by Philip Kerr
‘In fucking witchcraft, you mean? The next thing you’ll be telling me is that he believes in fairies and fucking voodoo dolls. Bekim Develi had a heart attack, Kojo. Like Fabrice Muamba. Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. That’s the medical description of something that the ancient Greeks used to say: “Those whom the gods love die young.” It’s sad, but that’s just how it is.’
‘The question is, what are we going to do about it? The boy won’t eat. He can’t sleep. He really thinks Bekim’s death is down to him.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me himself? This morning, at the training session?’
‘He wanted to, but he lost his nerve.’
‘If he ever had any. I might have respected him even a little if he’d had the guts to tell me himself.’
‘In front of all the others? It’s bad enough he thinks he killed Bekim without some of the others thinking it, too. He’s not the only superstitious idiot in your team.’
‘You’ve got that right, anyway.’
‘You’re going to talk him out of this mindset he’s got himself into, aren’t you? Before the return match against Olympiacos. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing you can leave to a man like Simon Page. I doubt that he can even spell psychology.’
‘Oh, he can spell it. But his idea of a mental function is getting pissed at the Christmas party.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll speak to him, okay?’
‘Thanks, Scott. He respects you. He needs guidance, that’s all.’
‘I’ll speak to him.’
Just at this moment, Mandingo – Kojo’s client – pulled off a spectacular top-drawer save. Even I was impressed.
Kojo grinned. ‘See what I mean? Mandingo’s just twenty-two and already he’s been picked for his country.’
‘If he really is twenty-two, that’s remarkable on its own.’
‘I’m telling you, Scott, that boy is the next David James.’
I didn’t know if that was good or bad but I shrugged and said I’d think about it; and fortunately for me, Phil put his head around the door soon afterwards and asked me to dinner on the boat. Frankly, I was relieved to find an excuse to leave the room.
‘Eight thirty,’ said Phil. ‘There’ll be a tender at Marina Zea at eight to pick people up.’
‘People?’
‘I think there are some girls who are coming aboard.’
I might have said I was busy, except I wanted to ask him and Vik if we could buy Hörst Daxenberger as a replacement for Bekim Develi.
‘I’ll be there,’ I said.
My phone rang again and this time it was a Greek number I didn’t recognise.
‘Mr Manson?’
‘Yes?’
‘My name is Dr Eva Pyromaglou.’
33
Anna Loverdos crossed her bare tanned legs and handed me her business card. Like her it was Greek on one side and English on the other. But the legs were shapely and certainly more interesting than what was printed on the card. When they’re crossed a good pair of legs can distract a man from almost everything.
‘My mum is from Liverpool,’ she explained. ‘She met my dad on holiday in Corfu. It’s very Shirley Valentine. I was born here and then went to a girls’ boarding school in England.’
Anna was in her thirties; attractive and well-spoken, she wore a wrap-effect pink satin skirt, a white silk blouse, and leather wedge sandals. The glass of champagne in her hand was the same colour as her hair.
‘Then I came back here. That was before the economy went pear-shaped, of course. I had a business entertainment company. Events management for multinationals, that kind of thing. Then I worked in PR for the Investment Bank of Greece. And now I’m running the International Relations Committee of the Hellenic Football Federation. Which is a lot more fun.’
‘I can imagine. So, what team do you support, Anna?’
‘I don’t. In my job it’s best to avoid any possibility of partisanship. Greeks take the matter of what team you support very seriously.’
‘So I’ve noticed. It’s like entering a war zone.’
‘Because my mum is from Liverpool I always say I’m an Everton fan. Which is always the right team to support in Greece because it’s not Greek and they’re never in the Champions League. Better safe than sorry in this country. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about that.’ She shook her head. ‘Some of what’s been said in the local press about you and your team has been awful, Mr Manson. Especially in view of what happened to Bekim Develi. This used to be a kinder country. But lately the rhetoric in football has become rather more poisonous in a way I’ve not seen before. These days Greeks tend to think all sport is venal and corrupt, like everything else.’ She smiled. ‘But you don’t want to hear about that. My job is to make sure the remainder of your stay in Greece is as pleasant as possible. Yours can’t be an easy job, right now. Let’s face it, even at the best of times it’s not easy keeping discipline among so many young and eligible men.’
I grinned. ‘I’ve already had to fetch them out of a strip club on Syngrou Avenue called Alcatraz. Footballers and strippers. Footballers and escort girls. They’re all tabloid stories just waiting to happen. You don’t know the half of it.’
She laughed and drained her glass.
‘Then again,’ I added, ‘perhaps you do.’
‘No, but I can guess,’ she said.
‘I’d say you can probably do a lot more than guess, Anna.’
‘All right, perhaps you’re right,’ she said, sheepishly. ‘As a matter of fact I did go to Alcatraz once.’
‘I thought so. Did you know Bekim Develi very well?’
‘Reasonably well, poor man.’
‘And was it you who introduced him to Valentina?’
‘Who?’
‘Oddly enough, that’s what Hristos Trikoupis said, when I asked him. No, don’t say anything yet. You know the old lawyer’s principle that you should never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer? That’s the kind of question I just asked you, Anna. Only I’m not a lawyer. And you’re not on trial. Hold up, no one is accusing you of anything. But there’s no point in denying you know her.’
‘What’s all this about?’ she asked.
‘Just answer the question, please, Anna.’
She slouched back in the armchair as if someone had loosened her brassiere; her eyes looked down uncertainly at the table. I realised she was looking at her own business card.
‘All right. But to be quite accurate it was Bekim Develi who introduced Valentina to me.’
I breathed a sigh of relief which wasn’t entirely for dramatic effect. At last I felt like I was getting somewhere.
‘But what of it? I get introduced to lots of people.’ She picked up the business card and handed it to me a second time. ‘That’s what it says on the card, okay? “International Relations.” Generally speaking that requires a little more than an exchange of emails.’
‘Have another drink. You look as though you need it.’
I waved the waiter over and ordered two glasses of champagne.
‘Look, all I want is to get my team back to London. I don’t want to hurt anyone or cause them to lose their job. Least of all you. I can see you’re a nice girl, but I need to know what you know. So. Tell me about it. Tell me everything you know and then you’ll never hear about this again.’
‘I want to know why you’re asking.’
‘All right. If it makes you feel any better. I figure Valentina introduced Bekim to the escort girl now lying in the chiller cabinet at the Laiko General Hospital. She and Bekim had a little party in his room at the Astir Palace Hotel on the night before he died. As yet that girl remains unidentified. And I’m assuming Valentina can name her.’ I paused. ‘Look, you can talk to me or you can talk to the police. It’s your choice. Just remember, I don’t bite like they do.’
She sighed, wearily.
‘What you’ve got to understand,’ she said, ‘is that it’s not unusual for FIFA and UEFA officials to solicit the company o
f girls in Athens. I just do what I’m told, right? As it was explained to me – and I won’t say by who – the important thing is to look after our VIP guests and to keep them out of trouble. Looking after our VIP guests means shepherding them away from the hookers on Omonia Square. Frankly, it’s dangerous down there. There are lots of drug addicts and homeless people. The police have been cracking down. In Sofokleous Street there are over three hundred brothels and many of the girls have HIV. A decision was taken to steer our more important sporting guests away from these places and to introduce them to high-quality girls. I decided to recruit one girl to handle everything for me: Valentina. She was perfect for the role. Whenever there’s a FIFA official or a top footballer in town, I have her contact him. If it’s a FIFA official we pay her. If it’s a footballer, then we let her negotiate her own fee. Sometimes she looks after the VIP herself but just as often she recruits someone else to take care of them. I suppose it was Valentina who provided Bekim with a girl. I know she liked him, and normally she looked after him herself, but on this occasion she must have been busy so she found someone else for him. I don’t know who that was. But Valentina’s real name is Svetlana Yaroshinskaya and originally she is from Odessa, in the Ukraine. I think she was originally an art student. She’s got a flat somewhere in Athens; I don’t know where. I used to Skype her when I wanted to speak to her. Her Skype address is SvetYaro99. But she hasn’t been online of late. And she hasn’t returned any of my calls. Which is unusual.’
The waiter came back with the champagne. I wrote down the Skype address and had Anna check it.
‘Was she – was Svetlana the only girl you had any dealings with?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
I took out my iPhone, tapped the Photos app, and called up the pictures of the dead girl’s tattoo I’d taken at Laiko General Hospital.
‘What about this tattoo? It’s not quite Lisbeth Salander’s dragon, I know, but it’s still quite distinctive, I think. No?’
‘No. Look,’ she said nervously, ‘you’re not going to mention my name, are you? No one cares about the police very much. But I’d rather my name didn’t appear in the newspapers. Especially the ones back home. My mum lives back in Liverpool these days.’
‘FIFA officials accepting free sex from high-class call girls?’ I shook my head. ‘Where’s the story there? I should think most people think that happens all the time.’ I swiped the screen to the next photograph, a picture of the dead girl’s face. ‘Have you seen her? It’s not a good likeness, but under the circumstances...’
‘No, I’ve never seen her,’ said Anna.
‘Take another look.’
‘I don’t know her. What’s up with her anyway? She looks like she’s asleep.’
‘Didn’t I say? She’s dead. That’s what’s up with her. This is the girl who was found drowned in Marina Zea. The one who screwed Bekim Develi.’
Anna’s jaw dropped and her eyes filled with tears.
I drank some of the champagne, stood up and tossed a fifty onto the table in front of her.
‘That’s for the drinks.’ I peeled off another twenty. ‘And there’s a little something for your time, Anna.’
‘You fucking bastard.’
I grinned. ‘We’ll make a real football fan out of you yet, love.’
34
That night I didn’t go to dinner on The Lady Ruslana. There wasn’t time. Besides, I wasn’t hungry and I knew I wouldn’t be good company, not in view of what I had planned for later on that Friday evening. The discussion with Vik and Phil about buying Hörst Daxenberger to replace Bekim Develi was going to have to wait. This was one of those rare occasions when the dead take precedence over the living.
As soon as I left Anna Loverdos I Skyped the number she’d given me, without an answer; then I called our lawyer Dr Christodoulou on her mobile and found her still in the office at nine o’clock.
‘Working late?’
‘Unsurprisingly, the reward notices we posted around Piraeus have generated a very large response,’ she said. ‘It’s going to take us all night to separate any genuine leads from the time-wasters.’
I told myself she was probably used to that; in Greece, wasting time seems to be a national pastime. And I didn’t feel sorry for her; lawyers love work and not because they love work per se but because the more they do the more fees their clients pay.
‘I hate to add to your workload,’ I lied, ‘but I’d like you to check out a name and see what it throws up: real name is Svetlana Yaroshinskaya, goes by the working name of Valentina. She’s a high-class escort. Possibly a friend of the murdered girl. Born in Odessa. I’ve got a Skype number, a mobile number and an email address. See what you can find out about her. Criminal record. Tax number. Bra size. Everything.’
‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?’
‘Not yet but watch this space.’
I didn’t tell Dr Christodoulou where I was about to go. A descent into the underworld is always best kept secret. I was beginning to realise that you have to be a bit of a pilgrim to solve a crime; you must first say to yourself what you would know and then do what you have to do, though all may be against it. Not to mention anyone to whom you’ve behaved like a fucking bastard. I shouldn’t have shown the pictures of the dead girl to Anna Loverdos; that had been rough of me. Yet a little part of me said it was right that she should share in some of the guilt I was feeling. It was men like me who’d fucked and murdered the girl in the mortuary at Laiko General Hospital; but it was a woman like Anna who’d helped to bring that situation about.
I took a shower to freshen up and clear my head, and put on an old T-shirt. I snatched up a handful of cash and a couple of whisky miniatures, and went downstairs to the hotel basement. I felt bad about leaving Charlie in the car out front but I needed a decoy and I didn’t think my police escort would be so easily lost again. It’s surprising how quickly cops learn things.
Having found my way through a few dingy, humid corridors and featureless passageways, I emerged through an anonymous door at the back of the Grande Bretagne onto Voukourestiou where the evening heat hit me like a big warm sponge. From there I walked a short way west onto Stadiou, and caught a taxi that took me around the square, then north, past the beleaguered Greek parliament building where a mixture of tourists and demonstrators were watching the Evzones – a ceremonial unit of Greek light infantry – changing guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
Tombs and their morbid contents were very much on my mind but this didn’t stop a smile spreading on my face as I watched some of the floodlit ceremony from the back seat of my taxi. The changing of the guard in any country is always a ridiculous piece of nonsense; in Greece, it reaches a new level of absurdity: with their pom-pom shoes, white party dresses, big moustaches and tasselled red hats, the Evzones themselves resemble the clowns from some obscure Balkan circus, but all this is as nothing compared to the farcical drill which makes the poor soldiers that carry out this clockwork pantomime look as though they work at the Ministry for Silly Walks.
I arrived in St Thomas’s Square, close by Laiko General Hospital, not long before eleven o’clock. Dr Pyromaglou had said that she would come and take a look at the body with me as close to midnight as possible when there were fewer people around in the hospital, to try to avoid being accused of breaking the strike.
‘I won’t perform an actual autopsy,’ she had explained on the telephone, earlier that day. ‘But from what I understand I might not need to. Wear an old shirt and bring a clean one to wear home because we can’t be seen in scrubs or white coats. That will give the game away.’
Spiros, the mortuary orderly I’d met earlier, had called Eva Pyromaglou at home and given her my phone number. It seemed that he was going be there, too, if only to keep a lookout.
There was an outdoor restaurant under the orange trees next to the Greek church with the many roofs, and it was there I’d arranged to meet her. She
was sitting alone, a copy of Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography on the table to identify her. It was Mr Pyromaglou’s copy apparently. I certainly couldn’t have imagined his wife enjoying it. Mind you, I can’t imagine anyone actually enjoying it. That book tried to settle more family business than the last fifteen minutes of The Godfather and you don’t have to be Roy Keane or Steven Gerrard to feel that way about it. Reading the book, I learned that Fergie has always collected Kennedy assassination documents and artefacts and it struck me as a little odd that he even had a copy of Kennedy’s autopsy. Then again I was hardly one to talk; meeting Dr Pyromaglou like this was more than a bit weird – like something out of an old Frankenstein movie – in which she and I were planning to interfere with a young woman’s corpse at the stroke of midnight.
The doctor was in her forties with very pale skin, an almond-shaped face, long auburn hair and worry-lines on her forehead. She wore a hospital pass on a bead-chain around her neck, heavy-framed glasses, a black polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sensible shoes, and looked as if she’d been conceived and born in a library. We shook hands.
There was still half an hour before the new shift came on duty so we ordered some coffee.
‘I know you’ve seen a dead body before,’ she said. ‘Spiros told me that you were okay with that. But looking at a body is different from what I intend doing. I shall probably need your assistance to take some swabs and perhaps to cut her a bit. So if you’re sensitive to the sight of blood then you’d better say so now. I don’t want you fainting while we’re in there.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said bravely. ‘When you’ve played football alongside Martin Keown you get used to the sight of blood.’
It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. I brandished the two whisky miniatures I’d brought from the hotel and then drank one immediately. ‘Anyway, I brought some courage from home.’
‘We’ll be working in quite a tight space,’ she said. ‘Did you bring a clean shirt, just in case of accident?’
I indicated a plastic bag by my leg.
‘Thank you for helping me, doctor,’ I said. ‘And her. The girl in the drawer, I mean. The police seem to be taking their time about everything.’
