by Alison Fell
At the bottom of the steps he held her to him tightly, like a teenager, and kissed her hard, without giving a shit about who was looking. As she bent to shoulder her holdall he noticed a label sticking out at the back of her T shirt. He tucked it in, laid a hand against her cheek, and let her go.
From the car park he watched a Lufthansa plane land and taxi back to the apron. Then the Olympic airbus lumbered to the end of the runway, turned slowly, and with a bullish roar of engines, thundered past the Terminal building. The plane lifted just in time to clear the sea, and soared up, banking, into its proper element
As the wheels tore themselves from the ground a ragged gasp came from his mouth. The confidence that had buoyed him up emptied out in a rush, and a hospital blankness descended on his mind, as if the future had turned tail before his eyes and angled back towards the past. Dry-mouthed, he felt the dipsa rise in him like a waiting demon, shrinking his innards and crawling like ants across his skin.
The cigarette was making him feel nauseous. He stamped it out and leaned against the roof of the car, winded, his knees as fragile as straw. He had an urge to head for the nearest bar and throw down first one brandy, and then another. He knew it was crucial not to think about Karen, nor about the fate that had delivered him up to a woman who could vanish like a migrating bird, a woman who didn’t know who or what she belonged to.
He forced himself to dwell on his responsibilities – to Vasilakis and the case, not to mention his dear Mama, who’d be flying in next week from Athens. He imagined her stepping gingerly down the metal ramp in her best high heels, her grey hair rolled up in the strictest of coils at the back of her neck – she refused to let Irini cut or style it, and dismissed any suggestion of colour rinses as the work of the devil. She’d expect him to play host, to chauffeur her around the island to visit with old acquaintances, second cousins, and sundry ancient relations-by-marriage; she’d expect him to take leave, although right now leave was the last thing he wanted. In that respect, the Kruja case might yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
It was too late to go home, but still too early to arrive at HQ. He got into the car, shaved quickly with the electric razor he kept in the glove compartment, and drove out of the car park. At the airport roundabout his procrastinating instincts took over. Instead of heading for Heraklion he found himself turning on to the old coast road: perhaps the sight of the sea would settle his nerves and put him in some kind of shape to face the day ahead.
A maroon camper van was parked in a small roadside lot, its roof loaded with luggage. There was just enough room for another car. He parked behind it, got out, and pushed his way through undergrowth to the scrubby shore, where a concrete jetty jutted a few metres into the water. At the end of the jetty a red-headed boy with alarmingly white skin stood beside an older man, presumably his father, who was ostentatiously muscled and wore a pair of skimpy black bathing trunks. The two of them seemed to be gazing at a huddle of small boats, moored to orange buoys, that floated just offshore.
Yiannis sat down on a rock and listened to the little slap of waves against hulls. In a daze, he watched a huge white yacht slide into view past the point and proceed with imperial grace across the bay, towing an inflatable behind it. A flicker of colour on the jetty caught his eye: the red-headed boy had unfurled a German flag, which in the absence of the slightest breath of wind neither flew nor flapped but drooped impotently.
Barking some kind of command, the father backed up a few steps and fiddled with the lens of an expensive-looking camera. The boy hoisted the flag above his head, stretching it taut between both hands, and posed like some victorious invader.
Yiannis couldn’t believe his eyes. Where the fuck did they think they were? At the very least such tricks were tactless, whether or not you’d lived through the war. He jumped up, put his hands on his hips, and glared menacingly at them. Although the father glanced in his direction, he made no response whatsoever and, evidently aware that arrogance wasn’t in itself an arrestible offence, continued to snap away happily. Frustrated, Yiannis turned on his heel and strode back to the car.
As he turned the key in the ignition he saw a traffic cop cruising round the bend ahead. He flashed his lights and the motor-bike slowed. When it drew up alongside he recognised Haris Kazantzakis, popularly known as Nikos, although as far as Yiannis knew he was absolutely no relation to Crete’s most famous writer. He indicated the camper van.
‘Do me a favour, will you, Hari? Just slap a ticket on this one.’
Haris grinned beneath his goggles. ‘My pleasure!’ Nowhere was there any indication that parking was prohibited, but Yiannis knew he wasn’t the type to ask questions. Any excuse to harrass our foreign friends was good enough for Haris.
‘Thanks,’ Yiannis said. ‘I owe you one.’ Momentarily cheered by the encounter, he put the car in gear and drove off towards Heraklion.
Like a javelin hurled from afar, the jealousy ripped into him. Now that Ingrid was out of his sight, all his ghostly competitors stepped from the shadows, rubbing their hands. He saw a good-looking American cross his chino-clad legs and lean towards her, flirting determinedly in the cramped intimacy of the plane seats. He saw tweedy university colleagues, tennis-partners, the hungry ex-husbands of Ingrid’s girlfriends, circling the bright halo of her hair like moths.
The sudden injection of adrenalin made his mind stall. The image that floated up through the fog was primitive and pre-Olympic. With a shiver of recognition, he let out a groan. What if the Kruja kid had been writing not about a test but a contest, some crazy ritualised competition over one of the women? Although only the DNA tests would tell which one, he himself would be betting on Margrit. With that autocratic sexuality, she was by far the likelier candidate for the Queen Bee role.
A furious toot from behind alerted him to the fact that the car had drifted across towards the inside lane. Correcting quickly, he raised a hand in apology. Shaken, he took a firmer grip on the wheel. The winner takes it all, he thought. And the losers? Well, no silver or bronze for them; the losers, in this case, lost everything.
*
Yiannis was getting tired of beating about the bush.
‘Did you or did you not help Wiltraud to move the body?’ he demanded.
‘I did not,’ Wolfgang replied, without a flicker of expression.
A night in the cells had done him no favours; unshowered and unshaven, he looked somewhat the worse for wear. Although previously Yiannis had discerned nothing remotely attractive in Wolfgang, he now found himself wondering how the frigid, monkish-looking German would appear if assessed by the jealous eye of a rival. Now that the idea had planted itself in his mind, through its altered filter he could detect a certain grace of movement, a slender musculature, the decisive line of nose and cheekbones.
‘But you’re familiar with Anemospilia, aren’t you, Wolfgang.’
‘It’s common knowledge that our members go there sometimes, there is no law against it.’
‘Leaving aside the law of trespass!’ Yiannis retorted.
Wolfgang bristled visibly. ‘People gossip about us. They are envious.’
‘Envious?’ said Yiannis, interested.
‘Everyone wants the dream, yes, but they won’t live it. They don’t have the courage to follow their hearts!’
A Greek would have spread his hands in an appeal for consensus, but Wolfgang’s remained stubbornly clenched. Q.E.D., thought Yiannis, as Ridotti muttered the translation to Kyriaki.
‘This dream everyone wants …’ he began, but Kyriaki interrupted.
‘We are charging your colleague with perverting the course of justice,’ she said impatiently. ‘She will be interviewed in the presence of her lawyer this afternoon.’
Wolfgang’s gaze did not waver; instead it grew icicles. ‘The guy was already dead.’ The slight shrug of his shoulders suggested that little love had been lost between them. ‘If Wiltraud tries to protect our commune – everything she has worked for – I see no crime.’
He looked challengingly from Yiannis to Kyriaki. ‘If you charge her with this you must charge us all!’
Don’t tempt me, thought Yiannis, picturing a happy band of heretics chucking themselves collectively on the pyre. He left it to Kyriaki to point out that in this case ‘protection’ meant removing evidence and supplying false information to the police. ‘I’m warning you,’ she added, ‘it won’t help your case if you keep refusing to tell us exactly what happened that night.’
As they listened to the translation Wolfgang brought out tobacco and papers, and began to roll a cigarette. Thin cigarette, thin lips, thought Yiannis. Last night’s ashtray had not been emptied. With a frown of distaste, Wolfgang pulled it towards him. In the flare of the match his face looked lizardly, the pockmarks standing out on his skin. He muttered something that included the word ‘mistake’.
Yiannis pounced. ‘Who made a mistake? Pema?’
Studying the hand that held his cigarette, Wolfgang muttered something that in German sounded insulting. Stupid arsehole, or some such.
Kyriaki glared, but Yiannis shook his head at her. He could see that Wolfgang was working himself into a lather. If he read his palm for long enough, maybe it would tell a story. The savage muttering continued, a kind of abusive internal debate. It was hard to tell whether he was swearing, praying, or berating himself.
Finally Kyriaki lost patience. ‘English!’ she demanded.
Wolfgang heaved a godly sigh. The hand with the cigarette scythed, teacher-like, through the air.
‘Fucked up men, doormat women. They have their precious little cars, their washing-machines. Then – Poom – man abuses kids, slits throat of wife. Son mugs old folk to buy drugs. Big surprise, yeah? Big media. – Where is community in this? Where is value?’
The aggressiveness of German became cold sarcasm in English. Yiannis waited while Ridotti translated the bombast for Kyriaki. Mainly the tirade made him feel very old. There was a time when he would have agreed wholeheartedly with the German’s critique of consumer society, but life seemed to have blunted most of the axes he’d had to grind. If Wolfgang’s socio-political theories held little interest, however, what did intrigue him was the venom of the delivery.
The details forwarded from Germany had been scant. Wolfgang Muller was born in 1972, in a well-off suburb of Munich, the only son of Erhardt, a financial lawyer, and Elfriede, a housewife. After gaining good qualifications at school, Wolfgang had studied dance-theatre in Wuppertal, and thereafter did youth work and part-time teaching in Bonn and Stuttgart. Apart from one shoplifting conviction while a student – the fine promptly paid, presumably by Daddy – he had not attracted the attention of the police. After a normal, comfortable childhood, if, perhaps, a cossetted one – it appeared that Herr and Frau Muller had been in middle age when they produced their only son – by all accounts he had grown up to be a law-abiding citizen. There was certainly nothing in the file to explain such bitter animosity towards the society that had shaped him. Although the same could be said, of course, about the backgrounds of the infamous Red Army Faction.
Kyriaki pushed her chair back and beckoned Yiannis to follow her out. In the corridor she thrust her hands into her hair and tugged furiously, as if to wrench it out by the roots.
‘Do we really have to listen to all that shit? Is it me, or is he getting loonier by the minute?’
‘He’s an angry lad,’ Yiannis agreed. ‘Chip on his shoulder the size of the Bundesbank.’
Kyriaki looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘Give me a cigarette, Yianni.’ He handed her one and flicked his lighter. She sucked at it greedily but blew the smoke out in clouds, without inhaling. ‘But was he involved, when it comes down to it?’
Yiannis shrugged. ‘Maybe not directly. I’d say he was all bluster, but that’s just gut instinct. Maybe he did try to stop Kruja, as Wiltraud says …’
‘Fuck it! We’ve got enough to charge him already.’ Just then Kyriaki’s phone rang and she fumbled to answer. ‘Vasilakis,’ she said, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘Right, sir. We’ll expect you, then’ She slipped the phone back into her bag. ‘There’ve been developments on the DNA.’
Yiannis pricked up his ears. ‘Did he say what?’
Kyriaki shook her head. ‘He’s on his way over. Wants to sit in on Wiltraud.’
‘Okay,’ said Yiannis.
‘Look, we know they’re all in on it, to a greater or lesser extent.’
‘Not unless someone changes their story,’ he objected. ‘Prys and Jean-Yves were away, so that only leaves the main players – who’re still swearing blind that Kruja left the commune months ago.’
‘And we’re supposed to believe that?’
‘Well, I can’t see them swearing the kids to silence, can you?’
Kyriaki dismissed this with a shrug, and stamped her cigarette out on the floor. Was it naive of him to suppose that asking the twins to lie wouldn’t sit easily with their high and mighty principles? ‘Let’s see what Vasilakis gets out of Wiltraud. If you ask me, they’re as tight as a vixen’s arse, the lot of them.’
*
Vasilakis seemed not to notice the parlous state of the snacks that had been sent down by the canteen. Although the sandwiches were dry, their corners curling in the heat, his hand was an automaton which reached for one after another and stuffed them into his mouth while he talked on, oblivious.
The bad news was that the tests on Margrit and Wiltraud were not a match for the female DNA found on the body – which, as Vasilakis pointed out, put an entirely different complexion on things.
For a moment Yiannis was too crestfallen to speak. He’d been so sure the tests would prove that one or the other had been, at the very least, an accessory, that he felt he’d personally let Vasilakis down.
Vasilakis washed his last sandwich down with a gulp of coffee, and tapped the file with a fingernail. ‘So let’s try to separate fact from fiction, shall we? Fact: we’ve got a body stripped of all ID, covered in honey and bees – which may have been self-administered, or administered by others. Toxicology shows that he either drugged himself, or was drugged. We have unidentified female DNA which proves that the victim had sex shortly beflore he died, so we have a third party. Wiltraud admitted that she followed Kruja and found his body at the Anemospilia archaeological site.Your Dutchman saw her in the vicinity of Panomeli early that morning, and trace evidence on an organic compost bag in Stavlakis’ olive grove links it to the body.
‘Then we’re left with the fiction. We have an admixture of myth supplied by the ever-obliging Ms. Hourdaki, and also the writings of Kruja himself, which according to Yiannis’s archaeologist contact appear to be flaky in the extreme. As for his literary forays into the prehistoric, well, they don’t float my boat, I have to say, and they wouldn’t cut much ice with a judge either. The long and the short of it is, too many man-hours spent on something that’s going to be given as misadventure.’ Vasilakis shrugged dolefully. ‘I’m sorry, guys, I’ve done my best, but to be quite honest I’m being pressured to wind things up as soon as possible.’
‘But sir,’ Yiannis objected, ‘we know someone, probably Wiltraud, moved the body. We’re still waiting for trace on the jeep.’
‘That’s the crunch, certainly. I’ll be very interested to hear what Wiltraud says about that now. It’s not that I’m against ifs and buts per se – life’s full of them, after all – but they don’t belong on a charge sheet.’ His eyes lingered on Yiannis, who wondered if he was being reproached. Was Vasilakis implying that he’d let his imagination run away with him?
‘The lawyer, by the way – do we know who he is?’
‘He’s a she,’ Kyriaki said pertly. ‘Olympia Athanasiou.’
Vasilakis grimaced. ‘Right. No pressure, then.’ He brushed crumbs off his shirt-front and eased his bulk out of the seat. ‘So I guess that’s about as far as it goes.’ He grinned wanly. ‘Short of a signed confession of murder, of course!’ He glanced at Yiannis, who had also got to his feet. ‘Relax, Yi
anni. I can handle the English perfectly well.’
It took Yiannis a second to realise what he meant. ‘But sir,’ he protested.
Vasilakis waved aside the objection. ‘Ioanna says you were at it till late last night. And frankly, pedi-mou, you look fucked.’ Pausing beside Yiannis, he laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You did good,’ he said in parodic American. ‘So get some rest. That’s an order. Ioanna will keep you in the picture.’
*
Yiannis knew in theory where the boat was, but as he paced the boardwalk between the moored dinghies he began to mistrust his memory.
On the deck of a yacht a tanned woman raised her sunglasses and eyed him with interest. She wore a lime green bikini and gold mules; her hair, bleached to the same gold as the mules, was scraped back from her face and clamped at the nape by a large artificial daisy. He greeted her politely, turned on his heel, and retreated to the shoreward end of the boardwalk. Pelicans waddled out of his way, hissing sullenly. At last he caught sight of it: a white dinghy with a scarlet stripe, the name Dimitroula in faded blue letters on the prow.
When he stepped down into the boat his nostrils were assailed by the nostalgic smell of pitch and salt-soaked wood. The oars lay in the bottom. Archaic, sun-bleached things roughly carved from olive boughs, they were as heavy as railway sleepers and suitable only for dire emergencies. Certainly he’d never seen them in use.
Since Irini and Tassos had taken the boat out only a day or two ago, there was petrol in the engine. He cast off, gave the throttle chain a sharp tug, and heard it splutter into life. The sky above was a steady blue, the swell gentle. He chugged sedately past the harbour arm and headed due north, towards nothing in particular, except perhaps the brink of the known world.