The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  Dorothy held her gaze on him. ‘We have to let them go, Alex, but that doesn’t mean we have to forget everything they stood for. What does Anna think she’s doing, planning to eat at the table of a family like the Palaiologi?’

  ‘Is that what you call letting things go, Mother?’ Mavros countered. ‘I thought there was supposed to be a spirit of reconciliation in this country now. So their fathers were notorious collaborators and anti-Communists during the Second World War. They’re not responsible for what happened to supporters of the Left back then.’

  Dorothy was looking out of the window towards the distant sea, her eyes moist. ‘You’re right, Alex,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time ago and things have changed. Besides,’ she added, with a sardonic smile, ‘Anna’s a very good journalist. Perhaps she’s doing an in-depth story that will dish the dirt on the family.’

  Mavros laughed. ‘I rather doubt it, considering that the husband is one of Nondas’s closest friends and business colleagues.’

  ‘What are you planning for the festive season, Alex?’ Dorothy asked. ‘Are you and Niki doing things together? Alex?’

  Mavros came back to himself. He had been thinking about Grace Helmer and the mystery man who had been her mother’s lover. ‘What am I planning?’ he repeated. ‘Em, nothing special. Working, probably.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve found something to investigate, have you?’ his mother asked with irony. ‘I was beginning to think you’d given up being a detective after that dreadful case in the Cyclades. Though I couldn’t blame you. Those awful murders in such a beautiful setting, the way the war is still remembered…’

  ‘Mmm,’ Mavros said, still distracted.

  Dorothy leaned forward. ‘I notice you’re saying nothing about Niki. Are you two still having problems?’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Well, yes, we are. She’s not very happy with me at the moment.’

  ‘If it’s finished, you should tell her, Alex,’ Dorothy said, her tone serious. ‘It’s only fair.’

  Mavros got up. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Except I don’t know if it is finished.’

  His mother shook her head. ‘Honestly, men.’ She had never been a great admirer of Niki Glezou, feeling that she was too possessive for Alex’s self-sufficient nature, but she frequently stood up for the younger woman on the grounds of female solidarity.

  ‘I’ll try to drop in tomorrow.’ Mavros bent over to kiss her. ‘I might know more about my plans by then.’ He moved away, then stopped. ‘By the way, Mother, when we lived in Neapolis you never happened to hear of, or meet, a man called Iason Kolettis, did you?’

  The fact that he was more interested in a name from a case he hadn’t even accepted than he was in his lover didn’t escape him. It didn’t make him feel proud of himself.

  The face in the mirror made Iraklis swallow hard. For as long as he could remember he’d kept an iron grip on his emotions, but since he’d returned to Greece they had become unreliable. A wave of nostalgia was bursting over him and he fought to bring himself back to the surface, his lungs constricting.

  ‘Who am I?’ he asked under his breath. For the last ten years he had used the identity he’d bought from a softly spoken Chinese in New York City, but that name had slipped away from him in recent days like old skin from a snake. So had the name he had grown up with and the aliases he had assumed in the sixties and seventies. The most useful had been Iason Kolettis, but the printer, the lover, was long gone—he was sure only he had any recollection of that name now. Now he was Iraklis again. But that was a cover too—Iraklis was a name that meant much more than the terrorist group. He blocked out the thought. He’d come back to uncover his family’s buried secrets: he’d been offered the chance to find the piece in the jigsaw that had always escaped him. But things were no longer as simple as they had been during the armed struggle. He had to be careful, take one step at a time. Some people out there were playing a dangerous game.

  He examined his features in the glass, trying to keep a grip on himself. The skin on his face was lined, though there was little sagging of the flesh—the massages provided by his barber back in Queens had kept his complexion in good condition. And his hair was still thick and lustrous. But his eyes troubled him. The rings around them were heavy, the irises an intense, blackish brown that saw everything. They looked inwards to his pain and his most burning desires, but it was what they had seen when they looked outwards that was unbearable. Not the violence and bloodshed, not the horror, but the joy. Those were the eyes that had studied her, that had looked into her eyes when he said the ‘s’agapo’ truthfully. It didn’t matter that he had lied to her about everything else; it hardly seemed to matter that he had killed her husband. His eyes had looked into her eyes, into the eyes of the woman whose name he hadn’t been able to say in his thoughts since the night he had ridden away into the darkness with her husband’s blood on his hands. Although it was twenty-five years since he had seen her, he was still shaken whenever he remembered the times they’d spent together. And the agony was worse now that he was back in Athens. It was breaking him, making him doubt his mission. Would the training he’d been through all those years ago be sufficient?

  Iraklis turned away from the mirror and went into the bedroom, a towel in his hands. As he dabbed his eyes with it, he focused on where he was and what he had to do. Menandhrou Street, a couple of hundred metres southwest of Omonia Square in central Athens; the Hotel Romvi, chosen for its run-down insignificance. Despite his poverty-stricken childhood on the wind-ravaged slopes of the Mani, he felt uncomfortable in the grimy building—he had got used to the well-appointed attic apartment in Queens. Room 845 had a view over a dilapidated neoclassical building used by the city’s Russian immigrants for illicit card games and sex. Mangy cats were prowling across the flat rooftops, torn plastic bags caught in the aerials and the air-conditioning vents. But this was his command centre. ‘Focus on the mission,’ he said under his breath. ‘Forget yourself. Forget her.’

  He pulled on a white shirt and buttoned it, suddenly aware that the room was cold despite the clanking radiator. He slid his hand behind the thin plywood wardrobe and pulled out the diskette he had secreted. He hadn’t expected that a thief would think of looking there when he was out and if they’d tried when he was in the room he was sure he’d have prevailed unless he’d been seriously outnumbered. But he had been trained to take every precaution and he couldn’t break the old habits—even if he was dangerously close to losing his grip.

  He concentrated on booting up his laptop. When it was ready, he slipped the diskette into the drive and entered the password he’d been given over the phone by his controller. And there it was. The story he’d never expected to read. The story of the war, the story that included his father, though it broke off before the end—the conclusion was what he had to discover. But that wasn’t all. There was also a profile of the target. Before he could restrain it, a shudder caught him. Did he have it in him? Could he undertake the final, most costly mission of all?

  Then the old slogans came back to him, the ones he’d learned during the first months in the youth party and then spray-painted on the walls of government buildings and banks during the dictatorship. ‘The Only Good Capitalist is a Dead Capitalist’; ‘Their Wealth is Our Blood’; ‘Down with the Junta and the Americans Who Pay their Wages’. He felt his lips form a smile. The old spirit was still there. After all this time it felt good to be back in the struggle, even if these labours were more personal than political.

  It was finally time to extract payment from the people who’d destroyed his family.

  *

  Mavros went back to his flat and made himself a sandwich. The sun was in the west now, its pollution-filtered rays coming over the Pnyx and the ancient marketplace. He took his plate out on to the narrow balcony outside his front room. The street was quiet in the late afternoon. The foreign workers from the neighbouring building sites—old houses being renovated for wealthy Athenians—had gone and there were only
a few tourists on their way down from the Acropolis in the winter air. But Mavros sat and let the ineffectual sun play over him all the same. The chill would sharpen his thinking.

  He hadn’t been surprised when his mother had declared ignorance of Iason Kolettis. He hadn’t told her anything else about the man who had been involved with Grace Helmer’s mother—client confidentiality meant a lot to him, even though he hadn’t yet accepted the job. If she’d shown any familiarity with the name, he might have opened up further, but it was a long shot and he knew it. Dorothy had never paid much attention to the intricacies of her husband’s political activities and Spyros had been careful to protect her from anything that might bring her into conflict with the authorities. The Iraklis group that had murdered Trent Helmer and numerous others had proclaimed its Marxist-Leninist ideals often enough in the pronunciamentos it delivered after the assassinations but, as far as he knew, it never had any connection with official Communist organisations—though he intended to dig further in that area.

  His mobile rang. It slipped between his legs as he tried to answer it and almost dropped on to the hard balcony floor. He scrabbled to rescue it.

  ‘Nai?’

  ‘You fucking bastard.’ Niki Glezou often used English with him when she was on the attack. ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ she demanded, switching to Greek.

  ‘I did ring you,’ Mavros replied. ‘You’d turned off all your phones. I left a—’

  ‘Why didn’t you come round to my place?’

  He sighed. ‘Because I didn’t want a fist in the belly. Or worse.’ Niki had perpetrated some humiliating punishments on him in the past, one involving honey smeared across the floor of the communal staircase. ‘Anyway, I was—’

  ‘Working. Yes, I know. The great detective’s work always takes priority. What were you doing with that bitch in—’

  ‘Niki,’ Mavros said, interrupting in turn. ‘Is this going anywhere?’ He meant the conversation, but he realised too late how she would take the question.

  There was a pause. ‘No, it’s going nowhere. Go to the good, wanker.’ She broke the connection.

  Mavros let the phone drop from his hand. His heart was thumping. It was always like this with Niki. She was a full-blown Mediterranean hothead and he came off worst in exchanges with her because of the less volatile side he had inherited from his mother. Sometimes he wished he were different, a hundred per cent Greek who was emotionally demonstrative. Perhaps he would have got out of his system the sense of loss he felt for his brother; perhaps he would have been able to function more effectively with women. But he couldn’t change how he was, that much he had learned over the years. Maybe Niki had learned it too and was cutting her losses.

  Mavros ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair, feeling the long strands slide across the skin, and thought about the background to Grace Helmer’s story. The Iraklis group killings, the red deaths. Apart from the 17 November terrorists, with their long record of action against political and business targets, the Iraklis group had been Greece’s most wanted criminal organisation—most wanted and most discussed, especially now, with its apparent return to the front line after years of absence. In the run-up to the 2004 Olympic Games, security concerns were dominating political debate both inside and outside the country. The Americans in particular were alarmed by what they saw as the ease with which assassins continued to evade capture. Not a single terrorist had been convicted in the twenty-seven years since the fall of the dictatorship, despite the increasing involvement of foreign police and secret-service personnel. In recent years, speculation had been mounting that Greek government figures who had been involved in the opposition to the Junta were protecting the assassins—even manipulating them, according to the most virulent right-wing newspapers. On the other hand, some journalists on the Left claimed that the CIA was pulling the strings.

  All of which made the Grace Helmer case extremely sensitive. Mavros knew that he should already have told the authorities about the man who called himself Iason Kolettis—Grace’s mother’s links with the assassin were a new development, and it seemed likely that the terrorist’s name and background were also unknown to them. But he had several reasons for hanging back. The years he had spent working for the Ministry of Justice after university had taught him to be cautious about the system. Volunteering information about a high-profile target such as Iraklis would lead to days, maybe even weeks of questioning for him and the rest of his family because of his father’s Communist background and his brother’s record of resistance during the dictatorship. He didn’t want to land that on his mother at this stage in her life.

  And then there was Grace herself. She was reserved, cold, but she needed to know the truth about her family and he could relate to that. She resembled him, still burning after all this time to find out what had happened to Andonis. He knew better than anyone how little use the authorities had been in that search. Why should they be any more effective with an assassination that had taken place twenty-five years ago, which they had singly failed to solve in the intervening period? There was also, he forced himself to acknowledge, his professional pride. Grace Helmer had come to him for help and he didn’t want to turn her away. In the past the only cases he’d refused to accept were those in which the potential clients were not really interested in the outcome: parents who were going through the motions of looking for offspring they were secretly pleased to have seen the last of, rich men trying to track down trophy girlfriends who had found a better payer. Grace wasn’t in any such category.

  Still, he thought, as he fingered his phone, it was a close call. He would be taking a big risk concealing what Grace had told him about her father’s killer. Maybe it would be better to talk to one of his contacts in the police. The commander Nikos Kriaras, who had steered Grace towards him, was a source of many clients—particularly foreigners—whom the police didn’t want to handle officially. Kriaras was a long-serving officer who, behind the scenes, had gained the trust of politicians from several parties. But he was also secretive, restricting his contact with Mavros to brief telephone calls, never on mobiles, which could be intercepted by the newspapers. Unless Kriaras’s suspicions had already been raised by Grace’s approach, it might be better to leave him in the dark, at least until the outline of the case and its potential consequences were clearer.

  Mavros sat back in his chair and looked up at the Acropolis, the lower levels of the rock swathed in winter vegetation. On the tall pole at the western corner, the Greek flag was flapping in the breeze. If it goes limp in the next minute, he said to himself, I’ll call Kriaras. If it doesn’t, I’ll go and talk to the Fat Man.

  The flag’s blue panels and white cross remained visible for much longer than a minute as it rode the relentless wind.

  The mountains of the northern Peloponnese were snow-capped, buzzards hanging on the air currents above the slopes, but the plain of Argos below was warm in their stony embrace. The waters of the gulf were rippled gently by the breeze, and the cargo vessels bound to and from Nafplion had cut huge V-shapes in the blue. All around there was a faint hum from insects that had been woken by the sun’s heat, the scent of oranges rising from the blanket of trees that spread across the wide expanse of cultivated land.

  ‘Ach, how fine it is.’ The woman at the table on the terrace stretched back in her chair, her weight making the wooden legs scrape on the tiles. ‘How fine this country of ours is.’ She looked across the array of plates and bowls, fruit and bread piled high around pots of yoghurt and honey. As was the custom, they had eaten a late lunch, served by the sombre butler she was beginning to wish she hadn’t hired. ‘Eh, Nikita?’ Suddenly her voice had an edge to it. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Her husband looked up from the sheaf of papers on which he had placed an electronic calculator, his fingers frozen over the keys. ‘What, Veta? Oh, shit, I lost my place.’ He bent lower, the bald patch on the top of his head glinting in the light. Although it was natural, it had the look of a monk�
�s tonsure, even if the expensive styling and the thin line of moustache on his upper lip detracted from the ecclesiastical effect. If anything, he had more the appearance of a nightclub owner, an impression fostered by the garish harlequin dressing-gown he affected. The juxtaposition of his lanky form with his wife’s bulk was a source of illicit amusement in Athenian high society—their ill-advised appearance as Laurel and Hardy at a fancy-dress ball had brought the house down.

  Veta Dhragoumi-Palaiologou, local Member of Parliament and shadow shipping minister for the conservative opposition, glanced at her husband with ill-disguised annoyance. ‘Come on, Nikita, lunch here is one of the few times we spend together. Can’t you do those figures when you go back to the office?’ She looked beyond him to the factory chimneys on the coastline. The Palaiologos family had always been major landowners on the plain, but after the Second World War her father-in-law, God forgive his rapacious soul, had established orange-pulping and tomato-canning plants between Nafplion and Argos. Her own father was a ship owner who had made a fortune carrying fruit and other sensitive cargoes around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Her marriage to Nikitas had been a business deal made in heaven for the two old men, both long dead.

  ‘Ah, to the devil!’ her husband shouted, throwing down the calculator and his papers to the floor. ‘The fools I employ, I’ll fire the lot of them.’

  Veta poured a glass of juice and handed it to him. ‘In the name of God, calm down. Try some of your company’s latest product. Actually, it isn’t bad.’

  Nikitas scowled at her. ‘You think I haven’t already tasted it?’ He gulped the juice. ‘Some idiot junior manager wanted to call it “Nectar of Iraklis”,’ he said. ‘The last thing those bastard terrorists are going to get is free advertising from me.’