Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (5 page)

Soon the islet of Eschati drew close, the summit of its low brown hill marked by a light on a metal frame. Yiangos remembered his grandfather telling him that during the war the Italians had disabled the lamp in order to make the passage harder for the
kaïkia
that carried Allied soldiers and agents between the mainland and the bases in the Middle East. Old Manolis knew plenty of stories about those times, but he rarely opened up. When he was a little kid Yiangos had heard the old man talking to his father, Lefteris, late at night when the
tsikoudhia
they made from the fermented skins of the family’s grapes had loosened their tongues, but his attempts at eavesdropping had been unsuccessful—in the house they always spoke in a low mumble, as if everything they had to say was top secret.

On the starboard beam now were the solid forms of Aspronisi and Mavronisi—White Island and Black Island— the first and smaller of pale rock, the second of darker volcanic stone. The pair guarded the entrance to Vathy inlet, the only safe anchorage on the south coast. The narrow bay was over half a kilometre long but access for vessels was difficult, restricted to a ten-metre channel between Mavronisi and the main island. In the old days they’d loaded ore and lignite from Trigono’s mines on to boats at Vathy. When the seams ran out before the war, the settlement in the inlet was abandoned. Yiangos had only been down it once when there was a festival at the derelict church of Ayii Anargyri. Virtually the whole population of the island had gone by boat, people spreading out after the service to eat their picnics on the pebble beach. But the priest was old now and he only observed saints’ days in churches that were accessible to his son’s four-wheel-drive Nissan.

‘Eh, Nafsika! Get up!’ Yiangos shouted. ‘We’ll be dropping the forward anchor in a minute.’ He steered to port, rounding the low promontory at the north of Eschati. The island was shaped like a teardrop, the raised ground with the light on the wider southern part. ‘I need your help.’

Nafsika sat up and reached for her bikini top. For some reason she felt uncomfortable acting the deckhand with bare breasts. Then she put it down again. If she didn’t hold Yiangos’s attention now, he’d get straight into testing the winches. She looked round at the narrow beach on Eschati. She’d heard from her cousin who ran tourist trips in his
kaïki
during the high season that the sand was soft, and today there was no one else anywhere near the islet.

She knew what she wanted as she glanced across at Yiangos and smiled. Judging by the way he returned her gaze, his eyes focusing on her chest, she was sure that at last he’d come round to her way of thinking—even if he did keep looking over his shoulder to the south.

As soon as she’d dropped the anchor into the rippling, translucent water, she stepped out of her bikini bottom and plunged overboard.

Yiangos wasn’t too far behind.

Mavros turned the key and pushed open the glass street door. The hall of the apartment block was cool and his nostrils filled with the pungent smell of the cleaning fluid used by the janitor. Although his mother’s flat was on the sixth floor, he ignored the lift and started up the stairs. As he passed the second landing an elderly man with thin hair and a tightly knotted tie looked at him suspiciously from a half-open door.

‘
Kali mera
, Mr Theo,’ Mavros said jauntily. He was addressing Theodoros Ioannidis, a retired senior civil servant and fervent nationalist who despised people he’d once misguidedly described to Dorothy as ‘long-haired layabouts’. He’d also given her to understand that he disliked being addressed by the diminutive form of his first name, a piece of information she’d immediately passed on to her long-haired son.

Mavros went on towards the sixth floor, his pace slowing as the breath began to catch in his throat. Not for the first time he regretted his commitment to using his feet whenever possible, as well as his mother’s decision to move out of the family’s rundown neo-classical house on the other side of Lykavittos after his father’s death. He’d loved his early childhood in the Neapolis district with its haphazard mixture of elegant nineteenth-century buildings and modern blocks. He’d also been very fond of the musty house, originally built by a currant exporter, that was such an unlikely dwelling for a senior communist official. It had long been in the Mavros family, the men having been lawyers rather than ideologues until Spyros combined the two, and he was as devoted to it as anyone. He squared it with the Party by putting up penurious students and visitors—often on the run from other countries—which meant that life in the old mansion was never dull. But Dorothy had never felt at home there, despite her adoration of Spyros, so it came as no real surprise when she used her own money to buy a modern flat. The house Mavros spent his formative years in was now an official Party hostel. He reckoned that was as good a use for it as any.

‘It’s all right, Alex.’ Anna was in the hall of the flat as soon as he opened the door. ‘It’s only a heavy bruise.’

‘I told you it was nothing to worry about,’ came a triumphant voice from the lounge.

Anna Mavrou-Chaniotaki raised her brown eyes to the ceiling and mouthed imprecations.

Mavros put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her lightly on both cheeks. ‘Calm down,’ he said, shaking her slender frame gently and hearing the material of her pale pink blouse rustle. As usual his sister was dressed in the best that the designer outlets of Athens could offer, her short skirt displaying perfectly tanned and exercised legs. Her stockbroker husband, Nondas, liked her to look her best at all times. ‘So the doctor’s been?’

‘And gone,’ Anna said, the nodding of her head making her gold earrings rattle; her jet-black hair, drawn back in a clasp, didn’t make any false moves. She was five years older than Alex and had two teenage children, as well as columns in several of the capital’s fashion and gossip magazines. Organisation and method were her watchwords, much to her husband’s approval.

‘Nondas all right?’ Mavros asked as they moved towards the
saloni
. Despite his brother-in-law’s dedication to the money markets and his behind-the-scenes involvement with the conservative Nea Dhimokratia Party, Mavros couldn’t find it in him to dislike Nondas Chaniotakis. He was a lively, well-educated Cretan who liked to eat in neighbourhood
tavernes
and who regarded his rich man’s toys—the BMW, the motor launch, the home cinema—with only passing interest. He loved his wife and his children too much to be engaged by the status symbols required by his profession and his party.

‘Mmm,’ Anna said distractedly. ‘I really ought to be getting over to the
Ena
office, I’ve got a piece to outline to them.’ But she followed Mavros into the spacious room where their mother was sitting in an armchair, the older woman’s left leg bandaged and stretched out straight. ‘Honestly, Mother, you were lucky I happened to drop in. You must be more careful, you’ll—’

Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou raised an arm. ‘Leave me be, Anna. I can manage perfectly well on my own.’ Her dark brown eyes flashed as she turned towards her children, the pure white hair with its natural waves catching the light filtered through the half-closed blinds. ‘When I
break
my leg, then you can be worried.’

Anna stepped to the window impatiently, her dark red lips set in a tight line.

Mavros bent over Dorothy and kissed her. ‘She’s right, Mother. You should be more careful. These floors are—’

‘Stop it, Alex,’ the old woman interrupted. ‘You know she only does it to annoy me.’ Dorothy and Anna had spent years perfecting the ultimate mother-daughter routine. They were devoted to each other, but were incapable of exchanging more than a few sentences without irritation flaring.

‘I’m not getting involved,’ Mavros said, assuming the neutral position he’d established when he was at primary school—he’d had the examples of his father and his brother Andonis to follow. ‘Anna’s only trying to be the dutiful daughter. You know that’s the way in this country.’

His mother made a dismissive sound. ‘They’re far too obsessed with family here,’ she said firmly. ‘People should learn to cope as individuals.’

Mavros took in her long, spare form, then found his eyes drawn irresistibly to the black-and-white photographs in matching plain wood frames that were the only ornament on the waist-high bookcase beside Dorothy’s chair. Individuals and families, they made up the dual heritage that Mavros lived with. His Scottish mother was self-reliant and had never been able to come fully to terms with the priority Greeks gave to family. The individuals in the family, especially his father and his brother, were strong characters, leaders, but they had taken their strength from the family that nurtured them. Mavros had always felt split between the demands and duties of family and a burning need to be alone, to find his own way in the world. But whatever he did, Spyros and Andonis were never far from his mind—and he was glad they weren’t, for all the pain he had from his memories of them.

He looked at the photos. Spyros had been in his fifties when the picture was taken. Five years later, his heart gave out a few months before the Colonels started persecuting the leaders of the left. His thick black hair was combed back from his handsome face, the hooked nose both his sons had inherited dominant. Above the open-necked shirt the skin on his throat was heavily wrinkled, giving him the look of a much older man. The years he’d spent in detention camps on remote islands after the Second World War and the subsequent civil war had taken a heavy toll. The old communist’s mouth, surmounted by a heavy moustache, rose at the corners to form a tentative smile, hinting that, despite the terrible weight of his suffering, he had somehow retained his faith in humanity. His eyes, dark blue in life but glossy black in the photograph, seemed to have witnessed great happiness.

Dorothy took in the direction of Mavros’s gaze but kept her own eyes to the front. ‘Let them be, Alex,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘They were with us and now they have gone. Will you never learn to accept that?’

Mavros was only dimly aware of her words. He was staring into the flat pools of Andonis’s eyes. The photo didn’t do them any kind of justice. Although Andonis was eleven years older than his little brother and had disappeared when Alex was only ten, the bright blue of his eyes was what people still remembered about him. Alex’s were darker, the brown flecks in the left one the result of a rare genetic mutation that made him stick out from the crowd. But Andonis had also been prominent since he was a small child, the burning blue of his eyes joining with the force of his personality to cast a spell on everyone he met. Boys listened to him and laughed with him, girls fell head over heels in love, both at school and later at the polytechnic. He had been one of the most daring of student anti-dictatorship leaders, even though he was younger than many activists. He was his father’s son, resourceful and inspiring, possessing few of his mother’s analytical powers and never for a moment in doubt of his abilities. There were a few people who had found him arrogant and overbearing.

And then, one night in December 1972, he had failed to return to the family home in Neapolis where he still slept. He had been at a meeting of an underground cell in the nearby town of Paiania and his comrades took him to the bus stop. But no one had seen him since.

Mavros sometimes wished that he could lose sight of his vanished sibling, even though the sudden flash he’d had of Andonis today when he was looking at the lekythos on the museum poster had been more vivid than the image in the photograph. He suspected that things would be easier if he could move on. But he’d been haunted by his brother for so long that he couldn’t imagine life without him. It was Andonis who lay beneath his work, it was his love of Andonis that drove him to search for strangers—as if by finding them he was keeping some faint glimmer of his brother alive in the family.

‘Alex,’ Dorothy said quietly, ‘you have to stop chasing shadows and ghosts. You’ve tried everything. You’ve spoken to witnesses, you’ve been through all the public and secret records you or anyone else can find. Please—’ she took his hand ‘—let Andonis go.’

‘Where have you been looking this week,
adherfouli
?’ Anna said from behind him, her use of the affectionate diminutive at odds with her stern tone. ‘Eh, little brother? Where have you been wasting your time since I last saw you?’

Mavros straightened up. ‘I traced a taxi-driver in Glyfadha. I heard about him from a new contact. The guy had supposedly been in the security forces during the dictatorship.’ He looked away from the bookcase. ‘It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. He spent the winter of ’72 to ’73 building a hotel in Limnos.’

‘Mother’s right, Alex,’ Anna said, grasping his arm. ‘You have to leave Andonis in peace.’

Mavros shook his sister off gently, not wanting to fall out with her. He was attached to her, even though he rarely made that obvious, but he didn’t much like her gossip-fuelled life or her ultra-modern house in the rich suburb of Kifissia. The poster he’d seen for the Theocharis Museum came up before him again, the image of the white flask with the sepulchral boatman. Ancient Greek myth had it that the souls of the unburied dead roamed for ever, denied access to Charon’s bark and the shadowy underworld ruled by Hades. That was how he’d thought of Andonis since he was a boy. His elder brother was a lost spirit wandering the earth, haunting him by day and by night, often appearing as a blurred face in which only the bright blue eyes were real. The reality was that Andonis was a permanent part of the structure of Mavros’s life. Because of his dual nationality he’d always felt different from other Greeks, and the mystery over his brother’s disappearance during the country’s most recent experience of totalitarian rule had made the sense of alienation, of living on the margins, even more pronounced. The fact that he had a flawed eye seemed like confirmation of that.

‘Yes?’ Anna asked, touching his arm again.

Mavros nodded haltingly, loath for her to know that he resented the way she’d built a life that had little or no room for Andonis. The truth was that he used Anna’s intimate knowledge of Athenian society in his work; as long as he disguised any requests that were to do with their brother, she never refused him. He wasn’t proud of the way he manipulated his sister, but he didn’t want to lose that precious resource.