A Darker God (7 page)

Ignoring the surreptitious movement of the door handle, Andrew Merriman began to write.

Chapter 4

S
oulios Gunay strolled to the café fanning himself with his straw boater. Ridiculous headgear! He still felt comfortable with nothing but his red fez. He felt more comfortable with his true given name: Suleyman … but, when in Athens … He joined three men at their table. They looked up eagerly.

“Kalimera, sympatrioti,”
said one. Was the Thracian greeting sincere or a sly and indiscreet reference to his northern origin? Soulios returned a stiffly polite reply. He looked at their drinks, signalled the waiter, and ordered more ouzo all round with mint tea for himself.

“I shouldn’t indulge you,” he commented with distaste when the four drinks arrived. “You should be keeping a clear head. That’s what I pay you for.”

“Oh, come on, now, we got it right this time, didn’t we? That was him, wasn’t it? You saw! You knew him, or you wouldn’t be celebrating by standing us another ouzo,” one of them reasoned.

“Give me the photograph.”

The oldest man, his cousin, took a battered sepia photograph from his briefcase and put it in the middle of the table.
They all considered the image, matching it with the features of the man they had witnessed briefly.

“Hard to tell. I’d know the
horse
if I saw it again,” the cousin commented. “But the arrogant poser in the saddle? Still has that swagger about him … if it
is
him we saw just now. All that bowing and scraping! It’s possible. He’s aged, if so … It’s been how long? Ten years?”

“Eleven,” said Soulios firmly. “The year of the Salonika fire—1917. That’s when I first encountered him. But it’s five years since he rode up to my door with his pockets stuffed with gold. It’s him. That’s all I need to know.”

The three men relaxed and exchanged congratulatory smiles. “Then you’ll be wanting us to …?” The youngest of the trio mimed unsheathing a knife.

Soulios stopped him with a peremptory gesture. “No. The next bit is delicate. I don’t mean to offend you but I have things to do, things to check … It will take time. My permit runs out next week and I must return … home.” The word always caught in his throat. He dislodged it and spat it out again: “Home … to Turkey.” He listened politely to the expressions of sympathy his show of emotion had triggered and concluded: “I’ll return when I can and prepare you for a busy summer. Meantime—you may stand down.”

His cousin shrugged. “Five years, Soulios. Strike while you still have the venom in you. Leave it any longer, you’ll start to forget. You’ll make yet another fortune, marry another wife … grow fat and easy sitting under your olive trees. Could be your last chance.”

Soulios smiled. “Oh, no. The poison distils. Or rather—it improves with keeping, like a good brandy.”

They looked at each other with the agitated disappointment of muzzled hounds shown the hare. “Well, when you need us you know where …”

He did. He owned their businesses and their homes.

“Thank you. There is one thing … Cousin, your boy—he is how old now?”

“Twelve, Soulios. Well grown. He’s a big, strong boy.”

“Time he was earning a wage?”

His cousin shrugged. “It’s not easy. The city’s awash with cheap labour, you know that. Lads that’ll work for a day to earn a crust of bread.”

Soulios glanced back up the street. “I think a job should be found for him. And I have one in mind. Send Demetrios to see me this evening.”

He smiled and rose to his feet, drawing the meeting to a close. “That will be all for the moment. You’ve seen him. You will know him again. You can go now.”

The bleak features invited no argument or comment. Respectfully, the three men finished their drinks, slipped away the banknotes he offered them, bowed briefly, and left together.

Soulios watched them walk away, eyes narrowed in speculation. He decided he had chosen well. The men were bound to him by the double tie of family allegiance and financial interest. The two older cousins had acquired a ruthless competence during their spell in the Greek army during the Balkan wars. They had not yet sunk into the mire of postwar lethargy; their spirit was not yet quenched by domesticity. They could handle weapons. They could kill. The youngest had a naturally vicious streak and a cockiness that pushed him to outdo the two others, whom he jokingly called his “uncles.” They would need careful management, but their talents, Soulios calculated, would be quite adequate for carrying out the first stage of his plans. The simplest.

His ultimate goal, a coup so ambitious and so satisfying he could scarcely bring himself to believe it attainable, his cousins had no conception of. And they must catch no whisper of it.
They would have no sympathy for his plan. In fact it would horrify them. They would refuse to be involved with it at any price. Soulios could understand that. No—for this a professional operator would be brought in from a foreign power. It would be expensive but Soulios was prepared to put his last drachma behind it. It would be tricky but, at last and surprisingly, there’d been a breakthrough. He’d learned to wait. And waiting had thrown up support from an unexpected quarter.

He’d discovered there were people in the city more fanatical and madder than he considered himself. Reckless, impetuous, wild-eyed people he wouldn’t trust as far as the end of the garden, but they had in place exactly what he needed: a network that threaded Europe. At the centre of the web was Athens, and from here it looped its way from glittering capital to glittering capital in a tangle of telegraph and telephone wires. He’d made discreet use of these people and what he suspected was their leaking sieve of an organisation. They were eager to help. And they’d found exactly what he was looking for in London.

London. The irony pleased him.

When he was sure he was not overlooked, Soulios sat down again, ordered some more tea, and took from his wallet another photograph. He placed it over the first. Dark brown with weathering and much use, the subject was barely distinguishable. Three dark heads close together, six bright eyes, a white streak which might have been a pearl necklace around a slim throat. Three innocents dead.

But it would take four lives to pay the bill.

His loving eyes made out the fading features with painful clarity. His wife, his six-year-old son, and his two-year-old daughter. Their image was still there, etched forever on his mind, as, clasped in each other’s arms with not even a burial sack to cover their dead faces, livid and lost, they sank slowly beneath the grey waters of the Bosphorus.

Chapter 5

October 1928. Athens
.

I
n an ancient scoop of land, a sheltered hollow on the southern slope of the Acropolis where the rock was still warm from the day, a man’s scream ripped through the gathering darkness.

The scream followed the unmistakable sound of a blade thrusting into flesh.

For a few seconds all other sounds were pushed to the edges of perception; the rumble of traffic, the pealing of a cracked church bell, the squabbling of a pair of birds were discounted by everyone within earshot as listeners strained to make sense of what they’d heard.

It came again, the same butcher’s blow, accompanied this time by a grunt of effort. A second piercing shriek of surprise and outrage turned abruptly into a guttural rasping: the gargle of a dying man whose lungs refuse to function, whose air passages are filling with blood. And yet the unseen victim went on fighting to snatch one more breath.

The Little Summer of Saint Demetrios had settled over Greece, smiling a blessing. It looked as though they were to have a gentle October. But the harsh heat of the past months lingered on in the citizens’ minds, a recent and scorching
memory. The memory was too easily triggered by a glance upwards to the contorted shapes of trees outlining the hills and the occasional whiff of charcoal carried down on the breeze. September rain had quenched the sporadic fires and already underbrush was shooting fresh and green amongst the blackened stumps, a premature taste of spring.

As the sun set, the evening sky began to flush with the grey-purple light that the slopes of Mount Hymettus bounce back with some optical witchery to stain the heavens for a few moments over the city. Athens, the violet-crowned, was settling gratefully for the night under a single silken sheet.

It should have been a moment of deep peace but, somewhere just out of sight, a man was screaming in his death throes.

A grey shape, hooded and masked, detached itself from a crowd of similar grey shapes standing frozen in horrified tableau within yards of the butchery, and with a wide gesture called for silence. “Quiet!” The voice was deep and authoritative. The crowd stopped its murmuring at once. And then the same voice came again: “There’s been murder done here!” The comment was sepulchral in meaning and delivered with an awed intensity, yet it was so superfluous, following the blatantly obvious nature of the assault, that it risked provoking an explosion of nervous laughter from two women who were sitting at ease on the hillside, listening, a short distance away.

This was no time for levity. The dying man’s pain was evident to all who heard it; his dogged refusal to surrender to whatever horror was staring him in the face aroused a sympathetic agony. A third slicing blow and a low gurgling sob had them twitching in response.

Was it over now? They longed for it to be over.

The two women stirred uneasily, listening on, wanting to block their ears yet not daring to miss a sound. Their tension, stretched beyond its limits by fear and pity, frayed and fell
apart at a further vocal onslaught, unravelling into strands of impatience and anger. Enough! Enough! Was the victim now attempting to call for help? Surely not! The man knew he must die. Why couldn’t he just bow to Fate, give up the ghost and slide away, putting the listeners out of their misery?

Laetitia Talbot, seated in the centre of the first row of marble steps, turned to whisper as much to her companion but closed her mouth, censoring the ungracious comment.

“Lord! Geoffrey’s really hamming it up, isn’t he?” Maud Merriman had no such compunction. “Where on earth does he think he is—the Torture Chamber at Madame Tussaud’s?” Maud’s commanding English voice risked disturbing the action even when produced, as now, in a whisper. She sighed and hunted for the spectacles that dangled on a gold chain on her bosom. She popped them onto the tip of her nose and turned the face of her watch to the dying light from the west but shrugged, unable to read it. “If I rightly remember the play, I reckon we’ve got three hundred lines more to come … Now—
you’ve
got the script, Letty. Aren’t you supposed to be prompting? Just have a look and check I’m right, would you?”

Laetitia knew that she needn’t bother. Maud knew every line of the tragedy by Aeschylus, whether in this new English version of
Agamemnon
they were hearing or in the ancient Greek.

“Good thing they invited
us
to their rehearsal, my dear! They can depend on hearing our informed opinion—delivered with unsparing honesty.” The relish in Maud’s tone promised a stinging application of the renowned Merriman honesty.

“We must tell them to speed things up a bit before the actual performance … Somewhere between lines nine seventy-five and thirteen-forty, I’d say. Wouldn’t you agree, Letty? Mark it up in your copy. No! There! There!” An imperious finger flipped over two sheets of the script in Letty’s lap and pointed
with unerring accuracy to line 975. “One hesitates, of course, to edit dear old Aeschylus and I’m quite certain the suspense is just what the author intended at this point—keeping us on the very edge of these uncomfortable seats—but all the same … An hour and a half should be the
absolute
limit for a modern audience. Great Heavens! This could all take another twenty minutes!” Maud hurried on, not requiring a comment. “Fifteen if they dash through it—longer if Geoffrey indulges himself in another death rattle. Don’t, I beg you, Laetitia, call for an encore! He’s showed off quite enough for one night.”

Maud pulled her woolly cardigan more tightly around her shoulders, shivered, and muttered to herself: “For goodness’ sake! Still moaning on? What’s the matter with you, Geoffrey?
Die
, man! Supper’s in half an hour.”