Irresistible

by Andrew J. Peters

  Cal shook his head.

  The walrus-like man brought out the folded photograph again. He showed it to Cal, tapping a dirty-nailed finger on the image. “You are Callisthenes Panagopoulos.”

  It was a photograph of Cal and Brendan in tuxes that Brendan’s grandmother had sent to the New York Times for their wedding announcement. Cal grinned. It was a great shot of the two of them. Then, coming to his senses, thoughts whirred in his head. Might he go free now? It was startling to think the mobsters may have been planning to kidnap Brendan for weeks. The announcement mentioned the wedding ceremony for Cal’s family in Hydra. These international criminals must have intended to ransom Brendan for a good chunk of his grandfather’s money.

  Cal nodded. “My family barely had money to buy clean underwear for the wedding,” he said. “I’m sure they’d like to pay for my ransom, but the best they could do is barter a goat and some used fishing equipment for my release.” He waited out a response as long as he could. “Can I leave now?”

  The mobster frowned and waved his finger. “This, not so simple.”

  “It can be,” Cal argued. “I won’t tell anyone. I swear. Just drop me off at the nearest port. I’ll even take my chances swimming if you’d prefer.”

  For a moment, the man’s gaze fell on him—gentler, perhaps yielding? Cal tried out a smile. It was really his only artillery. That brokered some more hesitation and even a face-palm from the guy.

  The mobster shook it off. “You stay. We decide to do with you,” the man told him, omitting “what.” His command of English lacked proficiency, which posed yet another challenge for Cal. How the hell would he negotiate being set free?

  The big guy propped his cigar in his mouth in a gesture of finality, though his glance lingered on Cal in something like fascination. He turned around, stepped through the door, and cranked closed its locking mechanism.

  Cal was trapped. His fate wasn’t looking so good. And what if the gangsters decided to make a second try to kidnap Brendan? Being kidnapped was terrible, but the thought of the gangsters getting Brendan and chopping off his ear to mail to his grandfather was even more terrifying. Cal had no way to warn his fiancé. He had no way to tell Brendan he was all right, albeit kidnapped and in need of a SWAT team rescue. Everyone back in Hydra had to be worried sick about him.

  His only hope was they’d find some clue he’d been taken, and the authorities might quickly follow a trail. Otherwise, he’d have to pull off some kind of impossible Houdini escape and hope one summer of lifeguard training on Onondaga Lake had prepared him for a gambit to land.

  AFTER HE HAD rearticulated to his nephews Anton and Emil they were useless excuses for human beings, Dragomir Negrescu—who’d earned the name the Bear of Bucharest—retired to his above-deck cabin with a bottle of Armenian brandy. He hung his suit coat up, unstrapped his revolver holster, stripped down to his sleeveless undershirt, and unbelted and unbuttoned his pants. After laying the revolver on his bed, he sat on the cabin’s single chair and lit his half-incinerated cigar with a silver Zippo lighter that had served him through three decades of smoking.

  This job of ransoming the rich American freight company heir was to be his life’s pension. He had toiled at all forms of illegal enterprise for forty years. At fifteen, he was taken under the wing of a corrupt Soviet Commissar to root out information on rabble-rousers in the Bucharest slums and garnered occasional work kidnapping children and bullying their families to empty their larders of contraband goods. Dragomir had moved on to running opium from Afghanistan into Romania to supply the recreational interests of army foot soldiers and then provided the names of the derelicts to the Commissar when his boss was in the mood to make an example of one of his underlings. It was dicey and modestly compensated work from a man whose paranoid nature made him an unreliable employer. By good fortune, the Commissar was shipped off to Siberia by his backstabbing superiors. That allowed the Bear of Bucharest to break out independently as a diamond smuggler, using the profiteering contacts he had established from his drug-running days.

  When there was competition, the Bear crushed it. His favored method had been abducting criminal upstarts and tearing out their faces with a three-toothed gardening claw, which he found provided a deterrent to their associates and had the benefit of enlarging his reputation. Later, he diversified to smuggling artillery to Central Asian rebels. In the fat years of the 1980s, he operated a profitable casino and a brothel in Constanta on the Black Sea. But every boom had an expiration date. The revolution of 1989 shuffled the deck of government authorities he could bribe. They played favorites with a new breed of criminals who supported independence, with no regard for experience or tradition. There’d been lean years for sure, but Dragomir found his next opportunity in joining the cause of his country’s urban rejuvenation by forging claims to abandoned lots and extorting hefty profits from big-moneyed foreign developers.

  It was a career that took a physical and psychic toll on a man even as hardened and unprincipled as Dragomir Negrescu. He was now fifty-five years old, overweight, diabetic, with plaque-encrusted arteries. According to his physician, he had a chance of reaching fifty-six if he retired, forswore fried meats and pastries, and adopted a highly improbable regimen of cardiovascular exercise.

  Dragomir had never married, so he had no sons to take up his trade. His nephews, Anton and Emil, had no such aptitude. They had bruised the few brains god had given them in street fights. Always, there were younger, hungrier men who were eager to claim territory in the world of criminal trade.

  When Dragomir received an international call from an old friend who had moved to New Jersey, he’d been sufficiently dog-weary to entertain the proposal of a ransom. He was adrift in debt, and while he knew such operations were a risky game, he had a winning track record in kidnappings from the old days. The friend, Marin Vadova, had been scoping out the American billionaire Harold Thackeray, and his grandson’s wedding trip to Hydra presented the perfect opportunity to snatch the society dandy. Dragomir had use of an old freight barge owned by a tobacco smuggler in Constanta. Marin knew a friend with a vacant apartment above a taverna on the minor North Aegean island of Psara. The plan was to hold the billionaire’s son there and use the apartment as a base while Marin negotiated the transfer of ten million dollars to an untraceable bank account in Dubai. When the money was received, they would release the rich hostage, blindfolded in a busy market in the city of Izmir on the Turkish Aegean coast. They had agreed to split the money fifty-fifty, though Dragomir had already worked out some creative accounting of his expenses to push things in his favor. With his share, he would buy a palace in Albania overlooking the Adriatic Sea, where at least if he died of heart disease, he would enjoy a better view than from his back-alley facing apartment in Bucharest when he took his last glimpse of the world.

  He took a long slug from the bottle of brandy. Now that dream was flushed down the latrine. They had stolen the target’s boyfriend and could never return to Hydra for an encore performance. The wedding party would be as skittish as cats. They would soon make a report to the Hellenic Police, who were, if not particularly adept at investigation, at least prudent enough to question an unscheduled Romanian towboat making port near the scene of the crime.

  Dragomir beat his fist against his knee. He had tasted the goddamn money. He had made a short list of Albanian properties and fucking calculated exchange rates. Instead, he would be returning to Bucharest where he was living on phony credit cards and dodging the Vasile clan for an unpaid gambling debt, until he cooked up a new extortion scheme. Prosperity was a fickle whore. Money cometh and money goeth. More goeth than cometh lately.

  And now, what to do with Callisthenes Panagopoulos? The greenest street hustler knew there was no profit in kidnapping a Greek unless his family had struck it rich in America, and Marin, who had researched every angle of the operation, had reported the kid’s family were peasants all the way back to the reign of Alexander the Great. Anton and Emil had insisted the
two men in the photo were identical, but they were blind. Callisthenes was a man who could not be mistaken for anyone else.

  Sweat beaded on Dragomir’s temples. He stood and pushed open his porthole window to cool himself with some bracing nighttime sea air. That young man strung up in the tank of the boat had gotten him worked up in ways that were not advisable for a man of his age and failing physiology. His photograph had whetted the appetite, but he was many times more glorious in person. With curled, blond hair as it was said, crowned the heads of angels. A face that inspired a thousand sighs, and a body that hit all the marks of masculine perfection. A smile from him had turned Dragomir’s insides to custard. To touch his lips would be an ecstasy. To do to him what Dragomir’s more base imagination pictured would be a sin worth being lashed by whips in the pit of hell for the rest of his days.

  This was not his first infatuation with a man, but even the most desirable young hustlers Dragomir had hired in Bucharest, Sofia, or Ankara had been ordinary in comparison. All his life, he’d kept his proclivities discreet. Romania was not Denmark with its worldly sensibilities. People concealed their perversions, though they had plenty, and they bargained with priests for absolution or bargained with grain alcohol if they were atheists. To be known as a homosexual, particularly among Dragomir’s gangster ilk, could end a man’s career, not to mention his life.

  Yet sublimely, ridiculously, Callisthenes Panagopoulos lifted him above those worries. How could anyone condemn him for loving the young man? He was the embodiment of beauty. He shone brighter than Apollo himself.

  Anton and Emil had vented strategies for disposing of the boy. Anton had suggested putting a bullet in his head and casting him overboard to disappear in a deep trench of the Aegean Sea. Emil had openly wondered if they might get a little cash for him from an Arab sex trafficker such as they had dealt with from time to time.

  This could not happen. Dragomir realized he needed to be careful about displaying his desires, but he would not allow any harm to come to the boy. In thinking about these matters, a terrible fear clutched his heart, and he stepped over to the greasy mirror on the wall of his cabin, searching his reflection with the horror of a man who did not know himself anymore. What fate had befallen him? His nephews had kidnapped the wrong man, and Dragomir could not cipher if Callisthenes was a seraph sent to deliver him to an afterworld of ecstasies or a Marț Sara, an incubus disguised in beauty’s form to lure him into carelessness and destruction. His mind was beguiled by a fantasy Callisthenes would want him, and they would swear their hearts be sewn together in the manner of righteous lovers like Hadrian and Antinous. Dragomir would make a home, a life for them, however it pleased his beloved. He would spare no sacrifice to make him happy, even forsaking his criminal ways to make an honest living, lest the boy be imperiled by his misdeeds.

  What foolish dreams had overtaken him! Dragomir was a fat, old, faltering ogre of a man. Callisthenes garnered proposals from handsome, young American aristocrats like Brendan Thackeray-Prentiss, a man who required three names. He would laugh at Dragomir’s near-pederastic infatuation. Though it was hard to imagine Callisthenes being anything but virtuous, Dragomir was well aware of how vain, cruel youths regarded amorous old men. His heart would be torn to pieces if Callisthenes spurned him. And if he did not drop dead from that, any word getting out about him circling around the boy like a pink-feathered, old buzzard would destroy him. It was tight quarters in the tugboat. His nephews could easily spy or eavesdrop on something they shouldn’t have.

  Dragomir sank back down on his little chair, grazing a hand on his bearded cheek. Though all of these considerations spoke emphatically against it, he could not shake free from the possibility of having Callisthenes as his lover. He could, however, make a bargain with himself. If the young man showed some sign, some divinely generous inclination he could love him, Dragomir would spirit him away to a place where they would never be found, and they would be sheltered by their happiness. Tears stung his eyes, and a great, maddening despair shook his bones. If it could not be so, Dragomir swore to himself he would kill Callisthenes to erase this folly of his heart and to make it so no man could possess him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE NEXT MORNING, Brendan headed to town in a water taxi, accompanied by Cal’s father, his four brothers, and Grandad Harry who could not be dissuaded from helming a mission of dire importance. They disembarked at the harbor of Hydra’s quaint town of immaculate white-faced villas, roofed by terracotta tiles and bedecked with scarlet bougainvillea hanging from windowsills. It was the shoulder season for the Greek isles, and only a few dozen tourists threaded the cobbled streets, which were lined with boutiques and outdoor cafés.

  The island’s police station was a short walk from the harbor, and it was housed in a cozy ground-floor pied-à-terre with dark wood doors and latticed windows. Such dainty elegance was nice to look at it, but it set the mind to worry about the police force’s experience with serious matters like kidnapping, or god help Brendan, suicide or murder. The Panagopoulos brood pushed themselves on the lobby’s single clerk in a Hellenic umbrage. Brendan stood back in deference. He couldn’t blame them for making a scene. They’d lost their baby brother. Alone, he might have thrown himself at the clerk with equal desperation. Though this seemed to be a garden-variety situation for the unflappable young man on duty in his tidy white cap and a uniform in patriotic midnight blue.

  Grandad sorted out an opening in which to insinuate himself. He was, as always, surefooted yet civilized with the clerk, and managed to send things into orderly motion. Brendan was briefly touched when Grandad introduced him as the “fiancé.” Documents appeared that needed filling out. The police lieutenant was called out from the station’s back room to welcome and tend to the complainants.

  While Cal’s father and brothers carped about the paperwork and argued with each other over how to fill it out, Brendan introduced himself to Lieutenant Giannis Constantinides. He explained he had evidence that needed swift examination. The dapper officer welcomed him into a comfortable office of artisanal furniture and framed photographs of the local scenery. Brendan insisted on taking the interview alone in spite of the glare of forbearance from Grandad and the grumbles of the Panagopoulos brothers. But Brendan was Cal’s betrothed and the last person to have seen him.

  Lieutenant Constantinides was a slim, handsome, clean-shaven man with dark Mediterranean features and a pleasant aroma of aftershave. He looked to be Brendan’s age if not younger. His English was accented but entirely serviceable, and he offered to make Greek coffee from a little brass pot on an electric burner that was set up on the office’s gleaming sideboard cabinet. Brendan politely declined. As soon as they were sitting across from each other at the lieutenant’s desk, Brendan brought the plastic bag with Cal’s flip-flop and bracelet out from his beach tote and presented it to Constantinides.

  The officer casually turned the items over, and Brendan explained where they’d been found. He proceeded to tell the man everything, from the embarrassing circumstances of his fight with Cal to their brief grapple, which had scared Cal away. He’d previously considered that in a missing person’s investigation, the boyfriend or husband was usually the prime suspect. Grandad Harry had urged restraint, wanting to fly out his lawyer from New York before anything was said. But Brendan decided he had to report the unadulterated facts. Cal’s life was at stake. How could he hide anything that could impede the investigation? His last accounting of Cal was a haunting, shameful memory, and if some detail inspired a theory about Cal’s whereabouts, he would happily go to jail. The confession poured out of him, as though he was striking a bargain with a god he’d not believed in prior to that day, and by his honest contrition, a higher power would bring Cal back.

  When he was done, the lieutenant smiled at him with a knowing glimmer in his eye. “This is a lover’s quarrel.”

  He reached across his desk and turned a double-photo frame outward for Brendan’s edification. One side of the frame
held a photograph of a pretty, young Greek woman and the other side showed an infant, perhaps six months old. Constantinides interwove his knuckles on his desk. “I am married myself.” He blustered out a razz that briefly unsettled his jet-black hair from his forehead. “This is a war that can never be won. Day and night, this woman is wanting to be fighting. ‘Why cannot we be going on vacation, Giannis?’ ‘Why does my sister have help to watch the baby, and I have none?’ ‘Why do you not love me like you used to, Giannis?’” He leaned forward and smiled crookedly at Brendan. “Always, this is what my wife is saying to me.”

  The lieutenant turned the photo frame back to his advantage. “Yet we make a very beautiful baby, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Brendan assured the young officer, though he was wondering how things had turned into two pals commiserating over married life. “But Lieutenant, Callisthenes has been missing for over twenty-four hours.” He looked to the faded, unmatched flip-flop, and a rush of sadness overcame him. “Why would he have left his shoe on the beach and torn his bracelet?”

  “This bracelet, it is a gift from you? Could be he was angry and tore it from his wrist in spite.”

  Brendan shook his head. “No. He had the bracelet before we met.” Now he was perturbed. He stared at Constantinides incredulously. “This doesn’t look like more than some minor domestic dispute to you? Where would he run off to, wearing one sandal? He left the hotel in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, with maybe forty euros in his wallet. There had to have been some sort of struggle on the beach. Or he went into the water.” Brendan’s voice trailed off fearfully.

  “Mr. Thackeray-Prentiss, this is Hydra. We have no crime,” the young lieutenant said. “And if your fiancé drowned, tell me—where is the body?”

  Brendan froze up for a moment, wondering if it was an accusation. The lieutenant sat back in his chair, inhabiting the thoughtful manner of an actual law enforcement official. “This place where the shoe and bracelet were found, the island shoal is very rocky and the sea is very forceful. You say the hotel groundskeeper searched this place. If your fiancé had been swimming there and drowned, he would be washed up on the rocks, along with his shoe and bracelet, plain for anyone to see. The same if he was thrown in. So you see, my friend, this cannot be.”