‘How much?’ the actress asked.
‘Five thousand euros?’
‘Make it ten.’
‘OK.’
They spent five minutes constructing the text, Mavros translating it into Greek.
‘The photo?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got some in my laptop. I’ll find the best. Rosie can hand over all the material to the geeks.’
‘The hotel will be able to find people to put the posters up.’
‘Right.’ Cara Parks smiled, this time less tentatively. ‘You know your job, don’t you?’
He raised a hand. ‘You might not like what I’m about to ask you.’
‘Try me.’
‘The night of August 9th 2000, Mulholland Drive.’ Mavros watched her face. Her eyes widened, but she held his gaze.
‘You have been busy.’
‘Wonderful thing, the Internet.’
‘If you can sort the truth from the lies. What do you want to know?’
‘Was it usual for Maria to be driving your car?’
Cara was silent for a few moments. ‘Not exactly usual, no. It happened occasionally, still does.’
‘Would you care to tell me why she was driving it that particular night?’
The actress pursed her lips. ‘Sure. If you care to tell me what it has to do with Maria going missing on Crete. You think the dead boy’s gang hired an international assassin?’
‘I don’t know enough about the Letter-Men.’
‘Believe me, they were assholes. Most of them were wiped out in a gun battle with a Mexican outfit last year.’
Mavros poured himself a glass of wine from the bottle in a silver stand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Cara said, ‘I should have offered.’
‘I’m sorry, I should have asked.’
She laughed. ‘I like your style, mister.’ Her expression grew serious again. ‘OK, here’s what happened. Confidentially.’ He nodded. ‘I was going to see this guy up on the Drive – a producer I’d got entangled with. Thing was, there was another man I was seeing, an actor. He used to get real jealous, would drive past my house and check if my car was at the front.’
‘I thought you people lived on estates with high walls.’
She smiled. ‘High railings and thorny plants in my case. You can see through if you try hard enough and I’d told the security guys to leave him alone. So Maria was driving the Merc back. She’d left her car at my place so she could get home. It had worked before. I’d given her a wig so she looked like me from a distance.’
The lives of the rich and famous, Mavros thought – just a scuzzy as anyone else’s.
‘Then that kid came out of nowhere, stumbled straight into the car. Maria wasn’t even going fast, but he flew through the air and hit the road head first.’
Mavros was still watching her closely. ‘I don’t know much about the Californian legal system. Was it an easy case to defend?’
‘The best lawyers can do anything,’ Cara said.
‘So you paid?’
‘Of course,’ she said, looking shocked. ‘It was my fault that Maria was driving back so late.’
He nodded. ‘Imagine the scandal if it had been you at the wheel.’
Cara Parks looked away, her face suddenly pale. ‘Yeah,’ she said softly.
Mavros left a few minutes later. He hadn’t learned much about Maria Kondos, but he knew more about the star. Cara Parks was convincing on the big screen, there was no doubt of that. Close up, on the sofa, things were harder to hide. He was almost certain she had been driving her Mercedes when it hit and killed Michael ‘Zee-Boy’ Timmins.
SIX
From The Descent of Icarus:
The sky was still full of our aircraft when we reached clear ground about three hundred yards from the Tavronitis bridge. There was sporadic fire from the trees on the other side of the river-bed and heavier weapons loosing off from the hill, but our scouts had done a good job. It seemed there was a gap between a pair of defensive positions. Captain Blatter arranged for covering fire at both, while the rest of us picked our way back across the stony watercourse and, to our amazement, reached the other side unscathed.
By now the sun was high in the sky and we were sweating like packhorses in our jumpsuits, the flies hovering around as if we were already dead. I was still carrying the MG34, with Wachter as my loader. He had seen something in my expression and was keeping behind me – or, more likely, he was using me as a shield against enemy fire. Lieutenant Horsmann moved from unit to unit, outlining the plan of attack on the RAF camp south of the airfield. It was unclear how many men were arrayed against us, so maximum force was to be used.
‘Including killing prisoners?’ I asked.
The lieutenant, a young man with little more than peach fuzz on his chin, avoided my eyes. ‘You heard Captain Blatter’s orders. We are the spearhead of the Wehrmacht. We cut through the enemy without mercy.’
I was going to raise the commandments, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath. My comrades were ready for action, their brows furrowed and their breath coming fast. They’d seen the dead men floating down under their parachutes and the planes taking flak. Now was their chance to blood themselves. Most of them were no older than Horsmann and hadn’t experienced the assaults in Belgium and Norway early in the war.
The idea was to probe the camp to see how well it was guarded. Several MGs were set up to cover the first wave, though I was told to go forward with the lighter-armed men.
I caught sight of Blatter at the head of a group to my right. He was still wearing his cap, something which would earn him a stern reprimand from his senior officers if he survived. It was then I understood how his mind worked. He didn’t expect to survive and he instilled this in his men. That made them an almost invincible fighting unit, caring nothing for personal survival. I was thankful that my own lieutenant, now rotting in the spring flowers, had never been so harsh.
Rifle shots rang out from the camp boundary, immediately answered by machine-gun fire from our men. I saw enemy soldiers drop down, while others remained in their slit trenches. Blatter’s unit was already at the edge of the camp and we were urged forward by Lieutenant Horsmann. I held the MG34 levelled in both hands, but I didn’t intend to fire it at another man. I had decided that my part in the war was over. My so-called comrades were savages and our invasion of foreign territory made us no better than the Mongol hordes that piled high the severed heads of the enemies they defeated.
‘Shoot them!’ I heard Captain Blatter scream, watching as men in Allied helmets with their arms high in surrender clambered out of the trenches. They collapsed as the paratroopers opened up on them.
‘Look out!’ Peter Wachter yelled.
I turned to my right and saw a group of huge men in tattered battledress charging us. Maoris. Although some of them fell as machine-pistols and rifles were directed at them, plenty more came on. I shivered when I saw that they had fixed bayonets. High-pitched screams came from those of our men who received the cold steel.
‘Fire, damn you, Rudi!’ Wachter screamed from the ground, where he was struggling to fit a new magazine to his MP40. ‘Fire!’
The New Zealanders were only a few yards away. I blasted away over their heads, making some of them dive to the earth. Others kept up the charge and I leapt to my right to avoid a bayonet that was directed at my chest. Then Wachter got his weapon going and the big men tumbled like children at play, though none of them got up again.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Wachter shouted, ducking his head as a grenade thrown by the next wave of Maoris exploded some yards in front of us.
I was still standing upright, gripping the MG34 loosely. I was smashed to the ground by a weight I realized was my loader.
‘Give me that, you fucking lunatic!’ He tugged the machine gun away and was soon emptying a drum of ammunition into the advancing foe. Then there was a diversion as some RAF men made a dash from Blatter’s murderers, the New Zealanders kneeling dow
n to give them covering fire. A few of them made it to the the treeline at the base of the hill.
‘Come on,’ Wachter said, getting to his feet. ‘Horsmann’s waving us towards the airfield. What’s the matter with you? Take these drums.’
I loped after him, as careless as the killers about my own safety. I knew I wasn’t going to die that day, not because I had some crazed notion of Aryan supremacy but because I had been chosen as a witness by some higher power. No matter what I did, I would survive while my comrades would not. I knew even then that I would die old, and only after I recorded my part in the events of the battle for Crete.
Because I had spared the woman, because I had shown mercy, I was no longer a proper paratrooper. I was the scribe, the sole recorder of my comrades’ butchery.
The stench of cordite, aircraft fuel, shit and rapidly decomposing flesh washed over me as I looked out to the heavenly blue of the sea. Above it was the sky’s darker and less pure blue, discoloured with the blotches of anti-aircraft bursts and smoke from doomed Auntie Jus.
There was a burst of machine-gun fire as a line of trembling aircraftmen were flung backwards into the dust by the men I had seen as brothers only a few hours ago.
Mavros went out of the main hotel building, his leather jacket over his shoulder. He had eaten a hurried room service meal and now wanted to have a look round the grounds. After a few minutes, he pulled on his jacket – the night air still had a bite from the snow-capped mountains to the south. The resort estate was lit up like an airport, pathways illuminated at knee height and different coloured lights on the villas, bars and swimming pools that filled the large expanse of ground. The lines of trees were decorated with white lights, giving a weird feeling of Christmas. He had Maria Kondos’s passport in his pocket and he intended to show it to as many out-of-the-way barmen and guests as he could.
Which he did over two hours, with nothing concrete to show for the effort.
Members of the film crew chilling out knew her, of course, but few of the resort staff did – it seemed she spent time with the actress or on her own. Seeing the lights of a last drinking hole down by the shore, Mavros headed towards it. The sea was running softly up the beach and the almost-full moon illuminated the shape of a small island not far out.
‘Ayii Theodhori,’ came a voice from behind him.
He turned to see David Waggoner, his face set in an expression that was probably the closest he got to good humour.
‘It’s a reserve for kri-kri – mountain goats, as you no doubt know.’
‘I do, actually,’ Mavros confirmed, though he had only the vaguest recollection of the beasts.
‘They found Minoan votive objects in a cave that was supposed in one myth to be the jaws of a petrified sea monster. Of course, the Venetians – inveterate empire-builders – turned the island into a fortress.’ The old soldier shook his head. ‘I remember the Ju52s and the bombers coming over it in ’41. We got a few, but the rest sailed through.’
Mavros kept walking, hoping to ask Waggoner some questions. ‘A nightcap?’ he suggested.
‘I shouldn’t. Got to drive back to Chania. But why not? The police don’t stop me.’
Mavros didn’t rise to that, but the arrogance of the man was grating. He was a war hero, so he thought he could do anything he liked.
‘You live there, do you?’
‘I have a pied-à-terre in the old town, yes, but I spend most of my time up in the foothills of the Lefka Ori.’
That got Mavros’s attention, remembering the phone call he had made to Kornaria. ‘In noble solitude or in a village?’
Waggoner glanced at him curiously. ‘Outside a village,’ he said, without offering further information.
Mavros let that go for the time being. They went into the bar, an almost deserted open-air affair covered by bamboo. The old soldier didn’t seem to notice the chill, but Mavros zipped up his leather jacket.
‘Carafe of raki,’ Waggoner ordered in Greek. ‘Have you tried the local spirit?’
Mavros remembered headaches after nights drinking with his brother-in-law, but decided to play the dumb Athenian. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it fiery?’
‘The stuff Kersten sells isn’t,’ the Englishman said scathingly. ‘The real thing is.’
Mavros diluted his drink with water to keep up the act and ate some peanuts. He wanted to ask Waggoner about his apparent feud with the German, but that wasn’t his priority.
‘On Sunday night, you drove out of the Heavenly Blue at . . .’ He consulted his notebook. ‘Ten nineteen.’
One of David Waggoner’s untrimmed eyebrows curved upwards. ‘How do you know that?’
Mavros ignored the question, watching him closely. ‘Were you on your own?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And you didn’t pick anyone up on the road?’
‘What do you think I am? Some kind of pervert? I don’t touch those foreign whores.’
Mavros kept quiet, a technique he often found productive.
‘Oh, I see. You think I had something to do with Maria Kondos’s disappearance?’ Waggoner didn’t seem unduly concerned. ‘Well, I didn’t see her.’
‘All right,’ Mavros said, changing tack. ‘Surely it would be more convenient for your consultation work if you stayed in the hotel.’
‘Not bloody likely. I spend enough time in the bloody German’s place without giving him the satisfaction of acting as mine host.’ The old man looked away and took a hit of undiluted spirit.
‘Why did you warn me off Mr Kersten?’
‘Because he’s a liar and a hypocrite.’ Waggoner’s eyes were narrowed now. ‘He participated in the worst atrocities the Fallschirmjäger perpetrated against our men and the local people, but he’s managed to worm his way into a position of respectability’
‘Building the resort and staffing it must have brought plenty of jobs to the area,’ Mavros commented.
‘And unfortunately that’s all some Cretans care about. Let me tell you, it’s different up in the mountains.’
‘In Kornaria?’ Mavros slipped the words in smoothly.
‘How did you—’ The old soldier’s eyes were less unwavering now. ‘I suppose you’ve read one of my books.’
Mavros kept silent, satisfied that his guess had been confirmed. He certainly would be looking at Waggoner’s memoirs if the case dragged on.
‘Well, anyway,’ the Englishman continued after a pause, ‘the point is that Rudolf Kersten should have been tried and convicted of war crimes. He shot men who had surrendered and he took part in one of the worst massacres of men, women and – God help us – boys.’
‘Where was that?’
‘Makrymari, June 3rd 1941. It’s only about ten kilometres from here. Fifty-eight souls slaughtered without trial in front of their families.’
Mavros heard the outrage in his voice, still strong despite the passage of over sixty years.
‘Kersten claims he was taken ill before the executions,’ Waggoner added. ‘And that he shot over the heads of our men at Maleme. If you believe that . . .’
Mavros felt the need of a stronger drink, but he confined himself to several gulps of the watered down raki. ‘He’d never have been given permission to build this place with that sort of record.’
Waggoner stared at him as if he were a small child. ‘Money is all that counts down here on the coastal strip. The locals have made a Faustian pact. They take the German tourists’ money and forget the past.’ He slapped the bar hard. ‘Well, not all of us have forgotten.’
Mavros noted the old man’s passion, but held back from asking more about Kornaria and its connection with Maria Kondos. He had the strong feeling that he wouldn’t get anything useful until he had more information to use as leverage.
‘Better be off,’ Waggoner said, getting to his feet. ‘Mark my words. Kersten might look like a harmless type in his dotage, but he’s killed women before. Maybe you should be looking more closely at him when it comes to your search for Mari
a Kondos.’
Mavros watched him march up the pathway, his heels ringing. The former SOE man had crept up on him effectively enough before, so he still possessed some of his wartime skills.
Draining his glass, he poured in more raki, diluting it with only a dash of water. There was more to this case than met the eye: the uneasy relationships between Cara Parks and the rest of the senior crew, Maria Kondos’s telephone link with Kornaria, and now the old soldier’s blatant attempt to put Kersten in the frame. He needed to consider his options.
He signed for the drinks and showed the barman Maria’s photo. As he’d expected, he showed no recognition of her.
On the way back to the main hotel building, Mavros texted Cara Parks and suggested she arrange for the missing woman’s photo, name and mention of the reward to be placed in the local newspapers. He suspected the correct procedure would have been to contact Alice Quincy or Rosie Yellenberg, but the actress had taken a major interest in the search.
Coming round the side of the hotel, he saw the flashing lights of police cars and quickened his pace. Had Maria Kondos been found? He went into the expansive reception area, in which people were milling around, and looked for Cara Parks. There was no sign of her. Renzo Capaldi, the security chief, was hanging around like a large spare part. Then he saw Hildegard Kersten, her face white with shock and a blanket around her shoulders, being tended to by two of the hotel staff. She stared at him as if unsure who he was and then beckoned him over.
‘Mr Mavros,’ she said, ‘thank God you’re here. It’s . . . it’s Rudi.’
‘What’s happened?’ He looked around again, wondering if David Waggoner was in the vicinity. He couldn’t see him.
‘We’ve been burgled,’ Hildegard said. ‘The police are here, but I don’t have any faith in them. Please help.’
Mavros held back for a moment, then decided that this was a good opportunity to get close to Rudolf Kersten.
‘What happened to your husband?’ he asked. ‘Is he hurt?’
‘No, no. It’s just that he’s being questioned by that idiot Inspector Margaritis and I know his blood pressure will be rocketing upwards. Come with me.’ Hildegard dismissed the hotel staff with a movement of her wrinkled hand and pushed past the policeman who was standing at the door to their apartment.
The Silver Stain Page 7