by Declan Burke
'She was fed up, hungover. Only asked the once, where's the girl staying rented the blue Kawasaki, Karen King. The guy got pissy, he couldn't speak English, so she just walked out again.'
Ray smoked on. 'How d'you think she is?' he said.
Sparks shrugged. 'She looked happy enough to me. That guy she's with, he's cute for an older guy.'
'I mean Doyle. How's she making out?'
'Doyle?' Sparks shaded her eyes looking across. 'I don't know. She says she's tired but it's more than that.'
'Like how?'
'She's just not herself. Maybe, she was saying yesterday, it was the fright she got, being shot at. You were there when it happened, right?'
'Already shot.' Ray crushed his smoke in the sand. 'Listen, I'm grabbing a beer. Want another one of those?'
'Sure. Only make it a strawberry one this time. Banana's a fattening fruit.'
'You could do,' Ray said, getting up, 'with putting on a few pounds. There's nothing less sexy than too skinny.' He stepped over the low wall, crossed the road and went into the roadside bar, Baywatch, ordered an Amstel, a strawberry daiquiri. Then, while the guy went out back hunting fresh strawberries, Ray rolled down his sleeves and strolled next door to the scooter rental, slipping a credit card, the gold one, out of his wallet.
'Yassou,' he said. 'Kalimera.'
'Kalispera,' the middle-aged guy behind the counter said, smiling. 'How can I help for you?'
'Looking to rent a bike, something decent. For a week.'
'You have a driver license?'
'Sure.' Ray got out his wallet, laid the license beside the credit card. 'I was here last year,' he said, 'you won't remember, but you rented me a sweet blue Kawasaki. Any chance it's still around?'
'Ah, but no.' The guy copying out Ray's details, liver spots like a join-the-dots game on the crown of his bald head. 'This is not possible. This bike, she is rented.'
'That's a shame,' Ray said. 'The guy rent it for long?'
'A woman. She rent for one week also.'
'Maybe I'll see her around,' Ray said. 'Persuade her to swap.'
'Perhaps.' The guy bobbing his head. 'But where she stays, is not a very good place to see her.'
'Oh yeah? She's staying up in the village?'
The ice had melted in the daiquiri by the time Ray got back to the beach. Sparks said, 'Any joy with the rental guy?'
'Nope. Unhelpful bastards, aren't they?'
'Who's that, the Greeks or just men in general?'
'Miaow,' Ray said.
Karen
Up close the ranch-style building was more in the way of an old bus garage converted into a dormitory, the whitewash dulled pinkish from the orange dust. Pyle led the way through the double gates into a graveled courtyard with a round dry fountain in the middle, the high walls topped by dinky little battlements that got Karen thinking, again, maybe it was just her frame of mind, of the Alamo. A red-brick barbecue over in the corner built into a recess under an olive tree. Karen liked the look of the bleached-wood picnic tables.
The dorm was another matter. Twelve beds curtained off, not all of them taken. Pyle said Karen could rent one of the rooms built on if she wasn't cool with the set-up. So that's what Karen did, choosing a room for its balcony looking onto the courtyard, a view of the Aegean beyond the battlements, Karen seeing the sea as a vast moat, liking the notion. She'd never seen Anna as placid, and wondered if it was all the open space or just the girl hungover from too many pills.
Or, maybe, Pyle.
He had his feet up on the balcony wall, a beer on his midriff, saying how he used to be a Marine. Did a tour, still a kid, in the Vietnam conflict, this before he came to Greece. Semper Fi, he said, my skinny white ass.
'Was this guy, Sassoon,' Pyle said, 'fought in the trenches in World War One. A poet. Anyway, he got invalided out twice but he always went back. I'll give the guy guts, he had that. But one war was plenty for me.'
Saying how he'd seen Vietnamese melted at the side of the road. Actual human beings shrunk down to not much bigger than dogs. The sight bad enough without the smell.
A comforting rumble to his voice, Karen feeling safe for the first time in she couldn't remember how long, the commune being so remote. A guy, George, out on the road watching for strangers. She said, 'That George doesn't talk much, does he?'
'It's better when poets don't talk out loud.'
'He didn't look much like a poet.'
'The best ones don't.'
Karen grooving on the scene, people wandering aimless through the courtyard, stopping off at balconies to shoot the shit, gathering around the picnic tables. Beefheart filtering out from the dorm, Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles.
'Ray used to be in the Rangers,' she said. 'He said it was like the Marines.'
'Ray of the Rangers?'
They both got a bang out of that one. Pyle said, 'He's had training, yeah?'
'Until he got court-martialled out.'
'I'm guessing he's a good man in a tight spot.'
'When he's not running off, sure.'
Anna whining at the sound of Ray's name, raising her head to look around. Pyle chucked her under the chin.
'Pyle? No offence, but I have to ask. I mean, about the duffel.'
Pyle shrugged. 'We have writers, painters. George the poet. One guy, he's a fire-eater. Another one's putting together a symphony of shell sounds and seagulls. Not exactly your criminal mastermind types.'
'I know, but --'
'First off, no one knows what's in the duffel. Second, Anna. Third, one of the commandments, it's actually a commandment, the Biblical kind. You finished with that?'
Karen sloshed around the inch or two of beer in her bottle. 'Just about.'
Pyle got up, went inside. Karen tapped along to a new Beefheart number and then realised it wasn't Beefheart, it was Elvis Costello, a tune Karen didn't recognise. She put her feet up on the balcony wall and tried to figure out how to play Pyle.
Karen wondering, again, if it all mightn't be a whole lot simpler if she was older, didn't need that buzz she got from Ray, Christ, even Rossi – how they let her feel it was okay, just once in a while, to get animal, forget everything except the right here and now.
He came back out with two bottles and a saucer, poured some of his beer for Anna and set it down in front of her. Anna sniffing, curious, then lapping at it cautiously.
'None of them,' he said.
'Excuse me?'
'You asked, on the train, how many of them offered to buy their way in.' He reached across, clinked his bottle against Karen's. 'I'm saying, none of them did.'
Melody
Mel went Spartan for accommodation, low-key, no sense in drawing attention, but was still a little disappointed to realise the wardrobe in her room was, she hated to admit, just a smidge narrower than she was herself.
She sat at the table out on the balcony overlooking the port and opened the notebook, time to recap. Except the glare of the setting sun on the blank pages reminded her of Ray, so drained he was a jaundice stain on the crisp white sheets. Mel suffering, along with the usual heartburn she got in the evening, pangs of guilt, and feeling a little crampy now from nerves.
Ray should be waking up any time now.
Mel hoped he'd get back on his feet and presume she'd hopped the next ferry out, the logical thing to do when you've ripped someone off for thirty grand, the guy flat-backed, unconscious with exhaustion. The doctor wanting to know how Ray'd busted his arm.
'Before my time,' Melody'd said. 'I met him on the ferry, thought he looked sickly. What d'you think, is it heat-stroke?'
Telling the doc Karen and Pyle were just off the ferry too, generously offering to help haul Ray out of the port around to the ESY. Mel dropping in a reference to Blanche DuBois, the kindness of strangers.
The doctor had nodded along, dubiously, then said Ray'd be okay once he got the other side of about two days sleep. Although, he'd be running some x-rays on the arm once Ray woke up, make sure it
was healing right, wasn't part of the problem.
'Super,' Mel'd said. 'I'll drop by tomorrow, see how he's doing.'
The doctor quizzing her about travel insurance, stuff like that.
'No idea,' Melody'd said. 'Like I say, I just met the guy. All I know is his name's Ray and he looked poorly.' Mel arriving in the doctor's office via a visit to the restroom with Ray's hold-all , none too happy her panties were big enough to hold thirty grand in cash but thinking too she probably should be counting her blessings. She'd given the doctor the hold-all. 'You want to rummage around in there,' she'd said, 'maybe you'll come up with some details you need.'
Then left and dragged her bags around to the port. Hailed a taxi, directing the cabbie up the hill to the village. Looking out at the pubs and clubs they passed, Melody wondered which one was Johnny Priest's, where Rossi and Sleeps were supposed to drop off the coke. Asking herself, a direct question, if she had the audacity, she ever found out which bar was Johnny's, to just walk in and ask for the ten grand she was owed. Thrilling to the idea, the daring. Actual tingles, like some dark electricity, when she pictured it – Jack, cool and roguish, an older guy, Judy with that big-girl style going on, Sophie Dahl packing heat and asking for the ten grand she was owed …
Write what you know, they said. Every time, Mel shelling out good money to hear the same damn thing fifty different ways – write what you know. Mel was always tempted to raise a hand, ask how that worked for ghost stories, or you wanted to write a movie about spacemen, aliens. What Melody mostly knew was how little she knew.
Until, okay, now.
The plan, if Ray was to catch her up, ask about the money, was to say she'd been keeping it safe for him, no sense in leaving all that cash lying around, a temptation.
As for Rossi and Sleeps, they tracked her down wanting to know where Johnny Priest's coke was at, Melody figured the same ploy would work there too.
Melody, in life as in writing, believed in the genius of simplicity.
Rossi
'So I says, "Ray, we can do a deal here."'
'How'd that go down?'
'I went down,' Rossi said. 'We're in parlay, yeah? But he whacks me with the Uzi anyway. Ow, Jesus. Go easy.'
This last to the nurse sewing the fresh wound. Which was at least a step up, Rossi conceded, from getting stitched by a vet.
'He had a go during a sit-down?' Sleeps said.
'This is what we're dealing with, Sleeps. A moral degenerate. Next thing I'm waking up in the box.' Rossi skipping how he'd thought he'd been buried alive, sliding past the bit where he'd had himself a quiet weep.
Rossi, in a bad week to start with, was having a long day. Shot at, knocked unconscious, dumped in an early grave, then jumping ship on Santorini, ferrying back the way they came, a couple of hours each way. Rossi traumatised by his experience and anxious to share. Except Sleeps was catatonic the whole time, only perking up when they made Ios.
'It gets worse,' Sleeps said. 'He's swiped Mel too.'
'Fuck Mel. Ow.'
'Please to sit still,' the nurse said.
'First off, I want that Uzi back,' Rossi said. 'You still have the mag, right?'
'You're the one had it. You must've left it in the van.'
'Crap.'
'Seriously, Rossi, I'm worried about Mel.'
'I give the girl six months, she'll be running the white slave trade out of Hong Kong.'
'Last I saw her,' Sleeps said morosely, 'she was with someone who'd shoot down on an unarmed man. The kind of degenerate, you called him, who'd whack someone during parlay.'
'Except,' Rossi said, 'she's more likely the one who swiped Ray. Jesus! Ow!'
The nurse staring at him, the needle poised. 'Your friend is Ray?' she said.
Karen
Karen reckoned the best thing, in case Pyle took any notions when he got back, the guy with a couple of beers on, was to be gone at the time. Pyle being smart enough, she was hoping, or experienced enough, to take the hint.
So she left Anna snoozing off her beer buzz and grabbed a sweater, the night turning chilly. Strolled out into the slivery-grey world beyond the walls, on down towards the shore along a tyre-marked track that wound through a grove of desiccated trees, Karen giving a wide berth to the little blue boxes Pyle'd told her were beehives. Ios honey, he said, being famous for its hint of oregano. Karen only realising then what it was she'd been smelling all day.
She strolled on, cicadas zizz-zizzing, lizards rustling in the dry scrub. A tinkle-tankle of goat-bells. Then heard a self-satisfied rumble and saw a faint plume of dust way off to her left, ghostly in the moonlight. Someone coming down off the escarpment, arriving late to the commune, a chainsaw juggler, maybe a seaweed sculptor. Pyle, okay, seemed to know what he was doing, talked a good game. But the rest were artists of the bullshit variety. One guy, eating vegetarian barbecue for Chrissakes, had told her with a straight face he was writing a ballet for trees.
She picked her way down a steep ravine, careful about slipping on the loose shale, maybe twisting an ankle, and got herself perched on a still-warm boulder overlooking a sheltered bay, a faint breeze funneling up the narrow channel to cool her face, the night plenty warm once you were moving. She lit a cigarette but mainly she inhaled the night, the quiet, the impression of comforting distance that went with looking out across a placid black sea. The cicadas, the whish-shushing waves, somehow part of the silence. The night damn near perfect except for the bee that'd tracked Karen all the way to the shore and was whining now somewhere up to her right, invisible in the dark.
Except then a boat rounded the near headland, its outboard motor buzzing, and angled down the channel.
Karen slid backwards off the boulder as a spotlight blazed, turning the cove bright as day.
Madge
'"Deliver Israel, O God, from all his tribulations,"' Madge said. 'It's from the Psalms. Psalms 24.'
'You wanted to call the kid Israel?'
Madge nodded. 'The nuns said to take something from the Bible. So, I'm handing him up, I figure the least I can do is give him a name that means something. Like a prayer, a blessing he'd carry all his life.'
'Nice thought,' Terry said. 'But for an Irish kid? You don't think you were setting him up for, y'know, all sorts of Christ-killer grief?'
'Don't sweat it,' Madge said. 'Frank got involved, Frank the fucking wannabe intellectual, the opera freak. A big fan of Rossini. Mainly,' she added, tapping ash, 'because of the Lone Ranger.'
'So you're saying neither of you was particularly worried about how the kid might fare in the playground.'
'I was seventeen, Terry, just after having a baby. I mean, this was about half-an-hour after being ripped open. Just trying to do the right thing.'
'And still trying now,' Terry said, 'even though the guy, you're saying, reckons you're wrong.'
Madge had seen Rossi on Santorini, Madge and Terry disembarked from the cruise ship and waiting to board the next ferry out, perched on their luggage while Terry sorted the tickets. Not recognising him at first, just idly scanning the faces of the milling crowd, then noticing the blood, some guy seriously pissed about something, waving his arms around, a big guy – Sleeps, who'd been so good to Madge, gave her his jacket for a pillow the time she fainted up at the lake – Sleeps nodding patiently while Rossi vented.
Fate, she reckoned. Surprising herself at how quietly she accepted it, all her effort taken up with suppressing the urge to go to him, take a cool cloth to his bloody face.
'He's in denial,' she said, Terry leaning back to order another couple of beers from the barman, Mr Baywatch. Madge's gaze riveted to the entrance of the health centre, Rossi'd been in there over an hour now. 'Like, he's been told all his life his mother was some slapper worked the canal, his father a pizza guy over from Sicily. This is what he's being told in the home. But he's the right age, Terry. The right name.'
'It's perfect,' Terry agreed. 'So perfect he steps in and snatches you right out from under Ray's nose. This Ro
ssi being the reason,' he added, 'everything fucked up. Why you're right now a fugitive from justice.'
Madge thought about that. 'Maybe,' she said, the barman placing a tray with two beers, frosted glasses, on the table, 'if I hadn't dumped him all those years ago, he wouldn't have been just out of prison and so desperate for money he'd cut in on Ray and Karen. How's that sound?'
'Like you're still a fugitive from justice,' Terry said, sucking some froth off his upper lip, 'only this time it's natural justice.' He considered. 'Except sounding, to me, like you're thinking of turning the tables, going off to hunt down natural justice. Make it all well with Rossi again.'
'You could just as easily have said that,' Madge observed, 'without sneering.'
'All I'm saying is, you've got enough problems without --'
'If Rossi's here,' Madge said, 'then it's Karen he's after. The money she owes him.'
'And you're going to help him,' Terry said, 'nail Karen. This guy who shot Ray.'
'Ray seems to me like a guy who can see the bigger picture.'
'Ray thinks twice,' Terry admitted, 'for sure. It's one of his strong points. But asking him to go splits with a guy nearly killed him? That's a big ask.'
'Who said anything,' Madge said, peering into the gathering gloom at the ESY, 'about asking?'
Ray
Ray'd never ridden any bikes with a busted arm before and wouldn't be in any hurry to try it again, especially not at night along some dirt-track felt like he was cruising railway sleepers. Ray wondering if he should've listened to the doc, stayed between the sheets. And then, just as the worst was over, Ray coming down off the escarpment and crossing the plain towards the lights, some guy ambles out of this tumbledown cottage and plants himself in the middle of the track. Ray, he wasn't doing four miles a fortnight on account of the arm, would've run him down.