The Black Life

by Paul Johnston

  Samuel picked up a file from the glass-topped table. ‘I have a collection of your press cuttings here, Mr Mavros.’

  ‘Alex, please.’

  ‘Very well, Alex. Your career has been most impressive.’

  ‘I’ve had my moments.’

  ‘Modest, too. I like that in a man. The French ambassador tells me that some of your biggest cases have not been reported in the media.’

  He knows the French ambassador, Mavros thought. How much does the French ambassador know about me?

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Good, because what I’m going to ask you to do must remain confidential.’

  Mavros sipped the coffee, which was nothing like as good as the Fat Man’s. ‘I’m always strict about client confidentially, but I can’t guarantee that the people I have to deal with will keep their mouths shut. Inducements can be applied, of course.’

  Samuel looked at Rachel, who had joined him on the sofa. ‘You mean money?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Everyone has a weak point.’

  ‘Ah!’ The Frenchman smiled. ‘I like your style. Let us begin. First, tell us what you know about me.’

  The initial contact had been by email. Mavros had checked Eliezer Samuel’s background as a matter of course. Apart from professional thoroughness, he had to be careful – the Son could be lurking.

  ‘You own and run Samuel and Samuel S.A.,’ – he got the pronunciation right – ‘one of the largest jewellers in France. Based in Paris, but with retail branches across the country. Last year the company made a net profit of over 60 million euros. You are sixty-three years old and are married to Nicole Pintor, your first wife Naomi having died in 1967. My commiserations.’

  ‘Thank you. It was … a terrible blow. She was hit by a car.’ Samuel looked at Rachel. ‘But Nicole has brought me great joy, as well as Rachel and her brother.’

  ‘David, born 1972, who is your partner in the business.’

  ‘What year was I born, Mr Mavros?’ the young woman asked.

  ‘January 14th 1977.’

  ‘Touché.’ She smiled briefly.

  ‘I’m impressed, Alex,’ Samuel said, lighting a medium-sized cigar. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘You have an apartment in the seventh arrondissement, a country house near Tours and a villa in Antibes.’

  Samuel puffed out smoke. ‘Very good. More?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded, though his expression was grim.

  ‘All right. Your parents were Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki. They, your elder brother and sister, your grandparents and the rest of your extended family were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau after being transported in 1943.’

  Eliezer Samuel had put down the cigar and was looking straight at Mavros. Rachel took his hand.

  ‘You have done your homework, Alex,’ the jeweller said.

  ‘If I may, how did you escape?’

  ‘My parents smuggled me out of Thessaloniki not long after my birth. I was fortunate enough to end up with a Jewish family in Canada.’

  Mavros looked at the daughter. In profile, her eyes on her father, she was very striking, her cheeks high, her nose straight and her unpainted lips full.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mavros said lamely. ‘That must have been very difficult for your parents.’

  ‘I imagine so, though they didn’t have long to live with it.’ Samuel picked up his cigar again. ‘I grew up in Montreal, but moved back to Europe in the late 60s. With the passage of time and the growth of the family business, I found ways of living with the facts you stated.’

  Mavros noticed the tense. ‘Found ways? And now?’

  The Frenchman looked at his daughter, whose hand was still over his. ‘And now our world has been turned upside down.’

  Mavros waited, aware that questions were unnecessary. Samuel hadn’t told him what the job was when he phoned to confirm their meeting. Now he would do so unprompted.

  ‘I need some more coffee.’

  Rachel refilled her father’s cup from the cafetière. Mavros shook his head.

  ‘This is what happened. I never returned to Thessalonique, as the French call it. That would have been too painful and I preferred to remain in a state of ignorance about the place where my family lived. But I provide funds for several Jewish organisations and have contacts there.’ Samuel emptied his cup. ‘Ten days ago I was contacted by Rabbi Savvas Rousso. One of the elderly women in a home I partly finance – her name is Ester Broudo – saw my Uncle Aron in the street.’

  ‘Your Uncle Aron? I thought all your Thessaloniki relatives perished in Poland.’

  ‘We did too.’

  Mavros looked from Eliezer Samuel to Rachel and back again. ‘So you want me to look for a dead man?’

  Samuel nodded. ‘Or that even rarer thing – a man who has come back from the dead.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Niki said, as she and Mavros left for the fertility clinic. ‘How can you find a dead man?’

  ‘Presumably he wasn’t really dead. Or the old woman who saw him is dotty.’

  ‘Those poor parents, giving their baby away. Or rather, those unbelievably harsh parents.’

  Mavros tightened his grip on her hand as they passed the police guard outside the apartment block. Predictably, she had zeroed in on that part of the story. He shouldn’t really have shared it with her, but client confidentiality didn’t include Niki and the Fat Man. Someone had to sound the alarm if he disappeared on a job.

  ‘It was good that they did, considering what happened to the family.’

  ‘Yes, but how could a mother separate herself from her child – how old was he?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘My God,’ she said, in anguish. ‘I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like.’

  Shivering in the unexpected cold, Mavros stopped a taxi on the Lykavittos ring road and directed the driver to the clinic behind the Hilton. They could have walked, but the lurking threat of the Son meant they rationed that activity. They still didn’t use a car, though. Mavros had never had one because he’d always lived in the centre of the city. Niki’s Citroën was under a tarpaulin in the parking area on the ground floor of their apartment building. He didn’t want the Son tailing her when she was on her own.

  He squeezed her arm. ‘They correctly guessed what was going to happen to the Jews of Thessaloniki. Besides they had two other children.’

  Niki turned on him. ‘That’s supposed to excuse them, is it? They already had kids, so they could dispense with the third one?’

  Mavros knew she was at high tension over the doctor’s appointment. ‘Look, Eliezer Samuel survived. He’s got two kids of his own. That was what his parents would have wanted.’

  Niki flopped against him. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She took his hand. ‘Alex, if I get pregnant and it’s a choice between me and the baby, you will take our child, won’t you?’

  ‘There’s a couple of pretty major “ifs” there.’

  ‘Answer,’ she said, her fingers digging into his skin.

  ‘It’s totally hypothetical,’ he objected. ‘Besides, there would be medical advice to follow.’

  ‘Coward,’ she muttered, turning away.

  Mavros kept hold of her hand but it was limp now, the attack of nerves having passed. That was just as well. He still hadn’t worked out how he was going to tell her about the arrangements he’d agreed with the Frenchman.

  TWO

  My life wasn’t always black. I still remember the blinding blue skies over the Thessaloniki I grew up in; the glinting waves in the bay and the green fields at the edge of the built-up areas. But things were already changing for the Jewish community. When the city was liberated from the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks in 1912, Sephardic Jews descended from those expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries made up the largest population group. That changed in 1922, when the exchange of populations meant that the Muslims left and Greeks from Asia Minor
flooded into Macedonia and its capital. They resented the wealth of the Jews, though many of our people were poor dock workers and carters.

  ‘My son, why do you care for those unfortunates?’ my father would ask. ‘I donate money to their representatives. You have no need to feel guilty.’

  So he thought. The family had been jewellers for centuries and he had four shops in the wealthier parts of the city. My elder brother Isaak had started working at weekends when he was still at school, but I refused. I was always contrary. I got that from my mother. Despite the restrictions of bourgeois Sephardic culture, she ran our home like an empress – a short one, like the English Victoria, but much louder, I would guess.

  ‘I don’t care if you don’t want to work in the shops,’ she would say, ‘but at least get out of that room. It isn’t as if you’re studying for school.’

  That was true. My parents didn’t approve of what I was taking in. They were comfortably off, but they never read anything but the Torah and the local newspapers. From an early age Shabbat was torture for me, though the Greeks forced all shops to open on Saturdays, so it was possible to escape. I don’t know why I never believed. Like many young Jews at the time I saw myself as Greek first and Jewish second, but that didn’t restrict my reading.

  ‘Who is this Marx, this Engels?’ my mother screamed, when she and my father decided to investigate my books. One of the maids must have put them up to it. We had a house on the shore beyond the White Tower and it was too large for my mother to look after without help. ‘Lenin? He was a monster!’

  ‘Marx was a Jew,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re so clever you’ll lose your nose,’ she said, seizing the said organ with short but strong fingers.

  ‘Communism,’ my father said, as if his burgeoning belly had been punctured by a pin. ‘Never had any time for …’

  ‘I’m educating myself,’ I said piously.

  ‘You’re fourteen years old,’ Father said. ‘You go to school for education.’

  ‘As if they teach anything useful there.’

  Mother twisted my nose. ‘They teach scripture and obedience.’

  ‘And arithmetic,’ Father added. ‘Essential for business.’

  ‘I don’t care about business,’ I shouted back. ‘I don’t want to sell overpriced trinkets to the wives of men who exploit the workers.’

  That stymied even my mother, who thankfully let go of my nose.

  ‘Overpriced … trinkets,’ repeated Father, as if I’d slapped him in the face with a particularly rank herring.

  At this point my brother Isaak stepped in. He was five years older than I was and had an enviable serenity about him.

  ‘Leave the boy,’ he said, with a soft smile. ‘It is good that he reads without supervision. Soon he will understand there is no future in communism.’

  I would understand no such thing – not for several years – though I did know that being a communist was dangerous. There had been a dictatorship in Greece since 1935 and, although there were no particular policies against the Jews, anti-Semitism had been building up in Thessaloniki. Jewish Communists had been arrested and sent to prison or remote islands.

  Dinner that evening was an unusually silent affair. My sister Miriam, twenty-one and newly married, was across the table with her skinny husband Albertos. They made a strange couple as Miriam was a similar shape to our mother, though less bulky.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, looking around the table.

  ‘Your fool of a brother thinks Lenin is a god,’ Mother said.

  Miriam stared at Isaak, then realised I was the one in question. She laughed. ‘Come, everyone knows he killed the Tsar and his family.’

  ‘Good for him,’ I said.

  ‘His policies also led to the deaths of millions of the Russian poor,’ Albertos said. He had been to university in Paris and was a lawyer.

  ‘They’re not called Russians any more,’ I pointed out. ‘Besides, Comrade Stalin isn’t a dictator, unlike Hitler and Mussolini. Or Metaxas.’

  People glanced around anxiously, as if agents of our own fascist leader were under the table or behind the curtains.

  ‘That’s enough of such talk,’ Father said. ‘I have made a decision. The boy may keep his books, but he must lock them in the cupboard. We can’t have the servants looking at them again.’ He turned to me. ‘My boy, you know that Communists are atheists.’

  I nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘But you had your bar-mitzvah last year,’ said Mother indignantly.

  I shrugged. ‘Did you give me any choice?’ I moved my gaze round the table. ‘Any of you?’

  Isaak laughed. ‘Our little revolutionary. Every family needs one.’

  He was right about that.

  THREE

  The fertility clinic appointment was a disaster. Mavros had provided a sperm sample earlier – having declined Niki’s offer of assistance – and the results were back: there was no shortage of little swimmers. That put the onus on Niki. The doctor had found nothing obviously amiss, but she had to do more tests. Apart from that, it was a question of ensuring they made love on fertile days and various strange postures that she should adopt immediately afterwards. They went home feeling less like messing around than a pair of eunuchs.

  ‘Next Thursday’s the beginning of my fertile time,’ Niki said, coming out of the shower with a towel covering not much of her.

  ‘Ah,’ Mavros said.

  Niki was immediately on the alert. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m going to Thessaloniki on Monday,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  He repeated the words more clearly.

  ‘That’s just great, Alex,’ she said, eyes blazing. ‘How long for?’

  ‘Em, I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ She sat down beside him on the bed. ‘Look, do you really want us to have a baby?’

  Mavros sighed. ‘Yes, I do. I’ve said so often enough.’

  She looked at him sceptically. ‘You can never say it enough.’

  ‘I just did – again.’

  Niki put the towel over her head. Mavros wasn’t sure if the display of her very attractive body was deliberate. Given that she wasn’t fertile, he suspected not – then berated himself for the disloyal thought.

  ‘So you’re going to look for a long-dead Jew?’ she said from behind the curtain of cotton.

  ‘The money’s good and we need it, especially with these medical bills.’

  There was a muffled ‘hmph’.

  ‘Besides, I might track him down quickly – or rule out the sighting as a mistake – and be back in time.’

  Niki’s face reappeared. ‘Well, that would be uncommonly decent of your majesty.’ She smiled emolliently. ‘Sorry, I’m being a bitch.’

  Mavros pulled her towards him. ‘No, you aren’t. I understand.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked, then stopped resisting.

  She may not have been fertile, but they had an unexpectedly good time.

  The next morning Niki let Mavros sleep. He woke up around ten. There was a text message on his phone: ‘Confirm funds sent 2 yr a/c. Rachel S.’

  That cheered him up. Still, the truth was he didn’t particularly fancy going to Thessaloniki on a wild ghost chase. He liked the city well enough, though it held some painful memories, but it was a long way just to talk to an elderly woman. That reminded him. He wanted to pick his mother’s brains.

  As he took the long way round Lykavittos, slipping down narrow streets and looking out for a tail, Mavros considered the condition of the job that was likely to cause him the most grief. Eliezer Samuel was already back in Paris, but his daughter had remained in Athens. She was following up leads to her great-uncle via the Jewish Museum. The plan was that she and Mavros fly to Thessaloniki together. He was on the horns of a particularly buttock-piercing dilemma. Should he tell Niki about that? If so, would it be better if he described Rachel as a dowdy woman in her forties? One thing was certain: Niki
had a track record of extreme jealousy. As he approached his mother’s apartment block, he put the decision off. Procrastination was the mother of lies.

  Mavros nodded to the private guard that his mother had agreed to pay for after the Son’s threat to the family over a year ago, then pressed the buttons on the entry pad. They were changed every week, much to the other residents’ irritation, even though the increased security was appreciated by some of them. Kolonaki was central Athens’ wealthiest area and burglaries were common. He ran up to the sixth floor, as usual the last flight of stairs making his lungs burn.

  The outer door to his mother’s apartment had been replaced with a heavy steel panel. He had keys but he preferred to keep her on her toes, so he pressed the buzzer and mugged to the camera on the ceiling.

  The door opened.

  ‘Alex. How nice of you not to call in advance.’ Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou’s voice was only slightly sharp. She knew her son was testing her. ‘Hold on while I get this stupid chain off.’

  Mavros embraced his mother when the door was closed again, feeling how frail she was. She’d had a stroke a few years before and, although she was back living on her own and running her small publishing company, she had aged rapidly. Then again, they had celebrated her eightieth birthday earlier in the year so she was doing well enough.

  ‘Don’t listen to me. It’s always a joy to see you, dear.’ Dorothy kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Come and have some tea.’

  Mavros followed her into the kitchen and opened the box of shortbread. His Scottish genes had donated him a sweet tooth or thirty (he had two caps). His mother smacked him lightly on the hand.

  ‘You’ll end up like your overweight friend.’ Dorothy would never use as vulgar a nickname as the Fat Man.

  Mavros carried a tray into the spacious living area. The French windows gave a view to the Acropolis and the sea beyond the southern suburbs. The water was grey-blue in the autumn wind and the jagged lines of the mountains in the distance were blurred.

  ‘So, how are you and Niki?’ Dorothy knew about the fertility clinic appointment.