A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  Mustafa stayed outside, Delia, Chante and I crowded into a space stuffed to the rafters with the implements of farm life: a wheelbarrow, various shovels, rakes, hoes and post diggers, a weed whacker, bags of fertilizer, horse tack, bags of oats, and various implements whose use I could not guess.

  ‘What do you think, Delia?’

  ‘I think this is the kind of stuff you might keep in the barn,’ she said.

  ‘Unless the barn is being used for something else. Stay here, I’ll go peek in the house.’

  Delia didn’t argue. Of the four of us, I was the go-to guy if creeping around like a burglar was called for.

  I plotted a path that kept as much as possible to shadow and hoped to God no one was sitting watching infrared camera feeds.

  I ran, stopped, sidled, stopped, ran a bit and flattened myself against the stone wall of the house. I heard nothing inside. The windows were open so I peeked in one and saw an empty kitchen. Peeked in another and saw an empty living room.

  I texted Delia: Barn. Ten minutes.

  I’d thought to bring a knife – the one Breen had thoughtfully provided. If the house was empty, then the parked cars might not be guarded. I crawled in a very undignified way from car to car, slicing tire nozzles as I went. If we had to run, we wanted the bad guys to try and follow in their cars, and that would stall them by five minutes, by which point, if we hightailed down the road, we could be back at our own cars.

  I met the other three at the side of the barn nearest the shed.

  ‘Noises inside,’ Delia mouthed.

  There were two doors, a wide one meant to allow tractors or horses to pass, and a smaller side door on the far side of the building. The large door was locked with a padlocked chain. I peeked around the corner and saw a large fellow of the sort you position beside a door to stop people coming in. We had Mustafa who I’d have bet a few euros on in a throwdown, but a loud fist fight was not the opening move we were looking for. We also had guns, but the guard might as well, and a shoot-out was also not what we were looking for.

  I sidled back around to the big padlocked door and nodded at Delia who drew bolt cutters from her pack. Mustafa took them from her and snipped the chain, catching it before it could rattle down and make noise.

  He drew the door back and revealed a dark, dusty-smelling chamber that housed three stalls containing two horses, both of whom looked us over and went back to ignoring homo sapiens.

  The barn had been cut in half by a sheetrock wall tacked up over a lattice work of exposed lumber. There was no door connecting the two halves of the barn, which was unfortunate. I heard music coming through the partition, and the murmur of voices. Then a sharp sound that sounded like a slap, followed by a child’s whimper and men’s laughter.

  ‘OK,’ I said, pretending to have a confidence I did not feel. ‘We go in the door past the guard. Mustafa, around the barn, if you would. And we need a diversion that won’t look like a diversion.’

  ‘I’ve got that,’ Delia said. ‘Chante, will you help me?’ Delia pulled a folding map from her handy backpack, and we waited until Mustafa had had time to circle around. Then Delia and Chante stepped out into plain view, both peering at the map by flashlight, two lost hikers who were somehow wandering around in the dark in the middle of nowhere at night.

  ‘Oh, hi!’ Delia said to the guard, adding a low, baffled laugh not audible beyond a few feet. ‘Do you speak English? We appear to be lost.’

  The muscle stiffened, relaxed, took a step and then decided to kneel down in the dirt right after Mustafa hit him in the head with a lead pipe.

  Mustafa did a quick search, drew out a pistol, looked at me, and said, ‘Do you want it?’

  The alternative was giving it to Chante, so I took it. A burglar or confidence man who carries a gun is a damned fool but I had at least handled guns and I was pretty sure (hoped) that Chante had not. In preparing to write Joe Barton’s adventures in New Midlands, I’d gone to Las Vegas and fired a wide range of weapons. Research! So I knew to draw the slide and check to see if I had a round in the chamber. And I knew to look for the safety. After that, it was mostly down to pointing and squeezing and being shocked at the noise, as I understood it. I stuck the scary thing in my pocket and kept a tight grip on my lead pipe.

  I looked to Delia. We were past the stealthy spying and breaking-and-entering phase now and coming to the door-kicking, for which she’d been trained.

  ‘Chante pulls the door,’ Delia whispered. ‘I go in left. Mustafa? Right behind me, and go right. David? Don’t accidentally shoot me in the rear end. No shooting, we want control, not mayhem.’

  I took a deep breath while my mind replayed every cop door-kicking scene in every TV show or movie I’d ever seen as well as the ones I’d written. Most were reassuring. But I focused much harder on the ones that were not.

  ‘Three … two …’ Delia nodded at Chante.

  THIRTY

  Chante pulled open the door, Delia rushed past her, Mustafa a split second behind.

  ‘Freeze!’ Delia yelled, and it was so authoritative that for a second I froze. ‘No one moves! You, on the ground!’

  I went through, pipe hanging limply by my side.

  The layout of the room was not the first thing I noticed. But it’s the safe place to start. The stalls on the partitioned side of the barn had been continued on this side, four of them, but improved by extending sheetrock to a false ceiling, making what looked like little offices in an unfinished building. Each had a door and each door was closed. The cubicles were roughly half of the total space, the rest was a sort of parlor, a faux Victorian pastiche with an upholstered love seat, and two leather easy chairs. An oak mantel had been nailed to the wall and a little electric heater glowed red where a fire should have been. Light came from three mismatched lamps.

  But before I noted all of that, I saw the framed photographs on the walls.

  I am not now, nor ever, going to describe what was in those photos. If I knew where those memories resided in my brain, I would take an icepick …

  I moved without intention, just moved toward the door of the first stall. It was not locked. I pulled the door open and saw a naked man just getting to his feet, and a naked little girl who was bleeding, and I smashed my pipe into Kiriakou’s face and pushed him down and kicked him and straddled him and laid the pipe into his face again and again as he shouted and cried and I didn’t give the slightest fuck what he had to say because I wasn’t really there, some other person, thing, force had control of my body.

  It was Chante who pulled me off. She must be stronger than she looks because I didn’t make it easy; I was still aiming for a solid kick to land with pointed toe in just the right place, but Chante pulled me back, out of the room and pushed me into one of the chairs.

  I sat there stunned for a moment, stunned not just by what I’d seen, what I was still seeing, but by my own reaction. I do not lose control. I do not ever lose control. Ever. There is no secret David Mitre, who gets a few drinks in him and loses control.

  I looked at the pipe in my hand. The business end was covered in blood and bits of tissue and hair, and I was glad I’d forgotten the pistol in my pocket because guns put an end to things and I had not wanted things to end. I had wanted to beat Kiriakou until he was crippled, disfigured, mutilated. I had wanted to beat him till he was paste. A red stain.

  I blinked and realized that I’d been gone for a few minutes. Not participating in reality, you might say. In a fugue state.

  Mustafa and Delia had been busy doing useful things like dragging naked and semi-naked men off terrified children, whipping on zip ties and settling them on the floor after only the minimum necessary roughness. Although one man who’d resisted Mustafa had an arm at an angle you don’t see in a medical diagram.

  Four naked or mostly naked men lay face down on the frayed oriental carpet, all with hands held tight behind them with zip ties. Kiriakou was bleeding from every part of his face. His nose was barely discernible. His lips wer
e shredded, gushing blood. A tooth knocked out by its roots poked through his left cheek.

  I wondered if I should feel ashamed. But honestly the phrase that came to mind was from the Old Testament: And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was good.

  Kiriakou forced open one eye, the other being covered in blood, and glared at me.

  ‘Yeah, you go ahead and eyeball me, asshole. I’ll pop that fucking eyeball out with my thumb and mail it to your wife.’

  Pretty sure that amounted to a threat of torture and was, therefore, wrong. And yet it felt just fine and Delia did not leap to intervene.

  The girl who’d been Kiriakou’s victim, another girl and a boy of maybe six clung to Mustafa. I don’t know how those children knew to trust the giant, scary man, but some instinct led them to him and they weren’t wrong. He was an oak tree and they clung to his trunk. Mustafa’s eyes blazed with rage and pain and tears rolled down his cheeks. I suppose it was a good thing that we didn’t have any telephone poles handy.

  Chante was holding a girl, a toddler, a little kid who should just be learning her letters.

  No children looked to me for comfort. I’m not that guy, I guess. And they may have been put off by Kiriakou’s blood spattered all over my face.

  Berthold was one of the men face down. He was yelling, outraged, furious, demanding to know who the hell we thought we were and I just … went away again for a moment and snapped back to reality only when I felt Delia’s hand on my shoulder, restraining not comforting.

  ‘David, no. No.’

  I stepped back. Twice now I’d lost it. This was not me, this was not Martin or Carter or Alex or any of the me’s I’d ever been. ‘Take these,’ I said through gritted teeth, and handed the pistol and the pipe to Delia.

  They had a sideboard, our gentleman child rapists, and three crystal decanters. The brown one looked like whiskey and I poured myself three fingers and gulped it down.

  I sat down again and locked eyes with Berthold. ‘Give me a fucking excuse, you piece of shit.’

  Weird, I guess, but in a gang consisting of an FBI agent, a giant Arab and an exceptionally rude Frenchwoman, I was somehow in the role of ‘bad cop.’ As a professional writer, I had good command of language, so I said, ‘I won’t kill you, motherfucker, I will slice off your cock and make you eat it and as you’re chewing, I will put a fucking bullet in your fucking spine and you can spend the rest of your evil fucking life as a dickless old man in a wheelchair pissing through a tube.’

  It was the specificity that sold it. That plus the absolute conviction in my voice, because I meant it, I absolutely meant it. And, again, the face dripping Kiriakou’s blood must have looked a bit grim.

  Chante said, ‘I have video, and by now it is in the cloud and in Mr Mitre’s lawyer’s inbox.’

  That calmed everyone down, including me. That was the nail in the coffins of all four men, and they knew it.

  Delia said, ‘Chante, Mustafa, would you take the children outside? Leave your phone on that table, leave it taping, but the children need to be out of here.’

  When they had all gone, Delia looked at me. ‘Are you okay?’

  Okay? I was sick through and through, shocked at the creature I’d turned into, every muscle fiber in my body twitching, and still on a hair trigger. ‘Never better.’

  Kiriakou was moaning in pain and spit out another tooth. We found their clothing and pulled out wallets and phones. Both of the unknown men were British expats, UK passports, local driving licenses.

  We dragged Berthold into one chair and Kiriakou in another. Kiriakou looked like a balloon a week after the birthday party. He was drained, emptied out. He was a cop: he knew just how hopeless his life was now.

  Berthold was a different story. He still thought he had juice. He still thought he was somebody.

  ‘Mr Berthold,’ Delia said, pulling the table closer so she could perch on the edge and look into his face, ‘we are going to have a conversation.’

  ‘Call my lawyer, nigger.’

  And I was up, because whatever had happened to my self-control, it was not yet repaired. Delia said, ‘No, David,’ again. So, I sat back down but drew out my never-used – well, not by me – brass knuckles and put my fingers through the holes. All to one side where Berthold could see and Delia could not. Just in case.

  ‘Let’s start again,’ Delia said patiently. ‘Your life as you’ve known it is over, Mr Berthold. Whoever you thought you were, that’s over. As of now, there is not a single person in the expat community, or in the wider world, who will speak so much as a single syllable in your defense.’

  She paused to let that sink in, and I could see that it did. Disbelief, denial, and the slow, sickening dawn of realization that it was the truth. I fed on his dread, I reveled in it.

  ‘You are going to spend the rest of your life in a prison cell. But there are bad prison cells, and then there are infinitely worse prison cells. Isn’t that right, Mr Kiriakou?’

  Kiriakou said nothing, just turned blood-rimmed eyes toward me. I gave him a cheeky wink.

  ‘There are places where a child rapist like you, Mr Berthold, becomes nothing but an object to be passed around by bigger, stronger men,’ Delia went on in a serious, measured voice. ‘There are prisons where the guards train up new recruits by having them beat short-eyes half to death. Prisons where you’ll be in your cell and someone will throw a cup of sulfuric acid in your face and the guards will take their sweet time about intervening.’

  I showed teeth stained with Kiriakou’s blood.

  ‘Ever hear of rectal prolapse?’ Delia asked, as if she was genuinely concerned. ‘As a person devoted to the rule of law, I absolutely deplore it, but … well, sometimes a prison gang rape can go on for hours. Twenty or thirty cons, one right after the other. The rectum comes loose. It basically … falls out.’

  Give Berthold credit, he’d managed to look tough for a few minutes there, but ‘prolapse’ did it. He knew he was hearing the truth. I watched as the fear grew inside him.

  ‘See, what you want right now, Berthold, what you need desperately,’ Delia explained patiently, ‘is a criminal charge that will get you extradited back to the UK. Cyprus only has the one prison, so you’ll be in with general population if you stay here. Now, in the UK, they have places for people like you. You’re a British citizen, you’d have the advantage of speaking the language. You no doubt have money stashed away … you could have a life in a British prison. So, what you want to do is tell me all about the trafficking scam, but be sure to include everything you know about money laundering as well.’

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ Berthold snarled.

  ‘So, you want me to call the Cypriot police. Because, see, the two go hand in hand. Once they take you in, it will be days before the embassy sends anyone to check on you. You’re going to want that embassy lawyer to come marching in with an extradition request. Otherwise he’s going to give you the number of a local defense attorney and that will be the last you hear from the British government.’

  Much of this was a lie. No one was ever going to put a good word in for Berthold. But it was a clever lie with just enough elements of truth for a desperate man to grab for. Berthold was at the low point of his life, a point he never expected to reach, and at moments like that you think, Home. And if you’re Berthold you start to think of friends you may have in government who may have their own peccadillos to conceal. You start to think maybe, just maybe, I can save myself.

  If I get home.

  ‘I’ll tell you some things,’ Berthold said, and damned if he hadn’t regained just a bit of his natural arrogance.

  ‘You two will want some privacy,’ I said. I stood up, my body still vibrating weirdly, something beyond the familiar adrenalin burn-off. I grabbed Kiriakou by the neck and dragged and pushed him out the door. Mustafa went back for the other two. We dumped the three partially-clothed men against the barn wall, their asses in the dirt.

  Chante had all four children dresse
d and huddled together in the back rows of the Toyota RAV with the engine running the heater. I don’t suppose Chante would have been my first choice to comfort traumatized children, but she was willing.

  ‘I had to change the tire,’ Mustafa said to me, raising a suspicious brow. ‘Someone slashed one tire on each car.’

  I nodded. ‘Must be a tough neighborhood.’

  I called Father Fotos and woke him up, because atheist hypocrite that I am, his big, gloomy church seemed like a safe place. He would know the right social services. Poor man, I’m sure he’d taken some tough calls in his time as a priest, but none worse than that one.

  When I was done, I noticed Mustafa eyeing me curiously. ‘I had not guessed that you were a violent man.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not. Maybe a couple of fistfights in my whole life. It was just …’ I didn’t have a word for what it was just. Finally, I said, ‘Like it wasn’t me. What a cliché. “I was a bystander, Your Honor. It was like someone else just rose up and …”’ God, I wanted to cry. But I’m a big, strong, manly man and we’re not supposed to do that.

  ‘Ah, then you lied, Mr Mitre. Do you recall me asking you whether you were a good man? And you said, “Not really.” What you should have said was yes, because there is good and evil in us all, but Inshallah, when the moment of crisis comes, it is the good that takes over.’

  I sighed. ‘The “good” almost beat a man to death.’

  Mustafa laughed and did a shoulder hug thing that did not quite snap my collarbones. ‘Almost, David. Almost. You had a gun in your pocket, you could have killed him.’ Then he sort of lifted me to where he could look me in the eyes. ‘What did you do with the gun?’

  ‘I gave it to Delia.’

  He nodded and patted my back. ‘Yes, good idea.’

  I couldn’t look at the children. I don’t even like children; hell, I don’t like people, period, let alone children. I couldn’t explain to my own satisfaction why I had lost my mind. Stress. Too many close calls. A visceral need to draw a sharp, clear line between me and them? Guilt over what I’d almost done to Thorne Breen? And maybe, I suppose, some things from my own childhood. Best not to dwell, I told myself. Best not to indulge in analysis when there was work to be done.