The Golden Silence Page 8

  Mavros was given permission to wait outside the classroom. When the last lesson ended, he stepped in and asked the group of lively teenagers if any of them could help locate her.

  ‘But why?’ asked one musclebound youth with his hair in a ponytail. ‘She’s only a Russian.’

  Some of his friends thought that was witty, but most of the class shouted at him angrily. It was apparent that Katia wasn’t the only immigrant child. There were a couple of Albanian girls, thin-faced but smiling, and a boy from the former Soviet Union like Katia—he was impossibly shy and said in broken Greek that he didn’t know her well. Mavros let the majority leave. They shouted as they ran off down the corridor, their expensive trainers squeaking on the tiled floor. He recognised three girls from the photos in Katia’s room and asked them to wait.

  One, a short, dark-haired girl with a spatter of acne on her forehead, was curious. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘A friend of the family.’ He knew that his business card would only make them wary. ‘Look, Katia’s parents are desperate. Is there anything you can tell me that might help me find her?’

  The trio exchanged glances and then the tallest of them, a statuesque young woman with a striking figure, twitched her head. ‘Not really. Katia was fun to be with and serious at the same time. She didn’t waste her time joking with the boys like the rest of us.’

  ‘So she didn’t have a boyfriend?’ Mavros asked, playing dumb.

  ‘What?’ shrieked the third girl. She had highlighted hair and purple lips. ‘You must be kidding. Katia learned how her body works from books, not from personal experience.’ She gave a lewd smile and the short girl laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ the tall one said, frowning. ‘Katia’s disappeared and no one cares. Except her parents—’ she looked at Mavros ‘—and you. Look, we didn’t really know her that well. No one did. She kept things private.’

  Mavros nodded. Since the girls didn’t know about Sifis, that was certainly true. ‘She never said anything about wanting to act or go on the TV?’

  This time all three of them burst out laughing.

  ‘You mustn’t know her very well,’ said the one with the highlights. ‘She gets embarrassed just reading the lesson out.’

  Mavros asked about Katia’s behaviour and state of mind before she disappeared—normal as the teachers had said—and let them go.

  The tall one gave him a sad smile. ‘I hope you find her,’ she said, shouldering her satchel. ‘She’s special.’

  Mavros watched her turn away. Everyone except the bitter man and the old gossip liked Katia, but no one had done anything to find her when she’d gone. That was the way it was in the big city. Disappearing into its anonymous blocks and narrow streets was as easy as falling off a fence. So was making someone vanish.

  On his way down to the avenue, he rang the boyfriend. Sifis sounded like he’d just come back from a trip down the Heroin Trail. He knew nothing about Katia having an interest in the stage and was as scathing as her classmates had been. Mavros let him go back into the void he was making for himself, struck again by how badly the young man was affected by Katia’s absence—and by how convinced he seemed to be that she wasn’t coming back. Could he have a reason to be so sure? He decided to pay Sifis another visit later.

  In the meantime, he needed to recharge his system. Stopping at a neighbourhood restaurant he knew on the avenue, he ordered a plate of beef and spaghetti. The waiter was attentive and the food was good, but all Mavros could think of was the beautiful girl who’d left no trace of her passing.

  The Father was at the window of the room on the seventh floor of a mid-price hotel in the city centre, blowing smoke out into the polluted air. The Son was asleep in the adjoining room, having handed the mobile phone to the old man. They were still waiting to hear the time of the pick-up. The Father knew why. He’d bought a copy of an afternoon paper and seen the report of the shooting at the Silver Lady Club. At least she was unhurt, the woman who gave them their orders and paid their bills. But he knew the heat was rising—and that he and the Son would soon be more involved in the gang wars.

  That didn’t concern him. He’d been through similar times when Stratos Chiotis was in charge, and they had never lost. The pattern was always the same: ambitious young thugs who thought they could take on the established operations declaring war and committing atrocities. There weren’t many of Chiotis’s rivals from the sixties still in business. They’d never managed to topple the family, and one of the reasons was the Father. What he did to the upstarts was well-known in underworld circles, though people needed to be reminded from time to time as his activities were usually kept hidden from the press and public. Bodies were weighted and dropped into the sea, or buried on distant hillsides. Now things were more public. And the Son, for all his prima donna tendencies and his smartarse smile, had brought an extra dimension to the business. The boy had talent, there was no denying it.

  The Father’s mind went back to a day on the lake when the Son was about eight, his skinny legs protruding from torn shorts in the bow of the boat. As now, there was snow on the mountains. The Father was at the oars, his eyes on the fish that the boy had emptied on to the bottom-boards from the net. ‘The perch, the carp, the eel, Baba,’ the Son said in his high voice. ‘They bite, Baba.’

  ‘Of course, they bite, boy. Fish are no different from men. They fight to survive.’ He let go the oars and stretched out a veined hand to grip the fully grown eel that had been caught up in the net. Instantly, under the pressure of his fingers, the creature stopped twisting and turning. ‘Do what I showed you,’ he ordered.

  The Son gave a smile and leaned forward to take the eel in his puny hand. It started to struggle again.

  ‘All it takes is determination,’ the Father said. ‘Are you determined?’

  ‘Oh yes, Baba,’ the boy said smoothly. Taking the knife from the scabbard on his belt, he sliced round the eel’s body beneath its head, pulled at the flap of bloody skin and ripped downwards. The whole thing came off like the skin of a sausage. The Son dropped the eel on the floor of the boat and watched as it thrashed around, its miniature jaws opening and closing with decreasing speed, as if it was mouthing its last words. At last it quivered into stillness.

  ‘Not bad,’ the Father said. ‘But normally we smack the eel’s head against the side of the boat before we skin it.’

  The Son stared up at him. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No,’ replied the Father, impressed by the boy’s dexterity. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

  The old man opened his eyes, taking in the grimy windows of the building opposite rather than rock-scarred mountains under a white crown. That had been when he’d first realised that the boy had potential.

  He drank some water and lit another cigarette, then started to check his tools. The knife, honed to perfection, was in its leather sheath. He kept it close to him, even back home in the house above the lake. The rest of the equipment was distributed around his clothing and luggage to escape suspicious eyes. He unscrewed the false top of the toothpaste tube and shook out the stainless steel dental probes. The wire ligatures, impossible to slip out of, were wrapped inside a woollen sweater. The rolled socks that he used as gags needed no camouflage. Nor did the yellow rubber overalls. The most important tools of all were in a talcum-powder container, small pieces of cork over their points.

  The Father shook out his hooks and ran his fingers over them, feeling the curved surfaces and the vicious barbs. Everything was in order. He packed the gear into a hold-all and went back to the window, feeling his knees creak. It wouldn’t be long before the work got too arduous for him, but he wasn’t planning on giving the Son the satisfaction of knowing that. He was already far too full of himself. He peered down at the streets. There were people crawling like ants, cars moving slowly and blowing their horns, brightly decorated shops.

  Was this what we fought for? the old man asked himself. Was this why we exterminated the Communists? To buil
d a paradise for empty-headed shoppers? He craned his head round, looking to the north. Only a few hundred meters away was the street where the headquarters of the security police had been during the dictatorship. That was where he’d worked, that was where he’d laboured to cut out the disease afflicting the country. And he’d succeeded. The scum he’d handled changed from wolves to lambs. They no longer shouted their contempt for government and country, they no longer boasted about how they were going to return power to the people. As if the people ever wanted power. The people needed authority and strong leadership, the people knew their place.

  Suddenly the Father was back in the special cells, the sound of motorbikes revving in the courtyard below to drown the victims’ screams. No matter how many cigarettes he smoked, the smell of sweat mixed with faeces filled his nostrils. He didn’t care. When it was cut with the metallic tang of blood, it became the smell of victory. Muffled blows were audible in the neighbouring cell as canes were brought down relentlessly on the feet of prisoners till they swelled up, the pain indescribable. He turned to the person he was to work on that night. The woman was slumped in a chair, her hair dangling in thick strands in front of her face and her blouse torn open. He felt aroused. He was always eager to carry out orders.

  The sound of the mobile phone brought him back to the present. He raised it to his ear. ‘This is the Father.’

  There was a pause. ‘Ah, it’s you. You’re in position?’ the woman asked, her voice as unwavering as it had been the last time he heard it months ago. It brought him pleasure.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Eight-fifty on the corner to the left. The usual driver.’ The connection was cut.

  The Father looked at his watch. There were two hours to go. He sat back to enjoy them. In recent years, the period of calm before jobs had become almost as enjoyable as the work itself. He let himself sink back, back to the cells.

  Recalling past successes was the best way he knew to prepare for future ones.

  Mavros stood in Kanningos Square in the city centre, his eyes on the second-floor light of the Great Athena School of Foreign Languages. He had been up earlier in the evening to ask about Katia and hadn’t learned much. The night school secretary, a wizened woman, was brusque and unhelpful. She seemed to remember Katia only vaguely. The owner was a thin old man in a sparsely furnished office with time only for the papers piled on his desk. He’d referred Mavros to the secretary with a dismissive wave. After learning that the advanced English class finished at nine-thirty, Mavros decided to wait outside.

  There was an unexpected chill in the evening air and he stood by a kiosk with his hands in his armpits, stamping his feet. The square—named after the British Foreign Secretary Canning, who had aided the cause of Greek Independence—was being redeveloped and the air was full of dust. He hadn’t expected to get much out of the people who ran the night school. The establishments were notorious for fitting as many pupils as they could into their classrooms and cramming them with knowledge in uninspiring ways.

  Mavros moved closer to the entrance. As the first gaggle of teenagers appeared, he stepped in front of them and help up Katia’s photograph.

  ‘Give me a minute, will you, my friends?’ he said. ‘You know who this is? I’m trying to find her.’

  The shouts and taunts died away, the kids glancing at each other.

  ‘We told her old man when he came round,’ said a round-faced boy in a torn T-shirt. ‘None of us has a clue where she went.’

  There was a chorus of agreement.

  ‘Did any of you spend time with Katia out of classes?’

  This time the voices and gestures were negative.

  ‘She always left straight away,’ said a girl with long black hair.

  ‘Did she seem distracted before she stopped coming?’

  More glances were exchanged. The girl ran her tongue along her lower lip.

  ‘No,’ she said, looking down.

  ‘Listen, I’m a friend of the family,’ Mavros said, ‘but not everything you tell me is going to get back to her father.’ He could see that Dmitri had intimidated the kids when he’d spoken to them.

  The boy shuffled his feet. ‘Well, in the last couple of months there was this guy…’

  Mavros held up the photo of Katia with Sifis.

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ said a girl with more sober clothes than the others. ‘He was a weirdo. He tried to sell you drugs, didn’t he, Marko?’

  The round-faced boy glared at her. ‘So? It was only grass. And I didn’t buy any.’

  There was raucous laughter, suggesting that wasn’t true.

  Mavros shrugged. ‘So he and Katia used to go off together after classes?’

  The students signalled their agreement.

  ‘He had a bike, a big one,’ said the long-haired girl.

  Mavros ran his eyes over them. ‘But the night she disappeared he says he didn’t meet her.’

  ‘No, that’s right,’ the same girl said. ‘I saw her walking up the street towards the kiosk. Then my dad came for me.’

  ‘Did anyone else see where Katia went?’ Mavros asked.

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Anything else that might help me find her?’

  They were silent again.

  ‘So she hasn’t turned up?’ the boy in the T-shirt asked.

  ‘Of course she hasn’t, dummy,’ the long-haired girl said impatiently. ‘Why do you think he’s asking these questions?’ She turned to Mavros. ‘Are you sure she hasn’t just run off with that guy?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  The girl twitched her head. ‘No, it doesn’t seem very likely. Katia wasn’t like that. She was dead set on getting into university.’

  Mavros remembered the flyer that the old gossip had seen. ‘She never said anything about acting or going on TV?’

  There were stifled laughs in the group.

  ‘No way,’ the round-faced boy said. ‘Katia was far too straight for that.’

  ‘Like you aren’t,’ one of his mates said, jabbing him in the ribs.

  The class broke up and dispersed across the square. Only the long-haired girl remained, her head down.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, shivering.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said with an encouraging smile. ‘The work probably got too much for her. She’ll be back when she’s over the crisis.’

  The girl didn’t look convinced. She stood there with her arms close to her body, mobile phone in her hand.

  ‘Can I see you home?’ Mavros asked.

  ‘It’s all right. My father should be here.’

  He retreated to the kiosk and looked at the newspapers that festooned it. Only when a Japanese car pulled up and the girl got in did he turn away and head for home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REA CHIOTI WAS running down a narrow passageway on uneven flagstones, the sound of her heels ringing out like rifle-shots. It was pitch dark, but she kept going towards a square of light ahead, not daring to stop. Behind her came the heavy tramp of armed men and no matter how fast she ran, they seemed to be getting closer. At last, breath catching in her throat, she got closer to the light. She passed under a heavy lintel and came into a circular space.

  There were torches all around and behind them she could see chiselled blocks of stone. Looking up, she realised that the walls sloped inwards to form a domed roof. And then, ahead of her, she saw the raised plinth. A man stood beside it, his face turned away from her and an inlaid knife in his right hand. He was bending over the naked and motionless form of a woman laid out on the raised stone. Rea heard herself gasp as she saw that the woman’s face was obscured by a mask—her gold mask with the sewn lips. She ran forward, hands outstretched, and seized the edges of the ancient artefact. Lifted it up and saw—

  She came back to the real world with a start, her eyes wide. It took her a while to work out that she was in bed in the penthouse suite that her husband kept in one of the city’s best hotels. She’d decided that it was safer t
o spend the nights there until she found out how the would-be assassin had known that she was going to the Silver Lady. She’d doubled the guard on her husband at the villa as she didn’t want him to be moved. Switching on the bedside light, she sat up and took a series of deep breaths. The dream, it had taken her unawares. She’d been overwhelmed by exhaustion after she arrived at the penthouse from a foreign trade reception and checked the daily reports from her subordinates. Most of the day had been taken up with the police and lawyers going over the shooting. But it wasn’t the first time she’d been gripped by such a nightmare. Ever since she bought the mask a year ago, it had been infiltrating her very being.

  Rea stood up and told herself not be so melodramatic. She had work to do, she had the family businesses to run. This was no time to be allowing the past to catch up with her. Those memories were long-buried, locked in the tomb. Why were they coming back to her now?

  Checking the clock, she picked up her mobile phone. She never took decisions lightly and she’d been mulling this one over since the attack.

  ‘The bouncer who shielded me at the Silver Lady last night,’ she said to her personal assistant. ‘I want him here at nine o’clock.’

  It was time she made some changes to her team.

  Mavros woke to the unpleasant prospect of making a preliminary report to Dmitri. At least Niki had spent the night at her place, so he hadn’t had to tell her about his lack of progress. He wanted to see if Katia’s boyfriend went anywhere in the evening, so he would have to interrupt his client during the day at his place of work. At least that meant he would avoid the mother’s devastated face. He called the Russian-Greek on his mobile and asked if they could meet. The man sounded surprised, then told Mavros where to find him.