The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  He glanced out of the condensation-streaked window and caught a glimpse of a nondescript man behind the trunk of a eucalyptus. He seemed familiar, but Mavros couldn’t place him. Had he seen him somewhere in the town? Was he the one who’d been on the ramparts of Akronafplia above Kyra Stamatina’s street? He felt his hands go clammy. He didn’t think he was one of the armed men—this guy was short and thin—but he couldn’t be sure. When the man started to move away, Mavros forced himself to keep thinking.

  He went back to the conversation he’d had with Grace last night. Whatever game she was playing, it seemed clear that the Americans were involved in the case. Was the man part of a surveillance team? He looked outside again. This time there was no one to be seen.

  Grace was right. It was easy to become paranoid in these situations. Still, someone had definitely been on their tail in Athens so why not here? But how would they have been spotted? Had Grace been keeping in touch with whoever was watching them? Had she really cut all connections with the agency she once worked for? The case had more shadows in it than an old black-and-white horror movie. If there hadn’t been the lead to Andonis, he might have left Grace to it and headed back to the big city.

  His phone went off, making him freeze. Was this the man they’d been tracking? The number displayed on the screen was one he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Mavros,’ he said, throwing down a thousand-drachma note and moving outside quickly to ensure the signal didn’t fade.

  ‘Yes,’ came an old woman’s voice. ‘My son still hasn’t returned.’

  He sighed as he reached the other side of the road. ‘Is that you, Kyra Fedhra?’ There was no one behind the eucalyptus. ‘Yiorgos hasn’t been in touch?’ He pursed his lips, annoyed with himself for having forgotten the earlier call from the Fat Man’s mother and wondering where the hell his friend had got to. Had that been him with the Lada down in the Mani?

  Kyra Fedhra launched into a lengthy complaint about her son’s lack of respect for his family, especially his long-suffering mother, stranded in her village with no one to run errands for her. Mavros thought about the distances. It must have been about three hours’ drive from there to Kostas Laskaris’s house at Tigani, more if the bad weather had held.

  ‘Let me see what I can do,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ll call you back as soon as I know more.’ He broke the connection, storing the number she’d called from in his phone’s memory. Then he swallowed a curse. This was all he needed right now. Entering the park and sitting down by the equestrian statue of the War of Independence hero Kolokotronis, he called Directory Enquiries and, after a struggle, got through to the Ayia Kyriaki community president. The guy sounded like he’d been woken from a decade-long sleep, but he eventually gave him the number of the woman who cleaned for Kostas Laskaris.

  ‘Yes?’ The voice that answered was male.

  Mavros had been trying to work out a coherent plan of action. He explained that he was a friend of the old poet.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ the man said. He sounded young. ‘I look after the tower and drive Kyrio Kosta around.’ He sounded very proud of that. ‘Can I give him a message?’

  ‘Yes. It’s about a mutual friend of ours, Yiorgos Pandazopoulos.’ He didn’t know for a fact that the poet knew the Fat Man, but he reckoned there was a good chance they’d met in the past when they were both active in the Party. ‘I want to know if Kostas has seen him in the last couple of days.’

  There was a protracted silence. ‘All right,’ came the doubtful reply. ‘I can ask him that.’

  ‘The problem is—’ Mavros began, then changed his mind. ‘What’s your name?’

  There was another pause as the young man considered the question with typical Maniate suspicion of strangers. ‘Savvas,’ he eventually replied.

  ‘Okay, Savva,’ Mavros continued. ‘Look, this man Yiorgos, you may have seen him yourself. He’s in his fifties and, well, to be frank, he’s very fat. And bald.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I saw that person,’ Savvas said, less reluctant. ‘He was in a clapped-out Russian car.’

  ‘A red one?’

  ‘Yes. But, like you say, that was a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Shit,’ Mavros said under his breath, then pressed the phone closer to his ear. Savvas was still talking.

  ‘…lot of visitors recently. I can see the road from our house. There was a couple who came twice. A good-looking blonde woman and a guy with long hair—he looked like a real bender—’

  ‘Really?’ Mavros said, preparing to terminate the conversation.

  ‘And then there was that other man,’ Savvas said, his voice more expressive. ‘Christ and the Holy Mother, I wouldn’t have liked to meet him on a dark night. He moved like a big cat, he—’

  ‘When was this?’ Mavros interrupted.

  ‘Two days ago, again. Let me think… Yes, the couple came on Wednesday and Thursday. So the fat man came on Thursday and the other man did too. I couldn’t see so well that day because of the snow.’

  ‘Can you describe the man?’

  ‘The lion, you mean? That’s the way I see him. He was tall, wearing a dark coat and a scarf, and he came in and out of the snow like he was hunting. Gave my mother quite a fright, I can tell you.’

  ‘What age was he?’

  ‘Dunno. Not young. In his fifties, judging by the lines on his face, though his hair was black enough. He had a flashy big car, silver. Do you still want me to ask Kyrio Kosta?’

  ‘Yes. Please call me back with his answer. It’s very important.’ Mavros gave him the mobile number. ‘You haven’t seen the Lada again?’

  ‘No.’ Savvas laughed. ‘It’s probably fallen to pieces.’

  Mavros had a worse feeling than that about the car and its missing driver. He stressed the urgency again and signed off, then put the phone into his pocket.

  ‘Interesting conversation?’ Grace startled him as she came round the statue base.

  ‘Em, yes. Don’t worry. It was nothing to do with the case.’ He wanted to keep the issue of the Fat Man to himself until he heard from Laskaris.

  ‘Are you sure? You sounded very serious.’

  ‘Family matter,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ Grace demanded.

  ‘I thought you could do with the sleep.’

  She studied him dubiously. ‘How many times have I got to tell you? I want us to stick together. Let’s get some breakfast.’

  Mavros followed her towards the café he’d just left. At least the coffee wasn’t bad.

  Flora Petraki-Dearfield, wife of the former British officer, slipped into the bedroom she was sharing with him in the Palaiologos house. She had finally managed to get Geoff to go out, having asked the men to take him into Nafplion for coffee. Fortunately Dorothy hadn’t appeared so far this morning. She and Geoff were both on edge, thanks to his memoir. The women were planning on going into the town with the kids to do the last of their Christmas shopping. Any minute now she would have free run of the house. She was sure the gloomy butler wouldn’t get in her way.

  The academic books Flora had brought with her were in a pile on the floor by the dressing-table. Among them was an obscure ancient text, which had some references to a sect of Iraklis worshippers in the second century AD that she wanted to check. But not now—she had more important things on her mind.

  Then, at the very moment she had the house to herself, she felt the past extend its clutching hands and drag her to the place she had consigned to the dark…

  Flora was back in the family house in the northern suburbs of Athens, an eight-year-old in petticoats, her jet-black hair gathered in a mother-of-pearl clasp. The German occupation was in its last months, but she had never been particularly aware of it. The Sunday rides in her father’s huge American car to visit friends and relatives still went on most weekends and the food on the table was little different from that she had always been given. Since the war had begun, most days she was confined to the neoclas
sical house with its large fenced garden on the slopes of the hillside, her lessons provided by increasingly thin tutors whose jackets were worn through at the elbows and whose trouser bottoms were ragged. But she didn’t mind the exclusion. She had her pony Snow White, a barrel-shaped creature who had never been short of fodder, the stable kept perfectly turned out by the wizened old peasant who also looked after the estate’s olive trees.

  Flora’s only sadness was her mother. She had been a celebrated beauty in Athenian society before the war, a soap heiress from Zakynthos with piercing green eyes whose elegance had been refined in a Swiss finishing school. But since the Germans came, she had lost the irresistible charm she once had, her expression becoming haunted and her beautiful eyes ringed in black. She still attended receptions and parties with her banker husband, but they no longer diverted her. It seemed she had seen things that disturbed her, but when Flora asked her what was wrong she just sighed and shooed the little girl from her room.

  And although she was young, Flora had become aware of the heavy atmosphere that was around her—not just in the house but in the city on the plain below. Sometimes smoke and dust billowed up in the distance, sometimes—more and more often recently—the sounds of aircraft and exploding bombs were carried on the wind from the docks in Piraeus. She asked her father what was happening, but he only told her not to concern herself with such things, they were not for pretty creatures like her. The tutors avoided answering too, but their sunken cheeks and nervous eyes told her that something terrible was going on beyond the wire and walls around her home. That was when she started to take refuge in the myths, the stories of the ancient heroes and gods that lifted her from the pain she knew was encroaching on her life. That was when she first read about Iraklis and his glorious deeds, his unjust fate and his eventual rise to Olympus to join the immortals…

  Coming back to herself, Flora glanced around the room in the watery sunlight admitted by the half-open shutters. She located her husband’s typescript without difficulty. He thought he’d been clever by secreting it behind the antique wardrobe, but she knew exactly how his mind worked. After the Mavros daughter, Anna, had brought it back the previous evening—a curious look on her face as she announced that her mother had asked her to return what she called ‘an undesirable book’—Geoff had taken possession of it like a miser who’d lost his wallet. He had then asked Flora to give him some peace, which she’d gladly done. She had no interest in reading the dog-eared script again. She had been perusing it at her leisure ever since he’d started writing it, waiting for him to fall asleep at his desk and extracting the pages from beneath his chest every night. Once his eyes closed, they never opened for at least an hour; that was another thing she had learned about him over the years.

  Flora took the block of typed pages out of their cardboard folder and started separating them—those that mentioned Nikitas and Veta’s fathers to the right, the others to the left. Then she put the latter, the bulk of the pages, back in the folder and replaced it behind the wardrobe. The smaller pile she held in her hands for a few moments, then slid into a brown envelope. Waiting for the sounds of voices and car doors slamming to end, she went out of the room and walked silently down the corridor. After she had checked that there were no servants in the vicinity, she went into the master bedroom and put the envelope under the covers. She made sure it was in the middle of the wide bed so that it didn’t fall out unobserved when her host and hostess got in.

  Back in her own room, Flora allowed herself a smile. The die was cast. Soon the culmination of the work she’d been undertaking for years would be achieved. She pressed her hands against her thighs and regained the iron grip on her emotions that had been an integral part of her success. Then she opened her books and concentrated on Iraklis, the ancient bearer of that name. All she could think of was his final labour, the most daunting one of all: entering the death god Hades’ realm through the cave at Tainaron in the southern Peloponnese and dragging the hound of hell up to the light of day.

  As if to validate the course of action Flora had initiated, one of the watchdogs beyond the security fence gave a loud howl.

  ‘So, what are we going to do?’ Grace said as Mavros walked away from the equestrian statue towards the waterfront. ‘Spend the day waiting for the bastard to call?’

  He glanced at her, head down. ‘Lighten up, Grace.’ He stopped as a lorry laden with boxes of oranges ground up the road in front of them, the name of Palaiologos in large blue letters on its side. ‘Have you got any better ideas?’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, grabbing his arm as he set off across the wide expanse of asphalt. ‘Isn’t there someone you can call? Some other contact who might know something that could help us?’

  Mavros stood on the quayside watching the cranes on a Russian ship hoist pallets. He made out the uneven line of Arkadhia’s mountains across the gulf even though the visibility was more restricted than it had been yesterday.

  ‘I’ve already rung someone,’ he said, thinking of the message he’d sent to Kostas Laskaris via his driver. ‘We just have to wait.’ He’d been wondering about asking Lambis Bitsos if anything had broken in the big city, but had dismissed the idea—the reporter had been short with him the last time he’d called, demanding to know what had happened to the great exclusive he’d been promised. He turned, raising his shoulders, then looked beyond her. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said with a groan.

  ‘What is it?’ Grace followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Who are they?’

  Mavros swivelled his head and calculated if he had time to make a run for it. There was no chance. The open seafront provided no cover. Besides, his nephew and niece had already spotted him. They were both waving like adolescents possessed. ‘My family,’ he said, ‘and other beasts of the jungle.’

  ‘Yeia sou, Alex,’ Mavros’s nephew said, as the group approached. He and his overweight friend were regarding Grace with interest.

  ‘Yeia sou, theie,’ his sister chorused, addressing him as ‘uncle’ even though she knew he disliked it. The girl with her gave him a supercilious smile.

  ‘Hi, kids,’ Mavros replied, English being the language he always used with them on his mother’s orders. He stepped forward and kissedAnna, feeling Nondas’s hand come down on his shoulder and acknowledging his brother-in-law with a wink.

  ‘Alex, you remember Veta and Nikitas Palaiologos,’ his sister said, narrowing her eyes at him—the unspoken warning was ‘Don’t be rude to our host and hostess, even if you don’t like their politics.’ ‘And Geoffrey Dearfield? My brother Alex.’ She watched as handshakes were exchanged.

  As well as meeting the politician and her husband once at a party, Mavros had seen them often enough in the papers and on television. In real life they seemed less like wax dummies, the woman’s fleshy frame and the man’s bald head giving them an air of vulgar humanity for all their wealth. The bent old man with the limp hand was another story: he looked like a refugee or a prison camp survivor, his head bowed and his voice weak.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ Nikitas asked, giving Grace a lascivious look.

  ‘Sorry.’ Mavros ushered his client into the group with his arm. He introduced her without clarifying the nature of their relationship. ‘Where’s Mother?’ he whispered to Anna, as more greetings were exchanged.

  ‘She isn’t very well,’ his sister replied.

  ‘I know. She called me yesterday, wanting me to join you.’ He looked at her helplessly. ‘It’s a bit difficult.’ He took in a couple of burly men in suits standing a few metres behind the group. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Security guards,’ Veta Palaiologou put in. ‘Now we can’t even go for a walk without scheduling a military operation.’

  ‘You must be used to it,’ Mavros said.

  ‘In the city, yes. But down here? It’s ridiculous.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re in that line of business yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not exactly. I look for people, not after them.’


  ‘It appears you’ve found one,’ Veta said, inclining her head towards his companion. ‘Helmer. That name means something to me.’

  ‘My father was in the U.S. embassy back in the seventies,’ Grace said.

  Veta’s eyes sprang open above her puffy cheeks. ‘My God, not Trent Helmer?’ She glanced at her husband—he was making expansive movements of his arms as he tried to impress the children and Dearfield with his business operations. ‘We—we knew him. My dear, I’m so very sorry. How old were you when he…when it happened?’

  ‘Five,’ Grace replied.

  ‘It was a disgrace. Those terrorists, they are scum, and our pathetic government is doing nothing to catch them now they have started killing again.’ She gave a weak smile. ‘I’m sorry. I am a shadow minister so you must forgive my intemperance.’ Anna was following the conversation avidly, scenting a story. ‘What are you doing in Nafplion?’ she asked Grace. ‘I don’t imagine my brother is showing you the sights.’

  Mavros glared at her.

  Grace spoke before he could formulate a response. ‘I’m trying to locate the woman who looked after me back then.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘My mother died recently and I…I felt the need to reconnect with my childhood.’

  There was a silence, broken by Nikitas yelling at his son to get out of a forklift’s way.

  ‘And this woman, she is from Nafplion?’ Veta Palaiologou asked.

  ‘We thought so,’ Mavros put in, trying to help his client out with the story she’d come up with. He was impressed by the fluency of the lie. ‘But unfortunately she seems to have moved away.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help,’ Veta said. ‘I have many contacts in the area.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Grace said, ‘but we have a couple more people still to talk to.’