Skios: A Novel (27 page)

somewhere about now Christian and Mr. Papadopoulou will produce the two incriminating passports … the police will be called … Oliver Fox will be arrested … Dr. Norman Wilfred will have a stroke … Annuka will deliver the Fred Toppler Lecture on his behalf … Christian will reclaim his kingdom … Eric Felt will enter into a civil partnership with him and become his formal heir apparent … Mr. Skorbatov will conclude whatever secret business it is that he is engaged upon with Mr. Papadopoulou … Nikki will marry one of Patrick’s drunken yachting companions … Georgie will take the veil … prices will rise … rain will fall … a cure for baldness will be found … and so on and so on …

Thus Oliver, standing there at the lectern with his mouth already open to bring into existence the wild series of inventions which would have sent the world off on a completely different causal trajectory, will have been preempted by the great gear chain of cause and effect—as it turns out to be with hindsight, now that it is actually happening. He set it in motion at the airport the previous evening, he is forced to realize, and the overwhelming probability is that it will now operate just as Newton, Einstein, and the real Dr. Norman Wilfred would wish. Each cause, he will almost certainly find it instructive to note, trails an effect at its heels like an obedient dog, each effect gratefully acknowledges a cause as its legitimate master. There is no room for any ridiculous impromptu interventions.

Clunk-click. Click-clunk. If only the initial conditions had been fully understood, and hindsight had been foresight, the whole sequence of events could have been predicted in time to be included in Newton’s
Principia
or the Book of Revelation.

However …

*   *   *

However, in the instant before Georgie waves and finally sets this well-prepared scenario upon its unstoppable course, something else occurs that stops it even before it starts. This is a completely unconnected and irrelevant event. A triviality, a passing thought in someone’s head, a velleity that comes out of nowhere and has no imaginable significance or place in any self-respecting causal chain.

One of the guests, Sheikh Abdul hilal bin-Taimour bin-Hamud bin-Ali al-Said—someone with no grievances, suspicions, or schemes of his own—happens to notice, in the dish of petit-fours on the table in front of him, a single remaining cube of Turkish delight. He doesn’t much like Turkish delight, but (as he explains at the subsequent government inquiry into the disaster) there is something unsatisfactory about the sight of one single Turkish delight sitting on its own in the dish, something that jars slightly with the natural order of things. So he reaches out idly to take it. And within the next few seconds the world has veered off the course that had been so carefully and elaborately prepared for it.

In reaching for the Turkish delight the sheikh has leaned across a candle. There is a smell of burning, and by the time he has popped the gelatinous cube into his mouth, and crushed it between tongue and palate, his robes are engulfed in flames. The people around him scramble to their feet in alarm. Chairs turn over. A voice, identified at the inquiry as belonging to either Suki Brox or Darling Erlunder, shouts, “Fire!”

Whereupon someone does.

It’s only a short burst in the first place, out of the darkness somewhere behind the speaker, probably from one of Mr. Papadopoulou’s security advisers, and exactly what he thinks he’s firing
at
is difficult to guess; but it’s followed by a second burst, which is most likely Mr. Skorbatov’s people firing back, after which the firing becomes general, and for a few moments the noise of shooting and screaming obliterates all possibility of rational reaction to events, and any semblance of ordered causality.

49

The screaming continues for some time after the shooting has ceased. By the time it has subsided, and people are beginning to emerge from where they have taken refuge behind pillars and under tables, the spotlights have been shot out to provide cover for the withdrawal of the more important business interests. The sheikh has also been extinguished, in this case by the bishop, who has wrapped him in his own robes, fireproofed against the candles used during the Orthodox liturgy, and the only illumination comes from the first faint moonshine and the few candles which have not yet guttered out or been knocked over in the panic.

When Dr. Norman Wilfred, or Oliver Fox as he has now in his state of shock reverted to being, gets up from the floor behind the table he finds the chairs in the darkness on either side of him empty; Mrs. Toppler and Mrs. Skorbatova have apparently been hurried away with their menfolk, together with the dead and wounded on both sides. Many of the other guests have fled as well. Some of those remaining are weeping or whimpering as they wander about in a state of post-traumatic shock, crunching broken glass underfoot, and falling into each other’s arms as they find their loved ones, or even their unloved ones, still alive.

Oliver recognizes one or two faces he had not expected to see looming up out of the darkness. Georgie … Annuka … As confused as everyone else, he wonders what they are doing here. Wasn’t Georgie coming tomorrow? Wasn’t Annuka remaining in London? Or had he heard a rumor that they were now living together somewhere?

Some of the people he knows seem to have been as unaware up to now of one another’s presence as he was of theirs, and a number of the predestined encounters do take place in one form or another. Everyone is too confused to be as surprised as they should have been, though, and the events have little of their expected force.

“I thought
you
were supposed to be giving the lecture, Wilfred?” says Georgie to a balding man who is distractedly trying to collect scattered pages of typescript. There is something that strikes Oliver as familiar about the name Wilfred, but he can’t remember what it is.

“Was I?” says Wilfred.

“Georgie?” says Nikki doubtfully. “So you’re here, then?”

“Nikki?” says Georgie likewise. “But you’re in Switzerland.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, and so are you,” says someone else to Georgie—a man Oliver remembers seeing somewhere once, a month or two before, who for some reason has the words “Happy Days” printed across his T-shirt.

“If I’m in Switzerland,” says Georgie, “why are you spying on me here?”

“Theta function,” says a little man in broken spectacles. “Lambda … phi…”

“Sixty-four euros,” say two bald-headed fat men suffering from warts. “Plus twenty-six euros’ waiting time.”

“Blood over my shirt!” says Annuka irritably. “A napkin, someone! Water! Oh, it’s from me. Someone fetch a dressing, please!”

There is a silence while Annuka dabs away at her shirt with her right hand, and bleeds onto it with her left.

Another man Oliver has never seen before is lying on the floor in T-shirt and skateboarding trousers, bulging in a hopeless, bloodstained kind of way. A strange creature is bending over him, holding a candle, and either feeling the victim’s pulse or robbing him. The creature’s lank gray hair falls around his face like some kind of mourning veil, and when he straightens up, his gaunt and wizened face in the candlelight reminds Oliver of a troll he once saw in a computer game. The creature gets to his feet and holds a small book aloft towards Oliver in a way that suggests silent accusation. For a moment Oliver believes it might be
The Thoughts of Chairman Mao
. He can see a picture of Chairman Mao’s face, but when the man brings book and candle threateningly closer, Oliver sees that the face is his own.

“Thank you,” he says. He takes his passport out of the troll-like creature’s hand and departs.

50

Within seconds of the eruption on the agora a kind of shock wave was radiating outwards through the rest of the foundation, as the guests scattered in terror to the shelter of their villas, or scrambled into their waiting limousines. Events by this time had become so complex that it was impossible to give any remotely adequate contemporaneous account of what was going on. It could only be reconstructed and recounted retrospectively. The
Journal of Science Management
was best placed to do this, since they had a correspondent on the spot, and they would have had an authoritative world exclusive on the disaster if Wellesley Luft, still hopelessly jet-lagged, had not slept through the entire proceedings. The official inquiry, though, was eventually able to put some sort of narrative together from what could be seen in the silent recordings of the various security cameras, and most of this material is now available on the Internet for anyone interested.

Here are two of the limousines silently colliding in the rush to get away, and blocking the exit from the car park. One of the security staff (Giorgios) tries to part the drivers, who have got out and started fighting, but they both turn on him, and he retires with his hand over his nose while some of the cars behind try to struggle past the blockage by forcing a way through the screen of bougainvillea.

The scenes from the cameras along the waterfront are even more confused, as crewmen and security staff bundle their employers into dinghies and tenders, and scramble with such haste to cast off that a number of people are left attempting to jump ever more impossible gaps from the quayside. One important-looking woman in low-cut evening dress and high-piled hair can be seen standing on the dock waving her arms at the departing boats, apparently pushed aside in the rush and forgotten about. A speedboat registered as
Why Worry
of Dubrovnik is run down by
Happy Days
of Izmir. A helicopter scrambled from the helipad hovers over the scene, possibly with humane intentions, and shines its searchlight down upon colliding boats, people in the water fighting to grab lifelines, and empty lifebelts. One of the boats capsizes in the downdraft from the helicopter’s rotors. Surprisingly, only thirteen bodies were recovered from the water by police later.

*   *   *

Events up on the hillside at the site of the new swimming pool above Epictetus were harder to reconstruct, because Reg Bolt had evidently turned all the security cameras off. The crane driver must presumably have fled at the sound of shooting, just as he was beginning to lower the enormous crate onto the truck waiting below, and so must the driver of the truck, because the crate had evidently come crashing down out of control, tumbled end over end down the hillside, and split open to reveal its contents.

Nikki, it turned out, had been wrong about them burying bodies behind the screen. They were digging them up. Long-buried bodies. Beautiful bodies, that belonged, now they had been found, not to Mr. Papadopoulou or the Fred Toppler Foundation but to the Hellenic Republic and mankind at large.

Or should have done.

*   *   *

It was the biggest and most beautiful of all the exhumed bodies that had burst free of the packing that imprisoned them. The first to see her was Chris Binns, watching at his window in Epictetus, struggling with his second stanza, and with no idea what all the noise and running around had been about. Suddenly, there she was, out of nowhere, a towering white figure in the darkness above him. She was wearing a helmet and carrying a shield, and there were serpents writhing at her feet. In the moonlight her face had an unearthly pallor. She stood gazing out over the lights on the agora, the classical ruins, the villas, the fishermen’s cottages, and the lapping water in the harbor. Her right arm was upraised, as if she was surprised by what she saw and was giving it her blessing, or laying a curse upon it. It was impossible to guess from the look on her face, though, what her intentions were, or what she thought about the world before her. Her expression was impassive, unshakeably serene, a blank.

Chris recognized her immediately from her helmet and her long white robes—her chiton, just as Wikipedia said. She was Athena, the goddess of wisdom and civilization, of craft and war and justice, the tutelary deity of the island.

For some moments he was so surprised that he couldn’t breathe. He had conjured her back from the underworld where the old gods live, and he had done it by imagining her, through the sheer power of the words in the poem he was writing about her.

She wasn’t a real physical object, he understood that clearly enough. She was some kind of hallucination, a projection of his own mind onto the external world. Of course. But his residency in Skios was justified. His choice of career. His whole life.

He felt in the darkness for pencil and paper. His long-awaited second stanza was already writing itself.

*   *   *

The confusion at the entrance by this time had grown worse because, just as the cars struggling to get out had begun to free themselves from the wreckage of the bougainvillea and smash their way through the barrier, they came up against the flashing blue lights and howling sirens of the island’s arriving emergency services.

Soon arms and clubs were being waved, first demonstratively and then in earnest, and soon after that the confrontation between police trying to reach the massacre and participants trying to escape from it was complicated by the violent intervention of a woman who loudly wanted the police to arrest someone for some other offense entirely. It was very difficult in the circumstances prevailing for police officers with only limited English to understand who was to be arrested for what—whether it was someone called Wilfred for impersonating someone called Fox, or the other way round; and whether the man whom the woman was propelling so urgently towards them, and from whom she was snatching some kind of typescript to wave in their faces as evidence, was Fox or Wilfred; and where Fox was if this was Wilfred, or Wilfred if this was Fox.

In the end, so as to get on with the job they had been sent to do, they arrested whichever man it was they had to hand, and later, in the calmer conditions of the police station, charged him with attempting to leave the scene of a crime, inciting public disorder, wasting police time, being an accessory in the deaths of a still undetermined number of people, and bringing the Hellenic Republic into disrepute. Annuka Vos, his accuser, or defender, who had attempted to prevent them throwing him into the van by battering the chief of police about the head with her handbag, and who had thereupon been thrown into the van after him, they charged only with attempted murder.