Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) Page 4

  ‘All right, Mother,’ he said, ‘I’m on my way. You listen to what the doctor says.’

  ‘Yes, dear, of course.’ Dorothy’s voice was lively again now that she’d got her way. ‘See you soon.’

  Mavros walked on, skirting a huge motorbike that had been chained to a metal post and was blocking the pavement. As he put a foot on to the road a Honda 50 brushed past at speed, the adolescent rider shouting abuse. Bastard bikers. Mavros loved the city, it was his territory. Ever since he was a kid he’d felt at home in the uneven, ankle-shattering streets and the smog-filled squares with their incongruous classical names. He knew it was crazy, but he’d learned to accept both his curious obsession with the city and its numerous failings— apart from the motorbikes and scooters. Despite the regulations that allowed only half of the cars registered by Athenians into the centre each day, and gave priority to the yellow trolleybuses and their blue-and-white diesel counterparts, the avenues and streets were clogged from not long after dawn until well into the evening. So the locals, apart from investing in a second car, made sure they also had some form of two-wheeled transport, which was immune to the restrictions. Mavros hated motorbikes like the plague and regarded their riders as self-centred, dangerous fools. He walked everywhere he could.

  As he began to scale the slope of Pindharou that led towards the bald, green-fringed summit of Lykavittos, the city’s highest central point, the crowds thinned. The area of Dhexameni around the reservoir built by the Romans was residential, only the throw of an anarchist’s grenade from the centre of the exclusive Kolonaki Square. Mavros stopped and looked down the narrow spaces between the apartment blocks towards the glistening blue of the Aegean east of Piraeus. The suburbs stretched down towards the sea in a pungent haze, and his ears rang with the blast of horns and the revving of engines. As he turned to go, an old woman bumped into him. Her face was heavily made up, her yellow linen suit from a high-class boutique.

  ‘Well?’ she said in a voice drenched in vitriol. ‘Let me past. What are you waiting for?’

  Mavros stepped into the road and watched her move carefully down the steep pavement, almost hoping she’d take a tumble. He twitched his head at the unworthy thought. But her words struck him again as he walked towards his mother’s block on Kleomenous, the spectacular stretch of water glinting up at him invitingly. Trigono lay basking out there, free of crowds, motorbikes and sharp-tongued harridans.

  What was he waiting for?

  Trigono, 1715 hours

  The trata Sotiria rounded Cape Oura at the south-eastern corner of the island and headed westwards. Yiangos was standing with an arm on the rudder and a foot on the long rod attached to the throttle, a cigarette between his teeth. Although his curly brown hair was short, the breeze and the momentum of the boat were ruffling it. He cut the engine revs and let the boat bob along on the swell. The southerly wind wasn’t more than Force 4, but they were now beam on to it so he couldn’t afford to let his concentration drop. He was early, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Perhaps the others would be too.

  ‘Look!’ he cried. His left arm was over his eyes, the right pointing towards the outermost of the chain of islets ahead. ‘Look, Nafsika!’

  The young woman was lying beside the winch wheels on the forward deck. She sat up, drawing her long, tanned legs beneath her. The purple bikini top stretched as she raised her arm to shade her eyes. ‘What is it, Yiango?’ she said, looking over the glare of the waves.

  ‘Eschati,’ he shouted. ‘The last island before Santorini. There’s good fishing on the western side.’

  ‘Good fishing,’ Nafsika said to herself. ‘Is that all you can think about?’ She ran her eye all around. There was empty sea on three sides and only the bare, near-vertical cliffs running down from the summit of Profitis Ilias, Trigono’s highest point, to the north. Beyond the forbidding rock face was the great ridge that linked Profitis Ilias with Vigla, the other main peak. Seeing that they were alone, she undid the clasp of her bikini and released her breasts. Maybe that would take Yiangos’s mind off the fishing. She looked sternwards and groaned. Now he was bending over and doing something with the nets. She lay down again and let her thoughts drift away, feeling the white skin on her chest tighten in the breeze. If her mother could see her now…

  What were they doing? she wondered. Yiangos’s father Lefteris would go crazy if he discovered the boat had been used when he was away at the court on Syros. The trates weren’t allowed to fish with the heavy nets until the season began on October 1st, and if the coastguard caught them things would be even worse. Ach, shit on them all. You’re only young once and Yiangos was a beautiful boy, she’d known him all her life. Not that she intended to marry him—they weren’t even engaged. She had other ideas about her future. She’d learned a lot from Eleni the archaeologist. Eleni said she was smart enough to do the university entrance exams again, smart enough to study in Athens. And Eleni’s foreign friend Liz had told her the colleges in England were desperate for foreign students. It was a pity Liz had left so suddenly, without even saying goodbye.

  ‘Wooo!’ Yiangos was upright at the stern, his eyes wide open. ‘You’ll make me hit the rocks, Nafsika. Put them away.’ He grinned at her uncertainly. She’d recently started doing things like that, pushing beyond what the island’s young women were permitted. ‘Do you want me to help you with that suntan oil?’

  ‘Wait till we’re on the beach, idiot,’ Nafsika replied, laughing. ‘I don’t want to have to swim back to Trigono.’

  Yiangos shrugged. He wasn’t intending to jump her on the foredeck when they were under way—his father’s boat was far too precious to take risks with—but it did no harm to show that he was interested. If he wasn’t careful she’d be after a smarter boy. He was sure the archaeologist and her crazy friends had been encouraging her to dump him. But today he would impress her, today she’d finally see how important he was.

  ‘Your loss,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be too busy with the winches to lie around.’ Busy with the ship’s gear—that cover story wouldn’t last much longer. His stomach clenched again as he asked himself how Nafsika would take it when the other boat arrived.

  Yiangos put another Marlboro in his mouth and scratched a match down the worn grip of the tiller. He knew Nafsika was drifting away from him, he knew he wasn’t good enough for her. But some of the stuff she’d picked up from the women who weren’t from the island wasn’t so bad. He took a surreptitious look at her open legs and bare chest. That made him remember what she’d let him do on the beach beyond the cemetery a couple of nights ago. He felt a stiffening in his groin and turned his head to the right, taking in the cliffs and the caves hollowed out by the sea at the shoreline. These waters were dangerous even when the wind was light. He looked back out to sea, but there was no sign of the speedboat.

  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 spe
nt 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.