The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Veta said. ‘All these years, all the horror. It has to end now.’

  ‘It will end,’ Dorothy said. ‘My husband was a man of peace. Most fighters were, whatever side they were on. People have learned to put their faith in peaceful methods in this country now. Iraklis and his kind are an anachronism.’

  The others looked at her, their faces racked with uncertainty. Only Geoffrey Dearfield kept his eyes off her. He was weeping quietly, a prisoner of the past who had thought he could find redemption by writing down his story; instead he’d handed himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

  About two kilometres further on, Iraklis turned the Range Rover off the highway. A side road led down to a canning factory and he pulled up between a pair of thick-trunked eucalyptuses. The Suzuki he had hired earlier in the day was parked to the right.

  ‘We’ll change vehicles,’ he said. ‘You and me first, Grace Helmer. Loudhoviko, lock up and lose the key.’

  The butler watched as the occupants of the front seats left the Range Rover.

  ‘What’s your interest in this?’ Mavros asked, instantly feeling the knife-point jab into his side again.

  ‘My interest?’ Loudhovikos replied, in a mocking tone. ‘My interest is the same as your father’s. The overthrow of an unjust system and its replacement by one that treats all citizens in the same way.’ He looked to his left. ‘Out. And slowly.’

  Mavros opened the door, the butler sliding after him. He could have risked slamming the door into him and making a run for it, but that would have left Grace alone in Iraklis’s hands. Besides, he’d given his word that he wouldn’t cause any trouble. Loudhovikos activated the central-locking system, then lobbed the key into the darkness beyond the trees.

  ‘Who will you work for now?’ Mavros asked, as they reached the Suzuki. ‘I presume you took orders from the dead woman.’

  ‘Shut up and get in,’ the butler said. ‘What do you care? At least your father and brother were in the struggle. You just suck up the crumbs from the rich man’s table.’

  ‘The struggle’s over, my friend,’ Mavros said, as he sat down in the back. ‘The Soviet Union’s gone. There’s no need for undercover operatives like you any more.’

  Loudhovikos closed his door and sniffed. ‘If you believe that, you’re even more of a fool than you look.’

  Iraklis started the engine and drove back up to the main road. He took a long look to right and left, then pulled out and accelerated towards Argos, but at the first left turn he braked hard without indicating and got off the highway. A narrow road led down to the bay. There was little traffic around. The lights of Nafplion were dancing on the still water to their left, while away to the right a line of small towns stretched down the Peloponnesian coast. The road they were on cut through a couple of villages, one consisting mainly of garish tavernas and nightclubs, before it reached the highway that led south from Argos. Iraklis stopped about fifty metres from the junction. ‘Will this do for you?’ he asked the butler.

  Loudhovikos nodded, his hand on the door catch. ‘Are you sure you don’t need my help any longer?’

  ‘Like you said, I’m losing my touch. I trust these two not to make a move on me.’ The terrorist turned and gave him a soft smile. ‘Go to the good, my friend.’

  ‘The mobile phones are in the bag on the floor,’ Loudhovikos said as he got out. ‘Long live the struggle,’ he added. ‘Whatever anyone says, you are still a great hero, Irakli.’ He closed the door behind him and disappeared.

  The assassin drove on past a brown sign pointing to the early Bronze Age site at Lerna.

  ‘Great hero,’ scoffed Grace. ‘Great murderer, more like.’

  ‘This is where your namesake defeated the Hydra,’ Mavros said, trying to distract Iraklis from Grace’s verbal assault.

  ‘Yes, how symbolic,’ his client said, giving him a sharp glance, then looking at the driver. ‘You’ve spent your life cutting off the heads of the people you think are your enemies, but still they keep coming.’ Her shoulders dropped. ‘What’s driving you? All that killing, all that blood. What’s the good of it?’

  Iraklis looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘They aren’t coming now, Grace. Don’t imagine they will rescue you. Not tonight, at least.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. No one who hasn’t grown up with the horror, no one who hasn’t seen what happens to people when power is wielded unchecked can understand.’

  ‘So, help me understand,’ Grace said, her eyes glinting in the glow from the dashboard. ‘You think I didn’t grow up with horror? I saw you cut my father’s throat, you bastard. How much worse was what you experienced?’

  Iraklis glanced at her, his jaw jutting. ‘I never even knew my father. You heard how he died on the cross. My mother was raped when she was carrying me, her sister was ripped open by the Right’s jackals. Why are you surprised that I could act as I did?’

  Mavros leaned forward, catching sight of the automatic between the assassin’s knees. ‘What are you saying? That there’s a genealogy of terrorism? That people who grow up with the sufferings of the previous generation are turned into unthinking avengers? If that was the case, Greece and most other countries would be full of people like you.’

  Iraklis was nodding slowly. ‘You’re right. I’m not talking for everyone, just for the few of us who had some kind of ability to shut off our emotions. That’s a curse. I didn’t ask for it. But there are a few like me, like Loudhovikos. His parents were in EAM, they fought in the Democratic Army in the civil war. They were starved and beaten in the camps throughout the fifties. Their health was ruined. And then, when the Colonels came to power, they were immediately taken back into custody and returned to the prison islands. They died within a month, separated from each other. They were both over sixty years old. My mother was lucky to survive the same experience. My stepfather was crippled by it.’

  Mavros sat back. The story wasn’t uncommon, he’d heard similar ones throughout his childhood, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. If his own father hadn’t died before the dictatorship, that would probably have been his fate too. Fighting with the memories that were suddenly stirred up, he was only vaguely aware that Iraklis had turned right on to the road that led over the mountains to Tripolis.

  ‘But you weren’t just a killing machine, were you?’ Grace was saying. ‘You knew my mother—you were the Iason Kolettis who seduced her. I suppose that crazy Flora gave you instructions to target an American diplomat. But then you fell in love with her, didn’t you? You felt the same way as Laura did.’

  The terrorist’s head shot back as if acid had been dashed into his eyes. He wrestled with the wheel as they went into the first hairpin of the ascent, then accelerated as the Suzuki cleared the corner. Shortly afterwards he pulled into the side.

  ‘Yes,’ Iraklis said, his voice almost inaudible. ‘Yes, I loved her.’ He glanced at Grace, his face a ruin. ‘I loved…I loved Laura.’ The instant he spoke the name, his face slackened and he gripped the wheel hard, like a man trying to resist a tidal wave.

  Grace was driving, Iraklis holding the automatic loosely, its muzzle pointed to the floor. He had his eyes locked on the road, which was twisting up the mountain in the beam of the headlights, but his mind had slipped on to another plane. He was aware that he should be paying more attention, that Grace or Mavros might make a move on him, lunge for his weapon, but he couldn’t fight his emotions any more. It had finally happened. He had said her name.

  For so many years he had kept out of his thoughts the name of the only woman he had ever loved even though her form—her joyful face and her soft, freckled skin—often slipped through his defences like a ghost. Laura. Oh, God, Laura, he said to himself. What did I do to you? Is it too late to lay you to rest, now that your daughter—her features and her lithe body so like your own—has found me? Oh, Laura.

  ‘Tell me about you and her,’ Grace said, her voice unwavering. ‘Tell me what it was between you that
filled her life even after you killed my father, that eventually drove her to kill herself.’ She glanced at him. ‘Tell me!’

  Iraklis’s thoughts were running out of control. It seemed that someone else was talking, he hardly recognised the voice, but the words came from deep inside himself.

  ‘I wanted to find Laura,’ he was saying, ‘even though it was too late. That was why I went to the U.S. I thought I could see where she had lived, I thought I could bring her back from the grave by visiting your home. It wasn’t hard to track down your mother’s address. And I went there one Sunday. It was fall, the trees in the countryside turning red and gold. I parked a couple of streets away and walked to the house, a baseball cap pulled low over my face. I hoped to make some kind of contact with her, I hoped to raise her shade like Odysseus did with his mother’s in the myth. And then I saw the woman I thought was Laura. I couldn’t believe it. She was alive, her face younger than it had been the first time I met her in the museum in Athens, her hair tied in a ponytail and her beautiful face caught in the soft light as she walked across the lawn. I started to run towards her—opened my mouth to call her name.’ He stopped, panting. He looked round at Mavros, and then at Grace, whose expression was impassive, her eyes on the road.

  ‘And then…and then I realised it wasn’t Laura. There was something hard about the face, a terrible bitterness in the eyes of the woman before me. She was Laura’s daughter, the little girl who had looked down on me the night I killed her father.’ He leaned towards Grace. ‘She was you.’

  Still Grace made no response, her lips set.

  ‘I managed to regain control of myself before you noticed me,’ Iraklis continued. ‘I walked past the house, never looking back, my heart almost wrenched from my chest. And I finally understood what I had done. Laura’s life had been ruined by what I did and she had killed herself, but her daughter was still carrying the burden of the pain. I realised then that love isn’t everything, that there are emotions stronger than love, places where love cannot survive. I should have known that earlier, much earlier. Perhaps deep down I did know it, but I was beguiled by the vain hope that I could get beyond the hatred and bitterness of my parents’ generation, beyond the violence it had spawned. False dreams and deception.’

  Grace turned to him. ‘Is that what you believe in, then?’ she said. ‘The triumph of hatred over love?’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Yeah, I guess that squares pretty well with what you’ve done in your pathetic life.’

  But Iraklis had sunk into himself, the words he was mouthing audible to no one.

  Laura, I could never have explained my actions to you. I could never have made you understand that hatred can only be matched, can only be beaten by greater hatred, force by greater and more pitiless force. I believed that, we all did. Flora died believing it. My mother still believes it in her scarred, unyielding soul. But now, my Laura, now I am tired and it’s far too late to make amends. Even the memories of our love—the museum’s cool halls, the statues’ vacant eyes, your shocked acceptance of the emotions that swept us away on an irresistible tide, your desperate screams as we surged to a climax—even those memories have receded now.

  All that remains is the awful emptiness in the eyes of the little girl, the girl who has grown into the woman sitting beside me, her pale, immobile face at the window above. That and the spray of blood from your husband’s throat, his body slumping and the light extinguishing in his eyes as he became another in the long line of red deaths.

  They had reached the plateau beyond the ridge, the lights from the gulf now gone. Grace increased her speed, her eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror continuously. Beside her, the terrorist was sitting up straight. He didn’t look sleepy; rather, it seemed to the others, he was fighting to keep his emotions in check.

  ‘How could you do it?’ Grace asked. ‘How could you kill your lover’s husband in front of her? In front of me?’

  Iraklis glanced at her. ‘Believe me, I never thought that you would be awake at that time, that you would come to the window.’

  She looked to the front and Mavros could see the muscles on her face clenching. ‘But you killed him anyway. You would have killed him if you hadn’t seen me. What did you think? That my mother would rush into your arms and congratulate you? That you would ride off into the night with her?’

  ‘I knew I would never see her again. I wasn’t a romantic.’

  ‘Ah, but you were,’ Grace contradicted him. ‘She wrote to me about you, she told me how you behaved when you were together. Don’t tell me you were faking that. My mother wasn’t a fool.’

  Iraklis was silent for a while. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I wasn’t faking what I felt for her. But the struggle was more important than the individuals caught up in it.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Grace shouted. ‘You just killed the woman who was behind your band of murderers. You wanted her to pay for what she’d made you do back in ’seventy-six.’

  ‘That was an accident. Besides, she went over to the Americans.’

  ‘But she was the one who told you to execute my father. She was the one who separated you from my mother.’

  The assassin didn’t answer.

  Mavros leaned forward. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked, raising his hand to secure Grace’s silence.

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘Tripolis?’ Mavros hazarded. ‘You could let Grace out there. I’ll stay with you for as long as you want.’

  ‘No way,’ his client said. ‘I haven’t finished with this guy yet.’ She glanced round. ‘There’s more that I have to ask him.’

  Mavros looked at Grace. He was still unsure of her motives.

  ‘You’re both staying till the end of the road,’ Iraklis said.

  Mavros sat back. ‘Good. I’ve got some questions for you too.’

  The terrorist sighed. ‘About your brother?’

  ‘Yes, about Andonis. Among other things.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Iraklis looked round at him. ‘What makes you think I’m going to open up to you?’

  Mavros gazed back at him. ‘Everyone needs to communicate.’ ‘You want a confession?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘You’ve got enough sins to confess,’ Grace put in.

  ‘All right, all right.’ The assassin sighed again. ‘Andonis Mavros. I only met him once.’ He was aware that he was talking, but he suddenly found himself in another Peloponnesian location—one that he had visited recently and that was only a few kilometres from the village where he grew up.

  From the ridge they could see the towers of Kitta, the mist rolling up the hillsides as the breeze set in from the sea that November morning of 1972. The poet Kostas Laskaris closed the door behind them and the pair of anti-Junta activists walked towards the peninsula of Tigani, their heads down.

  ‘So, Andoni, will you join us?’ Iraklis asked.

  The young man with the piercing blue eyes turned to him. ‘Maybe. If you tell me your real name. All this messing about with code-names and pseudonyms. How can you trust someone if you don’t know their identity? For me Iraklis is a mythical strongman who went around kicking hell out of gods and monsters, not flesh and blood.’

  ‘How do you know Iraklis isn’t my name? There was a boy in my class at school called that.’

  Andonis Mavros swung his leg over the gate that blocked the path leading to the headland. ‘Because everyone in the underground uses false names.’ He smiled. ‘Except me.’

  ‘You’re a fool, then.’ Iraklis stepped past him and headed down the rough track, the dew soaking into his boots. They didn’t talk again until they were on the narrow handle of the frying pan, surrounded by salt pans and sharp-edged boulders.

  ‘Tell me more about your group,’ Andonis said. ‘The comrades don’t approve of it. They told me to stay away, which is why I had to come all the way down here. Kostas Laskaris is the only one who seems to like you.’

  ‘Kostas has been a friend of my family for many years. But the rest of the old
comrades have lost sight of the struggle. They think that leaving the Colonels to self-destruct is the safest policy.’ He caught his companion’s arm. ‘That could take years. We aren’t going to wait.’

  They looked ahead as a seagull rose up, its harsh cry echoing around the rock surfaces.

  ‘I don’t want to wait either.’ Andonis Mavros was springing from boulder to boulder, as sure-footed as a goat. ‘But I need to know what you’re intending to do.’

  So he told the blue-eyed boy, told him about their determination, about their weapons and their training, about their list of targets. By the time he’d finished they were under the surviving bastion of the citadel.

  ‘How did they build this?’ Andonis Mavros mused, the question directed at himself as much as at Iraklis. ‘No wonder the myths say that Titans and Cyclops were responsible for walls like these. And now they’re undefended and irrelevant, the men who fought here forgotten by history.’

  Iraklis knew then that the young man wasn’t going to join the group, and that he wasn’t going to allow anyone he knew to do so either. They went up the narrow track to the ruined castle and wandered around the foundations and shattered cisterns.

  When they were inside the remains of a basilica, Andonis Mavros turned to him. ‘There are bones in here,’ he said, indicating a broken tomb. ‘Do you think they belong to some illustrious warrior?’ He looked out to the grey sea then back to the last summits of Taygetos, shrouded in mist. ‘You’re wrong, Irakli, or whatever your name is. Violence is not the way to proceed. Our parents learned the cost of violence and hatred. You should listen to the old men.’

  Then Andonis Mavros walked away, his figure gradually shrinking to a dot among the razor-stones of the crossing.

  Iraklis was sure that the young man with the blue eyes and the solemn voice was wrong. He hadn’t been surprised when he heard that Andonis Mavros had disappeared soon after. He was brave but he had no guile. There was no gravestone marking his time on the earth, as there was none for the thousands who had breathed their last on the barren, wind-ravaged headland of Tigani over the centuries. His father and his ELAS comrades had gone unremembered into the abyss as well.