The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  Iraklis shaved and showered, unperturbed by the low temperature of the water that came from the hot taps. Then, checking that the door was double-locked, he opened his bag and spread out the contents on the bed. Apart from the silenced Glock, which he had taken with him to the bathroom and now rested by his thigh, his weaponry consisted of a double-edged hunting knife that he had picked up in an outdoor-activities shop in Athens, and three pen-shaped explosive devices that had been delivered to the first hotel he’d gone to in the capital. He wondered if the person pretending to be him had used something similar on the investor Stasinopoulos in the concert hall—the newspapers hadn’t been specific about the bomb. Was the impostor the man he had seen near Babis Dhimitrakos’s body?

  The terrorist ran his eye past the small pile of clothes to the remaining items he had taken out. Two books. A thick guide to the Peloponnese in Greek that he had used to navigate his way around the back roads of the Mani and an anthology of Kostas Laskaris’s work. He hadn’t told the old man, but over the years those poems had become for him what the Holy Writ was to a monk—inspiration, comfort in hard times, a model of how to live. They were also a source of melancholic nostalgia for his homeland. He smiled as he had many times in the attic in Queens. What would the hard men in the construction gangs have thought of a colleague who read leftist poetry in his free time? But it was his secret solace, his only distraction—even though it was no diversion from the woman he had loved.

  Iraklis clenched his fists to dispel the image of her and opened the anthology. The house plan he had drawn after the latest phone call to his controller was between pages in the section marked Stichi, Song Lyrics. As he took out the folded sheets, he saw the lines of the song called ‘The Voyage of the Argo’, and the haunting melody flooded his ears. He had heard it for the first time in years in a café in Chicago where he had gone for a break a couple of months ago—back in Queens he avoided the kafeneia and tavernas in case he was seen by anyone who had known him in the home country or who was on his trail. That song, one of Dhimitris Randos’s most emotional, had brought unexpected tears to his eyes. He had seen the newspapers. The composer had fallen to his death and he was sure some anti-Communist bastard had killed him. But was there a connection to the other killings—a connection to him? He would have to watch his back even more carefully than he used to in the old days.

  He unfolded the papers, shaking his head to dispel the tune. This was it, the end game, the culmination of years when he had lost hope that the people who had rubbed his father from history would ever be identified. His controller had finally put the pieces together and he had to be sure of the plan: he had to memorise the location where he would finally rid himself of the family obligation he had been carrying from birth.

  The house was a problem—fences and alarm systems all round, guards, security doors and windows, and people, too many people, children as well. There was a risk that the target would be obscured by innocent bystanders. But that kind of risk had never been a problem for him in the past. Why was he so reluctant to consider the possibility of accidental deaths? Had he got soft from living in the belly of the beast?

  Iraklis studied the drawings for an hour, making refinements to his plan of action. Then he packed up his gear, locked the case and went downstairs without showing his face to the morning clerk. She was talking on the phone and did not break off. It was as he was walking to a car-rental office he had noticed the night before that his mobile was activated. As usual, he had it set on vibrate mode. Stopping in a doorway, he gave a monosyllabic answer. It was his mother. He confirmed that he was close and that he would be at the house late in the evening. She sounded as severe as always, but there was a waver in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. She was finally nearing the end of her long road.

  In an instant he was back in his childhood, seeing again the woman he had learned only in his sixth year to call Mother. It was the autumn day that she had reappeared in Kitta. He was nine years old and he was playing outside, wearing only a tattered pair of shorts and a vest, rolling in the dust with the mangy dog his grandmother tolerated in the yard behind the old tower. The sun had been blinding, glinting off the grey stone buildings and the purple-blue sea beyond Tigani. He blinked, then looked up at the figure that had materialised before him, blouse and skirt covered in dust and shoes scuffed. The woman was carrying an old suitcase tied with fraying string. She was tall, her black hair threaded with white and, although the skin of her face was not leathery like the old woman’s, she looked almost as worn out. He stared at the great gash in her cheek, the edges of it pitted by irregular dots and lines.

  ‘My son.’ Her voice rang out like a trumpet, the harsh sound echoing around the enclosed space.

  ‘Stand up, Michali,’ his grandmother said. He felt the old woman’s hand on his crew cut scalp. ‘Stand up, my boy. This is your—’

  ‘I remember her,’ he interrupted. ‘Are you coming home to stay, Mama?’ The unfamiliar word fell from his lips like a stone.

  The woman knelt in front of him, her eyes burning into his. Then she glanced at the case she still held and let it drop to the stony ground. ‘My son,’ she said, her face coming close enough for him to take in broken teeth and smell rancid breath. She took him by the shoulders and for a moment he thought she was going to shake him. But she held him still, her dark eyes dry. ‘We called you Michalis after my father when I gave birth to you behind the wire at Trikeri, but to me you will always be Iraklis.’ She blinked, her eyes dry. ‘Even though he left me unprotected, condemned me to years on the prison islands, my child taken from me.’ Her expression softened. ‘At least the comrades managed to slip you away from the camp and send you secretly to this house.’ Her face hardened again as she looked up to the sky. ‘Ach, my captain, was everything we gave for this? A lifetime of toil and blood for a puny, lice-ridden creature?’

  ‘Who is Iraklis?’ the boy heard himself say. ‘Where is he?’

  His mother gave a bitter laugh. ‘Who is Iraklis? He was a teacher, a fighter, a great leader. And now I hope he has gone to a better place.’ She trembled, then regained control. ‘I lost him behind the barbed wire. When I…when I woke in my agony he was gone. No one would tell me where he was, the cowards. I escaped from imprisonment to seek him as I have donenow, but there was no trace.’ She stood up and spok eover his head again. ‘I cannot stay, Mother,’ she said to the old woman behind. ‘They must not find me here. Look after the boy for me. Look after Michalis.’ She bent down to pick up her case.

  ‘I am not puny,’ he said, unsure what the word meant. ‘And my grandmother combs the lice out every Sunday.’

  His mother laughed again, this time less harshly. ‘That’s good, Michali,’ she said, standing up and turning away without touching him or catching his eye.

  ‘I will become a great fighter,’ he called after her. ‘Like our Iraklis.’

  The woman stood still for a moment, then strode off. He thought he heard a stifled sob, but he couldn’t be sure.

  And now, in Argos, as he went to hire a car, Iraklis found there were other things he couldn’t be sure about. Had he really told the woman he loved about the place he was from one afternoon? Had she told him she was going to paint a picture of Kitta that would rend the heart of every person who saw it?

  It seemed that things were becoming blurred and insubstantial. If he wasn’t careful the dead woman whose name he’d been unable to say for decades would finish him. The love they had shared was like a time bomb that had been counting down since the last time he had seen her outside the apartment building in Athens, her doomed husband on his knees before them.

  Iraklis forced away the image. He had to fulfil his obligation and get away from Greece before he lost himself for good.

  ‘How are we going to handle this?’ Grace asked. They were sitting in the small café near the old woman’s street where they’d arranged to meet.

  Mavros took a sip of unsweetened coffee. ‘Well, we’ve already estab
lished that you’re a keen amateur artist.’

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said, frowning. ‘You want me to go up on the ramparts and do a few more drawings while you sneak off and do whatever it is you do behind my back.’ She banged her cup down on the saucer. ‘Am I paying you or not? I want us to stick together.’

  ‘All right. I was going to keep you company anyway,’ he said with a loose smile. ‘You haven’t got a mobile so we can’t keep in touch.’ He pointed to the street map of Nafplion in her guidebook. ‘There’s a path down from the fortifications that comes out at the top of Potamianou, so if we see anyone suspicious I can get down quickly enough to tail him. I shouldn’t think Kyra Stamatina will venture out again. Women of her generation tend to stay inside as much as they can during the winter.’

  Grace looked at him dubiously. ‘All right.’ She signalled to the waiter. ‘Let’s get going then.’

  While she was paying Mavros’s phone rang.

  ‘Alex?’ came his mother’s voice. ‘Where are you?’ She sounded out of sorts.

  ‘Em, in Nafplion. Are you at the Palaiologos house?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were close by? Will you come and join us? It’s nearly Christmas and, to tell you the truth, I’m not feeling very well.’

  Mavros raised a hand to Grace and sat down again. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It—it wasn’t a very nice drive down yesterday and—’ Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou broke off.

  ‘And?’ His mother knew plenty of ways to exert emotional pressure.

  ‘And there’s something else, dear. You know Geoffrey Dearfield? Yes, of course you do, we were talking about him only a few days ago. Well, I’ve finished his manuscript and it’s…it’s quite awful, especially at the end. I don’t know what to say to—’

  ‘Mother, I have to go,’ Mavros interrupted, nodding to his client. ‘I’ll see if I have time to come up to the house. I’m sure you’ll find a way to break the bad news to Dearfield.’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ Dorothy began. ‘The problem is—’

  ‘Got to go. Bye, Mother,’ he said, breaking the connection.

  Grace’s expression was questioning. ‘Your mother? What was her problem?’

  He followed her out. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, wondering if he’d been too abrupt with Dorothy. She was occasionally querulous, but this time she seemed almost fearful of talking to Dearfield. He told himself that Anna would look after her. ‘She’s spending Christmas at a house not far from here,’ he explained.

  ‘You should go and see her,’ Grace said. ‘After we’ve finished.’

  He saw the strain in her face. One or both of the armed men would be hot on their heels, he was sure. Now that they were waiting for the man she’d seen kill her father to show up at his mother’s house, the tension must be getting to her. He was feeling it too, the conversation with his mother only serving to bring back the case’s link to Andonis more vividly. What kind of a Christmas present would it be for his family if he found out what his brother had been doing in the month before his disappearance? The idea that it might be something that tied Andonis to the terrorists filled him with trepidation.

  They found a track that led up to the battlements of Akronafplia, the great diagonal walls of Palamidhi hanging above them. The lower citadel was less spectacular, its walls and foundations bisected by a twisting asphalt road. They crossed a fence and made their way to the fortifications. There was a hole in the wall above Potamianou. The spot was sheltered from the breeze, which was fresher on the raised ground.

  ‘The guidebook goes along with what you said about there being a prison up here,’ Grace said, not bothering to take out her sketch pad. There was no one else in the vicinity.

  ‘Glad you believed me,’ Mavros said ironically. ‘There were plenty of old buildings around the country for any regime that was keen on repression. Akronafplia was used by the dictator Metaxas to confine Communists in the thirties. The prisons here were used all the way through the civil war. Even though they’ve been demolished, they’re in the collective memory of the country—there have been songs and poems written about them.’

  ‘By Randos and Laskaris?’

  ‘Probably. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but Kostas is bound to have used his own experience of them in his writing.’

  ‘He was locked up here?’ she asked, her eyes widening.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘And so was my father.’

  Before he could say any more about Spyros, his mobile rang again. The caller was Kyra Fedhra, the Fat Man’s mother, wondering if Mavros had seen her son in the last couple of days.

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I’m in the Peloponnese.’

  ‘So are we,’ the old woman replied. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You’re in Lakonia, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am,’ she replied brusquely. ‘But who knows where Yiorgos is? He left the day before yesterday. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going, but I have a feeling he was heading for the Mani to see that poet who writes the songs on the radio. I heard him mention his name on the telephone the day before we left Athens.’

  There were furrows on Mavros’s brow. ‘Why would he—’ He stopped, gazing down over the array of vehicles parked down by the bus station. ‘Kyra Fedhra, what kind of car was he driving?’

  ‘Oh, he borrowed some heap of junk,’ came the hoarse reply. ‘One of those Russian things.’

  ‘A Lada?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘A kind of dirty red, like a steak that’s hung too long.’ The old woman paused. ‘Why? Have you seen it?’

  ‘Em, no,’ Mavros said. ‘Don’t worry, Kyra Fedhra, Yiorgos will be back soon, I’m sure. Call me again tomorrow if he isn’t.’

  ‘Very well,’ she agreed, and hung up.

  Mavros put his phone back into his pocket, trying to make sense of what he’d just learned. Could that have been the Fat Man’s car on the track beyond the turning to Laskaris’s house at Tigani? If so, why hadn’t he been inside with the poet? Could he have been in the tower but hiding from Mavros? That didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Problems?’ Grace asked, her eyes on the lane below.

  Mavros chewed the inside of his cheek. The idea that the Fat Man might have been near him and avoided contact disturbed him almost as much as the imminent arrival of the assassin. He had often thought that if he couldn’t trust Yiorgos Pandazopoulos, devoted comrade of both his father and his brother, then the world and everything in it was lost. Had it come to that?

  The politician Veta Dhragoumi-Palaiologou was lying on the king-size bed, her eyes on the dark wooden beams that ran across the ceiling. Even in winter she felt the need of a rest in the afternoons. When she was younger, she had tried to keep her weight under control—diets, exercise, nutritionists, even a charlatan of a Swiss hypnotist—but in recent years she had given up the struggle. It was another gift to the government’s tame political cartoonists, who portrayed her as the elephant of the Right or as a phantom menace threatening to wrap the country in her fatal free-market embrace. That pleased her as it showed she had them on the run. But in the last few weeks she’d been uneasy, despite the Left’s manifest disarray. The terrorist killings of the businessmen had been a gift to the opposition, providing clear evidence of the government’s weakness—the fact that some of the cabinet had been left-wing activists when the Iraklis group first came to prominence during the dictatorship meant that they were tainted by association. It should have been an optimistic time for her party, but Veta wasn’t happy.

  Part of the problem was her house guests. What was going on with Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou and Geoff Dearfield? It was bad enough having to cope with the kids’ unpredictable behaviour—the boys veering between surliness and a boisterous disregard for anyone else, the girls desperately seeking attention; having to put up with a pair of elderly people who seemed suddenly in
capable of speaking to each other was the last straw. At lunch they had both looked pale and drawn. Anna had tried to engage them in conversation, but they were as monosyllabic as her son was during the run-up to exams every term. Veta had stared at her husband, trying to get him involved, but Nikitas was too busy discussing the Black Sea’s business potential with Nondas to notice.

  Veta swung her legs off the bed when she realised that she wasn’t going to sleep. She went downstairs, catching a glimpse of a muscle-bound security man beyond the fence. What was the matter with Nikitas? The house and grounds had more alarms than the prime minister’s residence. She was a senior politician, but she only had one bodyguard. Nikitas had employed three—one a brainless woman—and she was pretty sure they weren’t for her benefit. What kind of dirty deals had he been sticking his fingers in?

  ‘Ah, there you are, Anna,’ she said, when she went into the sitting room. ‘Has Loudhovikos offered you anything to drink?’ Her guest looked up from a magazine and shook her head. Veta sighed. ‘That butler is hopeless. He’s forever disappearing. I should never have employed him. He came highly recommended by a friend of Flora’s.’ She looked around. ‘Where are the children?’

  ‘The men took them for a drive,’ Anna replied. ‘They said something about playing football on the beach at Tolo.’

  ‘The girls will love that,’ Veta said, easing her bulk into an armchair. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Resting. Sleeping, I hope. I’m sorry, she’s behaving very strangely. I don’t know what’s got into her.’

  ‘Do you think they’ve had an argument about Geoff’s script?’

  Anna smoothed the fabric of her silk blouse. ‘Maybe. It’s not Mother’s way. She’s usually very good with would-be authors.’

  ‘Perhaps my husband wrote something that insulted her.’