A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  First stop, church.

  ‘I would like to make a contribution,’ I said.

  ‘Whakh?’ That’s how she said it, with a ‘kh.’

  That stopped me for a second. ‘A contribution. To the charity thing, you know. Because I admire your work.’

  ‘Enh?’

  ‘The kids and all. You know, feeding poor kids or whatever it is you people do. The charity thing.’

  Every single person on Cyprus speaks English. Every single one of them but this black-clad butterball with the dandruffy bun. I was in what I took to be the office of the more important of the local Greek Orthodox churches, a bit of intelligence I’d picked up at the party by eavesdropping on a rather stunning young Cypriot woman. Marvelous, what the charity did for local poor kids – like the children of the people who cleaned expats’ homes, no doubt – and I was here to deliver my bribe.

  Contribution.

  If you’re a stranger in town, and especially if you’re a foreigner, and you want an accelerated degree of grudging acceptance from the yokels, you contribute to a prominent charity. In Cyprus, the Greek Orthodox church isn’t just a church, it’s the single greatest power. They own something like a fifth of the island’s economy, a fact testified to by an impressive number of very large and quite new churches, all spotlessly clean, shiny and vibrant in pink and tan, bell tower and dome.

  There is a bit of a ‘thing’ still going on in Cyprus, a thing involving Greek Cypriots and the Greek Orthodox church on one side, and Turkish Cypriots and Turkish immigrants and Islam on the other. Long story short, they don’t like each other.

  Long story less short, Greek Cypriots are still pissed at the Ottoman Turks who ruled from 1571 to 1878. The Ottomans were fantastically corrupt and not terribly tolerant, and when some Greek Cypriots carried out a bit of Turk-massacring in 1821, the Ottomans responded by hacking up a bunch of Greek Orthodox clergy they’d invited over for lunch.

  The Ottomans eventually gave Cyprus to Britain in 1878 and the British swept in and imposed religious tolerance, a legal system, a deep respect for proper queuing etiquette and an insistence on driving on the wrong side of the road.

  There followed a period of relative peace, then in 1960 Cyprus declared its independence and chose an archbishop named Makarios to play the George Washington role. They typed up a nice constitution which laid out a peaceful sort of side-by-side, let’s-all-get-along, kumbaya arrangement between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and it was as much as several days before the two communities started taking potshots at one another. By 1964, the two sides were getting along so well that the United Nations had to send troops. Who are still there.

  In 1974, the Greek Cypriot military launched a coup, attempted to unite with the Greek military junta and the Turks decided, no, that wasn’t happening and invaded. They seized the northern third of the island and declared the independent country of the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus which was embraced by a host of nations including Turkey and also Turkey.

  Greek Cyprus cleaned up its act, joined the European Union, and the two sides settled down to decades of mutual loathing across a Green Line that split the capital, Nicosia, like John le Carré’s Berlin.

  Cyprus lives in a rough neighborhood, just about one hundred and fifteen miles from Aya Napa to Beirut, Lebanon, and another fifty miles gets you to Damascus, Syria, and Jerusalem is just two hundred and thirty miles off. This is not a neighborhood for letting bygones be bygones.

  Nowadays, Cyprus (the Greek part) has a democratically elected government, but the real power is arguably still the Greek Orthodox church. Which is why I’d decided that it wouldn’t hurt to have some element of said church believing I was a swell guy. My plan now delayed by ancient bun-lady.

  Fortunately, there was a poster for an NGO named Feed the Forgotten on the wall, so I took out my envelope of euros and held it up under the nose of the boy on the poster – he wasn’t starving, but he was thin, and his smile held just enough sadness and just enough hope.

  Please, sir, I want some more.

  ‘Contribution. Money. Euros.’

  ‘Euros?’

  ‘Get ’em while they last.’

  She took the envelope, peeked inside, closed it, took two breaths, then pulled out the cash and counted it with suspiciously-adept fingers. She said something in Greek that was probably a number.

  I nodded, and said, ‘Yes, two thousand.’

  She made a face like that was just more work for her, showed me a ‘stay here’ finger and bustled away. A minute later, she was back leading a man wearing overalls and an amazing beard.

  ‘Hello, I am Father Fotos.’

  ‘You’re kidding. I mean, sorry, nice to meet you. Father. David Mitre.’

  It does not come naturally to me to call people ‘father’, particularly when they look about nineteen even from behind General Longstreet’s beard. He made an apologetic face, wiped grease from his hand and we shook.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Father … um, I just wanted to make a small contribution to your charity work.’

  I could not say ‘Father Fotos’ and keep a straight face.

  ‘Not so small,’ he said, grinning. ‘May I ask how you heard of our work?’

  ‘At a party, actually, at Dame Stella Weedon’s house last night.’

  ‘Ah. Well, we are very happy to take your money and put it to good use.’ He tilted his head and looked at me from merry brown eyes narrowed with skepticism but not hostility. ‘And is there anything we can do in return?’

  Do you mean like put the word out that I’m a good guy who loves him some orphans so you shouldn’t believe anything bad you might hear about me? I did not say.

  What I did say was, ‘Oh, I have, like, no knowledge of the situation. But I had some tough times when I was a kid, so …’ Abashed smile, humble shrug, and I was heading for the door when he touched my elbow and I let him lead me out of the … whatever the official ecclesiastical name is for an entry-way office and out into the … whatever the official ecclesiastical name is for the church part. With the seats. The pews.

  The church was, in my inexpert opinion, over-decorated, with far too much reliance on gold leaf. Behind the altar were about three dozen icons, painted before the discovery of perspective, many old bearded fellows and the occasional robed woman, all with gold dinner plates hovering behind their heads. They stared down at me. One old guy was definitely not buying my bullshit. Fortunately, Father Fotos was.

  ‘You are the author,’ Father Fotos said.

  I nodded. ‘You are well-informed.’

  ‘I hear many things,’ he said with a sort of self-mocking seriousness I liked. ‘Also, my wife was at Dame Stella’s party. In fact, I would not be at all surprised to learn that you heard of our mission from her.’

  I blinked, processing that.

  He said, ‘Yes, Mr Mitre, we have married priests in our church. Indeed, you cannot be a priest unless you have not only a wife but a child.’

  I’m sure the altar boys are relieved is what I did not say, because I was there to make nice. Instead I said, ‘Is she a blonde, very Egyptian pyramid-painting eyes, serious and intense but still like she’d probably …’ And I stopped myself right there.

  ‘Were you about to say that she looks like she’d probably be very good at visiting the sick and comforting the afflicted?’

  I had to grin. ‘That was exactly what I was about to say.’

  Father Fotos shrugged. ‘I hear confession, you know. I’ve heard men confess their attraction to my wife.’

  ‘I assume you penance the shit out of them,’ I said. ‘She’s too young for me, but when I stop noticing women like your wife someone needs to put me out of my misery.’

  ‘Now I have a confession,’ he said. ‘It’s one I’m sure you’ve heard as often as I’ve heard a teenager confessing to masturbation. It is this: I have always wanted to be a writer.’

  I suppressed the groan, but my eyes did go a bit opaque at that point. The
n I saw the profit.

  Your honor, I call Father Fotos of the Hot Wife as my character witness.

  ‘Tell you what, father, let’s grab a coffee some day when we both have time, and I’ll lay my accumulated writing wisdom on you.’

  ‘And for my part I will save your soul,’ he said.

  ‘Ambitious.’

  All at once the bantering was over. He glanced a bit nervously at a nearby icon. ‘My wife tells me you spent some time talking to our assistant chief of police.’

  ‘Kiriakou?’

  ‘Yes. Cyril Kiriakou.’

  ‘I did, yes.’ Wait. Now I was the one deploying the old lengthening silence trick. I could see he wanted to tell me something and was working through the doctrinal barriers in his head.

  ‘One hears things,’ Father Fotos said at last. ‘Not in the confessional, of course, I would never violate the sanctity of the confessional, why you could safely unburden—’

  ‘You don’t have that kind of time,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Well, one hears things. I can only say that many things are not what they seem. All that is gold does not glitter.’

  ‘Really? Tolkien?’

  He did not laugh. ‘Do you believe in good and evil, Mr Mitre?’

  I shifted a bit uncomfortably. Some of the painted saints were giving me the eye, already not liking my answer. I said, ‘Father, Nazis performed medical experiments on children. So, yeah, I believe in evil. I just don’t think it involves some horned, hooved, pitchfork-toting Halloween figure.’

  ‘Well, Mr Mitre, there is evil on this island. So very much good, but still, there is evil.’

  I waited it out. And he added, ‘And you have perhaps already touched the edge of that evil.’

  I took from this a warning that Kiriakou was corrupt, which no doubt would seem evil to this bearded adolescent but to me was encouraging news. When you have no money, corruption is evil; when you do have money, corruption is convenient.

  My next stop was an environmental group that as best I could figure out wanted us all to bathe in a teacup and eat grass, I didn’t really know, but I doubted they could do much damage with a thousand euros. Ditto the centrist coalition party, which rejected a direct contribution with appropriately disapproving looks before directing me to a completely separate group that engaged in ‘activism.’ Those guys practically snatched the money out of my hand and would have picked my pocket if I’d hung around long enough.

  The picture I was painting through the medium of cash-on-palm was of an expat with a social conscience, a well-to-do American (thus assumed to be a braying imbecile), who was trying to do right by the locals. A cynic (no more than ninety percent of the Cypriot population) might suspect I was buying a little influence. And they would suspect that because I was in fact, buying a little influence. For an investment of four grand I now had eco-warriors, local politicians and a priest all ready to say, No, hold up there, officer: David Mitre is a good man. Why, just look at this orphan he fed. And he never wastes water.

  The only thing better is paying cops and prosecutors directly, and I expected to get to that, but it can be very sketchy business. Bribing cops requires research and planning, and even then it is dangerous as hell because you just never know when you’re going to run into an honest cop. I’m told they exist.

  I was therefore perversely encouraged by Father Fotos’ dire warning and I hoped my lunch with Kiriakou would show me the way. Cyprus wasn’t quite squeaky-clean Denmark when it came to corruption, but it wasn’t Somalia, either, and I couldn’t just stuff money in cops’ pockets. Probably.

  The discordant note was that if Kiriakou was corrupt he was subtly so. His suit and shoes were not the suit and shoes of a man on the take. I decided to hold off on open bribery attempts during our lunch.

  We met at a café off the main drag in lower Paphos.

  Paphos has three prominent, distinguishing characteristics aside from the endlessly gorgeous Mediterranean seashore. First, it is actually slightly less Greek than a Greek Town neighborhood in Brighton or Cleveland. The signs are in English. The food on offer is largely British, especially the full English breakfast. And if you bump into someone there’s a good chance that they will apologize.

  Second, it’s an oddly haphazard place with no notion of zoning laws, so that three-story, blocky apartment buildings and restaurants – some quite fancifully-built to resemble castles or lumpish approximations of circa 1965 Disney funhouses – stand side by side.

  Each building is topped by identical water tanks on rusty platforms, one tank for each apartment in an apartment block, which may go some way to explaining the lack of high rises. Water is an issue on Cyprus. I knew this because the eco-warriors had given me a flyer and I had not yet come across a trash bin to toss it into.

  But the most surprising Cypriot feature was the cats. There were cats everywhere. Cats on beach chairs. Cats nestled in banks of succulent ground cover. Cats on pool tables. Cats on bars. It’s as if some mad decorator had thrown them around like accent pillows. You couldn’t go twenty feet in any direction without seeing a cat. Paphos is a tough place for birds and mice.

  There was a tabby winding its way around Kiriakou’s corruption-denying shoes as I stepped up to his table. Kiriakou spotted me, half rose to shake my hand then settled back into his rattan chair. He looked tired, but friendly.

  ‘Shall we have some wine?’ he proposed.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to see the list?’

  ‘I’d much rather leave it to you, Cyril.’ Deliberate first-naming. It’s expected of Americans – we’re allowed.

  Kiriakou nodded and said something in Greek to the waiter.

  ‘Still or sparking water?’

  ‘Sparkling, please,’ I said.

  We chatted about the weather. It had been a dry winter, far less rain than normal and virtually no snow up in the mountains. Global warming, no doubt, we agreed.

  We agreed as well to share some olives and a plate of fresh anchovies. For our mains, he went with prawns, and I chose a seafood pasta. The appetizers came quickly as did the wine, which was a not-terrible Ayioklima white.

  ‘What new developments in your investigation, Cyril?’

  He made a grunt, emphasized with a shrug. ‘Nothing useful, I am afraid. We searched the victim’s hotel room.’ He lifted a leather document holder from the floor where it had been propped against his chair leg. From it he drew a paper and spread it out for me.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t read Greek. Or speak it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I will translate. The victim had a camera, but the data card was empty, all photos deleted. She had …’ He glanced at the list. ‘Three dresses, all with UK or French labels. Four blouses. Slacks. A skirt. Bras and underpants.’

  ‘Expensive?’ I asked.

  ‘Neither expensive nor cheap, off-the-rack things from John Lewis or Galeries Lafayette.’

  ‘Not helpful,’ I opined sagely. ‘Books? Laptop?’

  ‘A Lee Child novel …’

  I resisted a sneer. I liked Child; I did not like the fact that he outsold me ten to one.

  ‘… a guidebook to Cyprus. A Greek-English phrase book. And there is a laptop, but it is password protected, as was her mobile.’

  ‘You went through the usual passwords? 1-2-3-4-5-6? Qwerty? Password?’

  ‘And many more.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have friends at the NSA or GCHQ?’ I said.

  He barked a laugh. ‘Ah, but we have all been told modern devices are unhackable.’

  ‘Yes, we have all been told that. And if you believe it, I’ve got a bridge you can buy cheap.’

  He was unfamiliar with that wheeze, so I explained it to him.

  ‘In any event,’ he said, ‘I don’t think the intelligence world is anxious to help a local police officer.’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘A written diary, perhaps?’

  He shook his head.


  ‘Medications?’

  That brought up a quirked smile. ‘A common fiber laxative, ibuprofen, basic first-aid, bandages and an antibiotic cream. The only thing even slightly unexpected was a medical-strength cortisone cream.’

  ‘Hmm. Your medical examiner will probably discover a skin disease, dermatitis. Eczema. Psoriasis.’

  He agreed that was likely. ‘Our coroner will be conducting his examination this afternoon.’

  ‘Was there a prescription label?

  ‘At one time, but it had been removed.’

  ‘And, how old was the victim?’

  ‘According to her passport, she was thirty-nine.’

  Of course. If you were using fake papers why not stop at thirty-nine? My passport said I was forty-one, though I was one or two years older than that.

  ‘And this is the passport about which you have some doubts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I assume you opened the hotel room safe?’

  His eyes twinkled and he gave me a conspiratorial look. ‘Indeed, and that is where we found something … interesting.’

  I stabbed a playful finger at him and said, ‘You’re building suspense again, Cyril.’

  He spread his hands, fingers smeared with whitebait grease. ‘I do what I can to make my dull job interesting. Yes, it was in the safe that we found a different passport, also British, but with a different name. That, and five thousand euros, as well as a thousand in British pounds.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Credit cards in her purse?’

  ‘Two. An American Express card and a Visa, both under the name she was using here, Rachel Faber. And in the safe, another American Express and a MasterCard, names matching the second passport.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘There we go. That’s better. You pulled the records?’

  ‘Of course. In the second name which was …’ He pulled out a Moleskine and thumbed pages. ‘Hynson. Amanda J. Hynson. Each of those cards had auto-withdrawals. One for a Netflix account, the other for an online subscription to the Independent.’

  I decided to share some of my professional fictional sleuthing wisdom. ‘She’d pay those to keep the accounts active.’

  ‘Precisely.’