The Silver Stain (23 page)

‘What a surprise,’ Mavros said, with a wry smile.

‘Yeah. Achilleas Kondoyannis was his name.’

‘Kondoyannis? What the hell?’

Mikis nodded. ‘The name the guy in the
kafeneion
gave us.’

‘A relative? People called Kondoyannis emigrating to the USA might easily have shortened their name to Kondos.’

‘Right,’ the Cretan said, smiling at the pun – ‘kondos’ was Greek for ‘short’. ‘Maria Kondos. You think that’s why she was up there? Some kind of payback for the disgrace some relative brought on the village?’

‘The village where, as we know, vendettas are a speciality. It certainly needs to be checked out. Let’s get back to the Heavenly Blue and talk to the less-than-talkative Maria.’

‘I thought she’d started speaking again.’

‘Not much.’

Mikis applied full lock and turned the Jeep back the way they’d come.

In the hotel, Mavros ran up to his room and booted up his laptop. A search for ‘Kondoyannis USA’ brought up numerous references, though not as many as ‘Kondos USA’. Cross-referencing them would be a long job. He was about to give up and go in search of Maria when a newspaper headline caught his eye – ‘Florida Mobster Kondoyannis Jailed’. Maybe the surname hadn’t been changed, after all. The article was dated January 17th 2003 and described the end of the trial of Michael ‘the Bat’ Kondoyannis, fifty-seven, boss of one of northern Florida’s ‘most vicious’ criminal organizations. Born in Tallahassee, ‘the Bat’, so named for his use of a metal alloy baseball bat to deal with his enemies, had risen to the top of a gang run by Greek immigrants, originally from the island of Crete. Initially, they had been involved in illegal gambling and robberies, but in the last twenty years had controlled a significant part of the drugs trade in the South. Scrolling down, Mavros found a photograph of the mobster, a bull-chested man with short black curly hair. His features, including heavy rings beneath the eyes, were certainly Greek. He had been convicted of heroin, marijuana and hashish trafficking, using shipping containers supposedly full of olive oil, and of two murders. It was suspected he had links with organized crime in Sicily and other parts of the Mediterranean. Then there was another photo, this time of ‘the Bat’ with his family before his arrest. Next to a short, plump woman stood a figure with long black hair – his daughter Maria. There was no doubt that she was Cara Parks’ assistant. Presumably she had changed her name when she went to Hollywood. That was one of several things he needed urgently to ask her.

Before he could get out of the door, his phone rang.

‘Alex, it’s Cara.’

‘Oh, hi. Is your assistant with you?’

‘That’s just it. I expected she’d be in my suite when I came back from the shoot – she stayed there to handle the backlog of fan mail – but she wasn’t. I still have a card to her suite, so I checked. She isn’t there. I’ve asked at reception and no one has seen her, even though she’s still in that wheelchair. Apparently the shift changed. They’re contacting the people who were on duty, but no news yet.’

‘Here we go again. Tell me, did you know that Maria’s father is a recently jailed Florida mobster of Cretan stock?’

‘What? You must be joking.’ The actress sounded genuinely surprised.

‘No, I’m not. The question is, was she involved in the family business?’

‘That’s ridiculous, Alex. She wouldn’t have time . . .’

‘Really? Might only take a few phone calls a day to ensure the drugs were running into LA smoothly.’

There was a pause. ‘And that mountain village she was in grows dope, doesn’t it?’

‘Kornaria? Oh, yes, in a big way. And guess what – David Waggoner’s got a house up there. Are you sure you never saw them in conversation?’

This time there was a longer silence. ‘I don’t know. Maybe when we were preparing for the Galatsi battle scenes.’

‘Any raised voices?’

‘I . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘All right.’

‘Alex, you will find Maria, won’t you? You will finish the case?’

He said he would try and hung up. It looked like all roads led to Kornaria, where the locals would shoot him before saying ‘
Kali mera
’.

SIXTEEN

B
efore going any further, Mavros called Niki. She sounded tired.

‘What is it, my love?’

‘The job, of course,’ she said sharply, then, ‘I’m sorry, Alex. Sometimes it’s too much, the endless stream of people coming to Greece, thinking their lives will improve overnight. There’s a limit to the jobs I can find them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, when are you coming home?’

He’d been expecting the question. ‘You’re not going to believe this – the woman I found has disappeared again.’

‘And there I was thinking you’d got yourself involved in the Rudolf Kersten death. Some of the news bulletins are hinting there was foul play.’

Mavros had been hoping Niki wouldn’t have seen the news – she didn’t always watch it as she thought most journalists were liars.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The cops here are saying it was probably suicide.’

‘So you
are
involved?’

‘Well, the widow has asked me to help find the killer – if there was one.’

There was a pause as she filled her lungs. ‘Get back here, Alex Mavro. You know how these cases end – with you facing death and your bill unpaid. Come back tomorrow. Tonight, if they’ll give you their stupid Learjet.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Niki,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ve got to let me do my job.’

‘Oh, fine. And what am I supposed to do? Sit here waiting to hear that some lunatic Cretan villagers have chopped you to pieces?’

He gave a weak laugh. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not like that down here on the coastal strip.’

‘Alex, please. Come back home. I miss you.’

‘I’ll get back as soon as I can. Promise. I’ve got to run now. Love you.’ He cut the connection, disturbed by how close Niki’s imagination was to reality. All he’d done was buy himself some time – she’d be back on his case tomorrow.

He rang the Fat Man.

‘I see the German’s dead,’ Yiorgos said, after they’d exchanged unpleasantries. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be involved in that case too, would you?’

Mavros filled him in.

‘Sounds to me like you’ve got too much on your plate. Maybe I should come down.’

The idea of the Fat Man stomping around antagonizing people in the luxury resort wasn’t appealing, though he might have been useful in Kornaria.

‘No, thanks.’ He told him about Michael ‘the Bat’ Kondoyannis. ‘See if you can dig up anything about him and Crete. His family came from Kornaria.’

‘He was a drug dealer and he came from Afghanistan, Crete? It wouldn’t take a genius to work out where he got his supplies.’

‘Some of them, at least. But I want more than deductions, Fat Man. See if you can dig up something concrete about him.’

‘Concrete, as in the stuff the mob puts on people’s feet before chucking them overboard?’

‘Very funny. I found out something else.’ He told Yiorgos what Mikis had told him about his father when he had been known as Kanellos, and the lie told by Waggoner.

‘So an agent of the imperial power sets up a Communist. How unusual. I take it you’ll be having words with the shit-head.’

‘Soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve got a rendezvous with a Hollywood starlet.’

‘Screw you,’ the Fat Man said harshly. ‘Then again, if
she
does that, Niki will hang your intestines from your mother’s balcony.’

‘Over and out,’ Mavros said, heading for the door.

The man on the other side was wearing black clothes and a matching balaclava. Only the long knife in his right hand provided any contrast. Its point pierced Mavros’s T-shirt before he walked rapidly backwards into his room.

From
The Descent of Icarus
:

I came round in another field hospital, this one in the grounds of a Cretan prison. The inmates were all gone, most of them, I learned, killed when they joined the locals in the battles against the mountain troops who had flooded the west of the island from Maleme. My head was pounding and every movement provoked worse pain. I slid my hand up slowly and felt a bandage swathing my skull.

‘Ah, the brave paratrooper has woken up,’ said a sardonic voice.

I looked up at the doctor who was standing by my bed. His white hair was cut short at the sides and he wore a moustache like Himmler’s – clearly the kind of martinet who wished he was in the SS but had been deemed too old. The army was less choosy.

‘How long have I been out?’ My voice sounded tinny, as if it came from outside my body.

‘Your three-day coma has apparently rendered you unable to use the customary terms of address.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I mumbled, my interest in military discipline long gone.

‘Your captain – what’s his name?’

I didn’t know if it was a test, but I found that my memory was working adequately.

‘Blatter.’

‘Indeed. Captain Blatter, who, you’ll be pleased to learn, has been awarded the Iron Cross Class One by General Student, thinks you’re a coward and a malingerer.’ The doctor gave me a tight smile. ‘I have no opinion about the former, but I seriously doubt you’ve been faking the comas you’ve been in. Here’s my difficulty. We are unable to treat head injuries such as yours on Crete. We therefore will have to send you to Athens, from where I would hazard that you’ll be returned to the Fatherland and discharged from the parachute division – meaning you’ll spend the rest of the war stamping papers or fire-watching. Meanwhile, your unit has been ordered to leave the island tomorrow to take part in a major operation elsewhere.’ He glanced at my chart. ‘So how do you feel today, Private?’

I didn’t know what he was trying to do – maybe he felt a trained paratrooper shouldn’t be wasted even if he had a potentially catastrophic head injury, or maybe he wanted to see if Blatter was right about me being a coward. In any case, after what I’d seen at Makrymari, I had a single imperative – I was going to prove myself to the captain and then I was going to kill him. For myself? For the executed woman? I’ve never been able to decide. Maybe it was for both of us, victims of the war in our different ways.

Blatter welcomed me back to the unit with an ironic smile and a sarcastic remark, but he had more important things to think about. A month later we were storming into the Soviet Union, but as ground forces. After the Pyrrhic victory on Crete, Hitler had decreed there would be no more airborne assaults, so we fought alongside the ordinary army troops and the cold-eyed bastards of the Waffen-SS. Blatter’s zeal began to waver after two months of the winter, but I bided my time. I wanted him to be in full disarray before I ended his life.

That happened in early spring, when the birds on the great Ukrainian plain had started to sing again and the first shoots of grass had begun to appear under our ragged boots. We were ordered to attack a Red Army stronghold by a small river, and Blatter’s nerve finally went. I stepped up and said to his second-in-command, a Bavarian lieutenant named Wanner, that I’d look after the captain, taking my Luger from its holster and putting the muzzle against Blatter’s back.

We moved forward in an extended line, taking heavy machine-gun fire at several points. We had artillery support and that eventually pounded the enemy into disarray, not that they surrendered. After the last of them had been mopped up, I pushed the captain into a command post filled with shattered bodies and took out my service bayonet.

‘This is for the woman in Crete,’ I said. ‘And for me.’

He started to beg, dropping to his knees, which made it easier for me to slide the blade slowly into his mouth and upwards into his brain.

That was the end of the real war for me. I fought on, robot-like, but I remember few details. I was always the first to charge forward, the first to volunteer for suicidal missions, the last to turn tail when the great Soviet advance commenced. I expected every day to be my last, but I survived. It was as if I was under the protection of some jealous god. Eventually I could refuse promotions no longer and did what I could to protect the ever-younger, doe-eyed recruits from the inevitable. I was even given medals, which I accepted on behalf of my men. My unit was finally cut to pieces in western Poland and I dropped my decorations into the River Oder as the last of the great expedition staggered back into our homeland.

After the war I was still in some parallel world, passing through camps and offices until I was declared clean of the stain of Nazism and free to remake my life. Which I did, after I met Hildegard.

But my heart had never left Crete and I returned as soon as I could to live out my days near the places where the dark-haired woman and I had saved each other’s lives; and where I had failed to give her death from a compassionate hand.

When Mavros got further into the room, he saw there were two more balaclava-clad men behind the one with the knife. The latter pushed him backwards so he landed on the sofa. Then he went behind it and held the edge of the knife against Mavros’s throat. The shorter of the others sat down in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table, while the third stood alongside him. None of them were wearing Cretan boots or other garb.

‘You move, you lose your Adam’s apple,’ said the seated man, in Greek.

Mavros didn’t recognize the voice, but the accent was definitely Cretan.

He decided that moving his tongue and lips was an unnecessary risk.

‘You’re in luck, you know,’ the man opposite continued. The bared teeth in the balaclava’s slit suggested he was smiling. ‘I mean, you could already be dead. A vendetta isn’t something you Athenian ponces should take lightly. So we’re here to teach you a lesson.’ He paused for effect. ‘Cut his throat.’

Mavros was instantly drenched in cold sweat, his heart thundering. The knife blade was moved round his throat, nicking the skin. Then he felt warm drops on his forearms. He was about to duck out of the position, even though he knew such a movement would only bring death more quickly, when he thought of his father. Spyros was looking at him steadily, dark-blue eyes willing him to hold his nerve. Mavros stayed still and got his breathing under control, as the knife continued its light pressure round his neck.