A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

My phone rang. Delia. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I have something.’

  ‘So do I. Your tiki bar in half an hour?’

  ‘You’ll make Theo’s day.’

  Delia arrived, not in a bathing suit this time. Theo shot me a dirty look, like it was my fault, but still fawned over her for a good ten minutes. We drank sparkling water.

  ‘You first,’ Delia said, when Theo had finally absented himself.

  I told her about Chante’s video, the TR6 and its owner, Jeremy ‘Jez’ Berthold. Halfway through she typed the name into an app. ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘My guess is he’s ex-intelligence, still connected. Heard about Ramanda—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rachel slash Amanda. Ramanda. No?’

  She shook her head and seemed to be in some kind of pain. ‘No, David. We could call her the victim.’

  ‘The vic?’ I grinned. ‘How about UNSUB? That’s much cooler than saying Unknown Subject.’

  Delia had learned by now just to patiently wait out my more irrelevant digressions. ‘Here’s what I’ve learned,’ she said. ‘I heard back from my mob accountant. It’s a lot of data, but even so, it’s just a small slice of the whole picture.’

  ‘Caveat, caveat,’ I muttered while making a ‘get on with it’ gesture.

  ‘He went through what we gave him and according to him there are just too many questionable transactions going on to even get a handle on it. However, amid the usual Russian oligarchs and Saudi sheikhs looking to move money into more stable countries, what popped out was a certain NGO.’

  ‘An NGO?’

  ‘Feed the Forgotten,’ Delia said.

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘And here’s the thing: August 19, October 9, November 4 of last year. January 14, March 6, May 10 and June 12.’

  ‘June 12? That’s the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’ She grinned her predatory grin. ‘Which would be the day before the boat we saw yesterday landed. And guess what? The other dates roughly match up with refugee boats that later landed here on Cyprus. Boats that came from Alexandria.’

  ‘So wait. How does this work? Traffickers load up some refugees in Egypt and ship them to Cyprus. But either somewhere en route, or after they land, the healthy kids are snatched and sold off.’

  ‘And Feed the Forgotten sends a cash transfer to a Lebanese bank.’

  ‘Is this their redeeming slaves thing?’ I asked, frowning.

  ‘That’s not what the timing says.’

  ‘Where’s Feed the Forgotten’s money come from, aside from Hollywood people and my landlady?’

  ‘Charitable donations. Many, you will be shocked to learn, come from shell corporations.’

  ‘So wait, let me get this straight. The dirty money flows from various bad guys to the NGO where it is instantly “clean.” Feed the Forgotten uses the money to pay traffickers. The traffickers charge their passengers, steal the kids, then extort money from the parents and relatives and, of course, from Feed the Forgotten. A couple times a year, Feed actually produces a rescued victim and parades him around as a success story. And there is no accounting for the ones they ransom but never see.’

  We were working our way back logically, step by step to the sudden realization that had occurred to us when we were standing atop the odeum: not one scam, two.

  ‘Someone got the trafficking scam going in Sicily after the most recent Libyan meltdown, then relocated it to Cyprus after you and your fellow Feebs busted up that party. Meanwhile Feed the Forgotten was increasingly being used by Russians to move money. Hah! I think that’s the bones of it. We’re brilliant, Delia. We’re Nick and Nora Charles. Frank and Joe Hardy. Morse and Lewis. Batman and Robin.’

  Long pause. ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Scooby and Scrappy-Doo. The Russians cannot possibly be happy about attention turning toward Feed the Forgotten, or the AZX Bank, or the general topic of human trafficking. Those guys are all about money and lots of it. Also: Mulder and Scully.’

  Delia picked up the burden of thinking aloud. ‘You’re spotted talking to Calix Petrides at Kofinou, alarm bells go off, a call is made, and someone decides to follow you. You seem to be a busybody, and they may well have made me, which makes you more than a busybody. So, a hit is authorized. And did you just leave off Easy Rawlins and Mouse?’

  ‘Easy and Mouse are not partners. One’s a righteous detective and the other is a criminal, who … Ah. Okay, I see what you did there.’ That hurt my feelings a bit. ‘So, who killed Ramanda? The Russians? Whoever is running the trafficking operation?’

  Delia leaned back, tented her fingers and thought. I also thought. You could practically hear the gears whirring.

  ‘No wonder it never made sense,’ I said. ‘We were looking for a grand unifying theory for what was two completely different operations. Apples and oranges and the one maybe not liking the other at all.’

  Finally, Delia said, ‘Nestor Panagopolous.’

  ‘You think he’s the boss?’ I asked skeptically.

  ‘No, no,’ she snapped. ‘But he’s our lead. We need to find him.’

  ‘Every Monday,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you scoped the bank?’

  I put a hand over my heart. ‘What are you suggesting? Why, I never!’

  Delia sighed. ‘OK, look, David, we need new rules of engagement.’

  So close to making a dumb joke about not knowing her well enough to get engaged.

  ‘I can’t have you confessing felonies to me,’ Delia said. ‘But. You are a notorious liar, and a fiction writer.’

  ‘The two do go hand in hand.’

  ‘Yes, they also go hand in hand with grift and burglary and a few other things.’ She looked at me, very serious. ‘David, this isn’t just a job for me. Being FBI? That’s not just something I do to make a living. I graduated from Georgetown Law School, made law review, clerked for an appellate judge. There are a dozen law firms ready to pay me mid-six figures, which, needless to say, is quite a bit more than the Bureau pays.’

  ‘You’re a true believer.’ I intended it to come out as a sneer, but it came out sincere.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I believe in the rule of law. I believe people who break the law should be punished. So, you need to understand something, David. I like you. You’re smart, funny and fundamentally decent deep down. Way deep down. And if I may quote Minette by way of Chante, you are both tall and symmetrical, so I’d even go so far as to say somewhat attractive. But you and I are different tribes. There’s always going to be a wall between us.’

  ‘A prison wall.’

  Delia shook her head. ‘I’m not threatening you. I will stick to the terms of our deal. When I eventually write the report on this, you’ll be a snitch, a confidential informant. Your name will not appear – any of your names. What I’m trying to do is show you the respect you deserve by telling you how it is.’

  That shouldn’t have bothered me much. But it did. I had just been put in my place. It was a punch to the gut and I don’t think I hid it very well.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Got it.’

  ‘So, without confessing to any crimes, and bearing in mind that you are a fabulist … have you any knowledge of the AZX Bank in Limassol?’

  ‘So, you get to be on your moral high horse and yet profit from my low activities? You’ve got your mob accountant and me, your pet burglar.’

  ‘It’s called police work.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve done enough,’ I said. ‘I came close to being killed. I’m stitched up with thread from a hotel courtesy kit. I’ve got Kiriakou crawling up my ass and one way or the other I have to default on my lease and go somewhere else, because I am burned on Cyprus.’

  ‘Yes. You have done enough. More than enough. If you want to walk away right now our deal will hold.’

  ‘You think I won’t?’

  ‘Of course you won’t.’

  ‘Why won’t I? Why won’t I just tell you to take your Russian mob and your traf
fickers and your idiot NGOs and the rest and shove ’em?’

  She leaned forward and actually took my hand. There was some of her usual mockery in her eyes, but something warmer as well. ‘You know, I’d have thought you were more self-aware, David. You write about characters like you genuinely understand people, but you don’t understand yourself, do you? You’re not going to run away, not now, because there’s something you want and you don’t have it yet.’ A second later she rolled her eyes and said, ‘No, not that, good lord.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Redemption, David. You want redemption.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  From time to time, generally when I’ve had a bit too much to drink, I look her up on Facebook, the girl in the window.

  She got married. And for a time I had to endure photos of her with her husband who I cordially despised, although, hell I don’t know, he was probably a decent enough guy.

  They were divorced after five years. No explanation, just a Facebook posting and a change of status.

  They had a kid who would now be about nine years old. A boy. Looked like a healthy kid. She posted his drawings from time to time.

  I would go through her various likes – movies, music, and especially books. Especially books after I started being published. Drunk and weepy I would go to her Facebook page to see if somehow she had read something of mine. Of course she wouldn’t know it was mine, the David Mitre persona came much later than our brief affair. But no luck. She tended to read literary fiction, not genre stuff like mine.

  She lived in the San Francisco Bay Area where she worked in some capacity I never quite figured out for the Marin County Arts Board. Her son attended school and was doing fine there. She drove a Volvo.

  Her hair was shorter, more stylish and more blonde than it had been. She liked travel, especially Italy. She liked Beyoncé and Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams. On her list of favorite TV shows was Lost, which I decided had something to do with me. In my fantasy, I was the thing she’d lost.

  I can be a bit pathetic after a few too many.

  Sober me, rational me knows she had dodged a bullet when I took off. I’d been what, twenty-three, twenty-four? At that point, I was all arrogance, testosterone, paranoia and free-floating anger. I was out for revenge. Revenge against the man, against all the authorities and all their power arrayed so unfairly against me. And what had I done at that point? Just a few burglaries, some unnoticed skimming and a bit of bail-jumping. I was furious at the world for trying to lock me up.

  I was not always the coolly rational person I now manage to pass myself off as.

  In her pictures, the girl looked happy. I searched for subtle signs of deep loneliness, a sense of loss … Did not really find any of that.

  I was forty-two years old. I had five published novels. I had a bit more than two million dollars in secret accounts. I was tall, symmetrical and had excellent hair. People liked me, mostly, especially women. And yet I was pining for a woman I’d long ago left, and now for a woman who saw me as a lower life form.

  So, I poured myself a drink, and lit a cigar, and carried them both out onto the terrace to remind myself that I was in a nice villa on Cyprus, looking at the sun setting over the water, and not in some prison straining to see a patch of blue through a barred window. But there’s only so much pleasure to be gained by successfully avoiding the worst consequences of your own colossal stupidity. Some men scale cliffs, some men fight wars, some men create cures for cancer, and I nimbly avoid the consequences of my own actions.

  I changed my bandages. It had been almost three days and the cuts were puffy but not infected. Scabs had tentatively formed crusts beneath neat stitches, though the salt water had softened them. I was no longer seeping much blood, which was a good thing, and the pain was now less distracting than the fire ant itch of healing flesh.

  I decided I needed to get out of the house. Anywhere, so long as it was out. I drove down to lower Paphos and got lucky with a parking place. I walked along the shore a bit, hotels on my left, narrow, rocky beach on my right, idly counting cats, which, as usual, were everywhere. Every second chaise longue had its own tabby, legs drawn in, sleepy eyes opening to glance at me. So very much like Delia’s eyes and just as dismissive.

  I felt the tail before I spotted him. It’s a sixth sense, which admittedly, can be mistaken – I once played a game of French Connection subway shuffle on the Madrid subway before it occurred to me that the guy I thought was a tail was just flirting with me. But in my line of work, you check out these paranoid flashes, you can’t just dismiss them.

  Back in the bad old days, you’d check out a tail by pausing in front of a shop window and hoping to catch a glimpse of reflection. But technology is a wonderful thing, so I opened my phone, turned the camera to selfie mode and snapped some quick shots.

  And there he was about a hundred feet behind me. Thirty-ish, leather jacket, jeans, running shoes. It wasn’t Bristle or Baldy. Possibly a pal of my Russian friends, but my instinct said ‘cop’ not crook.

  I pushed a cat aside and flopped into a chaise longue, taking more pictures, this time of the blood-red sunset, ostentatiously playing tourist. A glance to my right showed that my tail had also decided this was an excellent time to enjoy the view.

  I groaned inwardly. The problem was that I didn’t even know for certain whether he was of the ‘collecting evidence’ or the ‘ready to commit murder’ variety of tails.

  I wandered up into the next hotel lobby, sat at the bar, ordered a Scotch and turned to watch the seaward door. And there he was, wandering across the room carefully avoiding looking at me and taking a seat at a distant table where he could face the sea and still see me out of the corner of his eye.

  I was feeling a bit down, and when I’m down there’s a tendency to want to reshuffle the deck, so I was just about to walk over and confront the guy when I spotted something else. Another guy. Also thirty-ish and alone. Also wearing a jacket despite the warm night, though his was a dark gray Canali sports coat, if I did not miss my guess. I own the navy version, which is not exactly relevant.

  The point was that this second guy also did the room-scan, which sort of carefully slid past me like I wasn’t there. He did look at Tail #1, though, and frowned.

  Interesting. Tail #2 either recognized Tail #1 as a fellow cop, or as a fellow bad guy, or was a bad guy recognizing a cop … or something, but Tail #2 was definitely carefully blind to me and unhappy about Tail #1.

  Well, fuck it. I was not in the mood.

  I carried my drink over to Tail #1, set it down on his table and plopped into the chair opposite him. I watched his reactions carefully.

  Cops and thugs are related on the family tree of homo sapiens in that neither is happy about being challenged. But the thug will project a danger warning, like a bull lowering its head to bring its horns to bear, or a gorilla beating its chest. A cop, on the other hand, is all about control. They don’t send out ‘I can kill you’ vibes so much as ‘I’m in charge here’ vibes.

  ‘Hi. I’m David Mitre. But you already know that.’

  He took a good two seconds to eyeball me with a flat, unimpressed look. No fear. No threat. Just that imperturbable cop smugness.

  ‘I no speak English,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a cop in Paphos, of course you speak English.’

  He didn’t like that. His jaw muscles clenched. His fingers formed into half-fists. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  So I said, ‘Listen, dude, I thought I should mention that you’re not the only guy tailing me.’

  He was unable to hide either his surprise or his quick, sidelong glances.

  ‘Gray blazer, at your nine o’clock. Posh-looking guy with glasses.’

  He glanced, held it a moment, and turned back to me, defiant. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Not one of yours, huh?’

  ‘Go away, you are bothering me.’

  I laughed. ‘Look, officer, the bu
llshit doesn’t work on me. I know you’re tailing me, I know you’re a cop, I know that guy is also tailing me, and I know he’s not a cop because cops don’t wear $1,500 dollar blazers unless they’re corrupt and lack all subtlety.’

  He wasn’t likely to ever make chief of police, this policeman, because he wasn’t very bright. He tried a bluff. ‘If I am a police officer maybe you should be more careful. I might arrest you.’

  ‘What?’ I made an incredulous face. ‘Look, dude … do you mind if I call you dude? Dude, officer dude, if you could arrest me, you wouldn’t be following me. Right? You tail people because you’re looking for evidence of a crime. Tailing and arresting are mutually exclusive.’

  He was caught flatfooted. I almost felt sorry for him. He was probably just picking up some overtime tailing me, probably had very little notion of why. Now he was trying to find a way to assert dominance, but he couldn’t and it frustrated him.

  ‘So, officer dude, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go ask the other asshole who he is. I just thought you should know. It’s possible he might do something unfortunate. And you’ll want to be ready. Right? Yeah.’

  I grabbed my drink and made a beeline for Tail #2. I took a stool beside him and by way of introduction said, ‘I can’t help but notice you looking at me. I thought I’d save you some time and tell you that I’m straight.’

  Tail #2 was a cool customer. He had the look of a businessman on holiday, maybe someone who worked in finance and thought a gray blazer was giddy informality. He looked like money, like a man whose wife I could divest of some jewelry. He also looked like he spent serious time at the gym, with shoulders and biceps both straining against fine Italian wool.

  ‘Mr Mitre,’ he said, and stood to extend his hand. Dry palm, firm, confident grip. ‘My name is Breen, Thorne Breen. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Yeah, enchanté. Cool name, by the way.’ British accent, too northern to be truly posh, but with a patina of BBC standard layered over it like veneer.

  We sat. I waited.

  ‘You will be wondering why I am following you.’

  ‘I will be, yes.’