Trick or Treat (29 page)

‘Where a boat called
Pandora
was torpedoed in 1943?’ asked Daniel.

‘Maybe. Maybe so. I never knew its name. In 1960, on holiday, fishing around there in a lawful
ploio psareme
— licensed,’ he added proudly, ‘a certain man came upon a rotten sack caught on his anchor, and when he pulled it up it had gold coins in it, so he...’

‘Marked the place and said nothing?’ guessed Daniel.

‘What do you think?’

‘That’s what I think,’ confirmed Daniel. ‘And came back the next dark of the moon for another dip?’

‘Indeed. That man might have been someone like me, you see. That man was not greedy. He took what I needed and went home and bought this house and brought my sister and her man and my children and my wife and then...I left it.’

I had noticed the segue between ‘that man’ and ‘I’ and didn’t say a word. I sipped my cold water.

‘Then I heard that my son had made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I went to him. He was in jail. He had been smuggling cigarettes. I needed the money to get him out and so . . .’ He shrugged.

‘You went back to
Pandora
.’

‘In the dark, in the wind,’ he said. ‘Only time the patrols would miss us was in the middle of winter. I sent my partner down and he said, the wreck’s gone, the seabed’s shifted, let me search a bit further, and then it got darker and colder and when I hauled him up he was blue and nearly broke his teeth shivering. But we had enough again and went ashore. He knew where the wreck was, I didn’t. The big earthquake broke all the seabed there, a wooden ship would slide and fall. I didn’t need no more, I got my son out and brought him here, but later I heard that my partner was arrested too. Jailed three years. A wild boy, that one. Albanian father,’ he said, shrugging again. ‘What can you expect?’

‘Did they catch him with treasure?’ asked Daniel.

‘No, drugs,’ said Yanni, spitting. ‘Filthy things. I never smuggled drugs.’

‘What was your partner’s name?’

‘Petros,’ evaded the old man.

‘Petros who? Come on, Saba said you’d help,’ coaxed Daniel.

‘That Saba of yours knows too much already,’ muttered Yanni.

‘You tell him!’ shrieked Lydia from the kitchen.

‘All right. Petros Ioannides.’ Yanni dug into his pocket and came out with a piece of paper folded small. He gave it to Daniel, who spread it on his knee.

‘Very good,’ he said, giving it to me to copy into my notebook. I managed an exact copy, Greek letters and English and rows of numbers. Apart from some loose tobacco and a coffee smudge, that was it.

‘You be careful,’ said Yanni suddenly, leaning forward and taking Daniel’s wrist in both his hands. ‘That Petros, he is a wild one. An
andarte
. A gambler. Never go back for the fourth bucket, that’s the rule. I got the house and the son and the rescue because I never went back to the well for the fourth time. He would. And the fifth and the sixth.’

‘I hear you, pirate. I’ll take care. By the way,’ said Daniel, standing up, ‘ever hear the name Barnabas?’

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‘Only in the Bible,’ responded Yanni.

‘Which you ought to be reading!’ screamed his sister.

He insisted on conducting us to the door, where a ring of children waited tensely, like leashed greyhounds.

‘Here,’ said Yanni, handing over a note. ‘Ice cream for all. Even your mother,’ he added, raising his voice so that he could be clearly heard by unimpressed ears in the kitchen. ‘She likes butterscotch.’

Timbo started the car again. ‘Home?’

‘Home,’ said Daniel.

‘I liked your pirate,’ I said.

‘Most women say that,’ he smiled.

‘So he found the wreck by chance?’

‘Possibly. Yanni will only tell us what he thinks we can find out by other means anyway.’

‘And now we need to find his wild Petros Ioannides?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does “Saba” mean?’

‘Grandfather. In Hebrew.’

We were playing a game, I knew. Daniel wouldn’t tell me anything outright, but he would answer yes or no if I asked the right questions.

‘Is Saba your actual biological grandfather?’

‘No, he’s dead. Both of them.’

‘But Saba is your client?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘And he’s asking the questions?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘In order to retrieve the treasure, which has somehow got from the Inousis islands to here, even after the Kalamata earthquake shifted the seabed?’

‘Yes, because Petros found it again,’ said Daniel. ‘And we need to retrieve it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it was stolen from the murdered,’ said Daniel fiercely. ‘And it must go back to their children.’

‘Ah. Yes, of course. But, look here, what use are a lot of gold coins and jewellery, even if they are fished up? It can’t be sold. You said there were millions of pounds’ worth. That’s a lot of gold. Someone would notice. You can’t just flood the market with highly identifiable coins and hallmarked religious treasures. And why on earth bring it to Australia when Europe or even South America is so much closer? It’s insane.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But how else to explain the ephod and the dowry necklace?’

I thought about this. He was right.

‘Coincidence doesn’t cut it, does it?’

‘No.’

Insula was quiet and we made coffee and sat down for a recap.

Daniel and I puzzled over the pirate’s piece of paper.

‘Looks like a phone number,’ I said.

‘Not enough digits.’

‘Would be if it was an old one,’ I said. ‘Put a nine in front of it and see what happens.’

‘An idea,’ said Daniel, and stabbed out the numbers. He held out the phone. The ‘this number is not connected’ message was telling him to check the directory and try again. ‘So much for that,’ said Daniel. ‘Some sort of code, perhaps?’

‘What does it say in Greek?’

‘Petros is a man’s name, but it also means rock.’

‘On this rock I shall found my church.’

‘Eh?’ he asked, not knowing the reference.

‘Sorry, New Testament. After your time.’

‘Funny. No, unless the numbers are meant to be divided into groups of four... thus.’ We looked at the groups of four: 2125 3729 1450 8381 0. ‘No, doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

‘Nor me. When are we seeing the Lone Gunmen?’

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‘About now-ish,’ said Daniel. ‘We’d better go down. They’ll never come up here.’

‘You go, and I’ll start some late lunch or early dinner,’ I offered. ‘How about a nice ratatouille?’

‘Too healthy. The vitamin Q in my blood has sunk to critical depths. Make me a London cabby’s fry-up of tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs and bacon,’ he said, grinning. ‘Kosher bacon, of course.’

‘Kosher bacon?’ I called after him as he left the flat. I had never heard of kosher bacon. Surely a contradiction in terms?

‘You just sprinkle it with water and call it lamb,’ I heard him say as the door closed.

‘Cheeky boy,’ I said to all three felines, who now presented themselves for food and caresses, but food first, before they collapsed. What they got was carefully sectioned coils of bacon rind, which were well appreciated. I left them in a heap on the balcony, washing their greasy paws and whiskers.

We now had a pile of information, but not a lot of analysis or even synthesis. Janelle worked in the peccant bakery, assuming that Mr Wyatt’s Best Fresh was the source of the soul cakes. This was reasonable only in that no other source had been found and someone was selling them in the dogleg alley right behind the shop. All those people in white wrappers had tested everything they could possibly test and the only ergot, hence LSD, had been found in the spilt flour on the floor of Best Fresh. That looked like a fact.

I am an accountant. I like facts. My hands continued to prepare a fry-up which no London cabby could refuse while I stacked, examined, polished and set aside facts as I came to them. When I had been through them all, I would be able to try and make sense of them.

So. The soul cakes had been made in Best Fresh and sold

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in the clubs and had driven people mad. That might have been what they were intended to do, or it might have been seen as an unfortunate side effect by people who wanted the money and didn’t care what effect their wares had on the consumer. People who weren’t intending to stay in the business long, because even a plague organism knows that if it kills off too many hosts it will itself die. Someone in the slash-and-burn school of marketing, in fact. Another fact. I polished it with my tea towel and piled it on the other.

Who was making the soul cakes? Not Mr Wyatt, he was too distressed, too straight, and too unimaginative. That left Eddie, a dim bulb who had no other interests and greatly valued his job, and Janelle, who had contacts with the witches and was one of Barnabas’s acolytes. Along with, come to think of it, those two vicious boys, Cedar and Cypress. Or Rocky, as Daniel had named the prettiest one. Mrs Ramsgate had said that Janelle was carrying on with Mr Wyatt, but Eddie didn’t seem to think so, though it was hard to tell with Eddie. And why would Janelle be doing that if she was within enthusiastic hugging range of the jovial and charming Barnabas, the father every mistreated girl thought she should have had?

Fact, and I didn’t care for it at all: the person who seemed most likely to be making the soul cakes was Janelle, and she might—might!—be making them for Barnabas. Who would want them made because . . .? Money, of course. Or possibly—and here I dropped an egg, luckily into a dish—to sabotage the samhain celebrations? I remembered Meroe talking about how much witches disliked one another. Did Barnabas hate the conservative witches so much that he would try to poison them? I wouldn’t have put anything past the big fat crook. But if that was the case something had slipped. He should have been keeping them for the actual ceremony, thus sending all of the participants on an involuntary trip. Perhaps someone else had intervened at this point. Sort of a fact, and I dusted it.

That concluded my consideration of the soul cake problem, because it now crossed with the mission on which Daniel had been engaged for the last week. The treasure of Salonika. We knew more about this one. Stolen by Max Mertens, who black
mailed Helmut the sailor into escaping down the coast of Greece in 1943 in a boat called
Pandora
which was ballasted with gold coins and other treasure. The boat was sunk by a British submarine and the crew rescued, except for Mertens, whom Helmut Schwartz had considered drowned. Helmut comes to Australia and becomes a successful hydraulic engineer and now lives in a nursing home. So far so good.

Mertens escapes and comes back to Greece in 1957, an act of extreme boldness. He is recognised in Kalamata and denounced and tried for war crimes and jailed, all without being able to get to the wreck of the
Pandora
, because it is now in a place where the Greek navy test their missiles and is under constant patrol. Germany gets their Max back but he dies in 1976 without any sign of prosperity except that earned by his own efforts. Facts.

And no one is allowed to go scuba diving in the Messinian gulf, where the battle of Navarino took place, because of the theft of antiquities. Fact. But a pirate called Yanni went fishing there, probably on or between some nefarious errands, and he, possibly by chance, catches an anchor in a soft cloth bag full of coins. He draws on this bank three times. Twice to finance his big house and his family in Australia. The third time to buy his son out of jail. And there Yanni leaves it, a cunning man who does not ride his luck. Fact.

But according to Yanni, his partner Petros is the only

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person who now knows where the wreck of the
Pandora
lies, somewhere other than where it was before the great earthquake of 1986 hit calamitous Kalamata. A map or sighting marks, such as we had from Helmut, would not help anyone find the treasure now. Petros of the Albanian father, a wild man. A dangerous man. So was this Petros the person who had brought all that gold to Australia?

And in the name of all the gods and goddesses, why here, and why now? Because at least some of the Salonika treasure was definitely here. The child had found Chrysoula’s mother’s dowry chain in the salt mud under a lot of black swans. The ephod, likewise, in the shallows of the sea. Both of those things had come from Max Mertens’ original stash and nowhere else. They were last seen in a sinking boat off Schiza, and now they were in Williamstown. Fact.

Weird. At this point Daniel came back with another sheaf of papers and I started dishing up his fried eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and kosher bacon. With it there was toasted sourdough, a good sourdough but not as good as mine. My mother of bread was sulking in its bucket in my bakery. I had dropped in and fed it this morning. Which now seemed to be a long time ago.

This might explain why, after eating a portion of the eggs and bacon, I made myself a small orange blossom—gin, orange juice and Cointreau—sat down on the couch, sipped it, and fell asleep. Too many facts and an early awakening really take it out of you.

I woke to the scent of coffee. Daniel was offering me a cup. I drank. Outside, it was getting dark. The table and floor were littered with sheets of paper, and the wastepaper basket was full of screwed-up balls of the same stuff.

‘I hate to wake you, but I need some help here,’ said Daniel.

‘I’ll just go and wash my face,’ I blurred.

I had fallen deeply asleep. I felt like someone had hit me on the head with one of those Wodehouse stuffed eelskins. When I returned I drank the rest of the coffee and looked at Daniel’s work. He had been doing exactly the same as me, though I hadn’t made notes. Facts were piled on one side of the couch. Things which might be true were on the other side of the couch, under Horatio. Surmises were all over the floor.

‘The trouble is that we have lots of connections but they don’t make any sense,’ he complained. ‘Why, for example, should Barnabas have the ephod? Or, indeed, how did he get it? Who gave it to him? And if he knows what it is and where it came from, how dare he flourish it about in the company of people who might be expected to be able to read Hebrew—the kabbalah being fashionable at the moment—and who are bound to ask how it came into his hands? It’s mad. Is the whole of the Salonika treasure here? Perhaps the ephod was stolen by one of the slaves who loaded the boat and brought it to Australia after the war.’