‘And you never knew Kolettis’s real name?’ Mavros asked.
The composer raised his chin in a negative gesture. ‘No one did. Not even his own people. He lived in different places, sometimes in Neapolis, I heard. But most of the local comrades didn’t know him.’
‘And what did Kolettis look like?’ Grace Helmer’s voice was encouraging.
‘I didn’t meet him very often. Each time he looked different. I told you, he was a chameleon.’
Mavros moved closer. ‘How can we find him?’
The composer shivered. ‘You are crazy. You do not want to find such a man.’ He shifted his eyes between them and seemed to realise how serious they were. ‘I don’t know. He has not been active for many years. I thought, I hoped he was dead. But now, with the killing of that investor Vernardhakis, I don’t know.’
‘They found a piece of olivewood on him like the ones Iraklis used to leave,’ Mavros said. ‘And last night there was another suspicious killing.’
‘Crazy bastards,’ Randos gasped. ‘They were all crazy bastards, but he was the worst of all.’
‘If they were all crazy, why did you write a song about Jason—I mean, Iason—and the Argo?’ Grace asked, her brow furrowed.
‘That was early, when Iason was a figure of hope.’ The composer raised his head. ‘And Laskaris wrote the lyrics, not me. You should ask him about—about the chameleon.’
‘We will,’ Mavros said. ‘But in the meantime we need more from you. If you know nothing about him, you must know something about his colleagues in the Iraklis group.’
Randos grunted. ‘Two of them are dead,’ he said blankly. ‘The ones who called themselves Markos and Thyella. We thought he killed them.’
Mavros was staring at him. ‘He killed his own comrades?’
‘We thought so. We found out from one of our people that they were identified by the new antiterrorist squad about ten years ago. They tried a—how do you say? Double-game?’
‘Double-cross,’ Mavros supplied.
‘Yes, double-cross. Used the group members to plot against their leader. When they were both hit by cars, we thought he had done it. But maybe they refused to play that game and the bastard security forces killed them, I don’t know.’
Grace leaned closer again. ‘You said two of them were dead. Are others still alive?’
‘Ah, no,’ the composer said, forcing himself back into the sofa. ‘No, I cannot.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Mavros said, smiling at him coldly. ‘Or the comrades will find out that you’ve been opening your mouth to us.’
There was a long pause, then Randos gave in. ‘All right. But you keep my name out of this, yes? There was one man, used to drive the killer on motorbike or car. Took the name Odhysseas, after the ancient hero. His real name was…real name was Dhimitrakos. I remember, it came up in a secret committee meeting once. Babis Dhimitrakos. I never met him. I think he was from some village in the Mani. That is all I know.’ The overweight man in the fisherman’s sweater summoned his strength and levered himself up from the sofa. ‘Now go. My wife will soon come. You not be seen here.’
Mavros beckoned to Grace. The visit had been more enlightening than he had expected. As they approached the door, the composer called out in Greek: ‘Young Mavro?’
He turned and saw the big man cradling a pair of mewling kittens in his arms. ‘There is pain everywhere in this story, pain for you too.’ Randos let out a long sigh. ‘Your brother Andonis.’
Mavros felt the floor shift as if an earthquake had struck.
‘Andonis,’ continued the musician. ‘He knew Iason…the chameleon. He met him once, outside Athens. Ask Laskaris.’ His eyes opened wide. ‘Ask the old poet, you hear?’ Then he turned away and closed the door.
Outside on the graffiti-bedecked landing, they waited for the lift.
‘Are you all right?’ Grace asked. ‘You’ve gone very pale. What did he say at the end? Was that your brother he was talking about?’
Mavros fended off her questions, saying that he needed fresh air after the suffocating atmosphere of the smoky apartment.
‘Yeah, it certainly wasn’t the kind of home I imagined for Greece’s most famous living composer,’ Grace said as they reached the main door. ‘He must be serious about his beliefs.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Mavros said, glancing down the street. ‘He’s a Communist through and through. But that never stopped him owning a beachside estate and a skiing lodge.’
Grace laughed, then caught the direction of his gaze. ‘So she’s still watching us,’ she said, taking in the smartly dressed woman who was reading a newspaper in a doorway about fifty metres away.
‘You spotted her before?’ There was surprise in Mavros’s voice.
‘Sure,’ Grace replied, as they started walking. ‘She was on the trolley, pretending to be interested in the ancient monuments.’
‘Where did you learn counter-surveillance techniques?’
‘I didn’t,’ she countered evenly. ‘I just got used to looking out for myself in some of the world’s most dangerous cities.’
Mavros was impressed by the smoothness of the reply; impressed, but not completely convinced. Right now he had more pressing things to worry about than his client’s credibility, such as who had put the tail on them. The Greek authorities, the comrades, some foreign agency? Or, worst of all, the terrorist group that seemed once more to be active on the streets of Athens?
Iraklis lay in the dark and tried to reconstitute the woman he still loved, her smooth, freckled skin and her perfect body. But she was staying away from him, taunting him with her absence, daring him to speak her name, to call her back from the void. He couldn’t do it. He closed his eyes and tried to join her, but he seemed to have become insubstantial himself, an empty space, a shade. All he had achieved by returning to Greece had been to put even more distance between them. If only he could forget her and find peace. But he didn’t want to let her go…
He woke with a start in the early afternoon. After shaving and dressing in a badly cut working-man’s suit, he pulled a scuffed cap down over his eyes. He walked out of the cheap hotel into the watery winter light that was emanating from a layer of cloud. His peasant bones told him there would be rain before long. He headed for the harbour front, anxious to stretch his legs. Later he would punish himself with his usual exercise regime, but for now a stroll would suffice.
Below the red-and-white-striped chimney of the power station that was Lavrion’s main landmark, the town clustered in a mass of grimy buildings. Only the yacht harbour hinted at wealth, most of it belonging to Athenians who appeared only at the weekends. Raising his eyes, he looked beyond the cape to the neighbouring island, feeling the blood rush in his veins. Yes, he still felt the fire that had been burning in him since he was a child. There lay Makronisos, the breaking ground of the Greek Left, the prison island where many had left their faith and their bones. That was why he had come out here, to rekindle his faith. The woman he loved was nothing here: she was consumed in the flames of the legitimate struggle.
For this was his real life, this was the world he had belonged to from birth. He had grown up in stony poverty, the sacrifices made by his family as real to him as the collapsing farm buildings and the sheep with their protruding ribs and glassy eyes. As soon as he could he had joined the party that despised the affectations of the rich, those bought with the sweat and blood of the workers. But in the last ten years he had compromised himself. None of his old comrades would be able to recognise him now, and not just physically. Thinking about that was painful, but he made himself go over what had happened in the early nineties to keep his mind from the woman.
The Iraklis group had been caught because someone had talked. The bastards in the Greek secret service, originally set up by the CIA in the fifties, and in the new antiterrorist police unit, had finally made one of his comrades into an informer. And they were smart—whatever you thought about their soulless ideology, they knew what they were doing. O
therwise they’d have executed him on the spot that night in Koropi when they surrounded the disused glue factory that the group used for its irregular meetings. They were clinical, no doubt because of the Americans operating behind the scenes. They worked on the others first, but he was the big prize. They wanted him to testify in court that the Iraklis group had links to leading politicians in the socialist party, which had ruled the country for most of the eighties and which was threatening to replace the weakened conservative government.
But he had resisted them. The comrades he had trusted—Odhysseas, Thyella, Markos—were beaten by the enemy, but the controller, still at liberty, had stood by him. Money had been handed over and one night he had found that the door in the safe house where he was being kept was unlocked. A few seconds were all he needed to get out, the car waiting for him where it was meant to be. In under twelve hours he was on the yacht, clearing the southern Peloponnese, Cape Matapan the last glimpse he had of his homeland. He knew he couldn’t come back for a long time, but he had surprised even the controller by disappearing in Portugal and eventually making his way to the U.S.—no one would have expected him to go there. The Iraklis group’s capture and his subsequent escape were never made public, presumably to save the government’s face. So he had lost himself in the backstreets of New York and spent years working hundreds of metres above the ground for a construction company. He managed to forget the past, but he never forgot the woman whose husband he had assassinated, even though she had killed herself five years before he reached her country.
Iraklis stood on the quayside, clenching and unclenching his fists. When he had found out she was dead, he had considering following her to the other side. He could easily have jumped from the topmost spars of the skyscraper he was working on at the time, or slit his wrists in a hot bath, like a Roman senator, back in the attic apartment in Queens; or he could have bought some drugs and drifted away in a painless dream. But the thought that he might one day go home kept him from suicide, the thought that one day he might find the people who had destroyed his father and consigned his mother to a lifetime of hate. Then, a few weeks ago, the controller had finally uncovered the information he needed, though it wasn’t yet all in place. The killing of the investor Vernardhakis had made their job harder and he was sure that the explosion in the concert hall was tied to it, even though the newspapers had confined themselves to hinting that was the case. Someone was posing as Iraklis and that individual or group would pay the price when the controller identified them—it was only a matter of time.
Iraklis looked out towards the barren island, remembering the traditions of vengeance he had grown up with—honour, the prestige of the family, had been one of the few traditions of his homeland that stayed with him, but it was more than that. It was a question of staying alive to perform the act that would free him and those who had preceded him into the darkness from the pain of the past, from the pain that was etched into the faces of everyone he had ever held precious, including the woman whose name he could no longer say.
But had he the right to continue the cycle of violence? He was no longer sure that he did. The years of studying history and politics at night school in New York City had made him doubt that—and the men who had trained him as an underground fighter always said that doubt was the most lethal of enemies.
He closed his eyes and suddenly found himself back on the scarred slopes of the mountain, a boy of fourteen whose step was long and whose eyes were clear. Ahead of him was the poet, his brow furrowed, a stick in his right hand as he navigated the narrow, winding path to the ridge that split the Mani in two. Behind them the land dropped silently into the blue glass of the sea, the rounded peninsula with its delicate handle picked out by the sun. A harsh croak made him look up. Ravens were circling on the wind, the feathers ruffled at the tips of their outstretched wings.
It was the day he had visited the place for the first time, the confined plateau between the rain-scoured peaks. The place where, in the ice-cold alpine atmosphere, his childhood dreams had turned with the poet’s words into the nightmare that had underpinned his adult life. The place of slaughter.
‘We’ll split up,’ Mavros said in a low voice, as the trolley-bus swerved to avoid a motorcyclist on Amalias Avenue, making him bump into Grace. Her slender frame was surprisingly soft in parts.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I guess you’re the expert at this.’
‘I guess I am.’ He smiled tightly. ‘Get off at the next stop. All you need to do is take the first right and walk for ten minutes to your hotel.’
‘I think I can manage that. What about you?’
‘I want to see if the tail stays on me. If she does, I’ll shake her off and see if she has any support. Don’t worry if she sticks to you—ignore her.’ He nudged his client as the trolley slowed. ‘Stay in your room. I’ll be in touch.’
‘This isn’t the deal,’ Grace complained. ‘I want to go wherever the case takes you.’
‘No time,’ Mavros said, pushing her towards the open door. ‘Trust me on this.’
‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But call me within the hour or else.’ She stepped lightly from the vehicle.
Mavros kept his eyes to the front until the trolley moved off again, then nonchalantly flicked them round his fellow passengers. The smartly dressed woman was in a seat to his rear, nose in her book. He could make out the title. It was a volume of the Nobel-winner Elytis’s poems in Greek. As he prepared to make his move, he considered whether her choice of reading indicated who she was working for.
The trolley stopped beyond the neoclassical buildings on Panepistimiou and disgorged a crowd of passengers. Mavros bided his time until the mass of boarders clambered on, then stepped forward to help an old woman with a couple of blue plastic bags. An instant before the doors closed, he stepped off, catching a glimpse of the tail’s shocked face. Before she could get to her feet to press the emergency button, he ran across the road, provoking a horn blast from a taxi driver, and cut into a backstreet. There were enough people around to cover his passing. He had made it. Now all he had to do was work out a plan of action.
That didn’t take long. He knew that, given the surveillance, he had limited time to make progress in the case. There was only one option and that was to get out of Athens and follow up the leads he had—Kostas Laskaris and the Iraklis driver Babis Dhimitrakos, the one who had been known as Odhysseas. He rang his mother.
‘Hello, Alex,’ she said brightly. ‘How nice to hear your voice.’
‘Hello, Mother. Listen, I’m a bit pressed for time.’ He jammed himself up against the window of a leather-goods shop as people bustled past. ‘Have you got Kostas Laskaris’s phone number down in the Peloponnese?’
‘Kostas Laskaris?’ Dorothy said, a hint of surprise in her voice. ‘Why do you want to talk to him?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Oh.’ His mother sounded put out. ‘Well, he hasn’t got a telephone.’
‘What? How did you get in touch about the lunch you gave him?’
‘He wrote me a letter and I replied in the same way.’ Dorothy was waspish now. ‘There are people who still use that mode of communication, you know. Kostas doesn’t like to be easily contactable in his tower.’
‘All right, Mother, I’m sorry. Where is it that he lives exactly?’
‘The tower is outside a small village called Ayia Kyriaki. Near Kitta, I think, in the western Mani. Why? You’re not planning on going there, are you?’
‘Maybe,’ Mavros said, thinking about the painting Grace Helmer’s mother had done with the nearby village’s name in the title.
‘Only I’m going to be in the Peloponnese for Christmas after all,’ Dorothy said, her tone softening. ‘What happened at the opera, Anna and Nondas being so close to that dreadful killing, made me want to be with them and the children.’
‘So you’re going to stay at the Palaiologos place?’ Mavros tried to keep the disapproval out of his voice.
�
��Oh, I know you don’t like Veta and Nikitas,’ his mother said. ‘But family is what counts, now more than ever.’
Mavros thought about that for a few moments. Randos’s mention of his brother, Andonis, was rattling around in his head. ‘Yes, you’re right, Mother,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll pass by their house at some stage. Bye for now.’
‘Goodbye, dear. And be careful.’
His mother often said that. Mavros usually ignored the words but this time they made him shiver. He had the distinct impression that he was swimming with the big fish, and some of them had razor-sharp teeth.
It was time to conjure up a dual disappearance.
Randos was at the piano, his eyes firmly closed, trying to lose himself in the crashing chords. His wife had returned not long after his visitors had left, seen the state he was in and gone out again. She had learned when to keep clear of him, though he imagined he didn’t often look so disturbed when he was composing. The cat didn’t have any option. Psipsina had draped herself over her kittens, their tiny bodies almost smothered by her loose flank. She opened her eyes from time to time, giving her master pained glances, but the sound from the piano didn’t stop.
The composer’s thoughts were jumping between scenes of his old life, the years he thought he’d exorcised in his music. That bastard who called himself Iason Kolettis, how could they have been so blind? He was a madman, they should have seen that from the beginning. Old Spyros Mavros had never wanted anything to do with him, he had seen the empty glint in the killer’s eyes even before he started his murderous activities. But the others had wanted to use him for the good of the Party. The fools. He had used them, he had sucked them dry and then left them in disarray to set up his private gang of assassins. Even young Mavros, the lost hero Andonis, had failed to see the dangers of working with Iraklis. And it seemed he had paid the heaviest price of all for that misjudgement. But he was young, innocent of the world’s harsh ways. The others, himself, Laskaris—they should have warned him. Instead, they had left him to be consumed by the killer’s fire. Randos cursed himself for a coward. The one time he had tried to reason with Kolettis, the killer had smiled viciously, his hand on the haft of a heavy knife, and told him that he would take no interference from comrades who spent their time arguing with each other rather than fighting for the cause. God, he had been so frightened. The thought of the assassin’s eyes still made him quiver.
The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller) Page 16
