euros!” he was shouting.

46

On the agora the last moments of pleasure were being savored before the serious business of the evening closed in. Coffee cups and brandy glasses were being drained, the crinkled silver paper off chocolates flattened on tablecloths. Legs were being stretched, bladders emptied, tables hopped, empty chairs smilingly leaned across. On the way to and from the gents’, elbows were being amiably squeezed and distant acquaintanceships renewed. In the queues outside the ladies’, hair tints were being insincerely commended and husbands half-sincerely disparaged.

Mr. Papadopoulou had sat down in the seat next to Mr. Skorbatov, left temporarily vacant by Darling Erlunder, who had got Wellesley Luft mixed up with Ludleigh Wells and was telling him how much she loved his best seller about how prayer could improve one’s orgasms. Mr. Papadopoulou was talking earnestly and sincerely, with much touching of Mr. Skorbatov’s arm and putting of his mouth conspiratorially close to the Russian magnate’s ear as he looked past the back of his head, while Mr. Skorbatov said nothing, but half closed his eyes and sketched the faint iconic suggestion of a smile.

In the shadows nearby Nikki was lurking, waiting for the conversation to end so that she could show Mr. Papadopoulou the abducted Dr. Wilfred’s passport.

From the shadows, too, a pair of glittering eyes looked out from a face as motionless and austere as a skull beneath its veil of gray hair, with an orange-trousered stomach twitching in anticipation beside it.

“Also,” Mrs. Fred Toppler was saying to the current Dr. Wilfred, “if you were the director here, you could exercise that other amazing skill of yours, and give me a little massage whenever I need it.”

Dr. Wilfred leaned a little closer to her and discreetly slipped his left hand under her silken top, then down inside the waistband of her trousers. It was now completely dark. Only the candlelit front sides of people still existed. “Just
there
?” he said.

“Oh my God,” she said, “that is so blissful! And so calming! If only you could keep your hand on my butt while I make my speech! You’re like Dieter, Dr. Wilfred—you give me confidence! We could do such great things together! We could make all the wonderful dreams he had for this place come true at last. He wanted to see the foundation reach out all over the world! South America—India—Russia! House Parties on every continent! Civilization spreading out over all the hurts of the world like oil on troubled waters!”