by Alison Fell
Handing the file back to Mouzakitis, Wolfgang nodded. He had hardly glanced at the photographs. Polly’s eyes were round and scared, watching him. His thumb had slipped into his mouth.
Mouzakitis glanced at the boy and raised his eyebrows at Yiannis, who replied with a slight shake of the head. Enough was enough, whatever the commune protocols. There was no sense in upsetting both the children.
‘He was here for how long, exactly?’
‘Exactly, Sergeant, I couldn’t say. People come and go. Commune life does not suit everyone.’
There was a sneer, Yiannis thought, in Wolfgang’s voice. He was beginning to lose patience with all this studied vagueness. If the rota on the wall was anything to go by, those were no dreamy hippies, but folk who dotted their i’s, crossed their t’s, and organised their every waking moment.
‘The name Pema – it’s German, or.?’
Margrit’s hand was on Cassie’s head, stroking her hair. The fingers were extremely long, the joints enlarged and arthitic-looking. ‘This was not his real name, I think. It was the name he took.’
‘And his real name?’
‘We are not the Gestapo, Sergeant. We don’t interrogate our members.’ This with the hint of a softening smile.
‘Pema was a student of Cultural Anthropology,’ Wiltraud interjected, in a voice that sounded muffled and somehow lifeless, ‘from the University of Tirana.’
Yiannis remembered that Theo had recently attended a conference in Tirana. The new Mayor, he said, was painting the city all the colours of the rainbow, but you could still drown a sizeable rat in the road potholes. He thanked Wiltraud and made a note. He was glad someone was trying to be helpful.
‘You have an address for him?’
Wiltraud shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
Surprise surprise, thought Yiannis. Putting his notepad back in his pocket, he stood up decisively.
‘I’d like to see the room he stayed in, if I may.’
‘Margrit uses it for her yoga now.’ There was something hushed and deferential in Wiltraud’s tone that made Yiannis wonder, not for the first time, who ruled the roost in this chicken-run.
Margrit hesitated. He could feel her taking the measure of him. Swallows were whistling in the eaves of the outbuilding; on a high rocky bluff behind the house goats grazed nimbly on sparse tussocks. At last she set down her glass, shrugging.
‘Okay. No problem.’
Yiannis followed her delicate shoulderblades along the corridor, past the work rota and the kitchen door. This part of the building was new, built of whitewashed breezeblocks and carpeted in coir matting.
Margrit turned right and limped up a short flight of stairs, her silk flounces eddying and rustling. On the landing a bathroom door was ajar; to the right of it was another door, which she pushed open.
Inside, a dark pink crocheted curtain dimmed the light from the window. There was a single bed with a rolled-up foam mat on it, a trestle table, and a camp chair. In one corner fat candle-stubs sat in a huddle on the bare floor. They were unlit, but their scent persisted in the room: lavender, he thought, cypress, and something sweet and heavy, like jasmine.
‘You do yoga here?’
‘And meditation, yes.’
Yiannis was suddenly conscious of his uniform, his polluting pistol. He imagined how she would light the candles after he’d gone, fumigate the space, chase out the bad karma. He saw several cardboard boxes stacked under the trestle table.
‘These boxes belong to Pema?’
‘His books, perhaps. He was working for his Doctorate.’
Yiannis looked at her sharply. ‘You expect him back, then?’
Margrit shrugged. ‘I really have no idea.’
He took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled out one of the boxes. Margrit sighed audibly but did not protest; she sat down on the divan, straight-backed, watching him.
The box was unsealed. He turned his back on her and opened the lid. Inside he saw a pair of jeans, some socks, a heavy woollen waistcoat woven in garish Aztec zigzags. Underneath the clothes were several books whose covers were familiar: paperbacks of Castaneda and Hesse, and Gimbutas’ tome on the Great Goddess, which Karen had bought years ago but had never managed to finish. At the bottom of the box were two A4 ring-binders.
‘Looks like he left rather a lot behind.’
Margrit laughed sharply. ‘You are wasting your time, Sergeant. The man in the photograph is not Pema.’
Yiannis felt a great stubbornness overtake him; the more she denied it, the more he felt inclined to prove her wrong.
‘Nevertheless, he has to be eliminated from the enquiry. Which is why I have to trace him.’ He leafed through the binders, looking for an address or a telephone number. The pages were closely typed, in English, with handwritten notes in the margins. He turned to Margrit. ‘Why would he write in English?’
‘Maybe he wants to publish, who am I to say? To my knowledge there are no publishers in Albania, Sergeant.’
Yiannis replaced the books and folded the clothes on top. DNA, he thought, would have a field day.
‘I’ll need to take these in for examination.’
Margrit laughed in his face.
‘You know, of course, that I can’t allow that! You will have to get a warrant.’
She had drawn her legs up under her in a lotus position; her long hands lay, palm up, in the lap of her silk skirt. Under the silk, the steel, he thought, convinced she was enjoying the confrontation.
‘Fair enough,’ he said, controlling his anger. ‘You’ll have it first thing in the morning.’
*
On the way back to Heraklion they got stuck behind a vast refrigerated truck. On a mural painted on the back and sides baby Eskimos ate ice-creams in a frozen landscape of seracs and ice-floes.
Yiannis and Mouzakitis crawled behind, sweating like pigs, as the truck swayed round the hairpin bends, mincing hedgerows and ripping off overhanging olive branches.
Yiannis got on the radio and requested the Tirana check, hoping the task would fall to the obliging Nina. For such a big bruiser, Mouzakitis was as timid as a mouse behind the wheel: at this rate it would take an hour to get down to the coast road.
Seeing a fork ahead, he lost patience and leaned across to blast the horn.
‘Take him!’ he cried, and Mouzakitis rammed his foot down on the accelerator, and veered across the entrance of a track which joined on the left. As the wheels mounted the verge, he corrected wildly, missing the truck by inches. Yiannis was left with an impression of the driver’s blank face, framed by earphones. He hadn’t even heard them coming.
‘Gamoto-mou!’ He glared at Mouzakitis. ‘You can open your eyes now, I’m taking over.’
He made short work of the coast road, and twenty minutes later the odorous roar of Heraklion engulfed them. He parked behind the police station and left Mouzakitis to return the photographs. After gulping a coffee at the counter of the Sportcafe on Yianari, he hurried back towards Dikeosinas Street.
On the way he passed an old, headscarfed Roma woman who was crouching on the pavement, holding out a packet of Softex and an imploring hand. Under her black skirt her legs were invisible, and her posture made her look boneless and collapsed, like someone who’s fallen from a 10 storey building.
Although the shrunken figure occupied no more space than a largish dog, something in the way the good citizens of Heraklion, while managing to give the impression of not having noticed her at all, stepped carefully around her, made Yiannis stop dead, go back, and press a 2 euro coin into her hand, for which he received two small packets of tissues and a veritable outburst of blessings.
He walked on through the crowds, dialling Dora’s number as he went. Her automated voice told him in Greek and English that she was unavailable, and promised to ring back as soon as possible. He left a message asking her to meet him that evening, and, spotting a convenient wastebin, dropped the tissues in.
32
Ingrid orders three fairly reliable items from the otherwise unpromising menu: courgette fritters, the garlic and potato paste called skordalia, and grilled sardines horis tipota – without the fries, the rice, the sodden pitta. The sardines are a main course, while the other dishes are starters, but she wants them all together.
Ola mazi, she insists, bracing herself for the skirmish.
‘Ola mazi?’ The waiter’s eyebrows arch in protest. The Shoestring does its best to cater for foreign tastes – witness the egg-and-chips on the menu, whimsically called the ‘Shirley Valentine’ – but apparently her request is a bridge too far.
‘Parakalo,’ she says firmly, staring him down.
Once again she’s dining with Hutchinson – not, unfortunately, in person, although there would be plenty of room for him at the four-seater table she’s been granted, for once, at the outer edge of the terrace – presumably because most Greeks prefer dining in the mezzanine, which is roofed, marble-floored, and protected by storm-sheets of sand-blasted polythene. A stubby date-palm shaped like an outsize pineapple hides her, at least partially, from curious eyes. Through its razor leaves she can see the Wilson-Wilsons, already eating, and a large family party celebrating what appears to be a birthday or name-day, since at the circular bar in the middle of the terrace a waitress is loading a tray with tall ice-creams spiked with sparklers.
On the way to the Shoestring she’d called in at the Captain’s to check on Charlie.
‘Right as rain,’ Glenys had told her. ‘But you know how it is, she just needed to hear a medic say so.’ She was lying down, Glenys said; evidently she’d had an anxiety attack, cured by a couple of valium. ‘Ken wants to keep an eye on her, though. He picked up some pizzas in town, but we might pop up for a drink later.’
In the Minimarket she’d searched for a postcard that would suit her mother – something gay and glamorous, on which to write an appropriately up-beat message. A bright white cove, bright turquoise sea, a bright red caique.
She extracts the card from the pages of Prehistoric Crete, where it’s been serving as a bookmark, and squares it up on the paper tablecloth. Greta will show it off to her fellow inmates and boast, glassy-eyed, about her daughter.
Dr. Ingrid Laurie, not the medical sort, you understand, the clever sort.
Sometimes she thinks that’s all Greta ever wanted – to be the top dog, the belle of the ball. Certainly she seems to be thriving now – happier in her fantasies, it appears, than she ever was in real life. And still with spite to spare for her dead husband, even though it was his foresight which funded the bay-windowed suite in Buncranna House, with its chintz curtains and ensuite bathroom, and even a corkboard on the wall for the display of exactly such trophies as postcards from globetrotting daughters.
Down on the beach the sunbeds have been put to sleep and dusk is falling on an empty sea. A lone man stands thigh-deep in the shallows, operating a toy speedboat by remote control, putting it through its paces. His small son looks on, yipping with excitement, while the mother – dressed in a matronly navy-blue beach-dress and bucket-shaped hat, although the sun set half an hour ago – fusses a beach towel over the boy’s shoulders. It’s young Sofia the maid, she realises: Sofia the foreteller of catastrophes.
The waiter unloads oil and vinegar from his tray, a miso of white, a wicker basket of bread. The paper tablecloth, strapped down by an elastic band, has a map of Crete printed in the centre. Around the borders are nautical designs of hawsers, knots, tillers, as if to remind her that she’s mistress of her own ship, and anything’s better than confinement in a chintz armchair, currant-scones in the hushed tea lounge, and the contemplation of a life wasted.
She turns the postcard over, picks up her pen, and stares, defeated, at the blank space. She knows her mother won’t even try to read between the lines; she’s never shown any sign of wanting to decipher her daughter. So why this nagging hope that one day a happy point will come when they can dispense with fiction, when some new and fragile language will be conjured up in which they can communicate?
Oh come on, she thinks. Tell her what she wants to hear. Minimum effort, maximum reward. Would it kill you to give her a little pleasure?
Around the terrace and in the eaves of the mezzanine, lights come on, fake carriage lamps which make even the children’s faces look florid and strained. Smells gust from the kitchen; on tree-boles, in doorways, the cats are gathering.
Her view of the mezzanine is partial, through a gap between two plastic storm-sheets. She sees a trouser-leg under a table, a bare foot in a brown leather loafer. It’s the ill-tempered tapping of the foot which has caught her eye. She glimpses two female feet in high-heeled sandals, below wide-legged white trousers.
A red-haired woman leans into the frame, supporting her chin on one hand, gesticulating at her companion with the other. She’s wearing a bronze kaftan made of some kind of sheer material, over a low-necked white vest. There’s a metallic flicker of rings, a man’s hand caught in the act of pouring wine.
Ingrid shrinks back behind the leaves of the date-palm. She doesn’t have to see the man’s face to know whose hand it is.
Her food is arriving, ola mazi as requested. The waiter arranges the plates on the table, his expression hovering between doubt and mockery. He nods graciously at her ardent efkharistos.
Then several things happen, in rapid sequence. First the cicadas turn up their volume to a deafening pitch, less like a song, suddenly, than the sound of knives sharpening on carborundum stone. Something must have alarmed or angered them; they sound, in fact, deranged.
Next Yiannis pulls the storm-sheet aside and peers out, frowning. There’s no doubt that he’s seen her, and no dodging the sudden quake she feels, so that when all the lights go out abruptly, she’s lightheaded, drowning in darkness, some cellular memory harking back to the original darkness of the cave. For a second the silence is total, but then laughter sighs out from the mezzanine, stoical and Greek, because it’s only a power-cut, and power-cuts are par for the course in the Cretan summer.
Every light in Panomeli has gone out, and beyond the point of the headland the westernmost straggle of Katomeli has also vanished into darkness; all that remains is the faint dazzle of a trip-boat in the bay, a sunset cruise, perhaps, nosing its way towards the blacked-out harbour.
She removes the glass canopy from the little oil lamp on her table, winds up the wick, flicks her lighter, and adjusts the flame to a steady sootless glow. People are filtering out of the mezzanine, following the children out on to the terrace to hover by the rail, their faces lit by the transient gleam of cigarettes. When the children twitter with excitement their delight is so palpable she can’t distinguish it from her own. It’s as if they’ve all suddenly remembered that what they’ve been missing is the wondrous, the event tinged with half-remembered terror that will snatch them up in its inclusive arms.
Even her modest meal looks ceremonial, as if it has finally found its proper place in the scheme of things. The sardines, she discovers, are delicious: crisp, lemony, and uncluttered, apart from a dusting of coriander and diced red onion.
In the black void of sky above the headland, the stars have become admirable. She nibbles at her food, admiring them.
The hum of the emergency generator sets up a ripple of applause and disappointment. The bar stereo picks up where it left off, and on the mezzanine the carriage-lamps pulse feebly and settle to a dim glare. The waiters are buzzing about again, skittish in the shadows, smiling broadly.
When she risks a glance at the mezzanine she sees an arm with a wristwatch, a hand draped over the mouth of a wine glass. The man’s legs are stretched out under the table, ankles crossed. The red-haired woman has disappeared.
The first lights to wink on are in the villages high up on the shoulder of Mount Yuchtas. Then Katomeli’s coastline sparks into life. Ingrid watches the power flow eastwards to feed the street lamps of Panomeli, the Totem Bar, and the bluish-white balcony lights of the new studio apa
rtments by the shore.
The night recedes, defeated, and the stars go out. Even the cicadas have subsided. She can no longer see the Milky Way; she can see both too much and too little.
When Yiannis appears before her she’s conscious that her senses are on overdrive, absorbing in a fraction of a second Van Morrison’s wailing prayer to Madam Joy, the cellphone in Yiannis’ hand, the thumb that strokes sideways across his chest in that Greek way, the mixture of arrogance and shiftiness in the way he glances around and doesn’t quite look her in the eye.
The absence of a smile confuses her. She manages a nod.
‘Please,’ she says, indicating a chair. She looks around for the red-headed woman. ‘And your friend?’
‘Dora?’ Yiannis shrugs, but doesn’t sit down. ‘She’s gone,’ he says, at least that’s what she thinks he says. His mouth is set defensively. ‘Something that was overdue, I think.’
Heat flames in her face for the casual way this Dora has been dismissed. Her immediate desire is to take the hard fact and scoot off with it, get the measure of its weight, its density. Set it on her private shelf and contemplate its glitter.
‘I see,’ she murmurs, although she doesn’t, at least not yet. Not one to waste time, then, a voice warns her. He’s wearing a black T shirt and chinos that are neatly pressed: if he’s going to be so businesslike, shouldn’t he be in uniform?
When the cellphone rings he doesn’t say excuse me, but steps aside and listens, expressionless, nodding out at the blankness of the sea.
Ingrid centres the postcard on the tablecloth map.
Dear Mother … It’s stamped and addressed, but the message space still waits for the flattering fiction. The single wine glass looks spinterish; if there were a spare one on the table she could at least offer him a drink before some important villainy drags him away.