The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘Slow in the morning, are we?’ Grace said with a smile. ‘I’ve already been out to buy the essentials.’ She went over to her bag and tossed him a brown paper bag. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness, or so my Ganma always said.’

  He opened it to find two pairs of boxer shorts. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Forget it. I’m the one who owes you, remember?’ He hadn’t insisted on her paying an advance.

  Shortly afterwards they left the room and settled up with Kyra Froso. She gave Mavros a knowing glance that turned to a wince of consolation when he didn’t respond in kind.

  ‘Sto kalo na pate, paidhia mou,’ she called after them.

  ‘What was that she said?’ Grace asked, as they got to the car. She had the key in her hand.

  ‘She sent us to the good,’ Mavros replied. ‘And she called us her children.’

  ‘That was sweet of her,’ she said, as she slid behind the driving-wheel. ‘Even if she didn’t exactly have my virtue as her number-one priority.’ She gave him a tight smile. ‘Right, no cheating by asking at kiosks this time. Get map-reading.’ She started the engine. ‘And don’t tell me that’s not a man’s job. While you were in the shower, I read about ancient Sparta in the guidebook. Girls and boys went through the same strict training regime. They were surprisingly modern about gender issues.’

  ‘I don’t remember Leonidas going into battle at Thermopylae with an army consisting of fifty per cent women,’ Mavros muttered, as he found the town plan in her book.

  Grace laughed. ‘Maybe he’d have won if he had. Where to?’

  He directed her to the main street. A left turn took them on to the road that led to the port of Yithion. It headed almost due south from Sparta, the imposing mass of Mount Taygetos to the right running all the way to the coast fifty kilometres ahead. Although it was only single lane in each direction, the road was reasonably fast, cultivated land interspersing with narrow defiles thick with trees. There was little traffic.

  ‘This is schizophrenic country,’ Grace said, as she overtook a tractor laden with branches lopped from the ubiquitous orange trees. ‘Serious mountains on both sides—’ she glanced at the more distant and rolling mass of Mount Parnon to the east ‘—and fertile flat land in the plain.’

  Mavros nodded. ‘Although this area is fairly rich by rural Greek standards, you don’t have to go far off the main road to find villages that are dying on their feet. The locals have been moving to Athens for years because of the harshness of life in the uplands. There was a lot of trouble here during the Second World War and after—massacres, reprisals, bad blood in spades. The southern Peloponnese was always very pro-monarchist, which meant that the Right’s stand-off with republicans and Communists in the late forties was even more extreme than elsewhere.’

  Grace took that on board without comment and Mavros wondered if mention of the Communists had made her think about the group that had executed her father. He kept silent until they had passed through the last defile and reached the outskirts of Yithion, the port of Sparta in ancient and modern times.

  ‘Not a bad-looking little town,’ he said, taking in the long promenade, hotels and shops lining the shore.

  ‘You haven’t been here before?’

  ‘Nope. My father’s family was from the mountains to the north of Delphi and we went there for visits in the summer when I was a kid. Lakonia is the back of beyond for me.’ Mavros caught sight of a small pine-covered island joined to the coast by a causeway. ‘According to your guidebook, that’s where Helen and Paris passed their first night together on their flight to Troy.’

  ‘There’s no escaping that woman around here,’ Grace said. ‘I’m following signs to Areopolis, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mavros repeated.

  Only a few kilometres beyond the port, the tourist installations—campsites and restaurants, rooms for rent and boarded-up souvenir shops—petered out. The countryside became more rugged. First there was a series of heavily wooded valleys, with medieval watchtowers and castles poking their crumbling ramparts through the dense foliage. Then the road started to climb and the trees thinned, finally disappearing altogether as they moved higher up the flanks of a grim, grey mountain. The sun had passed its zenith and the sky was covered in a layer of lowering cloud that made the atmosphere even more leaden. Mavros thought of the vendettas that had been fought out on this unforgiving land, then shivered—what the hell was he doing on the trail of a multiple murderer? If Iraklis was as good as his reputation suggested, perhaps he had turned the tables already and was following him and Grace. Somebody had certainly been interested enough in them back in the big city.

  ‘God, this is a fearful place,’ Grace said, glancing around. ‘Are those vultures?’

  Mavros followed the direction of her gaze and picked out a pair of birds circling high above the slopes. ‘I doubt it. There aren’t many in Greece. Not the avian kind, at least.’

  She laughed. ‘Politicians? Businessmen? Why do I get the impression you don’t like your fellow citizens very much?’

  ‘I don’t like some of my fellow Greeks very much, it’s true. Maybe it’s because I’m only half-Greek. I can be more objective.’

  ‘Have your cake and eat it, you mean,’ Grace said, moving the wheel to avoid a rabbit that darted across the asphalt.

  ‘Do I?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so. You can claim all the virtues of this country—the history, the culture, the joie de vivre—and at the same time dismiss its failings.’

  The observation struck Mavros as painfully accurate, so he let it pass unanswered. More and more, he was finding Grace Helmer to be an alluring woman—sharp, funnier than most and, like himself, driven—but he had to be careful. Getting too close to clients was never a good idea.

  They came round the side of Mount Kouskouni and the road began to drop towards Areopolis, the chief town of the inner or Deep Mani. The western coast of the peninsula stretched away to the south, the lower slopes green with the winter’s vegetation but the summits as forbidding as the higher peaks near Sparta. Grace was right: this was a fearful place, spectacular and crushing at the same time. Somewhere down the coast was the old poet Laskaris’s tower. Would he be willing or able to cast any light on the mysterious Iason Kolettis? And what had Randos meant about Mavros’s brother? Could Andonis have been tied up in the activities of the Iraklis group? The thought made his stomach clench.

  ‘Areopolis, two kilometres,’ Grace announced. ‘We’ll change places there.’ She gave him a mocking smile. ‘I reckon the map-reading’s about to get trickier so I’ll take over.’

  ‘You do that,’ Mavros said, looking at the guidebook. ‘Apparently the town used to be called Tzimova, but they changed the name after the War of Independence because of the region’s fighting prowess.’

  ‘Changed the name?’ Grace repeated.

  ‘Ares, god of war?’ Mavros said. ‘This is War Town.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ she murmured, as they approached the grey stone walls of the first buildings.

  Oh, great indeed, Mavros thought, looking around at the barren fields and crags. Being a warrior in this hard country must have been hell, no matter which enemy you had the misfortune to be fighting.

  By 6:00 a.m. the Fat Man had managed to load his mother and her myriad possessions into the ancient Lada Samara he’d borrowed from a friend. Despite the early hour, the streets of Athens were already busy, the inhabitants keen to get to work as early as possible to finish their main employment and go on to their supplementary jobs. The Christmas exodus wasn’t due to start for another few days, so by the time they got to the motorway the traffic was bearable. Yiorgos felt the tension in his limbs slacken. He didn’t drive often and every time he got behind the wheel he found that his fellow Greeks had learned new ways to dice with death on the roads.

  ‘Yiorgo?’ his mother said from the back—she refused to sit in the front of the car on the grounds that her son didn
’t drive with sufficient care. ‘You are not to go above ninety kilometres, do you hear me?’

  The Fat Man looked in the mirror, most of the view filled by wicker baskets and plastic bags containing the offerings his mother was taking to the family, then raised his eyes to the low roof. ‘You think this wreck can do ninety, Mother?’

  ‘Of course it can,’ she replied sharply. ‘I have been watching the speedometer and it has already touched ninety several times.’ She snorted. ‘I thought you called yourself a good Communist. This is a Soviet wreck, is it not?’

  Yiorgos bit his tongue and drove on past the laid-up ships in the Bay of Elefsis. His mother had distracted him for a few moments, but the thought that had kept him awake most of the night came back with a vengeance as soon as she stopped talking. The thought, the fear. Why did it have to be him? The comrades must have lost their collective mind. He had no field training. All he knew about that, he had learned on the streets during the dark years of repression. Why had they given him this job? They were no doubt testing his loyalty—they had probably heard about the card games he ran. But why that subject?

  He pressed his fleshy lips together to stop himself shouting from frustration. It was bad enough going back to Anavryti with the old woman, bad enough going back to Lakonia with its kafeneia full of crazy fascists and monarchists who had been in the bastard Security Battalions and were proud of it. But being ordered to carry out surveillance on an old comrade was worse than all of that. Whichever way he looked at it, the conclusion was the same. He was about to become the worst of all creatures, a traitor—either to the Party, if he failed to carry out the orders to the best of his ability, or to a man he had always admired.

  Looking ahead, the Fat Man made out the jagged pyramids of the Peloponnese’s mountains. Returning to the region of his birth had never filled his mouth with such a bitter taste.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘ARE you sure this is right?’ Mavros demanded, pulling up at the start of a narrow unpaved track. The branches of untended olive trees were hanging down on both sides, almost obscuring the way.

  ‘I reckon,’ Grace replied, squinting at the map. ‘This thing was supposedly produced with the cooperation of the Hellenic Army Geographical Service, but it doesn’t seem to show all the roads. I’m guessing Ayia Kyriaki is this way.’

  ‘We must have missed a turn-off earlier on.’ Mavros looked in the Fiat’s rear-view mirror. A huddle of stone houses was grouped around a junction, a dilapidated tower standing above a tiny chapel. ‘I could go and ask in that village back there, but I’d rather not attract attention.’

  Grace was looking ahead. ‘The sea’s that way,’ she said. ‘Isn’t the poet’s tower meant to have a view over a headland?’

  Mavros had called his mother half an hour earlier and asked her if she knew anything that could help him locate the place. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d started to give him an exegesis of one of Kostas Laskaris’s poems that described his home in symbolic terms. The gist was that the building he had spent years renovating was above a promontory called Tigani. ‘Let’s hope the road doesn’t get any rougher,’ he said. ‘This heap rides pretty close to the ground.’

  ‘Want me to drive?’ Grace said with an ironic smile.

  Mavros engaged first gear and moved off. ‘I can manage, thanks.’ He swung round a blind corner. ‘Shit!’ Slamming on the brakes, he managed to stop a few centimetres in front of a somnolent black cow that was standing in the middle of the track. Before he knew it, Grace was out of the car. He watched as she manoeuvred herself down its flank then gave it a slap. The animal performed a surprisingly dextrous volte-face and trundled off down the lane.

  Grace beckoned him forward. When the cow turned into a field, she got back into the car.

  ‘Where did you learn to handle livestock?’ Mavros asked as he started to move again.

  ‘I have many talents you don’t know about.’ Grace laughed softly. ‘In Africa, if you must know. Cows have a tendency to colonise the roads there.’

  ‘Makes a change from my Scottish ancestors.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Alex,’ she said with a groan. ‘You have a hang-up about colonialism.’

  ‘Why not? Powerful states take over weak ones, make use of whatever assets they have—minerals, crops, manpower—and then bugger off, leaving them in the lurch.’

  ‘Jesus, that is so misguided,’ Grace said, her eyes wide. ‘Didn’t the British build roads, set up schools and welfare systems, provide jobs all around the world?’

  Mavros saw a gate across the track. Beyond it the grey-blue surface of the sea stretched away to the southern extent of Messenia across the bay. ‘Yes, they did,’ he conceded, seeing that he’d touched a nerve. ‘I suppose what your organisation does is put something back into those countries.’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ she said. ‘And we weren’t even the former colonial power in most of the places I’ve worked.’ She looked to the right. ‘There are some buildings over there. Do you think this is it?’

  Mavros cut the engine after pulling into the side where the track widened. ‘Could be.’ He made out the upper part of a tall tower, the silver-brown stone and the shutters on the small windows in good condition. He got out and shivered. ‘Christ, the temperature’s taken another dive.’ He reached over to the back seat for his jacket.

  Grace joined him on the track, seemingly unaffected by the chill air. The fleece she was wearing was obviously a high-quality one. ‘Some house,’ she said, gazing up at the imposing building. The tower grew like an outsize factory chimney out of a solid two-storey block with a red-tiled roof. ‘I hope we can talk our way in.’

  Mavros was wondering how to approach Laskaris. The old poet had been friendly enough at his mother’s lunch, but he was clearly unwell, buckling under the weight of a long life. How prepared would he be to open up old wounds in front of an American? For most long-standing Party members that would be almost as bad as selling Lenin’s tomb to the Disney Corporation.

  ‘Are we going?’ Grace asked with a questioning look.

  He started walking from the car, taking in the path that led away from the gate. In the distance he could see a broad extension of land like a causeway. It led to a raised acropolis, the summit as flat as the surface of the water beyond. The desolation of the place made him flinch even more than the cold. ‘Look, Grace, Laskaris isn’t like Randos. He’s older and prouder. It might be better if I talk to him on my own.’

  She glanced at him. ‘No chance, Alex. That’s not the deal. I’m in on everything or I’m not paying.’ She opened her hand. ‘I’ve also got the car keys. If you go up there on your own, you’ll have a long walk back to civilisation.’

  ‘You’ve got all the moves, haven’t you?’ Mavros said, looking up to the heavy clouds. They were getting lower by the minute, rolling down the pyramid-shaped hills to the east like an invading army. There was a metallic smell in the air that presaged rain.

  ‘Yeah, I have,’ she said. ‘So are we going?’

  Mavros set off up the sloping path to the tower without replying. If he was lucky, Laskaris wouldn’t be able to speak much English—all the conversation at his mother’s had been in Greek. But he didn’t feel lucky. Rather, he had a sourness in his belly, a feeling of apprehension at what the composer Randos had said about Andonis. Did the old poet really know something about his brother? More than once Mavros had found himself at the point where he thought he’d finally cracked the case that had remained unsolved since he’d started out as an investigator, but his hopes had always been dashed.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Grace said, overtaking him. ‘It may never happen.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ he said in a low voice.

  They reached the heavy wooden door. It was studded with the heads of large nails and in the centre was a spyhole like the ones on the doors of prison cells. Beneath it was a knocker in the shape of a human hand. Grace lifted it and let it fall three times.

  For a ti
me there was no sound apart from the chirping of the birds in the lentisk bushes that ringed the building. Mavros stepped back and glanced around. The tower was on its own on the spine of a low ridge, a few stone outhouses to the rear. Further inland there was a small group of houses, all of one storey. The undulating ground between them and the poet’s home was rocky and uncultivated while the land beyond had been split up into small fields, only a few showing signs of recent cultivation.

  ‘Nobody at home?’ Grace said, moving her hand to the knocker again.

  Then they heard the sound of bolts being drawn and keys being turned. Mavros went back to the door, nudging Grace gently aside. He wanted the old man to be confronted by someone he knew. The heavy panel swung aside and there he was, blinking in the dull light like a mole whose subterranean chamber had suddenly been revealed.

  ‘Is it you, Alex Mavro?’ Laskaris said in Greek. ‘Is it you?’ His eyes were wide with surprise.

  ‘It’s me,’ Mavros replied, extending a hand. He was concerned that the poet might need physical support—he looked unsteady. ‘Are you all right, Kyrie Kosta?’

  Laskaris gave a crooked smile. ‘No titles, Alex. I told you. First names only.’ He gave Grace an appraising look. ‘And what is your friend’s first name?’

  ‘This is—’ Mavros broke off. ‘How is your English, Kosta?’

  ‘Ah, I was thinking you were foreign,’ Laskaris replied in smooth but accented English. ‘Are you American, miss?’ His expression was unreadable.

  Grace nodded. ‘How did you guess?’

  The poet raised his shoulders. ‘Know your enemy,’ he said. ‘The wholesome smile, the healthy body, the sensible clothes.’ He smiled again, this time more openly. ‘But we are no longer enemies, are we? The war is over and you are the victors.’ He extended a shaky hand. ‘Kostas Laskaris.’