The Green Lady Page 24

  ‘I’ll eat you first.’

  Mavros edged away, aware of Bitsos’s permanently raging hunger.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ the other man scoffed. ‘We’ll be out of here before we get that desperate.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I do, and I’ll tell you why. The Fat Man hasn’t been brought to join us.’

  ‘Jesus, Lambi, you’re right. He must still be at large.’

  ‘At large? Very good. But you take my point?’

  ‘I do. The problem is, he has no idea where we are.’ He thought of Telemachos Xanthakos. The policeman would help, but he didn’t know their location either. Which left . . .

  ‘That wanker of a fisherman,’ Bitsos said. ‘If he goes back to Kypseli, which logically he has to in order to keep in with the ecologists, he could be a weak link.’

  ‘He could be.’ Mavros found his mind moving away from their immediate plight to the females in the case. He wished he’d managed to get more out of Angie Poulou about her husband – it was clear she had suspicions about him, and she wasn’t involved in the Hades and Persephone cult. He also regretted not managing to ask her about Lia’s involvement with the ecologists and the abused girl, Ourania. Had she been to Paradheisos more than once, perhaps when Angie was tending her bees on Mount Elikonas? Could it be that Lykos had kidnapped her and kept that from Angeliki? And then there was Niki. Had the Son really gone after the woman Mavros had loved for years? If so, she was doomed – perhaps already dead. He felt his heart constrict as he realised how much he loved her. He should never have driven her to leave him. So she wanted children. What was wrong with that? He thought of his father, Spyros, who had died when Mavros was only five but who still influenced his life. Inevitably, his brother Andonis also flashed before him, his lips in their perpetual smile and his blue eyes wide open. If Mavros had kids with Niki, the ones he had lost would be kept alive, their genes passed on.

  ‘What is it?’ Bitsos demanded. ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No,’ Mavros mumbled, but his eyes and cheeks were damp. He was thinking of the children he would never have and the women he had failed – Niki, Angie Poulou and her daughter, the last only fourteen years old but, if Ourania’s abuse by Rovertos Bekakos was anything to go by, already mature beyond her years in the worst of senses. The question was, had Paschos Poulos been involved? Had he really abused his own daughter?

  Given he was deep in the underworld with little hope of rescue, Mavros supposed he would never find out the answers to those and many other questions.

  ‘Alex?’ Bitsos said tentatively.

  ‘What, Lambi?’

  ‘Can you . . . can you hold my hand?’

  He took the journalist’s scrawny paw and sank into an inner darkness that was even more absolute than that in the former dynamite store.

  The Son grabbed a towel after he sent the Filipina flying and ran to the gate. He held the fabric against the wounds to his head and ear until he got to the Fiat. He drove towards the national highway, but pulled in before he got there and looked at himself in the vanity mirror. His left ear had been halved and was still gushing, but the razor slashes to his face and scalp were less bloody. He managed to tie the towel in such a way as to cover all three cuts, but he knew he needed surgery urgently. He called the emergency number he’d been given and told the gruff man who answered what he needed. Five minutes late he received directions to a private clinic and was told to enter at the rear. When he was finished, he was to phone again to report.

  The clinic was in Vrilissia, a suburb further to the east. The building was modern and multicoloured, its car park full apart from a space at the far corner. The Son drove to it, got out and kicked away the cone that had been placed there, then parked. He walked round the edge of the building and went in a door that had been left ajar. A young male orderly was waiting for him, his eyes lowered. He took him straight to a consulting room. The doctor was suave and grey-haired, his hands steady as he applied anaesthetic spray and got down to stitching. He didn’t speak until he examined the ear.

  ‘I take it you don’t have the missing piece.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Plastic surgery can make up for it later, but I was told to get you on your way as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Were you?’ the Son growled. He had clearly pissed his employer off. A needle ran through his tattered ear, the pain easily negating the anaesthetic, but he didn’t flinch. It was mutual – he was pissed off with his employer, not to mention the woman who had resisted like a tigress. He would take her life, but it wasn’t a priority. If Alex Mavros really was involved, he got top billing, even over the next Olympian worshippers on his list. Then he had another thought. Mavros had a family – a famous father and brother, dead and disappeared, and a mother who published books. There was also a lover – what was her name?

  ‘Niki,’ he said, a minute later.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ the doctor asked, pausing in mid-suture.

  He could get her address, he could get the mother’s too. He had the feeling there was a sister too – he’d assembled a detailed file on the bastard when he was in Bulgaria. To hell with Lia Poulou. It was time Alex Mavros’s family paid for what he’d done during the Father’s last commission.

  The doctor stopped again. ‘You’re the only patient I’ve ever had who’s laughed during this procedure.’

  The Son caught his eye and the medic stepped quickly backwards, his hands raised.

  Bitsos had actually managed to fall asleep, his hand curled within Mavros’s.

  ‘No sleep before you’re dead, eh, Lambi?’ Mavros murmured. He felt curiously calm, like a condemned prisoner who had come to terms with his fate. He thought about the statues of the deities in the temple at the top of the tunnel. The Hades and Persephone myth, coupled with that of the Maiden’s mother Demeter, wasn’t downbeat. Unlike the traditions of the waste land, brought together by T.S. Eliot and the Greek poet Seferis, it didn’t signify the end of life on earth. Rather, it gave weight to the fertility that rejuvenated the natural world every spring. Even though many individual humans would not survive the harshness of winter, the species as a whole, along with many others, would flower.

  Then he thought of the real waste land that was the HMC plant – the mountainsides scored by huge cutting machines; the ore hauled away in monster trucks; the clouds of fumes that shortened the lives of people in Paradheisos and Kypseli; the waters of the gulf reddened and poisoned. The worst thing was that the mineral wealth that belonged to Hades Plouton in ancient times went to a small number of people. The workers were little more than slaves, thrown out of their homes when they could no longer pull their weight – and their children were abused and ruined, treated worse than sinners in the paintings that terrified people in the Middle Ages. How could the responsible parties look themselves in the mirror? Was that why Paschos Poulos, the Bekakos couple and the arch-thief Tryfon Roufos comforted themselves by believing in the Olympian gods? Did they think they could escape the torture region of Tartarus by cutting the throats of a few piglets?

  And then it struck him. Even though Lia Poulou may have been sexually abused like Ourania, that wasn’t why she had been taken. The bastards – whether Lykos and his fellow believers or the other faithful who included Paschos Poulos in their number – were going to sacrifice her. Not only that, he was sure the act was connected to the Olympic Games which had made Paschos Poulos even wealthier; sacrificing his own daughter to the gods of death and fertility would guarantee his future prosperity. Then again, the great King Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to ensure a fair wind to Troy. That deed had revolted his wife Clytemnestra so much that she had executed him in his bath with an axe.

  Mavros thought Angie Poulou would be capable of an act like that. One of his many sorrows was that he wouldn’t be on the surface of the earth to hear about it.

  Telemachos Xanthakos was at the bow of the fishing boat, watching as it swung away from the huge cargo ship and
headed behind a ridge that dropped sharply into the sea. On the far side there was darkness. He held the unlit torch that Akis Exarchos had given him and looked over his shoulder. Alex Mavros’s friend, the Fat Man, was a metre from the fisherman, the policeman’s pistol trained on the man at the tiller. When they passed into the lee of the ridge, Akis raised an arm cautiously and Xanthakos turned on the torch. He gasped when he saw the jagged rocks straight ahead, then Exarchos cut the revs and manoeuvred the boat towards the land.

  ‘Under the shelf!’ the fisherman shouted. ‘There’s a mooring ring.’

  The deputy commissioner knew he was taking a risk leaving Akis with the Fat Man, but he had no choice – neither of them could handle the controls. He leaned forward and ran his hand under the line of rock. Nothing, nothing . . . yes, a cold steel circle. He looped a rope round it and pulled hard, as the fisherman finished steering and killed the engine.

  ‘You know how to secure that?’ Akis called.

  Xanthakos shouted back in affirmation as he made the line fast – he had been fishing often enough with his father in the Gulf of Thessaloniki. He went sternwards, divesting himself of the yellow waterproofs. Then Exarchos made his move. Suddenly the detached tiller arm was in his hands. He swung it straight at the Fat Man’s head.

  ‘No!’ Xanthakos screamed, slipping on the wet deck. Then he realised that Mavros’s friend had ducked with surprising speed and jabbed the muzzle of the pistol hard into the fisherman’s belly. By the time the policeman reached the stern, Yiorgos was standing over Akis, the muzzle against his head.

  ‘Shit, that was close,’ Xanthakos said.

  ‘I can jive with best of them when I have to,’ the Fat Man said, with a grin. ‘Come on, bellyache. You’ve got places to show us.’ He handed the pistol to the deputy commissioner and pulled off the ill-fitting wet weather gear. Then he picked the fisherman up by the scruff of his neck and staggered with him to the bow. He swayed alarmingly for a moment, then stood safely on a flat piece of rock with his prisoner.

  Holding his pistol, Xanthakos followed them off the boat and up a steep outcrop. The lights of the plant glowed on the other side of the ridge. The wall of rock dropped at one point and he saw the extent of the installation. He had visited it on official business several times, but the view from above confirmed how huge the place was. And how ugly. A dense pall of dusty fumes hung over the valley floor and, to the rear, the ravaged mountain was like a half-eaten corpse with insect-like machines crawling over it. No matter how valuable the minerals extracted were, they couldn’t be worth this picture of desolation.

  They struggled on, keeping out of the lights from the buildings and towers. The Fat Man was wheezing for breath but he moved upwards doggedly, his heavy hand tight on Exarchos’s neck. Xanthakos heard him speaking to the fisherman in a low voice, but he couldn’t make out the words. Whatever they were, their effect was to make the thin man’s body loose, as if the fight had been knocked out of him.

  Eventually a pale stone building began to show in the distance.

  ‘What is that?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘It’s where the faithful worship,’ Akis said. ‘We shouldn’t go there. You aren’t allowed. You have to be ritually cleansed.’

  ‘Dirty, are we?’ the Fat Man said, raising his free hand. ‘I told you, you’ll be shitting through twin arseholes if you waste our time. Are you sure that’s the last place you saw Alex?’

  The fisherman’s head dropped again. ‘Yes, I swear it.’

  ‘What, by Demeter?’

  ‘This temple isn’t dedicated to the Green Lady,’ Akis said. ‘It’s Hades’ and Persephone’s.’

  Xanthakos felt a tremor. He knew the myths and he knew about the pomegranate seeds. Was the man who had planted them in his victims nearby? He looked around anxiously, but saw no one near the fenced-off structure.

  Ten minutes later, they were over the fence and at the entrance. There was a smell of burned pitch cut with the metallic tang of blood.

  ‘I can’t go in with the profane,’ the fisherman said, in a low voice.

  ‘You’re coming voluntarily or I’ll wrap you in some of the barbed wire we just clambered over,’ the Fat Man said. ‘This is my best friend we’re looking for.’

  Exarchos started to move forward slowly, the hand still on his nape. The policeman checked that the winding track to the temple was empty of vehicles and followed the others in.

  ‘Marx and Engels,’ Yiorgos said, taking in the heaps of entrails that had been plucked from the piglets’ mutilated bodies.

  ‘Please don’t blaspheme,’ Akis said. ‘Hades and Persephone are vengeful gods.’

  ‘Where’s Alex?’ the Fat Man demanded. ‘Tell me or I’ll pull these statues down on top of you.’

  The fisherman glanced at Xanthakos for help, but none was forthcoming.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said, flinching as the grip on his neck tightened. ‘I left before he and the journalist were disposed of.’

  ‘DISPOSED OF?’ Yiorgos roared. ‘You better hope Alex is alive or I’ll dispose of you like these little pigs.’

  Akis Exarchos pointed to the brands on the walls. ‘Light a couple of those. Behind the deities there’s a tunnel.’

  The Fat Man watched as the policeman got two of the torches burning and handed one to him. ‘Right,’ he said, pushing the fisherman between the blood and soot marked statues. ‘It looks like this leads downwards.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a full-blown highway to hell.’

  Telemachos Xanthakos walked after the asymmetrical pair. One thing he’d never have imagined was that the corpulent Communist would be an AC/DC fan.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lykos and Cadres One to Four had returned to Kypseli in the early morning. Angeliki’s earlier insistence that she had to see the doctor in Dhistomo urgently had taken him by surprise, not least because she’d refused to say what the matter was. She had borrowed Akis’s motorbike. Despite his easy success with women, he understood very little about them. She was waiting for them at the Ecologists for a Better Viotia office.

  ‘Where’s Ourania?’ Angeliki asked.

  ‘She . . . she wanted to go home,’ Lykos replied, keeping his eyes off his partner’s.

  The young woman looked at him gravely. ‘She might talk.’

  ‘Who to? Her parents? They’re company stooges. Her friends? She said herself that she hasn’t got any.’

  ‘Yes, but she should have stayed with us. We need her.’

  Lykos smiled. ‘We know where she lives. Can you help the cadres with the cooking? We haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.’

  It seemed Angeliki was going to object, but in the end she went into the back room and helped the young Communists cut up vegetables and herbs. When the soup-stew hybrid was on the gas, she came back out.

  ‘What is it?’ Lykos asked. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘Where’s Akis? His boat’s not in the harbour.’

  ‘He went off on that expedition with Mavros and the journalist, remember?’

  ‘They should have been back hours ago. I’m worried something’s happened to them. That’s not all.’ She went to the front window. ‘Did you notice those cars down the road?’

  Lykos got up and joined her, putting his hand on the back of her neck. Despite the heat of the night, the skin was very warm. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pointed through the open window. ‘The further one looks like an unmarked police car. The Peugeot, I don’t know, but I’m worried. I’m going round to Akis’s house to see if he’s there. His boat could have been stolen.’

  ‘Why not call him?’

  Angeliki stopped at the door. ‘If he’s in trouble, the last thing he needs is his phone ringing. And we should close the shutters. The guy with the funny rifle is still at large.’

  Lykos did as she said, then made a call. He recounted his overnight activities to his aunt and was praised. All he needed to do now was wait for things to come to the boil.
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br />   Mavros heard it first. He let go of Bitsos’s hand and stood up, head turned and one ear in the gap between the bars. Nothing. It had sounded like a voice, but he must have imagined it. Then he heard it again, followed by a deeper one. People were coming down the tunnel. His heart started to beat fast, then it struck him that the visitors would probably be Kloutsis and his sidekick, coming to gloat.

  Lights began to flicker higher up, gradually becoming brighter. Then an unmistakable voice called out.

  ‘Alex? Are you down this shit-hole, Alex?’

  Never had Mavros been happier to hear the Fat Man’s less than dulcet tones.

  ‘Yes, Yiorgo, keep on walking down. We’re in a cage.’

  Bitsos woke up with a grunt. ‘What is it? Are those fuckers coming back?’

  ‘No,’ Mavros said, grabbing him round his thin shoulders. ‘These are our fuckers.’

  Bitsos strained to hear. ‘The Fat Man,’ he said. ‘I never thought I’d be pleased to hear his elephantine tread.’

  The lights came closer and they realised they were flaming brands from the temple. Mavros made out the tall figure of Telemachos Xanthakos and the Fat Man. A shorter thin man was in front of them. Akis Exarchos did not look happy.

  ‘Christ, Alex, what is this place?’ Yiorgos asked, when they reached the bars.

  ‘Former dynamite store. Good to see you too.’

  ‘Piss off. We’re rescuing you, aren’t we?’ He glared at Bitsos. ‘No thanks from you, eh, hack?’

  ‘I think I love you,’ Lambis said fulsomely. ‘Now get us out of here.’

  ‘Deputy Commissioner,’ Mavros said. ‘Any thoughts on that?’

  Xanthakos held his brand as close as he could. ‘I can’t see any sign of explosives.’ He handed the torch to Yiorgos, who pushed Akis close to the bars. ‘We’ve already established that the fisherman doesn’t have a key, so stand back and cover your faces.’ He pulled out his service pistol and aimed it at the lock. ‘Yiorgo, you might want to pull your prisoner back a few steps.’