The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  Geoffrey Dearfield eased himself into the front seat of the old Rover and looked ahead across the isthmus to the mountains of the northern Peloponnese. The sun was high over the barren peaks, Acrocorinth with its wavy line of battlements standing firm in the near distance like a medieval challenge to the destructive power of time. Over these walls the Byzantine commander Leon Sgouros had ridden to his death in 1208, he and his doomed charger crashing to the rocks in a gesture of crazed defiance against the besieging Franks. The merciless rocks of this artificial island, Dearfield thought, his eyes now on the bridges that spanned the narrow cut separating the Peloponnese from mainland Greece. How many fighters braver than Sgouros had fallen to rot on the fields of stone in his own time? They were countless, forgotten by history. For decades he had seen their deaths as necessary, as a sacrifice for political stability and economic prosperity. Recently he had become much less sure of that and his return to the region where he’d spent years as a young man was hard to bear.

  ‘Come on, Flora,’ he said irritably. ‘It’s time we were on the move again. Veta and Nikitas will be wondering what’s happened to us.’

  His wife checked his seat-belt, her smooth-skinned face as neutral as ever, and started the engine. Since Geoffrey’s second heart scare in the spring she’d taken over the driving, much to his disgust. The Rover was his obsession; that and his precious ‘polemical memoir’. Flora Petraki-Dearfield was in her mid-sixties, fifteen years younger than her husband, and the burden of caring for him was getting heavier every year. She edged out of the parking area outside the restaurant where they’d stopped so that Geoffrey could empty his bladder, only accelerating when there was a large gap between the thundering lorries.

  ‘Come on, woman,’ the old man complained. ‘We want to arrive before Christmas.’

  Flora ignored him and drove across the bridge. The December light was bright, but the sunglasses she was wearing filtered it effectively. She was wearing an elegant trouser-suit that she knew made her look younger than her years, while her husband was in the heavy tweed that he wore from October to April whatever the weather—the habits he had grown up with in the damp of England had never left him despite the years he had spent in Greece.

  ‘Isn’t this interesting?’ she said, as they followed the motorway to Tripolis. ‘Soon we’ll be passing Nemea, where the lion was slain by Iraklis in his first labour.’

  ‘Hercules,’ corrected Dearfield. ‘You’re speaking English, so you should call him by his English name.’

  ‘But classical scholars call him Heracles,’ Flora countered, unwilling to let him have his own way. She was the one who had lectured in Greek history at the university in Athens, not Geoffrey.

  ‘Use that name, then,’ he replied, blinking his rheumy eyes behind the heavy frames of his glasses. ‘Not the modern version those bloodthirsty terrorists took.’

  Flora glanced at her husband. His heavily lined face, the thick white moustache stained yellow by the cigarettes he was now forbidden, was reddening. ‘Don’t let yourself be disturbed, Geoff,’ she said softly. ‘The authorities haven’t said that the explosion at the Megaro Mousikis was anything to do with the Iraklis group.’ They had friends who’d been at the production, one of whom had seen the blast that had killed the property developer Stasinopoulos.

  ‘It’s them, all right,’ Dearfield said, his hands, knotted with dark blue veins, limp on his thighs. ‘I feel it in my water. Old campaigner’s premonition.’

  They drove on past the ravine at Dhervenakia where the Turks had been slaughtered by the Greeks in 1822, four thousand Muslim corpses left unburied for the carrion birds and the blowflies. Geoffrey Dearfield knew every corner of the peninsula, having criss-crossed it on foot as a British liaison officer in the Second World War and in a variety of military vehicles during the ensuing civil conflict. When he was young he had found the violent history of the place fascinating and was forever regaling his colleagues with tales of the Greek War of Independence and the Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian and Ottoman atrocities that preceded it. But now, in his dotage, he found the faint but unmistakable tang of blood that he caught in the air difficult to take. He hadn’t admitted as much to anyone, but he was sure he wasn’t the only person to be oppressed by the Peloponnese’s savage atmosphere. His wife had never been affected by that weakness. He could remember Flora standing on the acropolis of Mycenae and beneath the titanic walls of Tiryns, her face burning with enthusiasm. She was inspired by mythical heroes like Agamemnon and Hercules. So much for the professional historian’s objectivity.

  Flora followed the road towards Argos, progress slower now they were off the motorway. Ahead, the orange groves spread out to the shores of the gulf, a shimmering lake of green beneath the grey arms of the encircling mountains. They would soon be at the Palaiologos house on the hill above the plain and her husband would feel more at ease. He had known Veta and Nikitas’s fathers in the war, and they had spent many nights there in the years since the younger generation had taken over the old family retreat. She knew Geoff was worried by the apparent reappearance of the Iraklis group. In the seventies and eighties he had lived on a knife edge, forcing her to move to a high-security apartment block and never going out without careful planning. He had made enemies on the Left because of his involvement with the government side during the civil war and the consultancy work that he never specified with the Americans during the dictatorship. When the terrorists had faded from the scene ten years ago, he had relaxed, though more recently he had been driving himself to finish his book—the memoir he had refused to let her see.

  Flora had shown no interest in his writing, concentrating on her own study of the Peloponnese from prehistoric times to the present. Looking through the windshield at the peaceful plain, she knew her ideas were well founded. The ancient myths had so many points of connection to later history. Many of the former inhabitants of this area, Argolidha, had been brutal tyrants—Pelops, Atreus the child-murderer, Thyestes, who unwittingly ate his own offspring, Agamemnon, slaughtered in the bath by his wife and her lover. Such viciousness had been repeated often by rulers both foreign and Greek, from the Byzantines in medieval times to the German and Italian occupiers in the 1940s. And what about Iraklis? Slave to a brutal master, he had laboured against terrible odds till he prevailed. No wonder so many of the wartime resistance commanders, let alone the terrorist group, had taken his name. He was an example of unflinching courage, an inspiration to all freedom-loving people.

  ‘Flora?’ Geoffrey Dearfield’s voicewas tentative. ‘You’ll be sure not to mention my memoir to Veta and Nikitas, won’t you?’

  His wife took her eyes from the tail of the decrepit truck that was crawling down the road ahead of them. ‘Yes, you’ve already made that clear, Geoff,’ she replied, screwing up her eyes behind her sunglasses, ‘though I don’t understand why you’re being so reticent.’

  Dearfield looked away. ‘I told you. I want to wait until Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou takes the book on before I tell people about it.’

  ‘Surely she will,’ Flora said, checking in the mirror and accelerating past the lorry. ‘You’ve spent so much time and energy on it.’

  ‘I’m not sure at all,’ he said, his voice low. ‘It may be too polemical for my own good.’

  Geoffrey Dearfield closed his eyes for a few seconds, but that was a mistake. In a flash they were before him, making him start and arresting the passage of air in his windpipe: the faces he had confined for years to the darkness, but which had recently come back to ambush him at every turn—faces that were dirt-stained but soft, the faces of young men and women with pleading eyes and broken teeth; faces on heads that had been detached from bodies and were floating unsupported in the air. And the blood—oh, God, so much blood, rivers in spate that never ran dry—pouring from the roughly severed necks. But worst of all was the man on the X-shaped cross, his eyes staring in bulging agony before his head fell like a stone on to his shattered chest.

  Would he neve
r be free of the horror?

  ‘You want to do what?’ Grace Helmer had stopped in the crush of humanity outside Monastiraki station, her eyes wide.

  Mavros took her arm and led her past the building site that made access difficult to Pandrosou, the street that ran towards Syndagma Square. Although it was only mid-morning, the waiters from the souvlaki restaurants were already touting for custom and the air was filled with the smell of grilled meat.

  ‘I want to talk to the composer Randos about the song your mother kept. What’s so surprising about that?’

  Grace pulled her arm out of his grip. ‘It’s about as oblique an approach as I can think of,’ she replied. ‘What about all those contacts you mentioned? Shouldn’t we be asking them about—’

  Mavros raised a finger to his mouth before she said the mystery man’s name. ‘Remember what I said about this case? How sensitive it is? If I use any of my contacts, the authorities or the Communists will hear about our interest soon enough. Then they’ll blunder in and you’ll never find the guy you’re looking for.’ He started walking up the street towards a small shaded square and decided to play his ace. ‘You were in the crowd outside the concert hall last night, Grace.’ He turned to her quickly and saw that her face was expressionless. ‘What were you doing there?’

  She raised her shoulders. ‘I heard the sirens and went to check it out. Anything wrong with that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, keeping his eyes on her. ‘Do you know what happened there?’

  ‘There was an explosion, from what I saw on the news afterwards.’ She was looking at him now. ‘They didn’t say what it was. Oh, God.’ Her tone was suddenly tense. ‘It wasn’t Iraklis again, was it?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said, keeping Bitsos’s information to himself. ‘But even if it wasn’t, the government and the police will be even more jumpy. Now do you see why an oblique approach, as you call it, is a good idea?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Grace conceded. ‘But what makes you think this composer will see us? Surely you can’t just walk into such a big shot’s house off the street.’

  ‘I called him this morning and told him I was a devoted fan of thirty years’ standing.’

  She stopped abruptly, making a pair of tourists in dirty clothes swerve around her. ‘Are you kidding? He’s an international star, isn’t he? That was enough to make him agree to see you?’

  ‘That and the fact that he was in the Communist Party with my father. He knew my brother too.’ Mavros smiled. ‘It’s all about personal contacts in this country.’

  Grace walked on, her eyes turned to him. ‘The brother who went missing?’

  He didn’t reply.

  When they walked into the open space in front of the cathedral, Grace tried again. ‘You’re still trying to find him, aren’t you?’

  Mavros nodded slowly. ‘I’ll never stop looking for Andonis,’ he said, glancing at the statue of a former archbishop. ‘The rest of my family think it’s a curse. Maybe it is. But it’s also a duty, a debt that runs in my blood.’ He glanced at her. ‘You can understand that, can’t you?’

  She looked away.

  ‘It would probably be easier for me to talk to Randos alone,’ Mavros continued. ‘Are you sure—’

  ‘I told you,’ Grace interrupted, ‘I want to be in on everything.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ He wondered why she was so insistent about being present throughout the investigation. Was the need to find her father’s assassin so overwhelming?

  ‘So where does he live, this musical paragon?’ Grace asked. ‘In some villa surrounded by fences and security guards?’

  ‘I think you’re going to be disappointed.’ Mavros beckoned to a passing lottery salesman. He chose a ticket from the old man’s pole. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to Grace. ‘Maybe it’ll bring us luck on our quest.’

  She accepted it, peering at the lettering. ‘Thank you, kind sir, but you shouldn’t have. Gambling is the opium of the people.’

  ‘Well said,’ he replied, starting to walk. ‘Randos would no doubt agree with you. He’s a Communist of the old school.’

  Grace caught up with him. ‘Where is it that he lives?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  She gave him a long-suffering look, then followed him into Syndagma Square.

  The air in the well-appointed room in the basement of the American embassy was cool and highly filtered, but the atmosphere was heavy. Three men and a woman were sitting around the dark brown conference table, files open in front of them and mobile phones close to their hands.

  ‘Status report, Ms Forster,’ the man at the head of the table said in an inert voice, his fair hair plastered close to his scalp.

  ‘The subjects are in Syndagma Square right now, apparently waiting for a trolley-bus.’ The woman’s voice was slow and deep, the drawl indicating that she was from a southern state. Her pale blue eyes were wide and fixed on the man who had spoken. She was dressed in a well-cut grey trouser suit, her auburn hair pulled back in a tight bunch. ‘We have three operatives on them.’

  ‘Let us hope they are not noticed,’ said the man opposite her. His English was cultured, though it was clearly not his mother tongue. ‘Mavros is not an amateur.’

  ‘Neither is Grace Helmer,’ said the fair-haired man. ‘None of your people are involved, Niko?’

  The police commander Kriaras jerked his head back at once. ‘The instruction from my minister was clear. As the woman is a U.S. citizen, you are to take the lead in this operation.’ His manner suggested that he was not in agreement with his superior. ‘He has complete confidence in your capabilities.’ He looked across the table. ‘But you, Peter Jaeger, do you have such confidence?’

  The American met his gaze and then stood up. He was tall, well over six feet, the lines of his suit failing to mask the well-developed layers of muscle. He glanced at the third man in the room, then nodded slowly. ‘I have absolute confidence in my team, Niko. You can be sure of that.’

  Kriaras gave a tight smile. ‘Good. We will hold you to that.’ He turned to the woman. ‘Jane… I mean, Ms Forster, can you make sure that nothing untoward happens to the subject Mavros? He has proved useful to us in the past without always being aware of it.’

  She looked at Jaeger. ‘Our operatives will follow orders at all times,’ she said mechanically.

  Kriaras shifted his gaze to the third man. ‘And you, Mr Milroy?’ hesaid, taking in the older figure at the far end ofthe table. The man was wearing a loose sports jacket, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His hair was almost pure white, cut short at the back and sides with the forelock hanging over his lined forehead, but it was his face that struck the policeman. It was inexpressive, almost featureless—the nose unremarkable, the cheeks smooth and the eyes an indeterminate hue—as if it were the template for a person yet to be created. ‘Will you do as you are told in this particular case?’ Kriaras asked.

  The man remained silent for a while. ‘Sure I will,’ he said, his voice level and unaccented. ‘I’ll do better than that. I’ll follow my conscience.’ He gave a slack smile.

  The police commander laughed, then realised that none of the others had joined him. He felt a chill run up his spine as he realised that he was meddling where he shouldn’t.

  ‘Let’s review the incident at the opera,’ Jaeger said, striding over to a display board and lifting the cover sheet. ‘Niko, what’s the present state of your people’s knowledge?’

  Kriaras looked down at his file, trying to keep Lance Milroy in the corner of his eye, and marshalled his thoughts. Not for the first time in his career, he had the distinct feeling that he was in the grip of forces he couldn’t comprehend, never mind control.

  In Syndagma they caught one of the city’s gleaming new yellow trolley-buses, Mavros cancelling the tickets he’d taken from his wallet in the machine inside.

  ‘What is this?’ Grace Helmer demanded. ‘A magical mystery tour?’

  Mavros smiled. ‘Lighten up. Take in the
sights while you’re here.’

  The trolley passed the National Garden then swung past Hadrian’s Gate and the thirteen columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, both monuments sheathed in scaffolding.

  ‘They’re busy cleaning everything ancient in the city in advance of the Olympics in 2004,’ Mavros said. ‘That temple was the largest in Greece and, as far as my memory goes, it took seven hundred years to complete.’

  Grace Helmer looked out at the immense marble shafts. ‘Impressive,’ she said. ‘But I’m not giving you a tip.’

  The sun had disappeared under a layer of grey-white clouds by the time they got off.

  ‘This used to be a working-class area,’ Mavros said, looking up towards the apartment blocks on the slopes of Philopappos. ‘Now it’s being bought up by developers and yuppies.’

  Grace took in the discoloured buildings. ‘I suppose it’s fairly central,’ she said. ‘And there’s a park nearby.’ She pointed up to the tree-covered ground higher up.

  ‘Mmm,’ Mavros said with a wry smile. ‘It was from Philopappos that Morosini bombarded the Acropolis in 1687, when the Parthenon was almost blown to pieces. And there were troops stationed there in 1967 when the Colonels secured the city during the coup.’

  ‘Thanks for the history lesson,’ she said, buttoning her jacket against the chill that had suddenly set in, ‘but I’m still not giving you a tip.’

  Mavros led her along a narrow street to the uppermost row of apartment blocks. ‘This is it,’ he said, consulting his notebook. ‘Number eighteen.’ He looked at the buzzer panel. Most of the name cards were faded, a couple covered in garish colours. The one bearing the name Randos was almost illegible. He pressed the button next to it.

  ‘Ela!’ came a bellow that was loud even through the dubious electrics of the mechanism. Before Mavros could identify himself, the buzzer went. ‘Ektos orofos!’

  ‘Sixth floor,’ he translated, taking in Grace’s blank look as he pushed open the street door.