Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Page B

girl’s voice broke in and asked him if he wanted another number. He said no, put the handset back on the cradle, pushed the ivory button, and watched the contraption glide into its nest and the lid click shut. Brad’s a good man, he thought—so the hell with him. You can cultivate a stern and fastidious morality if you sit all day in your gleaming basement surrounded by files and microfilm and computerized memory banks whose function is to provide you with answers. Naturally you treat every question as though there were an answer to it; you are never asked the sort of question which leaves you with nothing but an option between wrong answers, a choice of betrayals.
    He relaxed against the sexy leather and raked at his shin with the slow, unconscious strokes which so infuriated Mary. Role Playing and the Criminal Mind! Crippen, if he’d really been preparing a lecture on it, he couldn’t have chosen a better specimen. Goldsmith, Irons, Nicholl, and now Silver. Presumably he’d called himself Steele at some point, or even Copper. Michael O’Lybdenum? T’ung Sten, the Chinese acupuncturist? Sheikh Al Umi n’Um? Pibble wondered how he had once passed himself off as an English duke and was now so convincingly Levantine. It cannot be done for more than a day with makeup and stains always show—still the aristocracy has seen some swarthy members in its day. He was convinced it was the same man, not only because of the name; he felt proud to have met him—if your idol has feet of clay, it is some compensation that they have been modelled by a master hand.
    There was that Californian who had spent ten years working his way though half the hospitals of the state on forged credentials, diagnosing and healing and operating, never for more than a few months’ salary at a time. It is a sort of madness, an obsession with authority, a yen to be your own father figure; the need to make money in types such as Silver is very secondary. Pibble wondered whether something had happened in Katanga to shake his nerve and reduce him to the role of olive-skinned antique shark on the unprepossessing quay at Iráklion. Though even there he had the role of Great Lover to play, and perhaps the colour was an asset, a thrill for spiky widows relaxing in the notorious Mediterranean air. You couldn’t imagine Mrs. Dixon-Jones babbling secrets about her charges to every chance-met pot-seller; and she had drawn Pibble’s attention to the link between her Cretan knickknacks and the head of paranormal research with a curious air of pride and pleasure. Still, when Silver turned up at the McNair, trailing clouds of money. . .His story about meeting Mr. Thanatos was probably true; no point in lying when Pibble would be able to check in a couple of hours; so he must have used his nugget of knowledge with skill and nerve—though presumably a professional con man makes it his business to know the foibles as well as the movements of every millionaire in the Med.
    So poor Posey. The money was useful, the man who brought it a fraud. Lover or no, she must have cottoned on to that. And being a very good woman indeed—the worst sort—she had refused to shut her eyes to the fraud. To judge by the scrap of tape that had so irritated Silver, she’d only recently screwed herself up to action and asked Rue Kelly what she should do. Alas, Rue was not the type to shoulder responsibilities other than his own; in fact one of the pleasing things about him was his ability to keep his life compartmented, so that you never felt, laughing in the Black Boot, that he was about to borrow money off you or sour the easy time with tales of domestic intransigence.
    Then she’d snatched at a man of straw, old Pibble. Alas again, George Harrowby and Fancy Phillips had guessed his trade as he came through the door, and their whining intuitions were on the tape which went straight up to Silver. The moment she learned that,