The White Sea Read online

  Colombians certainly don’t, Mavros thought. ‘I’ve still got some time. You can go now.’

  ‘I’ll be taking the files with me.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘You’ll ring the brigadier when you’ve made your decision?’

  Mavros smiled. ‘I’d be working for the Gatsos family, not him.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll be able to shake him off. It’s an ongoing investigation and we can do things you can’t. Collaboration is a good idea.’

  ‘Only a cop would say that.’

  The lieutenant went to the door with his heap of files. ‘I’ll be seeing you again,’ he said.

  ‘Not if I see you first.’

  There was a noise that could have been a laugh.

  The Fat Man appeared a few seconds later. ‘Has the tosser gone?’

  ‘He has.’ Mavros sat down. ‘He pointed out that Kriaras will be expecting me to work with him.’

  ‘Surely you can get the shipowners to keep him off your back. Shit, look at that. Ten euros won’t cover a new one.’

  ‘I’ll pay the difference, for God’s sake. Now let me think.’ Mavros took out his notebook and started to draw up a list of pros and cons.

  Soon afterwards the bell rang.

  ‘That’ll be Nondas. Don’t worry, he’s not like Anna.’

  ‘He’s some kind of money man, isn’t he?’ Yiorgos said waspishly.

  ‘Just let him in. He’s a seriously good cook.’

  ‘Is he, now? It happens I have some pork chops in the fridge.’

  Mavros got up when his brother-in-law came in. He hadn’t seen him for a month or so. ‘What the hell, Nonda? You’re not ill, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m on one of those all-meat-but-not-every-day diets. This must be the renowned Fat Man.’ The Cretan stuck out his hand.

  Yiorgos shook it after a display of comradely reluctance. ‘I hear you can cook. Only I’ve got—’

  ‘Hold on, will you?’ Mavros said, taking the CD-ROM from Nondas.

  ‘What have you got?’ the Cretan said.

  The Fat Man grinned. ‘A couple of kilos of pork chops.’

  ‘Right, I’ll get them in a marinade. Show me the way.’

  ‘I thought you already made dinner at home.’ Mavros followed them, glowering. ‘Look, I’ve got to make an important decision. I want a war council.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’ Yiorgos asked. ‘There’s enough room.’

  ‘If I sit in the corridor.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Mavros fetched a chair. Nondas was throwing herbs and pouring oil and wine over the meat.

  ‘The point is, gentlemen, am I being set up?’

  They both looked at him, then Nondas started grinding pepper.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the Fat Man.

  ‘If the cops haven’t been able to find old Gatsos, how likely is it that I’ll pull it off?’

  Nondas flattened garlic cloves with the blade of a knife. ‘It’s not like you to be defeatist, Alex.’

  ‘Think about it. There’s a Colombian connection, which Kriaras may or may not know about – but you can be sure he wouldn’t fancy taking on an international drug network. There are potential diplomatic issues too.’

  ‘You’re a real diplomat,’ Yiorgos said, with a grin.

  ‘Piss off. Then there’s the Gatsos family. Obviously they know about the Colombian involvement in their business.’

  ‘Which may be wholly legitimate,’ Nondas pointed out. ‘Got any balsamic vinegar?’

  The Fat Man looked at him blankly.

  ‘Maybe, but you’ve got to be dubious. What’s in it for them to employ me at a very high fee?’

  ‘Have your brains slid out of your nose?’ Yiorgos said. ‘You’re the best there is. They want their grandfather back and you hung up your magnifying glass years ago. Only a large inducement would have got you even considering the job.’

  ‘Hm.’ Mavros looked at his watch. Half-an-hour to go. ‘What do you think, Nonda?’

  ‘I agree there might be some danger, but you’ve faced that often enough. Christ, even I have that time in Argolidha. Anna still talks about it.’

  ‘We were lucky.’

  ‘You saved us.’

  ‘My hero,’ said the Fat Man.

  ‘I seem to remember you almost ended up dead in that case.’

  Yiorgos looked chastened. ‘That was when I still did what the Party ordered.’

  Mavros looked at his notebook. ‘The two grandchildren are keen to find Kostas, but some of the other family members look a bit dodgy.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ said the Fat Man. ‘They’re thieving, uber-capitalist—’

  ‘Thank you, comrade. If I take the job, you’re going to be interviewing some of them.’

  ‘Hold me back.’

  Nondas came over and put his hand on Mavros’s shoulder. ‘Look, it’s work. You can’t bury yourself away forever. Your mother’s company is dead on its feet.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘No, you’ve done a great job keeping it going, believe me, but you know what you’re best at. Anna feels the same way.’

  Mavros bit his tongue. It wasn’t unreasonable for his sister to want him to be more fulfilled. ‘What about the money?’ he said. ‘It’s far too much. I think I’ll ask for less.’

  ‘Don’t,’ his brother-in-law said. ‘They’ve decided what they want to pay.’

  ‘You could always ask for more.’

  Mavros gave the Fat Man a diamond-tipped glare. The truth was, he did feel the pull of what had been his career, the only thing he’d ever loved doing. But he’d failed Niki … and Andonis.

  ‘Call them,’ Nondas said. ‘Make whatever conditions you like.’

  In the end, at 11.59, Mavros rang the number he’d been given and told Loukas he’d do it, the only stipulation being that he would work without being watched. He was asked for his bank account details and told the transfer would be made immediately.

  ‘That’s it then,’ Yiorgos said. ‘We’ve got something to celebrate. I’ll get the beers.’

  ‘I’ll give you whatever help you need,’ Nondas said, shaking Mavros’s hand.

  ‘And we’ve got the chops,’ the Fat Man said, handing round bottles of Amstel.

  ‘They need another couple of hours in the marinade,’ the Cretan said.

  Yiorgos groaned.

  It was a long night.

  Bastards!

  Kostas Gatsos had always been a good hater. Now all his emotions were directed at the people who were trying and torturing him. His right ear – or rather, the place where it had been attached to his head – was horrendously painful. The wound was covered in antiseptic regularly, the dressing changed. When he wasn’t seething, he found some hope in that. At least they didn’t want him to die of gangrene or the like. His ruined fingers were also being treated. Then he had a thought. Ransom demands were often accompanied by pieces of the prisoner’s body – hadn’t that Getty heir’s ear been sent to his family? Nails would do the job too. Yes, that was it. They were demanding money for him.

  But why had they waited so long? It must have been weeks since he was taken. And what was it the man in the balaclava had said after the first trial? Something about full sentence being deferred. Was this how it was going to be? More and more trials until he had no extremities left? Would they take his cock? His balls? He clutched them with his good hand. Anything but that. They might as well shoot him now. Though, given the degree of savagery they’d shown so far, he thought his death would be a lot more protracted and painful than a bullet in the head.

  Lying in the dark with his hand on his genitals, Kostas found himself thinking of the women he’d had. He’d never counted, but it must have been hundreds, maybe over a thousand. When he was fifteen, his father had taken him to a whore.

  ‘Turn this boy into a man,’ the old man had ordered. God knows when he’d last had sex; he was devoted to his wife and she was slowly coughin
g her life away.

  Kostas wasn’t inexperienced in the ways of the flesh. He’d won a scholarship to an English-style boarding school on Spetses. No girls, of course, but no shortage of other boys who were attracted by his mischievous smile and unusually long prick. There were the usual mutual wanks in the toilets and night-time excursions to other dormitories. Kostas was smart though. He didn’t go with just anyone. There was one boy with a circumcised member he enjoyed playing with. Otherwise he only gave himself to those who could do things for him – get him off punishments, help him with homework, supply him with luxury foods. As he followed the overweight woman into her chintzy bedroom, it struck him that he’d been a kind of whore himself. He had no problem with that.

  ‘Come on then, my boy, let’s see the crown jewels.’

  ‘Show me what you’ve got first.’

  Kostas watched as she – he vaguely remembered that she called herself Gigi in a desperate attempt for a touch of class – opened her dressing gown and let copious breasts fall out of her low-cut nightdress.

  ‘And the rest,’ he ordered.

  The woman gave him a sharp look and then submitted to his will. She lifted the gown over her head, revealing unshaved armpits, and lay back on the bed. Her thighs were heavy. He leaned forward as she opened them.

  He came four times in the next hour.

  As far as he had an Achilles’ heel, it was sex. Any female was a target – by the time he finished school, he’d had enough of male body parts. The urge took him frequently every day. At Cambridge, to which he’d won a scholarship from a Greek foundation, he screwed his bedder, the cleaner of his rooms at university, who was older than his mother; a librarian; several though not enough students – the late 40s weren’t noted for sexual liberation; and plenty of town girls who would do anything for some drinks and a bunch of flowers. But still he was unsatisfied. During one of his final examinations he had to ask for a toilet break so he could relieve himself of a hard-on that refused to detumesce even though he was writing about Keynes’s general theory. He got a third-class degree, but that was irrelevant. He already had a job offer from an Athenian bank.

  That was only a stepping-off point. After a couple of years he’d managed to raise the money to buy a small tramp steamer. Within five years he was a dollar millionaire and going to parties thrown by the Athenian rich, as well as their counterparts in Monte Carlo, New York, Buenos Aires.

  And always the women. He remembered a cleaner at a seaside villa that belonged to an older shipowner. She was on all fours, scrubbing the floor. He flipped up her dress and petticoat, pulled down her voluminous knickers and entered her from behind. An island virgin, she didn’t take it well, but he couldn’t help himself. The idea that the owners, especially the stuck-up wife, might have found him at it increased his pleasure enormously. He had to pay the girl off, but the sum she accepted was pitiful. The next time he visited, she sucked him off at the breakfast table. The hosts and other guests didn’t notice that he bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.

  But servants were one thing; the rich always took advantage of them. Other men’s wives were a completely different challenge. He enjoyed them more than their daughters, who either threw themselves at him or clamped their thighs together, as unyielding as Swiss bank vaults. One way or another he got all the society wives he wanted; some of them were hideous, although they tended to be the most interested. He took extra delight in fucking the wives of government ministers, the men being no more than marionettes who danced to the tune of the real elite. He remembered Elsa, whose husband had been mayor of Athens and was subsequently minister of trade. She was a screamer. The only place he could safely screw her was at the opera. A large woman was singing an inappropriate Mimi when they got together, her husband having gone off to meet a colleague. He paid off the concierge and they slipped into the women’s rest room. He took her against the row of sinks, her evening dress pulled up and her silk knickers ripped open. She almost deafened him in one ear.

  Which brought him back to the darkness in which he was lying. Was it the right ear, the one he had lost? Fuck the pathetic cowards who wouldn’t reveal their faces. He would cut off the men’s cocks and jam them down their throats. As for the woman in the crocodile mask … he would have shoes made from her skin.

  By five a.m. the Fat Man and Nondas had passed out on the sofa. Beer had been consumed, more by them than by Mavros, who sat with his notebook open at the table among the ruins of the chops. He was constructing a plan of action and had also made a call. Brigadier Kriaras was less than impressed at being woken up, but agreed that copies of the police files would be supplied now that Mavros had taken the case. Lieutenant Babis would act as liaison; not, Mavros insisted, as watchdog.

  Before he drew up a work roster for the approaching day, he tried to make sense of what he’d let himself in for. Kriaras apparently wanted him to be involved. After five years that would have included plenty of major cases, he suddenly wanted Mavros in action again. Why? Was the Gatsos family’s grip on the government’s nuts so tight? Maybe, but Kostas wasn’t the first shipowner to have been kidnapped in recent years. Why was Mavros back in favour? The grandchildren were certainly keen to have him, Evi more than Loukas, though the quarter million was the family’s, not hers, despite her offer. What did they expect him to find that a major police operation hadn’t turned up? Was he to put the wind up other family members? If so, his employers weren’t going to be disappointed. And what about the Colombians? He would be talking to Loukas and Evi about their involvement in the group. If they had suspected the South Americans of being behind their grandfather’s disappearance, surely they’d have told Kriaras. The strangest aspect of the kidnap was the lack of either a body or a ransom demand. He was sure the old man had plenty of enemies in Greece and globally. A quick look at the background material had shown that he was a hard-nosed operator, who’d put many of his rivals out of business. But the well-executed raid on the villa in Lesvos could easily have led to his shooting as well as his son’s. Instead he had been taken. Did someone hate him so much as to spirit him away and lock him up or torture him to death? Had Pavlos been murdered as a demonstration of intent or as a deliberate target? Loukas had agreed he could keep the CD-ROM, so he would ask Nondas to see if Kostas’s son had been up to anything suspicious.

  Then he had a couple of the flights of fancy that sometimes cracked cases. First, could Kostas, aggrieved at some activity of Pavlos, have set up the hit and his own disappearance? Despite the apparent absence of threats, perhaps he needed to lay low for a while. Second, there was only one man Mavros had encountered who could have organised the attack on the villa and shot Pavlos in cold blood. He doubted the Gatsos grandchildren knew about the Son, but Kriaras certainly did – in fact he’d sanctioned the killer’s employment by a hyper-rich Greek industrialist in the past. Did he suspect or know that the Son was behind the kidnapping?

  If so, recommending Mavros to the Gatsos family wasn’t anything to do with his abilities. It was to draw the renegade killer into the open; with Mavros, whom the Son had sworn to destroy, as bait.

  NINE

  Jim Thomson woke up and spat out salt water. He was floating on his back, his clothes sodden, but the life jacket keeping his mouth above the surface of a gentle swell most of the time. There was a line of light low in the sky over the tip of his toes. Was it dawn or nightfall? He heard the call of seabirds and the top of the sun appeared over the far, flat horizon. A new day. Then he remembered the events of the night, the chaos and sudden sinking of the Homeland. He looked around, but there was no sign of any crew mates – no debris, only endless water. He didn’t have the strength to blow the whistle attached to his jacket. The cork felt heavy and he wondered how long it would keep him afloat. He reached his hands down to his legs and then felt his head. He had no pain and nothing hurt to the touch. If only he could drink something that didn’t taste of salt. His mouth and throat were wet, but that gave him no solace. As the sun rose, he h
ad to close his eyes because of its piercing brightness. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He raised his left wrist but his watch wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d taken it off after his shift in the galley. Jesus, what had happened? Thousands of tonnes of steel and coal, seventeen men: was he all that was left? The weather had been good. It was as if the Homeland had been torpedoed. Structural failure seemed unlikely as the new class of bulk carriers had been strengthened after earlier models were lost in heavy seas. There had been none of those last night.

  He tipped his head back to keep his mouth out of the water and let himself drift. He had no energy to paddle and, besides, there was no land in any direction.

  Somehow he survived the day, the sun having burnt his face and hands and, it felt, dried every drop of liquid from his insides. Darkness was a relief of sorts, but he was in agony, every breath seeming to rip his wind pipe. How much longer would he survive?

  The next dawn came upon him quickly, the sun up before he had fully regained consciousness. He considered taking off the life jacket and sinking into the cold, dark depths, but he didn’t have the will or energy to undo the straps. He rolled on to his front and sucked in water, trying to drown himself. But something in him wouldn’t allow capitulation.

  At last he heard voices: excited, babbling, high-pitched. He raised his head and saw it – a small craft low in the water, three skinny brown men in shirts and shorts standing up and waving their arms. He tried to raise one of his, but failed. It didn’t matter, they had seen him. Soon strong hands gripped and pulled him on board. The sun was low in the west and he caught a glimpse of land. He had survived. As the life jacket was removed, he fainted away …

  He came round as the boat bumped against a ramshackle wooden jetty. His clothes had been removed and he was in the shade of a tarpaulin, a length of dirty material over his body. A crate of silver fish longer than his forearm lay beside him, their eyes glazed and their mouths open as they had gasped for their last breath. He started to weep, saddened that he had made it while they hadn’t. The sea was their element. He was the stranger, he should have been the one to succumb.