Skios: A Novel (23 page)

In the sky above the agora lingered a frescoed ceiling of pink and golden cirrus. On the tables the flames of the candles swayed languidly as the diners moved about, finding their places, and then stood behind their chairs, waiting for the bishop to say grace. There was a bright murmur of people introducing themselves to the neighbors on either side. “Hi!” the wealthy and socially adept guests of the foundation were saying to one another, extending welcoming hands and smiling welcoming smiles. The wealthy and socially wary business associates of Mr. Papadopoulou unsmilingly inspected the outstretched hands, and nodded, and gave nothing away.

In the center of the top table, at the focus of everyone’s attention, stood Dr. Wilfred. He had surrendered to public opinion. Dr. Wilfred he would have to remain.

On his left stood Mrs. Fred Toppler, the candlelight flashing points of fire back from her hair, her neck, her bosom, her fingers; on his right Mrs. Skorbatova, with richly tanned full breasts struggling to be free of her décolletage, and a construction of brass-colored hair on her head that would have been proof against small-arms fire. In front of Mrs. Toppler were a table lectern and various microphones. Before these would be moved to stand in front of Dr. Wilfred, though, there were four courses of dinner, four fine wines, and surely also time for some idea to come to him about what he would do when the moment arrived.

Mrs. Toppler picked up a gavel made from local olive wood, and struck its olive-wood base three times. The murmur of conversation died away. The candle flames settled and stood as still as the diners themselves behind their chairs. From the farther end of the table came a mumble of Greek, incomprehensible but recognizably liturgical. “Amen,” agreed all but the most committed atheists and the most taciturn businessmen, and there was a slithering of rented gilt chairs being drawn back from the tables over rented oriental carpets as everyone sat down.

The dinner that marked the triumphal finale of the Fred Toppler Foundation’s annual Great European House Party had begun.

40

Nikki stood on the steps at the edge of the agora, in the darkness of the gathering night, looking out over the world she had created. Candlelit eyes sparkled. Candlelit lips talked and smiled. Candlelit heads bent forward to listen, were thrown back to laugh. Candlelit hands lifted soup spoons, broke bread, made charming gestures. More faces emerged from the shadows as waiters leaned into the light to serve and pour, to lay plates and clear them. A reassuring music of incomprehensible social noise rose into the night. Everything was going well.

All Nikki could see, though, was Dr. Norman Wilfred, as she still couldn’t help thinking of him, smiling his lopsided smile at Mrs. Toppler as she talked to him—talked and talked to him, leaning close to him, her hand resting on his arm. He couldn’t tell a lie, he had told Nikki at the airport, but he could smile a lie and he could listen a lie. He could look a lie as he brushed the lying rumpled blond hair out of his soft brown lying eyes.

Who was he, this Oliver Fox?

Why had he done it?

What was he going to do next?

And, most important of all, what was she going to do about it?

She knew what she was going to do about it. She was going to stop it. She was going to tell Mrs. Toppler. She was going to tell her now.

How, though? She would have to approach her on her right side, away from Dr. Wilfred, and interrupt her even as she spoke to him. Then do her best to whisper over the noise of the dinner …

But what whispered words could she find that could possibly make Mrs. Toppler understand something so incomprehensible? And even if she could find the words, how could she ever make Mrs. Toppler believe them?

All around Nikki the world continued on its allotted course. The forks went back and forth between plates and mouths. The first faint stars overhead moved westward. She was alone with her problem in the midst of it all.

She was going to do it, though, and do it precisely now. The decision was made. Somehow, though, the decision failed to reach the appropriate muscles. Still she stood watching.

*   *   *

“I must stop monopolizing you!” said Mrs. Fred Toppler to Dr. Wilfred. “I get so nervous, though! Every year it’s the same! Dance, yes, no trouble at all. I could get up on the table right now and dance my heart out, and I’d love every second of it! I have to make a speech, though, and all I want to do is get
under
the table and
die
! So of course I just keep talking! It’s terrible! I should be listening to you!

“So where was I? Oh, yes. Christian. I shouldn’t be criticizing our own director to you. But why isn’t he here? Why is he never anywhere? What does he do all day? We don’t know! We never see him! OK, he’s an elf, like Dieter. But even an elf has to come out of elfland sometimes!”

Dr. Wilfred gazed at her, nodding and smiling his soft sympathetic smile as she went on and on about whatever it was she was going on about. But he was thinking uneasy thoughts. He had succeeded in climbing the impossible climb. Only now he couldn’t get down again. He was stuck on the mountaintop. He had made himself Dr. Wilfred by his own individual act of will. He remained Dr. Wilfred by the will of others.

“So,” said Mrs. Toppler, “Christian’s days here are numbered. Only he doesn’t know it yet. How are we going to do it? Mr. Papadopoulou’s going to fix it. Cut off his supply of lentils. Underage boys on his computer. Concrete boots. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Tell me after it’s all over.

“I shouldn’t be saying all this to someone I only met this afternoon. But I feel I know you really well! I feel I can talk to you!”

He had pulled a face, thought Dr. Wilfred, and the wind had changed. He had created a monster, and his creation had risen from the laboratory bench and walked. And talked. And been listened to. And had quietly killed off its creator.

“So, OK,” said Mrs. Toppler, “this is what I wanted to talk to you about. This is where I need your advice. Who do we get to succeed Christian?”

She stopped. She was looking round the side of Dr. Wilfred’s head at the guest on his other side.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Mrs. Skorbatova! She looks as if they just dug her out of the permafrost! You better talk to her. I can pick your brains later. If she has a bad time here she takes it out on Mr. Skorbatov—Mr. Skorbatov takes it out on Mr. Papadopoulou—we don’t get this great new deal the boys are talking about. What great new deal? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Tell me when we got it.”

Dr. Wilfred turned his head. Mrs. Skorbatova was gazing into space, her face as expressionless as her piled blond hair and her naked brown shoulders: an ice goddess, inhabiting some freezing world of her own in the midst of the warm Mediterranean night.

“She doesn’t speak English, though, does she?” said Dr. Wilfred.

“Not a word,” said Mrs. Toppler. “Say anything you like. Just so long as she sees someone making the effort. Tell her the ten times table. She won’t know. A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice smiles. I’ll just read through my speech again.”

41

“Imagine it’s you,” Dr. Wilfred told Mrs. Skorbatova as he ate his mushrooms à la grecque and she ate her rump steak. “You’re standing here at the lectern. A few last coughs and rustlings as the audience settles. You wait until there’s absolute silence. You look out into the darkness, and there are all these faces gazing up at you, waiting to hear what you’re going to say.

“And you don’t
know
what you’re going to say! You may be about to say anything! Things you never knew you knew! Things you can’t understand! And all the time the real Dr. Norman Wilfred may be out there somewhere. May be about to get to his feet and humiliate you in front of the entire world …

“Now, don’t you feel a kind of horrible, wonderful tingling running up your arms?”

He had already told her that she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes upon. She had slowly turned and looked at him, but her face had remained as unflawed as ever by any trace of an expression. He had been encouraged enough by this response to confide in her completely. He had confessed to her that he wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. He had told her about Georgie, and Nikki, and Annuka Vos. About how he had climbed the climb and couldn’t climb down, performed the magic spell and couldn’t reverse it. And still she had gazed at him with her eyes apparently focused on something about two inches beneath the surface of his forehead. It was difficult to know whether she was doing it out of the same sense of social obligation as everyone else, or whether, in the great sea of meaninglessness on which she found herself cast away, even the sight of a particular mouth meaninglessly moving, particular eyes meaninglessly crinkling, and a particular hand meaninglessly brushing at its owner’s hair, was a piece of flotsam worth clinging to.

“Well, there we are,” he said. “Our hostess told me to talk to you, and now I have. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better resume my conversation with her. I don’t think I ever actually introduced myself, though. My name is really Fox. Oliver Fox.”

And now at last her expression changed slightly. She was still gazing at him. But her eyes were a little more widely open, and they seemed to have come into focus. Her lips had softened a little, as if she were contemplating the possibility of a smile. He was taken aback. She seemed to have understood something he had said. But what?

“The name?” he said. “You’ve heard of me? Oliver Fox?”

She raised her eyebrows. She was expressing something. Irony, perhaps. And she smiled. Definitely smiled.

“Good God,” he said. “You haven’t heard of me when I’m Dr. Norman Wilfred? And you have when I’m
Oliver Fox
?”

She rested her elbow on the table, and her chin on her hand. She looked straight into his face and raised her eyebrows again. Then started to laugh.

*   *   *

Nikki felt a sour acid around her heart as she watched them. He was making Mrs. Skorbatova laugh just as he had made her laugh. And what a deceiving manipulative cow Mrs. Skorbatova was! Refused to be able to understand a syllable of English when it was spoken by anyone else. A few flattering words from Dr. Wilfred, though—no, from Mr. Oliver Fox—and she understood them perfectly. As well as Nikki herself had.

This is why he’d done it, of course. This is why he’d put Nikki in this impossible situation. For a laugh. He’d seen the name she was holding up at the airport and simply decided on the spur of the moment to have a bit of fun at her expense. He’d told everyone so this afternoon. He’d been speaking the truth for once. So of course nobody had believed it.

Or
was
it quite as simple as that? Her eye moved from Mrs. Skorbatova and Mr. Fox to Mrs. Toppler. She was reading yet again through the speech that Nikki had written for her, then glancing yet again at her watch, making herself more and more nervous. Nikki’s eye moved on to Mr. Skorbatov, on the other side of Mrs. Toppler. He was cutting himself some grapes from the bunch on the table in front of him with a tiny pair of silver scissors. There was something about the way he was holding the scissors, about the single-minded concentration with which he was using them, that made Nikki uneasy.

Her eye moved back to Mrs. Skorbatova and Oliver Fox. He was still talking to her. She was still laughing. What was he telling her? Was it something that Mrs. Toppler had just been telling
him
? Was this why he was here? To find out about the foundation for Mr. Skorbatov? She knew, of course, about Mr. Papadopoulou’s money laundering, though she was careful not to know the details of it. But what else was he involved in? His guests at the House Party were presumably not discussing European civilization. She had a shrewd idea that Mr. Papadopoulou and Mr. Skorbatov had some new enterprise in hand for a start. She suddenly thought about the new swimming pool that no one was allowed to see. Or rather the hole in the ground that would one day be the new pool. A hole in the ground, while it lasted, might come in rather handy for other purposes. Burying radioactive material, for example. Or a body. More than one body, even. A regular supply of bodies. Mr. Skorbatov no doubt had a capacious cold store on his yacht. He might be giving Mr. Papadopoulou a regular contract to do his undertaking for him. She felt a sudden coldly dismal lurch in her stomach. Marine diesel spares! She had noticed the crate on the waterfront that morning. No! Not possible! Was it?

But if it was, then perhaps he wanted to know a little more about his business partner. Something he could have to hand if Mr. Papadopoulou ever took it into his head to increase his charges.

She watched Mr. Skorbatov put one of the grapes in his mouth … His jaw snapped shut on it, and was still again. The grape had gone …

She looked at Mrs. Toppler, sitting all unawares beside him. I could talk to her now, thought Nikki, while Dr. Wilfred is talking to Mrs. Skorbatova.

She was just about to move when she saw that Dr. Wilfred had turned away from Mrs. Skorbatova and was talking to Mrs. Toppler again.

She stopped, and stood watching the catastrophe approach, unable to move, as in a dream.

42

Oliver Fox had now told Mrs. Skorbatova all about the difficulties he had got himself into in the days when he had been Oliver Fox, and she had gazed at him throughout without saying a word. She was obviously interested, though; particularly, it seemed to him, in the parts that involved his smiling his smile, and brushing aside the lock of hair that from time to time fell into his smiling brown eyes. And above all in the parts where he recounted how negatively so many people reacted to the very mention of the name Oliver Fox. Each time it made her smile in her turn and raise her eyebrows, and sometimes lightly slap his hand.

Now Mrs. Toppler’s hand was on his other arm. “You’re a genius, Dr. Wilfred!” she said. “No one else has been able to get a toot out of her! How did you do it? You don’t speak Russian, do you?”