A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  We called the Cypriot police. Chante had already emailed them video of the scene, including video of Kiriakou blowing red snot bubbles as he slumped naked. I had checked that none of the footage showed my face, then suggested she forward a copy to the local newspapers as well.

  We dragged Kiriakou and the other two back inside their little barn of horror and slipped a zip tie through the latch so even if they somehow got their hands free they wouldn’t be getting out.

  ‘I guess it’d be wrong to set the place on fire,’ I said to Delia as we settled into my car.

  ‘Listen, David, we have agents who work on tracking kiddie porn. They get therapy, a lot of it. No one can stand it for long. It touches something deep.’

  ‘They’re just little kids, that’s the …’ But I didn’t know what it was, so I finished with a lame, ‘You know?’

  ‘I know.’

  Silence for quite a while as I drove through the night. I pulled into the curved driveway of Delia’s hotel. I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror, illuminated by the ghastly neon of the hotel’s entry. I looked like a survivor of a slasher movie.

  I was goddam proud of that blood on my face.

  Police lights came blazing up the road and passed us, heading toward the barn. They would question the men, ask them who had done this to them. My name would come up. Which meant one way or another I was leaving Cyprus.

  ‘I suppose beating Kiriakou was wrong,’ I said.

  ‘Illegal, certainly,’ Delia said. ‘If this were the US and I had authority, I would arrest you even though no jury I’ve ever heard of would convict you and few prosecutors would be foolish enough to try. But wrong? Beating an officer of the law who used his office to rape children?’ She actually ruffled my hair. Like I was her kid and I’d scored a goal. ‘I suspect, David, aka Martin, that you’ve never done anything more right in your life.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Berthold had told Delia everything. Once he’d started, she almost couldn’t shut him up. The names of three more Brits, a Swede, a Frenchman and two Cypriots, all involved in the trafficking ring. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would take the rap by himself, he was the kind of man who thought he’d get better treatment by giving up subordinates.

  Berthold had bought Delia’s logic in toto and he bent over backward to construct a case for extradition. He had profited personally from the trafficking and had paid no taxes on it. He had used classified information from his time at MI6 and from contacts there to blackmail and extort, first in Sicily and then, when that operation came apart, on Cyprus. He had also used his position to subvert Feed the Forgotten, a British-registered NGO, and enrich himself.

  And yes, he had ordered the murder of a British national, another corrupt former agent. He’d had her murdered on the beach because Ramanda had brought FBI to the island in pursuit of the very man who was the connective tissue between the traffickers and the money launderers. It had been a dual message to the Russians that he was in control and they had no reason to be concerned, and that he would not be easily intimidated because he was a protected man who owned a highly-placed cop and could do whatever he liked on Cyprus.

  Deep down, Berthold believed that once passions cooled we’d see that he was an important man, a man who had once worked in a senior position in government, a man who would be shown some consideration if he cooperated.

  Amateur.

  He might be an ex-spy and an evil bastard, but he did not know how police and prosecutors think. The Cypriots, the Italians and the British all had stacks of felony charges to play with now, and they would between them conspire to ensure that wherever he ended up, it would be the place most likely to destroy him.

  Which left Panagopolous and the Russians. And there, too, Berthold had been very helpful.

  I made a two a.m. call to my blue-water sailor, Dabber.

  ‘Unh?’ he said.

  ‘We met in a bar a few days ago. You remember?’

  That woke/sobered him a bit. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you have your boat at the Paphos dock before nine a.m., I will hand you an envelope with five thousand euros. We will take a short sea voyage and return to Paphos, where I will hand you another five thousand.’

  Had he been alert, he might have tried to bargain, but he was too slow and I hung up on him.

  I showered off Kiriakou’s blood and decided to just sort of sit down in the bottom of the shower for a while. I suppose that’s my safe place. It must have been quite a while because I was interrupted by a soft knock on the bathroom door.

  ‘It’s me,’ Chante said. ‘Delia requested I check on you.’

  I toweled off and slipped on a robe and headed straight for the whisky. ‘Want one?’

  ‘I have one,’ Chante said.

  It was chilly out on the terrace. Rain had fallen while I was showering and the chairs were wet, but it felt clean and fresh. Chante sat opposite me.

  ‘How about you, Chante?’ I asked. ‘You okay?’

  She’d been crying. So had I, but I could blame the shower.

  Chante’s mouth twisted. She jabbed a rigid index finger against her forehead and I understood. Neither of us had a visible wound, but we’d been hurt just the same. There was a poison in our minds and it would take a long time to flush out.

  I nodded. I raised a glass and said, ‘To Delia.’

  Chante raised hers and growled, ‘Not just to Delia.’

  I said, ‘You’re right. To the big man. And to you, Chante.’

  ‘Not just,’ she said again, and damned near made eye contact with me.

  It was by far the nicest thing Chante had ever said to me. Granted it was just two words and I wasn’t actually named, but still …

  She held up her phone. ‘I’ve uploaded everything again, for certainty. Now I am going to sleep,’ she said and walked into the living room without another word.

  It took me longer. In fact, I ended up drinking myself to sleep right there on the terrace. At some point in the night, I must have regained consciousness for long enough to fetch a blanket, because when I woke to my insistent phone alarm at seven thirty, my bedroom duvet was spread over me.

  I made coffee and toast while Chante fried eggs and sausage and mushrooms and grilled a tomato – everything but the beans and the blood pudding – to make a full English.

  Delia arrived just as we were sitting down and only then did I notice that Chante had made breakfast for three.

  We could have all used some sunlight, but the clouds gave us only glimpses, and the breeze was stiff enough to tear the tops off waves out in the Mediterranean. We didn’t say anything more than ‘pass the salt,’ for a while.

  ‘Mustafa?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘He speaks Arabic, Father Fotos does not, so he will stay with them for a while.’

  ‘Underneath all that big and scary, Mustafa’s a dad,’ I said, and thought, Or at least he was.

  ‘Thanks for breakfast, Chante,’ Delia said, giving her number one killer smile. Then, to me, ‘Will your man be there?’

  ‘I think so. If he’s sober.’

  Dabber was not sober, but he was there with his boat tied off to the mole, looking sweaty and anxious, but still playing the part.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d be bringing two such lovely ladies aboard,’ he said, doing a sort of bow as we hopped onto the deck. ‘G’day, miss,’ he said to Chante. ‘G’day, miss,’ he said as well to Delia, but I could see that she set off alarm bells. He shot me a panicky look.

  I laughed. ‘Yeah, she’s a cop, Dabber. But she’s cool.’

  ‘Yes,’ Delia agreed drolly, ‘I’m one of those cool cops.’

  We set off to sea and as we bounced along Chante did some throwing up so Dabber tossed her a blister pack of Dramamine. Then Dabber pulled me aside to ask, ‘What’s all this, then, mate? What are we about?’

  ‘Not what I ever expected to be doing,’ I said. I showed him map coordinates on my phone.

  ‘That’s just open wate
r,’ he protested.

  ‘It won’t be tonight,’ I reassured him. Unless of course Berthold had misled us. The refugee pressure was growing and he’d had high hopes for increased profit and more children to rape.

  Why was it that the photos on the wall of that barn were what came to mind? Because I’d been unprepared for them? Because they were sickening trophies that testified to minds so dark there was no place for them in the human race? Because the actual children …

  Bingo, that was it. I could recall the photos and just feel disgust. I could keep a handle on that. The actual kids … that was going to be hard to think about. Forever.

  Delia was standing in the bow despite the spray and the wind, which pushed fitfully at her windbreaker, outlining arms and chest. Her face was wet and I was sure her lips would be pillowy soft and taste of salt, and equally sure that I would never know. I went to stand beside her. It felt not-wrong being with Delia as she closed in at last on her bête noire, her cliché unfinished case.

  But I’d begun to have my doubts about Nestor Panagopolous. I’d been trying to make sense of his role in all this, and the answer that had come was both logical and improbable.

  The Kute Koala or whatever the hell the boat was called was no speedboat, but it managed a respectable ten knots and the sun was just dipping toward the western horizon when we reached our spot.

  ‘Now what?’ Dabber asked, a can of beer in hand.

  ‘Now we wait,’ I said.

  ‘And what are we waiting for, exactly?’

  ‘Well, Dabber, we are pretending to be fishing, and we are waiting on two boats set to rendezvous about two miles east of here.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where these two boats are coming from?’

  ‘One is coming from Alexandria,’ I said. ‘The other will be coming from Limassol.’

  Dabber might be a broken-down old drunk, but he was not stupid. He liked zero parts of that story.

  ‘You’re either smuggling hashish or refugees, mate,’ he said darkly. ‘I didn’t sign on for neither.’

  ‘Well, captain, it isn’t hash. And if this goes well, you will have another five on top of what I’ve already promised. Fifteen large for a day’s ride is good pay.’

  ‘Not if I end up in prison with my boat seized.’

  ‘No prison,’ I assured him. ‘Possibly death, but no prison.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘And, I’ll add, a hearty fuck-you. We are heading back and you can keep the money.’

  Delia had joined us in time to hear that last bit and I knew that she had a gun, and that no power on earth was going to stop her from getting Panagopolous. But before we reached the point of threats, I said, ‘Dabber, I don’t know you, but I know you’ve done some things you’re not proud of. Me too. But if this works out, you’ll be the man who saved some lives.’

  He snorted derisively. ‘That and a fiver will buy me a pint.’

  ‘You’re right, it won’t buy you a damned thing, though the money will. But it will give you something better.’

  ‘What’s better than money?’

  I did not wink at Delia, that would have been too much. But I felt her listening, as I said, ‘It will buy you redemption, Dabber. You’re a drunk, and a bit of a cheat, a bullshit artist, a hustler. We both know you’ve broken some laws, right?’ He did not rush to deny it. ‘And we both know that’s not the worst of it, because it never is. You’ve done things that don’t set right with you. Things you wish you could take back.’

  He tried to bluster. ‘You don’t know anything about—’ But I waved that away.

  ‘Don’t try to con a con. Sin and redemption, Dabber. Sin and redemption. Do this one good thing. Just this one good thing.’ He gaped at me, confused, glanced at Delia, more confused. So I said, ‘It doesn’t mean you enter a monastery, captain. Jesus, I’m not here to save your soul; if there’s a hell, I imagine we’ll meet up there eventually, you and me. You can go right on being a drunken hustler and smuggler and general reprobate. But you’ll have this one good thing you did.’ I patted his heart, showing him where he could store his ‘one good thing.’

  He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Tried again and again, nothing. Then, with an expression containing bewilderment at himself bordering on panic, he said, ‘Well, I’m not sitting here all bloody afternoon, doing nothing. If we’re meant to look like we’re fishing, then we’d best get the gear out.’

  We did, and for hours as the sun sank toward the horizon and the clouds went from gray to mauve to blazing orange, we fished. I’d never been deep-sea fishing before and I honestly cannot recommend it. It’s hard on the shoulder and arm muscles holding a great long fiberglass pole while dragging a baited hook around a mile above the bones of a thousand lost ships. No matter what anyone tells you, there’s no real skill involved, as evidenced by the fact that the one serious bite I had managed to escape, while Chante landed a twenty-pound grouper.

  I hadn’t actually seen ‘my’ fish, but I’m pretty sure it was two or three times bigger than Chante’s.

  Chante’s grouper was tasty, though. Chante cleaned and filleted and fried it up in the galley and we ate hot, crumbling chunks of it with our fingers. Grouper not ten minutes out of the sea, and cans of cold beer – that part of fishing is excellent.

  ‘I may have your boat on radar,’ Dabber reported after dinner. He showed us a green dot amid, many other green dots.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Delia asked.

  ‘Direction of travel and speed,’ Dabber said, cocky in his sailing knowledge. ‘It’s making five knots. You could row faster. It must have set out last night.’

  ‘Anything coming from Limassol?’

  ‘Lots of things,’ Dabber grumbled. ‘But this one here,’ he tapped the screen, ‘That’s on an intercept course, and it’s doing maybe fifteen knots.’

  ‘When it gets here, it will look like Cypriot Marine Police.’

  ‘Bloody hell. And then what’s the plan?’

  I shrugged. ‘They’ll go for the refugee boat. We will wait and watch. Then, we will interfere.’

  ‘That’s not a plan,’ Dabber protested.

  ‘Here’s the thing, Dabber: as you know, I’m a writer …’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ There was a bit of skepticism in the man’s tone.

  ‘… and there are two schools of writing. There are writers who plan it all out in advance, plan every detail. And then there are what we flatteringly refer to as ‘discovery’ writers. Those are writers who start something and figure it out as they go along.’

  ‘Sounds like a bullshit artist, mate.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘Kind of does, doesn’t it.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Rain came in a thin drizzle, enough to reduce visibility to a few dozen yards, not enough to provide an excuse to turn around.

  We followed the refugee boat on radar, Dabber using all his skill to make it look to anyone watching us as if we were just a fishing boat heading back toward land after a long day of battling tuna. Delia, Chante and I all watched the glowing screen over Dabber’s shoulder, two bright dots converging as we chugged in a straight line toward Ayia Napa, a course that would look entirely innocent and yet would bring us close to the rendezvous.

  We calculated that it would take the phony Marine Police boat a good ten minutes to separate out the children they meant to seize. After all, they were maintaining a pretense of legality, they would need to take their time.

  Delia was not confident of success. She didn’t say anything, kept a brave face all the while, said all the right things, but I knew her a bit by now and she was nervous. I understood why. We were re-enacting the scene from Sicily, but this time with the Fair Dinkum in the role previously played by a US Navy destroyer, and with supporting roles played by a drunk, an irritant and a semi-retired felon.

  I was if anything even less optimistic. The outcome might rest on how well the enemy – enemies, plural – communicated, how quickly they reacted. I was worried abo
ut the refugees but more about Delia. They were general, she was specific. They were ‘humanity’ about which one is supposed to feel concern; Delia was a friend. I liked her. We’d had adventures. Someday when we were both old and wearing adult diapers we could sit side-by-side in wheelchairs at the Cops N’ Cons retirement home, pass a bootleg flask and talk about the crazy stuff we’d done together back in the day.

  I have a friend who is an FBI agent.

  What irony-loving god of fate had set that up?

  Then Dabber said, ‘That shonky police boat is still making speed.’

  Delia frowned. ‘Could we be wrong? Maybe it’s the wrong boat, just someone heading out to sea.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, because I suddenly knew what would happen next.

  ‘Dabber, full speed. Now!’

  ‘Now, hold on a—’

  ‘Goddammit, now!’

  Delia was looking at me like she suspected I’d slipped a gear, but then her eyes widened.

  ‘They’re shutting it down,’ I said. ‘The Russians are shutting it all down right now.’

  I’ve said it before: there is a difference between a cop brain and the brain of a successful criminal. Cops think in organized channels, in lines that wind their way through law and training and morality, with secondary thoughts of public perception and even career advancement. A smart criminal sees straight lines, bright clear lines that go from what he wants to how he’ll get it.

  ‘The Russians know about Berthold,’ I explained tersely. ‘It’s Panagopolous on that boat. He’ll have orders to cauterize the wound.’

  ‘Jesus, no,’ Delia whispered, eyes searching the dark ahead.

  Not again. She didn’t say that, but it was there. Not again.

  If Panagopolous was watching us on his radar he did not seem to be deterred. But then, this same ploy had worked once before for him, and all he saw in the vicinity was a day cruiser.