Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (4 page)

‘Like I told you,’ Ozal said, ‘they don’t give a shit about a foreign woman, even if she has got a Turkish background. At least not unless there’s a body involved. To tell you the truth, the State Department people didn’t get off their butts until recently either.’

Mavros held up the postcard showing an Istanbul street scene. ‘“I’ve met someone,”’ he read. ‘“See you when I see you. Love, Rosa.”’

‘Yeah,’ Ozal said, shaking his head. ‘You can imagine how that went down with my mother. She’s going crazy, thinking Rosa’s been hijacked by white slavers and forced to do unspeakable things.’

‘Your sister’s twenty-nine,’ Mavros said. ‘Can she look after herself?’

‘Sure she can,’ the Turkish-American replied with a nod. ‘She’s a New Yorker, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Husband, boyfriend, partner?’

Ozal lifted his shoulders. ‘Nah. Rosa dates guys but she isn’t into long-term relationships.’

‘And she was travelling on her own?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Has she stayed away beyond her scheduled return date before?’

Ozal shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. She’s really into her work in the gallery back in Manhattan. That’s what worries me most. She’d never have given that up, even if she’d met the hottest date in the universe.’

Mavros put down the card and picked up a second, this one sheathed in a transparent cover. ‘And now—out of the blue— comes a postcard from the Greek islands, dated six weeks before the Istanbul one.’

‘Yeah. Like I said, it arrived back home a week ago.’ Ozal looked at the transparent plastic envelope. ‘I told my brother to put it in this before he couriered it to me. Not that there’ll be any forensics on it after all this time, I suppose.’

‘Too much forensic—the postman’s fingerprints and your family’s, for a start.’ Mavros reached over and took the envelope. The postcard was a typical tourist shot of an island square, a blue-domed church sheltering behind a large tree and, beyond, astreet lined with two-storey houses. An ‘X’had been placed above a house with a distinctive blue-and-yellow door.

‘“
Nisos Trigono,
Kykladon. Ieros Naos Ayias Triadhas
,”’ he read. ‘Island of Trigono, the Cyclades. Church of the Holy Trinity.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ozal lit another cigarette.

‘And the handwriting is definitely your sister’s?’

‘Definitely.’

‘No sign of nerves or compulsion?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘“This is more like it,”’ Mavros read. ‘“Hardly any tourists, beautiful scenery, even an archaeological dig! X marks the house where I’m staying. See you all soon! (Sorry, Mama, the handsome men are already married…) Love, Rosa.” Postmarked June…’ He squinted at the blurred stamp. ‘…June third.’

‘Fucking Greek postal service,’ Ozal said, spitting strands of tobacco on to the gravel. ‘It must have sat in a bag they forgot about until recently.’

Mavros compared the writing on the two cards. It was similar, although the Istanbul one was in capitals. ‘And you want me to go down to Trigono to look for Rosa? See if she went back there?’

‘Yeah. Maybe she met some guy after all.’

‘I take it the Greek police aren’t interested?’

Ozal stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Your guy Kriaras got his sidekicks to call the police department on Trigono, but they didn’t have a clue. That’s why he put me on to you.’

Mavros was studying the Turkish-American. ‘Why don’t you take a trip down there yourself?’

‘I haven’t got any free time right now,’ Ozal replied. ‘I’ve got a shitload of meetings here and in Istanbul over the next week. Anyway, what’s the use of me going down there? You’re the local expert.’

‘Not in the islands.’

‘You want this job or not?’ the Turkish-American asked. ‘What’s your problem, Alex? An all-expenses-paid trip to a holiday island? Sounds like a great deal to me.’

So why are you paying me to enjoy myself? Mavros wondered. Why is your business more important than your family? He looked at the Turkish-American. ‘You’re in the antiques trade.’

Ozal returned the look curiously. ‘Yeah. How d’you know that?’ He stared into Mavros’s eyes, a puzzled expression spreading across his face.

‘You mentioned earlier that you went to Edinburgh for an auction.’ Mavros looked away, aware that Ozal had noticed the brown marking in his left eye. It was usually women who spotted it.

The Turkish-American’s expression lightened. ‘Oh, right. Smart guy. You pay attention. I like that.’

‘I need to think about it,’ Mavros said, closing his notebook. ‘Don’t worry, that won’t take long. Can I ring you tonight?’

‘Jesus, you’re a hard man to convince,’ Ozal complained. ‘All right, call me at the Intercontinental at ten.’ He got to his feet, one hand massaging his backside, and picked up the photos and postcards. He started to put them back in his case then changed his mind. ‘Here, you keep these. You can drop them off at the hotel if you don’t go for it. Maybe they’ll help you make the right decision.’

Mavros nodded. ‘Maybe they will.’ He watched as Ozal moved towards the Fat Man, tossed him a couple of thousand drachmas—provoking no response—and left.

And maybe they won’t, he thought. The idea of leaving the city for a barren rock inhabited by tourist-fleecers, fishermen and goats wasn’t very enticing, even if Rosa Ozal definitely was.

The Fat Man raised his eyes from the book as Mavros came up to the counter a few minutes later. ‘Alex,’ he said, looking concerned, ‘do you realise that you look like shit? You’ve lost weight, your fingernails are bitten to hell and your face is all pasty.’

‘Thanks, you mountain of flesh.’ Mavros handed over some notes. ‘You look wonderful yourself.’

‘No, seriously. You need a holiday.’

‘Not you as well,’ Mavros said with a groan.

The Fat Man shrugged. ‘Only trying to look out for you, my friend. If you go on like this, that woman of yours is going to take fright. What’s her name again?’

‘Niki,’ Mavros said. ‘Don’t talk to me about Niki,’ he continued over his shoulder as he headed for the door. ‘I’m the one who’s taking fright.’

The Fat Man laughed. ‘You really know how to pick them, don’t you, Alex? You’re too handsome for your own good, my boy.’

‘Not a problem you have to stay awake at night over.’

‘Very funny. No, seriously, it’s that weird eye of yours that attracts them. Like flies to—’

‘It’s a mark of my mixed heritage,’ Mavros said in an elevated tone. ‘How dare you equate it to a display of sexual power? It’s a metaphor, a poetic marriage of—’

‘It’s a nasty brown stain on what would otherwise be a pair of beautiful blue eyes,’ the Fat Man interrupted with a guffaw. ‘Good health, my friend.’

Mavros smiled. ‘Go to the good, comrade.’

The café owner watched the door close and shook his head before stuffing the money he’d been left into his back pocket.

M
AVROS
went out of the Fat Man’s and into the sunlight that was broiling the city. Ahead of him the Erectheion and the Parthenon were riding the tainted air above the rocky plug of the Acropolis. He took his sunglasses from his belt where they’d been hooked by one leg and put them on. Turning quickly to the left, he strode up the street towards the enclosing wall of Hadrian’s Library. If he was lucky Deniz Ozal wouldn’t have got too far ahead.

He caught sight of the Turkish-American in the crush around the engineering works in Monastiraki Square. Although the city council had been trying to clean up Athens in advance of the Olympic Games that were only three years away, it wasn’t getting very far with the Flea Market. The bottom line was that tourists liked the dusty, overpriced souvenir, clothing and junk shops, and they liked the coconut and dried-fruit sellers. The coins and small-denomination notes they left in the begging bowls proved that they were even sympathetic to the gypsy women in bright chiffon veils, their pathetically deformed children spread out on the pavements like exhibits in a medical museum. So, as it was in no one’s interest to change things, the council let the traditional local colour remain despite the revulsion it induced in many upwardly mobile elected members.

Mavros closed on Ozal as he moved up Pandrosou, making sure he was obscured by a group of French women who were haggling over the price of an ugly red-figure vase. He rarely accepted jobs before he’d obtained some background on his potential clients—he had once narrowly avoided conspiracy charges when a Piraeus gangster hired him via an intermediary to trace a guy who subsequently turned up attached to a cement block in the harbour. Deniz Ozal had piqued his interest more than most. He’d never yet come across an employer who told him the whole story at the first meeting. The Turkish-American seemed curiously at home in Greece. Mavros wasn’t convinced that the Greek he knew came straight from a tourist manual. He was also wondering about the business dealings Ozal had apparently been pursuing in the weeks since his sister disappeared, dealings which seemed to mean more to him than Rosa did.

Stepping sharply to the right, Mavros positioned himself behind a stand of postcards—the ubiquitous fertility god Priapus with his giant, bent erection to the fore—as Ozal rang a bell on the other side of the street. This was interesting. The door opened and a shadowy figure in a bright red shirt ushered the Turkish-American in. Although the door closed quickly, Mavros had time to recognise the host and, anyway, he knew the premises. Tryfon Roufos of Hellas History SA was one of the most notorious— meaning corrupt—antiquities dealers in Athens. He was able to find his customers anything from Bronze Age figurines to the rarest of Byzantine icons, as long as they were able to pay his grossly inflated prices and live with forged certificates of provenance. Ozal had confirmed that he was in the antiques trade. It looked like he might not be restricting himself to the clearings from Scottish country homes these days.

Mavros waited where he was for a few minutes, scaring off a solicitous male shop assistant with a glare, before he walked on up the street. He hadn’t found out anything concrete about Ozal, but at least he had a better idea of the person he was dealing with. Anyone who did business with Tryfon Roufos was well endowed both with funds, as the Turkish-American’s clothes and briefcase had already suggested, and with dubious commercial intentions. Neither of these was necessarily a deal-breaker as far as Mavros was concerned, but he would have to watch his back. The most interesting cases usually gave him a frisson of illicit excitement, unlike the work he used to do in the ministry.

Heading through Mitropoleos Square, Mavros caught sight of an advertising hoarding that had been erected in front of the ugly grey cathedral where the nation’s politicians gathered like sheep on important feast days. The city centre had been plastered with this poster for weeks. Above and below an ancient lekythos, a flask that contained oil for offerings to the dead, were the words

    Mavros stopped to examine the image of the lekythos. He’d always found the white jars, the graceful tapered base and thin body leading up to a curved handle and black-rimmed spout, compelling. This one was decorated with a painting of a male figure in a rough cloak, his face bearded, standing on the deck of a boat. Small letters picked out his name in the space above his triangular cap. He was Charon, the boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the infernal river. Although recently it had happened to him less often than in the past, Mavros couldn’t prevent the shadowy features of his lost brother, Andonis, flashing up before him. Andonis was his one failure, the missing person he’d never managed to find. He took a deep breath and blinked to dispel the face, still familiar though he hadn’t seen it in the flesh for nearly thirty years, then turned off towards Ermou. He wanted to pick the brains of Bitsos, the crime reporter on the country’s most respected independent daily newspaper, who was usually to be found eating
penirli
—hot cheese bread in the Asia Minor style—around midday in his favourite backstreet café.

Before Mavros got there, his mobile phone rang.

‘Alex,
esi
?’

‘Yes, it’s me, Anna. What’s up?’ Since she’d married a Cretan, Mavros’s sister always started off speaking Greek to him, but he would respond in English. Even when their father was alive, the children had spoken English in the house at their mother’s insistence.

‘Not what’s up.’ Anna’s voice was tense. ‘Who’s up. Or rather, down.’ In the background there was a less animated but equally insistent voice. ‘Mother’s slipped and fallen again.’

Mavros found that he was leaning against a shopfront full of women’s undergarments. He shook his head and swore silently. ‘How bad is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anna said, a hint of panic in her tone. ‘She says her knee’s only bruised, but I think she might have twisted a ligament or done something to a cartilage. The doctor’s on his way.’ There was a pause. ‘She wants to talk to you.’

‘Alex?’ Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou sounded more in control than her daughter. ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine. I didn’t want Anna to bother you. It’s the marble floors, you know. I’ve never really got used to them.’ She’d never lost the burr of her Scots accent either. ‘Alex?’

‘Yes, Mother.’ Mavros knew what was coming.

‘Are you very busy?’ Dorothy’s voice was less assured now. ‘Only it would be lovely to see you. It’s been a while…’

Mavros was shaking his head again, trying to ignore the pair of high-cut black knickers at eye level behind the glass. It was precisely three days since he’d seen his mother. Then again, if he was going to take the Ozal case and hightail off to the Cyclades maybe he should build up some reserves of maternal goodwill. For all her Scottish blood Dorothy was as clinging as any Greek mama. He glanced at his watch—a stainless-steel Gucci number that Anna had given him on his thirty-eighth birthday and which the Fat Man had designated an insult to the working classes. The reporter Bitsos would be back in his office soon. He’d have to catch him later.

‘All right, Mother,’ he said, ‘I’m on my way. You listen to what the doctor says.’

‘Yes, dear, of course.’ Dorothy’s voice was lively again now that she’d got her way. ‘See you soon.’

Mavros walked on, skirting a huge motorbike that had been chained to a metal post and was blocking the pavement. As he put a foot on to the road a Honda 50 brushed past at speed, the adolescent rider shouting abuse. Bastard bikers. Mavros loved the city, it was his territory. Ever since he was a kid he’d felt at home in the uneven, ankle-shattering streets and the smog-filled squares with their incongruous classical names. He knew it was crazy, but he’d learned to accept both his curious obsession with the city and its numerous failings— apart from the motorbikes and scooters. Despite the regulations that allowed only half of the cars registered by Athenians into the centre each day, and gave priority to the yellow trolleybuses and their blue-and-white diesel counterparts, the avenues and streets were clogged from not long after dawn until well into the evening. So the locals, apart from investing in a second car, made sure they also had some form of two-wheeled transport, which was immune to the restrictions. Mavros hated motorbikes like the plague and regarded their riders as self-centred, dangerous fools. He walked everywhere he could.

As he began to scale the slope of Pindharou that led towards the bald, green-fringed summit of Lykavittos, the city’s highest central point, the crowds thinned. The area of Dhexameni around the reservoir built by the Romans was residential, only the throw of an anarchist’s grenade from the centre of the exclusive Kolonaki Square. Mavros stopped and looked down the narrow spaces between the apartment blocks towards the glistening blue of the Aegean east of Piraeus. The suburbs stretched down towards the sea in a pungent haze, and his ears rang with the blast of horns and the revving of engines. As he turned to go, an old woman bumped into him. Her face was heavily made up, her yellow linen suit from a high-class boutique.

‘Well?’ she said in a voice drenched in vitriol. ‘Let me past. What are you waiting for?’

Mavros stepped into the road and watched her move carefully down the steep pavement, almost hoping she’d take a tumble. He twitched his head at the unworthy thought. But her words struck him again as he walked towards his mother’s block on Kleomenous, the spectacular stretch of water glinting up at him invitingly. Trigono lay basking out there, free of crowds, motorbikes and sharp-tongued harridans.

What was he waiting for?

Trigono, 1715 hours

The
trata Sotiria
rounded Cape Oura at the south-eastern corner of the island and headed westwards. Yiangos was standing with an arm on the rudder and a foot on the long rod attached to the throttle, a cigarette between his teeth. Although his curly brown hair was short, the breeze and the momentum of the boat were ruffling it. He cut the engine revs and let the boat bob along on the swell. The southerly wind wasn’t more than Force 4, but they were now beam on to it so he couldn’t afford to let his concentration drop. He was early, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Perhaps the others would be too.

‘Look!’ he cried. His left arm was over his eyes, the right pointing towards the outermost of the chain of islets ahead. ‘Look, Nafsika!’

The young woman was lying beside the winch wheels on the forward deck. She sat up, drawing her long, tanned legs beneath her. The purple bikini top stretched as she raised her arm to shade her eyes. ‘What is it, Yiango?’ she said, looking over the glare of the waves.

‘Eschati,’ he shouted. ‘The last island before Santorini. There’s good fishing on the western side.’

‘Good fishing,’ Nafsika said to herself. ‘Is that all you can think about?’ She ran her eye all around. There was empty sea on three sides and only the bare, near-vertical cliffs running down from the summit of Profitis Ilias, Trigono’s highest point, to the north. Beyond the forbidding rock face was the great ridge that linked Profitis Ilias with Vigla, the other main peak. Seeing that they were alone, she undid the clasp of her bikini and released her breasts. Maybe that would take Yiangos’s mind off the fishing. She looked sternwards and groaned. Now he was bending over and doing something with the nets. She lay down again and let her thoughts drift away, feeling the white skin on her chest tighten in the breeze. If her mother could see her now…

What were they doing? she wondered. Yiangos’s father Lefteris would go crazy if he discovered the boat had been used when he was away at the court on Syros. The
trates
weren’t allowed to fish with the heavy nets until the season began on October 1st, and if the coastguard caught them things would be even worse. Ach, shit on them all. You’re only young once and Yiangos was a beautiful boy, she’d known him all her life. Not that she intended to marry him—they weren’t even engaged. She had other ideas about her future. She’d learned a lot from Eleni the archaeologist. Eleni said she was smart enough to do the university entrance exams again, smart enough to study in Athens. And Eleni’s foreign friend Liz had told her the colleges in England were desperate for foreign students. It was a pity Liz had left so suddenly, without even saying goodbye.

‘Wooo!’ Yiangos was upright at the stern, his eyes wide open. ‘You’ll make me hit the rocks, Nafsika. Put them away.’ He grinned at her uncertainly. She’d recently started doing things like that, pushing beyond what the island’s young women were permitted. ‘Do you want me to help you with that suntan oil?’

‘Wait till we’re on the beach, idiot,’ Nafsika replied, laughing. ‘I don’t want to have to swim back to Trigono.’

Yiangos shrugged. He wasn’t intending to jump her on the foredeck when they were under way—his father’s boat was far too precious to take risks with—but it did no harm to show that he was interested. If he wasn’t careful she’d be after a smarter boy. He was sure the archaeologist and her crazy friends had been encouraging her to dump him. But today he would impress her, today she’d finally see how important he was.

‘Your loss,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be too busy with the winches to lie around.’ Busy with the ship’s gear—that cover story wouldn’t last much longer. His stomach clenched again as he asked himself how Nafsika would take it when the other boat arrived.

Yiangos put another Marlboro in his mouth and scratched a match down the worn grip of the tiller. He knew Nafsika was drifting away from him, he knew he wasn’t good enough for her. But some of the stuff she’d picked up from the women who weren’t from the island wasn’t so bad. He took a surreptitious look at her open legs and bare chest. That made him remember what she’d let him do on the beach beyond the cemetery a couple of nights ago. He felt a stiffening in his groin and turned his head to the right, taking in the cliffs and the caves hollowed out by the sea at the shoreline. These waters were dangerous even when the wind was light. He looked back out to sea, but there was no sign of the speedboat.