The Silver Stain am-4

by Paul Johnston

  ‘Because he hates his grandfather,’ Hildegard said. ‘He thinks he betrayed his country by coming to live here.’

  Mavros intended to come back to that. ‘If you want to pay Oskar off, why did you involve the police?’

  ‘Ah, that was unfortunate,’ Kersten said. ‘One of our gardeners saw someone coming out of the rear window. He gave chase, but the individual ran to the gate and got away in a waiting car.’

  ‘Which will be on the gate’s CCTV.’

  ‘No doubt,’ the resort owner said. ‘But I won’t be giving that to the police.’

  ‘Ah. Tell me, what should I know about this Oskar? Is he, for instance, two metres tall and a hundred and thirty kilos of muscle?’

  Hildegard got up from the table and returned with a photograph, showing a thin man in his late twenties, his blond hair cut short and tattoos on his puny forearms.

  ‘And the unsavoury group he hangs out with?’ Mavros asked.

  ‘Some of them came here once with Oskar,’ Kersten said. ‘Skinheads, layabouts. I gave them food and beer and they left quietly enough.’

  ‘You could go now,’ Hildegard said. ‘You can’t do anything to find the Kondos woman at this time of night.’

  ‘I could sleep so I’m in good shape to carry on the search for her tomorrow.’

  Rudolf Kersten stood up stiffly. ‘Alex, if you do this small thing for us, I will pay you a thousand euros.’

  Mavros looked at them and then nodded. He’d been made another offer he couldn’t refuse.

  SEVEN

  The Kerstens gave Mavros a money-belt filled from with cash from their safe. It made him look like he had a pot belly.

  ‘Are you sure you trust me with this?’

  Rudolf looked at him unwaveringly. ‘I’m sure. I can’t send anyone from the hotel staff with you in case they recognize my grandson. We do have a standing on the island.’

  Mavros nodded, wondering if now was a good time to ask about the wartime atrocities he’d heard about from Waggoner. He decided against it, not fully trusting the former SOE agent.

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said, wondering if he would.

  ‘Oskar often goes to that bar, the Black Eagle, behind the old harbour,’ Hildegard said.

  Mavros had a feeling he’d been there with his brother-in-law. In any case, it was only a few minutes’ walk from Anna and Nondas’s flat. He wondered if Barba-Yannis would still be awake — it would be an opportunity to get the keys.

  ‘Anything else I should know?’ he asked.

  The Kerstens exchanged a glance. ‘Well,’ Rudolf said, ‘Oskar got involved with a far-right group back in Germany after he left school. It’s possible some might be out here with him. He. . he also has contacts with a group of extremist Greeks.’

  Whence the skinheads, Mavros thought. Neo-Nazis and bonkers Greek hyper-patriots. Were they worth it for a thousand euros? Definitely not, though there was no harm in checking Oskar Mesner out. Maybe he’d be on his own in the corner of the bar nursing a small bottle of lager.

  ‘I have. . I have weapons,’ Kersten said.

  ‘World War Two relics or something more modern?’ Mavros asked, unable to restrain himself.

  ‘I have nothing from the war,’ the old man said in a low voice.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Mavros said firmly. Like his father and brother, he was opposed to violence in all forms except verbal. It was said on the Left that both Spyros and Andonis would have risen even higher than they did in the resistance movements they were engaged in if they had sanctioned the use of armed revolution.

  ‘Here,’ Kersten said, giving him a folded piece of paper. ‘This note tells Oskar that this is the last money he will receive from me. Please give it to him after you get the coins back.’

  ‘One of us will be awake all night,’ Kersten said, with a soft smile. ‘We have great faith in you, young man.’

  Mavros wished them goodnight, inordinately happy to be called ‘young’ when he was forty-one. Maybe it was the long hair.

  Renzo Capaldi was hovering outside the private door, looking like a giant who was about to be thrown out of his castle for eating the furniture.

  ‘Mr Mavros, is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dance Swan Lake?’

  It was as he approached the main door that the thought struck him. He looked in his pocket and found the car-hire company card, then pressed out the number on his mobile.

  ‘Is Mikis around?’ he asked the woman who answered. ‘I’m with the film crew at the Heavenly Blue and I’d like him to pick me up?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Would that be a problem?’

  ‘Not unless he’s hitting the beers, which he better not be.’ The woman laughed. ‘I’m his mother.’

  Mavros wondered if Mrs Tsifaki had biceps like her son’s.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said after a pause. ‘He was watching the basketball. He’ll be with you in under ten minutes, Mr. .?’

  ‘Mavros.’

  ‘Black by name, not black by nature, I hope?’

  ‘Only occasionally.’

  Mikis turned up in the same Jeep.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said, after greeting his passenger.

  ‘Centre of Chania. Sorry to drag you away from the basketball.’

  ‘Nah, it’s rubbish. Opium of the people.’

  Mavros turned to him. ‘That’s not exactly what I expected to hear from a guy who spends his time servicing Hollywood capitalists.’

  Mikis laughed. ‘I’m not a member of the party or anything, but I like some of the things Marx said.’

  ‘Yeah, so do I,’ Mavros agreed. He’d never had any interest in joining the Communists or any other party, despite his father’s decades of underground service. He’d never been sure why, but it was probably because he didn’t like authoritarian structures. According to the Fat Man, it was because he didn’t care about his fellow men and women, something he tried to disprove in his work. It was an ideology of sorts.

  ‘I’ve got to pick up some keys and then deliver something,’ he said to Mikis. ‘You’re not rushing off anywhere?’ It had occurred to him that having the burly Cretan at his side might be useful if Oskar was with his friends.

  ‘Whatever you want. It’s the production company’s bill.’

  Driving around the old town of Chania at night, even during the early part of the tourist season, was less than straightforward. Mikis dropped Mavros as near Barba-Yannis’s place as he could; they’d arranged to meet outside the Black Eagle twenty minutes later.

  Mavros knocked on a neatly painted blue door, encouraged by the sound of a television inside. The door opened and a wizened old man with a spectacular moustache looked up at him. Even at night he was wearing the vraka, though he had taken off his high boots.

  ‘Is that you, young Alex?’ he asked, squinting.

  Twice in one night, Mavros thought. Once more and I’ll turn back into a student. He shook the old man’s hand and asked him how he was.

  ‘Better than I ought to be. I was ninety last month, you know.’

  Mavros passed on greetings from Nondas and Anna, then said he was in a hurry — he’d call back to see the caretaker at a more civilized time.

  ‘Civilized?’ the old man cackled. ‘This is the best time of the day. The TV’s full of girls in their underwear. Have you ever called one of those numbers?’

  Swallowing laughter and taking the keys, Mavros headed down the narrow street to the flat. It was on the second and third floors of one of the Venetian houses that had escaped the German bombing before and during the Battle of Crete. Inside it was cool, the furniture covered in sheets. There were cockroach traps all over the place. He considered taking a knife from the kitchen or leaving the money there, but decided the presence of Mikis would be enough to keep things calm.

  He locked up after himself and stowed the heavy keys in his jacket pocket. The Black Eagle was round a couple of corners and a hundred pace
s nearer the harbour. Although it was past midnight, music was playing from all directions and the yells of drunks rang out regularly. Mavros remembered what David Waggoner had said about the Cretan deal with the devil — it sounded like the demons were loose tonight, and it was still only May.

  He saw Mikis in a doorway about ten metres from the tables outside the bar.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think you want to go in there,’ the Cretan said. ‘It’s full of shaven-headed shitheads, the kind who think Hitler was a god. There are Germans and Greeks. The latter call themselves the Cretan Renaissance.’ He laughed harshly. ‘They wouldn’t know a renaissance if it performed colonic irrigation on them.’

  Mavros laughed, then went closer and glanced inside. The back of the bar was full of shouting yobs, one of whom was Oskar Mesner. The question was, how to lure him out on his own?

  From The Descent of Icarus:

  We got our toe in the door at Maleme and over the next couple of days the Auntie Jus landed mountain troops in large numbers. There were plenty of planes hit as they came in to land or took off at their excruciatingly slow speed, but our forces were mustering. Captain Blatter had several RAF men shot for refusing to assist in shifting damaged aircraft from the runway. I felt sick the whole time, going about my duties like a machine. Wachter kept away from me and I was sure he had told the other men about my failure to fire. Cowards were not countenanced in the ranks of paratroopers, so I was left alone.

  Until it was time to advance. Surprisingly, the New Zealanders had not pressed us when our position at Maleme was critical — I later learned that the Allies’ communications were almost non-existent and their commanders had failed to realize how vulnerable we were. That’s what days of bombing and strafing will do to men in inadequate defensive positions. Units were sent forward to probe locations to the east, many of them making good progress despite dogged defence from the Maoris and Greek irregulars. Captain Blatter dispatched Lieutenant Horsmann’s company — including Peter Wachter and me — towards a village called Galatsi. The 109s were still shrieking over our heads, their machine guns shredding trees and anyone beneath them. I had been ordered to the front of the line by Blatter before we left. It was clear that he hoped I would stop at least one bullet. Horsmann gave me a sympathetic glance, but was powerless to contradict his superior.

  It was a hot morning and we passed several German corpses. Their faces were blackened and flyblown, their bellies swollen to bursting point except for those who had been hit in the abdomen. Soon the word went round that our men had been mutilated. This caused anger and a burning desire for revenge amongst the others, but I was only saddened by the waste of young lives.

  The outskirts of Galatsi — less a village than a hamlet — were deserted, the walls of the simple peasant houses wrecked by strafing and the roofs of most of them collapsed. There was the occasional burst of firing on the higher ground to the south, but little of it came our way — Blatter’s men were clearing out the enemy.

  We assembled in the small square around an ancient tree, most of its leaves blown to the dusty ground. There was a gap in the aerial activity and I heard birds singing from the small gardens behind the shattered buildings. And then came a combination of sounds that, first, set our nerves on edge and, second, sent us scurrying for cover.

  Two British light tanks came into view at the other end of the street and started firing at us. They accelerated, our return fire ringing off their armoured fronts and sides. But they were only the start of our travails. Behind them came the New Zealanders, bellowing war cries and carrying rifles with long bayonets. They were followed in turn by Greek troops, some of them armed with nothing more than pistols and knives. They were also shouting a battle cry, a single word repeated over and over again. Later I learned it was ‘aera’, meaning that the fighters should fall on the enemy like a great wind. And then came members of the local population, whose homes we had destroyed and were now taking refuge in.

  We were the elite, so inevitably my comrades dealt death to many of the attackers, but they were not discouraged. The tanks ran to a stop, their crews killed — at least so we thought, until a stocky officer with fair hair leapt from the turret and emptied his pistol into a paratrooper who had foolishly gone forward. He then seized the dead man’s weapons and took cover behind the vehicle, waiting for the charge to reach him.

  Machine-gun fire rang out from all around the square. I saw Wachter, his face set hard, discharge drum after drum. That didn’t save him. He was skewered by a pair of burly Maoris, one of whose bayonets broke off when it pinned him to the ground.

  ‘Direct your fire!’ Lieutenant Horsmann yelled, but it was too late.

  The wave of attackers dashed over us, New Zealanders trampling paratroopers with their heavy boots, the Greeks, who I later found were gendarmes, cutting throats and smashing heads open with the butts of German rifles they had taken from the dead. Then came the locals, old men throwing rocks at downed men, boys handing them more, and women. . it was then that I saw her, the woman I had left on the ground before we retreated to the Tavronitis. There was a bloodied bandage over her shoulders, but she was firing an MP40 from the hip. Her hair was tangled and raised by the wind — she could have been a Gorgon or a Fury, come to claim our bodies for the death god.

  Fire from my comrades was minimal now. The lieutenant charged forward with an MG34, but was cut down by a blow from a curved sword wielded by a bearded man in baggy trousers. His head was almost severed.

  Panicked, I tried to fire, but my machine-pistol jammed. I took out my bayonet and pistol, ready to face what was coming to me as the last of the unit. I hit a gendarme in the leg and a hail of fire was directed at me. By some miracle, I escaped injury. Then a Maori leapt on me and knocked the weapons from my hands. He heaved me up and threw me against the wall, pulling back his rifle with its awful bayonet.

  ‘No!’ came a scream from the window.

  I looked past the New Zealander and saw the woman I had spared, her face spattered with blood.

  ‘This man, mine!’ she said in a crude English accent, coming through the window frame. Beyond her I saw the fair-haired British officer. He was shooting our wounded in the head with the Luger he had plundered.

  The Maori shrugged and strode away, while the woman raised the MP40 at me. The irony of being executed with a German weapon didn’t escape me, but I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to leave this world of fire and slaughter.

  She fired above my head, pieces of plaster falling past my eyes. Then she stepped up, eyes burning into mine all the while, and beckoned me to take off my helmet. She swung back the machine-pistol and smashed the butt into the side of my head.

  Before I went into the darkness I saw her lips form into a smile that wasn’t completely full of hate.

  There was no alternative, Mavros realized, to going into the Black Eagle and asking Oskar Mesner to come outside with no more than one sidekick. Tempting him financially seemed the most likely method to work, so he fumbled with the money-belt and took out a thousand euros.

  The bar was smoky and the music ear-shredding metal — it was making many of the customers nod their shaven heads like demented puppets. Mesner was at a table with three men, two of whom had bare skulls and the other a crew cut that the US Marine Corps would have approved. Mavros wondered how the Kerstens’ grandson, with his unshaved head and sparse moustache, fitted in.

  Moving slowly closer, he held up the money and slipped it into the German’s shirt pocket. That obtained him a degree of interest.

  He leant close. ‘There’s more waiting for you outside, Oskar,’ he said in English, having been told Mesner spoke the language. ‘You don’t have to come on your own, but a tough guy like you doesn’t need more than one bodyguard, does he?’

  The German looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and disgust — he no doubt disapproved of shoulder-length hair. ‘Karl,’ he said, angling his head to the front of the bar.

&nb
sp; One of the skinheads got up, banging his large backside into a young man wearing a Greek national football shirt. Words — probably incomprehensible to each of them — were exchanged, before he pushed his way out of the place. Mavros beckoned Mesner to follow and took up the rear.

  ‘What’s this about?’ the German demanded, as soon as they hit fresh air.

  ‘You know what it’s about, Oskar,’ Mavros replied, leading the incongruous pair towards the doorway where Mikis was concealed and stopping a few paces away from it. ‘You have something your grandfather wants.’

  ‘Oh, that old arschloch,’ Mesner said, his voice unnaturally high. ‘He can go fuck himself.’

  ‘Except that he’s authorized me to pay you another nine thousand euros,’ Mavros said, with a smile.

  ‘Who are you? His schoassniessen?’

  The skinhead guffawed.

  ‘Which means?’ Mavros asked politely.

  ‘How you say in this fucking language. .? Person who sneezes shit.’

  ‘No, I’m his person who sneezes euros.’

  Mesner looked around — the street was deserted.

  ‘You have this money with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ Mavros had considered leaving the funds in Nondas’s place, but had decided he could handle it, especially with Mikis in reserve. ‘You give me the coins, I’ll take you to the cash.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ the German said, then his face froze. ‘What coins?’

  Mavros laughed. ‘Too late. Besides, you were seen. You should be thankful your grandfather didn’t tell the police.’

  ‘He’d never do that,’ Oskar Mesner bragged.

  ‘Yes, he will. This is the last time you get let off. Look on the bright side — you’ve just made ten grand.’

  The German glared at him. ‘Do you know how much the. . the merchandise is worth?’

  Mavros nodded. ‘But twenty per cent is better than nothing.’

  ‘What if we make you take us to where you’ve got the money?’ Mesner said, glancing at his bulky comrade.

  ‘Go ahead and try,’ Mavros said.