by Alison Fell
The 800 million francs in the Deauville safe were the chance of a lifetime, tempting enough to drag Bob out of retirement; ‘L’affaire de ma vie,’ he told his faithful ex Yvonne.
‘Don’t do it,’ Yvonne warned, ‘You’ll get caught, and you’re past the age when you can take it.’
The Bar Narcisse. Flasks of pastis and yellow Ricard ashtrays, Paris rain streaming down the plate-glass windows. ‘I was born with the Ace of Diamonds in my hand,’ Yiannis murmured, squinting out at Heraklion’s bright blue day.
The Courts of Justice were housed in the same tall Venetian building as the Police Station. The Court was still in session, the clerk told him; his own case would be delayed. Assault and insulting behaviour over at Agios Nikolaos. The three English thugs had been cooling their heels in Nea Poli jail; all going well, they would be fined and dispatched post-haste to Her Majesty’s Constabulary, and Yiannis could wash his hands of them.
He slipped in and took a seat in the back of the court, where a Roma case was still in progress.
The Sokadre lawyer – a balding, fiery-eyed man in his fifties – was demanding to read a statement, even though, as the Magistrate pointed out, five of his Roma clients were to be released immediately without charge, and the other four following payment of outstanding fines for traffic violations.
The Magistrate frowned at his watch. ‘I would remind you that you have already won the legal argument, yet it seems you must also win the moral one. In which case, the Court would appreciate brevity.’
Quite so, thought Yiannis. The Sokadre lawyers were increasingly on the offensive, but in his opinion what they notably omitted to mention was that citizenship carried not only rights, but duties. The social contract wasn’t a one-way street.
The lawyer had produced a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, which he now proceeded to read:
‘We believe that the methods adopted by the police – sealing off the whole Roma settlement at Nea Alikarnassos, instead of systematic calls on individuals to present themselves – are illegal, as they constitute an insult to human decency.’
Dignity, thought Yiannis, surely he means dignity. The defendants – men whose ages ranged from 18 to 60 – scowled and shifted in the dock. Yiannis caught the eye of one of them, and looked away, discomfited. In no way did he condone the persecution of minorities, but could he honestly deny that he harboured fairly deep-rooted cultural suspicions? Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Roma were a closed community, and this inevitably attracted prejudice. There was no getting away from the fact that their allegiances were to clan, not country. Presumably they paid at least some of the taxes required of them, but beyond that, well, it was hard to see what they contributed to the society at large.
Ask not what your country can do for you, he thought, but what you can do for your country. In many ways Kennedy’s idealistic appeal seemed more prescient now than it had fifty years ago.
‘Those methods of the police also contribute to the embedding of a stereotype that portrays the Roma as ‘‘the usual suspects’’,’ the lawyer continued, ‘something that the Greek Ombudsman has pointed out in his letter to the General Police Directorate of Thessaloniki following the carrying out of similar raids on the community of the Roma of the Gallikos River. If I may quote from letter 1/868/00/2.’
The Magistrate was visibly irritated. ‘No you may not! Unlike your grievances, the Court’s time is not limitless. I believe you have already made your point.’ As the Court rose to recess, two of the arresting officers, bully-boys Yiannis knew from Police Security, were blatantly smirking.
Outside the Court he snatched a cigarette before his case was called, and watched the Roma men being claimed by their womenfolk, who looked handsome and archaic in their long skirts and black flower-printed headscarves. Perhaps there would always be groups like those, he reflected: groups on the margins of modern civilisation, nomads from another age. Perhaps there were chasms that no one, with the best will in the world, could ever cross.
The Sokadre lawyer stood alone on the steps of the Courthouse, a desultory figure with his briefcase and his lightweight city suit. Yiannis watched as his clients, who had abandoned the guy with barely a handshake, bundled into battered cars, honked horns, shouted triumphantly to their relatives. If Sokadre had called a press conference, the invitation had gone singularly unheeded.
Shortly after he got back to the station Theo rang back, his 40 a day cough rumbling down the line. Yiannis tucked the phone under his chin.
Serology, he wrote on his notepad, watching his cigarette burn down in the ashtray. Karen’s photograph frowned disapprovingly through the smoke. He moved the ashtray away from her.
‘We’ve got semen on the thighs, and I’d hazard vaginal fluid as well, although I’d want to do Lugal’s iodine for epithelial cells to be sure, or as sure as you can be with vaginal. If I get the go-ahead, that is.’
‘Shit!’ said Yiannis, letting out his breath. ‘Cherchez la femme, then.’
‘Looks that way.’ Theo’s voice was animated. ‘Think raven-haired maiden, Yianni, think temptress. We’ve got some hairs, long, dark, some with roots, so DNA could work. But the tox screen’s even better. Stomach contents are pretty interesting. Your victim liked his drugs organic. Seems he hadn’t eaten for 24 hours, apart from raw opium. The genuine article, straight fom the poppy. Papaver somniferum, if you want to know.’
‘Really?’ said Yiannis, who didn’t.
‘What’s even more unusual is the other opiate. Comes from the narcissus bulb. Basically it’s a poison, but the quantities weren’t enough to kill him. There’re also traces of some kind of home-brewed beer, made from fermented barley.’
‘Quite a cocktail!’ Yiannis had been decorating his notebook with test-tubes and bunsen-burners, his mind milling about in the school Science Lab. Unlike Yiannis, Theo the A student had relished the instability of chemical compounds, the bright unnatural lights and sudden explosions. ‘It’s gone to Narcotics?’
‘Yep. Something new for them to chew on, as it were. But between you and me, my friend, if the victim was female, I’d immediately think Rohypnol. A rough and ready version, okay, but a similar chemical makeup. The effects would be roughly the same.’
Yiannis saw that the test-tubes he’d drawn looked more like condoms. He crossed them out hastily. ‘Meaning?’
‘Well we’re not talking Ecstasy here. Compliance to the point of coma is what I’m suggesting.’
Yiannis didn’t hide his incredulity. ‘Girl meets boy, girl rapes boy? Somehow I can’t see it.’
‘Unconventional, I agree. Although speaking as an old married man, I can only speculate on what consenting singles get up to these days. I mean, you’re the bachelor boy, Yianni, you tell me.’
Yiannis ignored the jibe. One of Theo’s less attractive traits was a tendency to indulge his envy to the point of insensitivity. Although he had married quite recently and, it seemed, happily, Theo was terminally wistful about his lost freedoms. In tavernas, on the streets, his eyes worked overtime at their mournful appraisals. Sometimes his lips worked too, and if to remind him of what he was missing. Luckily for Theo, no sounds came out; even more luckily, Livia either didn’t notice this nervous tic of his, or was wise enough to wait until it withered away of its own accord, like the State was supposed to do under socialism.
‘So we could be looking at an accident. Some sort of folie à deux, maybe?’
‘We could. Must have been a pretty persuasive girl, though, getting her date to roll around in the honey-pot. Unless the stuff came after the act, of course. Didn’t they preserve Alexander the Great in honey to bring him back to Greece?’
Yiannis’ mind flashed up an image of the corpse on the autopsy table. By the time he’d arrived the honey had been hosed away, and until now he’d managed to blot out the sensations attached to his first encounter with the body: the cloying smell of the thing, its baleful stickiness.
‘What about prints?’ he asked. DNA evidence
– if it was available – was fine for corroboration, but in investigative terms it was nothing.
‘Some latents. Pretty blurred though. The honey didn’t help.’
‘But you’re enhancing?’
‘Trying to. Another wierd thing, though, is the pollen. Shed-loads of it, relatively speaking. Massive deposits just about everywhere they swabbed. If it was up to me I’d send it straight to the University but I’m not the one who makes the call.’ There was an edge of bitterness in his voice. Despite Theo’s superior qualifications, it was Kallenikos who was Chief Medical Examiner.
‘So we wait.’
‘We wait. But if Kallenikos gives anaphylactic shock as cause of death, where’s your case?’
My case? thought Yiannis. If and when the ponderous wheels of justice began to turn, his involvement would be strictly peripheral, and Theo knew it.
‘Unless someone wants to try taking a bunch of bees to court.’
Yiannis laughed. ‘Even for Vasilakis, that would be a first.’
‘So how did you get on with Monica Vitti?’
For a moment he had no idea what Theo meant. ‘Stromboli?’ he said. Theo had lent him the DVD a week ago. ‘I was going to watch it last night, but something came up.’
He thought of Pericles’ sad kitchen, with its cobwebs worthy of a Grimm’s fairy tale. The smell of the place had made him gag. He remembered sour milk, mouse-shit, and something worse, some undertone of extreme organic nastiness. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d personally attended the old mother’s funeral years ago, he’d have said her corpse was still in residence, easing its way through the several unspeakable stages of putrefaction.
The ‘things’ were clearly archaeological, although Pericles swore he hadn’t been aware of it, and Yiannis was inclined to believe him. He’d zipped them into a polythene bag for protection and locked them in his desk drawer until he could pin down someone at the Museum. His phone call had elicited more irritation than excitement. The Assistant Curator, when he finally got through to her, pointed out that they simply didn’t have the space to house every minor find, not to mention the dire shortage of the sort of skilled staff required to catalogue them. She didn’t actually say they were already bursting at the seams with all that old Minoan junk, but that was certainly the implication.
10
On the way back from Knossos Ingrid has almost an hour to wait in Heraklion before the last bus leaves for Panomeli.
Tucked into the eastern armpit of the Venetian Port, the bus station is a noisy, chaotic encampment of ticket kiosks in the shadow of the huge Minoan Line ferries. The newer buses wear horns. Her first thought on seeing them was, how witty of the Cretans, to turn a bus into a bull. Then she noticed the German maker’s marque. The forward-thrusting ‘horns’ were extensions to hold wing-mirrors, presumably designed to make passing easier on narrow country roads. The neon destinations which flickered above the windscreens were an archaeologist’s primer: Arkhanes, Mallia, Zakro.
She buys a frappé in a styrofoam cup and carries it to a bench on a grassy plot near the old Venetian Arsenal, where she sits smoking, watching the planes carve out their westerly sky-track above the harbour before banking sharp right at the yellow ziggurat of the Lato Hotel, and climbing away to the north. On the fourth floor of the hotel two uniformed chambermaids laugh as they stretch and fold a white sheet across a half-metre gap between balconies.
Images of Knossos dart back at her. Two swallows whistling around the frescos of Evans’ reconstruction of the Piano Nobile. The extreme angle of the cobbled ramp which sloped down to the Theatral Area – a ramp made for running, for gaining the momentum needed to explode into somersaults over the bull’s horns in the tavrokatharpsia.
The huge clay pithoi, jars that had held oil, wine, barley, chickpeas – row upon row of them, stored in a labyrinth of underground alleys. The Palace built around them like a comb round honey. Although she knew perfectly well that the site was pre-Hellenic, she was aware of a mounting stress within, of missing the pleasure of recognition. But why had she expected to find anything that was remotely Greek about Knossos? If there were reference points they lay, surely, to the east, in Anatolia or Jericho or Uruk. Even the intricacies of the plumbing suggested a devotion to water equalled only by the Arabs. The lustral baths, the open stone conduits with their elbow joints and T junctions, to channel clear fresh water to every corner of the compound, its constant flicker a blessing, 4,000 years ago, in the blazing heat of the Aegean summer.
Think deep time. Think Neolithic.
A wordless landscape – not quite a blank slate, but a blue slate pavement written on by the strophe and antistrophe of feet.
The dancing priestesses, bright-bodied like bees, their poppy-capsule heads exploding in a rain of seeds.
Poppy-cults with their opium apparatus. Women falling in love with bulls.
Pelicans balance unsteadily on the swaying masts of the yachts in the marina. It’s hot, that oppressive 6 o’clock heat which crams itself into the narrow streets of old Heraklion. The crowds at Knossos, the Palace itself, have left her dazed and a little panicky, as if she’s sinking back into the pre-literate, understanding nothing. Knowing far less about the Minoans than she did before she set eyes on the place. Her head is at bursting point. Schliemann and Troy, Evans and Knossos. If imagination, rather than science, had always guided the spade, how could you ever hope to find the thread of truth, the link that would connect the present in some real way with the past?
Once again she tries to put herself in Alice’s shoes. Sensible shoes, to be sure. Which is, of course, unfair of her. But all the same, she thinks, soaking a tissue with water from her bottle and wetting her neck and brow, all the same – as a woman.
A three-legged dog limps across the intersection and dives into the shade under her bench. Splaying up its hindquarters, it bares its teeth and worries eagerly at its fleas. She edges to the far end of the bench, imagining ringworm, intestinal parasites: like the rest of Greece, the island is overrun by sorry strays.
One thing, though, is certain. Alice Kober would have been outraged by Knossos. The woman who so abhorred fictive thinking would have taken one look at Evans’ wishful reconstructions and snapped, ‘Show me the evidence!’
11
Asterios, they call him, because of his head, which is too big, and his jaw, which is oblong and juts like the open drawer of a cash till. Asterios the Minotaur.
What men call you, you become.
Here in his cave of darkness shaved ladies arch their bodies like bows on the magazine-covers. Foreigners come up from the beach sun-blinded and blink over his counter, unable to see him in the gloom of the periptero, and the sand carried on their feet covers the pavements, glittering like glass splinters. Parakalo! they cry, wanting cheap cigarettes in cartons of 200, cans of Sprite, sugar-free chewing-gum. No change, they say, den eho psila, these bare-bellied blondes with jewels in their navels, these skinny pale-eyed beauties.
There are those who pity the miserable fate of a man whose mind is encased in the body of a beast, but he, Asterios, pities the bull, for no one appreciates the pain and despair a beast must feel whose pure instincts are disrupted by the agitations of a man’s mind. Give a bull grass, sweet water and a willing heifer and he is happy. But a man is never content. If no gadflies of worry exist he will invent them. If today the till is full he will lie awake worrying about tomorrow, for these ochre clouds on the far horizon may be augurs of a meltemi that will drive the tourists from the shore, and then the sunbeds will lie empty and wind-lashed as the storm whips up, and Androula will take no euros for a day or more. But he, Asterios, is the one who will brood on the lost takings, for always it is the man who bears responsibility, and if the money shrinks away he is the one who feels the hurt of it, just as the man who makes the profit feels the pride.
What is sent by the Gods cannot be railed against, but a man bears the weight of his own mistakes.
Whenever he passes the Pa
ntelides field, he spits on it.
In the old days, before cellphones and apartments,when tourists still queued at the periptero to make their long distance calls, the field was his millstone. On the upper slopes the soil was so thin and flinty that olives could squeeze no sustenance from it, and vines blighted and blackened on the salt-tainted marsh of the seaward strip. His father had broken his heart on that land, and so would Asterios have broken his, if he’d had his way, but as soon as the old man was in his grave he swore to rid himself of every worthless acre.
In those days Pantelides went barefoot and rode side-saddle on his donkey, so when he said he would take the field off his hands and pay money for the privilege, Asterios laughed up his sleeve. Pantelides said he would grow maize on it, keep goats. Asterios nodded and slapped the old boy on the back and drank his raki and did not disabuse him.
Pantelides had red rheumy eyes and a stupid smile, but what Asterios did not know was that the smile concealed cunning, and the eyes saw what his own did not. The future, white marble and mortar: 4 storey blocks of holiday apartments, balconies with balustrades sculpted in the shape of sunrays, gardens with rose-beds encircling plaster Aphrodites, crazy-paving paths flanked by bulbous lights which gleamed from the ground like toadstools. From the Golden Sun Studios it is only half a kilometre to the new beach, half a kilometre to the bars and dance-clubs of Katomeli. The Golden Sun Studios have become Pantelides’ goldmine.
Pantelides had planted no maize, yet after a year or so he had a long black Mercedes, and no need of goats. Then the new road came curving through the valley, and what had been useless marsh became prime land for which the government paid topdollar. Once Pantelides had built a villa for his son and daughter-in-law, he began to sell the remaining land in plots, and soon other houses were thrown up – summer villas with swimming pools for people from Athens, and more apartment blocks for the swelling tide of foreigners. Pegasus Rooms, Apollo Studios, Herakles Apartments.