The Green Lady (2 page)

The Fat Man stopped shouting at the parade of athletes in their curious uniforms and slapped Mavros on the thigh. ‘I didn't mean it, Alex. Go and make things up with her if that's what you want. I can't stand the woman, but I know you loved her. Maybe you still do.'

Mavros let that go unanswered. The truth was, he didn't know what his feelings for Niki were. He had loved her even more after they came back from Crete, but months of arguing had taken their toll. Anyway, it didn't really matter what he felt. She'd told him she hated his lack of commitment and that she never wanted to see him again.

‘Want some
galaktoboureko
?' There was more than a hint of white-flag waving in Yiorgos's voice. That was the good thing about living with him – no matter how much they yelled abuse at each other, they never held bad feelings for long.

‘OK,' Mavros said, well aware that following pizza with the custard-filled fylo pastry would do his burgeoning belly no good. The Fat Man was a skilled cook and thought small portions were for capitalists.

Later Mavros went up to his bedroom, his friend's shouts audible until he put on a Nikos Papazoglou CD. He sat in the sagging armchair and looked at the walls. This had been Yiorgos's room for his whole life, but when Kyra Fedhra died a couple of years back, he'd moved into hers. The tattered Party posters were still there, some of them from the time when the Communists had been banned. Mavros had thought about replacing them with art work of his own – he owned some good framed prints by Moralis, Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and Tsarouchis – but he didn't want to turn the place into home. Both he and the Fat Man knew this was a stopgap.

Though finding somewhere else would be difficult. Greece had been going through years of unparalleled growth and property prices, both to buy and to rent, were ridiculously high. His mother and sister had both offered to lend him money, but he knew he would never be able to pay them back from his irregular private eye earnings. That adversely affected his
philotimo
, the often exaggerated sense of self-respect that every Greek possessed. The fact that he was half Scots complicated the matter. Dorothy had inculcated in him a Calvinist attitude towards the handling of money, despite the fact that she had been an atheist since she met his father.

Mavros looked at the framed black-and-white photos on the bedside table. On the left was his father Spyros with the hooked nose he himself had inherited, the moustache and the intense stare. He had been a senior member of the Communist Party and had died in 1967, before the military coup that would have seen him sent to a prison island again. On the right was Andonis, Mavros's brother eleven years his senior, who had disappeared at the age of twenty-one when he was already a leading light in the student opposition to the Colonels. He was Mavros's only professional failure. Wherever he delved, there was no substantive trace of his handsome, smiling brother. He didn't know how his mother had managed to bear the double loss. He had been too young at the time and only become obsessed with finding Andonis when he grew up. He would find him, he said to himself, even if it took all his life.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

‘Alexander Mavros?' The voice was female, low and speaking English.

‘Alex,' he replied. ‘Who's this?'

‘Never mind. I have a job for you, it may be the biggest in your career.' The woman paused but he kept quiet, unimpressed by hyperbole. ‘Tomorrow morning, nine o'clock. Meet me at the top of Mount Philopappos. Come alone.'

‘How will I identify—' The connection was cut.

Mystery woman, Mavros thought, tossing his phone on to the bed. Just what he needed. Nine o'clock? He was very much not a morning person. Then again, he hadn't had a decent job in a month and wasn't in a position to ignore opportunities. The Fat Man didn't want any rent, but Mavros wanted at least to pay his share of the household expenses.

Besides, he couldn't sit inside all the time, especially with the Olympics going on. Not that he wanted to attend the overpriced, often fatuous events, but there was a buzz in the city he enjoyed. Unlike Yiorgos, he hadn't wept when it was announced that the Athens bid had been successful. ‘It'll be the ruin of the country,' his friend had said. ‘We'll be stripped naked by the jackals of international capitalism, as well as by our own.' He might be right, but why not wait and see? Maybe there would be uses found for the specially built hockey and baseball facilities, even though Greeks knew as much about those sports as Americans knew about cricket.

Mavros set his alarm for seven-thirty, stripped off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts, and had a cold shower. The windows were open, but the temperature was still almost unbearable. The Fat Man didn't have air conditioning, regarding it as a con instituted by big business, so Mavros had to suffer.

That ought to have made his residual Calvinist soul feel good.

‘Where is she?'

The man in the mask of burlap struggled for breath.

‘What?' the Son shouted. ‘I can't hear you!' He poured another bucket of water over the prisoner's head and watched as the heavy material soaked it up. Breathing was almost impossible now and the man struggled against the wire securing his wrists and ankles to the metal chair bolted to the hard earth floor.

‘Where is she?' the Son repeated.

The prisoner's heavy head was bent forward, wrapped chin on his throat. He was trying hard to blow the burlap away from his lips.

His captor selected a dental probe from the row lined up on the table nearby. ‘Can you feel this?' he asked, applying the point to the naked chest.

A squeal came through the burlap.

‘I thought you might. So answering my question isn't so hard.
Where is she
?' The Son pulled back the man's head and put an ear close to where the mouth would be.

‘I . . . I don't . . . I don't know. They . . . they don't . . . tell us things . . . like that.'

‘Really? I thought you were a senior celebrant.' The probe did its work in another spot.

After the squealing stopped, the prisoner managed a few more words. ‘Yes . . . but I . . . I don't make . . . the decisions.'

The Son, tall and muscular, with his thick hair cut short and dyed blonde, walked away. Apart from latex gloves and thick socks, he was naked, as he always was when he extracted information. Sometimes, even with male subjects, he got excited and there was no point in constricting himself. He went to the sink and ran water over his head. It was hot, even for August, even in the hills above Thiva. The ramshackle farmhouse had been deserted for years and no one came up the rough track. The fields were untended and there were no livestock on the surrounding slopes. It was the usual story. When the older generation died out, their kids, already big shots in Athens with beach houses and luxury cars, ignored the rural property that had kept the family going for centuries. It had no value now that farmers, buoyed by EU grants, lived the good life in the valleys. Like all Greeks and half the world, they would be watching the idiocy taking place in the Olympic Stadium.

He opened the door and went outside. To the south the glow from Athens was visible over the hilltops, but westwards were only steep mountainsides and, far above them, the sparkle of long dead stars. How many years would it be before Greece was a similar burned out ruin? Unlike the Father, the Son was a realist about his country. He'd never been taken in by the rubbish the old man spouted about the virtues of army, church and family. The Father, a security policeman and torturer during the dictatorship, had been a rancid hypocrite. He'd made big money freelancing for the Athens crime bosses, who were connected to the dictators and their henchmen. So much for army, church and family, especially since the old bastard had pushed his wife down the stairs to her death. The Son had taken steps to make sure nothing like that would happen to him.

The man in the mask was making a curious noise, but the Son paid little attention. He was thinking about his success over the last two years. After being forced to leave Greece – and there would be a reckoning for that – he had plied the trade the Father had taught him throughout the Balkans. There was no shortage of customers. He had also added to his talents, as gang bosses were often more interested in killing their opponents than extracting information from them. He'd become a fully functioning hit man, able to take out people by rifle, bomb, pistol and knife – as well as a few specialities he'd come up with himself. It had cost him a large proportion of the old man's gold to take lessons from a retired Committee for State Security man in Bulgaria, but it had been worth it. Petrov had been a good teacher and he knew his craft, but he had a serious weakness – he drank vodka by the litre. That meant the Son couldn't trust him even with the little he had said about his background. The Father had been a perfectionist, suspending his victims from the ceiling with fish hooks and lines. The Son was more practical. Whatever did the job – such as the piece of burlap he'd found in an outhouse, stinking of goat's cheese.

He closed the door and went over to his prisoner.

‘For the last time,
where is she
?'

The man was silent and motionless, his head still forward.

The Son bent over him, his nose twitching. He could smell death better than a master of wine could identify a vintage. He unwrapped the mask and let it drop to the compacted earth floor. The prisoner's eyes were wide open and crimson veined, his lips lacerated where he had bitten through them. He'd succumbed to shock or suffocation, or perhaps had choked on his own blood.

Gathering up the tools of his trade, the Son smiled. No matter. It was obvious the fool didn't know anything. He'd have killed him anyway, though in a more imaginative way. Now he would move on to the next name on the list of worshippers he'd been given. He took the pictures with his camera phone that he'd been ordered to pass on to his employer.

The Son went out to the pickup truck – a battered, five-year-old Nissan that didn't stick out from the crowd, but packed a hefty punch under the bonnet – and took a plastic petrol can from the cargo space. He doused the dead man with enough fuel to mess up the crime scene investigator's job, even if he was found quickly. Then he laid a trail of petrol to the door, lit a match and dropped it. There was a noise like an ox belching and then the corpse combusted.

‘His soul flew past the barrier of his teeth and departed, lamenting bitterly, for the halls of Hades,' the Son said, leaving the door open until the fire was well established and taking a few more photos. He knew he had mangled the lines from Homer's
Iliad
, but he didn't care. The fact that the Father would have broken a stick over him for doing so made him laugh out loud.

T
he alarm woke Mavros from a troubled dream, in which Niki was pursuing him with a large pair of scissors in her hand. He showered and put on a loose white linen shirt and cream trousers. He considered shaving, but dismissed the idea. His stubble wasn't too long and the woman had cut him off.

‘Morning,' the Fat Man said, coming out of the kitchen with a tray of
baklava
, sweat streaming down his face. ‘How about this for a change?'

‘Just coffee,' Mavros mumbled.

‘You know that isn't how it works in the holy mother's halls. The deal is coffee and pastry, no negotiation.' Yiorgos went back into the furnace to make the brew. He had leased a run-down café next to the ancient market for decades and Mavros had used it as a makeshift office, mainly because the coffee was the best he'd ever found in the city. The fact that the Fat Man had known both his father and brother also played a part.

‘One
sketo
for the half-breed, one
varyglyko
for the chef.'

‘That's what you're calling yourself now, is it?' Mavros said, after gulping down a glass of water. ‘You should cut down on sugar. Your heart must be thundering like an elephant's.'

‘Then I'd get all bitter and twisted like you,' Yiorgos said, straight-faced.

‘Ha.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Meeting a client.'

‘Can I come?'

Mavros headed for the door, grabbing his sunglasses. That was one of the problems with living in the Fat Man's house. He was fascinated by Mavros's business and was always trying to get involved. He had succeeded once, a few years back, and they had both almost lost their lives.

‘No,' Mavros said, over his shoulder. ‘I don't want you scaring off the lady.'

‘Oh, it's a
lady
, is it? I wouldn't want to cramp your style, Mr Cool-as-Michael-Caine-in-linen.'

‘Besides, I'm just a parasite on the hide of the capitalists,' Mavros said, parroting his friend's standard gibe about his profession. ‘Turn on the TV. You'll be able to abuse Greek athletes doing their best for their country.'

‘Sport is—'

‘The cocaine of the masses, I know. See you later.'

‘Go to the bad,' the Fat Man said, grinning.

Mavros walked up to Ippokratous and caught the bus to the Acropolis. The shabby thoroughfare had been tarted up because the cycling road race would be passing down it. That meant private citizens had got low-interest loans from the city council to repaint their external walls. There were also flags and bunting all over the place, some of them a hangover from the Independence Day celebrations in March. Mavros saw a scrawny cat clawing its way though bags of rubbish in a dumpster. At least it was still alive. There were rumours that the city's stray dogs had been rounded up and gassed, though the council denied it.

The bus turned on to Akadhimias, heading for Syndagma Square. The neoclassical buildings of the national library, university and academy looked splendid, Mavros had to admit. He still harboured a deep love for Athens and there was no question that the Olympics had stimulated regeneration. But, looking at the elderly women in black and the skinny immigrant workers, he wondered how much of that regeneration was only on the surface. No, he wasn't going to become the Fat Man. He still believed the Olympics would do more good than bad. Then a ticket inspector got on and started bullying an old man whose mind clearly wasn't all there.