The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  The politician gave her a thoughtful look. ‘Well, if you’re sure…’ She moved away towards her family, a security guard close behind.

  ‘Quite a coincidence, your being down here, Alex,’ Anna said. ‘I hope your case has nothing to do with the Palaiologos family.’

  Mavros stared at her. ‘With the Palaiologos family? No. Why should it?’

  Anna drew closer. ‘Veta rather understated her standing in Argolidha. Her and Nikitas’s families have run the place for decades. I get the impression that nothing goes on around here without her knowing about it.’ She pointed at the ships and trucks. ‘Look at all this, for a start.’

  ‘We’re only trying to find a retired nanny,’ Grace put in.

  ‘Are you really?’ Anna said, her tone suggesting how much credence she gave that. ‘Come up to the house later, Alex,’ she said. ‘Mother wants to see you.’

  ‘I’m working, Anna,’ he insisted.

  ‘I can see that,’ his sister said, and went to join the others.

  ‘Why the lie about your nanny?’ Mavros asked.

  Grace ignored the question, her eyes on Veta and her husband. ‘Who are those people? She said they knew my father.’

  Veta Palaiologou’s voice carried to them across the asphalt. ‘We’re going for coffee, if you’d like to join us.’ It was more of a command than an invitation.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mavros shouted back. ‘We’re meeting someone.’ He didn’t want to be overheard if the terrorist rang.

  ‘Come up to the house in the evening, then. I’ll expect the two of you for dinner.’ The politician turned away, her demeanour and Anna’s look making it clear that another refusal was out of the question.

  ‘Christ,’ Mavros said. ‘Families.’

  Grace looked unconcerned. ‘Maybe we’ll have heard from our man before then. Even if we haven’t, going there might keep our minds occupied. How far away is the house?’

  ‘Not far. Five kilometres at the most.’

  ‘Fine. We can get back here quickly enough if we have to.’ She nudged him. ‘Have you done your Christmas shopping, Alex? Only two days to go. Tonight will be an ideal opportunity to hand over your gifts.’

  ‘I hate Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘I’ll help.’

  ‘Anyway, we can’t,’ he protested. ‘We have to go in search of your old nanny.’

  Grace jabbed her elbow into his ribs. ‘What did you expect me to say? Actually, we’re looking for the guy who killed my father and is currently assassinating prominent businessmen?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he replied, wondering if his client had experience of assuming false identities from her time in the CIA.

  He watched as the group filed into a classy café. Geoffrey Dearfield was hanging back, his head still down. Mavros remembered what his mother had said about the old man’s book and wondered if that was why he looked like a prisoner on Death Row.

  That thought made him glance up at the ramparts of Akronafplia. Many Communists had been executed after the war in the now demolished prison. The town where Veta and Nikitas Palaiologos held sway might be one of the most attractive in Greece, but it had been a place of slaughter in the recent past. The ancient hero Iraklis had been born nearby too. Would those aspects of the town make his modern counterpart feel at home?

  *

  Iraklis drove across the plain of Argos in the four-by-four he had hired, keeping to the back roads that cut the orange groves into regular shapes. Groups of defeated-looking men were walking up the asphalt, modern equivalents of the slaves and bondsmen who had cultivated the land since prehistoric times. Under the Ottoman Empire, droves of Albanians had come down to the fertile land of the Peloponnese and, until recently, the local dialect, with many traces of their native language, had been widely spoken. The men he was passing—a new generation of Albanians, but also Russians, Bulgarians, the dispossessed of the Balkans—were doing the jobs that Greeks no longer lowered themselves to carry out. Or so his mother had told him in the letters she occasionally sent via an intermediary, an old comrade in exile in the Caucasus, to the apartment in Queens.

  He drove through a small village and followed the road up to an old monastery. He left the car about a hundred metres from the building with its red-tiled dome and struck out over the foothills of Mount Arachnaio. The vegetation was damp, but there was a goat track and his feet didn’t get too wet.

  As he walked, he thought about his mother. She had kept her faith, both in the Stalinist ideals she had grown up with (none of the pallid trash peddled by the modern Party for her) and in her son. They hadn’t met for nearly eleven years, when he was first becoming suspicious of his fellow terrorists. He had come down to Nafplion from the city to visit her. His stepfather had recently died and he had wondered how she would be, but there was no sign of grief. She was still a striking woman, though her hair was now heavily streaked with silver and the scar on her cheek was as prominent as ever. He’d even wondered if she used makeup to emphasise it; she was like a Soviet war veteran sporting campaign medals every day. She didn’t ask him about the Iraklis group’s activities, though she knew he was involved in it—she knew enough about clandestine activities to keep her distance. She was proud of him; she told him never to give up the struggle and to remember that his father was the greatest hero of them all.

  It all came back to his father. The ELAS kapetanios had suffered on these very hills, along with his fighters and countless other comrades who had made the final sacrifice in the wars and against the bullet-pocked walls of the prisons. But no one knew exactly what had happened to him, not even his mother. She had lost contact with him at the very end and he had disappeared into the void. Now, at last, the assassin was about to find out who had despatched him there and the debt of family honour would be repaid.

  Iraklis came over a ridge, then pulled back a few yards. There it was, the building he had come to inspect. An ugly block like a factory or a warehouse, the modern extensions that had been built against the sides alleviating the ugliness only slightly. The Palaiologos house. He took out his binoculars and focused on the lower walls, registering the metal posts between which barbed wire was strung and the lights, turned on even during daytime. It wouldn’t have been so different when his mother had been here in the war. There were guards and dogs then as well, though no electronic alarms. He took the plan from his pocket and checked the locations of the sensors. It wouldn’t be easy to get in unobserved, but he knew he could do it—and get out again too. He swung the binoculars round and picked up the road that led down from the house to the walls of ancient Tiryns.

  He confirmed the line of the smaller track on the other side of the citadel that he planned to use on the way in, then moved back behind the ridge. Tiryns. When he was a kid, he’d paid little attention to ancient myths and heroes. From the time he first saw his mother, he had concentrated on modern history, pestering his grandmother and his teachers to tell him about the war. He had earned himself many beatings at school and in the streets of Kitta—most of the adults wanted to pretend the civil strife that followed the Axis occupation had never happened. There was a collective amnesia that spread even to his grandmother, though she did let slip some things about his mother and his wretched, murdered aunt. The rest he found out from Kostas Laskaris, when the poet returned to the Mani to refurbish his family’s tower. He was the one who had spoken about his father, the idealistic schoolmaster who had been transformed into the master-tactician and guerrilla captain known as Iraklis. Laskaris had wept when he had spoken about his leader, and the assassin had finally discovered that they had been friends from boyhood—friends and maybe more than friends before his mother had got involved. When he was old enough, the poet had taken him up to the place of slaughter and told him what had happened during the war.

  He stood up and started to walk back to the car. Soon it would be dark and he would make his way to the tiny ground-floor flat in the steep lane to see
the old woman one last time. Then he would go to the Palaiologos house and regain his family’s lost honour according to the traditions of the harsh land where he had been reared. His father had been betrayed at the last, he was sure of that—just as he had been. Since he was a boy, he had felt the need to avenge his father. That urge had been behind the acts of terrorism, the killings, the violence that had destroyed the lives of many more than the victims—it had destroyed the families of the victims and it had destroyed the woman he had loved, the woman whose name he couldn’t speak.

  Iraklis stopped, his head down. He had come to the final labour, the culmination of his career, and the weight of it was crushing him. He was no longer sure that he had the strength to prevail. But then he thought of his controller and shuddered. He couldn’t stand up to an iron will like that, not now after so many years. There was no option. He would be given the last pieces of information, which had only recently come to light, and he would do what he had been trained for. Then, perhaps, he could slip away into the darkness one last time.

  Mavros bought gifts for his family in the well-stocked shops of Nafplion, allowing Grace to guide some of his choices. They had lunch in a taverna after dropping off the parcels at the hotel. The phone stayed resolutely silent and eventually he couldn’t take it any more.

  ‘I’m going back up to the ramparts above the old woman’s place.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Grace sounded doubtful. ‘Remember the men with the automatics.’

  ‘The waiting is driving me crazy.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s only about an hour till dark. I won’t stick out too much in that short time.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Mavros would have preferred to go alone, but it made sense to keep her in tow—he didn’t want to leave her as easy prey for the terrorist, and this way she wouldn’t be able to act independently. His suspicions about his client wouldn’t go away.

  They walked up the long way round, skirting the Venetian bastion on its eastern side. The sun was dropping behind the distant mountains and lights were glowing across the town. The call of a nocturnal bird preparing for the hunt echoed round the old walls. As they came round a bend in the road, the impending darkness making it difficult to see clearly, Mavros grabbed Grace’s arm.

  ‘What is it?’

  He raised a finger to his lips and craned his head forward. ‘Do you see that figure?’ he whispered. ‘By the wall at the top of Potamianou?’

  She screwed up her eyes in the gloom. ‘Do you think it’s our man?’

  ‘Why would he be hanging around above his mother’s front door?’ He paused. ‘Unless he thinks the place might be staked out. No, I saw a movement up there last night, remember?’

  ‘Someone else on the terrorist’s trail?’

  He stared at her. ‘Maybe it’s the guy who saved us.’

  Grace met his gaze. ‘Or one of the people who were tailing us in Athens.’

  Mavros led her to a low wall. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath as he crouched down. He looked quickly over his shoulder. A man was walking his dog about fifty metres away. Further off, a pair of noisy boys were belting a football across the road that bisected Akronafplia.

  ‘Perhaps he’s just a local voyeur,’ Grace said. There was a guest house below the ramparts, some of the shutters open.

  Mavros had his lower lip between his teeth. ‘Let’s leave him to it, then.’ He stood up. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll put our man off calling us.’

  On the way back down to the lower town, Grace nudged him. ‘We don’t have to go to that politician woman’s house if you don’t want to. Maybe it’s better to stay in Nafplion in case Iraklis wants a meet.’

  He thought about that. ‘No, let’s keep to the plan. It’s close enough for us to get back quickly. Besides, I want to check out that house party.’

  ‘Why?’

  He held off answering until they had cut through a disorderly line of people boarding the Athens coach. ‘It was something my sister said—about the families of the politician and her husband running this area for decades.’ He glanced at her. ‘Could there be some connection between them and the assassin? After all, Stamatina Kastania’s been living here for years.’

  Grace brushed away some hairs that had escaped from her ponytail. ‘And the woman Veta said they knew my father.’

  As Mavros turned to look at her, his phone went off. They both jumped. Going into a dark alcove, he raised it to his ear.

  ‘This is Alex Mavros,’ he said clearly, in Greek.

  ‘Hallo,’ came a rough voice. ‘This is Savvas.’

  It took Mavros a few seconds to connect the name with Kostas Laskaris’s driver. ‘Ah,’ he said, stifling his disappointment. ‘You have some news?’

  ‘Yes. I gave Kyrio Kosta your message and… You know, he really isn’t very well. You shouldn’t have made me bother him with this. He’s trying to finish a very important—’

  ‘Get to the point, will you, Savva?’ Mavros interrupted. ‘Has he seen Yiorgos Pandazopoulos?’

  There was a pained silence before the Maniate spoke. ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck it, that’s all?’ Mavros said, his voice rising in frustration. ‘You should be careful how you speak to people, my friend,’ Savvas said, his tone menacing now. ‘Kyrios Kostas says he doesn’t even know any Yiorgos Pandazopoulos. Goodbye.’

  Mavros lowered the phone from his ear and swore again.

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘No news, more like,’ he replied. Then his anger turned to unease when he realised that the call from the Mani had told him more than he’d initially thought. Even though Kostas Laskaris was aged and failing, his mind had been working well enough when they saw him. The chances of him not knowing and not remembering the Fat Man struck him as minimal—as did the chances ofYiorgos parking his car in the shadow of the Communist poet’s tower but not knocking on the door.

  Something very strange was going on above the rugged headland where his brother had met the man who became Iraklis.

  *

  Geoffrey Dearfield closed the door behind him and staggered to his bed, his strength almost gone. Why had he agreed to go to Nafplion with the other men? Why had he acceded to Flora’s demands? As soon as they got out of the Range Rover, Veta and Anna had arrived with the children and his spirit had almost cracked. This was no time to be carousing with children who knew nothing of the past, who were innocent of the crimes their ancestors had committed in the name of king and country.

  God, the lies that had been told. And would continue to be told, now that his only hope of seeing the memoir in print had been dashed. Not that he could blame Dorothy for rejecting the script; it was too divisive and corrosive a text for any publisher to accept—he’d known that from the start. Nor could he blame her for being so hurt, for refusing to speak to him about it. Her husband had been through similar horrors: reading the memoir must have brought that back to her. But it was unjust to treat him like a pariah. He was not responsible for the evils that the ELAS band had committed and, at the last, he had done as much as he could to lessen the suffering of its leader. He swallowed the bile that had risen to his mouth. He was kidding himself. He had made the fatal disclosure that the band was holed up in Loutsa, exhausted after the long trek across the mountains from the south. He was the one who had told Palaiologos and Dhragoumis. He could never forget the smiles that had spread across their faces.

  He turned towards the window, security lights casting the shadows of fence-posts and branches across the floor of the room in the late-afternoon gloom. And suddenly he was back in the compound on that terrible day when Kapetan Iraklis had been crucified on the St Andrew’s cross, his wrists and ankles bound tightly with rusting barbed wire. Prokopis Palaiologos and Sokratis Dhragoumis were standing in front of him, the former in a Greek Army uniform and the latter in a traditional tunic and kilt—he thought it gave him the look of a War of Independence hero, but it only emphasised his corpulent build and would have made his me
n in the Security Battalion snigger if they hadn’t been so terrified of him. They had been beating their prisoner for what seemed like hours.

  ‘Where are the other bands?’ Palaiologos shouted, bringing his cane down across the prisoner’s face. He stepped closer. ‘You traitor, you Communist snake, don’t you realise that your surviving fighters have all been captured? If you tell me where the neighbouring ELAS units are, you can save them.’ He drew closer. ‘Come, now, a commander’s responsibility is to his men. Or are you too much of a peasant to understand that?’

  The guerrilla chief raised his head with difficulty and spat blood, making Palaiologos step back and curse. He blinked, his eyes focusing on the comatose form of the woman in tattered fatigues. ‘Stamatina?’ he gasped. ‘Comrade Stamatina, can you hear me?’

  Palaiologos glanced at Dhragoumis and nodded. The heavy man in the kilt went over to the woman with the livid scar on her cheek and hauled her up. He took a knife from his belt and held it to her throat.

  ‘So,’ the interrogator said, ‘you have feelings towards this she-fighter?’ He spoke the last word as if it were unclean. ‘I thought that kind of thing was illegal in your rabble army. No matter. My friend here will cut her, do you understand? Cut her slowly and often if you do not speak.’

  ‘No,’ came a faint voice from the other side of the compound. ‘Let her be.’

  Dearfield watched as a young battalionist stepped up and slammed his rifle butt down on the bare head of the sad-eyed ELAS fighter who had spoken.

  ‘A pity,’ Dhragoumis said over his shoulder. ‘You should have let him watch. No matter. If the pig on the cross doesn’t speak, use your bayonet on him.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the young recruit replied keenly.

  ‘Are you ready to speak now, kapetan?’ Palaiologos asked, mocking.

  The bearded man’s eyes moved from the woman to the man on the ground beyond. ‘Kosta,’ he gasped. ‘My Kosta…’ He ran his tongue over broken lips. ‘I cannot,’ he gasped. ‘I will not—’