A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  The inchoate, preverbal part of my brain was still waving its hands. I shrugged it off impatiently. It would come to me, it always did, but never when I pushed for it to come. Anyway: there was a gorgeous, bisexual French movie star to save.

  I made a call with some trepidation. Mustafa answered on the third ring and said something in Arabic that I took to be a version of, ‘Hello?’

  ‘You remember a conversation involving telephone poles?’

  A long pause. ‘Yes, Mister … I’m very sorry, but I have forgotten your name.’

  ‘So much the better. Call me David.’

  ‘David.’

  ‘Look, I’ll be blunt. I need some muscle.’

  ‘Is this about telephone poles?’

  ‘No. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. This is about a woman who is being extorted by an asshole.’

  Big sigh. ‘David,’ Mustafa said. ‘There are many injustices in the world …’

  ‘The woman in question is a movie star. It would mean you’d have to attend a party full of rich, famous Hollywood people and whatever passes for high society on Cyprus.’

  Mustafa had stopped listening after ‘movie star.’ He would be very happy to attend. No, he would have no trouble leaving Kofinou, it wasn’t a prison. But what should he wear?

  Then I dialed Chante, who answered in a harried snarl. ‘Hey. I have a date for you, for the party. Nice guy. Large guy. Large, scary guy.’

  ‘Why is he not your plus-one? Why is he mine?’

  ‘Because my plus-one is an FBI agent.’

  Credit where credit is due, Chante immediately put it all together, and said, ‘Make sure he knows this is not a romantic date with me,’ and hung up.

  Which left me facing a vital question all on my own: what was I going to wear?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Because Paphos is a British outpost, not an American one, there are fewer posh designer stores than you might expect to find. Lots of full English breakfasts, lots of places to buy souvenirs, lots of jewelry stores where you can buy loose diamonds to hide inside your toothpaste where customs agents won’t find them; not as much Gucci or Versace.

  They do however have a mall every bit as boring as a typical mall in Kansas, and there one can, with effort, find decent shoes. Which is what I was doing when who should I run into but Cyril Kiriakou.

  ‘Mr Mitre!’ he said as I emerged from the Aldo store with a passable Wiellaford loafer and three pairs of socks. ‘I was shopping for my wife’s birthday, and I run into you.’

  ‘Yes. What an amazing coincidence.’

  ‘It is, it is,’ he said, nodding along. ‘Especially so since I wished to speak with you.’

  ‘Oh? About your murder case? I imagined that was either solved or, perhaps, put on the shelf.’

  He shook his head very slightly and met my gaze. ‘Murder is never put on the shelf.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Nor is attempted murder. Even breaking and entering is taken seriously. Shall we go to Costa and have a coffee?’

  It was a short walk, half a mall’s length, to the food court where I was assaulted by the aromas of my one-time home: Burger King and Taco Bell. The walk was just long enough for me to run through the possibilities, which came down to two: either I was being tailed, and professionally so; or Kiriakou had a GPS tracker on my car. Which would not be a good thing.

  We ordered and took a table ‘outside’, meaning in the mall.

  ‘So, how is it going?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘Perhaps I should ask you.’

  ‘You’re the policeman, I’m just a writer.’

  ‘Indeed. Yes. Just a writer. Then, as a writer you may find it interesting that we have suffered something of a crime wave lately. There was quite a dramatic scene at the Aphrodite’s Conch hotel. It seems a knife fight broke out in an elevator, if you can believe it.’

  ‘Huh. Was anyone hurt?’

  His eyes went to my bandaged hand. Then to the bruise on the side of my jaw. Then up to me, eyes merry and sly. ‘It seems someone was. Our forensics team had quite a time collecting blood samples. The inside of the elevator car was smeared with blood.’

  ‘DNA?’ Eyebrows up in anticipation.

  ‘Eventually. For now we have numerous eyewitnesses, some of them from the elevator itself. Of course we showed them … what is the term of art? Six packs, yes? Six photos, some of people known to be innocent, some of known criminals.’

  ‘Any luck?’ I knew the answer. I knew what was coming next. But I was curious about how he’d lay it out for me, how he would build his case. I’d have been more afraid but he wasn’t here to arrest me, he was ‘fronting’ me, poking me with a stick to see what I said or did.

  ‘Well, a very interesting thing. Purely as a joke, you understand, one I thought might amuse you, I inserted a photo of you.’

  ‘Really? A flattering one, I hope.’

  He tilted his head, amused by me. ‘Surprisingly there are very few photos of you. The official photo you use, it seems, is a stock photo.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m a private person.’

  ‘There are photos of you at book signings, but it is fascinating how few of those are usable shots showing your full face. Nevertheless …’

  ‘If you dig deep enough in Google Images …’

  ‘… I was able to have my little joke and insert a photo of you.’

  He waited. I waited. We looked at each other. This was the moment where he expected me to lie. If I lied, he’d know. If I lied, he’d produce his trump card, presumably GPS from my … And then I remembered: we’d gone in Delia’s car, not mine.

  ‘I hope your witnesses did not pick me out,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean I hope they ID’d the guy you’re looking for.’ I managed with Herculean effort to squeeze out a confident smirk.

  ‘Well … as it happens no one accidentally identified you. Or any of the other mug shots.’

  There were definite quotation marks around that word, accidentally. He’d expected to identify me. He’d been hoping to.

  ‘Huh,’ I said, oozing sympathy, ‘it’s funny how people in a lift with a stabby dude don’t recall faces.’

  ‘Indeed. I see that you have injured yourself.’

  ‘Got that right, Cyril, I cut the shit out of my hand.’ I held it up as proof that I did indeed have a hand, and that said hand was in fact bandaged. ‘I slipped in the shower. Hand went right through the glass door and managed to smack my head on the side of the sink stand as I was going down.’

  Go ahead and check, asshole, you’ll find the glass shower door is shattered. You’ll find traces of my blood on some of the glass, which I swept up and bagged but did not put out for the weekly collection. Because I didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck, pal, I am a professional and it’ll take more than some bent yokel cop to ever catch me out on an alibi. None of which I said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said at last. ‘Did you see a doctor?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nah. No need. I put in a couple stitches myself. Some Neosporin. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘You stitched your own hand?’ He made a disgusted face and winced, which I sympathized with.

  ‘Painful as hell, too, but I can handle pain – with a bit of help from whisky.’

  ‘I salute you,’ he said with all the sincerity of a tobacco company spokesman. ‘It is a week for blood, it seems. Blood in a hotel elevator, blood on a second-floor balcony in Limassol. I have ordered DNA testing to see if perhaps there is a match.’

  I was almost insulted by that because he said it with an understated but definite leer, a got-you-now look. In recent years, technology has come online that allows DNA testing in a few hours. But as a practical matter the turnaround for DNA testing tends to be expressed in days if not weeks, and I was pretty sure Cyprus, a country that bought signs warning of speed cameras but no actual speed cameras, had not invested in the latest DNA tech.

  I nodd
ed. ‘Maybe you’ll catch the guy. That would be pretty definitive, matching blood samples from two locations. Excellent sleuthing, Cyril. But I don’t see the connection to your murder.’

  ‘Have you been to Limassol?’ he inquired innocently. ‘It’s very different from Paphos.’

  ‘I was there just yesterday evening,’ I said.

  That disappointed him. ‘Business?’

  ‘Curiosity. I wanted to see it. And as it happened, I met a woman and … well, we had a nice time.’

  ‘This woman …’

  I was morally certain now that he had a GPS tracker on my car and was dying to spring that on me. But of course I had parked a good quarter of a mile from Tatiana’s house. He could put me in Limassol – conceded. He could put me in the right neighborhood. But the beautiful thing was that his own GPS data would place me well away from the breaking and entering. He had needed me to lie about being in Limassol.

  Nice try.

  I leaned forward and lowered my voice. ‘We spent some time at her apartment. And the embarrassing thing is I don’t even remember her name, let alone where we ended up.’ I made the universal sign for drinking. ‘I was a bit … confused, shall we say?’

  ‘Perhaps you entered the address in your car’s guidance?’

  ‘No, she had me follow her. Very twisty-turny.’

  He smiled for himself alone, shook his head bemusedly and changed the subject. ‘I see you’ve been shopping.’

  ‘I have. I’ve been invited to a gala tonight and found I had no proper dress shoes.’

  ‘The Feed the Forgotten gala? I suppose they know you as a famous author.’

  I glided over the implication that there might be some other way to know me, and said, ‘Actually, someone from the movie is staying downstairs from me and was kind enough to invite me. I’m afraid midlist crime novelists don’t rank very high where Hollywood folks are concerned.’

  We made some more polite noises and parted with a handshake. I had the distinct feeling that my pal Cyril was frustrated. I went into the men’s room, hid in a stall for a few minutes and came back out. Then, with my Aldo bag in hand, very much the casual shopper, I spotted Kiriakou and tailed him at a discreet distance. I followed him around Carrefour as he picked up batteries and a pack of mechanical pencils. Then back out into the mall, walking with purpose, presumably heading for his car. He stopped suddenly at Marasil, a kid’s clothing store, and I had the terrible sense that he was searching the display window for my reflection. Had he spotted me?

  But after a moment’s hesitation, he went into the store and emerged ten minutes later with a shopping bag. And then went to his car.

  I drove home with my new shoes, parked and slithered beneath the hot engine. It took a couple of minutes to find the Spark Nano tracker up behind the muffler. It’s a good device that retails for $129.99 but can be found on sale for $79.99. I’ve used them on occasion. I decided to leave it in place for now: evidence jiu-jitsu, using the force of the enemy’s attack against him.

  I went inside and found Delia and Chante sitting on my terrace drinking my wine and chatting amiably, an activity I’d never imagined Chante to be capable of.

  Chante was fetching in a tailored dark gray suit, the sort of thing you wear to apply for a job, but with a pale-yellow silk blouse it was not eye-catchingly drab. Delia wore a blue dress with an enticing slit, and a short matching jacket.

  ‘Well, aren’t I the lucky one?’ I said. ‘I get to escort not one but two gorgeous women.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mustafa had taken a bus to Paphos and we picked him up en route at a petrol station.

  The Mercedes C-class cabriolet is not a small car unless you have Sasquatch in the passenger seat. With his knees practically up under his chin, Mustafa still left Chante with very little leg room behind him. Delia had her own long legs stuffed in behind me. Neither woman would allow me to put the top down because: hair.

  ‘We should discuss the extortion issue,’ Delia said, having been briefed by Chante. ‘Obviously I have no powers of arrest.’

  ‘Not here you don’t,’ I said. ‘But if this Chris Temple asshole thinks he’s looking at FBI trouble when he gets back to the States … And if we get an opportunity, Mustafa can have a conversation with him.’

  ‘Well, so long as you have a carefully-thought-out plan,’ Delia snarked from the back seat.

  It was not a long drive, fortunately, just a quick hop to what is called the Paphos Archeological Site. The site is an official, UN-designated, please-don’t-fuck-this-up site. I had already toured it a week earlier in preparation for my GQ piece. Basically it’s a lot of mosaic floors from the Roman era. Most of the mosaics are in what was once, long ago, a single house belonging to the kind of guy who could afford a whole lot of mosaic floors portraying a whole lot of classical allusions. I would expand on that in the article, no doubt, but basically: mosaics.

  The unnamed Roman who, for the sake of convenience I’d like to call Spurius Flatulus, picked himself a nice plot, well above both lower and upper Paphos, with sweeping Mediterranean views. He had some neighbors (Tittius Agrippa and Pustulus the Elder) who also had mosaics. I assume that was part of the sales pitch for the original real-estate development: Location, Convenience, Mosaics! In truth, they were excellent mosaics, obviously an upgrade over ‘builder grade’ mosaics, which I assume were just bathroom tile.

  There are also columns here and there, standing stark with nothing to support and had I paid any attention in school I could have said whether they were Ionic, Doric or Corinthian columns. However, I can state categorically that they were columns.

  We were not there to see either mosaics or columns, we were there to rescue fair maiden, a notion that would not really become a trope until at least a millennium after Flatulus’ day.

  Delia, Chante, Mustafa and I walked the long gravel and dirt pathway to the odeum, which formed the secondary centerpiece of the archeological site. The night was warm with a bit of breeze and I could smell salt water and history. We were not alone on the path: there were gaggles ahead and behind, women tripping in high heels, men marching with grim fortitude toward forced enjoyment.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘Aphrodite was supposedly born here, in Paphos. Her mother was sea foam and her father was Uranus.’

  ‘Here it comes,’ Delia muttered.

  Because in my early-forties I had still not achieved total adulthood, I said, ‘Yep, water and Uranus. Basically the goddess of beauty was the product of a divine enema.’

  This clearly funny bon mot was met with pained silence, which, on reflection, I deserved.

  The party was set for the odeum, an outdoor theater dating to the second century – the era of Trajan and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. It was a semicircle of stone bleacher seats rising a dozen levels, with an overbearing and much more recent lighthouse looming up behind. On either end of the bleacher seats were small tumbles of sandstone blocks, presumably remnants of the box office and refreshments stands. The immediate surrounding was mostly bare dirt interrupted by more ancient Roman debris, an air-conditioned silver construction-site office off to the side and very stone-appropriate restrooms. In the middle distance was a rough-hewn rock wall holding weeds and dry shrubbery at bay. Way beyond the wall was upper Paphos, modestly illuminated.

  We were confronted by a host checking names against a list on an iPad. I was in a giddy mood, with Delia not quite on my arm but in the general vicinity of it, and the prospect of Minette in my future, and an absence of people trying to stab me, so it was with difficulty that I resisted identifying myself as Biggus Dickus. But I guessed that with this many Brits in attendance that Monty Python reference must already have been trotted out.

  Once through, we merged into a crowd of perhaps a hundred people not counting uniformed waiters and bartenders. It was a posh, well-dressed crowd: diamonds were much on display, but not the big stuff, not the necklaces or the pendant earrings, more the tennis bracelets, diamond studs and one carat
or smaller rings. A good pickpocket could have strolled through and walked off with a hundred large, but that’s never been part of my criminal repertoire.

  I did what I could to spot any Russian assassins, but the truth was I was safe. A killing here, tonight, with Hollywood people in attendance, would have the entire law enforcement establishment of planet Earth down on you. And your bosses would kill you just for being stupid.

  As we headed toward the nearest of two bars I considered how I would do it. ‘It’ in this case meaning how I would fleece this crowd if I were still in the business.

  After considering various unlikely dramatic scenarios involving Joker vs. Batman scenes with costumed minions surrounding the place, I settled on the less-dangerous notion of obtaining the invitations list. The guest list would be a map to unoccupied homes and hotel rooms – pick out half a dozen likely targets, grab a drill and a backpack, plot a route, and carry out lightning-quick burglaries, drilling out wall safes and running with the loot. That way the suspects would be anyone who had knowledge of the guest list and that would slow the cops way down.

  Not that I was really thinking too hard on the subject. It was more muscle memory than anything else: when I see diamonds I have to at least consider … I’d want to fence the goods off-island, for sure, and quickly before the alerts went out. Grab the loot and catch a boat to Beirut, maybe? Cairo? Palermo?

  But again, that was not why I was here surrounded by people who were probably fully-insured and would scarcely miss … No, I was here to save Minette from a foul extortionist and be hailed as her hero. Minette herself likely had a hell of a wall safe collection of baubles. Which I would never even consider. Probably.

  It was a bit like being a recovering alcoholic with his one-year chip wandering into the Old Town Ale House in Chicago. Usually I could push thoughts of grifts and jobs out of my mind, but there was just so much potential in this crowd. It almost seemed wrong that none of these people would be ripped off.

  ‘We should break up and mingle,’ Delia said. ‘We look like a gang on the prowl.’