by Stav Sherez
‘You.’
‘What?’
‘You sent the wrong guy to prison.’ Nikos flashes back to the drifter. He’d seen his picture in the Athens papers. A skinny Macedonian, out of work and haunting the beach resorts in search of easy pleasure. The previous Chief of Police, Nikos’s predecessor, was under house arrest, pending trial on twenty-seven charges of corruption. Petrakis had taken over. Petrakis had extracted the Macedonian’s confession.
‘We needed to close this thing.’ Petrakis’s voice is raised a couple of notches, whether because of the whisky or the conversation, Nikos can’t tell. ‘People were already cancelling their bookings. We lost Thomas Cook and the Russians when the second body was found, and we still didn’t have a suspect. We needed to put people’s minds at ease.’
‘You needed to find the murderer,’ Nikos replies, his jaw clenched. ‘Once you arrested the drifter, the case was dropped. You let him get away with it.’
‘You know what this means now, two years in a row?’ Petrakis interrupts, ‘Someone’s trying to tell us something. You were there too.’
‘This isn’t 1974.’
‘I know that,’ Petrakis sneers, ‘but someone wants us to think it is. We need to catch him before … we need this contained. No press. No fanfare. This is something we have to deal with privately. When you release the information to the press this afternoon, tell them there are similarities with last year’s cases but that this year’s killings seem to be the work of a copycat.’
‘That isn’t my conclusion.’
Petrakis takes another sip of whisky. The ice cubes rattle against the empty glass. ‘That’s my conclusion, and, in case you’ve forgotten, I’m still your boss. You want this killer? Then play it cool at the press conference. Otherwise you’ll be watching from the sidelines, got it?’
Nikos wishes he could slam the phone down but it’s a mobile. He stabs the end button with his forefinger and places the phone back inside his jacket. He takes a sip of his coffee but it’s cold and bitter.
FOUR
She was so shocked by her first sight of the island that she almost turned back towards the boat. But there were people behind her, urgent and ready to disembark; the night had swallowed the ocean, and they were tired and crabby and wanted to get to their homes, hotels, the rest of life.
The harbour was a bouquet of light and sound. Mirror balls flashed. Strobes strobed. Brain haemorrhage-inducing beats boomed from every taverna. She could feel the vibrations, tangible in the air as the heat which still covered the land even though the sun had been down for a good few hours.
In front of her, awaiting the disembarkees, were gaunt men holding up small rectangular pieces of card with names scrawled upon them and forced smiles planted on their faces. She scanned the names as she dropped her bag but couldn’t see hers anywhere nor any strange variant on it which might have relieved her in its wrongness.
‘Carson? Pantheon tours?’ She asked a small man holding a card with Baz scrawled on it. He shook his head and looked away.
‘Madam?’ Someone was waving at her from the other side of the group of men. She sighed, relieved. Perhaps his pen had run out or he didn’t know how to spell her name. She walked towards him, past the spilling passengers and fried-food stink.
‘Madam, I’m afraid there is no one here from Pantheon.’
She looked at him as if not understanding at first, not wanting to.
‘But I’m supposed to be met,’ she said, remembering the same sinking feeling she’d had at the airport when her taxi driver hadn’t shown up. ‘I don’t know where to go.’ She repeated the sentence in Greek. Her university Greek still lived somewhere in her head. The words felt strange and newly discovered in her mouth.
The man smiled, and she thought she could see sympathy there, maybe an understanding of what it means to be a single woman alone on a strange shore.
‘The name of your hotel?’ He replied in English.
‘The Argo.’
‘You can get a taxi.’ The man pointed to small lay-by in the road which had already filled up with a scrum of tourists. ‘But you might be waiting an hour, maybe two. Only three taxis on island, so they have to make round trip.’
She nodded, showing she understood, but began to feel scared, hopeless, as if the whole thing were damned from the start.
‘Lady, you can walk if you feel up to it. Only twenty minutes up the hill, your bag it has wheels, no?’
She stared back, as if to check, though she’d bought it especially for the trip and knew its wheels were good. She began to wonder if perhaps this man who seemed so understanding only understood he had an easy one here, and she thought she could see something in his eyes she didn’t like.
‘No taxis?’ she said, almost desperately, wondering if she’d made a huge mistake and how this would all be just another adventure if Don was with her.
He shrugged.
‘And if I wanted to walk, how would I go?’ she asked, realising she had no option now, not wanting to stand amongst the others, broiling in the heat.
He pointed towards town. She saw a line of tavernas all draped in marquees that closed them off from this side of the harbour. Behind them, streets wound uphill, narrow and twisted as a crash victim’s spine.
‘You go, you go, you go …’ he said, pointing towards the dark street and then turning his hand up as if he were trying to reach the moon which hung over the island like a dim streetlight. ‘Up and up and up, then you will see the sign. The hotel is at the top of the hill. Very expensive. Good views.’
She thanked him and began walking. She looked back to see if the man was following her but he’d disappeared.
The main street consisted of identical tavernas; blackboards with misspelled English delicacies outside each one. There were shops selling sun hats and inflatables. Racks of obscene postcards twirling in the early evening breeze.
She’d thought she would come to the island and hear the plucking of bouzoukis and the strained singing of Greek fishermen, but instead all she could hear was the thock and scream of electronic music emanating from the dark insides of bars. Red, green and blue lights flickered and drowned out the stars. Men sat on the pavement, drooling drunk, singing football chants. The smell of fried bacon and vomit mingled and saturated the still air.
She walked by a group of Australians laughing uncontrollably. She caught something about a mangled hand, centipedes, a story from the Outback no doubt, and passed them. To her left, a man in a shiny football shirt was lying face down on the cobbles. She heard him cough and saw a thin stream of vomit escape his mouth and roll down the cobblestones. With one shaky hand he tried to extract a cigarette from a crushed packet lying next to him. She held her breath and negotiated the trolley past him and into the snaky alleyway that led upwards.
The street of tavernas seemed the only flat area of the island. Hunched on its shoulders, the land reached up towards the black sky, punctuated by the lights of houses like fallen stars.
The walk wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined, the dark giving the street the impression of a much steeper angle than it actually was. She pulled her luggage behind her, the wheels bouncing and cracking on the old surface and thought about how she was going to call her travel agent first thing in the morning and give him hell. Twice now she’d been stood up, left to fend for herself, and, from the few glimpses she’d seen, the island wasn’t the quiet paradise he’d attested to.
She stopped and had to gulp at the air to catch her breath. No, it wouldn’t do to get angry like that now. Not when she still had a way to go.
She continued up, past windowless houses and the crackle and buzz of cicadas somewhere in the distance. The streets turned unexpectedly into blind alleys or hidden restaurants, everything stooped and broken. There was no logic or order to it, and it made her feel dizzy, her heels unsteady on the cracked cobblestones.
She finally came upon the hotel sign and followed it to the left, through a small street where the houses
seemed to have collapsed into each other like shoulders turning in from a blow. She heard something scampering behind her, but when she turned around she could see only darkness where the street disappeared.
The road wound round and back up, and she was climbing again, out of breath. In the distance, bright like a satellite, she spotted the neon letters spelling the name of the hotel, and she felt ecstatic, like an explorer come upon a ruined city of such fantastic design that it stopped one dead in its tracks.
She heard something shuffling off to her right, a cat or dog, and continued now she had a beacon to guide her, a promise the hotel was indeed real and not some figment of the travel agent’s imagination.
She stopped abruptly when she saw them. A group of shadows, standing in the road, drinking and laughing. She knew the type. Their football shirts glistened in the moonlight. Their shaved heads made them look like a bunch of convicts on day release. They shouted and cursed and chanted terrace hymns. They fell over and punched each other on the shoulder. She quickly turned and took a parallel street, relieved they hadn’t seen her.
The road kept twisting and turning. Her heart pounding. Her breath trembling. She’d come all the way here to avoid drunken English yobs; she couldn’t believe it. She kept climbing, looking back all the time, so that she didn’t spot the two men until she was nearly on top of them.
She thought maybe they were locals getting ready for a night on the town and made a promise to herself to smile when they went past, searching her memory for the phrase for good evening.
They stopped a couple of feet in front of her. She considered turning back, running, but that was silly. The boys had probably just stopped to light a cigarette but there was no telltale sizzle of tobacco nor flash of light to calm the beating of her heart.
She straightened up, determined to walk by them, to make as if this was just another passing in the night and nothing more, but when she got to where the two men stood she saw that they’d positioned themselves so she couldn’t get past them.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, her voice floating away on the wind.
They looked at her, their faces dappled in moonlight. Young men in their twenties, dark and stubbly, smiling as they reached out and grabbed her, holding her shoulders rigid, chuckling to themselves.
‘Please,’ she said, but the tremor in her voice made her ashamed.
The taller of the young men put his hand on her breast. He grabbed her shirt and pulled it roughly out of her skirt. The other man gently unclasped her hand from the suitcase and grinned.
FIVE
Friday night in Palassos. The tubercular rasp of scooters and the relentless concussion of dance music. The peeling skin and six packs. A whole day and a half before Kitty was due to arrive. Jason double-checked the press release where he’d scrawled the name of the island. Had she known he was listening at the launch? Given the name of the wrong island? He shook his head. It was exactly that kind of thinking which had stopped him from doing so many things in the past.
He had a backpack with him. A few changes of clothes, toiletries and a copy of his manuscript. In his hand he held the new Lily Lombard novel, thick as a loaf of Polish bread, spine uncracked, half the way through. He stared at the photo on the back. The strange scenes around him. He couldn’t quite believe he was here. He’d booked the trip the night of the launch, before doubt and fear could get the better of him. He knew she wouldn’t talk to him any other way. Their positions in life were too far apart, almost like different species, unable to communicate. He stared at Kitty’s face, remembering how he’d come across Crime Novel, her debut, in a Notting Hill charity shop. He’d read it in the dark months after giving up the gallery, those days when he rarely went out, when the city seemed to be a mocking chorus to his failure. Reading her, he’d felt something so familiar, as if she reflected the parts of him he was unable to see. As if the words were a blinking light guiding him to safe shores. Somewhere in the second reading he’d known this was what he wanted to do. To sit in a room alone. To write these kind of novels. The Gallery had been a nightmare from the start. Too many people to deal with, too many faces to remember, too much exposure. Writing a book meant you could hide yourself from the world.
The club was small and stuck at the back of his hotel. His ears were already screaming with feedback as he hunched over his second ouzo. The club was packed and pulverised by dancing bodies, glowing with sunrays and bronzing lotion, whooping and screaming and kissing and smiling. Their jaws grinding and gurning to the beat. This was not his scene. Too loud. Too tiring. Besides, he couldn’t dance. Not worth a damn. Looked like he was an electrical toy whose wires had got crossed. So he sat at a small table at the far end of the club and watched them gyrate under the stuttering lights of the dance floor. The clubbers were mostly in their early twenties and looked like any of their ilk across the world. Cultural differences had been erased, and only the hooded tops, day-glo hats and trainers made by four-year-old cripples branded them. Their faces were tight and bug-eyed. They seemed lost in a mediocre dream.
By the third drink he was feeling better, drenched in the unfamiliar night. He stopped thinking of all the reasons he shouldn’t be here and started thinking about tomorrow. He couldn’t wait for Kitty to arrive. He knew it was right not showing her the manuscript in London. This would be much better. He imagined bumping into her on a beach in the late afternoon … a conversation among the sands … there was something about meeting people on holiday that erased all cultural and social barriers. In London, he would be nothing to her, another aspiring writer with a handful of loose pages, but here …
‘Your first day?’
Jason looked up, startled. A man was hovering above him. Two glasses of clear white liquid in his hands. He didn’t look like a waiter.
‘A drink?’ the man proffered, and Jason nodded. ‘Name’s Wynn. Glad to meet you.’
He didn’t like people sitting next to him uninvited, but a warm aniseed glow had descended, and the sound of another Englishman dressed unlike the clubbers, in a smart brown top and khaki slacks, intrigued him.
‘You staying or island-hopping?’ Wynn asked. His black hair, curly and skewed, rested on top of his head like a coil of snakes, continually in motion. His face was long and thin as if it had been stretched and folded then put back into place. The creases under his eyes looked like canyons seen from the windows of a plane. Moving in jerky, staccato motion, as if he were living in stop-frame time, he sat down. He passed Jason the impossibly tall glass. ‘A Long Island cocktail. Can’t spend your first night without trying one of these.’
They sat and talked for the next couple of hours. The drink had obliterated all sense of time and passage. Jason slipped into the kind of easy familiarity that one does on holiday when finding someone so similar to you that it almost obviated the purpose of going away.
He didn’t tell him about Kitty at first. He kept her to himself. He said he was burnt out from the city and here for a rest. Sun thirsty and beach crazy. Wynn laughed and ordered another round.
‘You made a good choice,’ Wynn replied, swatting at the cicadas nose-diving the table. ‘Don’t let what happened put you off.’
Jason wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. ‘What did you say?’
‘If you don’t know then that’s better. It makes no difference anyway. Would spoil your holiday. What happened, happened, and there’s no reason to think it’ll happen again.’
Before Jason could ask him to elaborate, a snow-white Scandinavian approached their table. She had long perfect hair and even longer, more perfect legs. ‘Hi. The bartender sent me over.’ Her accent sounded like something out of Beowulf.
Wynn smiled at her. He had such a disarming smile. A movie-star smile. The girl’s shoulders immediately relaxed.
‘Round the back, ask for Panos.’
She thanked him and disappeared.
Jason looked Wynn a question, but he either didn’t notice or was purposefully avoiding it. Three times this
happened in the next forty minutes, and he began to understand how it worked.
‘Pills?’
Wynn laughed. ‘I thought you’d see,’ he replied while lighting a cigarette. It was unfiltered and elliptical in shape like someone had sat on it. ‘Pills … powders … whatever you want.’
They sat there, table between them, sky and stars above, the smell of the Greek night drifting through Jason’s senses: the thick swirls of cigarette smoke and warm spicy wind, aniseed, slowly roasting pork, mint, parsley and the wild bitter tang of burnt diesel.
It was then the idea came to him.
Or at least that’s how it seemed. It could have always been there, in some form or other, a shapeless, shifting tremor which seemed to magnify and coalesce in the sharp Aegean light.
‘Would you consider doing me a favour?’ Jason leant forward, holding himself so he wouldn’t fall, the alcohol and night burning through his veins.
Wynn smiled. ‘I don’t even know you.’
‘That’s why it’s perfect.’
‘You’re starting to sound like that guy in Strangers on a Train.’
Jason laughed, nervous and drunk. ‘It’s nothing like that. I promise.’
Wynn moved forward, his breath sweet with aniseed and smoke. ‘Well, what is it then? I’m intrigued now.’
Jason had the story ready. He’d spun it through his head these past few minutes. It seemed perfect. He downed his ouzo. His face filled with blood, and for a few seconds the world teetered and almost collapsed. ‘It’s nothing really. I just want to impress this woman who’s arriving tomorrow night.’
Wynn looked almost disappointed. ‘What, you want me to book you a romantic meal?’
Jason shook his head. ‘She’s not that easily impressed. I had something a little different in mind.’
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘I want you to stop her in the street. A dark, empty street. She’s arriving on the evening boat.’ He pulled out the copy of her latest novel. Showed him the photo on the back.
