Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (23 page)

‘
Artemis
,’ Mavros read from the bow.

‘My daughter,’ Aris said, jumping down.

‘How old is she?’

The big man glanced at him. ‘Thirteen, fourteen. I don’t see her much. Her mother’s a bitch who made the mistake of thinking I’d stay with her for life.’ He laughed as he hauled on the mooring rope. ‘Jump on. I’ll give you the tour.’

Mavros made the small leap and held the rope to enable Aris to join him. He wasn’t much of an enthusiast of boats— like children and cars, they required you to lift the toilet lid and pour in your bank account—but he could see that the
Artemis
had unusual charm. The wood on the deck was stained a deep brown, and through the windows he made out a well-appointed cabin below.

‘Superb, isn’t she?’ Aris said, running his hand along the gunwale. ‘I wish I could spend more time on her.’

Mavros was looking at the mast. ‘You don’t sail her, though?’

‘Uh-uh. Engine only. Beautiful new Volvo. Gives her plenty of power and range.’

Mavros nodded. ‘I imagine. Were you on a trip a couple of days ago? She wasn’t here the day I arrived.’

‘Ah, no,’ the younger Theocharis said, glancing beyond him towards another boat. ‘No, I had her in the yard over on Paros. They brought her back yesterday.’

Mavros didn’t ask what the
Artemis
had been in for. Before he embarked, he’d noticed a section on the waterline amidships with fresh blue paint, the wood smoother than the other planking. He remembered what the men on the ferry had said about the scrape along the side of the boat the young drowned couple had been on—according to them, there had been traces of blue in the wood.

Then he saw where Aris was looking.

The old, one-armed man Manolis was staring across the water at them from the deck of the
trata Sotiria
, his heavily built son, Lefteris, also fixing them with his eyes as he coiled a rope. The faces of the two islanders expressed a barely concealed hostility that made Mavros shiver in the bright sunlight.

I
T
DIDN’T
take long for Aris to lose interest in showing off the
Artemis
to Mavros. His mood changed from effusive to irritable, though Mavros couldn’t be sure how much this had been brought about by the sullen stares of Manolis and his son, Lefteris. Leaving the port, he headed up the main street to the OTE to run a check on Aris’s boat.

The telephone office was located in a cubby-hole in the northern wall of the
kastro
, a guy with a grizzled moustache behind the counter. Mavros spotted the local Golden Guide behind him and pointed to it. There were several boatyards listed on Paros, most of them under the names of their owners. There was only one with a company name, Blue Wave Dock SA in Naoussa. He wrote down all the numbers and went outside to call the first one on his mobile, looking around to check there was no one in the vicinity.

‘Blue Wave Dock,’ came a languid female voice.

‘Yes, good day,’ Mavros said in Greek. ‘This is Worldwide Marine Insurance in Piraeus. I understand that you recently undertook repair work on behalf of Mr Aris Theocharis.’ He was taking a chance that the big man would have taken his precious
kaïki
to what looked like the most professional operation on Paros.

‘That is correct,’ the woman answered after a pause, responding to Mavros’s formal language with a marked increase in courtesy. ‘How may I help?’

‘No doubt we’ll shortly be receiving the documents from the insured, but I would be grateful if you could give me a run-down of the work you carried out.’ Mavros moved into the centre of the square to distance himself from a pair of voluble Italian tourists.

‘Certainly,’ came the reply. ‘Kindly give me your fax number.’

‘I require an outline on the telephone,’ Mavros said in the firm tone used by business people to prevail over minor functionaries. ‘Now, if you please.’

There was a pause and then the sound of fingers tapping on a keyboard. ‘Yes, here we are, Mr…what did you say your name was?’

‘Mitsotakis,’ Mavros said without hesitation. Using the family name of the country’s last right-wing prime minister would keep the woman on her toes.

‘Mr Mitsotakis,’ the woman repeated slowly, clearly impressed. The tactic had worked—it usually did with employees in private companies. Civil servants needed a different approach after years of socialist government. ‘The work carried out on Mr Theocharis’s boat was put in hand immediately. Remove and replace section of hull measuring one point five by nought point four metres, bond joints, seal and paint new section. The total cost—’

‘That does not concern me at this stage,’ Mavros interrupted. ‘I need to know how the damage to the hull occurred in case of litigation.’

‘Surely your client will furnish you with the relevant details,’ the woman said.

‘Yes, but I need your company’s appraisal,’ Mavros said coldly.

There was another pause as the woman shouted for someone called Mikis. A conversation ensued that Mavros couldn’t make out. Finally the woman came back to the phone. ‘Apparently there had been heavy contact with another vessel. There were traces of white paint in the damaged section. If Mr Theocharis hadn’t brought the boat in promptly, the gradual influx of water would have given rise to serious danger of sinking.’

‘Thank you,’ Mavros said. ‘I’ll make sure that your cooperation in this matter is noted.’

‘Thank you, Mr Mitsotakis. Good day, and please remember us whenever—’

Mavros cut the connection and sat down under the mulberry tree. When he’d been on the
Artemis
he had managed to cast an eye over the
trata
the young couple had been on. Its hull had not been as seriously damaged as Aris’s, but there was enough of an abrasion to suggest there had indeed been heavy contact. The likelihood of Aris having run into a different white boat didn’t seem overwhelming. But did that mean he had some involvement in the drownings? If so, why had the men of the dead boy’s family stared at him rather than confronted him? Maybe they’d been paid off.

Head bowed in thought, Mavros started walking. He had come to Trigono to find a missing woman, but it seemed that this was only one of several curious issues: the drownings, Aris’s damaged boat, the war memorial with the erased name, the photos linking Eleni the archaeologist to Rosa Ozal, the photos and the diskette that seemed to link Rosa to the wartime officer George Lawrence and to the dig—the dig which was on old man Theocharis’s land. Things seemed to lead back to Panos Theocharis. He even found himself wondering if his client Deniz Ozal could be tied up with everything—after all, he was an antiquities dealer and he’d visited the notorious operator Tryfon Roufos inAthens. Not only that, his sister Rosa worked in a gallery back in Manhattan. Did either of the Ozals know one or other of the Theocharis men?

It was time Mavros found out more about the museum benefactor’s activities on the island, and he knew where he was going to start. But there was someone else he wanted to question first.

December 19th, 1942
 

Suddenly how different it all is. Hiding from the Italians has
been easy enough. They’ve only been as far as the village
since I landed, and then just for a few hours each week to buy
provisions at rates that are highly unfavourable to the
Trigoniotes. But now I’m also having to conceal part of my activities
from Ajax and from the leader of the Greek Sacred Band
unit that has arrived. I’m sure that Ajax, who is limping but
mobile again, suspects that I have been up to something that
his family wouldn’t approve of with Maro. I’m also sure that
Captain Th. would insist on my immediate replacement if he
found me involved with a local woman. He is a stickler for discipline
who doesn’t cut his four men any slack at all. I can tell
by the way he looks at me, his eyes hooded and reserved, and
by the formal way he addresses me that he resents my presence
on the island
.

For it seems that Captain Th.—Agamemnon is the code-
name he has been allocated—is a local of sorts himself,
although he only spent the summers here when he was a boy.
Apparently his father owns the large estate beneath Vigla. Its
eastern extent is on the other side of the track from my hut in
the Kambos. The old man is close to death in a clinic in
Athens, which means that the captain, an only child, stands
to inherit the wide stretch of cultivated land as well as the
land above it, not that the worked-out mine shafts and the
cave systems around them are worth much now. To say that
Agamemnon regards the island with a seigneurial eye would
be to indulge in the grossest of understatements. On the other
hand, the islanders seem to respect him: even Ajax, who has
never concealed his communist leanings from me
.

My life has become much more complicated with the
arrival of the Greeks. The main problem is that my mission
and Agamemnon’s have not been properly coordinated.
Every time I call base, I am instructed to proceed with
sabotage operations on Paros and the neighbouring islands
.
A good stock of explosives and other equipment has now
been landed at Vathy, and I have lugged a fair amount of the
former up to the caves on Vigla myself. The question is, what
do we do with it? Ever since Agamemnon and his men set up
camp in the sheltered watercourses above Vathy, Agamemnon
seems to have lost his appetite for action. Maybe the good
captain is set against hostilities or maybe the injury to Ajax’s
leg has made him think long and hard about the potential
effects of operations against the enemy—which are reprisals
against the local population. My God, I’m aware of that consequence
too. How could I not be? The idea of anything happening
to Maro keeps me awake through the darkness after
she has gone. But I was sent to Trigono to do a job and I can’t
ignore my orders
.

Ah, Maro, we have been unlucky to find ourselves in love at
this time of blood and fury! But then, we would never have found
each other in peacetime. Even if I’d stopped off on this wave-
lapped, gull-haunted island, I would never have been able to
get close to you. Although it is now fraught with danger because
of the influx of men trained in watch-keeping and observation
techniques, we have still managed to meet. Now you take your
donkey to the Kambos every morning to work the isolated strips
of land that are part of your dowry, and you slip away for an
hour to the secret place we have taken over. They never last for
long, but I live for those times when we take refuge from the
hostile outside world and lose ourselves in each other. Ah,
Maro, how I worship your perfect body that bursts with such a
frenzy of youth when I cling to it! How I rejoice in your breasts,
small but ripe, and your white thighs that press so tightly to mine
when I die in you, the tears dripping from my eyes and mingling
with those you are already shedding for the beauty of our love
.

But these interludes of bliss cannot continue. I saw a
movement on the ridge leading to Profitis Ilias when we
parted today. Whether it was one of Ajax’s men or a lookout
posted by Agamemnon doesn’t matter. Sooner or later we
will be seen. But I don’t care. My intentions towards Maro
are honourable. I would marry her tomorrow if the custom
allowed it. My love for her has made me more alive than
I’ve ever been before. Passion may blind men, but I am in
complete control of myself. I will push ahead with the
mission I have been planning with or without the help of
the Greeks
.

Outside, the night is still. The wind that has been blowing
hard from the north these last few days is finally exhausted.
In the distance I can hear the run of the sea and the faint
clang of goat bells up on the heights
.

The blood is coursing through my veins like liquid fire. Ah,
Greece! It is time for me to strike a blow against the oppressor.
Everything has come together. I feel that all my life has
been leading up to this glorious act. I cannot die. I shall
become one of the immortals. I shall live for ever. With Maro
.

Mavros followed the narrow street into the kastro and went up the steps to Rinus’s flat. Although he could hear music playing at low volume, there was no answer to his knocking. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he picked up the sound of careful footsteps behind the door. There was a crack in the panelling and he saw a shadowy movement through it. An image was flickering on the screen of a large television, and to the side of it he could see a pile of video cassettes. It seemed that the barman wasn’t receiving visitors—or perhaps he just wasn’t receiving Mavros. Short of breaking the door down, there wasn’t much he could do.

He headed back past Rena’s house, skirting a heap of fresh donkey droppings, towards a car and bike hire place he’d noticed earlier. Although the sun was high in the sky, its rays making the back of his neck tingle, he’d made his mind up— no motorised transport. The island was already too redolent of diesel and tractor oil. He pointed to the solitary mountain bike outside the ramshackle office and made a deal that didn’t strain his wallet. The broad-girthed girl watched him with ill- disguised contempt as he checked the tyre pressures and adjusted the seat height. Push-bikes were for kids or demented tourists—sensible people drove.

Mavros cycled out past the Bar Astrapi, feeling his thigh muscles stretch. The bike was in surprisingly good condition; there probably hadn’t been much call for it over the summer. He was going out to the dig to surprise Eleni. He reckoned she was as good a lead to Theocharis as any, despite her antagonism towards Mavros after he’d spurned her advances. But more important, the photo in the album proved that she knew Rosa Ozal. He wasn’t planning on confronting her over that until he’d regained her confidence, but he was curious. Why had she been lying to him?

He freewheeled down the slope to the Kambos, glancing to the right as he passed the farm where he’d seen the donkey being beaten. This time there was no sign either of the old bastard with the stick or of the sad-eyed creature. He remembered reading in a Greek novel at school about an island farmer who drove his decrepit mule over a cliff with a big stone lashed around it when it could no longer work. The thought that the animal he’d tried to save may have suffered that fate made him shiver.

At a dusty junction in the middle of the Kambos, Mavros saw an old church, the whitewash fresh on its walls but the stonework beneath heavily pockmarked. He stopped and dismounted, rubbing the backs of his legs. He took the guidebook from his bag. The Theocharis estate, the old tower hovering in the haze, was farther to the west. This had to be Ayios Dhimitrios, the church that once served the deserted village of Myli where the windmills to grind the corn produced in the fertile plateau had been built. Now the two round structures were only a single storey high, the upper walls collapsed around their bases. Going closer to the church, Mavros examined the holes around the door. There were a lot of them, some narrow and deep, the other indentations more spread out. They looked very like they’d been made by bullets of varying sizes. Glancing back at the ruined mills, he wondered if there had been action here during the war.