The White Sea Read online

  ‘A striking but completely confusing image.’

  ‘Huh. You’re not exactly Mr Six Pack 2010 yourself.’

  Mavros shrugged. ‘I lead a sedentary life.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m on my backside all day.’

  ‘Exactly. And you were smoking on the way over here.’

  ‘Just the one. You know I don’t do it in front of Mother.’

  Mavros’s phone went again. The same caller, the same failure to respond.

  Yiorgos turned on the TV. ‘Who was that?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t.’ The Fat Man settled on a channel showing basketball.

  ‘At least cut the volume,’ Mavros said. ‘What are you doing watching the modern opium of the masses?’

  ‘It’s a game of great skill.’

  ‘It is if you’re playing. Doesn’t take much skill to lie around watching it.’

  ‘Go and stick your head in a bucket. Do you want a beer?’

  Mavros got up and went to the kitchen. ‘You’re not allowed, of course,’ he said over his shoulder, but he brought two cans of Amstel back. ‘One for each of my kidneys.’

  ‘Fool.’ The Fat Man caught his can with one hand. ‘See, great skill.’

  They drank and abused each other until the match was over.

  ‘Time for your salad?’ Mavros asked.

  ‘Already eaten it. Time for souvlaki.’ Yiorgos picked up the phone. ‘You?’

  Mavros shook his head. His mother still cooked and they had eaten a three-course lunch. ‘You know what the old woman said to me today? That I should go back to work.’

  ‘She’s right.’

  ‘Not you too.’

  ‘No, really, you should. I’d have thought you needed the money these days.’

  ‘I never looked for people to make money.’

  The Fat Man caught his eye. ‘No, you did it because you had to – because of Andonis, who’s the only person you’ve never found. So why have you given up?’

  ‘What? Looking for my brother?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Realistically it’s too long now. The trail’s gone colder than the summit of Mount Olympus. But you still have the need to do the job, admit it.’

  Mavros got up and walked around the room. ‘People don’t have only one need, Yiorgo. Maybe I do still want to find people – I’d give my right arm for the slightest trace of Andonis – but I can’t be responsible for any more deaths.’

  The Fat Man sighed and got to his feet. ‘Some time you’ll have to realise that Niki’s death isn’t on you, Alex. She committed suicide when the balance of her mind was all over the place or she was murdered by that fucker, the Son. You aren’t guilty in either case.’

  Mavros stared at him. ‘But I am. I led her into danger. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘So find the murdering bastard and take it out on him.’

  ‘I haven’t got it in me any more, Yiorgo. I haven’t got the strength.’ He headed for the door. ‘Are you going to let me out of this fortress?’

  ‘I’ll come with you. You need another drink and so do I.’

  ‘You need another drink like a hole in the heart, my friend.’

  The Fat Man laughed. ‘I can watch you, can’t I? Anyway, we might pick up a pair of well-stacked divorcées.’

  Mavros shook his head. ‘Not unless you change – and I don’t just mean your clothes.’

  He was sent to hell by two hands with splayed fingers. Then he caught sight of himself in a small mirror by the door. Christ, he looked grim: hair like a derelict’s, stubble too long, face like it had recently been ploughed. Not even his trusty left eye – dark blue flecked by brown – would attract women now.

  ‘Caught you,’ Yiorgos said.

  ‘Just checking the damage. Not good.’

  The Fat Man slapped him on the back. ‘The trick is to get them drunk, remember?’

  Mavros followed him to the door. He shivered as Niki’s vertical body swayed before him as it did at least once a day. This was no kind of life.

  His mobile rang again. He turned it off.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Thomson, there’s nothing left except palliative care. We’ve done all the surgery we can and your wife refuses more chemotherapy.’ The oncologist looked at the file as if it could tell him anything he didn’t know.

  ‘So that’s it, doc? I just take her home?’

  ‘Until that gets too much for you both and she goes into a hospice. There’s no shortage of good ones in Melbourne.’ The doctor looked like he’d just left university. His black hair was short, without a hint of grey. Although he was strongly built, his eyelashes were long and curled like a show girl’s.

  ‘Any point in homeopathy or Chinese herbs?’

  ‘That’s up to you, but I wouldn’t waste the money. Raising your wife’s or your own hopes will only make things worse in the end.’

  Jim Thomson went over the conversation as he sat on the balcony of the Victorian terraced house in Kensington, three miles northwest of central Melbourne. He couldn’t get beyond the doctor’s last word and his lack of hesitation in using it. He’d been right though. Ivy didn’t want any treatment except the morphine drip. She lasted three weeks at home and another five days in the hospice, then slipped away when he was dozing, her hand in his. He didn’t know how long she’d been dead when he woke up. There was nothing material left of her except the plastic urn on the mantelpiece.

  But he could still smell her in the house, still put his hand where hers had been on plates, glasses, cutlery, pots. And her shape, for all her weight loss, was still imprinted on the mattress they’d slept on for sixteen years. The place and its contents were his now, even though the doctor had been mistaken in describing Ivy as Thomson’s wife. They’d lived together for so long that it came to the same thing, but neither of them had felt the need of formalising their relationship. They loved each other. What else mattered?

  The house had been bought by Ivy and her first husband back in the 80s, when the abbatoir was still in operation. Timmie got himself killed in an industrial accident that Ivy never talked about, not long before his place of work closed down for good. Jim hadn’t known the area then, but it must have been oppressive, especially the stink in the summer. The old yards had been demolished and turned into a housing project. He was glad he didn’t live over the killing floors that had run with the blood of countless animals.

  Then again he’d never intended to come to a city with so many Greeks. It had been easy to disguise himself – his English was good and his blue eyes didn’t smack of the old country. His hair was already a shock of white when he arrived in Australia though he was only forty. He’d been through plenty in his wind- and wave-battered life; he was lucky he had any hair at all. All the cities, the ports … The lights, the buildings, the food, the women … He should write his memoirs or maybe a novel. He laughed, making a couple of Chinese kids look up at him. He waved to them like the crazy old guy he was. He couldn’t write anything. Not because he was illiterate – he’d had a good education, even if it had been prematurely terminated – but because he would have to remember. After nearly forty years of confining the horror to the deepest part of his being, he wasn’t going to do that.

  But maybe he wouldn’t have a choice. Ivy’s last wish, whispered to him the day before she died, was that her ashes be spread in the waters off the island her grandparents had come from. She made him swear on their love that’d he do it, said there was a ticket to Athens in his name already paid for. All he had to do was choose a date.

  All he had to do. He’d kept his background to himself. So many secrets. Ivy knew he hadn’t told her everything, but she didn’t mind. She had him to herself and that was enough. He went out to work at the picture-framers where old Kinch had taught him the trade despite his advanced age as an apprentice. That could have brought him into contact with artists and dealers, but he had no interest in that world and kept t
o the workshop. He rarely went out in the evenings, fearful of hearing Greek in bars or restaurants. It was a strange wind that had blown him to the city with the world’s third largest Greek-speaking population, but it was Ivy’s home and he never wanted to leave the third woman he loved – in some strange way, despite being on the other side of the world, he felt he was home.

  And now he had to go back to the country of his birth. He’d considered reneging on his promise to Ivy and sprinkling her ashes in the Yarra, but that would have been wrong. He still retained a sense of decency. In fact, living with Ivy had turned him into a fully functioning human being. For that he owed her much more than a journey to Greece.

  The sun had gone down when Jim Thomson went into the house. He breathed in his lost love and then opened a tinnie. He was thinking about the doctor again. Ivy had come to her end, but his was still ahead, beckoning him like a sultry goddess, one who would not refused; a journey back to his beginning to find what monsters awaited him there.

  TWO

  Mavros and the Fat Man ate and drank at a taverna on Alexandhras Avenue. It was a dingy place, a continuous stream of cars and buses passing even late in the evening, but the meat was from the owner’s farm in Viotia and he knew how to cook it. Yiorgos managed to confine himself to a single beef chop, but disposed of two salads and enough wine to make a tractor tip over. Mavros wasn’t far behind, except on the salad count.

  ‘So how about it?’

  Mavros raised an eyebrow. ‘I know you’re meant to take regular exercise, but I didn’t think that meant with me.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I might have a girlfriend for all you know.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Why not? Everyone’s entitled to a private life.’

  Mavros nodded slowly, remembering the times before and after Niki’s death when he and his family – as well as the Fat Man – had been forced to take extreme security precautions. Which, in his lover’s case, had been for nothing. Fortunately the man who had been a threat had shown no sign of life since then, not that Mavros thought he was dead. It would be just like the Son to taunt him by disappearing for a long time and then making an explosive reappearance.

  ‘You are too, you know,’ Yiorgos said, in a low voice. ‘One-night-stands are fine, but it’s five years since Niki—’

  Mavros raised a hand. ‘Private means private, yes?’

  The Fat Man shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Maybe you’ve forgotten but I know you’ve got a great capacity for love.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Mavros said, not entirely in jest. ‘When you start giving me relationship counselling, I know the end of the world is nigh.’

  After half an hour they went their separate ways. Mavros was panting when he reached the Lykavittos ring-road, the lights from the chapel of St George on the summit shining. He had an exercise-bike in his mother’s storage space and it was well past time that he started using it. He reached the junction with Kleomenous Street, the luxury hotel bathed in a soft glow that must have cost more than an entire working class street’s lighting. Just before he reached the entrance to number six, a car door opened in front of him.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Get in. Immediately. Or I’ll arrest you.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  A heavily built policeman in uniform got out of the driver’s seat, spun him round, attached cuffs to his wrists and pushed him into the back.

  ‘Consider yourself arrested.’

  Mavros looked at the besuited figure next to him. ‘On what charge?’

  ‘Not answering your mobile phone.’

  ‘Fuck you again.’

  ‘Now you’re being childish. How about resisting arrest? For a start.’ Brigadier Nikos Kriaras was head of the Athens and Attica organised crime division. He did imperious without even trying. ‘Back to HQ,’ he ordered.

  Mavros tried not to show that sitting with his hands behind his back was uncomfortable. Keeping quiet seemed like a good tactic.

  Kriaras wasn’t fooled. He’d known his man for fifteen years and knew exactly how to play him. When they arrived at the imposing glass and concrete block at the eastern end of Alexandhras, the driver got out and hauled Mavros to his feet.

  ‘The cells,’ Kriaras said, signalling to a uniformed officer to take charge of the vehicle.

  Mavros walked along the corridors with his head high, the smell of disinfectant fighting a losing battle with that of human waste. The driver shouldered open a door and pulled the captive to a chair, clipping a chain attached to the floor to the one linking the cuffs.

  ‘Ready, sir.’

  The brigadier walked in, ignoring the chair on his side of the table.

  ‘I had a feeling these measures would be necessary.’

  ‘You always were a bully.’ Mavros’s relations with Kriaras had never been more than functional, but since Niki’s death they had ceased completely. The inquest into his lover’s death had concluded that she committed suicide, but both Mavros and the brigadier knew there was more to it than that. The former suspected that the Son, the stone killer who had sworn to strike at him, was behind the photo that could have driven Niki to take her own life. Even though the technicians had failed to establish that anyone else had been in their flat, Mavros still thought it was possible the Son had slipped in and murdered her. Kriaras’s refusal to investigate further and his earlier links with the Son had led Mavros to break off contact with him.

  ‘When’s he coming?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who. Is he going to hang me from the ceiling with fish hooks like his old man used to do for the Junta?’

  Kriaras gave him a disdainful look. ‘I have no idea where the Son is. He has nothing to do with this.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Believe what you want.’ The brigadier paused. ‘I have a job offer for you.’

  ‘Stick it up your festering ass.’

  ‘A quarter of a million euros up front, the same on conclusion of the case.’

  Mavros couldn’t stop his jaw dropping.

  ‘I thought that would get your attention.’

  ‘Screw you. Most of the jobs you put my way nearly got me and the people I care for killed. Why do you think I gave up missing persons investigations?’

  Kriaras gave him a disdainful look. ‘I assumed it was because you lost your nerve.’

  Mavros managed not to react to that.

  ‘All right, here’s how it’s going to be, Alex. All you have to do is talk to your potential employers. If you don’t take the job, more fool you. On the other hand, if you refuse to meet them, you’re staying here with our large friend for company. Rations, not very much bread and very little water. For as long as it takes.’

  It was obvious that someone with a lot of clout was tugging Kriaras’s chain. Mavros thought about the money. Not many Greeks had that amount to throw around these days, especially as a down payment for work that might go nowhere. A quarter of a million would keep his mother’s company going for a while longer – half of that would suffice. He knew how much that would mean to her. The prospect of unlimited incarceration in the sifling cell didn’t bother him unduly – he could be as cussed as Kriaras – but he didn’t have the appetite for more posturing.

  He raised his shoulders as far as the chain permitted. ‘All right, I’ll talk to them. Who are they? The Onassis Foundation?’

  ‘Close,’ muttered the brigadier.

  The floor of Kostas Gatsos’s cell was uneven and he could feel that the brick walls were unplastered. There was no light or furniture, and no window frames. He had tried pacing with his arms outstretched and the space seemed to be about seven metres by five. Was he in a storeroom? A basement? An oversized grave?

  He had been pushed inside what must have been some weeks ago. Without a watch or a view of the sky, he had no idea of how many days had passed. His captors opened the steel door at the far end from where his stinking mattress lay and left a chunk of bread and a bottle of
water, but he had the suspicion they did so at irregular intervals. Were they deliberately disorienting him?

  He tried to remember what had happened after Pavlos was shot. He had been rushed through the house to the front door, where a hood was put over his head. He had seen Boris in a pool of blood on the marble of the hall and one of the maids was sprawled in the corner, he hoped only unconscious. A heavy hand had pushed him down to the floor of a vehicle, his shoulders jammed between the front and rear seats. The driver was skilful and the engine smooth. At times he thought they were going uphill, but he couldn’t be sure. Then they stopped and he was pulled out. Someone took his right forearm and led him to what he soon realised was a boat, though he had no idea of its size. He could smell the sea from the loose bottom of the hood and hear the roar of a powerful engine. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was pushed into what he assumed was a cabin. He could only feel about with his head. It seemed he was on a mattress.

  ‘Lie still, old man,’ came a coarse voice in heavily accented English. The man who had shot his son spoke Greek. ‘Or it’s a bullet in the leg.’

  He did as he was told with alacrity. He may have been known as the Pit Bull because of his aggressive negotiating, but he knew when he had no room for manoeuvre. He had to use the time to plan, to work out how to talk the savages into letting him go. It would come down to money, these things always did. He wasn’t the only shipowner to have been kidnapped and held for ransom. Loukas and Evi would know what to do. They would bring in experts.

  The boat was on the water for about four hours, he estimated. He had spent a lot of time at sea over the years. Not on the cargo ships the group owned and operated, but on his yacht, the Tatiana, which he’d sold after he’d divorced his second wife, she of that name – he hadn’t felt the need to remarry – and even more on his 150 metre motor yacht, the Golden Arrow, which he took round the Mediterranean every summer. Prime ministers and film stars, artists and bankers, opera singers and even the occasional royal were his guests. The Arrow, a former passenger ferry, had been reconditioned and its interior refurbished by the best Danish designers. Good taste was the by-word. There were no bar seats covered in whale foreskins.