The Mask of Zeus Read online

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  Desmond Cory

  Copyright © Desmond Cory 1992

  In the Professor Dobie series:

  THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR (also published as THE CATALYST)

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  FOR RICHARD

  who likes Cyprus

  This is the sadness of the sea -

  waves like words, all broken -

  William Carlos Williams

  Synopsis

  ‘You’re rather a maddening fellow, Dobie … You seem to be such a harmless chap and in reality you’re about as harmless as a king cobra in a lucky dip. That’s why I’m going to have to deal with you accordingly …’

  Sent into exile by those of his friends and colleagues still reeling from his exploits in The Strange Attractor, Professor Dobie arrives on the isle of Aphrodite (aka Cyprus) prepared to induct his students into the Mysteries of Higher Mathematics. But the local gods have a shock or two in store for him …

  Aided and abetted by his charming (if caustic) companion Dr Kate Coyle and baffled by the literary effusions of a zonked-out young compatriot facing a murder charge, Dobie - with his customary two-left-footed aplomb - investigates the Amphitryon affair, a bewildering intermingling of myth, reality and apparent lunacy with all manner of political and sexual shenanigans, a case for a divergent thinker if ever there was one.

  Fortunately they don’t come any more divergent than Professor D and his wayward ditherings lead inevitably to a memorable final confrontation in which the mask of a legend is at last stripped away - to reveal the face of a highly contemporary and unusual murderer …

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM

  From Publishers Weekly

  Following his adventures in The Strange Attractor, handsome Welsh math professor John Dobie lives surrounded by speculation that he may have murdered his wife (he didn't) or pushed her killer down the stairs to his death (he did). Something of a distraction at the college in Wales where he teaches, he is persuaded by the administration to accept the offer of a visiting professorship on the island of Cyprus. There he occupies an apartment that once belonged to Derya Tüner and Adrian Seymour, both former students at Dobie's college, which is available due to Tüner's death and the imprisonment of Seymour, a druggie and failed writer, for her murder. With a gift for wayward thinking, Dobie is charmingly rendered as an innocent abroad, ogling topless bathers, imbibing plenty of exotic drinks and examining Seymour's cryptic and archly literary writings. These disclose infidelity (Dobie himself can vouch for Tüner's ample charms) and puzzle him with references to mythology, ancient masks, sunken mosaics and recent political events on the island. Occasionally weighed down by extended excerpts from the Seymour canon, the rest of the tale is playful, lively and not to be missed.

  Prologue

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  by Adrian Seymour

  The moonlit nights were best, when without turning on the electric lights he could move quietly from room to room, everywhere in the house, upstairs, downstairs … Well, not quite everywhere, but everywhere he chose, which was what mattered, the important thing, that at night choice should become action in this way, become movement of feet and hands and eyes instead of lines of words on white paper. Of course, being what he was he had no need to move feet or hands or eyes; he moved because he chose to, quietly, from room to room, acquainting himself with the appearance of this house, of this world, in the darkness, becoming an intimate of the night.

  Appearances were what he had to get used to. To the fact that eyes that see can themselves be seen. For this reason he chose to move at night, when all or most other eyes were closed, though he found the darkness strange in itself, he being compound of sunlight and of giddying aether like some mysterious mutant in an SF story; from the wide window of the sitting-room he could look through those alien golden-brown pupils at those other mindless living-boxes with their lines of glass windows meaninglessly blank as the lines of print in an open book, though glittering sometimes with reflected moonlight, with light that came from outside, not from inside. Inside the boxes there was nothing. Only people. People, asleep.

  Awake, they could make light by pressing a switch. They could make little rectangles of radiance, curtained off yet glowing in the stillness, behind which they too moved. Not as he moved but as shadows; they were the victims of darkness and soon they would surrender to it. They would sleep. Inexplicable compulsion. Yet they had no choice but to sleep. He had given them none.

  As he had given no choice to the stars that pricked out their eternal patterns in the blue-black velvet sky behind and above the buildings, over the shadowy trees. They made light, too, as they wheeled across the horizon in their great circle; light, but not the true light. The real light. Their patterns could be changed, and would be. When the real word was said, the word that was to the words in books as his own light was to those other lights … Not even said. Not even thought. But willed …

  Then the stars would stop. And change their names. And appearances would be otherwise. Destiny would be fulfilled. His own as well, though he himself had chosen it. The gods, the other gods, were after all there amongst the stars: Mars, Venus, Mercury, Pluto, though set on other courses; that, at least, was a way of looking at it. A poet’s way, perhaps. I see the stars at bloody wars/In the wounded welkin weeping. All lies, of course, and yet, and yet …

  He looked down at the sheet of paper on the typewriter roller. His fingers, poised above the keys, showed a strange reluctance to move, to make the needed addition, and in the end he took them away. Something had gone wrong already and he knew it. Morn the star of horn. Star the horn of morn. Or, if it came to that, QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM straight across the board, it all came to the same in the end. Stuck.

  Impotent.

  Knowing, as always, that all he needed was there. Letters, spaces, punctuation marks; it was only a matter of putting them in the right order. The same with words, with paragraphs. A matter of knowing what. That had to be the trouble. The page he’d written, was it the beginning of something, as he’d thought? Or the end of something? Or neither? Until you knew that, it made no sense. Or not the right kind of sense. He didn’t have to read through what he’d written again; he never did. The writing might pass, for a first draft. That wasn’t it. Word was following word across the page in the customary manner.

  But …

  He stared for a long while at the wall in front of his desk and some three feet from his nose; a blank wall, except for a handout calendar that hadn’t been sellotaped there quite straight. He was back in the cage. A caged tiger. There should a plaque on the door of his room saying Tigris tigris; what the hand dare seize the fire indeed. Not much of a tiger, ever, if you faced the facts. But at least a published and publishable tiger. A young man of flair, of promise. A young man to watch.

  Well, that’s what people do. To tigers. They watch them go up and down up and down up and down up and down; there’s not much else that a tiger’s good for when it’s in a cage. Facing a blank wall. And a calendar.

  He heard the car drive up and park outside and a minute or so later the front door key turn in the lock, the door open and close. The zoo-keeper was back. It was feeding time, maybe. But the quick tap of heels on the tiled floor didn’t lead to the kitchen. They led to the door of his room, where they paused. He waited for the door to open. Eventually, it did.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  He went on looking at the calendar. A hillside, tall spiky trees – cypresses, maybe – and a row of stone columns modelled out of icing sugar. Italy, he rather thought. Or some other place where he’d never been. Beside the desk there was a chair where she could sit down, if she moved a jumble of opened books out of the way. She did so.

  ‘Whe
re’ve you been?’

  ‘Just down to the village.’

  She looked tired. Her face was a little pinched, if that was the word, though also flushed from the heat of the summer night. On the heels of her shoes, smears of mud. Noticing them, she twisted one foot and rubbed the shoe gently against the edge of the brown patterned rug.

  ‘So what’s the latest gossip?’

  ‘I don’t think there is any.’

  ‘Ah.’ It was a pity he could never think of the right things to say. The implications of that question weren’t, after all … Exactly. Very flattering. ‘I’ve got something down at last,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Well, no. Not good. I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Still, it’s something. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought when I started that it might be. But then one always thinks that. Or one wouldn’t start.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘A little.’

  A little tired. He wondered what that meant. Surely you were tired or else you weren’t? … Staring all this while at the blank wall in front of him. Perhaps if you weren’t in a cage it would be different. But then she wasn’t really a zoo-keeper. She was a caged animal, too, in a different way. You get tired, pacing up and down.

  She said, in the end, ‘May I read it?’

  He pulled the paper from the roller and handed it to her. She opened her handbag, took out her reading-glasses, put them on. Then started to read. It was all very casual and yet very formal, like part of a well-practised ceremony. That was what it was. An established marital ceremony aimed at the relief of impotence. In other words, a going-through of motions. Still, it was important, in a way. Especially when motions are all you have left. Up and down, up and down, the pattern moving steadily while the typewriter ticks …

  ‘Science fiction? That’s a new idea.’

  ‘It’s not that really. At least I don’t think so. Maybe it’s not fiction at all.’

  ‘Well, but it might … Mmmmmm …’ Her head, bent over the paper, showed an escaped tuft of dark curling hair at the nape of her neck. The reading-glasses didn’t diminish her obviously spectacular beauty, though sometimes they made her seem demure. Which she wasn’t. Beauty, though, is sometimes a matter of unobvious things, like little undisciplined wisps of hair, the half-furtive rub of a shoe against the edge of a carpet. Often when you look for it somewhere, it’s somewhere else. She took off her glasses. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

  ‘Whatever it is I want is some place else. That’s all.’

  ‘Story of everyone’s life.’

  ‘Is it? Maybe. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll admit I don’t quite see where it’s headed.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘It is the beginning?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well … Mostly I like it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Though it’s maybe a little pretentious.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I mean … “intimate of the night” … That sort of thing.’

  ‘It’s a Robert Frost echo.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘No, you’re right. It’s lousy.’

  ‘I don’t think that.’

  ‘You know, if I ever have to get a book out and look something up, I know it’s got stuck, I know it’s hopeless, for some reason I just can’t …’

  He stopped. She put the paper on the desk, put her glasses away in their case. Small neat movements of small neat fingers. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

  ‘No. Not hungry. It doesn’t matter.’ It really didn’t.

  He slid another sheet of paper into the roller after she had gone. Motions are important. Going through the motions. While she doth horn the star of morn And the next the something farrier, shit, how did it go? He reached towards the pile of opened books, checking the movement as the door closed behind her. I know more than Apollo. I know it’s hopeless.

  He stared towards the wall.

  But now his own planet was slowly rising. A prick of light, what else? in the distant south. Lifting itself above the horizon as the door clicked shut, in the same immense instant of astronomical time; an instant foreordained; a moment among countless millions of such moments, yet – because foreordained – determinable. Of such moments was his own calendar composed; written not on perforated pages but across the heavens and in starry signs, moments foreordained, predeterminable, and yet … he chose them. He chose them as at this particular moment he chose to be made a man, to be made a man, in the likeness of Adrian Seymour, that pretentious fart Adrian Seymour … Pretentious? What nonsense. He didn’t choose to pretend to be. He was.

  The strengthening moonlight commenced to outline his face as he stood at the window. A man’s face. Adrian Seymour’s face. Narrow, thinly bearded. The eyes no longer a glimmer of gold but a dull, uncomprehending blue and with lids that moved constantly, blinking, blinking. The mouth a mere slit, a sharp line of petulance. It moved; it smiled; everything was movement: mouth and feet and hands and eyes, all in constant motion, all in endless and meaningless quest. Where was the great inner stillness of Olympus? What could human beings understand of it, being twitched here, jerked there, in this weird puppet play they called life? And where was …?

  Ah, well. It didn’t matter. It really didn’t. What mattered was the action. The happening. The face, the hands, the feet, only means to an end. A means of brief escape from that stillness of total foreknowledge, the full recall of things that hadn’t yet taken place … Yet, they said. And, not yet. A word that implied expectancy. Anticipation. Excitement. Of such things as these, he knew nothing, precisely because he knew everything. Only mouth and eyes and hands and limbs could resolve that paradox, resolve it in action. Arousal. What’s to be a god but to enjoy? Yes, but how to enjoy, other than through abnegation? Through the forgetfulness of all that he knew?

  A swan, now: Rising from the water in an angry white whirl of glittering feathers. Or a milk-white bull, great shoulders steering the bladed horns through arcs of vibrant power. Creatures obedient to the urge of a clearly sensed purpose, simple yet irresistible. Tonight the same purpose, expressed through another, a far more stimulating agent. A man. This man. Tonight I will enjoy Amphitryon’s wife. The action simple, inevitable, ordained.

  He sat carefully down in the chair and laughed, making no sound. Amphitryon, indeed. That field-marshal of words, that starer at walls. I am not he. I am still I, though appearances may deceive.

  I am great Jupiter. And my words are thunder.

  ‘Why do you keep looking at your hands?’

  ‘Must have caught one of my fingers between the keys.’

  ‘Oh. Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not really.’

  She sat down on the chair and crossed her knees. He wondered why she’d come back.

  ‘You ought to eat something. If you’re going to work late.’

  He shook his head. He felt a little giddy. ‘It’s pretty late already. Did you eat something? … Down at the village?’

  ‘Eat? … No.’

  Better not insist. When her lips pressed together like that … She was nervous. He didn’t wonder why. She often was. She started to pick up the books she’d moved from the chair and to leaf quickly through them, one by one. ‘Hey, look at this.’

  Nervous tonight, yes. But when he turned his head she was smiling. Reflectively, almost secretly. ‘Where’d this come from?’

  What she had in her hand was an old theatre programme, the covers yellowed but not too badly, the papers crumpled but not too much. ‘Oh, I was just looking through some of the old Cardiff stuff … Scraping the bottom of the barrel, you might say.’ The past is past. John Dryden, Amphitryon. Produced by Adrian Seymour. Big big deal.

  Nothing there to be proud of, anyway. Gimmicks, in the usual undergraduate way, substituting for talent; all the actors dressed in white or black or in combin
ations thereof, Alcmena making her entrance behind a bloody great hairy borzoi on a leash. A white borzoi, of course.

  She was looking now at the signatures of the cast scrawled over the back page of the cover, her own at the top. ‘You remember that dog?’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘What was the tyke’s name?’

  ‘His name? Shuffle.’

  ‘Shuffle, that was it. Should have got his pawprint.’

  ‘You should, yes. The star of the show. A born upstager.’

  She put the paper back on the desk, still smiling to herself. ‘You know something else I remember?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I remember thinking you were a bastard in those days. A real conceited bastard.’

  ‘While I, on the other hand, admired you very much.’

  ‘I know. That’s what got to me in the end. I was swept off my feet.’

  Though it wasn’t exactly admiration that he’d felt. You admired ability, a talent – not the simple projection outwards of youthful grace and beauty. You need more than that to be an actress, to resist more or less successfully the brutal buffetings of the roles one plays, of those countless occasions on stage when one doesn’t pretend but is. Not that she’d ever seriously intended to be an actress. Her talent was for mathematics and always had been. Ah, but she’d been admired, that was the point, admired and envied and, naturally, lusted after. It wasn’t something that made things now any easier.

  Looking at her again, he saw that she wasn’t far off tears. Not in itself an unpleasant condition; her eyes had been damp when, standing straight-backed in her allegedly Grecian tunic of virginal white, he’d seen her take the spotlight for her curtain call; damp, and shining all the more alluringly in the sharply focused brilliance. As indeed they shone in that photograph on the wall in the sitting-room. Allure was the key word. You needed allure, to play Alcmena. While Jupiter—