The Silver Stain (6 page)

Cara Parks’ expression was grim. ‘You’ll be earning your corn, Alex. Maria’s immediate circle comprises the residents of this resort complex.’

‘I’m sure you can narrow them down a bit,’ Mavros said, taking out his notebook. ‘Who did she spend time with on set?’

‘Apart from me and the other people who look after me, no one that I know of.’

‘Give me their names.’ He noted her personal hairdresser, dialogue coach, costume designer and various others. ‘What about in her free time?’

The actress laughed. ‘Free time? You don’t get much of that on location. For all I know, Maria might have spent every evening in the hotel bar or disco – though I doubt it – but she was always fresh at six a.m.’

‘No significant other?’

Cara looked blank. ‘Oh, you mean lover. Never heard of one. Sorry.’

‘That’s OK. I’ll take it from here.’

‘And you’ll find her.’ She raised her hand. ‘I know you’ve never failed, Alex, but this is important to me. I care about Maria, I really do.’

Mavros watched her carefully. Her eyes were damp and her lips had trembled. For all her acting skills, she looked sincere.

‘Where was she staying?’

The star held up an envelope. ‘243. There’s a duplicate key card here. The hotel’s been asked to leave the room untouched.’

‘Thanks.’ Mavros got up.

‘No, thank you,’ Cara Parks said, rising and shaking his hand again. ‘I know you’ll help us out.’

‘I don’t suppose Maria’s ever done this kind of thing before?’

‘Nope.’

‘By the way, what role are you playing in the film?’

The actress took a moment to refocus. ‘Oh, I’m Eleni Panakaki. The village girl-next-door who becomes a heroine and nearly gets herself shot. It’s a good part, plus I get it on with a Maori officer – except he’s white, not one of the tattooed hunks you see walking around here.’

‘Hugh Rook,’ Mavros said, remembering the actor from a magazine article. He was a former pretty boy trying to extend his range.

‘Yeah,’ Cara said, without enthusiasm. ‘Spends most of his time talking to his parents. They’re in the hotel too. Apparently his grandfather fought in the battle.’

Interesting, Mavros thought, but hardly significant. He headed for the door.

‘
Ade yeia
,’ the actress hazarded.

He raised a hand without turning round as he repeated the second word of the farewell phrase. The dialogue coach had been doing a good job.

FOUR

M
avros went down to the second floor and found the missing woman’s room. There was a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and he made a note to ask housekeeping if it had been there since Monday morning. Then he pulled on the latex gloves he kept in his back pocket. The place had a similar lay out to his own but it was in a considerable state of chaos, with files all over the floor and clothes draped across the furniture. It took him a few minutes to satisfy himself that this was the way Maria Kondos lived, not least when he found the bathroom messier than a teenage boy’s. If someone had turned the place over, it had been done very subtly – which didn’t mean that someone hadn’t been through it and covered his or her steps. But he doubted it. The open tubes of make-up and the heaps of unwashed clothes suggested a life with time only to think about the important things, and there was no obvious sign of a struggle.

The question was, where to start? There was a desk in the living area, on which Maria Kondos seemed to have maintained a modicum of order. On the left side was a pile of papers, some bound together. They turned out to be the script for
Freedom or Death
, with additional dialogue on separate sheets. Cara Parks’ lines were highlighted. In the centre was a mobile phone, the battery discharged, an American passport in the missing woman’s name, a wallet containing credit cards and a California driving licence in her name, as well as over five hundred euros, and a small leather clutch bag with mascara, lipstick and the like. There were also two condoms.

After plugging the phone into its charger, Mavros sat back in the velvet-covered chair. The condoms suggested that Maria Kondos had a least some interest in the male sex, while the lack of a key card for the room gave the impression that she’d left willingly, expecting to return. On the other hand, she had taken no ID or means of payment. Had she expected not to need any? That could have meant she wasn’t going outside the resort area, or that she had left with someone who would pay on her behalf. But would a woman go anywhere without the other items in the clutch bag?

He turned to the right side of the desk. There were several small framed photos, showing a very Greek-looking elderly couple and some small children. Then it struck Mavros what he hadn’t seen – any form of computer. He checked the desk drawer and the rest of the suite. Under the bed, he found a charger for a laptop, but no sign anywhere of the machine itself. There were no diskettes or external memory devices to be seen either. Which left him with the suspicion that Maria Kondos had gone somewhere in the hotel with her laptop – perhaps leaving her phone behind by mistake. Searching a hotel the size of this one would be a hell of a job, especially with all its outbuildings.

The buzz of the doorbell interrupted his thoughts. He moved as quietly as he could across the marble floor and looked through the spyhole. A tall but stooping elderly man with a walking stick was in the corridor. He definitely wasn’t from housekeeping.

Mavros opened the door.

‘So sorry to bother you,’ the man said in Greek, his voice surprisingly strong and his accent only slightly foreign. His nose was misshapen. ‘I take it you are Mr Mavros?’

‘Em, yes . . . and you are?’

The old man handed him a card. ‘Rudolf Kersten,’ he said. ‘I created the Heavenly Blue.’ The way he put it almost made Mavros laugh: as if he was an Eastern potentate – or the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant. ‘Ms Cara Parks just called me. I wondered if I might be of assistance.’

‘Ah, right.’ Mavros looked over his shoulder, reluctant to invite the man into what might be of interest to the authorities if the woman never returned. ‘Actually, there are some things you could help me with. Could we go down to my room?’

‘No, no, come to my residence,’ Kersten said, turning away. ‘I insist. It isn’t far.’

They went down to the ground floor in the lift, the old man asking a couple of exhausted guys in high-visibility jackets and shorts if everything was satisfactory. They looked at Kersten sullenly and nodded.

‘I see it as my duty to talk to all my guests,’ Kersten said, leading Mavros to a door beside reception. The staff nodded to the owner punctiliously. ‘Even the less than polite technicians on the film crew.’

The mixture of conscientiousness and condescension silenced Mavros for a few seconds. The old man’s residence was literally behind the shop. A short corridor led to a large living area with a view across the grounds to the sea.

‘Please be seated. I will arrange coffee.’

‘No, I . . .’ Mavros tried to stop him, not being a fan of that beverage in the afternoon, but Kersten headed away without paying attention.

‘There,’ he said, returning almost immediately. ‘Hildegard will be with us shortly.’ He sat down in what was obviously a favourite armchair, his walking stick fitting into a groove on the side. ‘Ms Parks is most distressed about her friend Maria, Mr Mavro. I understand you have undertaken to find her.’

‘I have.’ Mavros looked at his notebook. ‘Actually, there are some specifics you could pass on to your people.’ He paused, wondering if the old man would call a secretary or take notes of his own.

‘Fear not, my memory is still excellent,’ Kersten said, with a smile. His face was leathery and his hair sparse, but the sparkle in his pale blue eyes gave him the look of a younger man.

‘All right. Could you find out from housekeeping when the “Do Not Disturb” sign was first noticed on room 243?’

‘That is easy. I have already ascertained that the sign has been on the door since Ms Kondos arrived nearly two weeks ago. It seems the lady likes to look after herself.’

Or not, Mavros thought. ‘Right. Did any of your people see Ms Kondos on Sunday evening?’

‘As far as I have been able to ascertain – and I have been working on this since Ms Parks first called me yesterday morning – none of them did.’ He looked down briefly. ‘That isn’t to say that one or more of them might not have been paid for their silence. It is my experience that people in the film business, especially Americans, can demonstrate remarkable largesse when the mood takes them.’

Mavros sensed the wisdom in the old man’s words – he had clearly seen much in his years as host to the rich and powerful. ‘Do you have CCTV?’

‘Outside the perimeter, yes, but not inside. I am not enamoured of today’s surveillance society.’ He looked across at Mavros. ‘I came of age in Hitler’s Germany.’

‘Rudi?’

Mavros looked round to see a short woman in an unseasonably thick skirt coming towards them with a tray between her hands. Although she must have been in her seventies, her hair was pale gold and plaited elaborately at the back of her head. He stood up to help, but she tutted him away, putting the coffee pot and cups on the mahogany table.

‘This is Mr Mavros,’ Kersten said, continuing in Greek. ‘My dear wife, Hildegard.’

Mavros shook hands with her and watched as the old couple kissed each other on the lips.

‘How do you take your coffee?’ the woman asked.

‘White, no sugar,’ Mavros replied, wanting to dilute the caffeine hit.

‘Mr Mavros has come to find Maria Kondos, Hildegard,’ Kersten said. ‘I’m giving him all the help I can.’

‘I’m sure you are. It’s a shame the people making the film haven’t shown more interest.’

The hotel owner looked surprised. ‘But they brought Mr Mavros from Athens. He’s the best in the business.’

Hildegard Kersten turned her eyes back on Mavros. ‘Is that so? Well, I wish you luck. They are all crazy, those people. It’s only Ms Parks who really wants her friend back.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Mavros asked. He had seen that Rudolf Kersten gave his guests a more personalized service than that of most hotel-keepers, but he didn’t want him and his wife to retreat behind the shield of confidentiality. He had also picked up a hint of tension as the old woman had come in – when her husband had mentioned Hitler’s Germany.

‘I’ve seen them together,’ Hildegard replied. ‘They have a high level of dependency on each other.’

‘But you haven’t seen Maria since . . . ?’

‘Sunday afternoon,’ she replied instantly. ‘When the limousine brought them back from the shoot.’

‘We were in the car behind,’ Rudolf Kersten added.

‘My husband is the film’s official consultant regarding the
Fallschirmjäger
– the German paratroops.’

Something had stirred in Mavros’s memory, a newspaper article with photographs from a previous May when the Battle of Crete memorial was attended by veterans from all sides.

‘You were one of them, weren’t you?’

The old man nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I was,’ he said, his voice weaker. ‘It was the worst experience of my life – and later I fought on the Eastern Front.’

‘Hush,’ Hildegard said, going to her husband and taking his hand. ‘I told you the film would bring back too many painful memories.’

Kersten smiled sadly. ‘But that is precisely the point, my dear. The film will lay the memories that have been tormenting me at last. The film will make me free.’

Mavros felt like a child that had strayed into a room where the big people were doings things far beyond his ken.

From
The Descent of Icarus
:

Allied resistance around the Tavronitis river-bed had been subdued, at least for the time being, by bombing and strafing. Peter Wachter and I made our way across the rock-strewn watercourse, keeping our heads down as the 109s streaked overhead. One of our gliders had crashed into the west bank, the aircraft’s flimsy frame crumpled like a dirty handkerchief. Bodies were strewn around it, limbs at crazy angles and faces already swollen in the heat.

‘What now?’ I asked, after gulping from a water flask I’d picked up from a dead man.

Peter was peering through the trees that lined the dry river. ‘I reckon Maleme airfield’s a couple of kilometres to the north.’ He pointed. ‘See the bridge? It’s beyond that, on the other side.’

I took in the fragile metal structure. ‘You’d have thought the Brits would have blown it.’

‘You would. And you’d have thought they’d be defending it on both sides, but we seem to be in the clear here.’

I caught the unmistakable low rumble of Auntie Jus, coming toward us from the sea. One of the leading aircraft was hit in the port wing and dropped to the ground like a lead weight before anyone could jump. The others ploughed on through the storm of fire and parachutes started to appear.

‘They’re going to come down ahead of us,’ Wachter said, clutching my arm. I saw that he’d been badly scared by what he’d been through. I hadn’t had time to be afraid. ‘Come on.’

I followed him through the trees and we came upon a comrade cutting away his parachute lines. We exchanged unit numbers with him as more men came down, most of them escaping the machine-gun fire from the hill across the Tavronitis.

‘You’d better come with us,’ a gnarled sergeant said, handing Peter drums of MG ammo from a canister. ‘Our officers have made it.’

I recognized the leaders of the company. Lieutenant Kurt Horsmann was a decent enough type, but Captain Horst Blatter, his face marked by duelling scars, was the kind of stiff-necked Prussian who led by instilling terror in his men. He glared at Wachter and me as if we were deserters.

‘You say you’re the only survivors of your unit?’ he demanded. ‘That’s impossible.’

Wachter nodded to the hill. ‘We came down in open ground to the rear of that, sir. There are New Zealanders all over it. And that’s not all.’ He stopped and looked at me, expecting me to continue the story.

‘There are civilians, sir,’ I said. ‘Armed civilians.’

Blatter removed his helmet and put on his peaked cap – he was even more of a crazed Prussian than I’d imagined, showing no fear of the bullets that were cutting through the trees.