The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  ‘What? Yeah, I can sketch fairly well. My Ganma insisted I took lessons, even though my mother wasn’t interested in me following in her footsteps.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mavros said. ‘Here’s what we’ll do.’ He leaned forward and started to speak in a low voice.

  Kostas Laskaris tried to concentrate, his head bowed over the table. The terrorist’s second visit had troubled him more than the first, the blood on his gloves a reminder of the savage struggle he was involved in. He wished he’d had the courage to ask Iraklis what had happened to Andonis Mavros after their meeting down on the promontory all those years ago. But there had always been silences between them, since the time when Iraklis was a boy and Laskaris had kept a watchful eye over him at his grandmother’s house in Kitta. Even now, the assassin hadn’t asked him about his father, hadn’t gone over the last time the poet had seen Kapetan Iraklis in the war. And now Laskaris had put Alex Mavros and the American woman on to Stamatina. What had possessed him? Some irrational guilt about the brother who had disappeared? It was all too late, all futile.

  Although he didn’t have the energy to climb to the room at the top of the tower—the pain in his belly was such that he could hardly even get to the toilet on the ground floor—the inert body that had been dragged up there was making him feel like a stranger in his own home. When would the struggle be over? he asked himself, no sound coming from his chapped lips. He clenched his fists and forced himself back to the war. To the time in early 1944 when there was still a sliver of hope…

  Kapetan Iraklis and his band of ELAS fighters undertook many labours in Lakonia in the final winter of the occupation. As the Germans’ grip on the Peloponnese loosened, the guerrillas came down from the mountain, confining the occupiers and the collaborationist Security Battalions to the main towns. There were several skirmishes around Sparta, culminating in a bloody assault on the medieval fortified town of Mystras where detachments of the enemy were holed up.

  The poet groaned when he thought of the battle. He didn’t know it at the time, but that was when the last innocence was burned from his soul: it had risen up into the still air with the cordite fumes and the smoke from the grenade blasts that hung in a black cloud against the snow on Taygetos’s upper flanks.

  ‘Come, Kosta,’ Iraklis said with a wide smile, from the line of trees beneath the lower gate of the old enclosure. ‘It is time for you to be my faithful helper again.’

  ‘How many more times must I perform that role, my captain?’ he asked, unable to resist returning the smile, then ducking his head as a burst of machine-gun fire ricocheted from the track a few metres in front of them.

  ‘Not many,’ Iraklis replied, his wispy beard filled with shreds of vegetation from the crawl they had made through the undergrowth. There were also breadcrumbs from the hurried meal they had taken in the village below. He glanced along the line of fighters, their tattered uniforms supplemented with sheepskins and scarves they’d been handed by sympathetic locals. ‘Comrade Stamatina, Comrade Dino, are you ready?’

  The hard-faced woman nodded as she slipped off the safety catch of the machine pistol she had taken from a dead German. ‘Ready, my captain.’ Her expression lightened for a moment as she caught his eye.

  ‘Me too,’ said the youth, his cheeks rosy and smooth but his eyes glinting mercilessly. They had seen many horrors since the massacre at the place of slaughter. He was clutching a British Army-issue Lee Enfield, a well-honed bayonet fixed beneath the rifle’s muzzle.

  Iraklis took in the rest of the unit, some behind him and others lined up to the north and south to stretch the defenders. Then he leaned across and squeezed Kostas’s arm. ‘Courage, my friend. We will prevail.’ He smiled again, then raised his arm, stood up and shouted the advance. His cry was repeated by all the fighters.

  The poet couldn’t remember the latter part of the battle. Usually he could recall every scene, every enemy he had encountered, every man he had killed. But this time was different, this time the blood-lust rained over him in a red deluge and he became a heartless killer. Because Iraklis was hit in the first moments of the assault on the gate, his upper body jerking back like a marionette’s before he crumpled to the ground.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he yelled, getting back to his feet before anyone could reach him, a dark stain spreading across his right shoulder. ‘To the walls, comrades.’ And he staggered onwards, firing his Schmeisser with his left hand, shoving away any fighter who tried to help him.

  Kostas Laskaris lost his hearing, the sound of gunfire and the shell blasts disappearing from his ears to be replaced by a loud rushing like the sea breaking over sharp rocks. He got to the barricaded gate, the grenade that looped from his arm blowing a hole in the old wood. A helmeted German’s face dissolved in a spray of red when he pressed the trigger of his submachine-gun. He saw Dinos dash ahead of him, hacking through the debris with his bayonet and breaking the first line of defence. Then Stamatina was at his side, her lips drawn back to reveal blackened teeth. They cleared the gate together and found Dinos standing over a battalionist in a kilt, repeatedly burying the bayonet in his fellow countryman’s chest.

  Stamatina slapped his arm and pointed ahead to show him there were plenty more to be dealt with. Then a gash suddenly opened up on the left side of her face, blood welling like a mountain spring. Her eyes met the poet’s for a second, then she stormed on, firing from the hip. The walls and buildings of the medieval town were lined with enemy soldiers, the flash of their guns lighting up the drab stonework. He looked back and saw Iraklis standing by the gate, his head against its shattered post. His kapetanios waved him on with his good arm. Then Kostas Laskaris was consumed by the slaughter.

  He came back to himself in the late afternoon, sitting beneath a large, open-roofed ruin that must once have been a palace. He blinked and took in the grey sky and the skeins of cloud high above, then realised he could hear again. Small birds were chirping outside the old building and there was no sound of gunfire. He got to his feet unsteadily and walked outside, his weapon in his hand. When he checked it, he realised that the magazine was empty, as were his pockets and belt pouches. His Italian Army revolver had been completely discharged too.

  ‘Bravo, Comrade Kosta. You survived.’

  He turned his head and saw Dinos running down from a red-tiled church. Floating above him was the curved wall of the fortress on the summit of the hill. In one hand was his rifle and in the other a bulging, discoloured sack.

  ‘What’s in there, Dino?’ he asked, suddenly aware that he was desperately hungry. ‘Something to eat?’

  The youth stopped beside him and opened the sack. ‘No,’ he said with a grimace. ‘I found these in the stinking collaborators’ command post. They must be our boys.’

  The poet had swallowed back bile as he made out a pair of severed heads with black hair. ‘Take them to the kapetanios,’ he said.

  ‘I have already avenged them five times over.’ Dinos arched an eyebrow. ‘What’s the matter? I saw you kill many of the pigs too.’

  Laskaris walked away without replying, stopping to retch on to the cobbles. He was thinking of Iraklis’s second labour, when the hero had cut off the Hydra’s many heads. The myth had become reality, the horror never-ending.

  Down at the gate among the corpses he found Comrade Stamatina, a field dressing on her cheek and a wild look in her eyes. She wouldn’t speak to him.

  ‘Where’s Kapetan Iraklis?’ he asked the men by the gate. ‘Is he alive?’

  They pointed down the track and he ran to the huddle of fighters, pushing his way through them.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Kosta,’ Iraklis said. He was propped up against a low wall, a medic working on his shoulder. ‘I hoped you would escape unscathed. We have won a great victory.’ The group muttered in approval. ‘We have driven the enemy from the city that was once a Byzantine stronghold, held by the noble Palaiologi. We have proved ourselves worthy of our ancestors.’

  The poet turned away, dread smotheri
ng him like a shroud. They had won a victory, but at what cost? They had become monsters, they were no better than the fascist oppressors. What was left of the struggle for a just society?

  Shortly afterwards the ELAS band received orders to move to Argolidha. A few days later they heard that the Germans and the Security Battalionists had retaken Mystra.

  *

  Mavros stood behind the church of Ayios Spyridhon. In the square beyond, beneath a tall tree with a bust of a local writer, Grace was sitting with her scarf raised over the lower part of her face. They’d been lucky. The skies had cleared and the temperature was considerably higher than it had been yesterday. Walking from the hotel to the town centre earlier, he had seen the snow on the mountains across the bay. The high roads would still be treacherous, but down here by the sea it was almost balmy. Nafplion was a charming town, one of the most beautiful in Greece. By daylight, the fortifications of Palamidhi were even more impressive, the russet-grey walls rising up from the sheer hill like great dams in a complicated geometric arrangement. A partially covered staircase zigzagged up from the huddle of houses in the historical section of the town like a vein through the flank of bare rock. The seafront was that of a working port, cargo vessels alongside loading pallets full of oranges. And out in the bay a small island in the shape of a submarine floated on the bright blue water, its miniature castle—where the Turks had housed their hated executioners—standing up like a conning tower.

  Grace leaned forward and shaded in a section of her drawing. At first she had resisted Mavros’s demand that she sit drawing in the open air to keep watch on the old woman’s street, but he eventually prevailed. He wanted to confirm that she bore the name Kostas Laskaris had attributed to her before he went any further.

  Mavros moved round and glanced up the narrow lane. There were fortifications above it, but their warlike appearance was diminished by the multicoloured clothes that had been strung between the houses to dry. Stamatina Kastania lived at number three, but he hadn’t been up to examine the door. Better to keep clear in case the assassin was already there, and study everyone who came up or down the steps of Potamianou. So far there had only been a couple of children wrapped up like Michelin men and a young man who gave Grace a shameless stare. The lack of action had given her the opportunity to use the pencil and pad Mavros had bought at a nearby stationery shop lower down, resting her backside on a plastic crate they’d found on the corner.

  Mavros watched from the shadows of the church wall. Grace stopped drawing only momentarily when a middle-aged man walked up the street towards the lane. The guy was tall and thin, wearing an expensive green wool coat and a blue sailor’s cap. He also had sunglasses over his eyes, which made Mavros suspicious. But the man passed Grace with a nod and a smile, then opened up a shop further on. No dice.

  Then Mavros heard a noise from a door halfway up Potamianou. Looking out of the corner of his eye, he saw an old woman in black walk stiffly down the steps. She must once have been tall, but now she was bent, a black scarf over her silver hair. She reached the bottom and stood to catch her breath. Then she hobbled over to Grace and examined her work. ‘Ochi poly kalo,’ she said dismissively, and headed down towards the town centre. There was a deep scar on her left cheek.

  Mavros swallowed a smile—the judgement was that Grace’s drawing wasn’t much good—and set off to tail the old woman. Until he returned, his client was on her own.

  Flora Petraki-Dearfield looked across the bedroom at her husband. She could tell that he hadn’t slept well. She knew it without taking in his listless form and hanging head: Geoff hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since he’d started writing his memoir.

  ‘Come on, you’ll miss breakfast,’ she said, making her voice as gentle as she could. The fact was that she had lost patience with her husband long ago. She had been young when she met him after the war and although she had never been impressionable—her father’s piercing gaze and sharp intelligence had been passed on to her, giving her the ability to see through people and their pretensions within minutes of meeting them—she had realised that the English war hero offered a means of escape from the bitter household she had grown up in. But she hadn’t expected Geoff to resign himself to a mediocre position as foreign adviser to a company run by rapacious Greeks after he’d lost his seat at Westminster. It was as if the fight had gone out of him. It was only when he fell in with the Americans in the early sixties that he had found himself again. He had contacts in the intelligence world and in the Greek armed forces from his time as a so-called observer during the civil war, and he had used them to attain an influential behind-the-scenes role before and during the dictatorship. Only recently had she realised how much guilt he had been harbouring about his past.

  Dearfield got up, then sat down on the bed in his pyjamas as if exhausted by the effort. ‘I don’t want anything to eat. If you could ask them to send up a flask of coffee…’ He kept his eyes off her. ‘I can’t face all those people.’

  ‘What did Dorothy say?’ Flora asked, stepping closer. ‘Is she going to publish your book?’ Her husband didn’t answer, still avoiding her gaze. ‘Geoff,’ she said, ‘it’s all in the past now, it doesn’t matter any more. Why don’t—’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he interrupted. ‘Leave me alone, damn you!’

  She jerked back, surprised by his vehemence. ‘Very well,’ she said.

  Down in the dining room, Anna and Veta were trying to inspire the children, who had stayed up late into the night and resented being forced to sit round the table. There was no sign of Dorothy or of the two husbands.

  ‘My mother is still feeling tired from the drive,’ Anna explained, after greetings were exchanged, the women’s ‘kali mera’ warmer than the children’s—they regarded Flora with suspicion because of the impending excursion.

  ‘And our men have gone down to the ships that Nikitas has loading in Nafplion,’ Veta said. ‘What about Geoff?’

  ‘Working,’ Flora said. ‘He asked for coffee to be sent up.’ As the order was relayed to the impassive butler, she thought about the lie. Her husband’s mania with his memoir had shut him off from her, but still she was making excuses for him. The truth was that the book had her in thrall too.

  When everyone had finished eating, Veta clapped her hands. ‘Right,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The weather is better today.’ She looked out of the window. ‘The sun is shining, so we are all going to the ruins as planned. We are fortunate to have an expert in our company. Kyria Flora will be our guide.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Veta’s son Prokopis mumbled, glancing at Anna’s Lakis for support. ‘We were going to play Mythical Monsters on my computer.’

  His mother gave him a fierce look. ‘I’m sure you’ll find out all you need to know about those on our trip.’

  Flora smiled at the boy across the array of cereal packets on the table. ‘You know that Tiryns was the birthplace of Iraklis, don’t you, Prokopi?’

  The teenager scowled. ‘I thought he was born in Thebes.’

  ‘There are versions of the myth that say that,’ she countered patiently, ‘but Tiryns is more convincing in my opinion. I’ll tell you why when we get down there.’

  The children didn’t look any more enthusiastic, but Veta and Anna herded them out to get ready. Flora finished her coffee, wondering what she’d let herself in for. Her students at the university were more interested in modern history than the ancient myths, but at least they didn’t challenge her so insolently. She checked that she was unobserved, then went into the empty sitting room where she took out her mobile phone, made a call and spoke for a short time. Then she walked out, her face expressionless.

  They made the short drive down from the hillside in two cars, Flora taking the sniggering boys in the old Rover and Veta the others in her Land Cruiser. The snow on the peaks of Arkadhia to the southwest was glinting in the sunlight, the sky pale blue, blotched with thinning clouds. From above, the acropolis was an extended oval, like an aged ship whose hull ha
d been battered and broken by the elements. And then, as they came down on to the plain and cut through the orange groves, the vastness of the walls became apparent and any impression of weakness disappeared. The stones of the great fortifications were huge and, even though they hadn’t been at their full height for centuries, they still looked impregnable, a bastion against time and decay.

  The ticket-seller waved Veta’s party through with a subservient smile and Flora led them up the incline to the entrance gate. The initially wide ramp narrowed when it turned back on itself and forced anyone seeking entry into a cramped space between steep walls. Now Prokopis and Lakis were silent. Even the girls curtailed their discussion of pony breeds in the forbidding enclosure. It didn’t take much imagination to realise the slaughter that must have taken place here in ancient times, but Flora hammered the point home all the same. In her opinion the young weren’t made sufficiently aware of the violence that underpinned so-called civilisation. Then they came up on to the flat floor of the palace, a few lines of low stone being all that remained of the royal chambers.

  ‘In these rooms, if the myth is to be believed,’ she said, giving Prokopis a tight smile, ‘the great Peloponnesian hero Iraklis was born. Appropriately enough, you might say, for such a powerful man. For the walls of this fortress were believed to have been built by giants, the one-eyed Cyclops. Only they were capable of lifting such huge rocks. Until the great hero came along.’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Anna said. ‘How did the real builders manoeuvre the massive stones?’

  ‘They used slaves,’ Flora replied tersely. ‘The Mycenaean regime was an élite military one, based on subjection and coercion. The ordinary people lived on the plain around the citadel, unprotected from any sudden attack.’

  Veta laughed, her cheeks still red from the effort of hauling her bulk up the ramp. ‘You’re almost sounding like a socialist, Flora.’