He closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. The thundering city with its twenty-four-hour rush and babbling crowds, its guns and explosive devices, its shattered bodies, wasn’t the real world, even though it had been his life for decades. The real world was in his dreams, where the woman he’d never even kissed lived, unchanged despite the ravages of time and the knife she’d put to her own throat.
The hit man went there with a smile on his face.
Mavros got a call from Lambis Bitsos not long after he got back to his flat.
‘I don’t know why I’m doing this,’ he said, the noise of other voices in the background.
‘Because you enjoy waking people from their well-earned slumbers?’ Mavros could tell that Bitsos had something he was burning to pass on, but he knew that rushing things would only put him more in the journalist’s grip. ‘Because you’ve run out of dirty magazines and want to confess your sins to someone responsible and understanding?’
‘If I give you this, I want something good from you in return, okay?’
‘Mmm,’ Mavros responded noncommittally. ‘Won’t I be able to read it in tomorrow’s paper?’
‘I don’t think so. The paper’s already gone to press and, besides, this is so hot that the government will have to approve publication.’
Now Bitsos had Mavros’s full attention. ‘All right, Lambi,’ he said. ‘I’ll play ball.’
‘You’d better, Alex,’ the journalist said threateningly. ‘And you’d better keep this to yourself. Or should I say, you’d better keep these to yourself.’
‘These?’ This was getting better by the second. ‘You mean you’re going to give me leads, plural?’
Bitsos groaned. ‘I must be out of my mind. All right, get this. Preliminary investigation shows that the explosion took place in the auditorium’s most expensive seats. The victim was the property developer Paschalis Stasinopoulos. It seems he was blown apart by a small explosive device, bits of him ending up over a lot of horrified politicians and Athenian society figures. What do you think of that, Mr Detective?’
‘Interesting, Lambi,’ Mavros said, concealing the fact that he’d already heard all of that from Nondas and Anna. ‘What else?’
‘Christ and the Holy Mother, there’s no satisfying you,’ the journalist complained. ‘All right, how about this? The experts reckon it was a sophisticated anti-personnel device.’ He paused. ‘The kind used by only the most skilled terrorists.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mavros said, registering the tension in the reporter’s voice. ‘There’s a link with the Vernardhakis killing.’
‘Exactly. My paper just received a statement from Iraklis claiming responsibility.’ Bitsos paused for dramatic effect. ‘And there was a piece of olivewood in the envelope.’
Mavros kept his mounting excitement under wraps. ‘Well, well. Are the authorities impressed?’
‘Changing their underwear, more like,’ the journalist said. ‘They’ve taken the statement away, but we managed to copy it first. I’ve been comparing it with some of the old ones, especially those that weren’t made public. I reckon it’s genuine.’
Mavros whistled but didn’t speak. These developments made the Grace Helmer job even more risky. And what had she been doing in the crowd outside the concert hall, which was only a stone’s throw from her country’s embassy?
‘Hello, is anybody there?’ Bitsos asked caustically.
‘What? Oh, sorry, Lambi. Just thinking.’
‘That’s what I was worried about. Make sure you tell me the results of your thought processes, eh?’
‘Okay. Thanks for the intelligence.’
‘I hope I haven’t made a career-threatening mistake,’ Bitsos said, sounding unsure. ‘And, Alex? Tell me you gave my number to your relatives.’
‘Sure I did,’ Mavros replied. ‘Well, I will do. Sweet dreams.’ He cut the connection before the reporter could protest then turned off his phone.
Sweet dreams. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be having too many of those.
CHAPTER SEVEN
November 1943
THE sun was bright over the stone skin of the mountains, but the air was cold, carrying the smell of winter, which had already mounted the wind’s back far to the north. The Soviet winter, the young poet thought, the power that would blast across the old world and cleanse it of the exploiters’ legacy. He glanced ahead at the long line of his comrades, men and women crushed under great loads, a few bony mules interspersed. They were the tools of the revolution, the corrosive acid of justice, the saviours of the people. His family had been unlucky, his parents and grandparents taken by disease when their bodies were weakened by malnutrition, his brother run down by an Italian Army truck in Kalamata. But he and his fellow fighters would build a new Greece on the bones of their ancestors.
‘Slow down, Comrade Kosta,’ panted the boy behind. ‘I can’t keep up with you.’
‘You must,’ Kostas Laskaris replied. ‘The Germans and the collaborationist jackals have our scent.’ He looked round and gave the fresh-faced volunteer a death’s-head grin. ‘Besides, ELAS commanders shoot malingerers.’
The boy’s face blanched and he marched on with renewed vigour. ‘Comrade Kosta?’ he said, after five more minutes of battling with the uneven stones on the steep trail. ‘What’s a jackal?’
The poet didn’t answer. He was staring ahead, taking in the twin cliffs that hung down from the peaks of Taygetos like the adamantine walls of a cruel king’s castle. Beneath them was a small piece of flat ground, a lower ridge of exposed rock circling it. He felt the snake writhe in his belly. The years he had borne arms had taught him to recognise terrain suitable for an ambush. Kapetan Iraklis had led them to the perfect killing ground.
There wasn’t time for an extended speech from the band’s leader or for any more indoctrination by its political commissar Vladhimiros. Iraklis, his fatigues as torn and filthy as anyone’s, roused his troops for battle. As he spoke, his black beard glistened in the sunlight, his eyes flashing splinters of passion.
‘Comrades, brave fighters of ELAS Lakonia, the hour has come. The occupiers have been massacring our old people, our women and our children.’ He looked around the faces of the unit—wrinkled men with long beards, women with grimy faces, youths with wispy eyelashes. ‘They have allowed the so-called Security Battalions to be formed, led by Greek officers whose love of the king and hatred of the people has turned them into traitors, and manned by common criminals. Now they think they have caught us in their trap.’ He raised an arm and indicated the curtains of rock to his rear. ‘But everyone knows that true Greeks fight hardest when their backs are to the wall. Victory for our fatherland and our people!’
The comrades cheered wildly, paying no heed to the enemy that was on their heels. Then they listened to their section commanders as the dispositions were handed down. In under fifteen minutes the plateau was cleared, the single tripod-mounted machine-gun they had captured in a skirmish outside Sparta hidden behind the rocks on the western flank. Fighters were arrayed round the low ridge, their rifles laid out on the stone in front of them, the precious clasps of ammunition removed from bandoliers in readiness.
Kostas Laskaris found himself in the centre, the young peasant boy on his right and a hard-faced woman from Kitta on his left. She had lost her husband to the Italians in Albania and her two brothers during the German armoured advance through the Peloponnese. More recently her sister had been raped and murdered by a squad of gendarmes because she was suspected of Communist sympathies.
‘Aim steady and true, Comrade Stamatina,’ came a soft voice from behind her. She gave a harsh smile and tightened her grip on her rifle.
Kapetan Iraklis turned to the boy. ‘And you, Comrade Dino. Today your family in Alika will have you to be proud of as well as your brother who died on the Albanian front. You will become a hero of the people.’
Kostas glanced at the youth beside him; his eyes were moving constantly and he was licking his lips. He was
amazed that Iraklis remembered the background of everyone in the band—he himself hadn’t known where the boy came from.
Then Iraklis looked into his eyes and he felt his heart swell, the blood course through his veins like liquid fire. ‘And you, my Kosta, be as merciless as ever.’ The kapetanios squeezed his calf briefly and moved away. The area he had touched throbbed like a wide but pleasurable bruise. For a few minutes the fighter lost himself in a morass of indulgent thoughts—of how long nights around meagre fires in mountain caves and in ruined goatherds’ huts had made him realise that the feeling he had for the man who’d named himself after the ancient hero, the man he had known from childhood, was the deepest love; of how that love was returned, he was sure of it, even though it was impossible for any open acknowledgement to be made in wartime; of how in the future, when victory was assured and a more tolerant world established, he and Iraklis would no longer have to conceal their emotions.
Kostas gazed up into the sky and watched the birds of prey circling, their cries coming down to him like a bitter benediction. Like them, the fighters had nothing except their weapons and their unbreakable will to keep them alive. Until then he never had any doubt that they would prevail. But now the guerrilla band had to fight Greeks as well as Germans.
In a rising cacophony of heavy boots and clipped commands, the enemy, foreign and native, approached the place of slaughter.
Mavros was woken by the sound of the telephone. It seemed only a few minutes since he’d been talking to Bitsos, but a glance at the clock told him that it was seven in the morning. ‘You do provide a twenty-four-hour service, don’t you?’
He recognised Grace Helmer’s voice through the fog of sleep. ‘Did I say that?’ he asked, his mouth sticky.
‘The customer’s always right, huh?’ She sounded like she’d been awake for hours.
‘Of course.’ Mavros had a flash of his client behind the police line at the concert hall, her eyes wide. Maybe her desire to stick to him during the investigation was just as well—that way he’d be able to carry out covert surveillance on her. There was something about Grace Helmer that made his antennae quiver, and it wasn’t just that she was a seriously attractive woman. ‘I suppose you want to know what we’re going to do today.’
‘Got it in one, Marlowe.’
‘Have breakfast, for a start.’
‘Second breakfast in my case. All right, where? Oh, I know. That charming little dump you frequent, the one with the waiter who doesn’t like Americans.’
‘You noticed?’ Mavros wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to have Grace and the Fat Man under the same roof, but he was still wondering about his friend’s reaction when he’d tossed the name Iason Kolettis at him. There might be something to be said for playing off the two against each other. ‘All right. I’ll see you there in an hour.’
‘Don’t be late.’ Grace cut the connection.
‘There’s a challenge,’ Mavros muttered into the buzzing receiver. Then he headed for the shower, but stopped mid-stride in the doorway. Before he went any further with the case, he needed to check his client’s background. He booted up his computer, logged on to the Internet and ran a search for Meliorate, the Washington-based charity Grace had said she worked for. Up came a flash-looking home page with a menu. He clicked on the Key Personnel button and there she was, photographed in worn green top and trousers against a backdrop of jungle, a tired smile on her lips and a group of children around her—‘Field supervisor Grace Helmer at our resettlement camp in Burundi’, the caption said. Case proved, he thought. Maybe he shouldn’t be so suspicious of people. He flicked around the site, learning that the charity was funded by donations and operated independently of the U.S. and all other governments. He logged off and went for his shower.
At the Fat Man’s there was relative calm. A pair of elderly shop owners in the far corner nodded when Mavros arrived, their voices low. They were probably planning the next season’s assault on unsuspecting tourists. At least that meant that Yiorgos Pandazopoulos didn’t have to pay attention to his female customer. He was hovering around the two men’s table, his face split by a grin—anything to do with extracting cash from the foreign bourgeoisie went down well with him.
‘I thought we said an hour,’ Grace Helmer said, her tone accusing.
Mavros sat down opposite her. ‘We don’t work on English timing here. Besides, I had to make myself look respectable.’
Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘You blew it. Anyway, you don’t have to impress me. I hired you for your mind, not your body.’
Mavros let that go and watched as the Fat Man lumbered over. ‘Morning, Yiorgo,’ he said in Greek. ‘This is your last day, isn’t it?’
The café owner nodded, giving Grace a sceptical look. ‘That’s right. What’s she doing here?’
‘Taking in the local colour.’ He glanced at the table. ‘Would you like anything else?’ he asked, indicating her half-drunk coffee. ‘I’m having whatever pastry he’s got.’
‘I’m not a big fan of pastries.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you are,’ he said, glancing at her lithe form. He turned to Yiorgos. ‘What have you got today?’
‘Galaktoboureko,’ the Fat Man replied. ‘You’re in luck.’
‘What? You haven’t eaten it all?’
‘No,’ Yiorgos said irritably. ‘The old woman only got round to baking in the middle of the night so it’s even fresher than usual. I’m telling you, she’s more excited about going back to the village than a teenager on her first date.’
‘It’ll be cold down there at this time of year, won’t it?’ Mavros said with a sardonic smile. ‘You’ll be able to do some mountaineering.’
‘On Taygetos?’ Yiorgos moved away to make Mavros’s coffee. ‘You must be joking,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s a man-eater.’
Grace Helmer was staring at Mavros. ‘What was all that about?’
‘Nothing much. He’s going down to the Peloponnese with his mother for Christmas and he’s not looking forward to it.’ He wondered if there was any chance that she understood Greek and was feigning ignorance of the language, then told himself not to be so paranoid. She’d left the country when she was five and had probably only picked up a word or two in the English-speaking house—the nanny was foreign too, he remembered. It was hardly likely that she’d spend her minimal time off in the jungle with a textbook and a cassette-player learning Greek.
‘The Peloponnese,’ Grace repeated, lowering her voice. ‘He’s not from the Mani, is he? Remember that painting my mother did?’
Mavros took out his notebook and found the entry he’d made after their meeting in Grace’s hotel. ‘Lament for Kitta? No, Yiorgos’s village is on the other side of the mountain.’ He was thinking about how the Fat Man had characterised it—‘man-eater’. Was that a standard Lakonian epithet or had he a personal reason to hate Taygetos?
Grace sat back. ‘Right, Alex. How are we going to get on the-man-whose-name-I’m-not-going-to-mentionin-public’s trail?’
Mavros was studying her. Her hair was pulled back again, emphasising the prominent features of her tanned face. She was wearing the same jean jacket that she’d had on outside the concert hall. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, turning as he heard Pandazopoulos’s heavy tread behind him. He got up quickly and led his friend back to the chill cabinet. ‘Tell me, Fat Man,’ he said, turning the screw on the Communist, ‘do you remember that song “The Voyage of the Argo”?’
‘How would I not remember it, Alex?’ said the café owner. ‘We all sang it under our breath for years during the dictatorship.’
‘And do you remember who wrote it?’
‘Of course. It was one of Randos’s first big hits.’
Mavros glanced back at Grace. The conversation was in Greek and she didn’t appear to be following it. ‘With words by Kostas Laskaris, yes?’
The Fat Man nodded, his expression wary.
‘Who was the captain of the Argo, Yiorgo?�
� Mavros demanded, his eyes meeting the other’s.
His friend stiffened. ‘Fuck you, Alex,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I told you not to talk about him.’ He went behind the chill cabinet with surprising speed.
Mavros wasn’t proud of himself for hinting at the name of Iason Kolettis via the name of the ancient hero who led the Argonauts, but he’d wanted to see if Yiorgos would crack. ‘Don’t worry,’ he persisted. ‘I’m going to question Randos himself about it.’
The Fat Man kept his head bowed.
‘And then I’m going to question the poet Kostas Laskaris.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Yiorgos shouted, losing control. ‘They won’t talk to you about him. They’re the last people who’ll talk about him. Now, take your American woman away and leave me in peace.’
Mavros bit his lip, guilty that he’d provoked his friend but at the same time disappointed that he hadn’t got anything more out of him. He picked up the tray and took it over to the table—he didn’t intend to miss out on his breakfast.
‘Was he talking about me?’ Grace asked. ‘Am I amerikanidha?’
‘Mmm,’ he mumbled, his mouth full of custard-filled pastry. It seemed clear that she’d registered the café owner’s scathing tone, but not the meaning of his words. He drank his coffee in haste and stood up, dropping notes on to the table. ‘We’d better get going.’ He turned as he went. ‘Merry Christmas when it comes, Yiorgo.’
There was no reply—only a hurt glance and a melancholy shake of the Fat Man’s head.
The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller) Page 13
