by Blake Banner
She slid her large glasses down to the tip of her nose and regarded me with very dark blue eyes.
“A few might be a bit of an exaggeration. A couple would be more precise. There’s this one,” she pointed behind her to a small, sandy cove, “and then there’s Pori Beach. The rest is all cliffs and rocky shoreline.”
“I’ll only be here a few days. I guess I’ll take a couple of picnics to Pori Beach.”
“I guess you will.”
“How about places to eat?”
She put her glasses back where I couldn’t see her eyes.
“I have the best restaurant on the island. Then there’s Mixalios up the road, if you’re a carnivore.”
“I’m a carnivore. I think it’s cruel to eat anything that was not recently gamboling in a field.”
“Why am I not astonished?”
“Carrots lead such cruel lives, buried in the soil from birth, and as soon as they break free, they get eaten. It seems inhuman to me.”
She suppressed a smile. “Then there’s Tis Marias, which is frightfully trad’ and friendly, and then there’s Guacamole, Burgers and Cocktails, which is exactly as the name suggests. Finally, over on Pori Beach, there is Finikias Hotel which is fun in a rustic sort of way.”
I glanced at my watch. It was one forty-five. “So is it too late to have lunch at the best restaurant on the island?”
“Far from it.”
She brought the Jeep up to the dock and I loaded my bags in the back. She gave me the keys and we drove to Charlotte’s House. The hotel turned out to be no more than four hundred yards away, sitting on the beach she had pointed out to me earlier. It was more like a large, elegant house than a hotel. Five broad steps led up from the sandy beach to an ample terrace where tables and chairs were set out under a creeping Russian vine. Tall, Mediterranean pines flanked the building, sighed in the breeze and scented the air, as well as providing shade.
A couple of large arches gave access to a lobby that was more like a large, elegant drawing room. The reception desk was small, and tucked away on the left. There was a fountain in the center of the floor, and on the right there was a cold fireplace. The furniture was eclectic, an old chesterfield sofa here, an overstuffed calico armchair there, a heavy Moroccan lamp table beside an Emmanuel cane chair, and ferns, lots of ferns in giant terracotta urns. I liked it.
Two more arches at the back gave onto a patio with a pool, and an elegant staircase led to the rooms upstairs.
Charlotte smacked the bell on the desk and while she signed me in to a large red book, a small man of about a hundred and ten took my bags and carried them up the stairs.
“Wifi is a problem,” she said, as though I had asked why she used a book instead of a computer. “So is broadband, cable and just about everything else.” She raised her eyes and smiled as she slid the book across the counter at me and handed me a pen. “This isn’t the virtual world most humans inhabit these days. This is the real one they left behind.”
I took the pen and signed. “That’s good to hear. I always figured if it was virtual, you were only getting twenty percent of the deal.”
“Sight?” I nodded. She said, “So you get cheated out of sound, smell, taste…”
“And touch.”
“Kostas has taken your bags to your room. Shall I expect you for a cocktail before lunch in, say, twenty minutes?”
“That sounds about right, Charlotte.”
Kostas had put my bags on the big, king-sized bed and thrown open the dark blue French doors onto a small terrace where there was a round table with a couple of chairs. The Mediterranean looked close enough to reach out and touch. A pale haze moved over it in the heavy heat, and mountainous islands, peaks left over from the Flood, rose monolithic out of that mist, like half-forgotten truths about who we were, and where we’d come from.
Kostas pointed at a freestanding wardrobe and a slatted door onto an en suite bathroom, muttered something surly in Greek and left before I could tip him. I had a quick shower, changed my clothes into the kind of cream linen the brigadier would have approved of, and went down for a cocktail and a late lunch.
I found Charlotte in the shade of some palms beside the pool, sitting at a white, wrought-iron table. As I sat, a younger version of Kostas emerged from the shadows in a white jacket, carrying a tray and two menus.
“He knows what I want, what will you have?”
“Will he know how to make a Vesper martini?”
“I shouldn’t think so for one minute. Have a dry martini with gin and an olive and be grateful we have gin and martini at all.”
“I’m grateful.”
She said something to him in Greek and he went away.
She handed me a menu. “I suppose you’ll want lamb.”
“Coming to Greece and not having lamb is like going to the moon and not having cheese.”
She opened her menu and giggled. “That’s funny. You’ll have lamb chops, we do them extremely well, and we’ll share a salad and kalamari to start with. Greek wine is very risky, leave that to me.”
I handed her back the menu. “So who do those yachts belong to in the harbor?”
“Oh, regulars who come every summer. This used to be a popular place. June to October it was generally packed, with the harbor absolutely full of boats, and many more anchored at sea or at Pori Beach. Then the crisis struck, credit was cut off left right and center, banks foreclosed on mortgages, cash dried up and the only people who had money in Europe were the Scandinavians and the Brits, and what little they had they spent in Spain. As I am sure you know, Greece practically went bankrupt, and just as we were emerging and tourism was picking up again, bang!”
“Covid nineteen.”
“Not back to square one, we’d like to be in spitting distance of square one; no, we’ve gone back almost to a post-war economy, controlled by Brussels. And things are just getting started. It’s going to get a lot worse.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
She gave a shrug, like the answer was obvious. “Once the emergency measures stop propping up the European economies, taxes start rising and banks start foreclosing, Europe will implode. You’ll have twenty-seven countries all sucking at the teats of Germany and France, who are in no condition to suckle anybody. This island will shut down. Much of Greece will.”
“That’s a shame. Will you have to close?”
“Almost certainly, unless I set up some kind of luxury holiday resort for billionaires. The spot’s ideal for it, you know.”
Kostas Minor reemerged from the building with a tray of bottles and glasses. He served Charlotte with a Beefeater and tonic. Instead of lemon she had two small slices of lime. For me he had a short, fat whisky glass with three big rocks of ice. Over that he poured a generous measure of Beefeater and topped it up with martini into which he dropped an olive.
Charlotte rattled at him again in Greek and I caught the words, kalamari, arnaki, katsikisio and saláta. Kostas grunted and ambled away with a face that suggested our lunch somehow proved the basic unfairness of the universe. I raised an eyebrow at her.
“OK, everybody knows what kalamari is, arnaki is lamb and saláta is obviously salad. So what’s…,” I hesitated, smiling, “catch a kiss-ee-oh?”
“Katsikisio is goats cheese, and you know, Robert, it is really quite pointless flirting with me.”
Really? Why’s that?”
She didn’t answer for a while, staring out at the hazy blue horizon. I was about to change the subject when she said, “I’m just not available.”
“Oh.” I watched her sip her drink, and asked, “Do you get many billionaires here? I guess they pass here on their way to Puerto Banus from Saudi, Israel, Russia…” I paused, then added, “But mainly Russia. I guess Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli, they’d all pass to the south of Crete. You’d have to pull in the Russians first.”
“I was being flippant.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s not such a bad idea. If you have a friendly Russ
ian billionaire you can sell him the idea as a money-laundering scheme. They’d probably finance it themselves. You could have five-star hotels, a casino, everything a Mafioso billionaire needs to blot out the horror of who he is.”
She looked at me and laughed. “My dear Robert! What an absolutely horrendous idea. And such bitterness! What has the Russian Mafia ever done to you?”
“Oh, long story and not very entertaining.”
She sipped and set down her drink. “As a matter of fact we do have a Russian billionaire who passes this way from time to time in one of those superyachts. He doesn’t stop at the port, he usually anchors at Pori Beach. I have no idea if he is a Mafioso, or I suppose in his case it would be a mafioski.”
“Does he come ashore and mix?”
“Rarely. Mainly he keeps to himself and stays aboard the yacht.”
“He ever come and eat here?”
“Once or twice.” She looked at me and raised her sunglasses onto her head. “We are a bit of a nosey parker, aren’t we?”
I laughed. “I’m sorry if I am intruding on a sensitive subject.”
She didn’t answer. After a while Kostas Minor brought out a white linen tablecloth, napkins, heavy cutlery, white wine in a bucket of ice and two plates and glasses. After that he brought a large goats cheese salad and a dish of kalamari.
Charlotte ate the battered rings of squid with her fingers. When she had eaten four or five, and drained her first glass of wine, she said, “I don’t normally like Russians. They are far too intense. But Gabriel was somehow different. He broke all the rules, was utterly uncompromising, and once I had been loved by him, nothing else could come close.”
Five
I sipped, wondering if this was going to complicate my job. “You still see him?”
“Every now and then he drops in if he’s passing. But of course I am nowhere near as fascinating for him as he is for me. I run a small hotel on a small, deserted island in a country that is hanging on tooth and nail to the European Union to avoid slipping into the Third World. He is an emperor. He owns palaces, on the land and also on the sea. He owns industries. He has companies preparing to mine on the moon and Mars. My goodness! He owns people!”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “He owns people?”
“Thousands of employees who work for him, all his devoted followers, he is a visionary. And then there are people like me. He owns me, body and soul.”
I chewed on a ring of squid, wondering if she knew what she had said, or if it was just part of her gushing, slightly infantile infatuation.
“You were speaking metaphorically?”
She tried to force a laugh and it came out as a sigh. “Of course.”
I shrugged. “There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Slavery is more prevalent now than it has been since the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Quite a lot of multinationals use slaves in countries where the regimes are willing to turn a blind eye.”
Kostas Minor came and took away our plates, then brought a large dish of lamb chops and a stone jug of red wine. He poured me a small amount to try. I was surprised and showed it on my face.
“It’s good.”
“It’s mine. I have a small vineyard on the far side of the island. I age it in oak barrels instead of pine. This one is three years old.”
“That’s quite an investment for a slow return.”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if I was drinking Gabriel Yushbaev 2018. Two got you twenty I was. I wondered also if she knew he was about to turn up on her island.
“I’d be curious to meet this charismatic guy who makes it pointless to flirt with you.”
She laughed. “Well, maybe you’ll get the chance if you hang around a few days. He messaged me a couple of days ago to say he’d be passing by on his way to his palace in Russia.”
“No kidding? You think he’ll descend among the humans for a bite to eat?”
“He might. You never know.”
“Tell him you have an American friend who is prepared to invest in a money-laundering scheme for him.”
“I think I’ll pass on that one. Now, do try the lamb, or Aggy will be very upset.”
The lamb was as good as she had promised, and by the time we had finished the platter and the jug of wine, the afternoon was drawing on and the shadows of the palms were lying long across the turquoise pool.
I made my way up to my room, collapsed on the bed with the window open to the dying afternoon, and slipped into a deep, dark sleep. I dreamed, but didn’t know I was dreaming. I had that conviction of reality. I was talking to Sheila Newton[5] in the pine forest above Marbella. She looked gray and dead, with dark hollows under her eyes. We were standing over Segundo Lopez’s body and she was saying, “If you don’t kill one you have to kill the other.”
Then I was awake. A full moon was suspended over the ocean outside my window. Its translucent light occupied most of the dark sea, and tinged the deep blue of the sky with green. There was an eerie stillness. I sat up and went to the window. The pines and the palm trees were motionless: tall narrow shadows touched by the moonlight. The only movement now was the winking of the small waves on the shore. The touch of a cool breeze carried the sigh of those waves to me across the sand.
Then there was a light, just a glimmer at first, out beyond the port, but as it inched into view it became clearer, winking in the dark. Then there were two, and three, a ship of some sort. I checked my watch. It was thirteen minutes past five. At first I could not make out the details of the boat, they were obscured by the glimmer of the lights, but as it moved into the moonlight scattered across the ocean its silhouette became visible. It was either a luxury cruise ship, or a superyacht, and there was no doubt in my mind which.
I leaned my elbows on the windowsill and watched it pass slowly west, toward Pori Beach, knowing that Gabriel Yushbaev was onboard, and the Colonel Jane Harris was with him. I wondered if they were sharing the same bed in his stateroom, and I felt the hot coals of anger burn in my belly.
I didn’t sleep after that. An hour later I went for a run and worked out on the beach while watching the moon fade into a blue-gray morning sky. I finished up with a swim and strolled back to the hotel at eight o’clock. Charlotte was not there, so I went to my room, showered and changed my clothes, and grabbed the key to the Jeep. I was thinking of breakfast at Finikias Hotel, at Pori Beach.
I timed the drive, taking it easy, and found that at a steady twenty miles an hour, it would take me ten minutes to get from the hotel to the beach. A steady twenty miles per hour was not as simple as it might sound. The road was not asphalt. It was dry, beaten earth eroded by rain, intense heat in the summer and salt winds that blew in off the sea across an almost flat island. There were rocks, potholes, ruts and gauges, not to mention dust, gravel and sand. Twenty miles per hour on that road would be a hurry-up.
The road cut across the eastern half of the island, winding through a russet wasteland of ochre dirt, small gnarled bushes and, here and there, a small pine copse. After about seven minutes I came to what looked like an abandoned, derelict holiday resort made up of ugly concrete boxes piled on top of each other for the factory farming of tourists. Some of the buildings had got as far as being whitewashed, others were in naked, cement gray with gaping wounds where the doors and windows should have been. Rubble, dirty wooden pallets, mounds of sand, all abandoned, starved of the lifeblood of cash, completed the picture of desolation.
Just beyond this apocalyptic holiday resort I came to a small, grassless knoll, topped by another pine copse. Here the road turned sharply to the right and descended a gentle slope to a sandy cove where the water was a cool, lime green and looked good enough to drink. To the left of the track there was another one of those stacks of concrete cubes, but this one had been mellowed with a large veranda onto which had been built a pine structure covered in dry branches to create cool shade. There were red plastic tables and chairs bearing the Coca-Cola logo, a white freeze
r with a card pinned to the wall above it showing pictures of ice creams, and a bald guy in black pants and a white shirt leaning on the pine balustrade that confined the veranda. He had a red gingham dishcloth in one hand and he was watching me like he wasn’t sure whether to be curious or not.
I parked on the sand and climbed the four concrete steps to the veranda. There was a young couple in the far corner. They had a white tablecloth, croissants and coffee, and very orange orange juice. The bald guy smiled at me above his hairy chest.
“Kaliméra,” he said, like he really wanted me to believe he meant it. “Kalos ithate!” He gave a little bow and indicated the red plastic table with both hands. “You sit, sit. What you drink?”
“Coffee, and I’ll have some breakfast. Toast?”
“Toast with oil?”
“With butter.”
He went inside and I sat, looking out at the small bay. The Bucephalus was a little less than five hundred yards out. An easy swim, but the moonlight could be a problem. I’d have to check the time the moon rose and set. The alternative would be to black my face with boot polish, or use air bottles. That was fine as long as nobody spotted the bubbles.
The yacht was big, the size of a small cruise ship. It had three decks and the bridge above the main deck. I figured it was about one hundred and eighty feet long, and electronically it was probably state of the art. Of course, electronics were only ever as good as their power supply, but as long as they had juice, they could be a real problem.
The waiter brought my breakfast and I sat buttering my toast and sipping the strong, black coffee while I watched the yacht. I was thinking it would have been handy to get a look onboard, or at least review the plans of the boat, but the brigadier had not been able to get anything better than a general layout.
I bit into the toast and watched as a dingy was lowered from the stern into the water. A woman and a man climbed aboard and the small boat headed for the shore. The woman was not a blonde, and the way she moved was too affected to be the colonel. As they drew closer I could see she was tall, wore a lime green bikini and had short, dark hair. I wondered if she would die in my attack on the boat.