A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  ‘Back to insult my beer again, Mr Mitre?’ Theodoros asked.

  ‘I’m meeting someone,’ I said.

  ‘Police?’

  I shook my head slowly, as I settled onto the barstool. ‘So, you’ve had police here?’

  ‘Of course I had police here,’ he said with some asperity. ‘A woman was murdered right there.’ He pointed, in case I had forgotten. The relevant spot was now occupied by a pink German woman and a pair of loud, sweaty toddlers.

  ‘Did you happen to mention that I was here?’

  He came over, placed both hands on the bar and leaned toward me. ‘I don’t mind lying, especially for customers who tip generously, as you do. But I don’t like being caught in a lie, especially not by police when they are investigating a murder.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I admitted. ‘And what did you tell them?’

  ‘That I heard screams. I turned and saw the blood. You had already left. The truth.’ His shrug modified the word ‘truth.’

  ‘Okay. Your future tips are safe.’ He didn’t immediately turn away. I said, ‘More?’

  This was his cue to channel some ancient cowboy movie bartender. He started polishing glasses and avoiding eye contact. ‘Rumors,’ he said.

  The whole world has gone from watching or reading tropes to living them.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Some think the police are not trying very hard.’

  ‘Some think that, do they? Why do some think the police would slow-walk a murder?’

  Shrug.

  ‘Are you seriously hitting me up for a bribe?’

  ‘I have my eye on a car. A Peugeot 308 GTi. Used. The body needs work, but the engine and transmission are still in excellent condition.’

  This was getting ridiculous, I was bleeding cash. I slid a C-note across, and said, ‘Here, buy yourself a tire.’

  He gave me a long, speculative look. Oh, he took the money, but then he eyeballed me curiously.

  ‘Some day,’ he said, ‘I would like to know why you are interested.’

  ‘Yeah? I’d like to know why some are dubious of the cops. And I paid for that answer.’

  ‘There are rumors in the expat community that MI6 and your FBI have both offered assistance and have been turned down. Turned down and told to fuck off. By the police.’

  ‘Politics?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. One of those ‘maybes’ that mean ‘no.’

  ‘MI6 and FBI are both very good at their jobs,’ I said, struggling to generate a simulacrum of approval. ‘They have capabilities Cyprus cops may not.’

  ‘We don’t usually like foreigners poking their noses in.’

  ‘Really? I’d think you’d be used to it by now, having had, what, three thousand years to adjust?’

  ‘Many dislike the way the UK still controls parts of the island. Others are upset by the numbers of expats. Cyprus for Cypriots, all that.’

  ‘Cypriot nationalism? That’s a thing?’ I asked. But Theodoros was distracted and when I followed the direction of his gaze, I saw why. Special Agent Delia Delacorte was approaching. She wore a loose, unbuttoned robe over a bathing suit, a conservatively-cut, navy two piece. She was not quite Halle Berry in the famous orange bikini from the old James Bond movie, but she was in the ballpark: Halle Berry with a darker complexion, natural hair and about twenty percent more predatory swagger.

  Not Minette, not Halle Berry, but gorgeous, with far more leg than strictly necessary for locomotion.

  No, David.

  She took the stool beside me, ordered a beer from Theodoros, who delivered it with shocking speed and then took his time asking her if she’d like anything to snack on? Anything? Anything at all? Crisps? Peanuts? A pushy, young Cypriot bartender?

  Her thigh brushed against me.

  Seriously: no.

  Eventually my white-hot glare convinced Theodoros to go drool at the other end of the bar.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, extending my hand. ‘My name is David.’

  She left my hand hovering. ‘You called this meeting.’

  ‘Should you be drinking beer while on duty?’

  ‘I’m not on duty, Mr Mitre—’

  ‘I thought we were first-naming by now. No?’

  ‘I’m not on duty, David. In fact, I’m taking some personal vacation time. Just enjoying the beach and the sunshine.’

  ‘So … I can call you Delia?’

  She carried herself with an air of calm that came with a suggestion of danger. Long ago I’d met a woman who I’d figured for a mark. We chatted, hung out, went to a movie together. But as I was laying out the opening moves of my grift over dinner, she suddenly looked up and our eyes locked and I will never forget the cold chill that went up my spine as she said, ‘Don’t play me. Bad things happen to clever boys who try and play me.’ Turned out she was not just the suspiciously well-heeled owner of a fashionable boutique, she was also the sister of a gentleman of the Salvadoran gangster persuasion.

  Delia was kind of like that, but with threats of prison rather than artery cutting.

  ‘Or I could go on calling you Special Agent Delacorte. Ma’am.’

  ‘Delia will do,’ she growled. ‘For now.’

  I was dancing on the line between desire and fear. Like a praying mantis that knows that copulation ends in his head being eaten by the female but is still thinking, Enh, might be worth it.

  ‘Well, Delia, here’s what I know: refugee kids don’t always reach the resettlement camp. Especially not the pretty ones.’

  ‘As a private citizen, a tourist on holiday, I find that interesting.’

  ‘But not surprising.’

  ‘My surprised expression would be like this.’ She fractionally raised one eyebrow.

  She didn’t hold the expression for long and I missed most of it because I was not focusing entirely on her face. ‘Maybe, Delia, you should lay out for me just what it is you want. Because so far I’ve spent—’ Quickly calculating a reasonable vig, adjusting for inflation, considering bank exchange fees, rounding up to the nearest five grand – ‘fifteen large getting this far. I mean, what’s going to make you happy?’

  ‘Evidence always makes me happy. Connect some dots. Get me to where I can push this.’

  Here is what I did not say: I want to sleep with you, but you scare me, Delia, and having never fear-fucked a Feeb before, I’m quite frankly not confident of my performance. And yet, I am willing to take on the challenge, just please don’t eat my head.

  What I did say was, ‘Do you have someone following me? And doing a lousy job of it?’

  ‘You’ve picked up a tail?’

  That got her attention.

  ‘Not here,’ I said with more confidence than I felt. ‘But I went to the refugee camp yesterday, during the day, and when I left I had two new best friends in leather jackets driving a Land Rover.’

  I gave her a quick rundown of both my visits to the camp, leaving out Mustafa’s kind offer. I also mentioned without naming Theodoros or Joumana that there were doubts about how hard Cypriot police were trying to solve the murder of the woman on the beach.

  Delia nodded. ‘That was well done, David.’

  ‘Thank you, Delia.’

  ‘Shoot me the stills you showed them.’

  ‘The kid with the foot could give testimony,’ I said. ‘That’s evidence.’

  ‘Connected to no one. I need names.’

  ‘Then I need help.’ I fished a thumb drive out of my pocket, took her hand by the wrist, ignoring the way she bridled, and trying to ignore the fact that I could feel her pulse, turned her hand over and put the drive in her palm. ‘These are the records of juveniles processed through Kofinou. I assume the port authorities and the Marine Police keep records of how many people are on the refugee boats they intercept. If the Marine Police pick up a boat with x number of kids and something fewer than “x” make it to the camp …’

  Delia nodded, and said, ‘I have software tools. My laptop is back in my room.’

  I�
�ve heard sexier seduction lines. We finished our beverages and headed up toward her car, leaving a disappointed Theodoros still in need of three more tires.

  Delia was staying at a three-star hotel a few miles north of my usual haunt, in a less pricey neighborhood with a rocky beach.

  It wasn’t a long drive in her little rental Kia, but after only a few minutes driving up the stop-and-go coastal route, Delia said, ‘What color was your Land Rover?’

  I glanced in the wing mirror on my side. ‘The color of that Land Rover behind us. I outran him in my Benz, but you’re not going to do it in this hamster-powered sardine can.’

  The predator cocked an eyebrow at me and pulled a two-wheel turn that left my internal organs behind. She squashed the clutch, threw the gearshift, hit the accelerator hard and all four hamsters revved to panic speed. Right. Left. Vroom! Left. Vroom! Right!

  We hit a parked bike. We ran oncoming cars onto the sidewalk. We murdered a trash bin. But damned if Delia’s FBI training wasn’t paying off. The woman could drive.

  ‘I hope you got the extra insurance at the rental counter,’ I said.

  Delia came to a tight four-way intersection, pulled a U-turn, slammed on the brakes behind a parked car, and yelled, ‘Down!’

  We both ducked. I was bent over, face-to-face with Agent Delia under the dashboard, hoping I looked braver than I felt.

  We waited. The Land Rover roared past.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ I chattered.

  ‘Never as the rabbit, a few times as the hound.’ Not a quiver. Not a stuttered consonant. She could have been talking about golf or her favorite cheese.

  Delia’s hotel was a cement rectangle of six floors above ground, tall for this end of Cyprus, a bland, anonymous and decent if not showy establishment. It was the kind of place where tourists hung their wet bathing suits off the balcony to dry. I wouldn’t have stayed there, but Delia was a civil servant. She would have to submit a reimbursement request.

  ‘They lay out a good breakfast buffet,’ Delia said defensively.

  ‘They’d have to,’ I muttered. Snobbery came very late in life to me, but I’d paid my dues with time spent sleeping under bridges and in public libraries and jail cells. ‘There’s the bar. I need a drink.’

  I finished the Scotch before the slow, wheezing elevator got us to her top-floor room.

  Delia’s room was international standard Hilton-lite: two single beds, one chair, and a mountain slash parking-lot view. She got her laptop out of the room safe and sat at the desk. I sat on the edge of the bed leaning forward to shoulder surf, hoping – futilely – to see her password.

  ‘This will take a while. I missed lunch. Call down and order some room service,’ she ordered me.

  ‘What would you like?’ I asked, obedient.

  ‘Food,’ she snapped.

  I ordered some Greek specialties and a bottle of local white wine. And fresh strawberries, because I wanted to see her eat a strawberry. I already had a mental image of that but I wanted detail. With luck I’d have a strawberry moment with Minette as well, and I could compare. In the interests of science.

  I knew that my sudden and growing carnal interest in Delia was a lame attempt at gaining control, I’m not entirely un-self-aware. I was feeling like I was no longer writing the narrative of my life but was being swept up in someone else’s story with potentially disastrous consequences. It wasn’t hard to trace the mental chain from Delia to Halle Berry to James Bond to the fantasy that like Bond I was irresistible and that once a woman had slept with me she’d be so taken that she wouldn’t even mind dying in the second reel. I’d made a lucrative career out of charming women, and now that I was slipping back into the warm embrace of my bad-boy past I was beginning to shed the restrictions of pretended normality, allowing an attenuated version of the old sense of invulnerability to sneak back in.

  And Delia was genuinely sexy. That was real. And here she was, right next to me. Her only real flaw was that she was smart and strong. Also experienced. And cynical. And an FBI agent. All in all nothing like the women who’d fallen for my glib bullshit in the past. But that was a bad line of reasoning to pursue because it led right back to a suspicion that I wasn’t so much Bond to her Jinx Johnson in this scenario, as Sancho Panza to her Quixote. Robin to her Batman. Donkey to her Shrek.

  No more comforting analogies presented themselves.

  Delia was onto some secure site and typing in a query. That didn’t work, so she tried another query, then another and finally, ‘Hah!’ She pointed proudly at a spreadsheet. Then she opened a desktop app and merged the data. The Mac chewed on the ones and zeroes as room service arrived and the sun plunged.

  I poured wine and offered her the choice of dishes. She went with the moussaka.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Delia asked after her first bite. ‘I thought it was lasagna.’

  ‘Sort of. Lasagna with lamb instead of beef and eggplant instead of tomato sauce and béchamel instead of mozzarella.’

  She shoveled big bites and quaffed wine and I was just about to reach across and wipe away an endearing bit of béchamel on her lower lip when the goddamned computer dinged and she was back at the desk.

  ‘A total of two hundred and nine juveniles either picked up on the beach or intercepted at sea,’ she said. ‘One hundred and eighty-five registered at the camp.’

  ‘That’s …’ I’m not quick with numbers unless expressed in terms of dollars.

  ‘Twenty-four,’ Delia said. ‘Of course this proves nothing. Could be bookkeeping errors, could be miscounts at sea, adults wrongly labeled as juveniles …’

  ‘So, what, maybe half that number? A dozen kids?’

  ‘That’s not enough?’

  ‘Delia, what is the market price of a child nowadays?’

  ‘It depends. Could be as low as a grand or as high as ten grand.’

  ‘Let’s be generous. Ten grand times twelve kids is a hundred twenty grand,’ I said, proudly displaying my mastery of the multiplication table. ‘How is a hundred twenty worth the effort and the risk? People are being paid off, so figure half of that net goes to the main operator. It’s not enough money to motivate a very public murder.’

  ‘No,’ she admitted, deflated.

  We both stared disconsolately at the laptop.

  ‘So, there it is,’ Delia said, ‘But it isn’t the it we’re looking for.’

  ‘You already knew this much,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘More or less. But I didn’t have specifics, and now I do. Thanks to you.’

  ‘I appreciate your gratitude. And since we’re—’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, David,’ she said, her tone somewhere on the amused–irritated scale. ‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’

  ‘Whoa, I wasn’t—’ I protested too loudly.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ She stood and stretched her legs by bouncing on her tiptoes a little. While still in a bathing suit, mind you.

  I did not intend, consciously, to reach for her, it just happened. The next part, where she grabbed my hand and twisted it backward so hard that I had to drop from the bed to my knees, also just happened.

  She let me go and sighed. ‘Do you think I’m so clueless I don’t feel you looking me over like the last shrimp on the buffet table? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been pawed by horny guys – and one girl – as I worked my way up at the FBI? I’ve had assistant directors offer me promotions for blowjobs and in terms just that direct.’

  ‘I didn’t …’ Yeah, that was all I could come up with.

  ‘I am an FBI special agent, I am not a set of tits, you sociopath.’

  I had to laugh. ‘Special Agent Delacorte, I’m sorry if I made a clumsy pass. But you’ve been working on me since our first meeting. I’m dumb, but I’m not that dumb.’

  Then she smiled, a full-on, ear-to-ear smile that might make some men weak. Men like me. ‘Okay, David, let’s cut the shit. It’s not happening. Not. N-O-T followed by the word “happening.”
’

  I sighed and produced my rakish smile. ‘I had to try.’

  And I will again. I did not say.

  She crossed to the window and looked out through a slit. ‘The Land Rover.’

  I joined her and shared her view of the hotel parking lot, surprised that night had fallen hard while we were playing with computers and dipping tarama. ‘Two men. I can’t see the driver, but that guy smoking there, the bristly one? I recognize him from when I made them the first time.’

  I fell silent and closed my eyes, scrolling back through places and faces. Had I seen the man anywhere else before? If so I wasn’t clicking.

  ‘Hey. Let’s get a shot of him.’ I aimed my phone out of the window, careful not to be spotted, and took several pictures. To Delia’s frown I said, ‘You might want to run this photo against the videos you people got from the yacht.’

  Slight parting of lips. Intake of breath. A quick cover-up as her face went opaque. ‘That kind of thing requires manpower.’

  ‘You’re the FBI, what, you’re all busy?’

  ‘Manpower means putting in a request, running it up through channels … By the time I do all that we can make the guy ourselves.’

  I drew back and stared at the lovely Delia and, with a grin tickling my lips, said, ‘Oh, my God. You’ve gone rogue.’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever, David, you—’

  ‘That’s why Agent Kim isn’t here anymore. That’s why you’re so ostentatiously playing the vacationing sun worshipper. They’ve pulled you off this case.’

  I could see I was close to the mark. Close but not a bull’s-eye.

  ‘Oh, wait, no,’ I said, ‘you’re actually here for something bigger, aren’t you? Is this all just incidental?’

  ‘Not incidental, but not the whole picture. I don’t know the whole picture, and if I did I couldn’t tell you.’

  That seemed like an invitation for me to guess. ‘Terrorism?’