Crying Blue Murder (MIRA)

by Paul Johnston

  Halfway up the street he came to an open space on his left. Behind a dusty yard surrounded by acacias and pines stood the wide single storey of the island’s primary school, a few brightly coloured swings to one side. Through the open windows Mavros could make out the avid faces of small children, eyes fixed on their teachers. He wouldn’t have volunteered to go in front of a class today and keep the youngsters’ minds off what had happened.

  As he passed, a two-metre-high white marble column caught his eye. There were a couple of faded wreaths at the base and he stopped to take a closer look over the wall of the school yard. The tapering stone shaft was square and names had been inscribed on the lower part of the front face, beneath a carved olive branch and the years 1940-44. Several of the surnames were repeated—Glinos, Roussopoulos, Matsos. They were obviously some of the island’s main families.

  And then he noticed something else. The lowest name on the memorial had been erased, the marble roughly chipped away. But the strange thing was that an attempt had been made to reapply the letters with black paint. The surface of the stone had been scrubbed, recently by the rough look of the marks from a wire brush, but a few of the letters were still visible. Mavros thought he could make out a capital ‘T’ and, farther to the right, a ‘Z’. He gave up trying to decipher the writing where a surname would have been.

  Behind him came the sound of a throat being cleared. He turned to find the one-armed old man with the fierce expression he’d seen in the port crossing the road to join him at the wall.

  ‘Ti thelete?’ he demanded. What do you want? His eyes bored into Mavros’s. ‘Edho dhen einai yia xenous.’ This place isn’t for foreigners.

  Mavros was startled by the old man’s fierceness and he feigned incomprehension. He moved away from the memorial with a shrug. The islander stood in front of it like a sentry, his gaze still on the intruder. Manolis was his name, Mavros remembered from the conversation he’d overheard. It was his grandson who had drowned. He would have been stricken by the event, but why was he taking it out on a stranger? Maybe he just saw Mavros as an easy target.

  Mavros soon reached the plateia, the main square. It wasn’t very large, no more than twenty metres across, the centre taken up by an ancient mulberry tree with a thick trunk. Its branches hung low over the tables of the kafeneion. The village’s central café was closed and there were clusters of desolate-looking men in the shade of the tree, their voices low. The southern side of the square was formed by the wall of the kastro, small windows set between massive blocks of russet-brown stone. He sat down on the low retaining wall around the base of the mulberry and took the postcard Deniz Ozal had given him from his bag. The church to his left was Ayia Triadha, the one in the picture. He swivelled his head. So the street with the house Rosa Ozal stayed in was the one leading away past the castle wall. It was clearly the main road out of the village to the south. He stood up again and walked in that direction, looking for the blue-and-yellow door the missing woman had marked. He found it in less than a minute.

  Knocking at the door and receiving no answer, he thought at first that he was out of luck; the occupants may have been with the bereaved family. Then he noticed a slight movement of the curtain at the front room to his right so he tried again. Again there was no response. Perhaps the owners didn’t want to rent rooms at this terrible time. He was about to give up and go back to the shade in the square—the sun was burning down on his head in the treeless street—when there was the sound of a key turning and the blue-and-yellow panelling swung aside.

  Mavros recognised the black-clad woman immediately. He’d seen her when he came off the ferry. A shy smile appeared on her lips as she nodded. It looked like she remembered him too. Her dark hair was tied back in a bow.

  ‘You need a room?’ she asked, her English accent unexpectedly good.

  Mavros nodded. ‘Yes, do you have one?’

  The woman nodded again. ‘I have plenty. The season is finished. There is no one else in my house.’ She kept her eyes off him as she ushered him in. Her face was square and fleshy, but the skin was smooth. Even though there wasn’t a trace of make-up she looked less worn than the average island woman and her brown eyes shone with intelligence when she summoned up the nerve to raise them.

  ‘This way,’ she said, leading him down a dark passageway. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Alex,’ he said, keeping his surname to himself for the time being. He wouldn’t be able to pretend that he was a foreigner if he told her his surname unless he constructed some story about being a second-generation emigrant returning to the fatherland. It would be easier to use his Scottish identity.

  ‘I am Rena,’ she said, turning to him as she stepped out of the corridor. ‘Welcome to my house.’

  Mavros was pleasantly surprised. If he hadn’t needed to check out the place where Rosa had been, he’d have avoided staying on a main road. He’d made that mistake in the village he’d visited on Zakynthos and had been woken before dawn every day by the sounds of farm vehicles with unsilenced exhausts and loudly revving motorbikes. But this was something else. The house backed on to a small courtyard that was cool and quiet. It was sheltered by a wide pergola over which had grown vines and bougainvillaea, a whitewashed stone wellhead in the centre.

  Rena pointed to a small, single-storey building on the far side. ‘Your room is there, with kitchen and bathroom.’ She pointed to the wall behind. ‘I live on this side. Alone.’ She nodded, smiling shyly. ‘So no noise, no disturbance. I will show you now.’

  Mavros followed her across the spotless flagstones to the outhouse. ‘Where did you learn your English?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’ Rena looked affronted. ‘I say something funny?’

  ‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘I learn English here. There is a xeni, a foreign woman, who makes lessons.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mavros stopped behind her as she raised a key to the door.

  ‘You will like this, I think,’ Rena said, lowering her eyes as she stood to one side and let him move past her into the room.

  Mavros felt his upper arm brush against her chest and saw her cheeks redden instantly. He stepped into the rectangular room to give her some space, keeping his eyes off her for a few moments. Although the low building had looked small from outside, the main room was expansive, a double bed in the centre and a wide table under the shuttered windows. The decor was less minimalist than was often the case with rooms for the tourist market, yellow curtains setting off the pale blue paint of the walls and a tastefully framed print of an island scene by the painter Theofilos over the bed. To the right a pair of doors led into a spotless bathroom and a small but well-equipped kitchen.

  ‘Very nice,’ Mavros said.

  Rena acknowledged the compliment with a smile. ‘You will stay?’

  ‘You said you have other rooms,’ Mavros countered, wondering where Rosa Ozal had stayed but not wanting to ask the woman before he had her confidence.

  ‘Yes, two,’ Rena said, her face falling. ‘You don’t like this one?’

  She looked so upset that Mavros decided to leave further questions till later. Besides, this room served his purpose very well. He would be in the centre of the village and able to come and go without disturbing his landlady.

  ‘I do like this one,’ he assured her with a smile. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  Rena’s expression lightened and she handed him the keyring. ‘How long do you stay?’

  Mavros raised his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure. A few days at least.’

  She nodded. ‘That is good. Usually I ask for money in advance, but you have an honest face.’ She gave a shy smile, then she became sombre again and turned away.

  Mavros was sure that she had just remembered what had happened to the young couple and the fact that their funerals would soon be taking place. He suddenly felt like an intruder in the village. But maybe grief would make people drop their guard and that could be to his advantage. There were times when his profession
made him ashamed.

  In the late afternoon Mavros woke up in the double bed, wondering for a few moments where he was, and then took a shower. Rena had given him lunch of home-made fava— ground yellow peas with onion and paprika—salad and a smoky local white wine that had sent him straight to sleep. Often when he had a siesta he felt terrible afterwards—one of his British friends had dubbed the activity ‘death in the afternoon’ on a visit to Athens—but not this time. He was ready to start the search for Rosa and he sat down at the table to consider the options. He would obviously have to hang back with direct questions about the missing woman. If her hot date in Istanbul had turned out to be a wet blanket and she’d come back to the island, it was possible that she was involved with a local guy who might not take kindly to someone snooping around. Even if she wasn’t hooked up with some bronzed fisherman, it was a fair assumption that she was keeping her head down. He’d need local information to help him locate her, and now was hardly a time when the islanders would open their hearts to a foreigner. Anyway, gathering impressions of places was the way he always worked when he was out of Athens. Initially the best course would be to check things out surreptitiously and see if he could pick up her trail on his own. It was time to do some more eavesdropping.

  There was no sign of Rena when Mavros left the house. He pocketed his keys and headed for the square, but it was as dead as it had been earlier. The only people around were a few card players in the kafeneion, all of the men looking downcast. He decided to go down to the port. On his way he stopped outside the school again, feeling the eyes of some small children on him from the swings. Stretching his hand across the wall, he managed to touch the abraded area of the memorial column. He ran his fingertips over the space to the right where the surname would have been and felt the faint outline of three more letters— ‘PEN’, he thought. Continuing down the street, he tried to make sense of it. Why would the people who ran the island have sanctioned the removal of a name that had clearly been approved when the memorial was first erected? And who had tried to write the name on the column again, not very long ago? Twitching his head, he told himself to forget it. He’d always had a tendency to waste time on speculation. It was part of the curse of being an investigator.

  When he got down to the port, the last of the sun turning the buildings a deep red, he went over to the café he’d been in earlier. There was only a faint light from the depths of the interior, chairs stacked on the tables outside. He tried the door and found it was open. Even though he didn’t want to start showing people the photo of Rosa Ozal yet, he needed to find the village’s hot spots. Not everywhere could be closed because of the impending funerals. There were enough tourists around to tempt someone to offer them a good time. Not here, though.

  ‘No, no, closed,’ said the waiter, Thanasis, who’d served him in the morning, raising his head from the sink behind the bar. His eyes were heavily ringed and damp.

  ‘Okay,’ Mavros said. ‘Is there another place open?’

  The youth shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ It was clear he didn’t much care.

  Mavros sympathised with him. According to the guidebook the population of the island was only around five hundred, so he must have been known the dead boy and girl well. He turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ Thanasis said in a low voice. ‘There is bar called Astrapi.’

  Mavros looked back at him. Astrapi meant ‘lightning’. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Go down Ayia Marina road about one half kilometre.’ The young man shook his head. ‘All crazy people there.’ He lowered his head and didn’t speak again.

  Mavros went outside again and was about to head back up to the centre when he caught sight of a pair of figures at the near end of the pier. They were engaged in deep conversation, their heads close. One of them was Manolis, the one- armed old man who’d sent him packing from the war memorial; he was clutching the other man’s bare forearm. Looking around him and seeing that there was no one else in the port, Mavros walked away from them. They stopped talking and looked at him suspiciously as he went past them into the darkness beyond the last streetlamp. Waiting till he heard the voices start up again, Mavros ducked down behind a bus that was parked at the quayside. He felt his heart suddenly pound in his chest. What he was doing was wrong, but there was something about the fierce old man that puzzled him. Years of watching people at the margins of society— criminals, addicts, people at the end of their tether—had sharpened his senses.

  Mavros crept behind the bus’s long flank and found that when he’d reached the rear wheel he could make out the voices. The sun had sunk farther, the last of its red stain swallowed up by the waves.

  ‘Life is a whore,’ the old man cursed. ‘And the sea is a whore and murderer. Do you hear me, Lefteri?’

  The other man mumbled in assent.

  ‘I was here when they brought them in. Naked they were, the idiots. What had they been doing? You don’t fuck when you’re on a boat at sea, for God’s sake. Their eyes were as glassy as an octopus’s. I’ve spent most of my life pulling fish from the salt-veined killer and now I pull my own grandson from it.’

  The other man wrenched himself away. ‘I know, Father,’ he said in a sullen voice.

  ‘You know nothing, Lefteri,’ the one-armed man raged. ‘Where were you? Going on trial for beating a tourist to pulp. And all because he went to sleep in your boat. What do you know? You should have been here, and since you weren’t you’re going to hear everything about it. Christ, the horror. The young men in the boat from Paros pushed me away— gently, mind—when they took the tarpaulin off them to spare me that sight, but I forced myself forward. There had to be some member of the family present and you weren’t even on the island. Besides, I was the oldest.’

  ‘Yes, Father. Now let me—’

  ‘Stay here, you fool. You shouldn’t be going shooting rabbits tonight of all nights, but if you must then you’ll go with what I have to tell you in your mind.’

  There was a silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Very well.’ The old man’s voice was harsh and he was no longer bothering to control the volume. ‘I kneeled on the deck—do you hear me?—and touched my grandson’s hand. I felt the flesh that was already cold and lifeless. Their mouths were gaping, as if they’d been crying out as they took their final breaths. Nafsika’s hair was knotted around the white skin of her shoulders. I saw our boy’s limp cock as they cut away the nets and pulled the bodies apart, and I saw the triangle of thick hair beneath the girl’s stomach. Then I heard the wailing of the women as your wife and your mother arrived running, their lips spattered with froth. I kept them back as long as I could and then the old women took over. They’ve been through many deaths. But where were you, you fugitive? You coward?’

  There was another, longer pause.

  ‘I’m going now.’ Lefteris’s voice was deep and resentful.

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’ the old man shouted. ‘Your only son is dead and you’re going hunting? My God, Lefteri, what kind of a man are you?’

  Mavros looked round the edge of the bus cautiously and saw the younger man’s heavy body and clenched fists.

  ‘I’m the kind of man you were when you were young, Father,’ he said slowly. ‘All the men of the Gryparis family are hard as stone, aren’t they?’ He grunted. ‘Except my son, it seems.’ He leaned closer to the old man. ‘Leave me be,’ he said. ‘My affairs don’t concern you, old man. Don’t get involved.’ Then he stepped away, his heavy boots crunching across the sandy asphalt. Soon afterwards there was the sound of a starter motor and headlights came on. Mavros shrank back against the side of the bus and watched as a gleaming new pick-up with a high suspension came past on the road that skirted Faros towards the south.

  The old man stood where he was, his voice only partially audible. He was saying something about Gryparis women being hard too, about the family being cursed in the female line. Then he shuffled away towards the main street, the vigour suddenly gone from his b
ody and his shoulders drooping as if they were carrying a fearful weight.

  Mavros watched him move off, trying to get his head round what he’d just heard. Far from grieving for the loss of their male heir, the old man and his son seemed to be locked in their own savage world, one in which normal human feelings were unknown. Mavros felt like a traveller in a previously undiscovered country. How could a father go hunting the night after his son had died without any expression of grief? And how could a grandfather talk about his grandson’s shrivelled genitals and the poor girl’s nakedness as if they were nothing more than animals?

  He shook his head and wished he’d never embarked on the surveillance strategy. But how else would he be able to find the missing woman in this beautiful, brutal place?

  Mavros walked towards the square on his way to the bar he’d been told about. The night air was cool. In Athens the evenings at the end of September were still warm, but on Trigono the breeze had cleared away the heat of the day and there was a lot of dampness in the atmosphere. He’d seen the signpost to Ayia Marina earlier. His guidebook told him it was a beach resort six kilometres out of Faros on the eastern leg of the triangle that formed the island. He passed through the square, now even quieter with only a pair of black-clad old women talking in undertones outside the church, then headed past Rena’s house down the street that led out of Faros. Apart from the occasional child’s cry and the muted sound of televisions, the village could have been under military curfew.

  The streetlights were dim and infrequent. Mavros suddenly found himself beyond the last buildings. A dog barked away to his left and a rustling came gradually closer. As he rounded a corner, hand against the stones of a low wall, light flooded out from a single-storey house. It fell on the grey face and ears of a donkey in an enclosure to his right. As he got closer he made out a sign with the bar’s name, silver bolts of lightning around the letters. The pounding of rock music became more audible with every step.