Free Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Page A

here, so that outsiders don’t cotton on. Doll slipped up when she took that call this morning. It was Posey’s notion—she fixed it with Thanassi before I flew in. In fact she told him she wouldn’t have me here if there was going to be any publicity about him and the McNair. You mightn’t think it from what you read, but he’s pretty damned good at keeping his affairs quiet if he feels like it. It’s not all Van Goghs at Sotheby’s and fancy-dress splurges on the Grand Canal. I’m going to tell you how I first met him, because that’ll give you some notion what kind of guy he is.
    â€œI was sitting by the yacht basin in Iráklion wondering where my next drach was coming from. I’d had a job at the hospital, but the cops had jumped on me because I didn’t have a work permit, and the reason I didn’t have a work permit was that I’d been in Katanga and all my papers had gone up in smoke, so I was using a passport which was, well, not so good, because I happen to be not very popular with my own government. I was OK with the local police, because their captain had a bitch of a wife who’d got him pretty near impotent, and then he’d nigh on killed himself experimenting with aphrodisiacs, and then he’d come to me because he reckoned that a doctor without a passport would tell him secrets which respectable doctors keep to themselves, and I coaxed him round to trying a course of psychoanalysis. I could have spun that out another couple of months, and I was getting one free meal a week from a bar where I was massaging the proprietor’s father’s spine, but I was broke until charter flights began. Any fool can make a living then, but this was a month too early.
    â€œSo I sat and waited for my free meal, pretty damned depressed, and watched a bunch of tourists come cackling down the quay. They stopped right opposite the bar and a Scandinavian-looking dolly, all thigh and teeth, came over and asked if she could take my photograph. Pidgin Greek, but I don’t speak it much better myself. I told her I would charge a small fee, and when she understood she got angry and went back to the others. I was cursing myself, because she might have tipped me if I hadn’t asked, when a thug in a chauffeur’s rig came over. I thought trouble until I saw he had a silver jug and a tumbler, and then I looked at the tourists properly and recognized the big one with the red face, so I let the chauffeur pour me a big Bloody Mary, and I stood up and said, ‘Zeto o thanatos,’ which means ‘Long live death,’ and drank his health. Then he came over himself and asked me what I meant, apart from politeness, and I told him that as I was a doctor my trade was death. He took me a sight more seriously than I meant; but he went back to his party and spoke to them, and they went on down the quay while he came and sat at my table with the jug and another tumbler. We drank, and talked of this and that, including my own troubles, and after a bit the chauffeur came back with a couple of bottles of champagne and a cold roast duck. We drank all that champagne and we ate the duck in our fingers and threw the bones in the harbour. We went on talking. I liked him. I was just thinking it was a bit of a sod this happening on a day when I was due to get a free meal anyway, when he asked if I’d like to come and be his personal physician for a bit. I turned him down, which I’d not have done sober. I told him the truth, which was that I was sick of orthodox doctoring and all I wanted was to get to London and research into the telepathic powers of cathypnic children.
    â€œWell, that meant another hour of talk while I explained about the McNair and we drank Costa’s filthy coffee. About quarter to four he paid for the coffee, tipped Costa a bit over the odds, but not much, said ‘so long’ to me, and walked off. I watched him sail out of the harbour