The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  ‘Grace Helmer,’ she said, taking the hand in a gentle grip.

  ‘Come in, both of you,’ Laskaris said, looking beyond them. ‘You brought no other unexpected visitors?’

  Mavros shook his head and followed Grace into the long hall that took up the ground floor. ‘I’m sorry. I would have telephoned, but my mother told me you prefer to live without one.’

  The poet ushered them towards the fireplace at the far end of the room. Although there was a log fire burning in the grate, the house felt cold. Mavros noticed papers spread across the table on the right. He wondered how the old man could work in such a temperature.

  ‘I hate telephones and computers, fax machines and televisions,’ Laskaris said. ‘All they do is distract people from the important things.’

  ‘And what are they?’ Grace asked, her eyes running around the undecorated walls.

  ‘The injustices of life,’ the old man said, indicating a sofa spread with a traditional rag cover. ‘The shallowness of contemporary culture. The need to change.’

  ‘The revolution, in other words,’ Grace said. ‘I thought you said you’d lost that war.’

  ‘We can still hope that people will see reason,’ Laskaris said, his face tightening. He sat down heavily in a leather armchair.

  Mavros leaned forward. ‘Are you all right?’

  The poet raised a hand. ‘It will pass. I…I have taken my pills.’

  Grace got up, went to the kitchen area and returned with a glass of water she’d poured from an earthenware jug.

  Laskaris drank gratefully. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, dabbing his lips with a handkerchief. Then he looked at each of them. ‘What is it that brings you here, so far from the real world? I hope your mother is well, Alex. I know it is only a few days since I saw her, but at our age…’ His words trailed away.

  ‘She’s well,’ Mavros confirmed.

  ‘She didn’t send you down here on some errand? Something about the edition she wants to do of my work?’ The poet smiled. ‘Her business has been very successful. Even Spyros would have been impressed.’

  Mavros returned the smile. His father had never approved of his mother working. Like many male Greek Communists, he had never come to terms with the idea of wives earning despite his lifelong commitment to social change.

  ‘So…so what is the reason for your trip to the Deep Mani?’ Laskaris’s eyes shone out from the pallid contours of his face. He glanced at Grace. ‘Helmer. The name means something to me.’

  ‘My father, Trent, was in the Athens embassy.’ Grace’s voice was level. ‘He was murdered by the Iraklis group in 1976.’

  The old man was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Of course. I remember that…that tragedy.’ He met her gaze. ‘Those people were traitors to the cause, you know. The Party had disowned them.’

  Grace said nothing but her face visibly hardened.

  Mavros intervened before she did something to antagonise Laskaris. ‘Iason Kolettis,’ he said, resorting to shock tactics. ‘We know he was behind Iraklis. We want to trace him.’

  The poet’s expression didn’t change. ‘So does the antiterrorist squad. I shouldn’t tell you this, but the Party would like to catch the killer too. Some of the comrades still feel guilty that the group was formed by people whose roots were in the struggle.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s foolish, like so much the comrades do now. I am not in contact with them any more.’

  ‘You think Iason Kolettis is responsible for the killings of the businessmen?’ Mavros asked, encouraged by the old man’s frankness. Perhaps Laskaris trusted him because of his father, or perhaps Grace’s presence had loosened his tongue. That had worked with Randos.

  ‘He may be,’ Laskaris replied. ‘Be sure, there will be a statement claiming responsibility. There may have been one for the first murder. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government kept quiet about it. It must be in a state of panic.’

  Grace stood up and approached the armchair. ‘Do you have any idea how we can find him?’ she asked, her voice tense.

  Mavros raised a hand and waited till she had sat down again. ‘I think we should tell our host what we heard from Randos before we ask him for help.’ He ran through what the composer had said about Iason Kolettis and the reference to him in the lyric that the poet had written.

  Laskaris studied him as he spoke. ‘What are you saying, Alex?’ he asked, when he had finished. ‘You think that “The Voyage of the Argo” is some kind of code? I wrote many song verses using ancient myth. I had to because otherwise the fools who governed the country would have sent me back to prison or had me killed in a so-called accident. But that doesn’t mean I knew Iason Kolettis’s real identity.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘No one did. That was his skill, his greatest achievement. He was better than any actor. He changed appearance, he disappeared every few months and returned with another identity.’

  ‘But you met him, didn’t you?’ Grace said. ‘You must know something about his background.’

  The poet looked at her as if she were a child. ‘I sympathise with your pain. God knows, I have lost enough dear ones myself. But this is a hopeless thing you are doing. The Party was an underground organisation for decades. We were experts in protecting ourselves. People knew only the bare minimum about each other, even people who were much less cunning than Kolettis. That was the case even for political officials like me.’ He blanched, taking several deep breaths before speaking again. ‘For field operatives like him, the precautions were even more elaborate.’ He gulped down the last of the water from his glass and licked his lips. ‘Besides, Iraklis was a proscribed organisation. We lost contact with the madman as soon as he was expelled from the Party.’ He sank lower into his chair. ‘I’m sorry, I cannot help you.’

  Mavros looked at Grace. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but he had the distinct feeling that the old poet knew more than he was saying. The question was, how could they break through the walls he had built around himself?

  Iraklis drove the hire car he’d picked up in Athens across the Isthmus and into the Peloponnese. The traffic wasn’t heavy, the truck drivers eating their midday meals and most Christmas revellers not yet on the roads. He gunned the big Citroën’s engine and headed down the motorway towards Tripolis in the fast lane.

  Yesterday he had spoken to his controller and discovered that people had been asking questions about him in his old persona of Iason Kolettis. There was time before the confrontation that was planned, time that he could use to clear up some unresolved issues, personal as well as professional—though, since his return to Greece, the two had been getting harder and harder to separate.

  For years he had blocked out the end of the Iraklis group, spending the time in New York City when he wasn’t working on educating himself. The apartment in Queens was filled with books on politics and history. Often he put on his headphones when the noises of the throbbing city kept him awake, listening to the English phrases and repeating them till his accent was good. But since he’d been back in Greece, the need to see the surviving member of the group, the only survivor of his former comrades who had been captured, had been growing. There were things he had to say, things he had to hear. What action he then took would depend on the man who had been known as Odhysseas. Babis Dhimitrakos had been reliable until the enemy had taken him, but he hadn’t known much about Iason Kolettis—the assassin had kept everything to himself, even within the small terrorist cell. Apart from that one night—the night he had killed the American—when he’d lost control after the operation and drunk himself into a stupor. Had he talked? Had he blurted out something that might still give him away in the hours after he had killed the husband of the only woman he had ever loved? The splinter of doubt had turned into a sharpened spike, like those the Turks had used to impale their prisoners. Babis Dhimitrakos. He had to make sure of his old brother-in-arms.

  By mid-afternoon he was past Sparta and on the road to Yithion. It was then that Iraklis began to feel anxious about an
other old comrade. He hadn’t been in the western Mani for decades—not since he had visited Kostas Laskaris during the dictatorship. The poet. Should he be fearful of him as well? He had followed his work in the New York Greek community’s newspapers: the international awards and nominations, popular songs, the reputation he had acquired for mordant criticism of the contemporary Left. No, Kostas was old now, near death. He could do nothing, he would do nothing to harm Iraklis. But it would be a good idea to see him again—he owed the former resistance fighter much.

  Southwest of Yithion, the clouds tumbling down the stone flanks of the peaks, he had felt the weight of his early years crush him more than it had since he was a teenager. When he returned during the Colonels’ regime, he’d been on fire with the struggle and hadn’t given a thought to the bitter pain he had suffered as a child on the Mani’s barren soil. But now it came back to him, leaped on him like an assailant in an ambush to squeeze the breath from his lungs. He pulled in to the side of the road, provoking a horn blast from the van that had suddenly appeared behind him. It swerved past, the youthful driver mouthing obscenities.

  Ach, this place, he said to himself. Great dams of stone shutting it off from the rest of the world, only the sea offering any respite, and that a chill one without profit except for the most dedicated fisherman; the men intemperate and fierce. Why had he come back?

  Iraklis closed his eyes and remembered the tall figure of his mother, her face shrouded by the hood of a tattered coat, the first time he had met her. Before that he had never even seen a photograph of her. His grandmother had beckoned him into the low stone house he shared with her outside Kitta when he came back from locking up the goats for the night. The movements of her hand were so quick that he thought she had been taken by a fit. And then he saw there was another woman behind her.

  ‘Here he is,’ his grandmother had said. ‘Only six years old, but he looks older. Like a young fighter already.’ When she pronounced the word palikari, the sadness in her voice seemed infinite, as if his fate, a terrible one, had already been written.

  ‘Come, Michali,’ the woman behind said. ‘We have things to discuss.’ Her tone was businesslike, grown-up to grown-up, like the men he’d heard bargaining in the kafeneion. Although he didn’t know her, he understood she was his mother. The deep scar on her cheek didn’t frighten him. It made her look as noble as a warrior woman in the old stories.

  ‘Mama,’ he began, opening his arms to embrace her and feeling her bony body beneath them. She didn’t make any movement to circle her own arms around him.

  ‘My son,’ she said simply, her voice still level, ‘sit down and listen to me. There isn’t much time.’ She motioned to her mother to close the door.

  ‘Where have you been, Mama?’ the boy asked, taking in the woman’s ragged blouse and skirt, and the dark-ringed eyes in her drawn face. He blinked at the scar on her cheek and looked away, tears now filling his eyes.

  ‘I have been on an island,’ she replied. ‘Locked up like a dog. I have been freed, but soon they will want to catch me again.’ She frowned at him. ‘So listen, Michali, you are the man of the house now that my father is dead.’

  He blinked back tears for the old man who had been the only one to smile at him and who had died in the winter, worn out by a lifetime of toil.

  ‘You must look after your grandmother,’ she continued. ‘And you must stay at school as long as you can.’ She looked away. ‘Even though what they teach you is nothing more than lies, stinking nationalist and monarchist poison.’ She stared back at him and he felt the power of her eyes. ‘You must learn to read and write, you must study. And then…’ she gave a smile that lit her face with an unexpected expression of joy ‘…and then you must join the struggle.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ he replied avidly. ‘But what is the struggle?’

  ‘The people’s struggle, my son,’ she said, her expression stern again. ‘The struggle for a better world.’

  The boy had sat there, not understanding the meaning of her words but convinced by their force. He had remembered them every day and had joined the Party’s underground youth organisation as soon as he could.

  Throughout the exchange his grandmother had stood motionless, but her expression was disapproving. When her daughter rose to leave, she shook her head. ‘What good will he do?’ she asked, her voice cracking. ‘He’s only one and they are many.’

  His mother had smiled once more. ‘He will do much good, I am sure of that.’ She pulled the hood back over her head and moved to the door, limping heavily.

  ‘Don’t go, Mama,’ he cried, clutching at her. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I must carry on the fight.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘I will return when I can, Michali.’ She stepped away from him.

  ‘And my father?’ he asked. ‘Where is my father? When will he come?’

  She looked at him but didn’t speak.

  The fifty-seven-year-old Iraklis sat up in the driver’s seat and looked out over the sides of the Pendadhaktilos, grey stone running down the great ridge beyond Itylo into a layer of fresh green growth. His homeland looked fertile, and for a few moments he was fooled into believing that it wasn’t the quarry of violence and death it had been throughout history.

  But how could he be fooled? He was more in tune with the blood-drenched landscape of the Peloponnese than anyone alive. He was a descendant of the region’s heroic line, a warrior defending his family name to the last.

  Kostas Laskaris gave Mavros and Grace a meal—coarse bread, feta, a salad of tomatoes, olives, onions and capers, with a heavy local wine—after he had cleared his papers from the heavy antique table. He willingly answered their questions about the region and his work, but refused to talk any more about Iason Kolettis. When a local woman, dressed from head to toe in black, came into the house and collected their plates, the poet went with her to the kitchen area. Mavros took the opportunity to speak to his client.

  ‘This isn’t getting us very far, Grace,’ he said, his voice low. ‘You have to let me speak to him on my own.’ He opened his eyes wide at her. ‘It’s the only way.’

  The American pursed her lips. ‘Okay. But you’re going to tell me everything he says.’

  He agreed even though he didn’t intend to divulge anything Laskaris said about Andonis if he succeeded in getting the old man to explain the composer Randos’s reference to his brother—that was family business.

  ‘I usually take a walk outside at this time,’ the poet said, when he returned to the table. ‘You are welcome to join me.’ He was respecting the traditions of hospitality even though it was clear he would have preferred them to leave.

  Mavros stood up. ‘I’ll come with you.’ He glanced at his client. ‘Grace will help with the dishes.’ He smiled as she shot him a ferocious look.

  ‘There is no need,’ Laskaris said to her emolliently. ‘Take your ease in front of the fire, my dear. The weather is fit only for dogs, old Communists and the sons of old Communists.’

  It wasn’t raining yet but the clouds had come down further, obscuring all but the lowest slopes of the hills. Mavros shivered in his thin leather jacket.

  ‘You will need more than that if you stay in the Mani at this time of year, Alex,’ Laskaris said in Greek. He smiled, but there was an undercurrent of tension in his voice. ‘Are you planning to stay?’

  Mavros was unsure how to initiate the conversation about his brother.

  ‘I would invite you both to sleep in the tower,’ the old man said, glancing round at his home, ‘but it isn’t very comfortable for people used to life in the city.’

  ‘It’s very fine,’ Mavros said, taking in the stone walls then turning towards the headland and the sea that lapped around it. ‘I can see why you wanted to live here. Don’t worry, we aren’t staying. There is someone else we have to see.’ He considered asking Laskaris about the Iraklis band member Babis Dhimitrakos, whose name the composer Randos had given them, but decided against it—if the old man didn�
��t want to talk about the terrorists’ leader, why would he say anything about a lesser member of the group?

  ‘You will not find the man who was Kolettis,’ the poet said, moving forward awkwardly and looking down over Tigani. Then he took a deep breath. ‘Nor will you find your brother here.’

  Mavros felt steel fingers grip his heart, taken aback that the old man was volunteering to talk about Andonis. Even though he had been preparing himself to broach the subject, he now found that he could hardly speak. ‘Andonis?’ he gasped. ‘What do you know about Andonis?’

  Kostas Laskaris took his arm and squeezed it weakly. ‘You see the promontory? The sharp rocks, the old walls?’ He turned to look at Mavros. ‘That is believed by many experts to be Castle Maïna, the most impregnable fortress in the area in the Middle Ages.’ He gazed across the causeway with its pattern of salt pans and sharp boulders. ‘Your brother went down there with Iason Kolettis.’

  The breath stopped in Mavros’s windpipe and he had to force himself to breathe, the raucous cry of a gull over the headland bringing him back to himself. ‘What?’ he stammered. ‘Andonis was here? Andonis met Kolettis?’

  ‘He did.’ Then the poet let Mavros’s arm go. ‘But I don’t know what they discussed or what resulted from their conversation.’

  ‘When was this?’ Mavros asked, trying to slow down the thoughts that were cascading through his mind.

  ‘November 1972, if my memory is correct,’ Laskaris said, poking the bush in front of them with his stick. ‘Yes, I think that is right.’

  ‘The month before Andonis disappeared,’ Mavros said, staring at the old man. ‘Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell my mother years ago?’

  Laskaris’s eyes were lowered. ‘What would have been the point? As I said, I don’t know what they discussed. I only facilitated the meeting, gave them somewhere safe to stay for a night.’

  ‘But…but what could Andonis have been doing with Kolettis?’ Mavros asked, directing the question at himself as much as at the old man. ‘None of his colleagues ever said anything about a contact with the Iraklis group.’