Michael was just crossing the street in front of his hotel when he again saw the Gypsy boy with the red scarf who had followed him from Sasha’s encampment. Michael entered the lobby and walked quickly to a side door. Slipping out into the late afternoon crowd, he circled back to the front of the hotel in time to see the youth pause in front of the building. Michael walked quickly up to him and fastened a steely grip on his shoulder.
“Let go!” the boy cried, trying to break free, but Michael hung on. “I want to talk to you.” The youth was in his early teens and close up there was little doubt who he was. Michael had seen that same crafty expression too many times before. “You’re one of Sasha’s sons, aren’t you?”
“So what if I am? I was just walking on the street!”
“You were following me. You followed me when I left your father’s tent.”
The boy struggled to get loose, but Michael forced him against the building. A few passersby glanced at them curiously and hurried on perhaps concluding that Michael had caught the Gypsy boy in the act of picking his pocket.
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” the youth insisted.
“Your father and I were boys together. What is your name?”
“Alberto,” he replied after some hesitation.
“Well, Alberto –” Michael adopted a more friendly tone of voice “– you are quite clever at trailing people. Your red scarf is too easy to spot in a crowd, but otherwise you have developed all the right skills. I was certain I’d lost you once, before I reached that apartment in the Vathi district. How were you able to stick with me without my knowing it?”
The boy looked down at the sidewalk then apparently decided to share his secret. “There was a man following you, too – a man I’ve noticed hanging around our tents. When I saw him follow you, I followed him –”
“What does he look like?”
“He has dark hair and a beard. Sometimes he carries an artist’s easel and rolled up canvas like a painter.”
“All right,” Michael said, relaxing his grip on the boy’s shoulder. “Run along now and report to your father. Tell him I’ll be seeing him soon.”
Michael spent a restless night. He had seen Nita Delvado and heard at least the broad outlines of her story. By rights he should be getting the train back home to Romania. But should Nita be warned about this man who had followed him to her apartment? In her line of work, one could collect a great many enemies in twenty-five years.
By morning he had decided. He would visit her one more time before he left. And he would visit Sasha too, as he had promised. The morning air was warm so he decided to walk to Nita’s apartment as he had the previous day. Traffic seemed heavy for a Saturday morning but he reminded himself that he knew nothing of this city as it was today.
There was a car in front of Nita’s building, and for a moment Michael thought it might be Alec Grimsby’s limousine again. Then he realized it was an official car with a police seal on the door. A uniformed officer stood guard.
“What’s the trouble?” Michael asked. “I’m a friend of Nita Delvado, who lives here.”
The officer spoke quickly to a man inside the entranceway, his Greek too fast for Michael to understand. The second man motioned Michael inside and led him upstairs to Nita’s apartment. A man in a braided uniform, obviously in charge, stood just inside her door.
“Did you know the dead woman?” he asked.
Michael looked down at the body in the center of the floor the scarred cheek turned toward him. She was wearing the same dress as the day before. “Yes,” he managed to say. “Her name was Nita Delvado.”
She had been shot once in the chest at close range, the officer told Michael. Since none of the neighbors heard a short, the killer may have used a silencer. It had happened sometime during the night, probably after midnight. “Did she have any enemies?” the officer asked.
“I saw her yesterday for the first time in twenty-five years,” Michael explained. “She wrote to me recently saying she’d like to see me again. I came here to visit her. She told me a little of her past life. She may have had enemies but she mentioned no one by name.”
They questioned him further and took his name and address. “Do you know where she got the scar?” one of them asked.
“No,” Michael answered thinking of Sasha. Likewise there was no point in mentioning Alec Grimsby or the mysterious bearded man. If any of them had had a hand in her death, he’d need evidence to prove it.
Finally they let him go. He wandered the streets aimlessly for an hour, to be certain the police weren’t following him, then he headed for the Gypsy encampment in the vacant lot near the markets.
For the weekend tourists, the Gypsy women had set out card tables and folding chairs, and were telling fortunes – reading palms and interpreting the fall of the Tarot cards in exchange for a few coins. Michael found Sasha far away from this activity, talking with some of the men of the tribe. His son Alberto hovered nearby playing with a jackknife.
“May I speak with you?” Michael asked.
Sasha nodded. “Of course, Michael. Alberto told me about yesterday. I hope you don’t think I sent him to spy on you. He’s a good boy but he goes off on his own too much. I had no need of Nita’s address, and if I did I would have asked you for it.”
“Nita is dead, Sasha. Someone murdered her during the night.”
“What are you saying!” He seemed truly surprised.
“Someone shot her in her apartment. This morning a neighbor noticed the door was ajar and found the body.”
“I can’t believe it.” Sasha seemed to sag noticeably at the news. “Was she robbed?”
“Apparently not, and there was no sign of forced entry. She seemed to have known her killer.”
“Alberto said a bearded man followed her. Perhaps it was someone from her past life.”
“Perhaps,” Michael agreed. “You said you saw her once. How much did she tell you of that past life?”
“She mentioned a man named Grimsby. She’d been shopping at the market and I came upon her accidentally. I’d heard rumors she was alive but the meeting was still a shock for us both. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“When was this?”
Sasha thought. “Probably three or four months ago now. I remember it was the beginning of the good weather before we went off on the circuit to help with the planting.”
“Did you argue?”
Sasha looked away. “Why would we argue?”
“She said you did.”
“It was foolish. At first I couldn’t believe it was really Nita. I kept telling her she was dead. Finally, when she convinced me, I welcomed her back. I thought she had come to live with us, but she was only passing through. She said she would never come back to this sort of life, the Gypsy life was what she’d escaped from. The way she said – I’m afraid I slapped her, Michael. I think you would have done the same.”
“Sasha –”
“She’d fallen in with bad people.”
“People like Alec Grimsby? Were you upset because she’d been living with that man? Because she rejected her Gypsy heritage?”
“Yes.” His voice was soft and ashamed.
“One more question, Sasha. Did you cut her face with a knife?”
“Cut her? Certainly not. I only slapped her.”
“Did she have a scar on her cheek?”
“Not then. Alberto told me later that he saw her on the street and she was scarred.”
“She said you did it.”
That was a lie!”
“Alberto seems to know everything,” Michael commented. “Come here, boy!” he called out to Sasha’s son, who was still playing with his knife.
“What do you want?” Alberto asked suspiciously.
“You seem to know what’s going on. Where would I find this Englishman Grimsby, the one who was with Nita Delvado that day?”
“The one who came to her apartment after you left yesterday?”
“That’s the
one.”
“Is it worth any money?” the boy asked slyly.
Michael laughed. “He learns well from his father.” He took a gold coin from his pocket and handed it over. “Now tell me.”
“On his boat in the harbor. The motor yacht, Quincade. I followed him there one day. He only returned to Athens recently.”
Michael nodded his thanks and turned to take his leave of Sasha. “Are you going there?” Sasha asked.
“I am. I think Grimsby can tell me who killed Nita.”
The Quincade was an impressive ship more than sixty feet long, the sort frequently encountered in the Mediterranean waters. Michael remembered them from his boyhood in the early 1960s and he knew that any man who owned such a craft would not be an easy person to reach. He’d taken a taxi to the thriving port area of Piraeus, a suburb of Athens some five miles from the center of the city. The ship lay peacefully at anchor, its gangplank guarded by a burly-looking crewman.
“I’d like to see Mr. Grimsby if he’s aboard,” Michael said.
The crewman almost smiled. “The cap’n don’t receive visitors.”
“Tell him it’s about Nita Delvado. I think he’ll see me.”
The crewman shrugged and disappeared up the gangway. While Michael waited he watched a boat at the next dock unloading nets full of sponges taken from the nearby water. Presently the man returned and said, “Follow me.”
Alec Grimsby, the white-haired man Michael had first seen entering Nita’s apartment the previous day was seated on a roofed deck in the stern of the yacht sipping a tall glass of iced tea. He rose and offered his hand as Michael joined him. “Nita mentioned you,” he said. “It is a terrible thing about her.”
“You learned about it quickly.”
The Englishman smiled and sat down again, offering Michael a chair. Up close he seemed younger, and there was something a bit debonair about him. Michael caught a whiff of the aftershave or cologne he’d first smelled at Nita’s apartment. “The police have already been here,” Grimsby told him. “A neighbor told them about my visits.”
“Were you with her last night?”
Grimsby shook his head. “I saw her earlier to say goodbye. I’m leaving port today. I have business matters elsewhere.”
“Nita told me you’d been friends for twenty-five years.”
“A long time, yes.”
“She told me the sort of thing she did for you.”
Alec Grimsby squinted at Michael. After a moment, he suggested a glass of tea. “Gypsies drink tea, don’t they?”
“Not this early in the day,” Michael answered. “I came here to ask you about Nita, and who would have wanted to kill her. I’ve been followed by a bearded man who sometimes carries artist’s materials. Would he have had reason to kill her?”
Grimsby smiled. “I have no idea what sort of life Nita has had here in Athens. She left my employ some months ago.”
“How many people like her do you have, risking their lives to line your pockets?”
The smile froze on his face. “Whatever she did was of her own free will.”
“Why did she return to Athens?”
“For plastic surgery on her face. She came back four months ago.”
Michael took a deep breath. “In the Romanian newspapers I read about the prostitutes in New York. They have pimps who keep watch over them. The pimps drive around in big fancy cars. In a way, the Mediterranean isn’t so different from New York, except that here the stakes are higher.”
“I will not be lectured to by a Gypsy,” Grimsby told him, his face frozen with controlled rage. “Go back to Romania or wherever you came from.”
“Did you cut her face?”
“That’s a Gypsy trick. You are wearing a knife on your belt right now.”
“Did you?” Michael repeated.
Grimsby must have pressed some hidden button – suddenly the burly sailor was lifting Michael from his chair, gripping him in a bear hug. “Time to go, mate!”
Michael doubled over, lifting the man’s feet from the floor and then quickly shifting his weight to roll him off his hip. The sailor went down hard, then came back up with a knife in his hand. Michael quickly drew his own weapon.
Grimsby barked an order to his man in a language Michael didn’t know. “I want no blood on my deck,” he said in English. “Get out of here, Gypsy!”
“If you killed her, I’ll be back for you!” Michael said over his shoulder as he walked toward the gangplank.
Somehow Nita Delvado, a woman who had been dead for him for twenty- five years, had become very important during her brief rebirth.
Michael found Sasha at the fish market, looking over the day’s catch while the women of the tribe used their fortune-telling money to buy food for the table. “We’ll be on the road again in two weeks,” he told Michael. “Sometimes I think it’s not so bad. At least we get out in the fresh air, away from the city’s pollution.”
“Sasha, I have to ask you something.”
“What is it my friend?”
“That day four months ago when you saw Nita. You told me you didn’t cut her.”
“I didn’t. My God, Michael, I would never use a knife on any woman!”
“And you said she had no scar that you noticed.”
“I told you that.”
“On which cheek did you slap her?”
“Which cheek? Michael, what difference does it make? I am right-handed. I was facing her, so I must have hit her on the left cheek.”
Michael nodded. “The one with the scar. Isn’t it possible that your nail caught her flesh and tore it without your realizing it?”
“No, it is not. I felt bad as soon as I did it and I looked at her cheek. It was red from the slap, but the skin wasn’t broken. She was crying, her face already wet from the rain –”
“What?”
“She was crying –”
“You didn’t mention the rain before.”
“Michael, do I have to give you a report on the weather conditions? It was raining. What difference does that make?”
“All the difference in the world –” Michael turned and ran for a taxi hoping he was not too late.
But the Saturday afternoon traffic had moved in, and his second journey to the docks at Piraeus took longer. By the time he reached the berth of the Quincade, there was no sign of the motor yacht.
Michael ran to the sponge fisherman at the next dock. “I’m looking for the Quincade. It was anchored there a few hours ago.”
The fisherman shrugged. “Gone. Sailed with the tide.”
“Where to?”
“Who knows? Perhaps to one of the islands. Everyone goes to the islands in the summer.”
Michael felt defeated. He stared out at the horizon, hoping for a sign.
The islands –
“Is there a ferry to Kea?”
“Yes, but it takes three hours.”
“Where does it dock?” The fisherman pointed and Michael waved his thanks and ran, catching the Kea ferry as it was about to depart. For the entire time of the crossing, he stood in the bow, feeling the warm salt air against his face. Finally, when the rocky shorelines of Kea came into view, he saw that the fates were with him. The motor yacht Quincade was riding at anchor.
When he left the ferry he started toward it, then changed his mind. Not the yacht. A hotel.
At the taxi-service stand, he asked a driver, “Where is your best hotel?”
“Straight ahead,” the man answered indicating a building of glass and chrome.
“No, I want something that would have been here twenty-five years ago.”
“You mean the Kythnos. I can take you there.”
It was an older white-stone building that showed signs of aging. At the dinner hour a rear terrace had a few diners, and Michael saw that he’d guessed correctly. Alec Grimsby was seated at a table off to one side with a woman companion. He half rose from his chair as he saw Michael approaching.
Michael barely glanced at
him. It was the woman he’d come to find. She was blonde now and there was no scar on her cheek, but he would have known her anywhere. “Hello, Nita” he said.
She stared up at him coolly, without surprise. “Hello Michael. Will you join us for dessert?”
“Only for talk,” he said pulling up a chair. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but just then he had no appetite.
“Don’t try any funny business,” Alec Grimsby warned. “My crewmen are armed, and only minutes away.”
“My mind doesn’t run to funny business, certainly not to anything as devious as the two of you.”
“I had to do it, Michael,” Nita said. “An Israeli assassin has been on my trail.”
“So you decided to die again. It worked so well the first time, you figured it might give you another twenty-five years. And you brought me back because I was the one who misidentified you the first time.”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” she tried to explain. “When I wrote and said I wanted to see you again, I meant it. But I had no certainty you’d come before I had to disappear again, no certainty the police would show you the body.”
“Who was it by the way? Who died for you this time?”
“Mosha’s death twenty-five years ago was an accident. Alec didn’t recruit me until after it happened, when it appeared my supposed death could be put to some real use. We had a good living, but four months ago we learned there was a price on our heads. Alec had seen a woman on Majorca who looked amazingly like me, except that she had a bad scar on her left cheek. She was a prostitute. I returned to Athens and let myself be seen by neighbors and a few old friends with a paste scar. I applied it with makeup every morning and touched it up when necessary. The assassin had tracked me to Athens by this time, but he waited to see if Alec would show, so he could kill us both. When Alec did come, he had the Majorca woman with him on the yacht. We exchanged places.”
The Iron Angel Page 14